Pink Floyd Book:

Editorial Review:
A look back at the popular rock group features exclusive interviews with Roger Waters and other Pink Floyd members and discusses the misconceptions about the group's albums, lyrics, and concerts. Original.

Pink Floyd: Bricks in the Wall Reviews:
Bizarre
2009-05-06 - This is a pretty strange book that is only intermittently about Pink Floyd. Full of unmotivated digressions on things like the CIAs MKUltra programme that bear at best tangential relevance to the book's ostensible subject matter, this is not the place to go for a comprehensive history of the band itself.

Dallas was one of the few people in the music media to have Roger Waters' trust (though that changed when this book was released) and so there are some insightful interviews with Waters, found nowhere else. These give a good look into the development of some of the band's key albums, and it is this feature that makes the book worthwhile if anything does.

However, all the useful insights in the book are those that come straight from the horse's mouth; Dallas' own additions are in places downright embarrassing. He calls David Gilmour a heavy metal guitarist and says that he, not Waters, wrote the lyrics for "Comfortably Numb", to give just one example each of the book's bizarre claims and outright factual errors. Sadly, I could multiply these examples many times over, but that would make this review hopelessly dreary.

The book seems to have been written mostly in 1984 or early 1985, with a final chapter, obviously composed a fair bit later, covering Radio KAOS and the then-untitled Floyd album soon to be released as A Momentary Lapse of Reason (neither of which is referred to anywhere else, even where they'd obviously be relevant; similarly, in an otherwise comprehensive chapter on their pre-KAOS solo work, Mason & Fenn's /Profiles/ goes completely unmentioned). I do applaud his fairly well-balanced assessment of the split (in a definite sign that he was doing something right, it seems to have pissed off both factions about equally), though in hindsight, calling AMLoR "a new classic" is a bit much.

Around the time of The Division Bell, a new edition came out. This was a white pocket paperback, as opposed to the original yellow trade paperback. The author and publishers did *not* take the opportunity to correct any of the errors or integrate the mid-80s projects into the text; even the page layout is exactly the same, preserving every error in the original right down to the obvious typo ("part history" instead of "past history") on the back cover. Not only does this version not correct any of the original errors, but a tiny epilogue (almost certainly not Dallas' work) that purports to update the band's history up to the beginning of the Division Bell tour serves to introduce a surprising number of new ones. Easily the most outrageous of these is the claim that the rest of the band reunited with Waters for the famous Berlin concert of The Wall, a whopper on a scale the rest of the book never even conceives of. While the original version, for all its strange features and outright mistakes, seems to have been written in good faith, the later version was an obvious cash-grab.

A good history of Pink Floyd
2000-04-17 - I have always enjoyed listening to Pink Floyd and when I came across this book the first time, I could not put it down until I was done reading it. It is a wonderful look at the history of Pink Floyd. This book takes you from the very beginning all they way up to around when Momentary Lapse of Reason was releaced and gives you how and why each album was made and the band member's thoughts about each song.

An interesting perspective
1998-08-22 - This is not a typical historical biography of the band like we are seeing released these days. Instead, the book complements some of the other better books on the subject such as Miles and Schaffner by offering insight on society and its influence on the band (hence the title). For example, it talks about how the MI5 and CIA originally studied drug abuse as a mind control method and how that research indirectly led to the band's rise and Syd's collapse. Or how the punk movement in the mid '70s influneced Animals. It ends in 1986 by giving an even-handed view of the Waters - Gilmour situation. If you can get ahold of it, I recommend it, especially to the completist. Non die-hards might find it a bit rambling and would be better off looking elsewhere.