Hello, my friends, old and new! As you probably already know, we're getting near the end, so I decided to present a few key songs from the solo careers of the Pink Floyd members. Today, it's David Gilmour's turn.
Gilmour's first solo album came out in 1978 and had his name as its title. Mihalis was the track that opened the album. Mihalis is the Greek equivalent of Michael. Gilmour was a frequent visitor to the Greek islands and "Mihalis" was the name of one of his favorite taverns:
There's No Way Out Of Here was the track that followed. It was the album's only single. It flopped in Europe but became popular on Album-oriented rock radio stations in the US.
Gilmour released his second solo venture, About Face, in 1984, following the apparent dissolution of Pink Floyd. He has a stellar band backing him, including Jeff Porcaro (drums), Pino Palladino (bass), and Anne Dudley (synthesizer). The funky Blue Light was a minor hit:
This is the gorgeous Murder, a gentle acoustic track that explodes with some fiery organ by Steve Winwood and concludes with a fierce coda:
On an Island (2006) was his first solo album in twenty-two years. The album features Robert Wyatt, Jools Holland, Georgie Fame, David Crosby, Graham Nash, late Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright, early Pink Floyd member Bob Klose and Pink Floyd session and touring musician Guy Pratt. The album's orchestral arrangements are by Zbigniew Preisner. Chris Thomas and Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera assisted with production. The lyrics were principally written by Gilmour's wife, Polly Samson.
On an Island entered the UK charts at #1, giving Gilmour his first ever chart-topping album outside of Pink Floyd. It reached #1 on the European Chart, and #2 in Canada, Portugal, and Iceland. It has also provided Gilmour with his first US Top 10 album, reaching #6. The album has achieved platinum status in Canada and has sold over 1,000,000 copies worldwide.
The album opens with the instrumental Castellorizon, which segues into the album's title track, On an Island. The song is based on a night Gilmour spent on the Greek island of Kastellorizo. On an Island is a slow, textured, and spacy love song:
Rattle That Lock is his last solo album so far; it was released in 2015. The ageless harmonies of Graham Nash and David Crosby grace A Boat Lies Waiting, a moving, understated tribute to Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright. Gilmour's slide hovers above Roger Eno's elegant piano, chamber strings, and the cry of gulls. Samson's lyrics are economical but mighty, capturing bittersweet nostalgia, pain, and loss in their poignancy:
Now, it's time to resume our Pink Floyd Top 50 Countdown; we have reached the top 10, which means we're very near the end. At #10 is Echoes: Written in 1970 by all four members of the group, Echoes provides the extended finale to Pink Floyd's album Meddle. The track has a running time of 23:31 and comprises the entire second side of the vinyl and cassette recordings.
Not the first strap-yourself-in-folks Pink Floyd song by any means - Atom Heart Mother ran about ten seconds longer, and they'd hit double-digit minutes on a couple others even before that. Still, Echoes feels like a eureka moment for the band, the first time they'd had a central motif (that monster proto-Phantom of the Opera riff) strong enough to build ten-plus minutes of music around, and the first time they'd matched it with an ambient breakdown section (the whale-sounds middle) that was compelling enough in its own right to wade through until the hook's return.
That iconic ping that opens the song acts as a signal, announcing the arrival of Pink Floyd's defining aesthetic as they finally began to step out of Syd Barrett's long shadow. Its prodigious length, Across the Universe-inspired lyrics, and extended jam sections are reminiscent of the band's psychedelic years, but its well-crafted melodies show the band coming into their own as songwriters, and the tightened production portends Dark Side of the Moon. Echoes is also among the best early uses of Gilmour and Wright's harmonizing vocals.
It's the first song where Roger Waters begins to address more philosophical and universal concerns, grounded in the basic, primal connection all humans share at their core and the things that interfere with it. Also notable is the abstract midsection, featuring no real structure but rather a tapestry of instrumental effects that resemble whales, sirens and the rumbling of a stormy sea. The main riff, built around a distinctive descending chromatic pattern, will be recognizable to some as practically identical to the main motif used in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, which came out a full 13 years after Echoes. Waters has acknowledged the similarity in interviews and claims he could sue Webber for plagiarism (and he probably could), but he's never taken the matter to court - perhaps because he's burned out from the ugly legal turmoil between himself and his former bandmates.
John Leckie, recording engineer on Meddle and Wish You Were Here, said: "I love the interplay with the guitars and keyboards. It's a keyboard track, really, with classic Floyd chord progressions. The record had started off earlier in the year, with the Floyd putting down ideas, each of which was called "Nothing". We went up to "Nothing No 20". And then they came in three months later and put them together as one piece. They played it right through, the funky breakdown excepted, because they'd been playing it live. I went to see them at Twickenham Tech - they were still playing college gigs, and there wasn't anyone there. They did Echoes then. They probably played it the same every night. Although it sounds improvised, they weren't really improvisers, like Soft Machine - they weren't jazz musicians. I don't think they aspired to be. It was tightly rehearsed and structured."
"I remember good vibes in the studio. They were all together and contributing, like a normal band. We spent a lot of time experimenting with the technology we had. We would get two tape recorders, six feet apart, with a 10-second delay, which built into those wailing voices at the end, like creatures from the deep. We pushed the toys we had to the limit. They were trying to experiment, and make sounds no one had heard before." Here's the song:
The band’s version of this in Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, which sees the band jamming it on out in an empty Roman amphitheater, is highly recommended. Fun fact: the Beastie Boys loved this song and film so much that they incorporated the visual of the amps stamped with "Pink Floyd. London" in their video for Gratitude. This is the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii version (part 1):
This is part 2:
At #9 is the title track from their first #1 album in the UK, Atom Heart Mother (1970). Atom Heart Mother is a six-part suite, composed by all members of the band and Ron Geesin. It takes up the whole first side of the original vinyl record. It is Pink Floyd's longest uncut piece. Pink Floyd performed it live between 1970 and 1972, occasionally with a brass section and choir in 1970–71.
Recording began with the drum and bass parts, recorded in one take for the entire suite, resulting in an inconsistent tempo throughout the song. Roger Waters and Nick Mason had to play for twenty-three minutes straight. When Roger Waters heard David Gilmour playing the guitar parts for this track, he said that he thought it sounded like the theme song from the western film The Magnificent Seven.
Stanley Kubrick wanted to use this track for his film A Clockwork Orange; however, the band refused permission. Kubrick did, however, include the album cover in the film. It can be seen on a shelf in the music shop scene. Years later, Kubrick refused Roger Waters permission to use audio samples from his film 2001: A Space Odyssey on Waters' solo album Amused to Death. Tit for tat.
This is the first real effort by Pink Floyd to shake the astral boundaries they'd set (or had others set) for themselves and move towards cohesive and uniform pieces of music. It's almost purely instrumental, save for the lyric, “Silence in the studio!”.
Moving through an orchestrated, Western-sounding theme and into a haunting choir section, an ultra-funky jam section and back around to the main theme, it shows Pink Floyd at their most ambitious and musically creative up to that point. Roger Waters and David Gilmour would later decry this suite (and its namesake album) in their later years, dismissing it as "childish" and "rubbish", but most hardcore Floyd fans (me included) still hold Atom Heart Mother dear.
This is what Iain Banks, author, had to say about the track:
"I have a weakness for bands with semi-symphonic ambitions. We all - by golly, quite rightly - recoil in horror from the excesses of the triple-sleeve concept album so beloved of certain progressive bands of the '70s. But even allowing for the fact that in some ways the three-minute balls-out head-thumping thrash is what pop/rock is most truly about, it's good to hear talented musicians giving their imaginations room to play in. Floyd taking a side of an LP to launch into a widescreen abstract soundscape of madly chuntering choirs and sonic weirdness was an almost predictable step after the serial indulgences of Ummagumma, but it could still all have gone horribly, embarrassingly wrong. It didn't. This is one of their finest pieces. The Floyd always had the tunes to match their ambition, and that makes all the difference." Here it is:
This is a live version at the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris, France, by l' Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France with Ron Geesin:
This a version that I especially like, by the Le Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP):
At #8 is one of three songs from The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) to be found in our top 10. The other two are in the top 6. In fact, the top 6 is comprised of two songs each from Pink Floyd's top 3 albums, DSotM, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall. Time is the only song on the album credited to all four members of the band, though the lyrics were written by Waters. This song is about how time can slip by, but many people do not realize it until it is too late. Roger Waters got the idea when he realized he was no longer preparing for anything in life but was right in the middle of it. He has described this realization taking place at ages 28 and 29 in various interviews.
The cruelest trick that Pink Floyd ever played on their stoner fans, setting the alarm clock to end all alarm clocks to go off right when Dark Side seems to be settling into its early mellow. Blame engineer Alan Parsons and his quadrophonic sound tests for that one, but credit the band to living up to so dramatic an intro with one of their best lyrics - about Waters' sudden quarter-life crisis - a trademark wailing Gilmour solo, a sporadic two-minute drum solo that defies the easy metaphor of life as clockwork, and the band's first on-record reprise, of album opener, Breathe, cleverly following the Time closing sentiment:
"So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say."
As with much of Floyd's catalog, tension and duality play an outsized role here. The lyrics acknowledge that common late-20s fear of "ticking away the moments" until they're gone, but the song itself is an ambitious, sprawling epic that requires patience and a deep breath to appreciate. Lively, buoyant verses give way to dreamy, lethargic passages in which 10 years pass by in the blink of an eye, and the effect very much mimics how life can feel sometimes: Slow, then blisteringly fast, the years spinning around in circles until one becomes indistinguishable from the next.
There are six "normal" songs on Dark Side, and each one has a coherent point. The words are all colloquial, honest, and about something, and the meaning is underscored by the music, and the production, on every track. One key ingredient was an engineer named Alan Parsons, who seems to have been the catalyst for turning the band into the sensational creators of Dark Side and Wish You Were Here. (Parsons went on to have hits of his own, in the guise of the Alan Parsons Project.) Floyd's album originally hit number one (in the US) that summer for just one week. It took a while, but industry folks started noticing at some point that the album was still bouncing around in the lower reaches of Billboard’s albums chart, where it stayed for 14 or 15 years. Dark Side was certified 15 times platinum in 1998 - after everyone rebought copies of it on CD - and has sold about 23 million copies in the US to date. Worldwide, its total is 43 million, making it the second-largest selling album of all time, after Thriller.
Patterson Hood, of the Drive-By Truckers, said the following: "The Dark Side Of The Moon was my favorite record. It came out when I was eight, and my dad [David Hood, Muscle Shoals bassist] had it. He had all the Pink Floyd records. Dark Side… was like hearing the most exotic thing in the world. For an eight-year-old in Alabama, it was like something from another planet. It made a huge impression on me. I remember saving up my allowance money so I could buy my own copy. Time was a really big deal when I was a kid. My stereo was down on my uncle's farm and I'd go stay with him on weekends. Out on the farm, I could play it as loud as I wanted to. So when I went to bed at night, that was my 'go-to-bed' record. From eight through to 12 or 13, that was the record for me."
"I liked how dream-like it was and especially liked the hypnotic quality of it. It was a very melodic record. I followed Pink Floyd through my teens, right up until punk rock started happening at junior high school. Listen to any of the Drive-By Truckers songs I play lead guitar on and Dave Gilmour is one of the bigger influences on my playing. I look forward to playing Dark Side… for my own daughter when she's old enough. I think she'll like the weirdness of it." Here it is:
Here they are, live at Earls Court, London:
At #7 is the last song we'll hear from the Syd Barrett era. It was their second single and their second most successful hit in the UK, peaking at #6 in 1967. See Emily Play was originally presented at (and named for) a psychedelic event on the south side of the Thames, Games for May; Barrett later changed the title. Stories differ as to why. The result is an interesting amalgam of then-current styles, including Merseybeat, that lurches into a plainly psychedelic mélange. Barrett’s classic early psychedelia lyrics - "You'll lose your mind and play," etc, etc - cut deep. There's a wonderful black-and-white video to accompany it, too.
It's Pink Floyd's signature early hit in their home country, with sighing guitar slides, lush production, an expert chorus, and the least knotty melody or song structure of Barrett's tenure. Of course, Syd thought it was too poppy and begged the band not to release or promote it ("John Lennon doesn't do Top of the Pops!"), and it'd be years before the band released anything nearly so immaculate again, with or without their self-destructive frontman. All the more reason that See Emily Play stands today as such a standard-bearer for psych-pop, brilliant, precious and thoroughly transportive.
Paul Weller, leader of the Jam, then the Style Council, then a formidable solo artist still active and successful today, is also a fan of the song; in his own words:
"There are so many of Syd's songs that I love, but this is my favorite. I remember hearing it on the radio as a kid and being totally bowled over. It was a proper hit single, which is unbelievable when you look at the state of the charts now. Melodically it's brilliant, and the arrangement is so compact and concise. It does so much in less than three minutes. Sonically, it's amazing. The intro is fucking over-whelming, it still sounds fresh today. But then for me, all those great psychedelic records haven't dated at all."
"I like the fact that lyrically it's a simple song. I read an article recently that explained that it was inspired by a girl called Emily Young who hung out with the Floyd. She was friends with Anjelica Huston, I think. There's a purity about the song which reflects that."
"It's funny. At the time it came out I didn't know what Syd looked like. I had no idea that he was this amazing, beautiful-looking character. Which is odd, because I used to watch Top Of the Pops religiously every week. I didn't actually buy it until years later!"
"Syd has been an influence on all my music. I heard Start! on the radio the other day, and it reminded me that the guitar break was totally influenced by Syd. Even if it didn't sound like him, in my mind I was trying to get that psychedelic feeling over. To me, that's what Syd's Floyd were about: creating a mood you can't quite put your finger on…" Here's the video:
David Bowie was also a huge fan of the track. In fact, he covered the song for his 1973 tribute-album to the '60s, Pin Ups. Here it is:
Finally for today, at #6, is another song from The Dark Side Of The Moon. Responsible for establishing Pink Floyd as a commercial force in the US, Money gave Pink Floyd their first trans-Atlantic hit, peaking at #13, the band's second most successful single in the US.
Money likely holds the distinction of being the most-taught rock song in collegiate music appreciation courses, its seven beats per bar standing tall as an example of how pop music can subvert expectations on the sly. Like much of Pink Floyd's catalog, Money embodies the tension between subversion and conformity. It sounds both strange and familiar, using the sounds of everyday capitalism - the clinking of coins, the clanging of a cash register - to create a loop that lasts for as many beats as there are days in a week. That's no coincidence, as this is clearly a song about the sense of dull inevitability that comes with living in a society obsessed with money. It takes one of the most searing solos of Gilmour's career to blast through the noise and let some light in, but money, embodied by that creeping seven-beat loop, can only be held at bay for so long.
Someone - Waters? - coaxed out of Gilmour a remarkably tough vocal, somehow combining cynic and everyman, sage and naïf; listen closely and you can hear a very human voice straining to break out of the unnerving, unrelenting rhythm's constraints. The single is as unconventional a hard-rock record as the era produced. The album version, six-and-a-half minutes long, slides effortlessly out of the dynamic bass riff in 7/4 into a long and dazzling 4/4 Gilmour jam filled with piercing guitar lines that both undergird and de-romanticize the singer's plaints. The ride back into the main beat is a thrill and a half. This is what the band could do when it worked together - not for nothing, one of the few Pink Floyd songs, long or short, that leaves you wanting more.
(Although Roger Waters and David Gilmour had originally stated that the song had been composed primarily in 7/8 time, it was composed in 7/4, as stated by Gilmour in an interview with Guitar World magazine in 1993.)
Lyrically, Money lampoons the modern world's obsession with money and is a tongue-in-cheek look to the sad reality that money drives the vast majority of the decisions and actions of mankind - ironically, this sour take on money wound up making Pink Floyd just that, and enormous amounts of it too. A remarkable aspect of the song is that it's actually funny! - all the more amazing since Waters' sense of humor isn't one of his finest attributes. watch out for the zooming sax solo that shreds harder than most guitar clear-outs.
Andy Fairweather-Low, former member of Amen Corner and of Roger Waters' touring band, had this to say: "In 1967, Amen Corner toured with Jimi Hendrix, Floyd, The Move and The Nice. I remember listening to the Floyd for so many nights and thinking, 'I don’t get this: where's the backbeat?' And the first Floyd song I got to play bass on in 1984 was Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, which immediately took me back to 1967 and the Albert Hall. They created a new musical genre. I've been playing with Roger for a long time, touring from '84 through to last year. And that length of time says it all. Roger and I became very close. The more I've played with him, the more I've realized how many truly great songs he's written. When I started playing Money on the Dark Side… tour, I thought, 'What a riff. How the hell do you come up with something like that?' And the time signature is 7/4, then they sing over it! Another thing Roger did incredibly well was putting extraneous noises into the music - they become completely part of the foundation of the song. There's a filter in Roger's brain that tells him if something is going to work or not."
This is the single version:
This is the album's version:
This is a reggae version by the Easy Stars All-Star:
On 2 July 2005 Pink Floyd performed at the London Live 8 concert with Roger Waters rejoining David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright. It was the quartet's first performance together in over 24 years - the band's last show with Waters was at Earls Court in London on 17 June 1981. This is from that show:
Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; even though I post this early, so it's practically a 6-day week, the number of weekly visits were twice as much as the last time. True, the last one wasn't one of the better weeks, but this week is back on the right track. The three stories of the week did very well, especially the Oscar predictions. Also, there's still a lot of interest for the story from the week before, that of Zelim Bakaev, as well as for the R&B artists that I've presented. That's nice.
As far as countries are concerned, after a small break, France returned to success, reclaiming this week's #1 position. Spain didn't do as well as it usually does lately, thus dropping out of this week's top 10. The same applies to Sweden. They were replaced by all-time top tenners Italy and Russia. France, Italy, and Canada slightly increased their overall percentage, Greece, Germany, and Cyprus remained as they were, while the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates slightly decreased theirs.
Here are this week's Top 10 countries.
1. France
2. the United States
3. Greece
4. the United Kingdom
5. Germany
6. Italy
7. Cyprus
8. Canada
9. Australia
10. Russia
Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Faroe Islands, Ghana, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Martinique, Mexico, Namibia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. Happy to have you all!
And here's the all-time Top 10:
1. the United States = 31.0%
2. France = 22.9%
3. the United Kingdom = 8.5%
4. Greece = 7.9%
5. Russia = 3.3%
6. Germany = 2.4%
7. Cyprus = 1.26%
8. Italy = 1.19%
9. Canada = 1.04%
10. the United Arab Emirates = 0.42%
That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!
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