September 29:
♫ It’s been another week of
watching things slowly travel towards fruition, here at the AAA. After having
studied even more web hosts than there are classic psychedelic albums for the
best part of two weeks, we’re still not totally convinced about where best to
place our site. It’s been a bit like that in other AAA areas too: the new Oasis
album ’Dig Out Your Soul’ is out soon but not quite yet, as are a new
as-yet-to-be-titled Kinks box-set and the much-delayed CSNY
tour-come-Bush-baiting documentary Déjà vu Revisited. There’s only one new AAA
release to tell you about this week: yet another paving slab-sized John Lennon
biography, ’The Life’. Good news: its by Phillip Norman, the ‘first’ Beatle
biographer whose book ’Shout!’ is said by many to have kick-started the whole
rock journalism movement and even when heavily censored by Brian Epstein and
full of interviews of notably bored and jet-lagged Beatles was always engaging.
Bad news: this longer, less censored, better researched book simply isn’t as
good, as least to judge by the three scathing reviews of it I’ve seen.
There
isn’t much to find out about Lennon and despite the promises on the back cover Norman
♫ Pink Floyd news: By far the highlight
of the week was David Gilmour’s appearance on ‘Later with Jools Holland’. The
band, with sorely missed member Rick Wright, had been booked on the show eons
ago to promote Gilmour’s new live CD/ DVD ‘live at Gdnask’, with the Poland
city the last farewell stop on Gilmour’s mighty world(ish) tour of
2006-07. But after Rick’s unexpected
death a fortnight back, Gilmour surprised us all by performing a tribute to his
old friend, Wright’s rare ‘Remember A Day’ from the ‘Saucerful Of Secrets’
album, a track which hardly anyone seems to know and as far as I recall has
never graced the live-set of any Floyd line-up and/or spin-off. But the song
has always been one of my Floyd favourites—we’d already plugged it mercilessly
on this site before Rick’s death and its at #3 in our Rick Wright song tribute
above—so to see Gilmour’s sensitive arrangement and interpretation of a song
recorded before Dave had even joined the Floyd was marvelous indeed.
♫ Anniversaries this week: Phil Oakey (frontman for
the Human League) turns 53 on October 2nd.
Events of the week: The Beatles’ first single ’Love Me Do’ entered the
charts on October 5th, 1962 and the first CSN LP, released in June 1969, turned
gold on September 30th that year.
