Since you are in the UK you are "closer" to the home of the Floyd... Any stories or insider information you could share... Ever do a drive by of Glimour or Waters house? Ever see them in a small setting?
Oh dear this is slightly embarrassing :oops:
Back in London in 1966 I was living with a singer - we played the folk clubs, very much in the jazz /blues / Middle Eastern influenced vein of say Davy Graham and Sandy Denney, not that they as far as I know actually worked together. My girlfriend had a younger sister, one of those insanely beautiful Pre-Raphaelite looking girls, whose boyfriend was the bass player of a rather odd band called The Tea Set. There was another Tea Set playing the clubs in those days, and one day my sister-out-of-law's friends found themselves on the same bill as the other guys, and so a swift, rather awkward name change was in order!
Of course the bass player's name was Roger, and the new name was The Pink Floyd Sound. We used to go to see them at the UFO club and at the Marquee, where they gradually dropped the "The" and the "Sound" from their name.
A year later an old blues buddy of mine returned from Morocco, where he'd been studying Arabic music (and other local customs :wink: ) and we added bass and drums, and formed an electric band. We opened for the Floyd, and Traffic, at the Roundhouse on different occasions, around the time of the The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace - another famous early Floyd gig, with Soft Machine, Arthur Brown and other mad people ...
There's not much more to the story - there were the two singles, "Arnold Layne" and "Emily", the first album, then my girlfriend's sister split with Roger, the Syd Barrett troubles happened, and the rest is history ... I never actually met Dave Gilmour to speak to as far as I remember.
I saw them live at festivals a few times in the early Gilmour days, and not since ... but they remain one of my very favourite bands to this day ...
And I thought Nascar guitars were too much.
You can ride a Yamaha, or play a Yamaha, it is up to you.
My daughter wants the black one.
Maybe marketing over substance, but hey, anything that helps kids keep an interest is a good thing.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- HST
PVTele thank you for the incredible story... Sounds like great times back then... That is very cool that you can say you opened for Floyd... What was the name of your band at the time? Do you still have a band? Thanks for sharing...
I'll only be down there (in the basement practicing) for a couple of minutes or so...
My SoundClick Page: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=470725
ya thats an awesome story pvtele
Head Arcitech at Vandelay Instudries
The band that opened for the Floyd at the Roundhouse and so on was The Society of the Walking Wounded - though I also played there with the 32:20 Blues Band.
Most of my recent guitar playing (resumed 4 years ago after a bad accident put my left arm out of commission for a few years) has been in the church worship band, but recently I've begun playing with a jazz / blues pub jam band (scary good musicians - half of them are Bournemouth Symphony players on their night off ...) here in Dorset. It looks like I may be doing some session work for my younger daughter, who's working on her first album in Italy! How cool is that? Stuff the generation gap, say I!
