Pink Floyd co-founders Roger Waters and Nick Mason hope an exhibition in May documenting the rock band’s 50 years in music will give fans a sense of their live work as well as honor those who helped fulfill their artistic vision.
“The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains” opens at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in May, the same venue which previously hosted a David Bowie retrospective.
On display will be more than 350 artifacts, including letters, sketches, handwritten lyrics as well as footage of the band’s live performances.
“I think what [fans] will get…is a real sense of the scale of some of the live work that we did, some of theatrics that we developed over the years,” Waters told Reuters on Thursday. “Hopefully there’s personal memorabilia that people are interested in because they’re interested in the history of it.”
The exhibition comes 50 years since the release of Pink Floyd’s first single “Arnold Layne.” Known for its experimental music, the band went on enjoy worldwide acclaim, namely with “Dark Side of the Moon” and “The Wall.”
“What you realize is that it’s literally hundreds and hundreds of people who’ve worked with us as sound engineers or road crew, technicians, inventors or graphics or whatever,” Mason said. “And to go ‘we got through a lot of work by getting help from these people’ – that’s a really nice aspect of it.”
Released in 1979, “The Wall” is one of the most successful albums of all time.
Asked about U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the border with Mexico, Waters said: “The building of walls between nations and between religions and between races and between different groups of people with different beliefs is invariably counterproductive.”
“We should be past a time when we’re wanting to make enemies of the other. Unfortunately we’re not.”
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