Ben Insall at Luke Smith's Lo-Fi Zone (and Pink Floyd)

Monday 12th February
Bramleys, Canterbury
 

Luke Smith and the Feelings are currently just Luke and Tom Holden (now on guitar, rather than bass). It was nice to hear "I Don't Want To Go To Parties Anymore" again. A set of folkish originals from guest artist Ben Insall (probably most familiar here as a member of Arlet).

I saw Luke again on the Friday afternoon up in Origins bar at UKC's Darwin College, where he has a casual weekly lunchtime piano gig. Always an incredibly diverse array of pop melodies, you never know what's coming next. I was on a sofa working on my laptop, and Luke dropped into Wyatt & Kramer's "Free Will and Testament" knowing I'd like that. Having just finished Mark Blake's Pink Floyd history Pigs Might Fly I'd been binge-listening to early Floyd earlier that day, so I almost went up to Luke to ask if he could play any Syd Barrett. But I was caught up in my work, and delayed doing this for a few minutes...and then, he suddenly went into "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". When he'd finished, I explained what had happened, and then had a super-intense deja vu while discussing the Floyd's career arc with him.

Although rather sad, this was my favourite anecdote from the book:

I also felt quite a lot of sympathy for Rick Wright, "the quiet one" who got given rather a hard time for many years. It was heartening to learn, though, that a couple of years before his death in 2008, Gilmour invited him along on a tour which he enjoyed more than any he'd previously been part of. Gilmour several times refers to "Echoes" in the book as a conversation between himself and Wright, so I went back to the footage from the gig they played in the Gdańsk shipyards in 2006, found this, which feels more "genuinely" Pink Floyd than anything that the Gilmour-Mason-Wright lineup did in the 80s or 90s, and it feels like Wright being fully acknowledged for his work. Just WOW!