Grit in the Gears

I am the grit in the gears, the missing bolt, I am the poker of sticks into spokes. I like to know how things work, but sometimes when I take them apart and rebuild them, I have a few pieces left over. I am a man, so I tend to leave reading the instructions until after it goes wrong. And like all men I have a comprehensive mental map of the world and never need to ask directions. I never get lost, only sometimes I'm late, or end up in the wrong place entirely. It's what we do.

Thursday, 6 January 2011

Atom Heart Mother

PINK FLOYD'S ATOM HEART MOTHER

On march 3rd, 2003, a collection of very talented French students performed Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother in its entirety at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP).

That's all I know about this video.
Pink Floyd themselves never had a full performance filmed. Some of this sounds uncannily like the original.

Atom Heart Mother isn't the most approachable Floyd opus, it marked the transition from the very chaotic Pink Floyd of Syd Barrett's day to the later band dominated by Roger Waters. It's hard to imagine bands of today venturing into such ambitious, and risky, territory, yet this album, in 1971 went to number one in the u.k. charts. In America, well, no surprise, it only made number 55, took it until '95 to go gold in the u.s.

All the band, at various times have disowned it or labelled it as a low point in their creative career.
I disagree. The low point to me is their probably best selling album ever, best known... The Wall. Now that's a heap of worthless, badly thought out dross if ever I saw one.
I've never yet figured out to what extent they stand behind the stuff they spout in The Wall, and to what extent it's parody.
A marching cohort of schoolchildren chanting "We don't need no education" rather undermines its own premise.