In The Pink: Not A Hunting Memoir

An insider’s tale of life with the Floyd, rock’s most impenetrable band.

The late journalist Nick Sedgwick was a long-time friend of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. In 1974, he was commissioned to write the group’s biography and joined Waters and his first wife on holiday and the band on the road. But after he’d presented Floyd with a brutally frank account of the experience, the book was canned for the sake of diplomacy. Sedgwick passed away in 2011, and Waters has faithfully reproduced his manuscript but with his own corrections/asides in the margins. This portrayal of bickering rock stars – imagine This Is Spinal Tap meets Lord Of The Flies – is less shocking now than it might have been then, and more surprising is Sedgwick’s account of Waters’ marital breakdown, as witnessed on that hellish shared holiday. But In The Pink does give Floyd devotees a real fly-on-the-dressing wall room experience: funny, grim and genuinely revealing. Mark Blake