Martin Popoff released his book Pink Floyd: Album by Album on June 26th of last year. On the one year anniversary of the book’s release, Brain Damage sat down to chat about his projects and about his experience writing and editing the book – which included interviews with Dream Theater’s Jordan Rudess and Genesis’ Steve Hackett. Popoff’s most recent releases are Born Again!: Black Sabbath in the Eighties and Nineties, Judas Priest: Turbo ‘til Now, and Aces High: The Top 250 Heavy Metal Songs of the ’80s. He shared his view on a number of issues confronting the music industry, on drumming, and on Pink Floyd’s place in history. Brain Damage: Pink Floyd: Album by Album was released on this day, last year. How was that project different from previous ones, i.e., did you feel the Pink Floyd connoisseurs you interviewed were different from experts on other bands that you had interviewed for other projects? I wouldn’t say there was a difference. The same mix of celebrities, rock stars, super experts like yourself! But as you know, as more of a hard rock/old man heavy metal guy, it was fresh and fun for me to do something like this, especially to get re-educated again on the pre-Dark Side of the Moon albums, which I hadn’t paid much attention to in recent years. BD: To what extent do you try to balance your own input on each album in a book like this, relative to the input from those you are interviewing? The fun part is I get to say my say completely in the fairly long and involved intros to each album. After that I’m perfectly happy leaving all the views up to everyone else. I might have leading questions that I ask over and over where I seem to be soliciting a certain response, and maybe because they are leading questions, they do steer the narrative, but other than that, for this style of book, it’s all about the views of the contributors after the introduction. BD: Were there any particular surprises in the process of writing Pink Floyd: Album by Album? Yeah, because actually your input, I learned quite a few cool little trivia bits about the last few albums. And again, I really got to digest and restructure and re-memorize all those old albums. It’s really quite a remarkable career, how completely crazy Pink Floyd were allowed to be leading up to Dark Side of the Moon. BD: Did you ever entertain the idea of including the live albums (other than the live material on Ummagumma)? No, with five books like this, I just thought talking about the live albums would be the most boring thing. To me, I’m famously not a live gig guy or a live album guy. In fact, once I’ve seen a band two or three times, I almost feel like I never need to see them again. Ha ha, this is actually true, and I’m barely exaggerating, really, but I have these conversations with like, Rush tribute bands, maybe some of the people who were actually in the Rush: Album by Album book, who invite me to their gig, and to let them down easy, but actually, I’m not kidding here, this is actually the truth, I tell them that if Rush themselves were playing the bar down the street like they were, I probably wouldn’t even go. Okay, the truth is, I would go to say that I was there, but I wouldn’t stay for the whole thing! I just don’t care. To me the important part is the writing of the song, and between the music and the lyrics, the lyrics are more important.
