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Pink Floyd 1969-06-26 London (Hogweeds 2022 remaster 24-44) Royal Albert Hall, London 26th June, 1969 This is an audio restoration of a historic occasion, Pink Floyd’s ‘The Final Lunacy’ concert in London’s famous Royal Albert Hall, one which earned them a lifetime ban from ever performing in the building again (an injunction that lasted less than a year). It was toward the end of a short UK tour, and joining them on stage were the brass section of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and members of the Ealing Central Amateur Choir, conducted by Norman Smith. These musicians and singers are heard to majestic effect performing Celestial Voices, during which Rick plays the hall’s grand organ, and with a canon being fired at the conclusion. Elsewhere in the concert, the Floyd’s recently developed ‘Azimuth Co-ordinator’ sent audio around multiple speakers, the band sawed wood on stage, a crew member dressed out as a gorilla roamed the audience, and a pink smoke bomb was detonated to end the show - pyrotechnics which likely were the source of the ban. It was a spectacular and memorable occasion. The music performed was The Man / The Journey Suite, with Set the Controls as an encore. It was one of the Floyd’s most experimental and ‘spacey’ periods, and one can see how songs arranged into conceptual suites became their template for later albums such as Dark Side. There is only one known document of the occasion, a mono recording of unknown origin. It captures nearly the entire concert, but misses the first two songs; Daybreak (Grantchester Meadows) and Work, with a few cuts during audience applause. Sadly, the audio quality is not good. Apart from being mono, the frequency response is muddy and thin, lacking both bass and top end, like listening to the concert down a telephone line. Nevertheless, being such a historic occasion, I felt a restoration of the audio would be a worthwhile project. Source: The master appears lost, the best remaining source now being a 2nd generation copy to BASF single track mono reel to reel @ 3 3/4 ips from the collection of Bernard White. Transfers have been made of this tape over the years using different equipment, with slightly different results. Apparently the tape is no longer playable, but three of beechwoods transfers made around 2009 using different playback machines are bundled together as one torrent on Yeehskul: From these, the transfer I’ve chosen, using a Pioneer RT-707 into a Tascam HD-P2 at 24/48, has the least gritty top end and offered the best chance of recovering high frequency information. I auditioned other versions claiming to be 1st gen copies, however these were both poorer in audio quality and had been through a lossy stage, possibly minidisc.
