There I was at 12 and 13 and 14,  listening to the music of Pink Floyd on cassette tape.  Roger Waters’ first two solo albums too. But it was the Floyd stuff that meant the most to me. Had me copying out the lyrics on an old typewriter. Old school: pause/rewind/play and then  pause/rewind/play and again, pause/rewind/play.

Syd Barrett’s solo material next. Then David Gilmour. On to Nick Mason and Rick Wright eventually, collecting it all. It was the world to me back then. Live albums, compilations, in fact it started back when I was 10. An hour or so in  Christchurch, first south-island trip, just stopping through, and I wanted a Pink Floyd tape for the car. On the way to Timaru and then Oamaru with that amazing keyboard intro – and then the drums kick in! – sheep in the fields wherever we looked, the song Sheep on the stereo, also Shine On You Crazy Diamond. (Those long songs staying strong on that car-trip, making me a fan. Infecting my brain like devils).


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I don’t listen to Pink Floyd all that much these days.  But I think about the band often. What it meant to me. How it was the start of so much…

How One Of These Days just blew me  away, how the album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason is as good as anything else they  ever did. (I really mean that too by the way, neither a rinse nor a roast). Copies of the lyrics all over my wall, and my own poems being typed out to match (albeit kept in folders I didn’t want anyone to see).  My folks laughing knowingly, and in a way I only really know now as a parent myself, at the line, “The laddie reckons himself a poet”.

Something so English, so stubborn about the very best of Roger’s words. (“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”). So much doggerel though, wrapped up at least in a liquid-tension-piercing guitar tone. Those mellifluous keyboard lines and Nick Mason sending a telegraph ahead of every drum fill: Snare stop tom stop tom stop tom stop 

There were always better bands. There were always better songs. But for a while there
there were none that could ever seem so important. I really loved my Pink Floyd tapes.

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