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21 " Years before MTV, the system was for a band to appear on one of the celebrity shows then current. The presenter, usually a popular singer of a certain age anxious to extend his career, would sing a couple of numbers, and then bring guests on to chat, with musical interludes from the likes of us. With Syd approaching a catatonic state, you might think this was not a recipe for success, and you’d be right. "
― Nick Mason , Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd
22 " Obviously a computer still can’t throw a television out of a hotel window or get drunk and be sick on the carpet, so there is little danger of them replacing drummers for some while yet. "
23 " We thought we could augment the band with an extra guitarist to take the pressure off Syd. Jeff Beck’s name was mentioned, which would have been an interesting (and spectacular) experiment. I don’t think any of us would have had the courage to make the phone call at the time. Roger eventually managed it twenty-five years later. "
24 " Steve came from a very different background to the band. His father Tommy was a fisherman on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland; when the great American documentary maker Robert Flaherty made his film Man of Aran about life on the islands in the 1930s, Steve’s father was one of the featured characters. "
25 " The only real downside to all of this was not to appear for another thirteen years. In the brave new, and very middle-class, alternative world, mainstream politics were rather neglected. By the time anyone realised, it was too late. The wallflowers, who had been left out of all the fun in the Sixties, got their own back during the 1980s by gaining control of the country and vandalising the health service, education, libraries and any other cultural institutions they could get their hands on. "
26 " They arrived with few of the preconceptions or expectations of a normal audience, and were often in a chemically altered state sufficient to find drying paint not only interesting but deeply significant. "
27 " The R&B classics were mixed up with our longer workouts, so that ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, which we often used as an opener, might be followed immediately by a very straight cover of Bo Diddley’s ‘Can’t Judge A Book’ or Chuck Berry’s ‘Motivating’, one of Syd’s favourites. "
28 " We also gained an insight into how the rest of the music business viewed us when Alan Price raised a laugh at our expense by banging the reverb on his Hammond organ and announcing that this was psychedelic music. At the time we were mortified, probably because all our mums were in the audience; any sense of resentment has nearly worn off. "
29 " Meanwhile, Rick was supplying texture and melody, and Roger drive, discipline and musical forethought. As drummers are a law unto themselves, I fortunately have never had to justify my existence in quite the same way. "
30 " That complexity may only have been ‘quiet, loud, quiet, loud again’, but at a time when most rock bands only had two volume settings – painfully loud and really, really painfully loud – this was groundbreaking stuff. "
31 " Bernie Ecclestone’s comment that ‘If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu. "
32 " We eventually ended up with enough left-over material that we considered releasing it as a second album, including a set we dubbed ‘The Big Spliff’, the kind of ambient mood music that we were bemused to find being adopted by bands like the Orb, "
33 " Bootleg, a huge and immovable Great Dane, was also in attendance. "
34 " We were still quite short of material, and one extra encore found us with nearly nothing more to play: we plumped for ‘Echoes’. We were not that familiar with performing the song, and the piece sounded a little stilted – it was the last time we ever played the number. David now observes that one of the reasons we couldn’t quite recapture the feel of the original was that the younger musicians we were now working with were so technically proficient they were not able to unlearn their technique and just noodle around as we had in the early Seventies. "
35 " Both of these were played on the family’s new state-of-the-art gramophone that was electric and connected to a device resembling a cross between the cabinets made in the days of Louis XIV and a Rolls-Royce dashboard. "
36 " even if Guy Pratt was the last out of the bar the night – or morning – before, his playing was faultless on stage, a tribute to his iron constitution or the fact that our music was too easy. "
37 " Within a couple of years, I had gravitated towards a group of friends from the neighbourhood who had also discovered rock ’n’ roll, and it seemed an excellent idea to put a band together. The fact that none of us knew how to play was only a minor setback, since we didn’t have any instruments. "
38 " Help was at hand in the rather large shape of Douglas Adams. As well as being the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas was an Apple Mac genius, guitar enthusiast and – fortunately for us – a fan of Pink Floyd. He could bring a marvellous sense of humour to the most desperate moments. He became party to a lot of the discussions about the album title. "
39 " Regrettably these tapes still exist. "
40 " I would now tend to say that probably reflects quite accurately my own general commitment to politics – slightly to the left of half-hearted with only the occasional outburst of good behaviour. "