Layer 496 . . . Thunder, Euphoria, Spiritual Transcendence, Connectedness, Rev, Ecstacy, Adam, Colin, The War On Drugs and Tackling The Causes

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Maybe everybody should get blissfully stoned at least a few times in their life - if only to have some sort of benchmark against which to assess other states of bliss, or ecstacy.

I was thinking about this whilst listening to Pink Floyd's Delicate Sound of Thunder live CD - and getting carried away by the sheer genius of the musicianship and the performance. To say nothing of the incredible music itself - and the sublety of the lyrics.

There's no instrument that can do the things an amplified guitar can do, and no musician who can do them better than Dave Gilmour. To be in an audience when his band does its thing is bliss indeed - although listening to a CD through decent speakers or quality headphones can get you there as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicate_Sound_of_Thunder

One of the things I think I've learned in life is that the only worthwhile and sustainable highs are natural highs. Drugs are not only unreliable and potentially dangerous - they can even prevent natural highs occurring, to say nothing of many unpleasant and harmful side effects.

We do all seem to need, however, heightened states of spiritual transcendence, in which we feel intense wellbeing, connectedness and gladness in being alive. Sometimes it might take only a walk in a place of beauty to get you there; sometimes you can feel it sitting in front of a log fire watching flames flickering; sometimes music will take you there.

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In this week's episode of "Rev" (BBC2) the eponymous Rev - Adam Smallbone played by Tom Hollander - inadvertently takes Ecstacy (MDMA), which has been diluted in a whisky and ouzo cocktail and given to him by Adam's fruitcake parishoner, Colin.

Consequently the Rev becomes blissfully stoned - which is a real contrast to his usual state of fretfulness, frustration and anxiety.

MDMA can induce euphoria, a sense of intimacy with others, and diminished anxiety.
- Wikipedia     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA

Adam does indeed float away on a cloud of euphoria, feels enormous closeness and intimacy with everyone, and loses his anxiety.

"I'm off my tits, Lord. This is wonderful. I love you, Lord. I love your world and all the people in it."

Sounds OK, but the problem is he's not able to function in his job, and the comedown isn't too pleasant either. Colin tells him, "You'll be best off drinking through it."

Prior to experiencing the drug-induced high, Adam had tried explaining to Colin what it feels like to experience "God's love" - "I feel a sense of peace, a real sense of connection to others, and an absence of anything bad. There are moments when I feel like I'm surfing on a great wave of hope and love."

"A bit like doing Ecstacy, then?" says Colin.

"No. And most importantly you feel part of a huge loving family . . ."

"So it's exactly like doing Ecstacy then!"

"No! What I'm talking about is a permanent spiritual state that underpins my entire being."

"Have you ever taken an E?"

"No, Colin. Mind-altering substances aren't that big in the Church of England."

"Apart from drink. All vicars drink loads. And you smoke fags."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rev._(TV_series)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2011/11/rev-bbc-two-comedy.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sz26s

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People like Colin will always take drugs, until they decide not to. Why? See above. They can make you feel good, and can make life feel bearable, and sometimes wonderful. They can also seriously mess up your life, especially through impurity. Proper control and regulation of the trade in drugs would at least deal with the impurity issue. But there are other reasons for adopting a more enlightened approach to the trade in drugs. You can't actually prevent young people, in particular, being curious about drugs, and wanting to experience their effects. Some people have to actually experience the downside of drugs in order to decide to no longer to use them.

The war on drugs is a waste of time


It is not only very expensive and misdirected activity, but counterproductive and harmful..


by Tom Lloyd, former chief constable


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/20/drugs-british-police


Despite all the money and effort poured into the so-called "war on drugs", the inexorable spread of drugs and the accompanying damage is powerful testament to failure. What we are doing is not only very expensive and misdirected activity, but actively counterproductive and harmful.


If your child was found in possession of drugs, would you want them to be arrested, charged and convicted (with all the stigma that entails) or advised, supported and treated if necessary? Every drug user is someone's child and, sadly, often the victim of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.


Drug-taking blocks the pain and yet we ostracise and criminalise rather than understand and support. "Drugs are bad, ban them!" is an easy mantra, but it ignores the history of alcohol prohibition in the US and our own recent experience of spending more than £10bn a year on the criminal justice system and losing more than £15bn to crime that has merely accompanied the rise in the drug trade. The criminals make around £6bn a year. They are the success story.


Nowhere in the country is free from drugs and the associated crime epidemic. Criminals continue to make huge profits, corroding and corrupting public and private lives. They target each new generation of children and create addicts who are ostracised, become diseased and die unnecessarily.


More recently, I have been working abroad and the problems that exist worldwide are recognised at the highest levels, with most acknowledging the harmful unintended consequences of the current approach. A huge criminal market (with enormous financial incentives) has been created using corruption and violence to make its huge profits.


The Swiss people voted by a two-thirds majority last year to ratify their successful heroin prescription programme as official government policy. For 15 years, heroin has been prescribed in special clinics under controlled conditions, resulting in less crime, death and disease and fewer new users. After this "medicalisation" heroin is no longer cool. Importantly, of the previously hopeless individuals many now hold down a job and live normal family lives. All we have managed is three trial runs, obviously successful, involving just over 100 heroin users. This is good news, but we must move more quickly.


As we wring our hands and close our eyes to the lessons from abroad, delay in expanding heroin prescribing will inevitably lead to more people who will die, contract HIV and Hepatitis C, continue to commit crime and prostitute themselves to feed their habits.


Prosecuting users is misguided and counterproductive; prosecuting dealers without tackling demand or their profits does not work. If the money wasted on misinformation, low-level enforcement and condemnation had been spent on tackling the underlying causes, so many blighted lives could have been different. There are other options, but sadly we cannot hold a rational public debate as serving officers or politicians who dare challenge the "war on drugs" orthodoxy justifiably fear being pilloried by our national press.


Politicians will not even conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis of the current approach. The drug policy thinktank Transform has calculated savings of up to £14bn a year if drugs were controlled and regulated. It's not as if we could not do with the money.


So, where are we? Law enforcement spending is up, criminal profits are up but drug use is also up. The game's up!


We know that we must change and we also know that police officers like to make things happen. This is the time for police leaders throughout the world to challenge the status quo and focus resources on serious, organised criminals, not blighted users, and to focus on harm reduction not some pie-in-the-sky dream of a drug-free society. Where they lead, politicians will follow.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/20/drugs-british-police


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"Tackling the underlying causes." 

If the underlying causes of drug use are curiosity and a search for alternative ways to experience reality; if they're the seeking of fun and good times; if they're self-medication for feeling physical, mental and emotional pain - then you can forget about "tackling" these causes. There's no way in the world to eradicate them.

If, however, the underlying causes are poverty or feelings of uselessness and worthlessness, then there are lots of things we need to do to tackle such things. Some of the answers are economic and financial; some are related to inadequate education and parenting.

If the cause is a need to feel a sense of peace, or a real sense of connection to others, to feel closeness and intimacy - then there is plenty we can and should do. Personal,emotional, and social intelligence are within everyone's grasp - give or take a few psychopaths.

If the need is to feel what some Buddhists call 'satori' - spiritual ecstacy or bliss - then we need to offer much better opportunities to understand and to develop spiritual intelligence.
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Layer 366 . . . Pink Floyd, David Gilmour, Sheer Genius, More Rooney, Zen, Spiritual Intelligence, Stupid Bankers, Regressive Cuts and Hitting the Poorest

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Michael Mansfield was on Desert Island Discs this week, and chose a Pink Floyd track as his number one record. Someone's like or dislike for the Floyd is a very good indicator of musical taste and intelligence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vc504#synopsis

This week on Sky Arts there was another showing of "David Gilmour: Remember That Night - Live at the Royal Albert Hall." I've seen this 90 minute programme several times now, but what struck me this time was the sheer joy that his fellow musicians get from playing alongside the genius of Dave Gilmour. There's a quality to his playing, and a quality to his guitar tones and sounds, as well as the quality of the melodies and his singing, that brings smiles to the faces of the other band members when Dave's in the middle of one of his long solos. And they're not just smiles of enjoyment - there's a kind of disbelief and a delight that someone can be so brilliant, so expressive, so able to command your whole attention and send your soul & spirit soaring into another dimension. Comfortably Numb has arguably the best guitar solo of all time.

From Layer 138 -

Having just listened to an hour and a half of David Gilmour and Rick Wright and co on Sky Arts 1, Remember That Night, performing Pink Floyd classics such as High Hopes and Comfortably Numb, cranked up loud through the hi fi, I’m Zenned and blissed out . . .

See also Layer 45.

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Rooney's still in the news. His biographer, Hunter Davies, said on the radio yesterday that he clearly needs "therapy". Not quite, Hunter. As Oxzen was saying a few days ago, he needs to take time out to start working on his soul and his spirit through relaxation, contemplation and meditation. He needs to find his Tao, and a Zen approach to life.

Back in 1961 Alan Watts published a book called 'Psychotherapy East and West'. In it he describes two different approaches to achieving beneficial changes to consciousness and attitudes to self and society.

"The disciplines of Buddhism and Taoism are concerned with changing the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted people. It is increasingly apparent to [Western] psychotherapists that the normal state of consciousness in our culture is both the context and the breeding ground of mental disease. A complex of societies of vast material wealth bent on mutual destruction is anything but a condition of social health.

Buddhism, in common with Taoism in China, is not a culture but a critique of culture, and an enduring non-violent revolution or 'loyal opposition' to the culture with which it is involved. [The aim is] to help the individual to be himself and to go it alone without giving unneccessary offence to his community; to be in the world (of social convention) but not of the world. A Chinese Buddhist text describes the sage in words that strongly suggest Riesman's 'inner-directed' or Maslow's 'self-actualising' personality:

He walks always by himself, goes about always by himself;
Every perfect one saunters along one and the same passage of Nirvana;
His tone is classical, his spirit is transparent, his airs are naturally elevated,
His features are rather gaunt, his bones are firm, he pays no attention to others.

Maybe this is the special magic of Dave Gilmour - 'His tone is classical, his spirit is transparent, his airs are naturally elevated'. To the Nth degree.

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There was a discussion about bankers and banking, and about imposing some new special taxes on them, on an R4 Today programme this week in which someone said, "We shouldn't penalise an industry in which we excel". Penalise! Excel!

It's incredible, really. Our 'excellence' in banking has brought this country to the dire state it's in. Our entire banking system was only saved from bankrupting itself and from crashing and smashing our entire financial system thanks to the injection of billions of OUR money into the coffers of the very people whose "excellence" caused the crisis. These people now expect to carry on paying themselves even more billions in bonuses, and they regard any attempt on our part to recoup our 'investment', as it were, as an outrageous interference and an unjustified 'penalty'!

They clearly don't give a shit about any aspect of our society other than what they can get out of it for themselves, and they also have the nerve to threaten to fuck off to Switzerland and take their businesses with them if we even attempt to get them to contribute towards the national wellbeing. Can anybody say why we didn't nationalise the lot of them - at the point where their shares were worth next to nothing? We could have done it so easily.

Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse did a brilliant sketch on their BBC programme this week in which two stupid bankers sell to one another several times over a single worthless piece of paper - eventually raising it's 'value' to several million pounds - before finally finding some other sucker (banker) who can be conned into thinking it's worth what they say it is and who then agrees to buy it. That's the way to do it! Sheer excellence. Investment banking at its very best.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00v36y1
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Spending review: banks appear to have wriggled off the hook

Government accused of 'going soft' on banks with a charge that would raise no more than £2.5bn from the industry

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/22/spending-review-banks-off-hook

The day after George Osborne announced swingeing cuts to public services and welfare benefits, the government was expected to announce payback time for Britain's banks – blamed by many for the country's parlous economic state.

But despite unveiling details of a levy on bank balance sheets, the government was yesterday accused of "going soft" on the banks with a charge that would raise no more than £2.5bn from the industry.

Unions were swift to attack the plans, dismissing it as "a pathetically small amount" to demand from the banks.

Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who sits on the Treasury select committee, criticised the government for "going soft" on the banks and having a lack of ambition on the bank levy. "In the spending review, there were no new measures to ensure that those who caused the crisis pay their fair share towards paying down the deficit and the draft bank levy legislation published today falls far short of the decisive action we need and is an insult to those losing benefits and local services", he said.

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As for the coalition's claim that they have spread the misery 'fairly' and 'progressively', and that the wealthy will pay more than the less well off - anyone with half a brain can see that this is complete crap.

It's true that the wealthy will pay more - both in total and as a percentage of income - but so what? Someone who's already extremely well off will feel no pain whatsoever from a slightly higher tax bill and a loss of child benefit. We're talking here about people who already have extremely comfortable lives, who own their own homes, have a couple of nice cars, plenty of holidays, possibly own more than one property, etc.

Whereas someone who has no money and no assets, who's possibly trying to live on £65 a week, will feel plenty of pain if they lose even £10 of benefits or tax credits.

It's one thing for the coalition to implement policies which favour the already wealthy - but it's outrageous for them to claim that they've spread the pain of the cutbacks fairly and that everyone is having to share in the pain and the hardships.

Spending review cuts hit poor hardest, says Institute of Fiscal Studies

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/21/ifs-spending-review-cuts-poor-hit-hardest
Britain's leading tax and spending experts today flatly contradicted the key claims made by George Osborne and the coalition over the fairness of its £81bn austerity programme.

In a move that forced the government on to the defensive, the highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies challenged the chancellor's contention that his plans for four years of belt-tightening would be progressive, safeguard frontline school spending, and require smaller savings for departments than Alistair Darling would have demanded.

Angela Eagle, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: "George Osborne's smoke and mirrors have well and truly unravelled. On any measure his plans hit the poorest hardest. And the IFS have all but called him a liar for his ridiculous claim that he is cutting less than Labour planned."

In its detailed analysis of Wednesday's comprehensive spending review, the IFS said the £7bn of fresh welfare cuts, together with public spending reductions, reinforced the regressive nature of the changes introduced by the coalition since it came to power. Families with children would be the hardest hit by the changes and only by including the increase in the top rate of income tax introduced by Labour could the coalition justify the claim that the better-off were being hit more than the poor.

"The tax and benefit changes are regressive rather than progressive across most of the income distribution. And when we add in the new measures announced yesterday this is, unsurprisingly, reinforced," said the acting director of the IFS, Carl Emmerson.

"Our analysis continues to show that, with the notable exception of the richest 2%, the tax and benefit components of the fiscal consolidation are, overall, being implemented in a regressive way."

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Layer 45 Voices, Time and the Floyd

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This is a double blog, as I won’t have time to write one tomorrow.

Wonderful Radio 4 today featured a writer, a novelist, I’ve never heard of - Kate Mosse. The interviewer mentioned that Kate has created a very good website, on which she has a whole section of advice for writers.

http://www.mosselabyrinth.co.uk/advice/intro.asp

He website also has very interesting interactive section, like a blog, where she shares what she’s doing as a writer whilst she’s actually working on a novel - the idea being that she gets feedback from a certain section of her readership as she’s writing her next novel, which affects the way she’s writing it.

This is pretty much what I’ve been saying to friends about my enthusiasm for blogging - if everyone comments on everyone else’s blog it really helps to generate new ideas, helps to refine your previous writing, etc. The interactivity is crucial.

I guess in years gone by when people had no telephones, let alone email, if they wanted to share their thoughts and their lives with good friends then they pretty much had to write letters - lots of them. These days we can just publish blogs - letting the whole world know what we’re thinking and doing, or just letting a select readership have access to our journals, and giving them a means of instantly feeding back.

I have several good friends who are good writers, though most of them have yet to officially publish anything. Some of them annoy the living daylights out of me because they are so talented and such good writers, and yet they make little or no time in their busy lives for blogging or writing a journal, or whatever.

They all recognise that the process of putting their thoughts into writing is incredibly enriching, like a meditation. And yet they don’t have the drive or the energy to do it, at least not regularly. Or maybe they don’t think it’s worth the effort, or maybe they have misgivings about sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings, and don’t see the point of keeping a journal that’s pretty much for their eyes only.

I’m now fascinated by the thought that the thing we might miss the most about somebody we don’t see frequently is their voice - meaning their unique perception, their take on the world, their way of expressing themselves, their sense of humour, their original thinking, and so on.

And the more I think about this the more I feel angry that our schools don’t recognise that this is the most important thing we can do for children - to help them realise that they have an individual voice, an individual take on the world, a unique perception, which they need to recognise and learn how to express to the full.

It’s all very well learning to enjoy the individual voices of great writers, through reading them as often as possible. But children usually take in an implicit message that only the voices of published writers are interesting and important and valid - i.e. their own voice is extremely unimportant and invalid. In fact they don’t even understand the concept of having an individual voice.

I remember coming across Harold Rosen’s efforts to address this issue back in the seventies, through his work as a secondary school teacher and researcher. And subsequently his son Michael’s continuation of this work, especially in books like Did I Hear You Write?

I remember my own time as a teacher, returning from a day’s outing with my class, and hearing them ask the dreaded question, “Do we have to write about it?” Well no, they didn’t. It took me only a few minutes to scribe on the board their recollections of the actual events of the day. What was the point of 25 - 30 children all writing a useless list of “We did this, and we did that; we went there, and we saw this, and we had our packed lunch . . . “

All that I asked of them, in return for a brilliant day visiting exciting new places, was to write down their individual impressions of their experiences. What was interesting? What was exciting? Funny? Scary? Puzzling? And then, having written their individual thoughts and feelings, their responses and their conclusions, they loved listening to one another read out their pieces. Lots of appreciation and laughter. Which then inspired another burst of writing - “Oh yes! I’d forgotten about that! That’s what I thought as well! I need to write about that!”

They soon learnt that what’s important in the process of learning is not so much recording the facts as recording their individual take on the facts, which is as true for a science experiment or the discovery of a new maths concept, as it is for a geography or history or art or geology field trip.

Being able to examine and reflect on our own unique and individual thoughts is a vital part of living and learning - about ourselves and about life in general.

It’s a waste of time being an individual human being unless we enjoy our individual humanity, and the individuality of others. Unfortunately our school system doesn’t care for developing children as individuals, and certainly not as individual writers, and it claims it has no time to do so, as it rushes each day to cover the ‘curriculum’ and prepare for tests.

A cracked record? Moi?

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Time and the Floyd.

Last night was Pink Floyd night on BBC4. A whole evening of brilliant TV, and music, and without a single advert. Pure magic.

The story of the Floyd is a fascinating one. There are so many elements that make their story so unusual. They were a unique band to begin with, thanks to Syd Barrett. I hadn’t fully appreciated what a strange, wonderful, courageous, charismatic and brilliant human being he was in those early days, before he lost his mind. I hadn’t realized either how much his talented peers had loved him, and how much they had missed him, both personally and musically, after he’d gone off with the fairies.

His whole spirit was unique, iconoclastic, anarchistic. And the band therefore didn’t give a damn about fashion and trends and commercialism. Sure, they wanted recognition and appreciation, but not as individual egos. It was all about the music, and what they had to say about life, the universe and everything.

I remember well their early days - the incredible live shows they performed just after “Arnold Layne” - coming into the mod haven of Coventry Locarno on the back of their chart hit, and playing unbelievable spaced out music that was nothing like Arnold Layne and nothing like anything anyone had ever heard; playing in semi darkness, with a liquid light show projected over the entire stage.

The audience wasn’t stoned, as such, but it sure felt that way. I guess people either loved it or hated it. Either you got it or you didn’t. I guess quite a few of my mod mates might have been unhappy that it wasn’t an evening of Arnold Layne type ditties, and headed off to the bar. I didn’t really notice anyone else. I was too wrapped up in the music and the performance. These guys were the house band of the incomparably trendy and freaky UFO Club, for chrissakes. Not that I’d ever smoked a joint, let alone taken LSD.

Arnold Layne, though untypical, was itself a great song. I still have a pristine 45 rpm copy of it. Such wry humour, such a strange thing to write a song about. Someone’s strange hobby. Collecting clothes. Moon shine, washing line. A see-through mirror. "He dug it". Lyrics and a tune you could never forget.

http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/p/pink_floyd/arnold_layne.html

That was the beginning of a lifelong fascination and appreciation, right through to my current enjoyment of David Gilmour’s ‘On An Island’, and his band’s brilliant performances of ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ on the DVD. Nobody else plays and sings like that. The Floyd completely stole the show when they invited Roger Waters back to perform at Live8 in Hyde Park in 2005. Which would have happened with or without Waters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/06/30/bmfloyd30.xml

Their very early stuff, though immature and relatively amateurish, on account of them being non-musicians (apart from Rick Wright), was totally original, totally off the wall. They maintain, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, that they weren't good enough as musicians to copy or imitate what other bands were doing, so they didn't. Following Syd's example they weren’t afraid to experiment, and improvise, and jam. Their gigs were all about improvisation and jamming. Nobody had ever seen or heard anything like it. And this was before Dave Gilmour joined the band.

By the time I saw them in Manchester in 1969, at a college gig, they were on their way to becoming megastars, and Gilmour was a well-established member. The light show was projected all along one side of the hall by now, as well as all over the stage area. They had well and truly mastered their instruments, and the stage was filled with their gear - a huge drum kit, amps, speaker units, even kettle drums and a gong.

Their catalogue of tracks by now included Astronomy Domine; Careful With That Axe, Eugene; Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun; and A Saucerful of Secrets. All of which are immortalized on the great live album recorded at that Manchester College of Commerce gig in June 1969 - Ummagumma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ummagumma

Coincidentally I was also at the first ever live performance of Floyd's Atom Heart Mother at the legendary Bath Festival in Shepton Mallet in 1970, but that’s another story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_Festival_of_Blues_and_Progressive_Music_1970

I also remember standing in the amphitheatre in Pompeii in the mid ‘80s and picturing the Floyd playing there, performing the amazing track Echoes from their album ‘Meddle‘, in Live At Pompeii. They showed clips from that last night on the TV, including shots of them strolling around the rim of Vesuvius, which is indeed an amazing experience. Awesome!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd:_Live_at_Pompeii

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2hFZ8KnsSo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sein6WnbY0

You can get a flavour of the film from the comment on the youtube video, posted by StripeyElephant - "Holy fuck this is the best thing I've ever seen."

My own favourite part of it is the middle section, where the camera tracks slowly around huge menacing black stacks of speakers - studying an unbroken black wall of speaker units, with protruding horn units looking like military grenade launchers, about to lob sonic bombs around the deserted amphitheatre. Roger Waters' bass thunders and throbs its incessant pulse

Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum

followed and accompanied by Gilmour's howling, wailing, pleading guitar; soaring and wrenching your spirit, demanding you go with it to some otherworldly place in his emotional universe, accompanied by Rick Wright's vibrating rotating wail of electronic organ and Dave Mason's precision drumming and splashing smashing cymbals. I still find electrifying the moment when Gilmour first cuts into the bass drone with the nastiest bluesiest most jagged chord imaginable, whipped into some previously unknown sonic dimension by his incredible mass of electronic gadgets and effects.

(There may be little point playing this video unless you're able to pump it through a good sub-woofer setup or some good headphones)

You may like to know that, according to an old book of mine about guitar players, Gilmour used to use (pre digital and Midi) an effects board consisting of a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, an MXR Phase 100, a Dynacomp noise gate, a Uni-Vibe, a Pete Cornish Custom Fuzz, a Jim Dunlop Cry Baby, and three sweep pedals. "This new state of the art board had sophisticated revolutionary switching capabilities - each effect could be individually by-passed or configured in any sequence, and there were three outputs for various amps." On the other hand, this may be too much information.

The centrepiece of last night’s broadcast was a documentary about the making of Dark Side of the Moon, which is now seen as their magnum opus, and which they are quite rightly extraordinarily proud of.

It was so interesting to find out that it was made in the Abbey Road studios, pre-computers and digital recording, and the sonic effects were all done on an early sequencer and using tape loops set up on banks of reel to reel tape players. Of course! And of course nobody else had ever tried to work in this way. Nobody else was so experimental and innovative.

Roger Waters’ lyrics might now be viewed as typically ‘angry young mannish’ (as he does himself), but he was able to encapsulate perfectly in words what so many of us were feeling in the aftermath of post-60’s disillusionment - feeling about materialism, about the rat race, about the lack of sanity in the world, about militarism, about mortality, about religion, and about ‘hanging on in quiet desperation’. Lyrics that were not wordy, lyrics that were economical and evocative and precise.

The programme told the story of how Clare Torry came to perform her incredible improvised wordless vocal over Rick Wright's brilliant ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’. They described how their old mate Dick Parry was invited to play his wonderful sax pieces on ‘Us and Them’ and ‘Money’. They also told the story of how the strange rambling voices and the manic laughter were specially recorded for the album.

I first heard Dark Side of the Moon lying beside a log fire in a darkened room in the house of a VSO teacher in Northern Nigeria in 1973. In the context of the time, and having just a week ago emerged from the Heart of Darkness, so to speak - from the jungles and rivers of Zaire and Central Africa - it was an unforgettable and mind-blowing experience.

Just listening to some new music on some good quality hi-fi would in itself have been mind blowing after all the time I'd been without it, after all those weeks of traveling across the Serengeti, through the mountains of Rwanda, and along the mud roads of the central African rainy season. Coming into contact with the Dark Side in those circumstances was a breathtaking sonic culture shock and mind-fuck of the first magnitude.

Dave Gilmour says in the documentary that he only wishes that he’d been able to have the experience of hearing the album for the first time, from start to finish, completely ‘out of the blue’. Well Dave, I can tell you, listening to it in its entirety in the stoned darkness of an African evening in front of a flickering log fire was spine-tinglingly overwhelming and incredible. And for that, many thanks.

It says something for the quality of the documentary and the strange brilliance of the band and their music that even my son, no lover of rock or the sixties or psychedelia, sat with me and watched it all through, even though he was dog tired after a double shift at work. There’s hope for him yet! He’s a wonderful young man, but has a lot to learn about music, which, by the way, he seems to have stopped listening to. He’s reached a hiatus. The day he plays and enjoys one of my precious vinyl albums on my turntable I’ll know he’s getting fully on message and fully on track.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398868/

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Having just re-listened to 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene', I'm still amazed by the insane power of Roger Waters' diabolical screaming, and recall vividly the effect of it during live shows. Thrilling, scary and and somehow liberating. I didn't realise at the time that you were allowed to be so full-on crazy and anarchic in public - so utterly emotionally over the top. If you were standing close to the stage it was as disturbing and disorienting as witnessing The Who smashing their instruments.

Sure, it was wild and anarchic and pointless and childish, perhaps. But then isn't this what art is supposed to be about, at least some of the time? Delving into our innermost darkest thoughts and feelings, and expressing them, in words, images, colour, movement and sound. As I say, a kind of liberation.

It's interesting that Michelangelo Antonioni was so determined to have this track in 'Zabriski Point', and I well remember what a controversial movie that was when it was first released.

And going back to Romeo and Juliet (see Layer 31) there an interesting image in Romeo's response to being told "From Verona thou art banished" -

"There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence banished is banish'd from the world,
And world's exile is death; then 'banished'
Is death misterm'd. Calling death 'banished,'
Thou cutt'st my head off with a golden axe,
And smilest upon the stroke that murders me.

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One final thought, Let Pink Floyd be an inspiration to all fledgling musicians and writers - don't be put off your desire to be creative and expressive by a lack of technical training and know-how. Don't worry about not being able to do what others can do. Do your own thing, create in your own way using whatever skills and abilities you have, and enjoy whatever you do. Be original and then you can't be judged by conventional standards. Start a new genre of your own perhaps. And the more you do it the better you'll become.
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