I'm leading my Pink Floyd In 1960s London tour in the New Year – it's been off the programme since 2017 and I'm looking forward to revisiting it.
This post is from the first outing for the tour back in 2016. I hope it gives you a flavor of the tour…
Last Saturday I wandered round the route of my forthcoming Pink Floyd walking tour, doing a few last minute tweaks and adjustments.
On earlier walks around the route I had been very much "in my head" – concentrating on best vantage points, details, facts, cuts and edits. The practicalities of a walking tour.
Saturday was different. I guess the opposite of being "in my head" would be "out of my head", but that creates another picture altogether (!), one that will have to wait until AFTER the walk on Saturday.
On Saturday the psychogeography of the route leapt out for the first time.
It was there all along, of course.
But with my head up and eyes open I was delighted to see that the route I had chosen was no mere accident. Of course the route was dictated by locations and events, that's what a walking tour is all about. But the purposes of the locations we visit all changed long ago and the events are long past. Yet the subject matter had left marks or portents, poetic coincidences, clues or good omens at every step and stop.
We'll be cutting though Cecil Court on the way to Middle Earth in Covent Garden. And in Cecil Court, two of the themes of my walk, two of the recurring themes in the work of Pink Floyd, swirl all around us: childhood and war.
One of the running themes of English psychedelia (the period in which the tour begins) is second childhood. The period was made by creatives who had been war babies robbed of a childhood idyll. A theme to which Pink Floyd's principal writer Roger Waters returned again and again in his work - from Corporal Clegg on A Saucerful of Secrets right up to his masterpiece The Wall and on to The Final Cut. As we pass through Cecil Court, military memorabilia, uniforms and medals flash in our peripheral vision…





The next outing for the Pink Floyd In London tour is on Sunday 5th January 2020.
The tour is ONLINE BOOKING ONLY, exclusively via Eventbrite…
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