Now I could see them, shoved to the back of my bookcase behind two layers of CDs where they had lain hidden out of sight for twenty something years, unloved and unheard. For two decades I had denied their existence; for two decades I had edited them out of my story.
Yet here they were: dogged survivors of every musical purge; escapees from charity shop boxes of unwanted and outgrown discs. They had clung on, often retrieved from the throwing out pile at the very last moment, saved by an unconscious attachment I could not acknowledge.
Lockdown brought them into the light again. In those early workless weeks of March 2020 when there was nowhere to go and little to do, I turned to my record collection for solace. Forgotten classics and neglected gems eased the boredom of that time, and each disc led me on a journey deeper into my collection, a journey that led me to the back of the shelf.
Now their moment had come again: it was time for me to make my peace with Pink Floyd.
*
I discovered Pink Floyd backwards.
In my final years at high school we had a sympathetic English teacher who was happy to let us use his classroom where we could talk, write and listen to music. One day somebody brought in a copy of The Wall.
Hearing that album was a Proustian moment: I was five again, it was Christmas 1979, and the tastes and sounds of a long forgotten festive period were flooding over me. Lyrics came to my lips of their own accord, rising from some dormant area of my early memory:
‘Hey, Teacher! Leave them kids alone!’
A children’s choir, a disco beat, a gulping bass and a smooth guitar were indelibly engraved on my mind: I was listening to the least festive Christmas number one of all time, ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’.
My teacher commented that he didn’t think Pink Floyd were against modern educational institutions, that the band were just being satirical; but I thought they sounded exactly as if they were against modern educational institutions: I was smitten.
I had a yearning to know more. In the days before access to the internet’s easy information and before I had money in my pockets, this meant only one thing: badgering my mum to buy me a book about the band for my birthday.
I picked it from the shelves myself and passed it to my mother who reluctantly purchased it. Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey by Nicholas Schaffner, with a picture of an inflatable pig floating on the cover.
I tore hungrily through that book. I learned about a precociously talented young man called Syd Barrett, a writer of fantastic songs about cross-dressers, space travel, scarecrows and gnomes. At the height of his fame and success he suffered a catastrophic breakdown and was eventually forced out of the band. I found out how the Floyd struggled on without him to become, against every expectation, one of the biggest acts in the world. I read how they developed their stage shows from psychedelic liquid light displays to theatrical spectaculars where huge walls were constructed between audiences and performers.
By the time I had finished they were my band. No-one I knew listened to them or owned their records or talked about them, but I just loved the idea of them. They were my band, mine alone: they belonged to me.
*
Now I needed to hear their music.
In those days all I possessed was a Walkman cassette player. Cassettes were cheap and the cheapest Pink Floyd cassettes were the early ones, so I bought The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Pink Floyd’s First Album! it said helpfully on the sleeve), A Saucerful of Secrets and the odds and sods collection Relics from record stores in Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy.
At first they were difficult to listen to; they resembled nothing like the polished rock opera of The Wall. The music, what I could hear through the hiss and pop of the tape, was scratchy, angular and strange, yet I was intrigued enough to persist. I wasn’t sure what to make of these sounds, but they fascinated me.
Relics was easiest to get into. In particular I loved the catchy pop songs ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’. Hummable and weird, they had a child-like rhythmic lilt and a dark, fairy-tale sensibility, like the Brothers Grimm on acid. The first was about a man stealing woman’s clothing from a washing line and admiring himself in a mirror, all ‘distorted views, see-through baby blues’. The second was about a mysterious girl adrift in a wood, ‘floating through trees in sorrow, hardly a sound ‘till tomorrow’. Both were Barrett songs, and as I noticed Piper was almost entirely composed by Barrett I decided to tackle that next.
It took me ages to get into Piper. The album was an aural bombardment of ideas and sounds that I wasn’t sure how to process, but in the end the tunes pulled me through the assault: the swirling descent of ‘Astronomy Domine’; the prowl and purr of ‘Lucifer Sam’; the ‘doll’s house darkness’ of ‘Matilda Mother’; the wooden tick-tock of ‘The Gnome’; the pastoral cheek percussion of ‘The Scarecrow’; the spiraling riff of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’; the playground nonsense and mad sound collage of ‘Bike’. This was experimental, mutated blues and folk music that was disorientingly weird but also comfortingly familiar.
A Saucerful of Secrets sounded completely different again. Between albums something had happened to Barrett and only one tune was by him on Piper’s follow-up, but what a tune! The second record closes with his haunting ‘Jugband Blues’, a melancholy rumination that is suddenly bisected by a wild Salvation Army band interlude, like a mind perturbed by insistent, cacophonous thoughts. Quiet follows the storm, there is a gentle, lilting strum of guitar, some meditative rhyming lines and then the final, jarring off-rhyme:
‘And what exactly is a dream?
And what exactly is a joke?’
None of the rest of the album lived up to that track’s quality, but I still liked it enormously, especially the eastern intrigue of ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, the tongue-in-cheek sci-fi of ‘Let There Be More Light’, the sly guitar of ‘Remember A Day’, and the long instrumental title track, a multi-part confection awash with banging drums, mystery and atmosphere, like the soundtrack to some lost film about a haunted castle.
My enduring love for early Pink Floyd was cemented by these tapes, and made me hungry for more.
*
In the summer of 1992 I had just turned eighteen and was preparing myself for Edinburgh University. My parents had bought me a CD player for my birthday, and I had bought my first CD, The Madcap Laughs, Syd Barrett’s first solo album, shortly after.
Music would provide a lifeline at university. I struggled to settle at the Halls of Residence in my first year, and while everyone else appeared to be having a great time I found myself isolated and unhappy. The noise and warmth of the building was almost unbearable, and I was too shy to make friends easily. My already fragile confidence began to crumble and I experienced panic attacks, although I did not know what they were at the time: I thought I might be going mad.
The Madcap Laughs offered strange comfort. Recorded over the months after his ejection from Pink Floyd and overseen by David Gilmour, his replacement in the band, it captured Syd mid-breakdown. The songs are dark and downbeat. Syd audibly stumbles through his performances, the sound of a man coming apart at the seams, lost in an endless mid-afternoon glaze. A tune occasionally glitters among the murk like gold in a pan. His words rush by in a mumbled torrent, their flashes of sense borne away on the fitful flood. It is an intimate, painful listen, but it provided a measure of catharsis and helped me contemplate the troubles brewing in my own mind.
Listening in the dark through my headphones, this and the music of Pink Floyd became my emotional prop.
*
The post-Barrett Floyd also struggled. If it is clear that Barrett could not thrive without the sympathetic backing of his old band, it is obvious that his old band were initially lost without his guiding vision. They tried their hand at the singles charts with ‘It Would Be So Nice’ and ‘Point Me At the Sky’, dodgy sub-Barrett knock offs that disappeared without bothering the hit parade. Their original management dropped them in favour of the ailing Barrett who was, after all, a proven hit maker.
The aimlessness of Pink Floyd in the late sixties and early seventies matched my own mood during my undergraduate years. I was studying without any clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life, merely postponing the moment I would have to make any decisions. I enjoyed my subjects but I felt I was going through the motions, hoping it would all work out in the end somehow. I sense the Floyd felt similarly in those early days without their erstwhile leader.
I cannot in all good conscience recommend such albums as More, Ummagumma, and Atom Heart Mother to a casual listener. They veer from the desperately uneven through the outrightly ridiculous to the utterly pretentious, but they sound tracked those difficult years and I love them still. Just looking at the covers takes me back to my late teens and early twenties. When I gaze at the famous cow on the sleeve of Atom Heart Mother I can smell the interior of my friend Ian’s first car because that was where I was when I unwrapped it.
In these transitional years Pink Floyd could be very silly; the dry humour of Floyd’s work is often overlooked, but it is there in abundance on the albums of this period. In the absence of a firm musical direction they were open to almost anything. They put on shows where kettles were boiled and wood was cut onstage with amplified saws. In the studio they tinkered endlessly, spending years working on an abandoned project called ‘Household Objects’, for which they created music with the everyday items found lying around their houses.
There was, however, method in their madness. Without a lead writer, new material had to be painstakingly birthed from such collaborative experimentation. ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ from Atom Heart Mother is built around found sounds – boiling kettles, the snap, crackle and pop of rice crispies, water dripping from drummer Nick Mason’s tap. Even when projects were abandoned they could yield useful ideas to be recycled later. The wine glass drone of ‘Household Objects’ would eventually lend eerie background atmosphere to Barrett tribute ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ on Wish You Were Here.
The band toured incessantly during these years, building musical muscle and cultivating a loyal following. They jammed for long hours in the studio, endlessly improvising, sweating up numbers. Their sessions became notorious among EMI studio technicians who competed to avoid them, but sometimes the ennui bore fruit. ‘Echoes’ from sixth album Meddle began life as a series of jams called ‘Nothing’, ‘Son of Nothing’, and ‘Return of the Son of Nothing’. From these unpromising hours of noodling they plucked a single accidental note made on Richard Wright’s keyboard and built an entire song around it, one of their very best.
As a student I was not aware of the sheer volume of work that went into the tortuous recording of these albums. I enjoyed their lazy, laid-back sound because they chimed with my own detached feelings. When I stumbled in from the pub blind drunk in the early hours, I liked nothing better than to lie in bed and listen to Meddle, the perfect album to fall asleep with, lulling and gentle, melancholy and melodious. This, for me, is the highest praise.
Bassist Roger Waters was less sanguine about the Floyd’s status. By the time of Meddle he was deeply frustrated, desperate to stamp his mark on the music business and break the band in America. It was from this point that he decided to take the lyrical helm and force the band to focus, and Pink Floyd would never be the same again.
*
Can 45 million sales be wrong?
It is difficult to overstate the success of Dark Side of the Moon. It has spent over 900 weeks on the Billboard 200, has been certified platinum 15 times (and counting), has sold over 45 million copies worldwide and has been selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in the USA. It is the fifth best-selling album of all time. It is a cultural icon, a rock monument and a landmark of recording production. The music and the album’s prism imagery are endlessly celebrated and parodied. Its influence runs deep in popular culture to this day. It gave Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols a reason to wear his infamous ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ t-shirt.
Why then, is it the Pink Floyd album I listen to least?
It is arguably the first Floyd work since Piper to have coherence and focus, benefitting from a long gestation period as a live performance suite called ‘Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics’. The themes of Waters’ lyrics are universal: the pressures and stress of modern life; the fear of violence, despair and madness; the inevitability of death. It brings the trademark Floyd melancholy to the fore, with keyboardist Richard Wright in particular layering on those minor chord shifts that hint at genteel unease and deep, ingrained sadness. David Gilmour lays down some of the most blistering guitar work of his entire career. The whole thing sounds gorgeous, even today.
With so much to admire and enjoy here, why do I find it so difficult to listen to?
It may be that Dark Side represents to me the passing of the band I was emotionally attached to – silly, struggling, experimental, pretentious, funny – and the birth of another – slick, huge, pompous, serious. After the success of this album the Floyd never looked back, going on to release a string of massive sellers. Next came the Barrett tribute Wish You Were Here; then the sneering, sarcastic, punk defying Animals; and lastly, the magnum opus of spoiled rock superstar self-indulgence, The Wall. Each release bore them further away from the avant-garde whimsy I loved, and away from the music itself as Waters’ words began to overwhelm the input of his increasingly sidelined bandmates.
By the time I was buying these later albums I was reaching the end of my undergraduate career. It was the mid-nineties, the first stirrings of Britpop, and there were hipper, younger bands to switch on to. I started to go sour on the Floyd, and began to feel that their treatment of Barrett – effectively dropping their friend from the band when his mental issues proved too difficult to cope with and when he needed them most – somehow invalidated the rest of their output. The strong emotional identification I had formed with the band led to an equally strong backlash against them in my mind.
Gradually the Floyd albums got pushed further into my collection, reached for less and less often. The exception was the joyful and evergreen Piper, which stayed to the forefront of my affections, along with the two Barrett solo albums which retained their fascinating depths and darkness. I didn’t even bother investigating the post-Waters albums A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell. Who needed new material from these rock dinosaurs, these middle-aged frauds, this spent force from another age?
I moved on to new music. I graduated and left behind the unhappy experience of my undergraduate years. I travelled to Aberdeen for post-graduate studies, and had the year of student life there that I should have enjoyed during my four years in the capital: I made friends, drank too much, saw live bands, had my heart battered and had lots of fun. I recovered my confidence and self-esteem. I returned to Edinburgh to work in a series of ridiculous temping jobs, living the most care-free years of my life. I met and wooed my future wife. We settled into serious jobs, bought a house, got married and eventually started a family.
Everywhere I went those Pink Floyd albums travelled with me, but I wasn’t listening any more.
*
In lockdown, when the world narrowed to the house, the streets on the doorstep and the voices at the end of the telephone, it became necessary to find some means of escape into another universe. Music was one of my doorways into those other places, and Pink Floyd, the consummate albums band, proved my perfect lockdown companion.
Here’s the thing about music: if it catches you early enough, a song will be branded into your memory. You will never forget it, and even if you haven’t thought of it for years and years, you will one day find yourself humming or singing it as if you’d heard it only yesterday. I had carried Pink Floyd in my soul for all those years, and they had been nagging at my unconscious for all of that time. So when I returned to the records they were like old friends, and I could just sink into those well-worn textures and grooves, those long, instrumental passages that seemed perfectly designed to detach my mind from the here and now.
The early albums were a guilty pleasure and a self-indulgence: the stoned ramblings of Atom Heart Mother; the playful chaos of Ummagumma; the soothing winds of Meddle; the hazy smoke and wine evenings of Obscured by Clouds; the faux-exotica of More; the unfocussed ambition of A Saucerful of Secrets. Each proved a welcome destination, a comfort in all their long familiarity, their anchors driven firmly into the bedrock of my formative self.
More unexpectedly, lockdown gave me a new perspective on the post Dark Side albums. Animals seething with raw fury, spitting venom at unjust society; The Final Cut bearing weary witness to the betrayal of the post-war settlement and the asset-stripping of the public realm, a forty year legacy that gave us an NHS barely able to cope with the pandemic; The Wall exploring alienation, a man walled inside the confines of his own mind, cut off from the warmth of human contact – very apt in the days of Covid enforced isolation. These albums, unbearably misanthropic to my twenty year old self, grew wings in lockdown, revealing their prescient and humane sides in these new circumstances.
Towering over them all, Wish You Were Here, that dizzying masterpiece of melancholy, had grown much greater than I remembered. An album haunted by anger and unease, burning with a guilty conscience and raining fury on the music business, on success and on themselves. It is an album of absences – of Syd Barrett; of Waters’ father, killed in WW2; of ex-wives; of the band themselves, struggling to stay together in the wake of new-found fame and wealth. In the darkest days of lockdown, with so many loved ones absent, this music seemed nearly too painful to hear, but proved ultimately cathartic, moving me to much needed tears.
*
Having come this far and grown newly enthusiastic, I turned to the work I did not already know. I ordered The Division Bell and The Endless River. The fire had gone out of the Floyd when Waters quit after The Final Cut. An ugly and public court case for ownership of the band’s name had sullied their reputation for inscrutable privacy. David Gilmour eventually won the right to continue trading as Pink Floyd, but his first album at the helm, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, was bland and overproduced, essentially a solo effort repurposed as a Floyd work.
Without Waters the Floyd lacked lyrical bite and direction. It is true that Gilmour, a great guitarist, can play beautiful solos all day long and people will gladly pay to hear them, but without a concept or a purpose or anything to say, what was the point of the Floyd?
The answer the guitarist eventually arrived at, is that the music is the point. Freed from the overbearing Waters, his suffocatingly personal lyrics and grand conceptual ambitions, the band slowly rediscovered itself. With Richard Wright back on board as an official member (he had been sacked by Waters during the making of The Wall) they returned to the creative methods that the success of Dark Side of the Moon destroyed – they got together in a room and played long, exploratory, collaborative sessions.
Out of these sessions emerged enough music to fill two albums, The Division Bell and The Endless River. I moderately liked The Division Bell, a stately return to a classic Floyd sound, but my fondest discovery of lockdown proved to be The Endless River.
Completed from the unused material of the mid-nineties Division Bell sessions, the album was released in 2014 as a tribute to Rick Wright who died in 2008. The title refers to the closing lyrics of the song ‘High Hopes’ on The Division Bell – ‘The endless river, forever and ever’ – and early Barrett single ‘See Emily Play’ – ‘Float on a river, forever and ever’. The album itself forms a continuous loop of music, joining in a never-ending circle like a snake swallowing itself, finishing where it begins. It is an instrumental album, featuring just a single song with lyrics.
In essence, the album is an auditory journey through the Floyd canon. Rick Wright had retrieved some of his old instruments out of the band’s storage for the sessions, and much of his keyboard work here recreates sounds not heard since the musician’s sixties and seventies heyday. Part of the pleasure of listening to The Endless River is recognizing the references: the metallic sheen of ‘Welcome to the Machine’; the swooning synths of ‘Comfortably Numb’; the clattering tribal drums of ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’; the razor buzz guitar of ‘One Of These Days’; the sonic pings of ‘Echoes’; the church bells of ‘Fat Old Sun’.
Every era of the band’s music is touched upon in the course of the album’s meandering hour, self-consciously designed as a final musical statement. It contains a myriad ghosts, including a 1969 recording of the late Wright playing the pipe organ at the Royal Albert Hall, and it lays the ghost of the band’s later divisions, elevating the music above the fray. Gilmour enjoys the final word in the closing song of the band’s five decades career, ‘Louder Than Words’, reminding his band mates that though ‘we bitch and we fight’, it is the band’s music which endures and outlives them.
As a final act, it is hard to imagine a more moving or fitting curtain on the Floyd’s long career.
*
I know a lot of people don’t like Pink Floyd, and I can’t really blame them. There are a number of items against the band on the charge sheet: the endless repackaging of old music into new formats; the shameless wringing of money from loyal fans; the never-ending feud between band members; the relentless self-mythologizing; the pompous self-importance; the bloated touring machine: none of this endears them to the casual listener.
But maybe I have become middle-aged, because my attitude has softened and I can no longer summon the self-righteousness that led me to suppress my love for their music. I see now how young and inexperienced they were when they failed to deal with Barrett’s mental health issues, and I also see how the guilt of this acknowledged failure haunted them throughout the rest of their career.
I notice also how attitudes in general have softened to the band’s legacy in the years since I was in my twenties. Perhaps it is because they are no longer a live concern and two of their founding members are dead (Barrett pre-deceased Wright in 2006), but there seems to be among the music press a willingness to celebrate the band that was hardly evident twenty years ago. They are increasingly accorded a full measure of praise for their musical innovations and their stage craft, for their influence on multiple genres of popular music. Bands new and old seem comfortable acknowledging a creative debt. In a sure sign of cultural acceptance, they have even been a subject for a headline exhibition at the London V&A.
As ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon recently put it, even if their music is not your cup of tea, you would have to be as daft as a brush not to like the Floyd. They are, for all their undoubted faults, one of the great rock bands. They leave behind a canon of music and performance that is unique and individual. Theirs is one of the greatest of all the stories told in rock and roll. It is difficult to imagine the landscape of popular music without them.
At the start of lockdown the music of Pink Floyd felt like a guilty pleasure, but a year has passed and I no longer feel any guilt in my enjoyment. I can freely admit that I love their music. I’ve pulled the CD’s to the front of my collection, once more proudly acknowledged. In a way, lockdown has returned me to the enthusiasms of my younger self but with all the perspectives that maturity brings. By revisiting these albums I have reflected on past experience and come to terms with that part of my early life I still view as a failure. In the toughest of years I needed something to connect with emotionally to get me through, and it is their music, for good and bad, that got me there, and I’ll always be grateful for that.
Don't Burst My Bubble 