Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains Exhibition (runs until October 2017)

I have to confess that I was only peripherally aware of Pink Floyd. I knew they were the creators of Dark Side of the Moon, although I had never listened to it. The only one of their songs I could named was The Wall (or the Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone song as I knew it when growing up).

The notion of an exhibition dedicated to them didn't exactly fill me with much excitement. Some album art and maybe a bit of pop memorabilia for a band in which I had no personal interest. However, I'd recently bought membership at the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum to the culturally unaware), so I didn't have anything to lose, except an hour out of my day.

The first clue to the nature of the exhibition was the headset and attached metal box-with-LEDs-thing provided at the entrance to the exhibition. My immediate thought that this was some plan to turn us all into Cybermen - but I was assured that this was a location-based audio guide. Sennheiser headphones, so presumably they were serious about the quality of the sound.

The first indication that the exhibition was more than a few album covers was provided immediately inside the entrance to the exhibition as a giant black cab led through into the first room where we were treated to a multimedia experience of music, interview videos and a psychedelic, moving ceiling.

The layout in the first couple of rooms doesn't work particularly well with the crowds that a weekend visit attracts. Video interviews attract circles of people, which makes it difficult to get close enough to the exhibits. For those who can manage to squeeze past the crowds, the amount there is to see and read also slows the movement of traffic. With less people, there would be content to spend hours going over - as it was, I found myself skipping some parts, promising that I would come back another time.

Further into the exhibition, the crowds thinned out - possibly because they were all bottle-necked in the first two rooms. The layout further on make better use of the space - necessitated in part by the need for enough space to show off some of the Pink Floyd inflatables that were used in their stage shows.

Traffic management issues aside - and really the only way of preventing them would have been to have created a less compelling exhibition - Their Mortal Remains is a fascinating exhibition. Aside from presenting the album covers (and there is an entire room dedicated to the photography for the cover of Wish You Were Here), it provides a multi-media tour of Pink Floyd's history that gave me an understanding of the sheer scale of the influence that the band had and continues to have. It's also turned me from someone who didn't really care about Pink Floyd to someone who downloaded Dark Side of the Moon immediately after leaving the exhibition.

And despite only giving parts of the exhibition a cursory look, I still managed to spend two hours wandering through.