It won't be long before the 'new'* Pink Floyd album emerges & I wonder whether I am the only one to feel distinctly ambivalent about the whole idea. Eager, yes, to discover some genuinely interesting insights into the early sound which - I've always sensed - owed more than was often admitted to the keyboard player Rick Wright. Anxiety, however, in finding suspicions confirmed: that this will be an overproduced series of out takes which should have rightly remained on the editing room floor or in the can; that the current Mrs Gilmour has been allowed to contribute another set of lyrics only adds to the concern (how Roger Waters must wince at the very idea); & that the handful of albums which have some merit** will be yet further tainted by the subsequent cashings-in.

I suppose we will just have to wait & see ...

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* by chance (or maybe not) last night one of the Freeview channels was broadcasting a documentary on Atom Heart Mother. I'd seen it before but it really underlined the paucity of Floyd's material & skill once Barrett disappeared. Ron Geesin is the key figure behind the scenes shaping what were a series of incoherent noodlings into something substantial. Pink Floyd as the ultimate embodiment of the old chef's adage of never throw away scraps? Of course it helps to have EMI behind you, willing to throw vast amounts of money in advertising & lavish repackaging ...

** as far as I am concerned this means: Piper at the Gates, Meddle (for Echoes), Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals (which often gets short shrift).

The Wall is the beginning of the decline as Waters wrenches the band away from any kind of musical interest & into a form of self-aggrandising psychotherapy. The Final Cut confirms this dead end although there is at least a sense of personal investment. Anything since is truly awful & transparently motivated by alimonies for ex-wives, vintage car habits, & rock star misguided self belief that because B-A-N-D has become B-R-A-N-D this is reason enough to go into a studio. (Notice the way David Gilmour talks - a weird kind of Cambridge Senior Common Room gentlemanly understatement peppered with quasi-divine afflatus rhetoric masking pure profit-based calculation. I am sure he's a jolly nice chap - a typically Dave phrase - but Bono lies at the far end of this spectrum).