Roger Waters has announced he is to tour The Wall. Apparently in its entirety.The tour kicks off in Canada at the start of September playing across North America. At this time there are no planned dates for Europe which is a shame. To hear The Wall completely would be awesome for me. I was too young to see them tour it originally and still too young to see the Berlin concert. Whilst it would be ideal to see this performed by Pink Floyd, the continued animosity between Roger and David and the sad passing of Richard Wright would make any form of reunion pretty hollow.

On his new site, Roger Waters explains his reasons for doing it again, citing the continued relevance of the wall in our modern lives. He argues that, “Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?” Regardless of the meaning, this would be awesome to see.

Like most bands you have to be a fan club member to gain any chance of a proper ticket, but unlike most there is no charge. To get a Police ticket I had to £100+ fan club fee for a chance of a ticket and with U2 the preference is given to the fans who have been their the longest. By fans that means those that have paid they annual subscriptions every year. This charging vast sums for fan clubs [for the chance of a ticket] is something I object to morally but do for a chance to get a ticket before they go to the higher priced bureaus. Anyway, that is a topic for another day.

The fact Roger has no plans this year to tour Europe is a shame so I will be aiming for NYC to see the show. If you read the article on Rolling Stone, check the comments about his lack of European presence. One wag left the comment, “Hey Tom, get over it, Europe already has enough cool stuff like museums and tons of women with no inhibitions.”

www.rogerwaters.com

I am about to sit down and spend the afternoon writing and started thinking about what music I would like to accompany me. I was tempted to tweet for recommendations and then I thought no.

When I write I need music that I can enjoy, music I can lose myself in but music that doesn’t require much of my thoughts to enjoy. This is clearly not the time to break in a new band or album. Like running a marathon in brand new trainers, new music won’t help. So I will be turning to the old reliables to keep me fuelled this afternoon. These would include:

Tubular Bells & Incantations by Mike Oldfield – pretty much vocal-less and well worn in.

1999 by Prince. Once the first two tracks have settled down there are long periods of quite introspective music. I’ve been listening to this album for over 20 years now so there are no surprises to knock me.

Brian Eno – like Mike Oldfield, some of his work can be very melodic and calming. ‘Background music’ some people may call it but I find it works in harmony with my moods, allowing me a comfortable base to think. Music for Airports would be the obvious choice but all his ambient recordings are worthy on this list.

On the ambient theme, Kate Bush’s last album Aerial had an amazing second disk ‘a Sky of Honey’ is a beautiful tapestry of a Spring Day that is both inspirational and uplifting. At 42 minutes long it is regularly on repeat.

Genesis, being one of my all time favourite bands would obviously feature with The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway an easy way to lose yourself for two hours, although I would not recommend this for newcomers – it may need some breaking in before acting as your accompaniment. Trespass is also a wonderful album from very early on (their third album I think, pre Phil Collins.)

Talk Talk – now I only really got into their albums last year whilst I was writing a lot for the agency. I had always loved Natural History but had never really got into their albums. It’s My Life and The Colour of Spring are the ones to lose yourself in.

The KLF Chillout is also awesome, a bit like the Future Sound of London Radio 1 Sessions, very deep layered soundscapes – sadly not available on Spotify.

Rounding off the list is Clutching at Straws, the last studio album Marillion made with Fish before parting company. Just the first few bars make me feel like there is a warm blanket wrapped around me and we’re off for a great 45 minutes.

I guess a lot of these albums could be seen as quite introspective, dare I say ‘down’? But there is a balance, get really down and miserable and bang goes the inspiration – Lou Reed’s Berlin of course springs to mind but doesn’t appear here (I save that for long journeys) nor does Roger Water’s Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking which is also worth of discovery.

Do you have favourite albums to write to, work to? Fancy sharing them? I love new music and always keen to add to the roster of writing music. Leave a comment if you would be kind enough.

Title Song: Classic, Adrian Gurvitz (Spotify | YouTube)

For me, this is one of the nicest pieces of Christmas music – A jazz piece composed by Vince Guaraldi for the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Here is the vocal version which is lovely.

At over 6 minutes the instrumental version is a warm, hopeful piece of Christmas music. There is no video here, just the music so enjoy!

I h ave heard a lot about Biffy Clyro but never heard their music. In fact, I still haven’t. I was intrigued, however to see the cover of their latest album.

Which looked a lot like Storm Thorgerson‘s work for Pink Floyd, the Division Bell. In particular this one particular image bears a striking resemblance to the shots for High Hopes. (You can see more of this imagery in the video at the end of the post.)

A quick bit of digging shows indeed Storm is working with Buffy and this additional image shows they are going for a very Pink Floyd (or is Storm?) style, this one reminisicent of Wish You Were Here.

Buffy

Wish You Were Here

Brilliant! I love Storm’s work, my walls are covered in Pink Floyd prints and I find his work very inspring.

As he is working with Biffy I will now go and listen

Two videos for a Sunday morning. First, Robert Plant.

Second, a huge dust storm in the Australian Outback.

The sad news of Michael Jackson’s death has lit up the social streams as the news is radiated around the world, coupled with commentary, reaction and the occasional bad joke. His plans for an unparalleled set of concerts were set to restore his financial status and professional credibility. But with his early passing, the opportunity for such revenue generation has passed.

No doubt the record label(s) will be looking to reissue, repackage, re-evaluate the songs (double pack with a photograph, extra track and a tacky badge) which will help recoup some income for his surviving family.

But with the advent of new music channels, from Blip Fm to Spotify and Pandora, the ability to play the music instantly and share globally must start to impact on the revenue opportunity for back catalogue sales.

Is death no longer a career move?

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These are my bookmarks for June 23rd from 10:20 to 11:48:

• 35+ Horizontal Websites for Your Design Inspiration | Vandelay Design Blog – Websites that use horizontal scrolling in addition to, or instead of, vertical scrolling are becoming more popular. While this trend isn’t a good idea in every situation, the sites showcased here may give you some ideas or inspiration for using this approach in one of your own projects.
• Powerful Images to Give Lessons Punch | The Whiteboard Blog – One of the benefits of having an Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom (or even just a data projector) is the opportunity to display full colour high quality images instead of grainy acetates or posters. With a powerful image you can really add some “punch” to your lesson. Put images up while students are coming into the room – use them as part of a lesson starter – stimulate questions.
• Shop for music tee shirts, men’s tee shirts, women’s tee shirts and lyric tee shirts – i/denti/tee – lyric inspired T-Shirts. Beautiful

These are my links for June 15th through June 16th:

• We7 – Free Music, Listen to Music Free – music
• Opera Unite – With Opera 10, we are introducing a new technology called Opera Unite, radically extending what you are able to do online. Opera Unite harnesses the power of today's fast connections and hardware, allowing all of us to help define the future landscape of the Web, one computer at a time. Read about how Opera Unite is going to change the way we interact on the Web on labs.opera.com.
• The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) – The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses. The YUI project includes the YUI Library and two build-time tools: YUI Compressor (minification) and YUI Doc (documentation engine for JavaScript code).

These are my links for June 10th through June 12th:

• CheezeDMG’s Canterbury of New Zealand Facebook Fan Campaign Tops Euro Charts | Econsultancy – CheezeDMG’s Facebook ‘Become a Fan’ campaign for Canterbury of New Zealand hit the number one spot in the May Facebook Europe charts with an impressive click-through-rate of 2.2%.
• Apple – Movie Trailers – Shutter Island – From Oscar®-winning director Martin Scorsese, “Shutter Island” is the story of two U.S. marshals, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), who are summoned to a remote and barren island off the coast of Massachusetts to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a murderess from the island’s fortress-like hospital for the criminally insane.
• Idiomag – Creates a magazine mashup based on your Last.fm profile.

Don Riddell, CNN London Anchor and big brother had a very interesting interview with The Streets about how Twitter will affect the music business for ever. The interview, available below covers off how Mike Skinner is using Twitter to test tracks on a daily basis ensuring he understands what his fans like and dislike as he puts together his next album.

This form of social collaboration has the great potential to ensure album sales as the fans have been involved in the process and will feel much greater affiliation and affection for the music when it comes out. It also has the potential to save artists, and in particular independent artists much studio time which could be wasted heading down the wrong track.

Whether such a process will take an element of mystique out of the process is something we will need to see over time. I for one think it is a great idea.

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• mp3: the streets gives away new song via twitter (gorillavsbear.blogspot.com)