News

British World War II-era vocalist Vera Lynn died this morning. She was 103.

Lynn was name-checked in Roger Waters‘s “Vera,” which appeared on Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” (1979).

The song opens with the lyric, “Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?” The song also references one of her most famous songs: “We’ll Meet Again.”

Her recording of “The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot” plays during the opening of the film “Pink Floyd The Wall” (1982).

The New York Times reports that filmmaker Peter Whitehead died on June 10. He was 82.

Whitehead directed the 1967 film “Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London,” a portrait of the city’s swinging ’60s scene that featured a young Pink Floyd.

Music from the film, “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Nick’s Boogie,” were released in 1995 as the EP “Pink Floyd London ’66/’67.”

Whitehead also directed “Charlie Is My Darling,” a 1966 film documenting The Rolling Stones‘ tour of Ireland.

(Photo: Tim Kantor/The New York Times)

Vocalist Claudia Fontaine died yesterday. She was 57.

An accomplished vocalist who began working in her teens, she provided backing vocals for Pink Floyd on the 1994 tour of “The Division Bell,” which would become the “Pulse” (1995) album.

A member of Afrodiziak in the ’80s (pictured, with Fontaine on the left), Fontaine also worked with Elvis Costello & the Attractions, The Specials, The Jam, Howard Jones , Squeeze, Joe Cocker and many others.

British physicist Stephen Hawking has died. He was 76.

In addition to being one of the world’s brightest and best-known scientists, Pink Floyd fans know him as a voice on the band’s “The Division Bell” (1994) album.

Hawking lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and communicated using a speech synthesizer. It’s his synthesizer heard on the song “Keep Talking.”

The spoken passage came from a 1994 British Telecommunications television ad that caught the attention of Floyd’s David Gilmour. He described the passage to The Guardian in 2014 as “the most powerful piece of television advertising that I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Hawking is also heard on Floyd’s “The Endless River” (2014) on the song “Talkin’ Hawkin’.”

Evelyn Rose, the enigmatic one-time girlfriend of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, has died.

The official Syd Barrett Facebook page and The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit website report she passed away yesterday at the age of 69.

Nicknamed “Iggy the Eskimo” for her alleged Inuit heritage — she was born in Pakistan and lived in India and Aden before moving to England — Rose is the nude woman on the back cover of Barrett’s 1970 “The Madcap Laughs” album.

In the February 2011 issue of MOJO magazine, she told writer Mark Blake she’d helped Barrett paint the striped floor of his apartment the morning of the photo shoot, before photographer Mick Rock and sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson arrived.

In the article, Rose said, if you examine the photo closely, “I have paint on the soles of my feet.” She also stated when Rock and Thorgerson arrived, she left the room to dress, but stayed sans clothes at the insistence of Barrett. “That was his wicked sense of humor,” she said.

Photos: “The Madcap Laughs” back cover (Photo: Mick Rock), top; Iggy in 2011 (Photo: Chris Lanaway)

Pink Floyd drum technician Clive Brooks has died.

The news was announced by the official Nick Mason Facebook account. “With a heavy heart our Pink Floyd family say(s) farewell to dear Clive Brooks, drum technician extraordinaire, who sadly passed away,” the post reads.

Brooks, a London native, was drummer with bands Uriel, Egg and The Groundhogs in the late-’60s through mid-’70s.

He became a drum technician for Pink Floyd in the ’80s, working on the Momentary Lapse of Reason tour, and The Division Bell album and tour.

He also served as drum tech for Jeff Wayne‘s 2007 “The War of the Worlds” tour, Toto, Robbie Williams and Floyd tribute act The Australian Pink Floyd Show.

According to Wikipedia, on June 13, 1981, opening night of the last leg of “The Wall tour,” Brooks filled in for surrogate band drummer Willie Wilson who was ill.