By the Way, Which One's Pink?

I had an interesting day this week. We've got roofers in (on?) at the moment, tracking down a leak and generally fixing up the roof and gutters, so after one day of banging and scraping, I thought I'd make myself scarce by going up to London for the day on Tuesday. Looking through the "what's on" listings, I saw that there is a new Pink Floyd exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which sounded intriguing, so I booked myself in for an early afternoon slot.

Like everyone but a lunatic minority, I was appalled by the news from Manchester when I woke up that morning. If you've ever dropped excited children off at their first real gig, and later hung around outside to collect them as the crowds emerge, you'll know a little of the terror and panic that will have been experienced around the Manchester Arena the night before. It really doesn't bear thinking about.

In the aftershock of an event like that, so recently following the attack on Westminster Bridge, you expect security everywhere to be tight, but especially so in the capital. Now, I'm not a complete idiot. I know that, to a certain mindset, I can look suspicious, especially if I'm doing my thing with the camera. You know: Hey, what's that scruffy guy with the beard and backpack doing, taking pictures of blank walls, windows, and doorways? So, especially in central London, I take care not to look furtive. I use the camera openly, I don't sneak around, I do my best to look like what I am: a harmless tourist in town for the day. So, I was taken by surprise when, waiting for the crossing lights to change near Westminster, a police van pulled up, two enormous uniformed officers got out, and asked me to step to one side so they could ask me a few questions, if I didn't mind. When two more rocked up from behind, followed by a second van, they had my complete attention.

Obviously, on Tuesday security was on a hair trigger. It seems someone inside one of the government buildings I had just been working – lovely stained hoardings! – had thought I looked noteworthy, but not in a good way, and within a minute I had become the focus of a co-ordinated police operation. In my younger days, we used to play silly games with the police when stopped and searched; it was a foolish and risky rite of passage that said, you've chosen to waste my time so now I'll waste yours, just to amuse my pals. But not nowadays, and certainly not on a day of such heightened tension. I am cut from the same cloth as most policemen (if not generously enough to make a complete one) so, once it became obvious I was a harmless idiot with a baffling but unthreatening urge to photograph random marks on walls, we had a nice, friendly chat while my identity and story was being checked out, and a third police van was waved away as it arrived. It turned out my main interrogator was from my home town – we get everywhere – and I found myself interrogating him about his personal repertoire of streets and pubs and schools, rather more closely than he was prepared for, which clearly amused his colleagues. Most surprising of all, though, was that one of the most bulky coppers – who can't have been older than 30 at most – was very interested to hear that the V&A was having a Pink Floyd show, and keen to see it for himself. What is the world coming to?

So, eventually, as they say, I proceeded on my way in a westerly direction, until I reached the V&A, in good time to sit in the sunshine for a while in the spacious interior courtyard, eating my lunch before heading to the Floyd exhibition. It may have been residual paranoia from my recent encounter, but I got the distinct impression people were surreptitiously checking me out, as well as various other silver-haired bohemian types draped around the place. I think they were trying to decide whether or not we were somebody, most likely minor aristocracy from the Prog Era. It's a curious phenomenon that we become more generic as we age and wear our youthful flamboyance more lightly: after all, today's David Gilmour could easily be a prosperous IT consultant who'd always wished he was David Gilmour, and collects vintage Fenders. But, in Emily Dickinson's words, nope, I'm nobody, who are you?

In the queue for the time-slot I had booked, 1:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, the balding and grey-haired IT consultants and guitar collectors were out in force. Hardly surprising: it would be impossible to overestimate the significance of Pink Floyd in the lives of a certain senior segment of the population. If you were intelligent, counter-cultural, and born between, say, 1946 and 1956 then you, like me, will have spent many hours listening to their albums, although "absorbing" may be a better word. A little younger, and Pink Floyd will have represented everything you affected to despise in music; a little older, and you will have thought of them (if at all) as pretentious druggie drivel.

Look, isn't that Pink?

However, my own acquaintance with the Floyd is both narrow and very deep: I can honestly say that I know Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here as intimately as I know any other works of art, from Hamlet on down. Although I have barely listened to most of the other Pink Floyd albums, if at all. But then, I could say the same about the works of Shakespeare, or Keats, or Beethoven. I would have no hesitation in ranking Dark Side of the Moon among the great cultural achievements of the 20th century, and as one of the bedrock elements in my own psyche.

Which is why, for me, the V&A show is such a waste of time and effort. It's a multi-room, multi-media extravaganza, with a clever, location-sensitive audio-guide, all of which probably seemed pretty far out in the planning, but is actually impossible to follow in dark rooms crowded with knots of relic-worshippers hunched over guitars, gizmos and documents, impossible to see in their dimly-lit glass cases. The show is also utterly meretricious in its sensibility. It reminded me of how the Floyd's journey went from the thoughtful English romanticism of Dark Side of the Moon and the jagged, self-harming nostalgia of Wish You Were Here to giant inflatable pigs in a single, ill-judged stride.

So in the end I took off my headset and made my way to the exit through the now bizarrely silent rooms full of headphone-isolated zombies. It reminded me of nothing so much as being at the Knebworth Festival in 1975, where Pink Floyd conspicuously failed to rise to the occasion, dogged by technical problems, and I ended up wandering through the crowd thinking that this whole thing – not just this gig but the whole counter-cultural idea – had all gone horribly wrong, and been transmuted into mere merchandise-shifting and show-biz, and yet nobody seemed to have realised it quite yet.

And yet, it seems, in another part of the wood they had... [cue opening bars of "God Save the Queen"].

Exit through the gift shop...