‘Weekends have completely changed. Early to bed, early to rise. When I was younger, I loved my nights out in Belfast'
I find that as I get older, I naturally wake earlier, so I'm usually up around 7am, even at the weekend. At the moment, I'm deep in preparations for Echoes, the Louth Contemporary Music Society's summer festival in June. It's an exciting but intense time, pulling together incredible artists from around the world and finalising everything from flights to rehearsals.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Belfast Telegraph
26-04-2025
- Belfast Telegraph
‘Weekends have completely changed. Early to bed, early to rise. When I was younger, I loved my nights out in Belfast'
I find that as I get older, I naturally wake earlier, so I'm usually up around 7am, even at the weekend. At the moment, I'm deep in preparations for Echoes, the Louth Contemporary Music Society's summer festival in June. It's an exciting but intense time, pulling together incredible artists from around the world and finalising everything from flights to rehearsals.
Telegraph
23-04-2025
- Telegraph
Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII, review: A volcanic, vividly alive reminder of their greatness
'Some people think we are a relic of the past,' admits Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, staring equably into the cameras. The comical thing is that Mason is all of 28 years old at the time, in the prime of youth and vigour, but actually does look like a relic. His huge mound of long curly hair and proud handlebar moustache date the film almost as much as the incessant smoking of keyboard player Rick Wright. The year is 1972, commemorated by the Roman numerals MCMLXXII for this lovingly restored concert documentary Pink Floyd at Pompeii. The rock quartet are at the apex of their psychedelic phase but have yet to go globally imperial with the release the following year of Dark Side of the Moon – of which the film offers tantalising glances. Director Adrian Maben came up with the unusual idea of having the band perform their epic experimental set of interstellar rock to the empty stands of a crumbling amphitheatre in Pompeii, with no audience but a shirtless film crew baking in the relentless sun. At the time, it was viewed as a slightly pretentious art movie, an impression compounded by shots of the band walking around the slopes of Mount Vesuvius and staring into bubbling pools of lava whilst David Gilmour's distorted slide guitar echo around the stark volcanic landscape. Fifty-three years on it looks utterly magnificent, a glorious record of a group at the height of their powers that will delight every old rocker and should be required viewing for every aspiring young musician. Through a lens of hindsight, the setting suggests not so much antiquity as timelessness and classicism, implying Pink Floyd deserve to be viewed outside of rock history as part of a much greater span of creation. There is something about the lack of audience that invests the performance with singular intensity – art being made on the spot, for its own sake, not to pander to popular opinion. Progressive rock maestro Steven Wilson has remixed the music for 5.1 surround sound, which is perhaps the greatest joy of the restoration, because it sounds so all encompassing, vividly alive, and still utterly strange. Floyd themselves look shockingly young, as a shirtless, long-haired Gilmour fiddles with his effects unit and produces sounds from his instrument that shift across a dazzling spectrum, from ethereal weirdness to delicate melodiousness and grinding attack. His future nemesis Roger Waters wears a slim black vest and grips his bass guitar with taut, muscular arms, picking out mobile and at times almost funky grooves amidst tumbling expanses of sound. The future curmudgeon certainly looks like he's enjoying himself. Rick Wright smokes quietly in the background and effortlessly conjures warm vistas of piano, organ and synthesiser that float between all the spaces in the songs. When he joins Gilmour in tight vocal harmony on Echoes, that's when you really hear the gorgeous signature sound of Pink Floyd. The star of the film, though, is not the Adonis-like Gilmour, and certainly not the enthusiastically gurning Waters. It is Nick Mason, arms flying around his drum kit in incessant action, head swivelling to connect with his band members, his jazzy, groovy, loose but sensually felt playing at the centre of everything, holding the band's flights of fancy together. The man certainly loves his cymbals, which shimmer and tingle even in the quietest moments. It struck me how little you hear cymbals in modern music, relegated to a percussive effect by the metronomic logic of drum machines and digital programming. The flamboyantly experimental Saucerful of Secrets remains utterly astonishing, all the more so when you see these four young men conjuring it out of nothing. Discussing their 'reliance' on technology, David Gilmour stares into the camera with amused disdain. 'The equipment isn't thinking about what to do. It couldn't control itself,' he says. Now music is entering an era when the equipment can control itself, when AI threatens to eradicate all human invention and spontaneity from musical creation. This amazing movie shows us what the cost of that might be, because a group like Pink Floyd would find it hard to exist and certainly could not thrive in this reductive, generic streaming age. The volcanic action is interspersed with scenes filmed in Abbey Road during the recording of Dark Side of the Moon, which offer extraordinary glimpses of glories to come, particularly Waters fiddling with a now vintage synthesiser until the burbling sequence of On the Run miraculously emerges, with Waters glancing up to ask if someone is getting this. Wright sits in a cloud of blue cigarette smoke, fingers floating across piano keys like a jazz maestro on Us and Them. These scenes were apparently staged for the cameras rather than representing the actual recording sessions, yet they nevertheless afford intriguing insights into fractures that will ultimately destroy this tight unit. Playing a solo to Brain Damage, Gilmour pulls a sour face when Waters continually interrupts from the control room, complaining about feedback. 'Don't worry about that,' grumbles Gilmour. 'What would rock'n'roll be without feedback?' 'We have some pretty good arguments from time to time,' Gilmour admits, with an innocent smile, oblivious to the bitterness and acrimony that lies ahead. He and Mason were present at the film's premiere at the BFI Imax London and could be seen laughing at this restored vision of their younger selves. At 79, Gilmour has the craggy stolidity of the Vesuvian landscape. At 81, Mason looks less like a rock star than a retired investment banker. But both are still making exciting music and still going about it with an old-fashioned dedication to technical craft. Wright has been dead for almost seven years. The absent Waters, meanwhile, soldiers on as a controversial touring superstar, reshaping Pink Floyd's legacy from the later sequences of albums dominated by his songwriting, whilst indulging a nasty public feud with Gilmour. At Pompeii dials back to a time before all of that and very potently reminds us why we cared about Pink Floyd in the first place. It doesn't quite match the fly-on-the-wall intimacy of the Beatles's Get Back documentary series but it is glorious to see and hear this incredible band in their youthful prime, lean and handsome and playing out of their skins. Every young musician should be made to watch this and then pack away their AI tools and learn the joy of hands on creation. Bring back the cymbal!
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- The Guardian
Henri Michaux review – the delirious artist who took mescaline so you don't have to
Psychedelic art has an image problem. Picture it and you may see tie-dyed fabrics, muzzy portraits of Jimi Hendrix, endless vistas of magenta. By the end of the 1960s, the wave of drug experimentation that started with Aldous Huxley and the beat generation had inspired a lot of great music – but very little good art. The writer and artist Henri Michaux had several advantages that helped him transcend all that mediocrity. He was born in Belgium – not California – in 1899 and lived an avant garde life in Paris where in the 1920s he was photographed by Claude Cahun and hung out with the surrealists. He inherited a tradition of bohemian drug experimentation that went right back to poet Charles Baudelaire and his fellow members of the Hashish Eaters Club, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. So in 1955, when Michaux tried mescaline, derived from the Peyote cactus, he approached it as a surrealist creative technique, not a search for self-expansion. He shut himself up, ate a special diet, then let the drug wear off before he tried to capture in drawings what he had experienced. The results, on show in the Courtauld's drawings gallery, where you'd normally expect to see Old Master sketches, are addictive wonders of abstract art. Graphically precise yet sublimely suggestive, these works were first unveiled in a 1956 book called Miserable Miracle. They have the intensity of Jackson Pollock, but on a much smaller scale. They can also save you money and protect your health and sanity – for Michaux gives such a convincing visual account of what mescaline did to his brain that you can feel it work on yours. These artistic miracles don't just describe a drug experience. They set off a fizzing delirium in your own mind's eye. It starts gently. Soft horizontal black lines hover on a sheet of paper, interrupted by more heavily inked eye-like shapes, almost like musical notation. This delicate drawing beautifully suggests an oscillating chord or an underwater pulse. Michaux said he was expressing the tingling state the drug left him in. It's as haunting as the ping at the start of Pink Floyd's Echoes. Of course, you don't create a work of art as poetic as this just because you took a drug. Michaux had a long artistic life behind him that included using surrealist techniques to release spontaneous images. From these he graduated, like other artists after the second world war, towards abstraction, whose high priests had been the rationalist and geometric Mondrian and Kandinsky. But in the 50s abstraction went wild, improvisatory, expressive, and its hero was the alcoholic American Pollock. What mescaline gave Michaux is the freedom to be a French Pollock. His lines lead you into knotty forests, throbbing mazes. He never loses a sense of perspective but uses it to give his visions a reality in space. In one drawing, a shimmering network of reverberating lines recedes into the distance to resemble an aerial photograph of a giant prehistoric earthwork. In another, the entire paper is covered with entwined tubular forms in black and red ink, their surfaces dotted and flecked to create a texture like elephant hide. What is this wood of symbols? It could be vegetation, or arteries, or the brain's neural network. As a surrealist Michaux was accustomed to seeing images in random marks. It's a process that touches on how the brain works – and maybe mescaline intensifies it. As you gaze into these drawings, they seem to shape themselves into images, only for the images to slip away, mere phantoms of the mind. I think I see a spine and a skeletal hand and sometimes Michaux sees them too and sometimes he doesn't. In one drawing, an owl or a ghost might be peeking out, but any landscape I grope for in the mayhem of its great neighbouring sketch is obviously an illusion. This dark, rough surface is not any one thing even if it can make you see many things. Michaux takes you to the depths of your own mind where reality and fantasy interbreed. But the more you look, the more violence intrudes. Images turn gory – these include dismembered bodies and, in my eyes anyway, a rattlesnake. Has the Mexican Peyote awakened primal memories of Aztec sacrifices? It's more likely these cultural associations are hovering in his thoughts – and mine. I am the lizard king, I can do anything. Michaux's drawings have the conviction of a Holbein portrait. He believes he is drawing the truth, even if it is inexplicable. This is what makes them uncanny. And like all the most memorable records of psychedelic experiences, they have a disturbing, disillusioned edge. After all Michaux drew them after the mescaline had worn off. In one drawing, a sea monster with squid-like tentacles floats in crystal clarity. Did he really see this? Would you want to? Michaux broke through the doors of perception so you don't have to. Be grateful. Henri Michaux: The Mescaline Drawings is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, 12 February to 4 June
