Dave
Thompson is an internationally known music writer, having written books on
James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Jackson Browne, Kurt Cobain, Judas Priest, Cream,
Deep Purple and many more. He has written stuff for Cleopatra records,
Goldmine, Rolling Stone and many others.
The
book does not take a birth to now approach and skips around here and there for
the first half of the book and then takes you from 1967-1977, talking about the
development of all the Pink Floyd records, movie soundtracks (both published and
aborted), solo records, etc.. There is a
lot of indepth info about all the demos and early song titles that we used and
almost always changed for the early records. It was interesting that the band
up until 1975, used to work out all their songs in the live setting before
making the studio albums. This was destroyed by the success of a bootleg called
Winter Tour 74 that sold very well and had most of the material that would
eventually make up Animals.
A
lot of great info about the Wall, the making of Roger’s solo albums, his taking
control of Pink Floyd to force his works upon a group that was not really happy
about it. The author is both critical and sympathetic to Roger. It is quite
clear that Pink Floyd was no longer a group by the later 70s and Roger was
basically forcing the band to make his solo works and not leaving any room for
them to all create music together, which is a pity, as that is when they made
the best music. I learned quite a lot of new interesting information.
The
book is very well researched but the author did not approach Roger Waters, who
is still very much alive and well. I always wonder why they don’t contact the
person they are writing a book about. It would allow you to answer a lot of the
questions that the author speculates about in the text. Anyway, Roger is a
difficult personality and probably would be very unhappy about this book and
contents.
This
book was originally published in 2013 in hardcover. IT has not been updated for
the 2017 paperback version, which is a pity as Roger has finally released
another solo record. Anyway, this is a very interesting book and I learned a
lot about the man, the music and Pink Floyd.
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