I don’t go into London as often as I used to, and that’s really not a problem. It might have its hustle and bustle and top of the food chain city status, but it’s also not a lot of the fun it used to be. Perhaps it’s because I’m older, or just because I associate some aspects of London with things I’d rather not keep remembering to forget. Who knows and, let’s be honest, who cares? What I do know is that when I went into London a few days ago I came back with a sore throat, a cough, a spotty backside and an achy left arm, and if that’s not enough reasons to give the big smoke a wide berth then I don’t what to say. Not that it wasn’t worth it for the best part, which was a couple of hours at the IMAX in Waterloo. The last time I was there must have been around 2009, to watch Avatar in 3D, which is slightly less exciting than watching Avatar in a coma. What the hell happened to James Cameron? One minute he’s making stone cold classics (Terminator, Aliens etc, even Titanic is better) and the next he’s making crap like Avatar. It was so third rate it isn’t even worth dipping into again now, 15 years later, and I was never going to waste another second of my life going to see the sequel, a film that looks no more accomplished as a piece of artwork as someone just smearing the screen with buckets of blue sperm and then walking off for a pint. The IMAX is also deeply uncomfortable (like sitting on a Ryanair flight to somewhere you don’t want to go) and has a screen that is far too big for its own good. And that’s me done moaning.
I saw two famous people at the IMAX the other night. The first was Matt Berry, a man who has made a career from looking and sounding exactly like Matt Berry, and a career littered with fabulous moments. He also does a nice line in folk music, or so I’m told. He walked past me as I was leaving the toilets, a bit shorter than I expected, but then I never knew how tall he was anyway. He spent some time lingering in a queue at the bar and it dawned on me that this would be a good moment to saunter up, shake his hand and say thank you for being Matt Berry, but then some bloke approached him and asked for a selfie and while Berry didn’t seem to object neither did it look like this moment with a fan was proving to be the highlight of his evening. After that I felt glad I hadn’t wandered over. The fan is probably still showing all his disinterested friends the selfie, perhaps accompanied by a brief yet tedious anecdote, and then it will fade to dust like everything else; a brief encounter with no substance or consequence. I like Matt Berry very much but will I ever regret not saying hello? I shouldn’t have thought so. Besides, he was only the second most famous person I saw that night, because there’s no way that Matt Berry is better than Nick Mason.
It’s hard to think of anyone in the rock and roll business who appears to be quite as affable as Nick Mason. He has a beautifully dry and gentle sense of humour, seems devoid of excessive ego and talks about his job as if he is mulling over what he might order from the menu in a Harvester. If you know who Nick Mason is then well done you, have five points. If you don’t then let me enlighten you: he’s the drummer from Pink Floyd. I’ll just repeat that: HE’S THE DRUMMER FROM PINK FLOYD! No-one else was the drummer from Pink Floyd and no-one else ever will be. Just him. Drumming. In Pink Floyd. Now that really is something to write home about. Admittedly, catching a sight of him was no happy accident because he was there to do a little Q&A off the back of a new, scrubbed up and sharpened screening of Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, a much underrated document of where they were in 1972. It’s not often I would normally be bothered with this sort of thing (the chances for disappointment, even if only mild disappointment, are really rather high) but since getting a ticket took no effort and only a relatively modest charge I threw caution to the wind.
If you don’t like Pink Floyd then you’d have a job convincing me you know anything at all about good music. And if you’ve never heard of Pink Floyd and aren’t bothered about finding out more and would like to chat about good music then, frankly, you can fuck off and do one. Have no doubt, Pink Floyd are top division. They are world class. In fact, their music, indeed everything about them, is fit for intergalactic travel, passing distant clusters of beaming stars, shimmering nebula and belts of fairy dust, and capable of lighting up the blackest of holes. They may not be my favourite band in the world but they are comfortably in the mix – so good they’re almost too good to be on a list at all. The Beatles, Elvis and Elton John may have sold more records (so, more depressingly, have Queen, Michael Jackson and Rihanna) but even on their best days they never quite came close enough to capturing the magic in music that is there to be found in what Pink Floyd have to offer. And yet I’ve never bothered to write much about them and I don’t know why. I’ve written about The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, John Cale, Miles Davis, Talk Talk and George Harrison, for starters, but never, properly, about Pink Floyd. And so I’ve started a post in their honour and given it a Floyd-esque title and hopefully soon I’ll finish it off, but if I don’t it can be like their “Household Objects” project – a concept founded on good intentions that never quite took off. And at least I got to see Nick Mason. Oh, and Matt Berry. In the flesh.
G B Burton.19.04.2025
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 