Our very best wishes go to Guy Pratt today (January 3rd), who is celebrating his birthday. Born in London in 1962, son of the actor Mike Pratt from Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), Guy took to a career in music, which lead to his first world tour whilst still a teenager!

Working with the likes of Bryan Ferry and Robert Palmer lead to him being noticed by David Gilmour, who invited Guy to play for Pink Floyd in 1987. This lead to work with other major artists such as Madonna and Michael Jackson, but Guy has stayed loyal to David, performing alongside him up to the most recent tours.

Life as a musician on the road, and in the studio, inspired Guy to write his hilarious "My Bass And Other Animals" book, an essential read for any Floyd fan. He has toured his memories in a tour of the same name, and has also developed adaptations of the show, as well as presenting a new show, "Wake Up Call". Guy performed 17 shows last year, and let's hope he has more up his sleeve. Whatever your interests in music are, the shows (as with the book) give a mind-boggling and hilarious look at life with other musicians.

Many happy returns, Guy, from all of us at Brain Damage!

In the Netherlands, the public station Radio 2 has a very popular yearly countdown (from Christmas Day until New Year's Eve) of the 2000 best songs. Pink Floyd features heavily in the latest countdown, as they have done in previous years, with no less than eleven songs included, of which three are in the top 10:

• No. 6: Wish You Were Here
• No. 8: Comfortably Numb
• No. 10: Shine On You Crazy Diamond
• No. 48: Another Brick In The Wall
• No. 180: Echoes
• No. 212: Time
• No. 252: The Great Gig In The Sky
• No. 271: Money
• No. 522: One Of These Days
• No. 1078: See Emily Play
• No. 1157: Arnold Layne

The chart itself is topped by Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen), Hotel California (The Eagles), and Stairway To Heaven (Led Zeppelin). Our thanks to Teun Thonissen and Engelbert for their help with this information.

To reinforce the popularity of such lists in The Netherlands, Arrow Rock have also done their year-end all time best-of. No less than fifteen feature in their top 500, along with one of David Gilmour's solo pieces:

• No. 3: Comfortably Numb
• No. 11: Shine On You Crazy Diamond
• No. 18: Wish You Were Here
• No. 26: Echoes
• No. 43: Time
• No. 79: Another Brick In The Wall
• No. 112: Money
• No. 200: Us And Them
• No. 228: The Great Gig In The Sky
• No. 233: One Of These Days
• No. 263: Brain Damage/Eclipse
• No. 271: Hey You
• No. 357: Have A Cigar
• No. 414: Mother
• No. 465: On An Island

Our thanks to Roger Little for letting us know about this listener-voted chart of favourites.

All of us at Brain Damage want to wish all of you, a very happy, healthy, and Floyd-filled 2014. It's a year which promises to be an interesting one based on some of the rumours that are flying around, and a year where we won't just be looking ahead, but back as well. It's the (frankly, astonishing) 20th anniversary of the release of The Division Bell, Pink Floyd's final album, and other anniversaries will be dotted through the year.

As many of you know by now, there's some distinctly interesting glimmers on the horizon. Roger has revealed work is moving apace on his new album, Crosby and Nash (amongst others) have revealed they've been helping David Gilmour out with HIS new material, and of course we should have things like the live Wall DVD/Blu-ray to enjoy at some point.

We've got some nice surprises in the pipeline for you that we've been working on for a little while, and naturally we will bring you all the Pink Floyd news as it unfolds over the year, so make sure you keep checking back here. We're also building a good community of people over at our Facebook page so come and join in the conversation there. If you've yet to use Facebook, why not sign up (it's free) and give it a try. We often post additional material there which doesn't appear here, so it's worth checking out!

This coming Friday, December 27th, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire are airing a one-hour special called "Pink Floyd in Cambridge". Whilst details are very sketchy on this, they say that it gives the "story of the early years" of the band. We have no details of any of the content within - we presume that there will be some interviews included, but as to whom they spoke to, we don't currently know.

The show airs at 3pm GMT on Friday, and is repeated on New Year's Day (January 1st) at 1pm GMT. BBC radio can be heard in various ways in the UK and many parts of Europe - FM radio, DAB Digital, or via various digital, cable and satellite television services. Many programmes and station can also be heard worldwide via the BBC website, either live or on-demand through the iPlayer service (which is also now available for mobile devices). If it becomes available to hear after the event, we will update this story accordingly to include the direct link to the programme.

Our thanks to David Haddock and Warren Dosanjh for their help with this information.

UPDATE: We've now heard from the BBC that the programme "includes exclusive interviews with Jenny Spires who went out with Syd Barrett in the 60s, Warren Dosanjh who went to school with Syd and Roger Waters, and Wilf Scott who was a pyro-technician on Pink Floyd's "In The Flesh" tour of 1977."