Monthly Archives: November 2017

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Some things to consider if you’re coming to this new:

It’s a film soundtrack, but I’d argue that it’s fairly representative of what they were doing at the time. Why did they do a soundtrack album at this point? Mainly because they were skint – there are stories about how they had to borrow all kinds of equipment off Jimi Hendrix just to keep going, and six hundred quid a head for cobbling together some music for a film felt like a very good deal.

The reason they were able to cobble it together so quickly was that it is partly made up of stuff they were already doing in their live show at the time. The show was called something like ‘The Man and The Journey’, and included, among other nonsense, the band collaborating to make a table on stage, and at some point in the evening, sitting down and having a cup of tea. (I promise I’m not making this up). The stage show contained almost none of the Syd Barrett songs, except perhaps as encores, and no doubt they couldn’t figure out why they were skint…

All vocals are by Gilmour (amusingly credited as ‘David Gilmore’ on the film credits) – I think they were trying out the idea that he would take over all of Syd’s duties.

The film is the debut of Barbet Schroeder (you’ve heard of him; he directed ‘Single White Female’, among other things), and was, by all accounts, complete before the boys were asked to add music. There was, apparently, a lot of farting about in the studio with stopwatches and so on, but the end result works quite well in that late sixties moody European arthouse way.

The film? A version with Spanish subtitles is available here:

It’s worth a watch; if you get bored with the half-hearted sub-Sartre philosophising, stick around – everyone goes to Ibiza, does drugs and gets their kit off later on, and it’s all a bit – well, European arthouse. It should never be forgotten that the female lead is played by the splendidly named Mimsy Farmer. (I’m not making that up, either)

Oh, and drugs are bad, kids!

One more thing – before this came out there was one more attempt at getting a single in the UK charts. It failed miserably, so they just decided to be an ‘albums band’ in Britain at least. The A side is ‘Point Me at the Sky’:

The B side is more famous; we’ll meet it soon…

Incidentally, if you’re humming ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ after listening to that, you wouldn’t be the first..

Is it any good?

Sort of. I think it works pretty well as a soundtrack, not so much as an album – it’s out of sequence, for one thing – there’s little or no flow to the thing, but it definitely points the way forward, once you strip out the folk music and the distorted echo on some of the tracks.

Personally, I like ‘Cymbaline’ and ‘Green is the Colour’, there’s some interesting stuff scattered elsewhere through the album, but it’s one of only two Floyd albums I’ve never owned in any form. It, to these ears, leads into ‘Ummagumma’, but it’s hardly essential. Maybe if they’d kept the carpentry…

A Saucerful of Secrets

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Some things to consider if you’re coming to this new:

The most important one is that it’s a transitional album. The story is well-worn by now, but in case you’ve never heard it – Syd Barrett’s increasingly erratic behaviour led to, firstly, the band recruiting Dave Gilmour to play Sid’s guitar parts live, as the man himself was prone to just wandering about the stage, gradually detuning his guitar, and secondly, to dropping him from live performances altogether ( apparently, in the van on the way to a gig one night: “Shall we pick Syd up?” “Nah, let’s not.”).

As a result, only ‘Jugband Blues’ is a Barrett song on this, and it appears on the surface to be his reaction to being eased out of the band. He plays some part on ‘Remember a Day’ and ‘Set the Controls’, but is otherwise gone from the band. The album, therefore, is an unusual document of a band in flux – sometimes a four-piece without Gilmour, sometimes a four-piece without Barrett, and – on ‘Set the Controls’ at least, a five-piece.

Produced – as the first one was – by Norman ‘Hurricane’ Smith, who was reportedly frustrated at the band’s tendency to mess about with experimental sounds instead of recording three minute pop songs.

Smith also plays the drums on ‘Remember a Day’, as Nick Mason – never the most technically accomplished of drummers – couldn’t get the drum part right.

There was a single released first – the generally unremembered Barrett song ‘Apples and Oranges’:

After Syd left, but before the album was released, this piece of Rick Wright whimsy was released as a single:

It’s called ‘It Would Be So Nice’, and would later be erased from history (it’s not on ‘Relics’, and Nick Mason called it “fucking awful”.) To be fair, it is ‘fucking awful’.

So, is it any good?

Nick Mason called this his favourite Pink Floyd album. Nick, mate, you made ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘Wish you Were Here’. You made ‘Meddle’ and ‘Animals’ and ‘The Wall’. ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ isn’t anyone’s favourite Pink Floyd album.

Frankly, to these ears, it’s a bit of a mess. Losing the principal songwriter will do that to a band, I suppose, but it’s remarkable how everyone has a go at writing songs, and they all seem to just try to write what they think Syd would have written. Even ‘Set the Controls’, which is much more like later Floyd in many ways, seems to borrow directly from ‘Astronomy Dominie’ in structure.

You can, however, hear snatches of what they would become in the title track, which was apparently cobbled together from bits and pieces when they realised they were a whole 12 minutes short of a full album, and didn’t seem inclined to include the Syd Barrett tracks they had already recorded ( there’s one called ‘Vegetable Man’ which might have made it if they’d been able to keep Barrett as a non-performing member). I think that the experimental stuff in ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ shows promise, although it’s also more than a little flabby in places – the final section approaches brilliance, and fortunately, they seem to have realised that themselves, and tried to move in that direction.

Marks the first appearance of Roger Waters’ endless whining about how the war took his daddy away, although Corporal Clegg only lost a leg (‘he won it in the war’ is actually quite a clever line, but the song itself is only just this side of music hall parody).

Piper at the Gates of Dawn

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Some things to consider if you’re coming to this new:

This is the only album entirely by the original band (I like to think of them as ‘Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd’); Barrett was the songwriter; Roger Waters, Rick Wright and Nick Mason generally seemed to go with the flow for the most part – Pow R Toc H is maybe the only properly collaborative track, and reflects the general interest in making music with whatever they could find lying around. Interstellar Overdrive is a severely cut down version of the mainstay of the live set at the time, a sprawling, often disorganised mess which began and ended with a Syd Barrett riff, but generally wandered off into experimental soloing for 20 minutes at a time.

It was recorded literally next door to ‘Sergeant Pepper’ – at one point, the Floyd were allowed in to watch the creation of ‘Lovely Rita’. Strangely, this doesn’t seem to have put them off trying to do all kinds of experimental stuff on their own.

Barrett was, by some accounts, pretty much off his face on LSD for the entire thing.

The album does not include either of the singles:

Arnold Layne, which came out first, and was banned in some places because it was about a transvestite who stole peoples’ laundry, and

See Emily Play.

The US version of the album is somewhat butchered in order to include ‘See Emily Play’; it doesn’t include ‘Astronomy Dominie’ for some reason.

If you’re not keen on the hippy-trippy whimsy like ‘The Gnome’; fear not, it hardly ever comes up again.

My feeling:

It’s so definitively of its time that it’s very hard to review it dispassionately from 50 years away. I may have been alive when it came out, but I was buying Pinky and Perky singles, not Pink Floyd albums. When I did eventually hear it, I didn’t much care for it, because it didn’t really sound like their other stuff. Now, I can appreciate it (I like ‘Bike’, for example, because it seems to sum up Syd as he was at that time, but it takes a bit of determination to wade all the way through side two to get there.) but it’s not the first place I go for some Floyd.

As I will no doubt demonstrate, I like Floyd best when they’re stretching out and exploring musical ideas, so in the couple of places here where you can see them trying that stuff, I think it works much better than in the ‘let’s make a quirky, psychedelic three minute pop song’ stuff.

We’re not quite done with Syd Barrett yet, but this is the only Floyd album which is pretty much his idea of what they should sound like. It’s not exactly representative of what they would become, but it’s a pretty good representation of what ‘psychedelic rock’ sounded like in 1967.