The Pink Floyd Top 50 Countdown (#25-21) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends, old and new! Another week has come and gone, which mean it's time for the Pink Floyd top 50 countdown.

At #25 on our list is the first song that we encounter from Pink Floyd's classic album, Wish You Were Here (1975). Throbbing Gristle are generally credited with kick-starting industrial music, but Welcome to the Machine brought aspects of the genre into the mainstream decades before Nine Inch Nails was a twinkle in Trent Reznor's eye. It's among the densest tracks in Pink Floyd's catalog, showcasing the band's ability to pile up layer upon layer of Wright's synthesizers in the studio and come out the other side with a cohesive mix - and yet it’s simultaneously an astounding example of Gilmour's minimalist expertise. His legendary ability to sustain a note holds up even when his guitar is acting in a rhythm capacity, strumming cosmic chords. Those sonics - where else are you gonna hear bass that throbs like muscle pain, acoustic chords where every individual note stabs like an icicle to the back, or synths that shoot off like laser fireworks in the sky?

Talk about musique concrète - the slabs of sound here are massive; this is one of the greatest sci-fi rock songs of all time. The words track the childhood of what seems to be a rock star in the making - "You bought a guitar / To punish your ma" - with ominous results. The mix of the high electronics and prominent acoustic guitar sets up a tension; you wait for the vocals to come and buttress the acoustic instrument. Instead, they are a mechanical scream. (It's another one of Gilmour's most amazing vocal performances.) One of the great parts of the Pink Floyd story is how Waters became everything he'd written about. He acted out his bildungsroman even as he wrote it. He fired Wright, whom he'd known since he was a teen. He fell out with Hipgnosis, the design firm that had done the album covers since Saucerful of Secrets. Finally, he divorced himself from the people who'd made everything he'd wanted to do possible, often despite his, Waters', best efforts to sabotage it all. Why, it's almost as if he were building a wall around himself, becoming the machine he once railed against. That, Ms. Morissette, is what you call ironic.

This is the music video, created by Gerald Scarfe:

This is a studio demo of the song:

This is live in Paris, 1977:

At #24 is yet another song from The Wall (1979). Pink Floyd's political bent grew more pronounced as Roger Waters' influence became more dominant, but rarely was it ever as pretty as it was on Goodbye Blue Sky - perhaps because this anti-war lamentation invokes the WWII demise of Waters' own father, documenting his vulnerability in a way that the philosophical musings of Dark Side and the caustic commentary of Animals never could. It's telling that Waters himself doesn't sing on the track. Instead, David Gilmour's vocal harmonies, a crucial but oft-overlooked aspect of Floyd's aesthetic, float toward the heavens like the spirit of Waters' old man.

It's a brief Blitz ballad with some of the most heavenly harmonies acoustic picking of the band's career, the serenity of the main refrain chillingly undercut by the creeping synths and shellshocked lyrics ("Did-did-did you see the falling bombs?") on the verses. They may have nicked the outro melody from the chorus to The Rolling Stones' Ruby Tuesday from a decade earlier, but Goodbye Blue Sky ended up lending the main riff to Def Leppard's Hysteria a decade later, so it evens out.

This is the album's version:

A short, acoustic-based piece, Goodbye Blue Sky morphs almost impossibly from gentle, beautiful harmonic passages into chilling, harrowing darkness multiple times during its less-than-three-minute run. In the context of The Wall's story, it's a lament for the failure of the post-war dream, a promise that involvement in war and conflict would help solve the world's problems and lead to better society. It also stays consistent with the message of the English government's disregard for those who suffered because of it. Best seen along with its animated sequence from The Wall film, which juxtaposes elements of Nazism with Christianity amid a horrifying, war-torn landscape. This is that version:

This is what Gerald Scarfe, the illustrator/animator of The Wall album, stage-show, and movie has to say:

"Roger said he had this magnum opus he wanted to produce. He came to my house and played me the raw tapes, watching like a hawk. There was an awkward silence. Roger said, 'I feel like I've pulled down my trousers and shat in front of you.' At that point, The Wall didn't mean a lot to me. But when Roger talked to me about what was behind it, we had in common being affected by the Second World War. Roger's father had been killed in it, and I'd had a miserable time. 'Did you see the frightened ones, did you hear the falling bombs / The planes are all long gone, but the pain lingers on' - those are lines in Goodbye Blue Sky I can very much identify with. I was four when the war started. I was born into a world of ultimate chaos. I have very strong memories of air raid shelters and having to wear these ghastly gas masks. As an asthmatic, I couldn't breathe. I used all of that in the animation for Goodbye Blue Sky in the film - the frightened troglodytes have gas masks for heads and are crouching underground. The song and the animation has a sadness that resonates with my real past very strongly. And with Roger's."

This is a live version recorded on August 9th, 1980:

The young boy's voice heard at the beginning of the song belongs to Harry Waters, Roger's son. For the 1990 large-scale concert The Wall - Live in Berlin, vocals for this song were provided by Joni Mitchell, with visuals largely reprised from the film version:

At #23 is another song from The Wall, in fact, two songs. In the Flesh? opens the album; the first few seconds of the song are very quiet and feature the melody of the song Outside the Wall, which is the album's closing track. The recording begins abruptly in mid-song, and a man quietly speaks the phrase "... we came in?" At the end of the album, the recording of Outside the Wall cuts off abruptly, as the man says "Isn't this where..." This demonstrates a cyclical nature to the concept of the album, much in the way that The Dark Side of the Moon opens and closes with the sound of a heartbeat.

"So ya thought ya might like to... go to the show?" Though it hardly ended up one of its most famous tracks, "In the Flesh?" is the best kickoff The Wall could've asked for, Waters-as-Pink literally shouting stage directions as he cues the album's grand production, with Gilmour's soaring riffs and Wright's glowing organs giving him all the backing he could possibly need from the pit. By song's end, the dive-bombers are humming, the babies are crying, and the audience is silently screaming from the rafters.

This is the movie version:

This is Roger Waters' solo performance:

In the Flesh (without the question mark) reprises the opening song. In the film, Pink’s disintegration is complete. He’s reborn into something like a fascist leader, and we head into the climax of the film and record. The introduction of the song features the same explosive organ sequence heard in the introduction to In the Flesh?. Following this, the song then moves into a slightly quieter choir chorus, before the lyrical section. The end of the song features another organ sequence, and the song fades out to the chanting of "Pink! Floyd! Pink! Floyd!"

This is the movie version:

This is Roger Waters' solo performance in 2006:

The combination of both versions carries a highly dramatic impact; the doubting cynic of part one is now a full-on fascist thug in part 2. What's really interesting is the dichotomy presented here: The music is rousing Stadium Rock turned up to the maximum, while the lyrics show contempt of the moral and aesthetic values that this very type of music represents.

A similar two-parter is found at #22. Pigs On The Wing is divided into two parts, which are the first and last tracks of Animals (1977). Both are much shorter in duration, each part clocking at under a minute and a half, while the other three are over 10 minutes in length each. Also, both are in stark contrast to the album's middle three misanthropic songs and suggest that companionship can help us overcome our flaws. Without the track on Animals, Waters thought the album "would have just been a kind of scream of rage".

According to Nick Mason, and confirmed by Waters, it is a love song directed towards Waters' new wife at the time, Carolyne. She was really the only one of Waters' friends he had ever met who could hold her own in an argument with Waters; according to Mason, you had to be very good with semantics to win an argument against Waters. Waters wrote the song because that's all he had been looking for all along; someone who could stand up to him, an equal. The former piece of the song conveys a theme of despondency and isolation imposed upon the individual resulting from the societal pressures which work to separate the masses, a theme developed in the following track, "Dogs". Waters conveys a hopeful theme in the latter portion of the song, illustrating the strength and emotional safety as a result of unity among individuals, a safety Waters felt quickly upon meeting Carolyne.

A special version of the song was made for the 8-track cartridge release. The 8-track format featured a loop-play function where the end of the cassette was looped with the beginning of the cassette, allowing an album to play continuously without having to turn over the cassette. To exploit this feature, the special 8-track version of the song linked part 2 and part 1 with a guitar solo, performed by Snowy White. I give you this version here:

Finally for today, at #21, is a song from the band's first #1 album in the UK, Atom Heart Mother (1970). If is the first soul-bearing song by Roger Waters. There are times when I think that this song says more by way of its honest simplicity than many of his other songs that contain shout-from-the-rooftops rhetorics could ever achieve. It's a wonderful song bemoaning the growing distance between people.

This is what Ron Geesin, the orchestrator of the Atom Heart Mother (Suite), has to say:

"If reveals something of what Roger Waters really was inside. At the time, I was very close to Roger. But then I fell out with him. I'd just had enough. The fella was paranoid and I'd had one bit of nonsense too many. If is a kind of therapy. Roger could not face closeness, yet he needed it. Everybody needs friends, male and female, but he couldn't cope with it. His way of dealing with it was by either attacking people or hiding. Basically, If is Roger Waters saying I'd like to make an album but haven't got enough material. When Roger and I were close, playing golf together and socializing, he was always on about leaving the group. I told him the best thing to do was get up and do it, but he didn't."

Here it is:

This is a live version at Rosemont Horizon, Chicago, IL, USA - 26th July 1984. Accompanying Waters is none other than Eric Clapton:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; the number of visits has plateaued this week, which is only natural, as it was climbing insanely during the last couple of weeks. Still, we're talking about numbers that only existed right after George Michael's passing. The difference is, those numbers were story-specific, while the new visitors spread the wealth to all the stories.

Speaking of which, the stories most preferred by our visitors are the countdowns; the Pink Floyd, the Doors, the Chuck Berry, and the Led Zeppelin Countdown all did great during the week. The Chic story was another winner.

As far as countries are concerned, France continued galloping at a frenzied pace, while the other major players did OK but were no match to France, which was easily #1 for the week, while shortening the distance with the United States on the all-time chart. Speaking of which, Cyprus did relatively better than the rest, overtaking Italy (only just) to move to #7 on that chart.

Here are this week's Top 10 countries.

1. France

2. the United States

3. the United Kingdom

4. Greece

5. Russia

6. Canada

7. Spain

8. Cyprus

9. Australia

10. Germany

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Ecuador, French Polynesia, Guyana, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Laos, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, US Virgin Islands, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 32.2%

2. France = 20.1%

3. the United Kingdom = 8.8%

4. Greece = 8.0%

5. Russia = 3.6%

6. Germany = 2.5%

7. Cyprus = 1.27%

8. Italy = 1.26%

9. Canada = 1.03%

10. the United Arab Emirates = 0.45%

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