Like many musicians affected by the Coronavirus pandemic, the guitarist of legendary rock band Pink Floyd has kept his creative juices flowing by producing music while in lockdown. Hosting a weekly livestream from home called the Von Trapped Family - a pun on the family of plucky singing refugees from The Sound of Music – David Gilmour has released two new covers of songs by former bandmate Syd Barrett.
Paying tribute to the Cambridge-born singer and lyricist, who died in 2006, Gilmour featured in his latest weekly stream new covers of Octopus and Dominoes, tracks taken from Barrett’s only two solo albums, both released at either end of 1970, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. The full stream can be seen here, in which Gilmour and family – including Gilmour’s wife, the novelist and Pink Floyd lyricist Polly Samson – provide a wide variety of musical performances.
Revealing anecdotes about his former bandmate, Gilmour says that he has been asked to proofread a book of Barrett’s lyrics which is said to be on the literary horizon. This latest upload follows the May 9th release of the band’s bombastic performance Pulse, featuring film footage of ‘Us and Them‘ recorded at Earls Court in 1994 and restored using original tape masters in 2019.
The band’s YouTube channel has been bustling with archived material now for almost a month, since the release of a new series which sees the release of rare, previously unseen footage going live once a week. The band’s generosity with the presentation of their extraordinary archive is perhaps as close as fans will get to seeing them all together again.
Speaking to Rolling Stone last month in a video interview, singer-songwriter Roger Waters declared outright that a Pink Floyd reunion would be “fucking awful“. Having reportedly attempted a “peace summit” with his fellow bandmates, the pleas for goodwill were rejected. “I wrote out a sort of a plan because we’d come to sort of a — I don’t really want to talk about this,” he said, in relation to the idea of having a reunion, “but my plan didn’t bear fruit.“
