Pink Floyd and ROCK'N'ROLL

I have never really been a fan of Pink Floyd. I quite liked some of the early stuff, "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play". I caught up with them when the brilliant "Another Brick in the Wall" hit the charts, but that was it. The rest just seemed like a pretty weird noise.

Then something happened to change my mind. In August last year, I went to see a new play by Tom Stoppard called "Rocknroll". Set in Czechoslovakia and Cambridge, it revolves around the Czech revolution with references to The Plastic People of the Universe playing in Prague and Syd Barrett living his final years in Cambridge. The scenes are punctuated by extracts from 18 songs from Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair" to the Rolling Stone's "Its All Over Now". But the ones that made the biggest impression were the five from Pink Floyd including "Wish You Were Here". How can I have missed such a great piece of work.

So for Christmas I asked for their compilation "Echoes". Whilst there are some tracks that are not exactly to my taste, and some seemed just like wallpaper music, there were some blinding flashes that go to the heart. My preference for listening to music is in the car. It is only here that I occasionally hear something that has an actual physical impact, usually a tingling sensation somewhere in the brain. This certainly happened with "Wish You Were Here" and "Shine on you Crazy Diamond".

It also happened listening to another two albums I received over Christmas. "You Do" by Aimee Mann from the album "Bachelor No 2" was the stand out track. Not so much on any of the individual songs on "All the Road Running" by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, but just a succession of wonderful tracks. I can remember the odd song from Alison Krauss did it, a couple from Thea Gilmore on her latest album "Harpo's Ghost", every time I hear "Brothers in Arms" and recently Sandy Denny's "Who knows where the time goes" and "Solo". A good few years ago, driving home on a Friday evening, I can remember Johnny Walker playing the whole live version of "Freebird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd, all 13 minutes and eleven seconds, and buying the double LP just to get this track. Radio 2 is now just not the same.