Transcript
Hello Andreas, welcome. It’s very nice that it worked out. We have been in contact for a few months now and have
decided to record the podcast this summer. And as I said, I’m very happy, we’re very happy and for all
those who are wondering, who hear us in German, since Andreas, like me, is also German, we have decided
to record the podcast in German. for me the opportunity to finally be able to formulate
what I want to formulate without language restrictions. I hope that this will come across accordingly.
But to you, Andreas. It’s nice to have you here. Yes, Nils. Thank you very much. I was also happy about the invitation.
At first I had my doubts and thought, my God, you have already done various shows with the many really
important people from the Pink Floyd environment. Why do the guys now want to talk to me? But okay you say
‘Pink Floyd – The Records’ is the bible of bootleggers and
I don’t want to refuse and I’m very happy to have a nice evening.
Yes, yes exactly we’ll get to your book in a moment
We want to talk about it in detail right away, but at the beginning and that’s more or less the same for
all episodes, at least all episodes where we have guests, there is one question at the very beginning, namely the
question of how and when was your first encouter with Pink Floyd?
Yes, Pink Floyd, so if you want to be precise, then it was a TV show on ZDF, no on ARD, it was called Brennpunkt.
And they had Astronomy Domine as their title track. I recorded it on January 6, 1971
on my cassette recorder and then I went to a radio and television shop and said, I want
to have this music. It wasn’t quite that easy, the record saleswoman didn’t
know them, so a driver from a technology company happened to be there and said he knew that, it could be Pink Floyd.
And that’s actually where it all began. The first records I bought after that was “Meddle”, for example,
at a fixed price of 22 EUR, no 22 DM.
At that time there was a fixed price for the records… …and then i bought “Ummagumma” for a fixed price of 29 DM.
I found the record very interesting. To be honest, I couldn’t do too much with it at first.
It was something different in terms of music, always special. I mean, what else was there a the time?
There was, of course, Jimi Hendrix before, there was Deep Purple, there was The Doors, there was Led Zeppelin, a lot of exciting rock bands.
But from the beginning, Pink Floyd was somehow different and somehow special. And I think that’s also what explains the
enthusiasm for Pink Floyd. And if I understand correctly, you realised that immediately at that moment.
Somehow they are special, for whatever reason. That’s right.
So “Meddle” wasn’t my first LP that I bought. The first LP was by Uriah Heep, “The Magician’s Birthday”.
I bought them more or less only because of the beautiful cover. But it’s also great music.
But after that it went on slowly and steadily with Pink Floyd.
Correct. And have you also attended Pink Floyd concerts? I suspect so.
Yes, but unfortunately much too late for myself. Well, I would have liked to have been in 65/66
in the Roundhouse, the UFO Club or the Marquee. Who wouldn’t be. But it doesn’t work, because I couldn’t show up there
at the age of eight. My first concert was in January 1977 in the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin on the occasion
of the Animals Tour. Pink Floyd played “Animals”, “Wish You Were Here”, and
as an encore, a few tracks from “Dark Side Of The Moon”.
After that, of course, there were some other concerts,
especially perhaps in 1988, in front of the Reichstag building.
That was at the time when my book had already been put on hold by Pink Floyd’s lawyers.
And then I tried a trick to find out which hotel Pink Floyd was in, and called the various hotels and
asked for the tour roadie. It was clear to me that they were all in the same hotel. So if I had asked for Gilmour or Mason, they wouldn’t have
told me, yes, they’re here. And so I caught them there, talked to David Gilmour and
Nick Mason, and they explained their reasons again why they didn’t like my book so much.
But we’ll get to that later. But that they actually knew you by name in any case,
it’s an exciting situation already. Can you still remember the concert in 1977 well?
Because we talked a lot in this podcast about the 1977 Animals Tour, which was already very special.
It started in Germany, I would say, somewhat orderly and quiet and then became a relative disaster in the
course of time in the US and finally in Canada and in the end, if you are realistic, was rather the
nail in the coffin of the band or at least of the Relationship between, I would say, Roger Waters, David Gilmour
and especially Rick Wright, but also between Roger Waters and the audience in the end.
So let’s put it this way, in 1977 the Deutschlandhalle, that was a pretty quiet, normal concert.
Pink Floyd played there two days in a row. I think it was the 19th and 20th of January.
We were there for one day only. I wasn’t so enthusiastic at the time that I thought I had to
go to every single show. I’ve never been traveling like this before anyway. One show at a time was okay and the atmosphere was good.
Above all, the sound was great. That’s what has always fascinated me most about Pink Floyd.
They invented the Azimuth- Coordinator back then, and they performed their concerts in quadro with
various show elements in 1977, with the inflatable pig, for example, and so on.
So it was a very pleasant concert for me, let’s put it that way, I liked it very much. I recently bought a CD, I wonder where it came from,
where this concert is on it, but it’s such
a miserable quality… Fortunately, I didn’t include the CD-era in the book,
because it’s catastrophic what is sometimes released on CD, simply because it was cheap and
they were also cheaply made and you don’t have to own them. And when did it all start for you
that you dealt with live recordings, with so-called bootlegs or so-called ROIOs,
which later led you to write the book? It was a strange story, in Berlin, where I live
I could not find a record store, which had these illegal records, these bootlegs.
We were once visiting Hamburg, there was a store, it was called Gowi and at this store
I discovered “Best of Tour 72” a high-gloss cover in grey/black
with piggy on it and I thought, what it this?
And then… …I bought this record there, it wasn’t that expensive either.
Nowadays we know, it’s one of the best-selling bootlegs ever.
This would be followed later by “Tour 73” and “British Winter Tour 74”, presumably from the same creators.
And that’s how it started. Then I discovered “The Coming of Kohoutek” from AMTKRL
at the same store, also at Gowi. You can read in the book which record it is, it was also a
“Dark Side Of The Moon” concert and then the interest started and then I tried to make contacts.
It’s not like today, I mean okay you can’t buy such things on eBay, if you offer them in there, then you take the risk
of being harassed by lawyers. At that time, however, there were such specific magazines
as “Oldie-Markt” in Germany or “Goldmine” in the US, and you could sometimes find things like that.
At that time, it was not as tightly tracked as it is today on eBay.
Exactly, officially called “Imports”, that’s how you know it, that’s how we’ve heard it from other episodes.
In the end, it was much later for me. I guess we’re talking about the
beginning, mid-80s, I’d say. Yes, so it became more intense and then the collection
got bigger and bigger. As I said, not all the records mentioned in the book
were in my possession. I had many contacts, many people all over the world,
we sent records back and forth, or they sent me records, I photographed them and sent them back, then read out
the matrix numbers, they are all in there so that you can distinguish them at all,
the most diverse editions, exactly, there it is. And now, of course, it’s due to the fact that it was
released in 1988, that at some point it was over. For me, I thought it was good that I didn’t have
to include the CD-era anymore, i.e. CD-bootlegs. I was a bit annoyed that I put the stupid Italian
Acetates in there. At that time, shortly before the book was published, there
were one or two Italians who obviously had a record cutting machine. They cut the concerts quite unlovingly, which they
somehow got as tape, cut them to Acetates and then sold them as limited editions, allegedly 30 copies for
a lot of money, but they were not worth it. And I would have liked to leave them out, but they were
known at the time, had partly printed covers and that’s why they still appear in the book.
But they are very annoying for me, because at that time everything started to be more commercialised and it was
no longer purely for fans. It’s something else if you got a “Waters Gate” from 1970…
…as opposed to the products that came out afterwards.
Well, we’re even celebrating an interesting revival of vinyl at the moment. That means that right now there are various vinyl-bootlegs
that are flooding the market, which are ultimately not at all up to the standards in terms of recording quality,
which we are now exchanging digitally. However, there is a huge market again at the moment,
because the vinyl-market has interestingly grown again in general and that is remarkable and there are also a lot of
rip-off products, even today, so it always goes round in circles and in the end comes back again and again.
Have you ever been involved in the creation of a bootleg or in the distribtion, if you can say so for legal reasons?
Are there any recordings in which you were involved in at least some form?
Yes, yes, for some. It was simply because I also tried to get and trade
high-quality recordings. And since the quality of some bootlegs annoyed me so much,
I then, of course, got to know the right people who made bootlegs these days.
And then a few “things” were created where I either provided covers or the sound recordings.
For example, “The Return of the Sons of Nothing”. It’s a recording from, I think, 1972 from Böblingen.
It is of excellent quality. So you don’t have to feel ashamed that you were involved.
Or ‘Mauerspechte’ which is also a nice recording. Maybe a few more, let’s say five.
‘Mauerspechte’ was also one of my first bootlegs and I still remember how impressed i was back then, because it’s a very special
recording and because the concert is also very special, it was a very early one, where the very early ‘Echoes’ version
IF YOU DON’T SIT DOWN PINK FLOYD WON’T START! And in a relatively rude, typical “Berlin” tone I would say.
And the whole concert is somehow a very special one and that was a bootleg that I also owned very early on, which impressed me very much.
So it’s exciting to hear and see that you were involved to a certain extent.
I think I also contributed the ticket, which actually has a different date than the show and was stamped afterwards when
you look at the pictures. But I don’t remember exactly. Before we talk about the book in detail, I would like to
read from the foreword of the book. At least a small part of it, because I find it interesting and exciting on the one hand
what you thought when you created this book and what in the end, I would say, for legal reasons
is left over for self-protection. And that’s why I’m reading aloud briefly, because it’s just exciting.
Every collector knows the problem. You buy a record at the record fair or at the flea market or you acquire it from a special
collector’s magazine. When listening to it, you are shocked to find that there is a miserable sounding illegal live recording on the turntable.
The fan can hardly protect himself anymore, as the so-called bootlegs are becoming more and more like the official releases.
Perfect high-gloss flip sleeves and printed labels are now the order of the day to camouflage pirated copies.
The days of blank labels and neutral covers with an enclosed photocopy are long gone.
So far, there has been no list of Pink Floyd’s collectible records. It was also difficult to distinguish the original releases
from the re-pressings. Among other things, this book now provides information about this and is intended to protect music lovers
from unnecessary expenses. So, before we talk about how this book came about, it is
of course very exciting from today’s point of view to read what you did, back then, to, let’s say, find a
justification and explanation in the most positive sense for publishing a book, …I’ll show it again…
which actually shows …and I’ll get to it in a moment… a very nice outline of the Pink Floyd story
up to 1988, and beyond that, but this is of course the big and exciting part, a fantastic and still highly appreciated
list of all bootlegs for the fans. On the one hand, the preface is very correct,
because I would have been happy if I had had this book back then. I would have left a lot of bad bootlegs at the flea market,
which I bought there, if I had had an overview at that time, because the Internet didn’t exist yet.
At the same time, it is interesting to read that you tried to make it clear from the outset that you are
not interested in putting the bootlegs in the foreground, but in protecting people from the bootlegs.
Before we talk about the book, let’s talk about the end of the book, which is that Pink Floyd, despite these
Dear Mr. Kraska, with all due respect, but this book will not be in the market.
What was that like? Yes, that’s a bit difficult. We will go into how the creation of this book
came about later, I guess. Yes, yes. My publisher Michael Schwinn,
who released this book, he was so proud of this product, i did in collaboration with
a good friend who did the layout, Dietmar Birt from Frankfurt, that he immediately sent it over to Pink Floyd.
Ok. And that was…yes, i know, they would have gotten their hands on it at some point anyway.
But maybe it wasn’t quite so clever. At that time there was not even fax or
anything like that. Not the Internet anyway, not e-mail.
The lawyers have reached an agreement by telex. I still have the copies in the basement, I’ll keep them too.
I found them very exciting. It was just like that, the book was there,
Then here was a declaration of discontinuance.
but it still affected me. One reason was that I have a photo in it, there is a young lady
sitting in a racing car, behind it stands Nick Mason, the young lady is his daughter,
right to your own image. I wasn’t paying attention, I wasn’t right. I wasn’t sure how to handle these legal issues.
The second complaint came from Gilmour, because I have used facsimiles of the autographs on the first page
I did not have the rights. And the third lawsuit was from Steve O’Rourke, who has
unfortunately passed away in the meantime, who was the manager at the time, and he said that I didn’t have the rights
to print the official record covers. I have to say, that was a while ago, at that time
I wasn’t legally confident at all. I wrote to the management three times in total and
asked for the rights to use it for this book. And in the third letter I wrote that if you don’t answer
within four weeks, then I assume that I will be allowed to do it, which of course was completely wrong legally.
But okay. So then there were these three lawsuits, 50,000 pounds each.
The lawyers have written back and forth. The first edition consisted of 2.500 units and
we then agreed on selling only those which had already had been in the stores.
About 2.400 books have already been in circulation.
We have also collaborated with WOM, World of Music. At that time this was a big music shop and we also dealt
with other large music shops and that’s why so many units were already out there.
About 100 books remained, I bought them for myself much later …or there were about 200.
I then went to London and planned to sell it at the Pink Floyd convention, but maybe more about that later.
We had agreed on it, so the lawsuits were dropped and that was the end of the matter.
I would say that it is still a relatively mild outcome, considering that Pink Floyd and Steve O’Rourke in particular
are very rigid when it comes to protecting their own rights.
By the standards of that time, let’s say, let’s compare it with today’s conditions, it was really very humane
what happened there. Today it already goes like this, If you just unknowingly
put a bootleg in on eBay, then you get a fat lawsuit from lawyers hired all over Europe.
Well, that’s bad. However, I found it piquant that, after we had this argument,
there was the concert in Berlin in 1988 at the…
…not on the Maifeld, there was the Division Bell Tour, but in front of the Reichstag. And I had applied for a sales stand to sell the book…
…but it was pure madness. I would have had to pay 3.950 DM for one day for the sales stand.
You can think about how many books you would have to sell. But okay, they took the stand away from me afterwards,
because they say I would not get that stand after all the trouble I caused. However, I had received a press card.
And it wasn’t taken from me. With the help of this press card, I was there during the
set-up of the stage and the sound check, took beautiful pictures of how the pig was inflated and so on…
However, I knew immediately that I was not allowed to use these images. Otherwise i would have been in further trouble.
Yes, that was the story with the management. And as I said, I tried to discuss it with Nick Mason and
There’s no such thing,it’s not, it’s time to call it a day. Yes, especially when it comes to bootlegs, I also
know that Steve O’Rourke was pretty tough. So there wasn’t much room for manoeuvre,
that’s quite clear. But tell us a little bit about how you finally came to the book, what was the idea behind it.
I understand and I realize that the quality of the available bootlegs annoyed you, and not only you, but many,
and that the idea of creating a kind of overview was a very good one.
Was that also the idea of ultimately writing the book in the first place?
So to be honest, this foreword, that you read earlier
was written on the advice of my publisher.
My wish was to show the collectors which illegal
live recordings were available.
If someone wants to protect themselves from it, they are welcome to use the book, but most of those who have
purchased the book used it for other reasons, because they wanted to inform themselves…
…for their collection. If it is complete or is there still something to get.
So even by today’s standards for vinyl-bootlegs, it is still relatively complete, because not so many more
vinyl-bootlegs have been produced. It’s all on CDs now…or I don’t know, I’m not so technically savvy
whether you distribute bootlegs via Spotify or something now.
Pink Floyd does this interestingly. So even now, in order to escape the 50-year rule, everything they have
from that specific year is now published on Spotify & Co.
Unfortunately in a lousy quality. They don’t bother to find good recordings, find good quality
or even remastered it, but they just put it out so that they end up sitting on the rights and no one else can follow.
Typical Pink Floyd and also a bit of a shame, because there would have been a chance for Pink Floyd, similar to
King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer or whoever, to manage it properly yourself. You would have had to talk to a few people just to
self-publish an excellent catalogue and everything would have been okay. But they chose a different path.
Yes, what you are talking about is this regulation that after 50 years the rights are released, so to speak.
That’s why you could easily release another live concert like Rotterdam 1967 or something like that.
But this (Spotify) is new to me. But of course it is a valid procedure.
And it fits with the current management. Even if Steve O’Rourke is no longer with us. But I assume that they are behind it now.
The people are much stricter now. That’s just the way they do it. That’s the way it is. Yes. Ok.
But if I understood correctly, you didn’t write the book entirely voluntarily.
To get an extensive bootleg collection, you need a lot of contacts.
And I knew a few people at the time and then there was someone there, i don’t use his last name,
I’ll just leave out his last name. He once had a shop, which was called “Plattenmühle”.
Ralf and Susanne were a married couple and the managing directors, and they produced bootlegs,
and also sold them too. And Ralf knew that I already had quite an extensive
collection, maybe one of the largest in Europe for a while, I don’t know exactly, but I think.
And he said, man, what you’ve got there and all the information, don’t you want to take it and write it down?
And release it for the fans?! I thought actually i have a lot to do in my job,
but after a while I said, yes, okay, let’s do it. Then he paid me an advance, I think it was at the end
of 1983, beginning of 1984. And that’s when I started writing.
At that time something came up,
i found out that Ralf had not only dealt in records, but
also in drugs and got caught by the police
and disappeared from the surface. I could then reach his wife and said,
what about the advance? Oh, you can keep it. I thought, that’s great, but that didn’t guarantee
that what I’m writing down will be published. However, I had already started to deduct costs
for the creation of a book from the tax office. And after two years, the tax office asked, when will this book
finally be released, for which you constantly spend such horrendous sums, i.e. travel expenses, postage
costs and so on and so forth. So I thought to myself, just write to a few publishers now
and give the tax office the rejections to show that they would not be interested.
However, the next 10 letters, which were numbers 11 to 20 one was sent to Mr. Schwinn, who said, yes, let’s do it
and that’s why I had to sit down and continued writing until 1987.
For those who don’t know, in 1987 there were no personal computers.
I wrote this manuscript on a typewriter, a type wheel machine from ‘Brother’.
Then it was proofread again. After that it was copied again and that was finally
the manuscript that i sent to the aforementioned Dietmar Birt in Frankfurt, who took care of the layout.
He also got the photos from me and put the whole thing together.
That’s probably how the great picture on the cover came about.
This picture was taken with a plate camera with a negative size of 25 cm square.
The records were scattered on the lawn behind my apartment and have been photographed with this special camera
and while talk about this picture, I think there’s a yellow cover to be seen only rudimentarily…yes…
…under the “c” of ‘Records’ The cover there does not exist. My wife painted it…
And that led to the issue, that some hardcore collectors
who went totally crazy, because they thought they had all the bootlegs except this one
and they just did not find it anywhere… …and why? Because it doesn’t exist at all!
Unfortunately I don’t know where it has gone. It might be possible that it is with a protagonist from
your series…Charles Beterams in Holland. But I don’t remember exactly. That is quite possible.
So you sat down at the typewriter, researched, collected a lot, catalogued it all what must have been strenuous work.
So it’s exciting in terms of content alone. There is, even if it is very condensed
and not comparable to other books about Pink Floyd, by Glenn Povey or whoever,
still some very interesting information included there. So for all those who are not proficient in the German language
I have to say, I feel sorry for you, but there are very interesting topics in it. For example, we also had different guests…
…we had…Ron Geesin with us on the show, who also talked a lot about “Atom Heart Mother”,
about the production of it, or the studio work. You also have an interesting section in there, also very
interesting information, that on Wish You Were Here the tapes were played at a slower pace during the recordings,
in order to finally get Roger Waters voice to a higher pitch when playing back.
So this is information that even I didn’t have all these years. So that’s really exciting.
I know that you wrote the texts mainly on your own, but I also know, that there is at least one photo
of Glenn Povey in the book. And I wanted to ask you, who helped you with that?
Who were the people in the scene at that time with whom you had contact? I would definitely like to talk to you briefly about
Rolf Ossenberg later, but who else supported you or who else did you work with?
Just here, so you can see. On such cards were the information about each bootleg.
On these cards are also all the addresses and contacts of the most important people who supported me.
So, for example, when I see the first one here, Vernon Fitch, who created the “Pink Floyd archives”,
which is certainly well known. This is one of the most comprehensive sources of information there is.
Hans-Jürgen Müller, who has unfortunately passed away in the meantime. He bequeathed his collection to Ingo Brode in Ludwigshafen.
Nicholas Schaffner, also a fellow author of mine, unfortunately already passed away.
Rolf Ossenberg, first contact in 1984.
Charles Beterams, you’ve had him on the show already. F. Neuwirth was very important.
Hervé Denoyel in France. Paul H. in America, no in England, excuse me,
Christoph Hurler in France, by the way, he put me in touch with Ron Geesin, whom I had contacted
back then, Nino Gatti in Italy, Uwe Göller was the publisher of a fanzine, a German fanzine,
it was called Eclipse. In fact, it still exists. It’s no longer a fanzine, it’s now a complete newspaper,
back then it was a fanzine, Ingo Brode and Alois Wolf, yes, Alois Wolf, also Ludwigshafen.
It’s only a part. I had about 50 such cards and my colleagues, let’s
say colleagues, fellow collectors, they supported me very strongly.
So I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own. As I said, I couldn’t have all the records in my collection.
There are a few pieces that are particularly rare, also with all the extras.
For example, “Tokyo Triple”, it’s mentioned in the book, used to have a certain cardboard paper cover
and another poster in it and so on and so forth. And yes, if our colleagues hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t
have been able to finish it. I met many of them at Glenn Povey’s Pink Floyd Convention at Wembley Halls.
That was in August 1993.
That was also a strange story. It was, as I said, a pure Pink Floyd convention.
A buddy of mine, from Hamburg, Oliver, supported me, because you can’t run such a sales stand by yourself
with all these records. And I had brought 200 books with me, of which 194 i took back home by the way,
because everyone who was there already had them. And Olli goes to the other side,
rummages through a box of records and pulls out an original ‘Waters Gate’ with printed cover,
which cost him 20 pounds. From my point of view, it was completely unlikely to find
such a rare record on a Pink Floyd Convention, which was already traded for about 1.000 DM at that time.
And yes, at this Floyd convention, which lasted two days, there was a live show at the end of the second day
by a band called ‘Think Floyd’. They made really great music, played really perfectly.
A year later, they renamed themselves ‘The Australian Pink Floyd Show’.
And they are still on a tour today. I would say, after Pink Floyd, the second largest Pink Floyd-like event,
I have to say. They book huge halls nowadays. Exactly.
And so that was also a great moment for me, to hear them back in 1993.
As I said, shortly afterwards they changed their name and they are now going on tour, they tour worldwide, also with
a perfect show that is almost similar to Pink Floyd’s show back then.
Great instruments, and they play perfectly. The singing is great too. Yes, I think it’s also one of the few, let’s call it coverbands
that are also accepted and recognised by Pink Floyd. So what I heard was that Pink Floyd also acknowledges, they
do it very well and they are good. And I think it’s always a bit more difficult to aknowledge cover bands because you think…
c’mon, do your own thing. But here I know that the recognition is very high. Yes, yes, so there were also various meetings,
they were in touch with Waters, with Gilmour, with Mason.
Okay, these gentlemen so their own thing now with their solo tours and so on, but of course they
(The Australian Pink Floyd Show) can’t be in the book. Glenn Povey was also an excellent person,
an organizational talent, he brought out a fanzine himself, it was called “Brain Damage”, I googled it again
before our show, “Brain Damage” probably still exists, but no longer with Glenn Povey, that’s another one now, who
seems to run it. I couldn’t determine whether it is still distributed as a fanzine. But at least they got that website.
I believe that this is a website now. A pure website, exactly. Exactly, but Glenn is still active in the scene,
has his network and is still busy and I think he’s still a big Pink Floyd fan.
He has already published a few books. Exactly. Just like Charles from Holland.
Yes, exactly, and that ultimately brings me to Rolf Ossenberg.
Unfortunately, I never knew Rolf Ossenberg personally, but I was also a long-time member of the Yeeshkul community,
the website and the forum and there were many, wether it was Ron Fleischer or many other Pink Floyd fans
worldwide who knew him well. And I have to be honest and say that I find it exciting that it continues with you that I have
hardly experienced a serious Pink Floyd collector, fan or specialist who did not know Rolf.
Unfortunately, he died, and I did not have a relationship with Rolf in any way.
So it’s really impressive how busy and active Rolf was in the scene and how massively he helped shape the
Pink Floyd community in one way or another and how much he was involved in many endeavours.
Totally impressive. Yes, that is indeed the case.
So if you look in the book, you can see that Rolf has provided me with some photos.
He always said it was better not to write his name under it. But I thought that if he provided them, then his name
should also be there. He had an incredibly large collection.
I have to say, he comes from a relatively wealthy family, was later the managing director of a metal processing company
and unfortunately died much too early.
Weird as it is, on a train ride from Bonn to Berlin I had my (FAZ) newspaper in my hands and
there was his obituary in it. And the last sentence below it was Shine On You Crazy Diamond
Appropriate, fully appropriate. Otherwise I might not have noticed it so quickly.
But that’s just how it happens. Well, in my opinion, he did not live to be 50 years old.
Because that was quite a long time ago. And he was indeed very well connected, so he could also
exchange things and give them back and forth. He never revealed his entire collection to the outside world,
but I think it was even bigger than mine.
Yes, that can be possible, of course I can’t say. The collection you had, and we talked a bit about it in advance,
you’re no longer an active collector, but now more in a phase where you say, I would rather reduce
the collection and find solutions for this and also give things away.
But it’s quite clear that you had one of the largest Pink Floyd collections, I would say at least in Europe,
with two or three other collectors right together. What was your initial motivation
to become a collector? To own as many different variants and versions
of Pink Floyd albums as possible…and bootlegs?
Well, people generally say that you are either collector or hunter, so then I count myself more among the
collectors and then of course you try to determine the different pressings and try to acquire them.
I have to say, you mention the current phase, but I sold all the bootlegs shortly before the book got released,
because i was a bit panicked about GEMA getting me. You might have to translate GEMA again later.
Something like the BPI in England, which ultimately protects the rights of music publishers and music
creators here, so to speak. Exactly, and that’s why I sold most items in 1983-84, in three waves.
So if I had put them all on the market at once, then I would have overwhelmed the collectors, because it
was just too much. And then I sold it. In the meantime, we are now at today’s time, it is now the
case that I am no longer so insanely eager and have to own everything that is now only thrown onto the market
in limited quantities for commercial reasons. I’ll give you a current example.
Roger Waters ‘Redux’ in 27 different colours with a poster or without a poster with the cap… and, and, and.
The Nick Mason book, which is really very good… …he signed it on the tour, sold it for 1.000 EUR.
None of this is necessary or helpful. Roger Waters’ special edition with some great things
in it that no one needs. And that upsets me. And…if I would not be on this planet anymore,
as happened to Rolf, Rolf Ossenberg, who suddenly passed away.
I mean, I have two boys who couldn’t maintain the collection. They don’t know what to do with it.
They could just as well take everything to the flea market and then they would get 2 EUR or something for each LP. And to get around this, I’m reducing heavily now.
I know that I have some things that are traded at a high price, whether justifiably or not, I can’t say.
I’ll just give you an example, the album “Pulse” 4 LP-Set has been reissued by Pink Floyd Records, but was originally
released under EMI at the time…is insanely traded between 600 and 700 EUR.
I don’t know if someone pays that much, but it’s such items, so they don’t have to get lost just like that
and that’s why I contacted a Dutch colleague you know very well, who has often bought larger quantities from my collection.
He has his own business. It’s called, I think, “Pink Floyd Stuff” or something.
Yes. Charles. And we will meet in late autumn and agree on a sensible deal.
And he will take a large part of it back with him. There it is in the best hands. Clearly. It’s in the best hands.
This is also distributed worldwide, as far as I know. He also offers it through his website, he can sell well.
And he will benefit and so I will benefit. That’s important because we’ve been friends
for so long, none of us will rip off the other one. We’ll manage that cleanly and I’m looking forward to
him stopping by again. Yes, Charles Beterams is a great guy. All i can say is that we do business
with each other and that we also have a friendly relationship. We saw Nick Mason live together at the Loreley.
So as I said, that’s the best contact and the best way to do it, before, as you said, something like that,
and I’m afraid that unfortunately happens with many collections, before it disappears, is thrown away,
is dawdled away or anything else. Therefore, from my point of view, you are doing exactly the right thing at this point.
There is another topic what I would like to talk about with you before we finish.
I think everyone has already gotten to know you as a specialist, as a nerd, a Pink Floyd geek.
But there is a hobby of yours and although I am also an absolute technology nerd and totally tech-savvy for
many, many years, even decades and have tested many gadgets that have been developed in the past, you told me
about your hobby in advance and I have to admit that i have never heard of it but I find it incredibly exciting.
It is a technical development of the 50s, if I’m not mistaken.
But please tell me more about it. I know that in addition to Pink Floyd and all the
bootlegs and merchandise,you collect something very special.
Tell us more… You mean the Tefifon now? Correct.
I’ve prepared something for you. What is a Tefifon?
The Tefifon existed from the beginning of the 50s to 1962.
I don’t know if you can see it that way. Yes, that’s how you can see it. Yes, it’s a tape.
Here, when you pull it out, there is an endless tape of plastic in it and there are grooves on it, like on a record.
This tape has a playing time of one hour.
I would also like to show you the player, at least one of them.
It looks something like this. That’s already a portable model. There used to be other machines.
Wait a minute, I wanted to show the technology. That’s where this tape is inserted.
Here on this side is the pickup needle and then the machine starts.
The background to this invention was the following… Just one example. At the time when this was developed, in the mid-50s,
there were still shellac records. If you wanted to hear Beethoven’s symphony,
then an album consisted of nine single records. That means you had to turn around 17 times to then
listen to the entire Symphony No.9, ‘Freude schöner Götterfunken’ one after the other.
The idea of the gentleman, Karl Daniel was his name, he lived in Porz near
Cologne, was that these tapes were produced and the entire symphony would fit on it.
And it was actually a good sales success. However, the record industry was too powerful here as well
and ultimately flattened him because they forbade him to publish original artists who had made records
on these cassettes. So they just blocked the rights, so to speak, for this…
Yes, they have revoked the rights. And then, of course, it was also the fact that
at the beginning of the 60s, tape technology, i.e. magnetic sound technology, began and the sound
quality was better than on these tapes. But there are countless types, I have only shown
this specific model here, which also includes a radio, an FM radio receiver.
The original technique was such that you scratched the grooves on a film, on film material, 36 millimeters
of film material, and they were then reproduced by a so-called Teficord.
So this is an incredibly large collection area and there is also a lot of literature and you can also look it up
on eBay, there are still options to buy it there. This is much to the chagrin of my wife.
I used to have a phonograph collection and a gramophone collection, but I had to sell them.
And now there are a lot of Tefifones standing around. Even in the basement, but okay,
I have to consider how to handle this. How would you assess it technically? It’s mono I suppose, or it is even stereo?
There were very few stereo tapes, seven or eight of them. So you had to have a special device for that
with a stereo pickup. As I said, it worked like a record player with the crystal pickup.
But by then it was already too late, the technology was not able to establish itself.
It is interesting and I have to say, I only got to know these devices because I grew up with my grandfather
for a few years. He was a workshop manager in a radio and television shop and
when I came back from school, I always went down and talked to all the technicians and there was this device.
That somehow fascinated me from the beginning, then I lost sight of it and for almost ten years now I’ve been
trying to collect again, but I’m not going to overdo it. You have to keep yourself in check a bit.
Often I buy two or three devices of the same class that are defective in order to build another one that works.
I find this totally exciting, because these are inventions that somehow make sense technically and are exciting,
but for completely different reasons had no chance at all. So our company, for example
is on the site of the former EMI in Cologne in Ossendorf and a tower was built there and in this tower machines
were developed for producing a video vinyl record. This means that a complete system had already been more
or less patented in order to ultimately depict image information on a vinyl record with grooves and that even
worked relatively well. It just came two or three years too late, because the
Laserdisc was developed at the same time by Sony, I think, in Japan and in the end the product didn’t stand a
chance against the Laserdisc. But we have a complete building that was only intended to ultimately implement this invention
and bring it to market. And I always find it incredibly fascinating when, and in my opinion it is the same with the Tefifon,
there are devices that actually make sense, but perhaps arrived at the wrong time or the market sees competition and
ultimately pushes it away. So I find that totally exciting, I have to say. So because you just mentioned something with
an image information, Telefunken developed a system called TED. (Television Electronic Disc)
It was a kind of floppy disk, about 20 cm in size, where magnetic sound, i.e. with magnetic technology,
and pictures and films could be played. And if you think back to video technology, there was Video 2000
developed by Grundig, then there was Betamax from Sony and then there was VHS from Panasonic.
And then one disappeared, then the other disappeared. Yes, well, VHS no longer exists, but that was
ultimately the system that prevailed. And then perhaps we are back to the initial topic.
A vinyl record still has a longer lifespan than a CD, for example, and still has a higher degree of popularity.
You can see that in the numbers of records that are sold again today. Yes, yes.
And it’s simply the nicer medium. This is a discussion that we or I have again and again in
my professional environment, because it is always about streaming, i.e. Spotify and Co.
And Apple Music and everything there is…and Netflix. And I’m firmly convinced that having the product in my
hand, having the media in my hand, being able to look at something, having a booklet, has a total value and
you just shouldn’t give it up. That’s why a vinyl is so exciting, because to open The Wall and see the drawing by Gerald Scarfe,
the CD was an insane step backwards already. And what do we have now? Now we have some stupid, bad- sounding Spotify stream of
“The Wall” and the people who are now getting to know “The Wall” and don’t deal with it intensively don’t even see
the graphics by Gerald Scarfe anymore, they don’t even see any additional content anymore and I think
that’s a total shame. That’s why I find these special individual gadgets
that still exist and that you can discover totally exciting. And vinyl, as a much broader medium, of course, is in
demand like never before. There are Bruce Springsteen 10 album box-sets now.
There will also be a vinyl box of Pink Floyd with all records at some point. That’s totally in demand and I think it’s nice and I find it
exciting and that means for me quite clearly that at least people who don’t just listen to the music casually, but feel
something from the bottom of their hearts when listening to music, would also like to have something in her hands
and would want to feel it. That’s just my point of view.
Yes that’s right. That’s actually a good final word. Yes, I would say we’re almost through.
I think I got all the questions I had written down in advance.
The only thing left for me at the end would be the question concerning the legal disputes you had with Pink Floyd.
Did that change your view of Pink Floyd in any way or did you continue to be a fan even though they ultimately
wanted to get at you? I have to say that I ignored this legal dispute,
because there were still interesting things after the book was published.
Okay, there was the post-Roger Waters era, for example, because there was the Gilmour/Mason era with
“A Momentary Lapse Of Reason” and “The Division Bell” although it’s definitely a great album for me.
But that’s not Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd, they have developed again and again.
I mean, consider the psychedelic phase with Syd Barrett and then came the orchestral phase with the
transition from “A Saucerful…” to “Atom Heart Mother”. And then came “Dark Side Of The Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”
and then came the rebellious phase with “The Wall”, with “Animals” and new things
have always been created and interesting experiences have been made.
It’s not like Mike Oldfield releasing the seventieth version of “Tubular Bells” or Jean-Michel Jarre
the sixtieth version of “Oxygen” because he can’t think of anything better.
That’s Pink Floyd, a completely different level, so as I said, they’ve reinvented themselves again and again.
There’s an interesting Beatles bootleg, you can see
a drawing of John Lennon, holding two hand puppets.
One is Paul McCartney, no, he’s holding one, excuse me, he’s holding one, and that’s Paul McCartney, and
Paul McCartney is holding two hand puppets, which are Ringo Starr and George Harrison.
And if you were to translate that now, then of course you can argue about it again, but the big leader,
after Syd Barrett was no longer there, of Pink Floyd, was Roger Waters for me.
Then you could translate it the same way. Gilmour is not a bad musician.
Rick Wright played keyboards wonderfully and Mason can play drums, he’s not the greatest drummer,
but they played great together. But the visionary was Roger Waters, at least for a long time, no question, I see it that way, too.
Andreas, it was a great pleasure, it was super nice and very, very interesting.
Thank you so much for the time you took and that was really nice!
Thank you! I also thank you and hope the people who watch this will enjoy the show.
Absolutely. Thank you! Have a nice evening! Take care. Goodbye. Bye.