The Gonzo Daily - Monday
So it has arrived. The final Pink Floyd album is up
on Spotify, and I made it my business to listen to it whilst doing the blogs
this morning. It is exactly what they claimed of it; a collection of
instrumental jams from The Division Bell sessions twenty years ago, that Messrs
Gilmour and Mason have added a few bits and bobs to. Some of the reviews that I
have completely missed the point, somehow expecting it to be a 'proper' Pink
Floyd album, high concept and all, and somehow feeling cheated that it isn't. In
its own way it is the most high concept of Pink Floyd albums; the one which
shows that together the band are more than equal to the sum of the individual
parts, which is how - of course - it should be, and is what everyone who has
ever been in a band aspires to.
The reviews had mainly inferred that this was three
sides of instrumental noodling (using the word 'ambient' more often than I would
have liked) with one Pink Floyd song 'tacked onto the end'. In fact I found it
to be almost exactly the opposite. This is not ambient or new age music in any
shape or form. Neither (with the exception of two rather rough and ready pieces
on the end) are they jams. They are seventeen very well structured pieces of
Floydian instrumental music which would not have seemed out of place on any
Floyd album of the past four decades, and one slightly lacklustre song on which
Polly Samson tries to shoehorn her view of the zeitgeist of the band (which is
probably pretty much correct) into one final song to wrap things up neatly. But
you can't wrap things up nicely: Syd is dead, Rick is dead, Rog is nowhere to be
seen.
In a piece which turned up in a Zig Zag anthology
in the mid 1970s Roger Waters admitted that the band were always at their best
when they didn't try to be too clever. And so it is here. The percussion workout
on 'Skins' for example doesn't really work. And it is not, as he has claimed on
various occasions recently, because Nick Mason is a substandard drummer. Not at
all. But when they did things like this earlier in their career it was innocent
experimentation, whereas now, being played by two pensioners, it sounds like the
delicate sound of cynicism.
But on the whole this is a successful collection of
music released for exactly the right reasons, and if it doesn't tick the right
boxes for you it is your problem not theirs. Shine on you crazy
wassnames!
Jack Bruce, Corky Laing, Mountain, Tony Palmer,
Steve Hillage, Erasure, Keith Levene, Jon Anderson, Yes, Nick Redfern, Cat
Stevens, Steve Ignorant, Hawkwind, and Daevid Allen fans had better look out!
The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly (#103) IS available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com, and to download at http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/.
It has Jack Bruce on the cover, and features an
interview with Corky Laing about his erstwhile bandmate inside. We also have a
tribute to Jack Bruce from Tony Palmer, and another from Rob Ayling together
with an unpublished photoshoot of Bruce and Pete Brown. But there's more! There
is news about Daevid Allen, Doug Harr goes to see Erasure, Jon waxes lyrical
about Steve Ignorant's new album, and critiques Yusuf Islam's and comes to the
conclusion that Cat Stephens is a very brave man. Xtul are still in the deep
woods, and Corinna finds some real Beatles tat. There is news and unpublished
pictures from Keith Levene in Prague, and we send Steve Hillahe to a desert
island. There are also new shows from the multi-talented Neil Nixon at Strange
Fruit and from M Destiny at Friday Night Progressive, and the massively talented
Jaki and Tim are back with their submarine and Maisie the cow. There is also a
collection of more news, reviews, views, interviews and turtles having a snooze
(OK, no soporific chelonians, but I got carried away with things that rhymed
with OOOOS) than you can shake a stick at. And the best part is IT's ABSOLUTELY
FREE!!!
Read the previous few issues of Gonzo Weekly:
All issues from #70 can be downloaded at www.gonzoweekly.com if you prefer. If you
have problems downloading, just email me and I will add you to the Gonzo Weekly
dropbox. The first 69 issues are archived there as well. Information is power
chaps, we have to share it!
* The Gonzo Daily is a two way process. If you have any news or want
to write for us, please contact me at
jon@eclipse.co.uk. If you are an artist and
want to showcase your work, or even just say hello please write to me at
gonzo@cfz.org.uk. Please copy, paste and
spread the word about this magazine as widely as possible. We need people to
read us in order to grow, and as soon as it is viable we shall be invading more
traditional magaziney areas. Join in the fun, spread the word, and maybe if we
all chant loud enough we CAN stop it raining. See you tomorrow...
* The
Gonzo Daily is - as the name implies - a daily online magazine (mostly) about
artists connected to the Gonzo Multimedia group of companies. But it also has
other stuff as and when the editor feels like it. The same team also do a weekly
newsletter called - imaginatively - The Gonzo Weekly. Find out about it at this
link:
www.gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/2012/11/all-gonzo-news-wots-fit-to-print.html
* We should probably mention here, that some of our posts are links to
things we have found on the internet that we think are of interest. We are not
responsible for spelling or factual errors in other people's websites. Honest
guv!
* Jon Downes, the Editor of all these ventures (and several
others) is an old hippy of 55 who - together with an infantile orange cat named
after a song by Frank Zappa puts it all together from a converted potato shed in
a tumbledown cottage deep in rural Devon which he shares with various fish, and
sometimes a small Indian frog. He is ably assisted by his lovely wife Corinna,
his bulldog/boxer Prudence, his elderly mother-in-law, and a motley collection
of social malcontents. Plus.. did we mention the infantile orange
cat?
What has Corinna's column of fortean bird news got to do with Cryptozoology?
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