Pink Floyd Unplugged

edited by Dave Ward

First a few quotes about unplugged music...

Barrett: "I picked it [a banjo] up in a second-hand shop and plunked away quite happily for about six months. Then I decided to get a guitar. The first one was a #12 Hofner acoustic which I kept for a year. Then I joined a local Cambridge group called Jeff Mott and the Mottos and splashed out on a Futurama 2. At the time I thought it was the end in guitars. Fantastic design and all that. Incidentally, Jeff Mott was a great singer.... We [Jeff Mott and the Mottos] did a lot of work at private parties. And some of our material was original, but mostly we stuck to Shadows' instrumentals and a few American songs. Eventually the group dissolved and I moved into the blues field, this time playing bass. It was another Hofner, and I played that for a couple of years." --Beat Instrumental, October 1967

Wright: "I use very modern technology; the computer my two Kurzweil 2000, but I've become so old that I have very plain ideas about what sort of sound I like. It happens to be sounds that are natural and acoustic in character. I often begin with the sampler's acoustic sounds when I write, but then dub real instruments when it comes to recording." --MM, October 1996

Gilmour: [about "Seamus"]: "'Seamus' was fun but I don't know whether we ought to have done it in the way we did it on that album really, 'cause I guess it wasn't really as funny to everyone else as it was to us."

Then a few quotes about the ultimate unplugged Pink Floyd album that never happened, Household Ojbects.

Gilmour: "Strategically, our best thing to do next would be something weird, far out that nobody could possibly understand." --Sounds, 17 August 1974

Nick Sedgewick: "I remember I went to E.M.I. studios in the winter of '74, and the band were recording stuff with bottles and rubber bands..." --Interviewing Roger Waters, October 1975

Mason: "There are things like sixteen tracks of glasses tuned to a scale across the 16-track: it can be played across the faders, but what it really needs is each one going through a VCS3 or something, and then coming in to a keyboard. I suppose really it's a very, very, very, very crude Mellotron. There's a whole load of things we've done --some of them just down as sounds that work, others as bass lines, tunes." --Sounds, 17 August 1974

Mason: "...The Household Objects album would have been the wittiest thing to do next, and it would have been if we could have knocked it out. But I think what we'll do is what we've always done in the past, which is to struggle away at whatever we've got and see how it comes out." --Sounds, 17 August 1974

Mason: "No, we haven't made a new record because Dark Side is still selling a lot, so EMI isn't pressing for a new product. Finally we have worked with care, stopping ourselves on some things and excluding some pieces, which we would record if we were under pressure." --Ciao 2001, 25 May 1975

Gilmour: "We actually did get something out of it that we used on Wish You Were Here. We did actually use some of the Household Objects --the wine glasses were in some of the music at the beginning of the Wish You Were Here album." --90 Years of EMI Radio Special, hosted by Klef Richard, 26 November 1988