You like the popular beat combo Pink Floyd, don’t you? And, of course you like me – or my incessant Spotify playlists at any rate. Why not combine these two enthusiasms by reading a ridiculously detailed but hopefully entertaining and irreverent feature/essay on the band that I wrote recently. So far it’s been rejected by all your favourite classic rock-adjacent magazines, and nerdy music websites who I thought I might interest in it. But no matter, here it is for free. (And before you say “How egotistical”, or “No I don’t much like ‘the’ Floyd, actually”, this is only the second time I’ve ever publicised my Medium site.) So now you can set the controls and enjoy 33 years of other Horse pop nonsense that I did get paid for back in the day.
NB / The playlist is an economical five hours long and contains such progressive rock titans as Lil Yachty, Boards of Canada and the Bee Gees. You can find it at the bottom of the article, and if you’re listening on a mobile, it’s all shonkily mixed together. OK, I’ll stop talking about Pink Floyd now.
Excellent read. Really enjoyed it. I’m an “over-serious square” who occasionally strays into the fourth group (especially regarding TFC).
The Final Cut is much maligned. I think it’s perfectly fine if you don’t go into it expecting a Pink Floyd album. I was very confused when I got it for my birthday after having heard just about everything else and looking back now, Two Suns aside, I think the problem is the massive dearth of actual melody.
Enjoyed that! Great to see a Peter Walker mention – looking like a turned-on dentist from the outskirts of Hollywood (which he may well have been, for all I know) he none the less came up with this curiously weird little LP, and did a pre-Floyd on us all.
There’s an earlier one of his called Rainy Day Raga, as I’m sure you know, but its not as out there as that second (and final) release.
Peter Walker! But let’s not forget Peters Berkow and Ivers …
https://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2020/01/for-petes-sake.html
Peter Walker! Didn’t he start Quad Electroacoustics?
(Edith) Come to think of it, didn’t Pink Floyd use yer actual Quad 303s as on-stage amplification back in the olden days?
Really interesting read – thanks for sharing.
Thanks. I have enjoyed another of your Floyd playlists as well.
Very interesting screed, and I’m always up for more Floyd, for me the greatest British rock group. I don’t much care for Dark Side (deafening rattle of pearls from the Afterside) and actively dislike much of what they did later (sound of heavy elderly bodies dropping onto the linoleum, approaching ambwlans bells), but the run up to DSM is something I never stop playing. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety. Saw them first in ’67, with Syd, and was informed years later that Hendrix was on the same bill, and possibly the Move. Yes, it was the first time I smerked jazz tabs like, and I was poorly. Saw them next at the Lanchester Arts Festival, when my fellow teen acid head Phil got comps from his MILF, who was on the committee. I can remember a model plane circling the auditorium during Echoes, but this may not be reliable. By the time DSM arrived, well, it was their Dark Side, wasn’t it? Sales reps played the cassette in their Players-scented Cavaliers and architects impressed cocktail parties with the Bang & Olufsen. “Wait for the bells! It’s AMAZING!” I think it was the first time I heard people going on about “the production”. The Floyd were no longer ours, and had moved into the corporate hospitality lounge, and not even Roger’s increasingly noxious manic depression could shift them from the sponsored comfort zone. They were no longer spacey. Everything got grindingly serious. No really, Animals is really good! Yeah, no.
I got hold of the MQR remix of Atom Heart recently, and my foggy mind was blown anew by this work of singular beauty and great good humour. What a lovely, lovely band they were.
What I remember most vividly about early Floyd is the two beautiful women who stood at the side of the back screen and every so often flung some paint at it . Far out!
Some might recall that earlier this year I was dragged kicking and screaming to an Australian Pink Floyd concert in Aix en Provence. Best fun I’ve had in years.
Yebbut you remember Electrif Lycanthrope as a double album of whalesong … just sayin’.
Fucking hell, some fine memories there. I can see how Dark Side would be perceived as a sell out, man. I think it’s a technical achievement but then that’s me wanging on about the production. Can’t believe also that you a) Saw the band with Syd, and b) Didn’t notice the Jimi Hendrix Experience (I love the Move as well). As for Lodestone’s women flinging paint around: this is what people in Floyd research groups (yes, they exist; usually stitching together Super 8 of the Animals tour or trying to find old Top of the Pops recordings) call “new info”. I hope it finds its way to them – I’m just a dabbler. But thank you and everyone else for your kind words about the piece and the playlist. It was a lot of fun to write and I somehow knew it would find an audience here.
I was fourteen at the time (LoW. I think, would still have been in short trousers, so around the same age), and all I remember was noise and a crush of people all taller than me. We (my older sister, her boyfriend and me) didn’t stay for the whole thing and it didn’t mean that much to me at the time, other than being part of swinging London life that made me question everything (you know, like society an’ that). Plus, yes, giddy lettuce.
Dark Side really was that, as far as me and my mates were concerned, the band turning to the Dark Side. They were no longer a head band (man). Nobody I knew dropped acid to it. There’s no lightness to it, and Rick Wright, whose contributions thus far had been crucial, was shunted out by Waters’ grating Doctor Doom persona. Nuts to him, for ever and ever.
1966 I think, I’d have been 17, fresh off the train from Aberdeen. Saw them twice, each time girls throwing paint. The projector thingie kept breaking down and the music was very loud. I’m pretty sure Eric Burdon joined them on stage at one point but who really knows – not me, that’s for sure
Let’s take a moment to visualise this. Here’s Lodey, a lad of some seventeen summers, shorts freshly-ironed, woggle gleaming through the cloud of steam from the powerful locomotive whose number he has just underlined in his Ian Allan book. In his duffel bag; I-Spy Motor Cars, a bag of toffees, and a photograph of Mummy. He is approached by a long-haired man in an Afghan coat. “Hello sonny! Want to buy some dope?”
It was , I think, remarkably like that
Allegedly, the band I was in during my brief sojourn at Warwick U was the support ‘act’ to Ver Floyd at the Warwick Week dance in 1967. I have no memory of this whatsoever – which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen of course. They were stand-ins for Hendrix, who was billed to appear, but apparently the booking only existed in the head of the ents. sec.
I saw them a couple of times at Middle Earth in 1968 – the first time I think Syd was still with them. Then at Reading U in 1969, which was the last time I saw them. Don’t know why really, because I thought they were fab.
Thoroughly enjoyable read. Your thoughts on the various phases of Pink Floyd match mine pretty closely
I am very happy to see Atom Heart Mother getting some love. I think it’s the perfect spot in their career, mixing the psychedelic, pastoral and stoner vibes. The band have pretty much rubbished it in interviews, but what do they know? Marmalade, I like marmalade.
I also have that box set of The Wall – really odd how little discussion there is around the demo versions of the album. They had a fairly solid set of songs worked out for a single album, I think that’s the second set of band demos. The four of them are still playing together as a unit and you can see how that could have been made into a decent follow-up to Animals (love it or hate it, whatever…) – my hot take is that The Wall was a hostile takeover by Bob Ezrin, not Roger Waters per se, the point he got them to spin it out into the bigger thing that it became is apparent when you go through that set.
I also think they collectively struggled to actually write songs, but excelled at jamming. There were certain recurring riffs and sections. When they got their heads together they were brilliant at it, but you can also hear them struggling to come up with stuff when you listen to Raving and Drooling, which is basically One of these Days with Roger complaining over the top of it, and Rick playing disinterested wiggly VCS3 parts on that horrible flat keyboard that it had.
I don’t mean any criticism seriously. I love them, even the crap stuff.
Also, Oasis are great.
Never had a moment’s problem with Atom Heart. Meddle gets the popular masterpiece vote, but Atom Heart is just so lovable. “Pretentious” is the worst you can say about it (and Jolly Roger absolutely said it was, over and over) but I prefer the word ambitious. Let’s try this, how about this, is a great attitude for making an album. The main orchestral theme is magnificent, too, really powerful and emotional (Ron Geesin – carve his name with pride). One side of extravagant ambition, and a side of gorgeous songs ending with the daft Breakfast. A perfect trip.
And another shout out for the MQR mix, well worth seeking out. It’s all Floyd, nothing different for the sake of it, nothing added and nothing taken away, but they’ve very brilliantly added details and depth from the quad mix and the whole thing just sounds better.
https://magnaqualitasrecords.jimdofree.com/
This is magnificent:
I think Waters was so anti-AHM because it wasn’t him/his. He’s incapable of this.
Another vote for AHM.
People who describe ambitious, progressive and remarkable music as “pretentious” need a good kicking – and I’m not a violent man…
‘kinell, that’s brilliant.
It shirley is, but it also shows what an elegant guitarist Gilmour was/is. The guitar section is the only lapse from brilliantness.
I concur with most of this. I have listened to the Wall demos but it may just have been Waters’ home taped version I heard as it was very raw and too much Rog for anyone to take in one sitting. If they had made it a single album I may have just allowed In the Flesh and The Trial to bookend it, though to be honest The Trial’s musical-theatre stylings are not for me. By all accounts, Ezrin was the taskmaster who kept the whole project together (a project that only existed because the band were in a massive tax hole – the romance). He did the same on Kiss’ The Elder a couple of years later which, like The Wall, saw the band recording parts separately, sacking a member, and coming up with a rock folly to rival, well, The Wall.
To me, this is the Pink Floyd version of the album.not sure if this link gives you the playlist, so seek out Programme 2 of the Wall demos.
What a superb playlist – I’m listening to it even as I type.
Thank you very much!
Thanks for all your kind feedback, folks. I do try to contribute to everyone else’s threads, but I often find the conversation has been moved in a certain direction or what I might chip in with has already been said. So I’m more of a lurker until a new playlist bubbles to the surface when I just know here’s the place they’ll get an appreciative audience.
I’m the same age as Lodey, lived in the London suburbs, but totally missed all this stuff that was happening just a tube ride away….unbelievable.
Enjoyed the article and look forward to hearing the playlist. I’ve opined here more times than is totally necessary my dislike of the Wall and the adjacent albums do little for me compared to the pre DSOTM era. DSOTM is fine, but suffers from being the album everyone always refers to and knows. People bought it, along with Tubular Bells, to show off their new stereos.
Pre-DS, they were a blindingly successful UK singles band, live band, and albums band, surviving the loss of their main composer and most charismatic member. DSOT and after they were a blindingly successful global live band and albums band. Fans picked up during this period typically do not like Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, and fans of this album (a pop-art freak-out masterpiece owing nothing at all to anybody else) typically don’t like DSOT. Everything up to DS was invention, experimentation, creativity, and audacity; Dark Side was calculation, playing it safe, craftsmanship, and let’s face it, plodding. Plodding along a depressing furrow became their signature sound. Millions of people plod happily along, and good luck to them. But the Floyd and their audience used to fly.
I think of the Floyd (musically, if not financially) having less of a hard cliff edge and more of a gentle slope downward, starting with DSOTM.
There’s a mirror image graph which plots Uncle Rog’s ego rising – and arguably the crossover point is DSOTM.
I’m inclined to agree with this assessment. I well recall listening to DSOTM on the day of its release and being an impressed 17 year old. Motivated enough to save up my meagre pocket money and buy it a few months later. When Wish You Were Here appeared a similar initial emotional investment grabbed me. I have since added the last few LPs to my shelves, more from a completeness fetish than anything. Since then, I noticed that I have been more inclined to dive back into Piper or Obscured By Clouds or More whenever a Floyd itch surfaces, and inevitably that has led to Meddle or Umma Gumma or Atom Heart Mother by the end of the day.
Some years back, having listened to very little of the later Floyd albums for ages, I discovered how to acquire bootlegs on the Harvested label, most of which plundered the years from Piper to Meddle. What a revelation they are. Massed Gadgets, Embryo etc. Since then I’ve been listening almost exclusively in that rich pre-DSOTM territory where there were few rules and hanging on in quiet desperation was not the MO.
On reflection, my first exposure was the budget copy of Relics, and that’s where I’ve ended up again, back in the happy and exciting madness.
Relics is great. I coloured in the sleeve with my felt tip pens.
Someone did that to my Camembert Electrique, at a party…
Did they get a round of applause when they left the stage?
Eh?
Wot?
Plodding on in quiet desperation…..
Finky Plod!
Well lookee here.
https://www.moshpit.com/pink-floyd-fillmore-west-apr-29-1970/