Tag Archive: Pink Floyd The Wall


Setting the records straight on Progressive Rock

Filed under: Books, Music — Leave a comment
July 29, 2020

A NEW DAY YESTERDAY by Mike Barnes (Omnibus Press, 2020)

book cover

The decision to undertake a full survey of Progressive Rock music in the UK up to the mid-1970s is as bold and bonkers a project as a band embarking on a triple concept album. Yet, it works for me.

Progressive (Prog) Rock evolved in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of what Wiki defines as a “mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility”. 

Mike Barnes challenges the common prejudices surrounding this much maligned genre.

In setting the record straight, he immediately dispels the myth that Prog songs were mostly about wizards, elves and hobbits. He also shows that, contrary to common belief, bands were not universally trying to bridge the divide between classical music and rock. Rather, jazz, blues and psychedelia were key influences. Continue reading →

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Boyracers: Going nowhere fast

Filed under: Books, Fiction, Movies, Music, Parenting — Leave a comment
August 24, 2013

BOYRACERS by Alan Bissett (Polygon Books, 2001)

Cover

“Like characters in a plotless novel, we race through night after night, story after story, film quote after film quote, eternity stretching out before us like an open road”.

The above quote may sound like a romantic dream, but this rambling, albeit entertaining, tale is set in Scotland not America so the symbolic open roads have a nasty tendency of going in ever decreasing circles or else ending up at brick walls.

The ‘boyracers’ of the title are groups of teens who race cars in industrial wastelands in the city and exemplify the speed of life which is a double-edged sword of excitement and terror. A kind of modern equivalent of the ‘chicken’ game played out in Rebel Without A Cause.

This is not the story of the racers themselves but of four young male onlookers whose beat up car named Belinda is not built for speed. The Falkirk friends are soccer mad Irn-Bru addicts in pursuit of any combination of sex, booze and rock’n’roll that they can find.

Continue reading →
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STARING AT THE WALL

Filed under: Movies, Music — Leave a comment
May 1, 2011

Today I spent two hours staring at  The Wall.

I watched Alan Parker’s 1985 film of Pink Floyd’s concept album.

Probably it  would be more accurate to call it Roger Waters’ concept album since by this time Pink Floyd had ceased to be a band and had become a vehicle for his bloated ego.

It is fitting that another bloated ego, Bob Geldof,  was chosen to play the part of Pink in the movie.

He plays a burnt out rock star going slowly nuts in a hotel. Even the carpets outside the room have rectangular brick-like patterns to emphasise his feelings of mental enslavement.

Pink shaves his eyebrows, drives his wife away, mopes about his lonely childhood, trashes his room, becomes a fascist dictator and winds up heavily sedated in a loony bin. Continue reading →

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