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The power and the glory

Jonathan Glancey on a visionary plan to bring a neglected landmark back to life

Monday July 11, 2005
The Guardian

'Do you know how big Battersea power station really is?" asks Victor Hwang, president of Parkview International, the developer who will today apply for planning permission for a remarkable £1.5bn redevelopment of the long-abandoned south London industrial monument together with the 30 acres of ragamuffin land around it.
"You could fit Trafalgar Square and St Paul's Cathedral inside, that's how big. Or you could sit 2.5 million people down to dinner. So it's been quite a challenge to think of what best to do with this love-it-or-hate-it icon, so much a part of the London skyline since the 1930s. And then you have to remember that the power station occupies just 17% of the site it stands on: what do you with the rest to keep everyone happy?"

This is a very big - 36 acres in fact - question indeed. Hwang bought the derelict site of Battersea power station in 1993 on what he describes as "favourable terms". It had already stood empty and decaying for years, despite promises by Margaret Thatcher and Sir John Broome, the man behind the Alton Towers theme park, that it would be London's whizziest new attraction in the 1990s.
But Thatcher, despite being photographed at the helm of a JCB inside the brick walls of the magnificent power station, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was never to sweep a new broom through Battersea. The site remains as glum today as it has been for decades; and the power station, looking like a great upturned table on the Thames skyline, has been closed for pretty much as long as it was open.

The latest plan, masterminded by Cecil Balmond, deputy chairman of Arup, the international engineers, and head of its advanced geometry unit (AGU), is genuinely exciting. Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, architect of the Eden Centre in Cornwall, is in charge of remodelling the power station as an arts and exhibition venue, with a stunning, sci-fi hotel on the rooftop by Ron Arad, a highly inventive designer.

Unashamedly expensive suites will be reached by shuttles whizzing along tube-like corridors. Bathrooms will be like nothing you have soaked in before. And there will be a dining room with a single table at the top of one of the power station's four chimneys, "the most exclusive table in London", says Hwang, with justification. The chimneys may have to be taken down, for safety reasons, and completely reconstructed.

The power station will be flanked on its east, west and south sides by offices, hotels and flats intended to protect the site from prevailing winds and designed by an inspired cast of architects and engineers: UN Studio from Holland; John Portman, the hotel impresario, from the United States; Benson Forsyth; Arup Associates; and Cecil Balmond's AGU at Arup, who, as engineers, will making their debut as "architects" in their own right with the design of a sensual, subtle office complex, dubbed The Twist, which will also be a showroom and design centre for a leading but as yet unnamed European manufacturer.

"I took my daughter to see the Serpentine Gallery pavilion in Kensington Gardens two years ago," says Hwang. "It was the one designed by Toyo Ito, the Japanese architect, and Cecil Balmond ... I had no idea who the designers were, but I thought that this is what a genuinely new architecture might be like. So I bought the pavilion and took it to Battersea, where it reminds me of how creative we have to be here. I also asked Cecil to mastermind the whole site.

"I could have just brought in Barratt Homes, Travelodge and Holiday Inns, but I wanted to do something really special, an achievement as much as a business success, which is why it has taken a long time to get the plans right. Now we have to wait and see what the Wandsworth planners think."

With their radical, twisting, turning forms derived rationally from geometric forms found in nature, this new generation of buildings will dance around the power station, rising from a landscaped park designed by West 8 and Gustafson Porter, who will hope to have better luck here than they have had with the Princess Diana memorial fountain.

Huge flower

The new landscaping will take its cue from Balmond's ingenious substructure for the site, a spiralling realm of subterranean parking for 2,700 cars, that will gradually open up like the petals of a huge, if understated, flower at a ground level, uniting the entire, pedestrian-only site. A theatre will be incorporated into the landscaping.

"We also intend to build a pedestrian bridge over the Thames, connecting the power station to Pimlico," says Balmond. This will feature a bar, and will pull this down-at-heel part of Battersea into the well-heeled economy of the north bank.

Hwang's Parkview International has made its fortune from developing "off-centre" sites in China and the far east. Battersea, however, although shabbily treated over the past 20 years, is well connected by railway, bus, river and even by air - for the bespoke-heeled, it has its own heliport - although the power station will need to be connected to these more gracefully than it is today.

"We are going to lease Battersea Park station next door from Railtrack," says Hwang, "and spend £25m doing it up with a new walkway, designed by Nicholas Grimshaw, to the power station park."

This new forum for London, opening very possibly in time to greet the 2012 Olympics, promises at long last to bring a cultural and commercial excitement and purpose to this neglected patch of the city, just as the games will bring sport, entertainment and flamboyant new architecture, engineering and design to the East End. They could be a good match for one another.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1525611,00.html#article_continue

Репетиции выступления в пятницу 1-го

Репетиции выступления в пятницу 1-го, 2

SACD Wish You Were Here на завершающем этапе!!!

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WISH YOU WERE HERE - SACD
The full surround mixing of the 1975 album Wish You Were Here is almost finished. Doing any work like this takes time to ensure it is right, and provides the best possible audio experience, but PFM confirm that we are certainly looking at the end of this year for a release of the album in hybrid CD/SACD (Super Audio CD) format.

With James Guthrie at the controls, the quality of this should be very high, and worth waiting for - and the feedback we have had for his work on Dark Side Of The Moon has been uniformly positive.

As and when we have more information on both of these, we will of course let you know... and our thanks to PFM for the update!



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Date news posted: 20 July 2005

brain-damage.co.uk/

На Brain Damage появился раздел, посвящённый Выступлению в Live8!

Все репортажи и рецензи про Реюнион Пинк Флойд (включая их выступление и выступления других артистов), фотографии (включая те. что я запостил до этого - пятничных репетиций).

http://www.brain-damage.co.uk/general/l8index.html

Шикарнейшие Фотки!

800X600

http://www.brain-damage.co.uk/general/l8pics2.html

Breathe

Шикарнейшие Фотки!

Money

Шикарнейшие Фотки!

WYWH

>Шикарнейшие Фотки!
>WYWH

<---

Шикарнейшие Фотки!

WYWH 2

Шикарнейшие Фотки!

CN

Шикарнейшие Фотки!

CN 2

Шикарнейшие Фотки!

Band's Farewell

Шикарнейшие Фотки!

Farewell

PINK FLOYD-SCORED "COMMITTEE" DVD RELEASE DETAILS

The Committee DVD
with Pink Floyd score
Further to our previous news stories about the obscure Pink Floyd-scored movie, The Committee, we now have full details and a review of the long-awaited DVD release for you.

The film was originally released back in 1968, and has been unavailable since. Snippets of the Floyd score have appeared but the film itself never has - except maybe in one or two private collections. The wait is now over though, as it becomes available this month worldwide.

The film itself is in black and white, and runs for 55 minutes. The DVD includes an interview by Oscar winning director Jon Blair with Max Steuer (writer and producer) and Peter Sykes (director) that lasts for 50 minutes, and the package also includes a CD of the song The Committee (Jones/Steuer) arranged by Tim Whitehead for the Homemade Orchestra, plus two tracks from earlier Homemade Orchestra CDs.

The Committee uses a surreal murder to explore the tension and conflict between bureaucracy on one side, and individual freedom on the other. Both the style and the content of this film capture the feel of the sixties.

The musical score, written and performed by the Pink Floyd, whilst brief, is reckoned to be some of the most intellectual music the Pink Floyd have produced, according to music writer David King (who reviewed The Committee for Brain Damage. This is music that was never released elsewhere, adding to the intrigue and demand for the film.

Click here for our review of the DVD. The DVD (which is in NTSC format, with no region coding), can be ordered using these special links: Amazon.com (USA/International) or Amazon Canada, and also can be obtained through www.JazzCDs.co.uk for the UK and Europe.



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Date news posted: 21 July 2005

brain-damage.co.uk/

РЕВЬЮ НА РЕМАСТИРОВАННОЕ ИЗДАНИЕ ПИНК ФЛОЙД "LONDON 1966-67", выпущенное 30 Мая сего года.

CD REVIEW
PINK FLOYD'S "LONDON 1966-1967" REMASTER
A new, remastered, 20-bit reissue of Pink Floyd "London 1966-1967", which features a full length studio version of "Interstellar Overdrive" and the otherwise unheard "Nick's Boogie", has just been released on the Pucka label.

The tracks were recorded at the now defunct Sound Techniques Studio, London, on the 11th and 12th of January 1967 for Peter Whitehead's "Tonight Let's Make Love In London" film.

The recording sessions were filmed, and some of the footage from the session and from Whitehead's film is included on the CD as bonus content, that can be viewed on PCs and Apple Mac computers.

The CD brings together a couple of very interesting recordings from the Syd Barrett-era line up; one of the tracks ("Nick's Boogie") is unreleased elsewhere, and was found lurking in a desk some twenty years after it was recorded.

The recording of "Interstellar Overdrive" on the CD is a special version recorded for the film, and clocks in at 17 minutes. It is a good, full-length run through of the track, familiar to most. There's lots of deep bass in this version (typical of late '66/early '67 renditions), and, as can be seen in the accompanying video, lots of guitar experimentation by Syd Barrett.

"Nick's Boogie" is a fascinating, atmospheric track, held together with Mason's purposeful tattoo. Principally a two-hand performance with Syd, it is a testament to tape recovery techniques these days that the moulding reel that this was hiding on, was renovated - and so well. Both tracks sound wonderful and belie their origins - they are crisp, clear, have fantastic depth and resonance.

This is in part because this release boasts "Super Bit Mapping", a 20-bit digital mastering process, which on a blind A-B listening test with an older version of this release, revealed more depth and clarity. Although, like all such tests, this can be very subjective and dependent, too, on the auditioning equipment. If you have an older copy (particularly the most recent, previous reissue) you may not notice much or any difference.


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Turning now to the CD-ROM content, you are met with an eye-catching menu. All content (sensibly in Quicktime format to ensure compatibility across platforms) is presented in a relatively small window in the centre of the screen, so no controls to pause, fast forward/rewind or most importantly, resize the footage. This seems a little poorly thought out...

However, if you browse the contents of the CD on your computer, you can find all the individual video clips in the ASSETS directory, launch them directly from there, and have full control over them - including resizing.

Unfortunately, they have only included Interstellar Overdrive in the footage, and not Nick's Boogie. However, it is the full studio performance, albeit edited into footage of the day - bodypainting, shots of the 14 hour Technicolour Dream concert, the band performing at UFO, and so on. Other clips that you can select consist of interview footage from the 1960s of Mick Jagger, David Hockney, Michael Caine, Julie Christie, and an overview by the director, Peter Whitehead. The interviews are interesting relics of the 60s, very dated but fascinating all the same.

In terms of footage quality, the sound quality is very good throughout. Picture quality is good, if a little pixelated at times and certainly not as smooth as a DVD would be - especially when there is fast movement on the screen.


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The CD brings together two fine, early Syd Barrett-era Floyd tracks, well-played and well-recorded, along with some footage of them playing it. Whilst there are small niggles with it (relating to the footage presentation) it is the best we've got at the moment. A couple of years back, another company were looking to release the footage on DVD, but this collapsed in a mire of issues over the rights, so don't expect that any day soon!


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The CD can be ordered through these special links: USA, Canada, UK/Elsewhere, Germany, or France.



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Date posted: 21 July 2005


http://www.brain-damage.co.uk/news/0507211.html

Вспомним!

Сегодня Ровно 15 лет назад состоялся крупномасштабный концерт-акция Стена В Берлине!

Студийная фотка для промоушна

на репетиции перед шоу

исполняет Mother