Reissues from bands like Pink Floyd, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead have become events. The Dead have released a voluminous amount, particularly live material, while the Beatles’ reissues have taken on major cultural and historical relevance. But Pink Floyd may have recently topped them all.
Over the last five years, Pink Floyd’s reissue program has included two box sets that collectively established a new standard in reissues on many levels. The first, 2016’s The Early Years (1965-1972), covered the group from its March 1967 debut single “Arnold Layne” through the album Obscured by Clouds, released in June 1972. More recently, Pink Floyd has released The Later Years (1987-2019). The new box follows many of the formatting and design characteristics of The Early Years, with obvious stylistic and elemental differences.
Neither box includes the album sequence between 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon and 1983’s The Final Cut, the last studio project before Pink Floyd initially broke up. Three of those albums – Dark Side, 1975’s Wish You Were Here and 1979’s The Wall – have been the subject of major reissues, including the massive Immersion box-set series treatment.
Now out of print, The Early Years featured a whopping 33 discs. This new set is made up of 18. The Later Years covers a period during which Pink Floyd regrouped, but issued only three albums and rarely performed outside of a couple of major tours. So, they opened a treasure trove of more than 13 hours of unreleased material. The set includes films from various concerts, documentaries, unreleased live and studio material, music videos, rehearsals, TV ads and album cover-shoot films. The Blu-rays, meanwhile, contain most discs in 5.1 Surround Sound, which seems to be the preferred format of the Pink Floyd production team.
Both box sets feature a healthy amount of memorabilia. The new box includes replica posters, tour books, tickets, backstage passes, stickers, a 60-page hardcover book and other objects Pink Floyd fans will love. One of its highlights is a restored version of the concert film Delicate Sound of Thunder on DVD and Blu-ray. Everything that is on the six Blu-rays is duplicated on the five DVDs. Another key highlight is an updated and remixed version of 1987’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason that eliminates some of the original release’s synthetic contemporary sound. The group’s historic Venice and Knebworth concerts are included in their entirety. There are five CDs and two one-sided, vinyl 45 discs, with unique etchings on the B-sides.
To fully synthesize the amount of aural, visual, written, technical, artistic and historical material on both boxes would require months of time and few groups’ music catalog and live concert history deserve boxes this ambitious. It would also be easy to underestimate how creative and influential Pink Floyd’s art and photography are. In many respects, they are equally as important and significant as the music itself.
These box sets are massive undertakings that required a crack technical and creative team, and years to complete. Many of those involved have worked with the members of Pink Floyd, individually and collectively, for decades. We talked to three of them for this story.
Aubrey Powell, known as Po, has been associated with Pink Floyd since before they were even known as Pink Floyd, beginning with their days as students at Cambridge University in England in the mid-’60s. He co-founded the celebrated album cover design company Hipgnosis with Storm Thorgerson in 1967. The first album cover they designed was for Pink Floyd’s second album, 1968’s A Saucerful Full of Secrets. They did the next three covers, designed and photographed the band photo on the inside of the gatefold of 1971’s Meddle, and created the next four Pink Floyd album covers – including the iconic artwork for Dark Side of the Moon. Powell’s massive sleeve design discography could fill a book, but the designs he worked on with Storm Thorgerson include covers for Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Yes and many others.
Powell is also responsible for the overall design of The Later Years. The look reflects the more surrealistic approach of the early Pink Floyd albums in the 1960s and ’70s, but it appears modern and contemporary and not a homage or retread.
“I decided quite consciously to make the album cover design more in keeping with Hipgnosis’s previous surreal sense in Pink Floyd’s artwork,” Powell told me. “The Early Years was a departure, in fact, to a more graphic approach, but I really didn’t feel it worked too well. So, the tried-and-tested route seemed best and with The Later Years. I went back to what Hipgnosis do best – photo surrealism.”
Aside from Powell, the primary conceptual and thematic leader of the project was Michael Johnson. “I knew Michael Johnson’s studio and I wanted to try and work with someone who would be sympathetic to the Hipgnosis approach,” Aubrey Powell continued. “Michael had some good ideas, which I showed to the band, and then I made some changes and art-directed the cover in the way I wanted the image to go. For example, the location, what kind of streetlights, landscape, using a child not an adult, an evening sky – that sort of thing. The result was a successful collaboration.”
A centerpiece of The Later Years is a new film produced by Powell focusing of one of the Delicate Sound of Thunder shows filmed in August 1988 at Nassau Coliseum, New York.
“The reason the DSOT film was so successful is because I had the 310 original cans of 35mm film of the concert,” Powell said, excitedly. “I went back to the very start by digitizing all the negatives, and re-editing from scratch – which was very difficult because there were very few slated takes and no time codes, which didn’t exist then. Also the director, Wayne Isham, had the cameras shoot at different speeds and clearly had difficulty in communication with the cameramen, as the direction was very uncoordinated.
“Whether this was deliberate or not I don’t know,” Powell added, “but in 1987 shooting a 35mm live concert was really working in the dark – no pun intended – and not like filming today. That’s why the film appeared so super-imposed and with dream-like dissolves when released on VHS and Laserdisc. The quality, in retrospect, was terrible. Having re-edited over a 14-month period a new and clean digitized version, I then cranked the film up to 4K. David Gilmour re-mixed the sound with Andy Jackson, as he was never really happy with the original in 5.1, which now in the cinema looks and sounds amazing.”
I asked whether it was difficult to create new imagery for any particular album, or the packaging in general, and if the new visual concepts he considered on past projects would fit in now. “Yes and no,” Aubrey Powell answered. “Some of the contents of the box set were based on imagery from earlier times, but there is one piece that I really liked: It is the image I used for the vinyl double album and was in the box set too – of two men reading a map in black and white. I had shown this image as a rough drawing in 1976 as an idea for [1977’s] Animals. It was rejected, obviously!
“Even earlier in 1976, I had taken a photograph for a book I did of Paul McCartney’s Wings Over America tour called ‘Hands Across the Water,'” Powell added. “In that book, there is a picture of two chauffeurs looking at a map outside a diner in Peyton Place. Same vibe exactly.
“So, in 1980, I found myself in Iceland on a job and took the photo just for me,” he said. “When The Later Years two-LP vinyl set came up, I thought the picture appropriate, as in 1987 Roger Waters had left the band, leaving the future Pink Floyd in the hands of David Gilmour and Nick Mason – two men looking at a map for the way to go. David and Nick liked the idea, so out came the old negatives. Very happy about that, finally.”
Another project that Pink Floyd fans in the United States might get to see is Their Mortal Remains, an historical exhibition which initially ran from May through October 2017 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. No official confirmation or dates are available, but it looks very likely that the exhibit will come to America, with an announcement possibly soon. A web site for the exhibition says: Stay tuned for news about our next city.
Other projects coming from Aubrey Powell include a memoir to be published at the end of 2021, a large retrospective exhibition in Holland of the history of Hipgnosis, and a documentary film about Hipgnosis.
Andy Jackson has handled engineering on many Pink Floyd reissue projects, including both The Early Years and The Later Years, and the earlier Immersion box-set reissues. His work with Pink Floyd began with mixing the live sound for Pink Floyd’s historic Earl Court’s performance of The Wall in 1980, and was followed by his work on the film soundtrack for The Wall movie directed by Alan Parker, and then The Final Cut.
He was the primary engineer on A Momentary Lapse of Reason and 1994’s The Division Bell, and produced 2014’s The Endless River. He was also an engineer on The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, Roger Waters’ 1984 solo debut. He is the senior engineer for David Gilmour’s studios in Astoria and Medina, England, and has worked on all of Gilmour’s albums since 1984. He also engineered the live sound on Pink Floyd’s 1994 tour and Roger Waters’s 1984 tour.
For The Later Years, he didn’t just remix A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Some parts were actually re-recorded. “In our attempt to sound current at the time,” Jackson told me, “the album now sounds time-stamped. It sounds dated.” To correct this, drummer Nick Mason re-did some of the drums, and additional keyboards from the late Rick Wright were used; occasionally, this meant replacing parts they hadn’t played on the original, guest-packed album.
“Bob Ezrin came over to England and we recorded new drums with Nick and the idea was we would get Rick to play on it, but he never did,” Jackson added. “So, I went through tapes of the Delicate Sound of Thunder tour and found nice bits of playing from that and added them into the studio versions. And that was a very good thing to do because Rick is always much better when he’s not constrained. When he’s off the leash and when he’s playing live, he’s very loose with the songs and just plays freely.”
A focus on being more organic was already front of mind when Pink Floyd recorded The Division Bell. “There was very much a conscious decision to go for a more timeless approach,” Andy Jackson said. “It sounded like it could have been made right after Dark Side of the Moon, in terms of the approach. … They make it easy to a make a good-sounding record because the arrangements are very good. They have a lot of space in their work.”
Nick Mason and David Gilmour were very involved with The Later Years, prior to mixing. As on earlier solo albums, they worked at Gilmour’s studios in England – particularly Astoria, a houseboat on the Thames River. “Astoria is a beautiful place and there are ducks you can actually hear on some of the recordings,” Jackson said. “Medina was a small theater that was right next to David’s house that was for sale, so he bought it.”
As for future projects, Jackson said he is working on Dolby Atmos mixes for Delicate Sound of Thunder and Gilmour’s Live at Pompeii. He says that Dolby Atmos is a format that will only grow more common.
Andy Jackson’s primary partner in engineering these projects was Damon Iddins. They collaborated on the remastering for the Immersion boxes and both The Early Years and The Later Years. Iddins also worked on other Pink Floyd reissue projects related to Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd Pompeii concert from 1971, The Division Bell and The Endless River, the group’s final album. He’s contributed to several David Gilmour solo albums, including 2006’s On an Island, 2015’s Rattle That Lock and various live concert projects including Remember That Night, Live In Gdansk and Live at Pompeii. He has also collaborated on other reissue projects from Syd Barrett and George Harrison and on studio albums for Nick Cave and Richard Ashcroft.
Iddins mostly works as an assistant to Andy Jackson, explaining that The Later Years project extended over the course of many years: “It’s hard to say exactly how long it’s all taken, as it’s been a process that’s happened in various stages over the past few years for some of it,” Damon Iddins told me. “So, for instance, on The Early Years, there are tracks like ‘Vegetable Man,’ ‘In the Beechwoods’ and ‘Scream Thy Last Scream,’ etc., that we actually did the body of work on in 2010 but that didn’t get released at the time.
“Likewise, on The Later Years, for example, The Division Bell 5.1 mix had been completed in 2014 and took a fair bit of time to complete back then. It’s fair to say, though, that both of the box sets represent a huge body of work for everyone involved. And that’s not just our bit. There’s video, artwork, liner notes – everything. Just working out what was wanted and actually available took a while, and was a bit of an iterative process. Both box sets would have started with a proposal/wish list via Andy Murray and Elena Bello from the management team. There would then be suggestions, embellishments and no-goes along the way, once we started digging and worked out what we had. We have a lot of material stored that [long-time Gilmour assistant] Phil [Taylor] has made sure was safe over the last 45-odd years, and there’s a large amount stored via Abbey Road and a couple of other places. Eventually, it iterates into the final release.”
Iddins employs a specific methodology and aesthetic approach when taking what were originally stereo or even mono tapes and creating a 5.1 surround mix. “We will always go as far back to the original recordings as possible when remixing so that the quality is as good as possible,” Iddins said. “This also means you usually have more options on placements of individual elements. In fact, sometimes technology means we can go back further than the original release was able to do. For instance, the limitations of recording back in the late ’60s meant that some tracks would have to be recorded on four tracks and then bounced to another tape to enable the recording of the vocals over the top. This would then be bounced down again to make the final record. On a couple of occasions on very early stuff we’ve managed to get hold of the generation before the first bounce and get access to the individual tracks, which gives you more control and is a better-quality version than the bounce.
“Another example would be on A Momentary Lapse of Reason,” Damon Iddins added. “David had mentioned changing a sound on something which was on tape. Thankfully, Phil had kept all the original computers, MIDI interfaces and floppies in a safe place since it was originally recorded. It took a bit of working out, getting a working system disk and cajoling it back into life, but we managed to get the original sequences running 30-odd years later. I certainly don’t miss floppy discs! You forget in today’s world of instant gratification what a steep curve technology has advanced on.”
A core group of collaborators work in tandem, whether they’re completing archival projects like The Endless River or working on Gilmour’s solo albums. “My job during the recording process is primarily assisting Andy, who’s been David’s main engineer for the last 40-odd years,” Iddins began. “I work full time for David in-house, running the technical side of the studios and basically doing whatever is needed to get things done. The idea as always in these situations is to try and not let the technical process get in the way of the creative process. Once we’re in the thick of an album, there’s a core team of three, who between us get it all done. Andy and me on the engineering side – and Phil Taylor, who has worked with David since 1973, who is his guitar tech and runs the instruments and musical gear.”
Much of this takes place aboard Gilmour’s Astoria studio. “It’s amazing,” Damon Iddins enthused. “In all honesty, I sit here sometimes working with a glorious water view, wondering when someone is going to drag me off shouting, ‘How did you get in?’ I’ve got to spend the last 23-odd years doing something I love in an amazing environment with great people. I’ve been very, very lucky.”
Of course, Astoria is familiar to many, but not much is known about Medina in Hove. “It’s a great working space,” Iddins added. “It fulfills a slightly different role than Astoria, in that it’s primarily been put together to be a great tracking and writing space. It’s set up in a way that David can put stuff down whenever he feels the muse and his gear is good to go. If he ever feels like going in at four in the morning and writing a track, he can just power up and go.”
Few have worked with Pink Floyd as extensively and as long as Aubrey Powell, and he’s perhaps best able to put the long journey between The Early Years and The Later Years in perspective.
“Syd Barrett was a wordsmith and beautiful man who leapt too high too soon and fell, never to return,” Powell told me. “We all loved him and he was far too sensitive for this business. Roger Waters is inventive, ambitious and driven – and still is. He is a brilliant ideas man. I spent all last week with him. He’s funny but deadly serious and passionate about subjects that he believes in, and very hard-working. David Gilmour is always generous and a lovely man. The voice and the guitar of Pink Floyd and his solo in ‘Comfortably Numb‘ is sheer genius.
“Nick Mason is an absolute gentleman and the calm face of Pink Floyd, and is always keeping time between the factions,” Powell added. “He’s a diplomat and his new venture, the Saucerful of Secrets band, is fantastic. See him. Rick Wright’s work on ‘The Great Gig In the Sky’ and ‘Us and Them’ makes them two of the best songs from the Pink Floyd catalogue, and he was a great sailor too. He was good humored, although quite deep and sometimes troubled. He’s sorely missed, I can tell you.”
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