Seven Movies, part 1

There's something quite magical about the number seven: the seven wonders, the seven deadly sins, the seven heavens, seven days in the week, seven colors of the rainbow, seven seas, seven hills of Rome & of Istanbul, seven sages of Greece, seven notes in music, seven liberal arts - not forgetting The Magnificent Seven or Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. This year, something quite extraordinary happened: in the wake of Moonlight winning last year's Best Picture Oscar, not one or two, but seven gay-themed films with the potential to cross over to mainstream audiences and compete for top awards were released. I don't include any lesbian-themed films in this story, quite simply because I haven't seen any of them, while I've seen all seven films that will be discussed here and in the next story.

What's more incredible is that of these seven movies, each has a different nationality and each covers a different aspect of the gay experience. 120 battements par Minute (otherwise known as BPM) is the child of Moroccan-born French writer/director Robin Campillo - and is about gay activism in the face of AIDS, the story of the French branch of ACT UP in particular.

Call Me By Your Name is based on a novel by André Aciman, an Egyptian-born Sephardi Jewish writer of Italian and American nationality, with a screenplay by James Ivory, an American who has spent much of his long career being mistaken for an Englishman, and directed by Italian Luca Guadagnino. It's about the first love affair of a young man of intellectual family and personal background, in the idyllic countryside of Italy.

God's Own Country is a British film written and directed by Francis Lee and set in Lee's homeland, Yorkshire. It concerns the gay sexual desire among rural working people.

Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman), co-written and directed by Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio concerns the experience of losing one's companion and how LGBT people are powerless when facing such a loss, trans people even more so.

Beach Rats, an American film written and directed by Eliza Hittman, is about a Brooklyn teenager who has his gay awakening while trying to navigate through the homophobic waters of his blue-collar environment.

Inxeba (The Wound), directed by South African John Trengove, is about the circumcision ritual of the Xhosa tribe that takes place in the mountains and is considered as the initiation passage to manhood, and how that passage is complicated when man-love enters the equation.

Finally, Tom of Finland, directed by Dome Karukoski, born in Cyprus of a Finnish mother and an American father, brings to the screen the life and work of artist Touko Valio Laaksonen (aka Tom of Finland), one of the most influential and celebrated figures of twentieth-century gay culture.

Filmmakers of different nationalities, using different film-styles, and highlighting different facets of the gay experience; that's the sort of diversity we like. It helps that all seven films are worth watching and have all made an impression outside the gay festival circuit, as well as within. Today I'll deal with two or three of those; which leads me to something that I want to share with you: I'm not physically able to continue writing stories that each takes more than twelve hours to finish. It just takes too much time - and I have to put the rest of my life on hold to work it out. In order to avoid a burnout, I will divide the big stories into two or three parts. I'm not making any money from GayCultureLand, so I'd rather the writing be a joy and not an ordeal...

I will begin with 120 battements par Minute (BPM). Robin Campillo has been on my radar, since Entre Les Murs (The Class), in which he was the screenwriter and editor. He won the César (the French Oscar) for that - and the film was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. Then came the Eastern Boys, which he also directed. It was nominated for various major César awards, as well as winning awards in Film Festivals (Venice, Santa Barbara, Kraków.) One of my favorite gay-themed films, I reviewed it here.

120 battements par Minute (BPM) is even better: as the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw says in his 5/5 star interview, "Robin Campillo’s 120 Battements Par Minute is a passionately acted ensemble movie about ACT UP in France in the late 80s, the confrontational direct-action movement which demanded immediate, large-scale research into Aids. The movie compellingly combines elegy, tragedy, urgency and a defiant euphoria." He concludes his interview with "This film has what its title implies: a heartbeat. It is full of cinematic life."

Variety's Guy Lodge is equally enthusiastic: "A rare and invaluable non-American view of the global health crisis that decimated, among others, the gay community in the looming shadow of the 21st century, Campillo's unabashedly untidy film stands as a hot-blooded counter to the more polite strain of political engagement present in such prestige AIDS dramas as Philadelphia and Dallas Buyers Club. Candidly queer in its perspective and unafraid of eroticism in the face of tragedy, this robust Cannes competition entry is nonetheless emotionally immediate enough to break out of the LGBT niche."

"Arthouse patrons who didn't see Campillo’s remarkable 2013 breakout Eastern Boys may recognize him chiefly as the editor and writing partner of French auteur Laurent Cantet. Though Cantet has no direct creative involvement in BPM - he earns a thank-you in the closing credits - the spirit of their collaborations is plainly present in Campillo's lively, literate script, written with AIDS educator and activist Philippe Mangeot. Cantet and Campillo's Palme d'Or-winning The Class, in particular, is evoked through its reliance on contained, formalized group debate as a story propeller. Instead of a high school classroom, however, the four-walled narrative center here is an anonymous college lecture theater in central Paris, where members of AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) gather on a weekly basis to discuss their campaign strategy."

"As in Eastern Boys, Campillo's predominantly candid, unvarnished shooting style wrongfoots viewers ahead of his gutsiest manipulations of sound and image - in this case, a stark, unsubtle passage of widescreen visual poetry that turns the Seine purple with the blood of the needlessly damned. The oblique title, meanwhile, refers not just to medical heart rates as bleakly tracked on hospital monitors, but to the euphoric rhythm of the electronic music that soundtracks ACT UP's occasional disco breaks, in which matters of love, death, and ideology are briefly lost to the rush of the dancefloor, and strobe-lit faces fade into dust motes and blood cells. In one of BPM's most gently funny scenes, a well-meaning parent is ridiculed for suggesting 'AIDS is me, AIDS is you, AIDS is us' as a campaign slogan. By the end, you see where her critics are coming from: Campillo's sexy, insightful, profoundly humane film is most moving in those ecstatic interludes where, for a blissed-out moment or two, AIDS is no one at all."

I will add that watching the film made me get goosebumps, smile, and tear up in equal measure. All the young actors are amazing and the 80's-90's are perfectly captured. I know - I've been there. Here's a scene soundtracked by the Arnaud Rebotini Remix of Smalltown Boy:

This is the film's trailer:

The film was submitted by France for this year's Oscars. Unfortunately - and unjustly - it wasn't short-listed. It is, however, nominated for an impressive 13 Césars. I hope it wins them all.

The next film, Call Me By Your Name, is even more celebrated. Early on in the Oscar race, it was even considered as a possible favorite: wouldn't it be great if gay-themed films won the Best Picture Oscar two years in a row? It did eventually receive four major Oscar nominations, Best Picture among them, but it's the favorite in only one category: even so, the Best Adapted Screenplay award will be a fitting tribute for 89-year-old gay filmmaker James Ivory, who hasn't yet won an Oscar, even though he made some of the most iconic movies of the 80's and '90s, like Maurice, A Room with a View, Howard's End, and The Remains of the Day.

One of the film's four Oscar nominations is for Best Song, the Sufjan Stevens-penned Mystery Of Love:

The IndieWire's David Ehrlich considers the film as the best of the year. In his words, "It's 1983, 'somewhere in Northern Italy.' The height of summer and all of the neighborhood teenagers are in heat. Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet, keeping the promise he showed in Miss Stevens last September) is still a virgin. A 17-year-old American whose father, a local celebrity, is an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture (Michael Stuhlbarg), Elio has sprouted from the soil like the apricot trees that surround his family's villa, and he's impatiently waiting to bloom. Scrawny enough to be mistaken for a child but sophisticated enough to be mistaken for a man, Elio is a multilingual music prodigy who's more comfortable with Bach and Berlioz than he is in his own body. He knows everything and nothing. But he's about to get one hell of an education."

"Every summer, Elio's father flies out a graduate student to stay at the villa and help him with his research - this year's intern is Oliver (Armie Hammer, as sensational here as he was in The Social Network, but similarly a touch too old for the part). Oliver is 24 and his body is an epic unto itself, as big as any one of the ancient statues that have been dredged up from the local seas. Arrogant, eager, and almost suspiciously handsome for an aspiring historian, the mysterious new visitor often seems as though he got lost on his way to a Patricia Highsmith novel. While much of the film feels stretched between the feverish eros of Bertolucci, the budding warmth of Mia Hansen–Løve, and the affected stoicism of James Ivory (who, at 88, has a co-writing credit on this screenplay), a thin shadow of suspense creeps along the outer edges of each frame, priming viewers for a very different kind of pivot than the one Guadagnino deployed during the third act of A Bigger Splash."

"As the film progresses, Elio and Oliver begin to share more tangible things: Bike rides, errant touches, an unknown desire to have sex with one another (that last one is a biggie). Crucially, however, Elio is as conflicted about his own passions as he is those of the boy next door. His tastes are molten and volatile - he performs the same piano piece in a wildly different style every time he plays it, much to Oliver's amused frustration. When he's not busy gawking at his brawny infatuation, he's enthusiastically trying to deflower the French girl down the street (Esther Garrell, of the New Wave Garrells), who wears her wardrobe of summer dresses like she's trying to shame away the other seasons."

"Telling this story with the same characteristically intoxicating capriciousness that has come to define his work, Guadagnino doesn't dwell on looks of questionably requited longing. He's not Todd Haynes and - with the possible exception of a long take mid-movie that follows the two leads around a fountain and endows the space between them with a palpably physical sense of attraction and denial - he doesn't try to be. Instead, he stays attuned to the raw energy of trying to feel someone out without touching them, of what it's like to live through that one magical summer where the weather is the only part of your world that doesn't change every day."

"Rippling with nervously excited piano compositions and shot with immeasurable sensuality by Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Arabian Nights), Call Me By Your Name is a full-bodied film that submits all of its beauties to the service of one simple truth: The more we change, the more we become who we are. Like the Latin prefixes that Oliver and Mr. Perlman trace back to their roots or the antiquated artworks that resonate because of how much the world has changed since their creation, Elio learns that growth - however wild or worrisome it might seem at the time - is the greatest gift that he can give himself."

"Watching him slowly come to that realization is an unforgettable and enormously moving experience because of how the film comes to realize it, too. Guadagnino lives for the climactic portion of this story when feelings are finally transmuted into action and Oliver's true nature breaks through the marble bust of his body (Hammer's warmth in these scenes is extraordinary). The details are best experienced for yourself, but it's safe to say that movie lives up to the book's steamy reputation, and Chalamet and Hammer throw themselves at each other with the clumsy abandon of first love. Growingly increasingly divorced from its source material as it goes along, the final beats of Guadagnino’s adaptation galvanize two hours of simmering uncertainty into a gut-wrenchingly wistful portrait of two people trying to find themselves before it's too late. As Elio's father puts it in a heart-stopping monologue that every parent might want to memorize for future use: 'Don't make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything. What a waste.'"

"Leaving us with one of the gorgeous new songs that Sufjan Stevens wrote for the film, this achingly powerful story - a brilliant contribution to the queer cinema canon - breathes vibrant new life into the answer that Marguerite of Navarre gave to her own question. 'I would counsel all such as are my friends to speak and not die,' she said, 'for 'tis a bad speech that cannot be mended, but a life lost cannot be recalled.'"

Mr. Ehrlich is so eloquent that there's nothing more to add, except for that the film precisely evoked moments of my teenage years. And, isn't it funny, how these moments usually happen in the summer? This is the film's trailer:

I hope that the film wins all four of the Oscars that it's nominated for, including Best Picture and Best Leading Actor for the amazingly talented Timothée Chalamet. This is a behind-the-scenes feature with the director and the two young actors:

Finally for today, a gift from the United Kingdom: God's Own Country takes place in rural Yorkshire, in the Spring. Young farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker for lambing season ignites an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path.

It is amazing that God's Own Country is director's Francis Lee's feature-film debut. There are wisdom and confidence in his direction. The two leads, unknown till now, give sexy and powerful performances - and the magnetism between them is palpable. They are supported by two excellent character actors, Ian Hart and Gemma Jones.

The film is nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year in the BAFTA's (the British Oscars) and was nominated for eleven British Independent Film Awards, eventually winning four (Best Film and Best Actor among them). It also won one London Critics Circle Film Award, out of five nominations, as well as scoring wins in the Berlin, Chicago, Edinburgh, and Honolulu Film Festival, among others.

The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney rated the film with a 9/10 and said: "The hardscrabble lives of traditional farming families and the harsh splendor of the isolated West Yorkshire landscape provide the evocative backdrop to a poignant story of love and self-discovery in British writer-director Francis Lee's accomplished first feature, God's Own Country. Graced by its refreshingly frank treatment of gay sexuality, its casually expressive use of nudity and its eloquent depiction of animal husbandry as a contrasting metaphor for the absence of human tenderness, this is a rigorously naturalistic drama that yields stirring performances from the collision between taciturn demeanors and roiling emotional undercurrents."

"While it's too easy to predict Lee's film being simplistically dubbed Brokeback Moors, that comparison to Ang Lee's modern classic of gay drama isn't entirely facile, even if the social context, the contemporary setting and the highly specific sense of place make this heartfelt yet unsentimental film quite distinct. For one thing, God's Own Country ends not with the lingering music of tragedy but on a note of hopeful wholeness. It deserves to find a receptive audience, even beyond the core gay constituency."

"At the story's center is Johnny Saxby (Josh O'Connor), a repressed gay man in his early twenties who anesthetizes his loneliness with nightly drinking binges and the occasional cold bout of casual sex. He lives a joyless existence with his grandmother Deirdre (Gemma Jones) and father Martin (Ian Hart), who has suffered a debilitating stroke that leaves Johnny responsible for the considerable workload on their sheep farm. It's suggested that, along with his physical condition, Martin's bitterness is as much the result of being abandoned by his wife, who couldn't take the rigors of rural life. Nan isn't exactly a fount of great warmth either, and their disapproval of Johnny's boozing adds to the general mood of dourness."

"With subtle strokes and subdued revelations, Lee's screenplay lays out the development of an unexpected relationship that changes Johnny in ways that are painful, profound and ultimately freeing. At first, he's resistant to his father's insistence on hiring a temporary worker to help during lambing season. And he makes no effort to be friendly when Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) arrives, taunting the handsome Romanian migrant by calling him a gypsy. But when the two young men are sent off to work a paddock up on the remote moors, requiring them to camp out overnight in a stone shelter, hostility gives way to physical attraction."

"Lee and cinematographer Joshua James Richards make skillful atmospheric use of the rugged hill country, which looks gloomy even in spring, creating a melancholy mood and a somber canvas for the spontaneous eruption of desire between the two strangers. Their first sexual tussle is combative, angry, their naked bodies smeared in grass and mud, like animals. But while they revert to a circumspect mutual distance during the long daylight working hours, their nights together gradually give way to gentler sexual exploration."

"O'Connor is terrific at conveying Johnny's guardedness and bruised solitude; the lingering stares he shoots at Gheorghe reveal not just attraction but also an intuitive emotional response to the Romanian's soulful way with the animals, the land, even the stone fencing. Secareanu is equally effective. Without a lot of over-explanatory dialogue, a beautiful, almost silent exchange happens, in which Gheorghe reveals his deep-rooted ties to rural life while Johnny starts reevaluating his own inheritance in a less resentful light."

"When Martin has a second, near-fatal stroke, Deirdre remains at the hospital with him while sending Johnny and Gheorghe back to the farm to 'see to the beasts.' That spell alone in the house becomes an interlude of easy domesticity and affection that further expands Johnny's understanding of himself. But when his Nan makes it clear that Martin will not sufficiently recover to resume farm labor, the pressure causes Johnny to act out in damaging ways, putting everything he's gained at risk."

"In addition to the very fine work from O'Connor and Secareanu that anchors the drama, stage and screen veteran Jones brings quiet complexity to a role in which silences count as much as words, while an almost unrecognizable Hart gives a moving performance as a hardened man who shows surprising reserves of sensitivity when it most counts. Scenes late in the film in which Johnny takes a more active role in his father's care are among the most affecting moments, albeit while never surrendering director Lee's defining restraint."

"That characteristic extends to the sparing use of music, from ambient duo Dustin O'Halloran and Adam Wiltzie, who record as A Winged Victory for the Sullen; and to the muted color palette and elegant framing of Richards' cinematography. God's Own Country announces Lee as an assured new voice, his own personal ties to the setting reinforced in gorgeous colorized vintage farm footage over the end credits."

This is a montage of scenes from the film:

This is a fanmade video, set to The Days by Patrick Wolf:

Three movies that are so different from each other, which are however connected by their brilliance and by the honest way in which they depict various aspects of the gay experience. All three are must-see cinema. In our next story, we'll continue with the other four movies. Until then, keep yourselves happy and safe!

The Pink Floyd Top 50 Countdown (#05-01) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends, old and new! This is the last part of the Pink Floyd Top 50 Countdown. Doesn't time fly! Next week, a new countdown will begin. The honored person has in no way achieved the commercial success of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd, all subjects of previous countdowns. He does have, however, numerous deeply devoted fans around the world. He is, in my opinion, the most talented singer/songwriter to emerge during the last 40 years. We know him by his name, even though he's been in groups in practically all of his professional life. I know that GCL's good friend, Alan, will be very happy with this presentation. So will many British, Greek, Cypriot, and especially Australian friends. If you haven't guessed who it is by now, then just wait until next week...

Let's begin our final Pink Floyd story with the presentation of a few key songs from the solo careers of the Pink Floyd members yet to be presented: Richard Wright and Nick Mason.

Richard (Rick) Wright, Floyd's keyboards' player and occasional vocalist, sadly passed away in 2008. He had a limited solo career; just two albums. The first was called Wet Dream and came out in 1978. From this album, let's listen to Pink's Song, a song dedicated to Syd Barrett:

In 1984 he collaborated with Dave Harris of Fashion to form Zee. They only released one album, Identity. Wright later stated that he felt Identity was an "experimental mistake" that should never have been released.

His second and final solo album, Broken China, was released in 1996. The album is a four-part concept album which documents Wright's then-wife Mildred's battle with depression and is very much like a classic Pink Floyd concept album in its structure and overall feel. Two songs, Reaching for the Rail and Breakthrough feature Sinéad O'Connor on lead vocals, with Wright singing elsewhere. This is Breakthrough:

The group's drummer, Nick Mason, was more active in his career outside of Pink Floyd. Although he only had one solo album, he had a number of interesting collaborations, as well as dabbling in record production for other acts. He recorded five albums with Michael Mantler, the first being 1976's The Hapless Child. The vocals are handled by ex-Soft Machine Robert Wyatt. This is The Doubtful Guest:

Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports (1981) was supposedly Nick's solo album, although in truth Columbia, apparently attempting to cash in on Pink Floyd's explosion in popularity, released this album in 1981 under Nick Mason's name when in reality he's simply the drummer in this incarnation of Carla Bley's ensemble; Ms. Bley composed all the music and lyrics for this project. It's possibly her most overtly pop-oriented album, with all eight songs featuring vocals (again) by Soft Machine alumnus Robert Wyatt. I'm a Mineralist in one of the best tracks on the album:

Profiles was Nick Mason's second studio album and 10cc guitarist Rick Fenn's debut studio album. It was released in 1985. It was almost entirely instrumental, save for two songs, one of which was Lie for a Lie, featuring Maggie Reilly and David Gilmour:

Now that we're done with the appetizer, let's proceed to the main course: at #5 on our countdown is a song that for many is Pink Floyd's best. Comfortably Numb is the closing track on the third side of the double vinyl album The Wall (1979). The music, written by David Gilmour, blends perfectly with the lyrics written by Roger Waters. The song is based in reality, as Waters needed a doctor’s shot in order to get him through a show in Philadelphia in 1977. With Waters handling the verses and Gilmour handling the chorus, this song finds the perfect medium. Add to that not one but two blistering guitar solos by Gilmour and you’ve got a recipe for success.

Throughout Pink Floyd's catalog, David Gilmour is allowed plenty of moments to let his guitar skills shine, but nowhere does he play with such visceral power and energy as during his solos on Comfortably Numb. Often misinterpreted as a song about heroin use or drug use in general, the song actually details The Wall antihero Pink's moment of breakdown, where he's pushed beyond his mental limits and slips into full-fledged insanity. Waters' sinister vocals in the verses, as the crooked doctor who injects Pink with a drug to render him able to play a show when the rock star has sunken into a hopeless state of burnout, contrast magically with Gilmour's serene, distant vocals in the chorus. Gilmour's guitar work that cements Comfortably Numb as a classic - his first solo filled with longing and sorrow, while the longer, darker second solo plays like a scorching retreat into mental collapse.

Of course, it also helps that Waters and Gilmour are discussing heady, existential topics, the likes of which take on a grander purpose on a long enough timeline given the song’s transmutative properties. That probably best explains why so many people have gravitated to the song over the years, but allow me to toss out one last idea: the bass line. There is something about Waters’ brooding bass that digs right into the soul, wrenching out the ugliest part of our consciousness so that we might be able to reflect upon it and bring it into the light as we keep moving forward. Then again, none of that soul-searching works without every other element firing on all cylinders, so maybe it’s just a brilliant song.

It's the ultimate in Pink Floyd as classic rock titans, an absolutely towering power ballad where both elements of that phrase feel individually and collectively insufficient to appropriately summarize the song's might. Comfortably Numb is iconic from its opening line and nails both the little things (the "pinprick" sound effect) and the big things (Gilmour's GOAT-contending closing guitar solo) with such unquestioned mastery that the song endures as one of the most recognizable of its era, despite never charting pretty much anywhere. It might not be as mystifying or genre-blending as some of the group's other signature moments, but it ensures they'll have at least one standard circulating on classic-rock radio for as long as classic-rock radio is a thing. This is the version from Alan Parker's film:

The Scissor Sisters were our favorite 3/5-gay band of the 00's. Their first single Electrobix dealt with the obsession of many gay men with working out but proved to be less popular than its B-side, a cover version of Comfortably Numb. Their version of Comfortably Numb became a hit in many dance clubs and, after sending Pink Floyd themselves a copy, the Scissor Sisters received positive remarks from the song's original writers Roger Waters and David Gilmour. The song proved to be particularly popular in the UK, where it peaked at #10. Here's what the group's lead singer, Jake Shears, has to say about Pink Floyd:

"After a while, a band becomes more unashamed about doing certain things, and that's when I find them most interesting. I think Syd Barrett was really 'cool'; Dave Gilmour isn't. And I prefer bands when they stop caring about being cool."

"When I was in ninth grade, there was a kid I had a crush on who played me Floyd for the first time - I grew up on an island, and we would lie out on the harbour with a boombox and listen to this song. A few years ago, I was asked to sing Comfortably Numb with David Gilmour at Radio City for two shows. I was emotionally fragile and weeping - a mess - but over the moon, because I can sing the hell out of that song: I’ve been singing it for half of my life. But the day before the gig they decided not to have any guests. They canned me. Bastards! It was one of the worst things you could do to anybody!"

Here's the Scissor Sisters' version:

At #4 is an odd bit of Floydiana: This pretty Wright track was turned into the extravagant finale of The Dark Side of the Moon's first side when engineer Alan Parsons brought a singer named Clare Torry into the studio one night to offer some vocals. Asked to wail, wail she did. Part Cassandra convulsed at the state of a world that she had predicted, part mother crying over her earth, part lover lost, part human facing fate. Who's going to argue with her? Torry was paid scale; decades later she was finally compensated more appropriately and given co-writing credit, though terms were not disclosed.

Perhaps an 'interlude' by virtue of being entirely wordless - minus the well-chosen "I am not frightened of dying" spoken-word sample in the song's intro - but still one of the most memorable tracks on Dark Side, thanks to one of Rick Wright's greatest spotlight piano riffs and a stop-the-world, non-verbal vocal from soul singer Clare Torry. Despite coaxing her to classic-rock immortality through her solo, the sessions for Great Gig were about as awkward as you'd expect, Waters recounting the recording in '03: "Clare came into the studio one day, and we said, 'There's no lyrics. It's about dying – have a bit of a sing on that, girl.'"

Their most soulful song from decades worth of material, Floyd's The Great Gig in the Sky sounds like it's coming to us from a journey towards another plane of existence, what some call the 'afterlife.' Wright's holy piano takes us towards the hereafter, but nothing's ever so simple. The legendary wailing from guest vocalist Clare Torry acts as barriers we must overcome along the way, but hope wins out in the end - a rarity in the Waters era. Another perfect song on another perfect Floyd album.

May I add that I have a special connection to this song: one of the experiences that I had in my rather interesting life was selecting music for a play - the play being Paula Vogel's Pulitzer-winning play How I Learned to Drive. The story follows the strained, sexual relationship between Li'l Bit and her aunt's husband, Uncle Peck, from her adolescence through her teenage years into college and beyond. Using the metaphor of driving and the issues of pedophilia, incest, and misogyny, the play explores the ideas of control and manipulation.

In the play's final scene, Li'l Bit reflects on how she is ready to move on with her life, and that despite everything she has been through, she can thank her Uncle Peck for one thing: the freedom she feels when she drives. The final scene has Li'l Bit alone in her car, and as she adjusts her rearview mirror, she notices Uncle Peck in the back. After smiling at him, she steps on the gas pedal and drives away, finally leaving Peck in the past as she drives off to a new chapter of her life. In that scene, I used The Great Gig in the Sky. As the song started playing, it felt like the car blasted into the stratosphere.

This is a good live version:

Here's an interview with Clare Torry, giving us the history of that fateful session:

Even though Wish You Were Here (1975) is probably my favorite Pink Floyd album, I didn't want to have two songs from the same album in positions #1 & #2 of our countdown. So, even though I like the title track of this album the same as our countdown's #2, I've kept Wish You Were Here at #3. (Making a list is not the easiest thing in the world, especially if the list is not strictly private.)

Wish You Were Here opens with the white noise of an AM radio, its signal eventually settling on a lonely guitar track that sounds as if it's reaching out across the void. Gilmour's richer acoustic guitar comes in after a while to play along, but there's an obvious disconnect between these two tracks as if the former is a ghost that can't fully be summoned to life. It's an obvious but potent symbol of the band's relationship with former frontman Syd Barrett, who had descended into a drug-addled existence that precluded his taking part in Pink Floyd's success. But even if you take Barrett out of the equation, Wish You Were Here registers as a mournful, compelling call to action - a plea to always take the "walk-on part in the war" over the "leading role in a cage."

Wish You Were Here has untold layers of subtle production and structural depth to it. Consider the radio crackle the opening riff emerges from - a thematic holdover from the preceding Have a Cigar outro - and the way the song's acoustic solo lands on top of it with such comparative clarity, with every finger-on-strings slip audible, that it's heart-piercing from the first note. Or how the bleating synths come in to fortify the melodic refrain in between the first verse and chorus. Or how despite being among the most legendary sing-alongs in rock history - the song's chorus only appears once in the entire song. 

Wish You Were Here lands like no other song in the band's catalog, because it does all these clever, unobtrusively inventive things, but the song's core remains as emotive and relatable as a Lynyrd Skynyrd classic. It's about Syd Barrett, of course, but it doesn't have to be, not by a long shot. And even with a chorus so sky-scraping, you don't need to deploy it more than once when you're falling back to a riff that anyone who's ever learned the acoustic has attempted to master within the first month. Wish You Were Here packs the obligatory anti-authoritarian messaging into its verse, but its ultimate feeling is one of human connection, of needing friends and family and loved ones to give you a reason to keep fighting in the first place. It's as beautiful a composition and production as the '70s produced, and it should live on well after the last Dark Side of the Moon poster is torn down from a college undergrad dorm room.

Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music had this to say:

"I saw Floyd in the early days, at the Albert Hall with Hendrix, Amen Corner, and The Move. It was the most amazing package tour. I was 16 or 17 and it was incredibly exciting. Floyd, particularly the atmospheric and textural stuff, were a huge influence on my own guitar-playing with Roxy."

"Like a lot of people, I've heard all the tracks but had never tried playing them. So when David [Gilmour] asked me to go on tour with him, I had to create a guitar sound that was as close as possible to the originals. And of course, every backpacker from here to Timbuktu knows how to play Wish You Were Here, but not me! So I had to learn it from scratch, which was hilarious. It's one of their most well-known numbers and I spent the whole tour learning how to play it properly."

"That riff is like the other great riffs, like Shine On You Crazy Diamond. The minute you hear it, you know what it is. Halfway through the tour, I told David it was getting so embarrassing. So I went into his kitchen and said, 'For fuck's sake, show me exactly how you play it!' I think on the very last gig, which is the live version that's coming out, I do finally get it right! When you're playing those songs, you marvel at the simplicity of it all, yet it's totally self-contained. It's quite minimalist, so each part is distinctive."

This is the live version from the first time in years (and the last time so far) that Roger Waters joined the rest of Pink Floyd on stage. It was for the Live 8 event in 2005:

My choice for #2 are three songs from The Wall, the first two are short and serve as intros to the third. These are Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1) / The Happiest Days of Our Lives / Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2). Although the latter is without question Floyd's most popular song among the general public, I wouldn't place it so high on the list outside of the context given by the previous two: Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1) is one of the more effective tracks on The Wall, a spooky and evocative foreshadowing of the more famous Part 2. The Happiest Days of Our Lives is an absolutely awesome intro and by far Waters' greatest fragment. Just listen to the lyrics:

"When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who
Would hurt the children any way they could

By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
Exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids

But in the town, it was well known
When they got home at night,
Their fat and psychopathic wives
Would thrash them within inches of their lives"

These are followed by a deliciously chilling scream, which leads us into Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2). Often remembered solely for its line "We don’t need no education" and misconstrued as an anti-intellectual slacker anthem, the most commercially successful hit of Pink Floyd's career is actually more specific in meaning - it's part of the storyline of The Wall, after all. In the case of Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2), central character Pink faces abuse from strict, antagonistic teachers and an oppressive school system that looks to quash out any creative thought in the minds of its students. This means, then, that Waters is really decrying the narrow, rigid doctrines that schools often used to cling to, blaming them for turning out so many people who are apathetic and devoid of individuality.

Pigs Might Fly says that Ezrin is the guy who came up with the idea of turning a dirgey song fragment into what was essentially a disco mix; over Waters' objections, he stretched out the material they had as much as possible over a thumping beat - and said it was a single. Waters bought into it. (Again, this was the 1970s, and it was a pretty radical fusion.) Someone came up with the idea of adding the kids' chorus. This was farmed out to London, where a sub-producer recorded a group of schoolkids - without asking the school's or the kids' parents' permission. The production is immaculate - Gilmour sings with utter authority, and Waters, owning his own instrument, kicks in on the "Leave those kids alone!" line. The sound and engineering on this song are extraordinary, from the disco beat to the sax to the washes of guitar, and that thin but monotonous rhythm guitar track - right down to that flimsy little guitar break that somehow brings the song together. Gilmour is MVP for the killer guitar outro. You have to give Waters credit; six years after Money, he'd crafted another of the most improbable classic singles of the era.

An unlikely chart-topper on both sides of the Atlantic - though maybe not so unlikely when you consider the song's blend of arena-rock muscle with punk snottiness and (most importantly) disco propulsion, making it enough of a sledgehammer to tear down walls a lot more fortified than Roger Waters' metaphoric self-isolation. The band resisted it at first, but producer Bob Ezrin dragged Dave Gilmour into the discos and sent engineers off on secret kiddie choir-recording missions until they had a single as riotous as School's Out and as club-ready as Miss You, one still soundtracking middle-schooler revenge fantasies nearly 30 years later. Also, who can forget the outro that poses the question: "How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?" It's a question as old as time... "It doesn't, in the end, not sound like Pink Floyd," Gilmour begrudgingly admitted in 1999. True!

Here are the three songs together:

This is the official video for Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2):

Ice Cube of NWA was a fan:

"It was a big hit, it was getting a lot of airplay at the time, even on black stations. It's a seriously funky track, it's got a tight drum beat and a killer bassline. I remember we used to march around the playground singing the lyrics from this song. 'We don't need no education/we don't need no thought control… Hey teacher! Leave them kids alone!' Ha! When you're a kid at school, of course, you're going to love a lyric like that! The idea that we're all just bricks in the wall, just identikit packages that the system requires. That's the shit. It's real. And it's true. It's still true now."

This is The Happiest Days of Our Lives / Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) from Alan Parker's film:

Pink Floyd embodied the duality of presence and absence throughout their career, but never more powerfully than when Waters mourned the mental breakdown of his longtime friend and creative hero Syd Barrett - a breakdown that daunted the band as they tried to find their sound without him, then haunted them after they reached superstardom. It's the perfect encapsulation of Pink Floyd's classic sound and the ultimate tribute to the man whose disappearance spurred that transformation. The ethereal wine glass choir at the beginning and Wright's funereal mini-Moog and textured synths evoke ghosts of the band’s past; Gilmour's soulful guitar leads weep for Barrett's disordered brain; finally, Waters' lyrics comprise the greatest rock eulogy ever written. And yet the sheer musical talent Shine On You Crazy Diamond (our #1 song) exudes, from the beautiful melodies to the seamless transitions between the song's many parts, shows a Pink Floyd that could craft a masterpiece even without its founder.

The two-part Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Pink Floyd's longest song and ultimate perfection of their suite-song technique, is the band's magnum opus. Deliberately written as a final tribute to the fallen Syd Barrett, whom Roger Waters never directly wrote about after Wish You Were Here, Shine On sums up the influence and importance Barrett had on the members' musical vision as well as the honest realization that the band could never have reached the heights they had if he hadn't gone insane. This underlying message makes Shine On a rather ambivalent and certainly bittersweet ode, an acknowledgment that Barrett's mental breakdown was tragic yet fundamental to the band's music and story. The suite, actually divided into nine parts, is built from a mournful guitar arpeggio courtesy of David Gilmour and covers musical terrain ranging from a funk jam, a tempo-shifting saxophone solo, and even a funereal dirge to close the piece. Shine On also has an unsettling piece of history attached to it: As acknowledged by all the members of Pink Floyd, Barrett actually showed up in the studio while the band was recording this lament about him. It was the first time any of them had seen him in years, and due to his drastically altered physical appearance, nobody recognized him at first. When they finally realized it was Barrett, Waters was reportedly reduced to tears. This inexplicable alignment of events can only be explained by random circumstance, but such unlikely coincidence seems eerily supernatural and oddly befitting of a musical act as colossal and astral as Pink Floyd.

WYWH is the thinking person's Pink Floyd album. This meditation on friendship, madness, and the music industry encourages examination and revels in its own over- and undertones. Everything that Pink Floyd is at its best is right here, the opening 12-plus minutes. Oozing soundscapes, laid down on keyboards by Richard Wright; a dramatic and meaningful guitar workout, from Gilmour; one of Waters's most sincere set of lyrics and certainly a notably vocal performance - and all recorded with a humanizing warmth. Gilmour, at his best, starts out soft; his solos carefully dramatize themselves. Later, when Part 2 starts, his guitar's ringing clarity - four authoritative notes - sounds familiar and also heralds something new. Things never get boring - there’s even a terrific blues solo.

The song itself, of course, is Waters's most full-bodied tribute to Barrett. The angularity of the images captures the modernity Barrett fought against and was ultimately felled by, with a sobering and yet affectionate emotion. And when, in Part 5, the song begins to lag, saxophonist Dick Parry steps up, the tempo redoubles, and we fade into the menacing mixmaster of Welcome to the Machine. It's deceiving, at first, with more talk of suns and moons and black holes; but that's just to get the setting right for a story about a space-rock band and the leader from another dimension who drifted away.

This is our #1 Pink Floyd song, Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I–V):

As far as outside voices are concerned, it's only fitting to listen to what a member of the band has to say, in this instance, David Gilmour (commenting on another list where Shine On You Crazy Diamond was also the #1 song):

"It's great that this is No 1, as it's the purest Floyd song, the peak of that particular stage in our development. We wrote the song in a dingy rehearsal room near Kings Cross - I have no idea why we were in such a dark, cheap and horrible rehearsal space when we'd just released one of the biggest-selling LPs in history! Ha! Maybe it was tight-arsed management."

"The song fell out of a four-note guitar figure that I came up with - that distinctive opening sequence. Roger really liked it. It had that haunting, serial quality, like something from a piece of modern classical music, or from a film soundtrack. The rest of the song was a joint effort, which was becoming rare at around that time, where I and Roger tended to write separately and bring the ideas into a rehearsal. But here the song seemed to emerge organically out of a jam. There's the pedal bassline that links into the last part, lots of interesting chord changes, and Nick's drumming, which switches between a kind of 12/8 shuffle to a swing beat and back. The ideas were all so good that we wanted room for them to breathe, which is why the complete version is about 26 minutes long and needed to be split in two as it didn't fit on one side of an LP."

"Roger would always disappear for a few days to write lyrics and he came up with this tribute to Syd. They're beautiful words and it's a heartfelt tribute that speaks for us all. It had been four or five years since we'd last seen him, and I think it was all tied up with our feelings of regret and possibly guilt. It was a remarkable coincidence that, not long after we'd finished recording Shine On…, Syd wandered into the studio at Abbey Road. Everyone's memory of the event is a bit hazy. My memory is of a rather plump chap wandering around No 3 studio while we were mixing in the control booth. God knows how he managed to get past security - it was pretty tight then and I'd imagine that it'd be impossible nowadays! And it took us all a while to work out who it was - we were all a bit shaken as to how different he looked. We had a chat with him. When we played him some of the stuff we were working on he thought it was really good 'but a bit long.' Ha!"

"For years after he left, Syd was the elephant in the room when it came to Pink Floyd. He was the glue that linked us all. He knew Roger, Rick, and Nick from the first incarnation of the band, obviously, before I joined, but me and Syd were also close friends, dating back before the band. I liked to remember the Syd of my teens, this sweet, crazy, fun-loving friend that I went to France with and went busking with. And the terrible thing is that I couldn't really equate that figure with the person that he turned into. The thing was, his mental problems always seemed to come up when the issue of the band surfaced. So it was his family's preference that members of Pink Floyd didn't visit him, as it might set off another relapse. So it's astonishing to think that that time in Abbey Road was the last time I ever saw him."

"Obviously, the news of his death was enormously sad. I'd known he was ill for a long time, but the reality was terribly sad, even if I and the rest of the band had been grieving for him for over 30 years. The thing was that the Syd I knew hadn't been around for a long time. If I have one regret it's that I'd not been more forceful with his family and gone to visit Syd in Cambridge. But it's a difficult one to negotiate, isn't it?"

"Syd's death affected the way I now play Shine On…. It's a tremendously adaptable piece of music. On the original, it's a pretty big production, with harmonies and backing singers. On my last tour, it became more mournful. I stripped away everything. After a few dates, it became more experimental. We developed a new way of playing the opening where Phil Manzanera, Guy Pratt, and Dick Parry would play wine glasses - you know, rubbing a wet finger over the rims - that had been tuned to an open chord, replicating the organ part, and I'd play the guitar riff over the top. That was a throwback to the LP we were initially going to make instead of Wish You Were Here, in which the sounds were going to be made with household objects, an idea we ditched but which influenced some of what we did after that. It makes the track even more haunting and ethereal."

This is the song in its full length; Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I–IX):

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; it was a great week, the number of weekly visits was more than twice as much as the last time, for a second week in a row. The two Oscar stories of last week did very well, and our previous Pink Floyd story also did well. Older stories are also doing well, George Maharis, the Disco crossover hits, Zelim Bakaev, Grace Jones, and Tevin Campbell are all in this week's top 10.

As far as countries are concerned, France is unstoppable, an easy #1 for the week, achieving 250% more visits than the United States, at #2. The latter, however, managed to keep its overall percentage stable, which is good news for my American friends. Italy, Canada, South Africa, and Spain increased their overall percentage, while the rest of the key players slightly decreased theirs.

Here are this week's Top 10 countries.

1. France

2. the United States

3. the United Kingdom

4. Greece

5. Italy

6. Canada

7. South Africa

8. Spain

9. Russia

10. Germany

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Argentina, Australia, Austria, the Bahamas, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, Guatemala, Guinea, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Isle of Man, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Martinique, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 31.0%

2. France = 23.6%

3. the United Kingdom = 8.4%

4. Greece = 7.8%

5. Russia = 3.2%

6. Germany = 2.3%

7. Italy = 1.24%

8. Cyprus = 1.23%

9. Canada = 1.10%

10. the United Arab Emirates = 0.40%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!