Pink Floyd - The Studio Albums

[Slim]

Like The Who and The Rolling Stones, Floyd are a band I've always liked, but I've never heard some of their albums. Actually I'm a lot more of a devotee of their classic period than I am of either of the other two bands.

So I thought I'd have a journey through their studio albums. I'm not going to do the post-Waters material, I consider them to be Pink Floyd records in name only. I've heard the first two of them. No wish to do that again.

So yesterday I had a listen to:

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn [August 1967]

I can't say I greatly enjoyed this. I like the mood, the atmosphere. It must have seemed exciting and other-worldly in the Summer of Love. The album mostly washed over me quite pleasantly, but it was never really engaging or involving.

I did really like Syd's spiky electric guitar - it reminded me of '90s Indie, especially Blur. I've just read that Graham Coxon is a fan, which doesn't surprise me at all. I think Graham's vocal style (I have his solo album Happiness in Magazines) owes something to Syd as well.

It's a shame that Syd couldn't have written a few catchy songs like Arnold Layne or See Emily Play for this album. There is one, the closing tune Bike. But so much of this record is experimental and improvised that it just didn't really grab me. It's very much of its time. It has bucketfuls of that very 1960s English whimsy and it sounds extremely dated, though that's part of its charm. Probably sounds great if you're off your head on LSD, but I wasn't.

[Thenop]

Oh I like this one.
I never 'got' the Syd Barrett period to be honest. I will give it a go one of these days (see what I did there).

I have to say I do like the Gilmour era, and I know I am one of the few probably. For some reason they just clicked, have always been especially enamoured with the first live in from that period, A Delicate Sound of Thunder.

Anyway, looking forward diving into the pre Meddle albums, I have never really given them a chance.

[Nickslikk2112]

I love Piper, could well be my favourite Floyd album. I think it's the bucketfuls of English whimsy.
Never been off my head on LSD either.

[Fishy]

I never got the Syd era stuff either.. in saying that never got the pre Meddle stuff either .. most of it is utter wankery

[Slim]

A Saucerful of Secrets [June 1968]

A transitional album with contributions from both Barrett and Gilmour (they were in the band at the same time for a brief period).

This one seems to be a lot more focussed and coherent than Piper, until you get to the title piece. The first four tunes feel like proper compositions. Of these I was only familiar with Set The Controls which is something of an early Floyd classic. I remember seeing a concert performance of this on some music documentary in the '70s and being quite impressed.

The first two (Let There Be More Light and Remember a Day) are nothing special, but they're definitely proper songs. The fourth, Corporal Clegg is an intriguing little psychedelic curio, very much of its time and extremely Beatles-sounding. It's a sort of Concentrated Essence of Sergeant Pepper. But they do a much better job of it than the Stones managed on Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Then we get to the title piece which is, I suppose an early prog epic, supposedly in four parts over twelve minutes - but I found it to be more of the same meandering, experimental, improvised fare that Piper is largely composed of. I will say though that it's very atmospheric; it does set a certain mood very effectively. I can see why they were approached to do soundtracks.

There follows a slightly ethereal tune written and sung by Wright called See-Saw. I quite liked it. Reminded me a little bit of Echoes. And finally the only Syd tune on here, Jugband Blues. It has a very catchy chorus contrasted with some decidedly unfocussed, eerie brass band randomness. It seems, lyrically as well as compositionally, to reflect Syd's deteriorating mental state and I found it quite affecting.

Anyway - on the whole a bit more interesting than the debut effort I thought, but I can't see myself returning to it often.

[Nickslikk2112]

A Saucerful of Secrets is a definite step down from Piper doesn't hang together as well and Water's whimsical attempt with Corporal Clegg doesn't hit the spot.

On Jugband Blues Syd wanted a Salvation Army band to play randomly along which he didn't quite get. Ostensibly about Syd being in Pink Floyd at the point where he wasn't.

Nick Mason's saucerful of secrets did: Remember a Day, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun and A Saucerful of Secrets on their latest tour

[Slim]

More [June 1969]

Interesting one. I'm sure it makes more sense in the context of the film for which it was conceived as a soundtrack and I did consider watching it first. But it looks to be exactly the sort of modest budget '60s art film that I don't really have the attention span for, so I didn't.

Inevitably, the album is a bit of a hotch-potch. Some of the pieces are incidental music; background music by design and a bit tenuous. Some of them though are properly coherent songs with vocals. There are even a couple of sturdy rockers, The Nile Song and Ibiza Bar. Possibly intended to be heard emanating from a radio or a record player in the film rather than being mood-setting incidental music.

There are some wispy folky songs as well.

I wasn't fond of any of these tunes really except for Cymbaline, written by Waters, a catchy, spirited and slighly cynical piece. Hawkwind covered it and I've just had a listen - the Floyd version is better.

I quite liked a sultry blues instrumental called More Blues. Gilmour's blues vocabulary is a bit limited but he does have a nice feel for the genre, ditto Waters and Mason.

And I was impressed by the atmospheric incidental pieces; I can imagine that they set a tense mood in the film although they don't really work as standalone music, for me anyway.

For some reason Gilmour performs all the vocals on the record where present.

To what extent this is really a Floyd album I'm not sure and given its purpose it's not really fair to compare it to their usual album fare, but some of these tunes did get played live over the following couple of years.

Not a bad effort but of its time and a decidedly mixed bag.

[Nickslikk2112]

Aye, bit of a mixed bag, but worth it for the Floyd goes METAL The Nile Song. Guy Pratt's been trying to get Gilmour to play it live, miserable old sod says "NO!". Happily Nick Mason he say "YES!" his Saucerful of Secrets also wheel out Green is the Colour

[Slim]

Ummagumma [November 1969]

Really quite a strange one. A double album originally, and definitely a game of two halves.

The first half is a live record, and pretty much what you'd expect at this point in their career. More of the same trippy, atmospheric, low key overindulgence. More about the sounds and the mood they were getting out of their instruments. Compositionally very insubstantial, empty even, and to me not very interesting at all.

They do though perform these pieces very competently in a live setting.

The second half of the album is a set of solo efforts conceived by each member of the band without involvement from the others.

Wright's piece, Sysyphus consists firstly of what sounds like a soundtrack clip from a budget horror film, secondly of Stockhausen-style avant-garde grand piano wankery, thirdly a bit of tense background music with piano stabs and percussion and fourthly what sounds like incidental music for a hippy sci-fi film, very soft and ethereal, but interspersed with dramatic, crashing church organ music. At least there's only thirteen minutes of it, even if it feels more like half an hour.

Waters contributes two pieces. The first is a pleasant, gentle, folky acoustic piece with the sound birds tweeting softly in the background. It's overlong at more than seven minutes, but at least it's a song. Simple and bland, but it's a song.

Waters' second piece is an arty sound collage, reminiscent of The Beatles' Revolution 9 and irritatingly entitled Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict. There are looped ambient noises and voice clips. Animal noises. Roger offers us a few spoken words in a highly exaggerated Scottish accent. It's not music but actually I quite liked it.

Gilmour contributes a piece called The Narrow Way in three parts. The first is just a pleasantly and competently strummed acoustic piece for two guitars with some sound effects and a bit of ambient slide guitar. He plays nicely but again musically it's very thin gruel.

The second part is more interesting, built round a proper heavy guitar riff with a bit of percussion in the background. It descends into the usual Floyd chaotic noise. It does at least feel like progressive rock, but in the end it's only a repeated riff with a production job, and there's less than three minutes of it.

But the guitar player delivers on the third part - it has his trademark gently emotive, breathy, mellow vocal and falsetto harmony. And - get this - it sounds a bit like classic Pink Floyd! It also sounds an awful lot like late '60s Beatles, complete with Ringo drum fills, purposeful Macca-style bass, dramatic descending chords .. apart from the vocal, it could almost be an outtake from Magical Mystery Tour. Extraordinary.

Mason's offering, The Grand Vizier's Garden Party, is probably the worst of all four. There's a bit of pleasant, faintly mediaeval-ish flute but mostly it's built around reverb-effected percussion and space noise. Once again it sounds like it might work - at a pinch - as soundtrack material but would anyone really want to settle down in a comfy chair with a set of headphones on and sit through this?

Overall - Ummagumma has its moments. Or at least, it has one moment. But mostly it's the worst excesses of '70s pretentious self-indulgence writ large.

More than anything it's baffling. Why, at this stage of your career when you still have something to prove, and having just made a soundtrack album, wouldn't you try to make a focussed, coherent, musical statement? I could never have imagined, as a casual listener in 1969, that this band would go on to make some of the most memorable, transcendent, universally appealing rock music of the 20th century.

Still - glad I got round to listening to it. I remember being very intrigued as a teenager by the cover artwork, as featured in my old NME Encyclopedia Of Rock.

[Slim]

Atom Heart Mother [October 1970]

Roger Waters regards Atom Heart Mother as "a good case, I think, for being thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again".

Sorry Rog, I did have a listen. And while I can see where you're coming from, I don't think it's that bad. Well not quite, anyway.

The first part of this record is an old-fashioned Side One twenty-ish minute "epic". I'd never heard this before but I really quited like it. It's slow, it's a bit meandering, but it has some really nice musical ideas. It's something like a prototype Echoes. You can definitely hear signs of the classic Floyd starting to emerge. It's not great but it's coherent, it holds onto the musical theme and sustains it. I especially loved the brass section intro, with a sort of mediaeval fanfare feel.

But Side Two, as it would have been in those quaint old days when due to the technological limitations of the time, people had to listen to vinyl, does let the, er, side down a bit. Well, quite a lot. Waters' If is another dreary folky acoustic guitar piece backed up by a bit of keyboard and understated slide guitar. Just boring.

Wright's Summer '68 is a nice, Beatlesy, keyboard-dominated song with horns and additional vocals by Gilmour (I think. Maybe it's Rick). Quite liked it. Definitely a proper song.

I liked Gilmour's Fat Old Sun as well. It's a bit low key. Very Beatlesy, yet again. It's clear by now that Floyd simply wouldn't have existed if the Fab Four hadn't, but I think I already knew that. I was especially taken by how McCartney-esque the bass line was, and it seems that Gilmour played it himself.

But we end on the awful - just awful - Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast. Pretentious bollocks, with wanky instrumental sections further ruined by the sounds of people talking and eating their breakfast. Honestly I actually became angry and resentful while listening to it. Later on in the piece there's quite a nice progressive instrumental section that reminded me, slightly, of George Martin's Theme One, as covered by Van der Graaf Generator. But why is the whole piece thirteen minutes long? The other Side Two tunes amount to a bit more than fifteen minutes, there's just no need for it. They must have been high.

So there it is, not a great album and at the moment I'm not sure why they had an enthusiastic following at this stage.

[Slim]

Meddle [November 1971]

Now we're talking. Finally, the Floyd deliver.

I've owned this album since I was a teenager and I played it often back in the day. It's all about two of the pieces, for me - the first tune and the side-long epic on the flip side - but the remaining four aren't bad at all.

From the opening minute of One Of These Days it's clear that the band has raised its game pretty dramatically. Although it has more than a trace of the experimental / electronic noise Floyd, it drives along with a power, a purpose and an immediacy completely lacking from their earlier psychedelic sound collages. I hadn't heard it for years and it was a joy to listen to it again. It's aged nicely. It works.

As for the rest of the first side tunes - I don't really think there's anything special here but they all feel a bit more focused than the fillers on the previous few records. A Pillow of Winds is essentially an acoustic piece, a bit like Waters' earlier efforts from Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother but it has a bit more intensity, a nice production job, a nice mellow vocal from Gilmour (unless it's Wright) and what sounds like a fretless bass. Quite nice. Fearless is an odd one, a bit repetitive and dull. It somehow combines an electric blues feel with a mellow, ethereal mood. Not dissimilar from the previous tune in some ways. It ends with the Kop singing You'll Never Walk Alone - why?

I really like San Tropez. Bouncy, jazzy pop music. Fun. It has a nice Waters vocal and a simple but clever chord structure. Roger strums his acoustic very pleasantly, David adds a bit of tasteful slide guitar. Nice nice.

Seamus feels a bit like a throwaway effort. It's an old-time acoustic blues with a dog yelping in the background. It passes pleasantly enough.

But Echoes - a side long 'epic' in the time-honoured progressive rock tradition - is surely the album's piece de resistance. A dreamy soundscape, with beautiful use of harmony and melody. It's really immersive, it's a fair bit more powerful, dramatic and focussed than the Atom Heart Mother piece and it makes lovely use of light and shade to build tension. Always loved it though I have to own up again and admit that I hadn't listened to it for years.

Listening to it again, I wonder if the 'spooky' section with the unsettling, echoey howling wind ambient noise isn't perhaps a bit overlong? It does build tension and unease before the powerful instrumentation and the main theme come crashing back in, but in what's already a pretty long piece, maybe three minutes of it would have done.

But that's a nitpick really. Here's another one: they should have called the album Echoes to give it a bit more weight and significance. Like Close to the Edge, Hemispheres, 2112.

Anyway whatever the title it's a huge step forward. This is where the real deal Floyd starts, in my view - even though they're still dabbling with different styles.

[Slim]

Obscured By Clouds [June 1972]

This album is an enigma to me. It was recorded between Meddle and Dark Side Of The Moon, albums I owned and played repeatedly in my late teens - and yet I don't remember it being on my radar at all. I must have been at least dimly aware of it, because it gets a mention in the NME Encyclopedia Of Rock. And yet I never aspired to own it at all.

Did I encounter it while browsing through the LP sleeves in one of Hartlepool's record shops, and overlook it - perhaps because I knew it to be a soundtrack album? Or perhaps none of them ever stocked it.

I don't know, but in any case I'd never heard it until Thursday. And it's not bad at all.

Once again the question of whether it's a proper Pink Floyd album arises. The band had already started working on Dark Side Of The Moon when they recorded this over the space of a few weeks in the spring of 1972 so it's fair to say that Obscured By Clouds is really something of a low key (possibly even low effort) side project. Waters is said to have asked for the cover artwork to be dull and boring because Dark Side would have to compete with it.

Still, it was released as a Pink Floyd album - and ironically, by one account anyway, it's the album that broke them in America after Free Four was a radio hit.

I must admit I was a little troubed by the first couple of tracks, which are both in essence single chord drones with a bit of instrumentation over them. I thought I was in for a long forty minutes. But the rest of the tunes - excepting the last one, Absolutely Curtains which is a bit of a sound collage throwback - are concise, simple, accessible lightweight rock music with the usual Floyd touches. Nothing exceptional here, but quite a lot to like. Nice moments, lots of light and shade.

I especially like (the aforementioned) Free Four, written and sung by Waters. Beautifully astringent. It seems mostly to be about old age and impending death, despite bouncing along in an uptempo manner. Nicely juxtaposed.

The memories of a man in his old age
Are the deeds of a man in his prime.
You shuffle in gloom of the sickroom
And talk to yourself as you die.

Life is a short, warm moment
And death is a long cold rest.
You get your chance to try in the twinkling of an eye,
Eighty years, with luck, or even less.

I find it a little troubling that Rog was predisposed to thinking about this in his late twenties. I hate to think how he feels about it now he's had his eighty years.

I was quite surprised to find what sounds uncannily like a Who tune, power chord patterns and clipped guitar licks included. The Gold It's In The ...

And I liked Wot's... Uh The Deal. Sounds a lot like a George Harrison tune from one of the later Beatles albums.

Anyway - I expect I'll forget about it now I've had a listen but it's really thoroughly decent. I like it a lot more than the overlong pretentious wank on the first few albums, anyway.

[Slim]

The Dark Side of the Moon [March 1973]

Well - in a way, anything I could type here would be superfluous because anyone likely to read this will have heard Floyd's signature record and formed their own opinion long ago, I suspect.

But anyway: this is the Floyd's big moment. It's light years ahead of anything in their catalogue prior to March 1973 and I don't think any of the music they released in its wake comes close either. The stars align, everything comes together in one glorious moment in musical history and they catch lightning in a bottle.

Like pretty much every other music lover of roughly my age, I owned this album as a teenager. I bought it in 1979, and I had the poster that came with it on my wall. When I was first a student that year, at least three of the other rooms in the house I shared with 20 other students had the same poster affixed to the wallpaper as well, and the record could often be heard radiating from the various record players dotted around the building. It was still massive six years after it was released. Little wonder it spent thirteen years on the charts.

In a sort of homage to the way I consumed music as a precious and intense teenager, I listened to Dark Side of The Moon today in a darkened room, with headphones. I closed my eyes and immersed myself in it completely. Whether because I have better equipment, an older perspective or a more mature appreciation of music now, I somehow experienced it differently; perhaps in a deeper way.

When I listened to it today it felt more like an opera, a single piece - as though that subdued, insistent heartbeat that opens the album subliminally runs all the way through it. It flows beautifully, and although it's thematically linked rather than having an overt story narrative, somehow it captures that sense of a beginning, middle and end even better than (say) Tommy does, for me anyway. Listening to it today through my Grados, it really felt like high art. I was captivated.

It's sometimes argued that Floyd were prog, but certainly I don't think Dark Side Of The Moon is. They took their cues from popular music; some of these tunes would work for Sinatra or Petula Clark. No wigging out with bonkers time signatures or pretentious instrumental complexity, or anything like that. But they really raised their game in every department - the songs are extraordinarily powerful, the instrumentation atmospheric, dramatic and lush with not a note out of place and the melodies and harmonies are amazing.

There is, arguably, one piece that calls to mind the old experimental Floyd - On The Run of course. But it works so well as a tense transition between Breathe and Time that it doesn't outstay its welcome for a second.

It's recorded and produced beautifully and the touches added by other musicians enhance it very nicely. Clare Torry's astonishing vocal (as a kid I always thought she was a black woman); the sax on Us and Them (Richard Parry). The other backing singers. The snatches of recorded voices. The spatial effects, the cash registers, the clocks. And it all builds to a perfect crescendo in Eclipse.

Miles Davis even makes it onto the album, by proxy. Rick Wright was a fan and he puts to good use an augmented dominant chord change stolen from Miles in Breathe. Actually I think Rick's contribution to Floyd is underappreciated sometimes; his modal jazz sensibilities make their presence felt on other Floyd material as well.

Anyway. A very powerful, hugely affecting record and one of those rare cases where uncompromised art meets mass appeal. It's just brilliant.

[Slim]

Wish You Were Here [September 1975]

Another one that I bought in my teens, but I don't think I played it right the way through more than a handful of times. It feels like a bit of a let-down after Dark Side, though taken on its own merits, it's not a bad album.

I always loved Shine On You Crazy Diamond in both parts albeit with a critical misgiving (see below), but more often than not I'd lift the stylus after Part One, and put the record back in its sleeve. It's a beautful, haunting, evocative, powerful song. There aren't as many ideas in it as you might expect from a piece that's more than 25 minutes long in total, but for me certainly, the basic musical idea is enough to sustain the 13 minutes of the first part. Good stuff.

Welcome To The Machine is just a dirge, to me. Boring. And there's more than 7 minutes of it.

Have A Cigar is fine. Decent song, nicely played, nice vocal from Roy Harper. I had no idea it wasn't Roger Waters until a few years ago. It's as though Roy is trying to evoke Roger's style, and perhaps he is. The lyrics carry a cynical message about the music business. There's a hint of funk. But ultimately it's pretty ordinary.

And on to Wish You Were Here. Lovely song. The sound of someone picking an acoustic along to the radio was very relatable, when I first had the album. Simple really, and mostly based on a simple acoustic rhythm part. It rolls along nicely.

Finally, a 12 minute reprise of Shine On. It's basically the same tune as the first part. It feels a bit stretched out. It does add some hip jazz chords about six minutes in (courtesy of Rick Wright of course) and it somehow devolves into a sort of laid back but disciplined funk jam. But underneath it's the same basic tune as Part One. Definitely a masterstroke to split it into two parts arranged at opposite ends of the album, because as a single 25 minute piece it would be ridiculously overextended.

So: a big anti-climax from Dark Side, but that was probably inevitable. I think I probably would have seen this record as a step forward from Meddle in the way the band gels, and in the sense that they'd found a polished, sophisticated sound. But to me Wish You Were Here is very short on ideas. A lot less ambitious than the signature record that preceded it. Dark Side must have taken a lot out of them creatively.

[Thenop]

You are flying through these now    I must admit, I am woefully behind, but reading up so far I am not sure I've missed much. DSotM IS the big one, there are a couple more I like, I like WYWH actually, it suits the canon and - to me - sets the tone for Animals.

But first: DSotM. If there's one thing I can't stand about this record (and it's not the bands doing) it is the 'holy' attitude toward it. I listen to it - not a lot these days - and it is a sonic marvel. Still. It is the number 1 album to listen to when you get new equipment. A benchmark. And because of that, there are so many different (sounding) versions out there it makes my head spin. I much prefer a good old fashioned stereo mix (on my preferred medium), but there's 5.1, quadphonic (sp?), and what else you have. I have heard (and purchased much to my dismay) various versions, one sounding significantly worse than others. Other bands are like this a tiny bit. PF is traumatic when it comes to this one.

Alright, then. I like Meddle (love Seamus, what can I say? I am dog person) and even though I sort of understand what they tried with Echoes, I do find it a bit dragging on.