The V&A Museum has announced that it will be following up its critically acclaimed 2013 David Bowie retrospective with yet more British music legends with a major Pink Floyd exhibition in 2017. Titled Their Mortal Remains, it closes out a torrid period in the band’s history of late, as it had initially been intended to open in Milan in 2015 before going on a European tour, but it went on to be cancelled and resulted in a law suit due to money owed the surviving band members, Roger Walters, Dave Gilmour and Nick Mason.
However, the confirmation of the exhibition by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London means that it will finally get the public audience Pink Floyd fans have been wishing for. With a multi-sensory approach, along with the band’s quintessential music and visual genius it’s going to be one of the big shows of 2017.
Dates, opening times and tickets
The Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains exhibition will open to the public on the 13th May 2016, kicking off a five month run for the retrospective up to the 1st October 2016. Full price tickets, including the booking fee, will set you back a pricey £22, with concession prices at £18, so you might want to start throwing the pennies into your ceramic pink pigs now. We’re not too sure whether or not the price has been affected by the legal wrangle, but the fact that the tickets for the recent, and hugely popular, Rolling Stones: Exhibitionism exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery were £24 a pop would sort of imply that it’s just the norm for this kind of big budget show.
The museum is open daily from 10am until 5:45pm, with late night opening on Fridays until 10pm. Exhibitions close fifteen mins earlier than the museum itself and tickets are sold in set time slots in fifteen minute increments, so expect a pretty tight ship when you come to booking your slot.
About the exhibition
Pink Floyd has created some of the greatest music the world has ever been lucky enough to listen to, putting the brilliance of psych-rock on the map and creating music that discussed social issues without sounding like a load of old Sasquatch sacks. The five piece also created an incredible visual style to their album and tour artwork that blurred psychedelia and surrealism, while also having a fairly unique take on fashion. All of this will be brought together for the exhibition, giving it it’s multi-sensory approach that will feature everything from massive construction pieces from their album covers and live shows to a custom made laser light-show.
There will also be rare video footage of the band in concert, a 350+ item catalogue of artefacts and memorabilia from their early days right the way up to the modern day, and hand-written lyrics that were the very first notations for some of the great Pink Floyd songs that we know and love today. You’ll get to see some of their instruments up close an personal, along with other music tech that they used in their recording and live shows, architectural drawings for their massive stage constructions and very cool psychedelic prints and posters.
Highlights from the show include the 1977 Animals album cover art, an Azimuth co-ordinator used onstage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, 1967, made by Bernard Speight; a flower petal mirrorball stage prop Pink Floyd took on tour with them between 1973 and 1975, their 1967 UFO advert, the band’s face masks from The Wall Live, 1979, and the Tokyo-To concert poster from their trip to Japan in 1972
First impressions
While it’s a bit pricey, it’s probably going to be impressive, especially for fans of the band, which we’d count ourselves included with. It sounds like The V&A has gone all-out to deliver a spectacular show with the help and collaboration of the remaining band members, so if should be a music, video, sound and art hammer strike of an exhibition with bricks, pigs, money, war, psych and surrealism all wrapped up in a Pink Floyd-inspired laser show.
