News

The Chateau d’Herouville, the shuttered French recording studio where Pink Floyd and many other iconic bands recorded, is set to reopen.

Dubbed the “Honky Chateau” by Elton John, who recorded three albums there, the facility had been abandoned until recently purchased by four partners who plan to reopen it for sound recording and more.

Floyd recorded its soundtrack to the 1972 film “La Vallee” there. The album’s called “Obscured by Clouds.”

During its heyday of the ’70s, the French mansion an hour outside Paris offered bands such as David Bowie, T Rex, Cat Stevens and others, a place to not only record music, but to live — sometimes to excess — under the management of owner Michel Magne.

Magne took his life in 1984 as debts on the facility piled up.

New co-owner Stephan Marchi told Classic Rock magazine, “Ultimately we want to expand from sound recording to other mediums — writing, sculpting, painting.

“In everything, we are inspired by the idea of recreating the state of mind that prevailed here in the early 70s.”

Worcester Crown Court today dropped the remaining charges pending against singer-songwriter Roy Harper.

Harper, 74, best known to Pink Floyd fans as guest vocalist on the band’s “Have a Cigar,” had been acquitted by a jury of two sex crime charges earlier this year. The five remaining charges were dropped today.

“This case should never have gone as far as this, or taken so long to resolve,” Harper told the Guardian. “The psychological and personal cost to my wife and myself has been enormous and the financial cost hugely unfair. I lost my livelihood and I spent my savings, and more, on my defense.”

“Despite coming out of this without a blemish on my name, I cannot recoup my costs and that’s left me incredibly angry.”

The Highgate home in northern London where the founding members of Pink Floyd lived while the band took shape has been renovated and is for sale.

The three-story property was owned by Mike Leonard — the band briefly called itself Leonard’s Lodgers — a lecturer at Hornsey College of Art who was instrumental in developing the band’s trademark light shows.

Floyd’s Roger Waters and Nick Mason moved into the home in September 1963, joined a year later by Syd Barrett. Rick Wright also lived there.

Leonard, who continued to own the property until his death in 2012, had allowed the property to fall into disrepair. It was auctioned shortly after his death.

The newly-renovated home is stunning, and is listed for £3 million.

DailyMail.com has a series of before and after photos.

After a two-week accidental blackout, the “Floydian Slip” mailing list is back online.

If you’d like Pink Floyd and “Floydian Slip” news emailed to your inbox in daily digest issues, sign up now.

Thanks to crazy diamond Ray Sourdiffe for bring the mistake to our attention.

“Floydian Slip” is the subject of this week’s “Ten Questions” at broadcasting trade website AllAccess.com.

We answer 10 questions about our show, Pink Floyd, and the state of rock radio thrown at us by the site’s Rock Editor Ken Anthony.

Read “Ten Questions” online now.

AllAccess.com is owned and operated by All Access Music Group Inc. It was formed to keep the radio and music industries informed and up to date.

Stone carver Pippa Westoby (pictured) has started a petition to honor Pink Floyd with a plaque to be placed in Cambridge, England.

The band’s Syd Barrett, David Gilmour and Roger Waters have connections to the town, seen by some as the band’s true home.

The petition has 1,431 signatures; the goal is 2,000. Once complete, Westoby will present it to the Cambridge City Council.

“If we get approval, we will then be fundraising,” she told Cambridge News. “Any money raised (above the cost of getting the plaque carved) will be split equally between a few Cambridge-based charities for music, drugs and mental health.”

Sign the petition.

Today we made live a new floydianslip.com.

Rebuilt from the ground up, the new site features a “responsive” design to optimize user experience based on device — desktop, tablet or mobile phone.

This is the site’s 6th major design since we established floydianslip.com in 1996. You can browse screenshots of past designs in the “Floydian Slip Bizarre Collection of Antiques and Curios.”

West Coast Shaving has taken the faces of each member of Pink Floyd and created a photographic “average” of them (right).

The result, in our opinion, looks most similar to guitarist David Gilmour.

We reached out to the company to see if all five members (Syd Barrett, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Rick Wright) are included in the Floyd photo, but didn’t hear back.

The firm actually gave this treatment to 30 rocks bands, which makes for interesting conversion, not the least of which would be the question, “Why would a men’s grooming company do this?” Perhaps it thinks they all need a good shave.

Nonetheless, never say no to fun. All photos are below.

Garden Cottage (pictured), the house said to appear on the cover of Pink Floyd’s “A Collection of Great Dance Songs” (1981), has sold at auction for £215,000.

But, contrary to prior reports, the structure in Dungeness, Romney Marsh, is not the house from the album cover.

The Folkestone Herald reports Trevor Bunney of Dungeness says,”This cottage is not the cottage on the album, which is actually called Seagull Cottage. It’s situated further north just off of the Dungeness estate in between The Pilot public house and Kerton Road bridge.

Seagull Cottage is no longer in existence as it was destroyed by fire in the early 1980s. If you look to the right on the album cover you can just make out the houses over Kerton Road bridge, I know this for a fact as a kid I played in Seagull Cottage when it was derelict.”

The property was expected to go for £160,000.