13 March: Pink Floyd

On this date in 1966 Pink Floyd appeared for the first time at The Marquee in Wardour Street, London, England. 10 things you might not know about Pink Floyd:

1. The name was a merging of two of the favourite blues artists of band member Syd Barrett: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Prior to that, they’d used a number of names including Sigma 6, Meggadeaths, the Screaming Abdabs, Leonard’s Lodgers, the Spectrum Five and The Tea Set.
2. Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright first met as architecture students at London Polytechnic in 1963.Waters and Mason couldn't read Music, so they used architectural diagrams to physically lay out the arrangements of their songs.
3. Their first single was called Arnold Layne. The song was inspired by an actual person Roger Waters knew who would steal women’s clothes from washing lines. Their first album was called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, derived from chapter seven of Kenneth Grahame's children's novel The Wind in the Willows. This album was recorded at Abbey Road in 1967. The Beatles were in the studio next door at the time, recording Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
4. The title of the album Atom Heart Mother was inspired by the news that a woman had been fitted with the first ever atomic pacemaker. The album cover is a picture of a Cow, named Lulubelle III.
5. Another farm animal features on the cover of Animals: an inflatable Pig flying above Battersea Power Station. The pig was named Algie, and famously came loose and floated away, drifting into the flight paths of passenger jets, eventually landing in a field where the farmer complained it had frightened his cows. The content of this album was inspired by the novel Animal Farm by George Orwell.
6. The 1988 live album, Delicate Sound of Thunder, was the only one of their albums to be released in Russia. Russian cosmonauts proved to be great fans and took it with them onto the MIR space station during mission Soyuz TM-7 in 1989. Hence it became the first rock album to be played in space.
7. The Dark Side of the Moon is the third best selling album ever. It’s said that one in 12 people own a copy of it. It’s said this album is in perfect synch with the film The Wizard of Oz and that it was written that way on purpose. The band denied this, and jokingly suggested that their real intention had been to synch it with The Sound of Music.
8. The Atom Heart Mother Suite almost became the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, but Pink Floyd declined Kubrick’s request. The did, however, help finance the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
9. They were the first rock band to pioneer live surround sound. At first it was quite a rudimentary system involving Richard Wright using joysticks to propel sound 270 degrees around auditoriums. In 1972 they upgraded to a system that created 360-degree surround sound.
10. Pink Floyd released their 15^th studio album in 2014. It was called The Endless River, and it’s a double-album which comprises mainly instrumental and ambient music based on material recorded during sessions for their previous album, The Division Bell, 20 years previously. This became the most pre-ordered album of all time on Amazon UK and debuted at number one in several countries. The vinyl edition was the fastest-selling UK vinyl release since 1997. The reviews however were mixed with some critics saying it was “meandering”.

Character Birthday

Flasher, aka Ulric Pozzi, a member of one of three rival gangster families based in New York City. He has a pathological mental condition which compels him to expose himself. While his family are extremely embarrassed by this, they do not trust psychiatrists to help him.