The light goes out, the crackling of tension, the anticipation charges the air electrically. When the almost 70-year-old enters the stage slowly in the dim light, the emotions unload. With every step by David Gilmour a piece of music history goes on stage. The audience is aware of his career, which lasted almost half a century. The man has charisma, an aura that spreads before he even plays a note or sings a word. Wherever Gilmour has played during his tour that began last year or will play in the summer of 2016, there has always been or will always be the same reception.
!["Like a power plant without electronics" - With "Barefoot To The Moon" ECHOES pull the plug at Pink Floyd](https://www.eclipsed.de/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/Echoes%20Acoustic%201%20Damir%20Klaushofer%20web.jpg?itok=2UB6_EZH ""Like a power plant without electronics" - With "Barefoot To The Moon" ECHOES pull the plug at Pink Floyd")
eclipsed: You are celebrating your twentieth anniversary at the moment and are travelling electrically with Pink Floyd music for a correspondingly long time. With "Barefoot To The Moon - An Acoustic Tribute To Pink Floyd" you now succeed in staging the bombastic classics of the art rockers in strictly acoustic garb in a completely new way and thus bring out unknown facets. How did this concept come about?
Steffen Maier: Yes, at first you think Pink Floyd acoustically, it's like a power station without electronics. The first time I had this thought was when I read that Nick Mason would have liked to do something like this with Pink Floyd. And if that's what Nick Mason thinks, maybe it's really possible.
eclipsed: David Gilmour actually gave an acoustic show at the London Meltdown Festival in the Royal Festival Hall in June 2001, which was also released on DVD as "David Gilmour In Concert".
Perhaps the myth of "Wish You Were Here" began that Thursday, June 5, 1975 - with the mysterious visitor at Abbey Road Studios. Pink Floyd were working on the final mix of the core of their upcoming album, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", a song about their former frontman Syd Barrett and his unstoppable mental decay. Suddenly a bald, fat, confused-looking man stands in the room, all dressed in white, with shaved eyebrows and a white plastic bag in his hand. At first the musicians thought it was an unknown EMI employee, but on closer inspection David Gilmour became suspicious: "Do you recognize him? Look at him closely," he whispered to Nick Mason with tears in his eyes. The band had not seen their former colleague and friend for several years. The last contacts were in 1970, when Gilmour and Roger Waters and Gilmour and Rick Wright Barrett had helped out with his two solo albums.
We experience the warmest day of the year in England - with heat deaths in the London Underground. David Gilmour's houseboat MS Astoria resembles an oven. Only the cabin at the bow has air conditioning, which is why it is reserved for the owner. He receives barefoot in a heavy leather armchair, slurps black coffee and has something surreal about him: his head looks almost huge, his bulky body is in black clothes that stand in sharp contrast to his snow-white wreath of hair. When the famous guitarist and singer speaks, one has the feeling of listening to a philosophy lecturer from Oxford. David Gilmour is an awe-inspiring and respectful appearance.
eclipsed: David, you made it clear in advance that questions about Pink Floyd are undesirable. Why is this so important to you?
PINK FLOYD - Let there be more Wright
The announcement of a new Pinkloyd album - the first in twenty years - resembled a bang. The decision of Messrs. Gilmour and Mason to do little or no promotion at all for their tribute to their deceased band colleague Rick Wright, though. This approach raises many questions. Don't the old masters believe in themselves and their output? Do you think the whole thing might already be a mistake? Or did they just hire the wrong PR agency? eclipsed about the trials and tribulations surrounding "The Endless River".
So there it is, the new Pinkloyd studio album. The first in twenty years. What do you say to a researcher who has been believed dead for twenty years, who suddenly returns from the ice? "Nice to have you back," huh?
The announcement of a new Pinkloyd album - the first in twenty years - resembled a bang. The decision of Messrs. Gilmour and Mason to do little or no promotion at all for their tribute to their deceased band colleague Rick Wright, though. This approach raises many questions. Don't the old masters believe in themselves and their output? Do you think the whole thing might already be a mistake? Or did they just hire the wrong PR agency? eclipsed about the trials and tribulations surrounding "The Endless River".
As a supplement to our Pink Floyd title story of the eclipsed print edition 11/2014 we document here the complete interview which our author Wolf Kampmann conducted with Phil Manzanera at the beginning of October about the work on "The Endless River".
eclipsed: How can you make an album out of outtakes from "The Division Bell" after twenty years?
Phil Manzanera: When Pink Floyd started recording, which then became "The Division Bell", they decided to record the album like in the old days. The shows of the "Momentary Laps Of Reason" tour had gone well and the guys wondered why they shouldn't just improvise freely as they had done before. They went to different studios, maybe they had some chord sequences in their heads, but mostly they improvised. David had a DAT recorder with him, and whenever they had something up their sleeve that sounded reasonable, he would record it. In this way, twenty hours of jams and ideas were created.
THE WHO
The Story of Quadrophenia
"'Tommy' changed everything and saved us," Pete Townshend remembers in the introductory essay to the 2011 re-release of "Quadrophenia". Basically, The Who had been a singles band in the sixties; the sudden intellectualization of pop music had posed a new, unexpected challenge to its thought leader. "People suddenly wanted to hear 'serious' music from pop groups.
YES
Between heaven and earth
