Hello, my friends, old and new, and a very happy New Year to you all! After festive eating, drinking, partying, and whatever, here, to cleanse your palate, is the Pink Floyd top 50 countdown.
At #30 on our list is yet another song from The Wall (1979), called Run Like Hell. It was released as a single in 1980, reaching #15 in the Canadian singles chart as well as #18 in Sweden. The sound is amazing in this Gilmour track. (Waters did the words.) Great vocal track too, and I think the band does a fine job of deconstructing the chugging guitar riff that had fueled so many sex-charged songs before it.
Not like it's surprising that nobody ever thought to combine the strengths of Chic and Rush before Pink Floyd, but the fact that Floyd did, and came up with The Wall's side-four highlight in the process, is forever one for the top of the band's resume. Like Young Lust and Another Brick, it's at least based in the steady thump of disco, but unlike those songs, it's still mostly led by its guitars, the galloping, chiming six-strings of Gilmour. It might be the most anthemic chest-beater Floyd ever devised, but it's also one of the group's most unsettling, with dramatic tonal shifts before the explicitly fascistic Waters-as-Pink verses, and some of the singer's most stomach-churning, guttural wails ("If they catch you in the backseat trying to pick her locks/ They're gonna send you back to mother in a cardboard box!"). Unlike Us and Them, it's impossible to imagine any other band even attempting a song like Run Like Hell, but that just makes you grateful to have had such extended access to Floyd's singular dementia.
This is the version in Alan Parker's film, together with Waiting For the Worms:
This is a terrific live version, from August 9th, 1980:
At #29 is Careful With That Axe, Eugene. The song was originally released as the B-side of their single Point Me at the Sky and is also featured on the Relics compilation album; live versions can also be found on Ummagumma and in the film Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii. Pink Floyd re-recorded the track for Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point, retitling it Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up on the film's soundtrack album. My favorite version is the live one, found in Ummagumma (1969).
Never officially released on a studio album, Careful with That Axe, Eugene was one of the first fully collaborative pieces written by Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett's departure. Whereas at first, David Gilmour seemed to struggle to hone his sound as the group's new guitarist, Careful with That Axe is one of the first signs of his potential, creating an airy, ethereal atmosphere during the buildup and providing bluesy lead work during Roger Waters' famous scream section. As it represented a band finding its feet after losing its original leader, Careful with That Axe quickly became a fan favorite and a staple of early live shows.
A textbook acid-rock freakout, and much more effective with the live build on the Ummagumma version than in the more abbreviated form as the B-side to the largely forgettable Point Me at the Sky. You need those first three minutes of eerie falsetto, menacing organ, and lightly plodding bass before Waters offers the bad omen of the whispered title phrase, and the song absolutely explodes with his screaming - a hurricane howl that would become a signature sonic element of the band in the decade to come. Somewhere, a young Alan Vega was taking careful notes.
Genesis P Orridge, of Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle (we have presented him here: Genesis P Orridge), remembers:
"By 1969, I was living in the HoHo Funhouse, a semi-commune full of freaks in an old fruit warehouse in Hull. Pink Floyd were touring Ummagumma and the university asked us to do the light show. Everyone was stoned and tripping, but I vividly remember Careful With That Axe, Eugene, which nobody had heard yet and seemed to go on for three hours. We had these glass slides with liquid in, and an epidioscope, onto which we put live maggots. So you had this psychedelic light show, with six-foot-long maggots crawling across. Floyd played their first set, then came back on wearing overalls from a building site and carrying wood, a saw, some hammers and some nails. And they started building a very ramshackle table, sat on the wooden boxes they’d just made and had a tea break. Pre-industrial rock!"
This is the Ummagumma live version:
This is the Live at Pompeii version:
This is the single version:
At #28 is Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, from the band's second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968). This Roger Waters piece was a staple of Pink Floyd concerts from the late 60s into around 1973. As a very curious bit of trivia, it's the only song in their catalog which features both Dave Gilmour and Syd Barrett on guitar. However, it's a mainly rhythm-section and keyboard dominated song so you can't really discern the guitar parts all that well. Waters continues to perform this song at certain live events.
It's the passing of the torch from the Barrett era to the Gilmour era of Pink Floyd - and it's a chillingly beautiful, neon-green-glowing torch, at that. Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun is the only Floyd song with all five canonical Floyd members playing on it, and the balance it strikes between Barrett's improvisational heat-vision jamming and the ultra-controlled cacophony of the band's later highlights is downright eerie - unlike most of the band's extended workouts, the song never really detonates, instead producing a hypnotizing simmer that remains unmatched by the band before or since.
This is what band member Nick Mason had to say about it:
"It's a good example of something that we got our teeth into, which is that not everything had to be flat out all the time. We could be a bit more subtle and laid back. I can see now more clearly where the influences came from, so far as the drums are concerned. Do you remember a film called Jazz On A Summer’s Day? There was a sequence in that where Chico Hamilton played with mallets. I always had this in the back of my mind, long before Pink Floyd were even thought of, as something that was fantastically cool. Ginger [Baker] also played mallets with Cream on We're Going Wrong. It's that whole thing about being able to repress, instead of the endless, wild banging away that characterizes so much rock music. And I think that this is also a wonderful, held-back drum part."
"We recorded this around the time that Syd left. Before it all went wrong, ha ha! I'm not entirely sure if Syd was at this recording session or not – it was one of the Abbey Road dates where Syd was around for some but not others. But he would have dropped quite easily into proceedings were he there."
"I think you can see this as us not so much looking for a new direction rather than just developing something that was already kicked off – songs like Interstellar Overdrive and Astronomy Domine. We started getting into the business of extending everything, particularly anything we played live. It soon became unthinkable that we'd go on stage and begin and end a song within six or seven minutes."
"Actually I think there was quite a lot of structure to these songs, even if it doesn't sound like it! When we were doing Saucer – even tracks like Interstellar Overdrive – there was a move to put some structure into it, there's actually quite a disciplined structure of sorts. And certainly, A Saucerful Of Secrets was highly structured in the way that it worked. Having said that, we went on to release stuff like Echoes and a number of pieces that could be unspeakably open-ended and witter on for as long as anyone had the patience!"
"It's weird that, around 1967-'68, we all still thought we wanted to be an R'n'B band. We all thought it terribly important to perm our hair and wear leather trousers. But it's absolutely true what David and Roger say about our lack of musicianship being turned into a positive attribute. As we admired those fairly "authentic" R'n'B musicians like Eric Clapton and John Mayall, we couldn't quite do that, so we ended up doing something else. And one positive product of that – one that we weren't aware of at the time! – was the significance of having our own material. So many great artists like John Mayall and Aynsley Dunbar would release albums where virtually every song was a traditional blues song, arranged by them. I think our limitations meant that we ended up making music like Set The Controls…. I still think it sounds fantastic and I love playing it today."
This is the A Saucerful of Secrets version:
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun stays true to Barrett's psychedelic influence but replaces the fallen genius's characteristic whimsy with a more formal, somber and haunting tone, one that would become common in Pink Floyd's later work. Driven by a hypnotic, Eastern-tinged bass line, the studio version pales in comparison to its wildly experimental, extended versions of Floyd's live shows of the era. The live half of Ummagumma showcases Set the Controls at its most riveting and rewarding:
This is the Live at Pompeii version:
#27 marks the first time in this list that we come across a song (actually 3 songs) from the band's most famous album, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), one of the best-reviewed and best-selling album of all-time. And what better way to begin talking about this legendary album than from the start?
Most critics and Floyd fans agree that Speak To Me and Breathe In The Air form a thematic entity; for me, the following song, On The Run, belongs in there too. I consider Breathe In The Air as the main song, with Speak To Me as the intro and On The Run as the outro. The slow, faint pulse of a heartbeat that opens the sound collage Speak to Me and segues into Breathe has nearly become a cliché thanks to the immense stature of Dark Side, but it's an entirely appropriate opening effect for an album that so candidly examines the core of life and the human condition. Breathe, replete with gorgeous slide guitar work from David Gilmour and keyboardist Richard Wright's jazzy chord progressions, is a laid-back, melancholy prelude to the madness that follows it. The song also features some of Waters's most simple, direct lyrics.
The beginning to one of the most famous albums in rock history pretty successfully lays the groundwork for what's to come, with the Speak to Me intro essentially acting as a teaser trailer for the album's action highlights (the Money cash register, the Brain Damage cackle) and the sighing guitar slides of Breathe In The Air establishing the album's gorgeous Neil Young-across-the-fifth-dimension core jamminess. "Don't be afraid to care," Gilmour advises, words the band would either ignore or follow way too closely later in their career, depending on your perspective.
Life is too short to yadda yadda yadda. You've heard that ol' adage, right? Probably from your parents, your teachers, or even your friends. It's good advice, though, and traditionally a bit we often forget. Reason being, life makes it so easy to get bent out of shape over the smallest details, and that's a damn shame since life itself is a very beautiful thing. That's more or less the conceit to Breathe In The Air, yet the Dark Side of the Moon opener also suggests everything is par for the course - the love, the sadness, the chaos, the serenity, it's all good. As Gilmour advises (via Waters' own lyrics), "For long you live and high you fly/ But only if you ride the tide/ And balanced on the biggest wave/ You race towards an early grave." In other words, take those risks, make those leaps, but never lose your footing. Simple, cogent, timeless.
From the human, organic sounds and lyrical positivity of Breathe In The Air, we then go to the delectable sound collage that is On The Run. Note the sequencer programming; a simple melody is programmed in and then distorted and manipulated (here, obviously, sped up, among other things). It's one of the earliest examples of the uses of this eerie and powerful new tool, which various companies were making and with which Pete Townshend and Brian Eno, among others, had been experimenting. Waters and Gilmour do a great job of not just using the effects to wow listeners, though they do that, but also subordinating them into the meaning needed by the song, presumably the demands and vicissitudes of modern life, right down to being chased by helicopters. Among other things, you could make the argument it’s an important step on the way to ambient, and Dark Side would not be the album it is if this track were absent. I also sense that On The Run also influenced Giorgio Moroder, especially in his hit instrumental from Midnight Express, Chase.
Guy Garvey, of Elbow, commented on Breathe In The Air:
"My sisters loved The Dark Side Of The Moon, so it was always playing somewhere in the house. At 17 or 18, I had an acid experience and it made me listen to the album in a completely different way. I think Pink Floyd's ethos for Dark Side… was very different, too. It was industrial, experimental rock and represented a machine-made freedom. They were utilizing everything at their disposal, experimenting within themselves. It was a classic example of using the studio as an instrument. Breathe is as simple as dimples in the way it's sung, but they use an interesting vocal tracking style. The lyrics are delivered ad hoc, then tracked to lend them weight. It was something Pete Waterman later picked up, but that was to protect a bad singer. Pink Floyd put that song down as they felt it, then bolstered it to give it real weight. It was something else altogether."
This is the version that originally appeared on the album:
This is the quadrophonic mix:
Here they are, live at Earl's Court, London, 1994:
Finally for today, at #26, is Astronomy Domine, from Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). The song was written by Barrett and sung by Barrett and Wright. It was quite appropriate that the first song to ever appear on a Pink Floyd LP should begin with the sound of their manager reading the names of the planets over a megaphone, and unfold with zooming guitars, Morse code synths, pounding drums and disembodied vocals. The band would find many new and innovative ways to ready their brew for mass consumption - and it's been rightly pointed out that the band never really sang about space that much after this - but all the ingredients for their mega-success were still pretty much right there from the beginning.
It is unquestionably a major song, its hints of chaos and even danger a landmark in the development of psychedelic rock. The descending guitar line has an almost punk feel. And it really worked live. Unfortunately, Barrett's beginning was his end. By the time the band had finished its first album, it was obvious Barrett was damaged. There's no official diagnosis of his condition, but based on the surviving record it seems safe to say that Barrett was an early acid casualty. "He completely disappeared into himself," a friend said. And when, temporarily, he came out, he did things like trade away his car to a passerby for a pack of cigarettes. His ability to contribute deteriorated to the point where the band brought on Gilmour to play guitar for him; they even thought they might pull off a Brian Wilson arrangement, where Barrett could stay offstage and write the songs. But that couldn't happen. Eventually, the band stopped picking him up for performances, and Gilmour stepped up to become the group's main vocalist.
Peter Jenner, Floyd's manager between 1966-1968, remembers: "I was at the studio when they were making the first LP. Syd suddenly said, 'Let's have you read a bit through a megaphone.' And I was game for that, so they used it on the song. Syd had me read bits from a book of his, from which he was getting all his info about astronomy. Syd wasn't particularly into astronomy, it's more a case of us all being hippies and groovy and 'wow! man.' In that context, it worked. Syd's music was that of a very English eccentric."
This is the The Piper at the Gates of Dawn version:
This is the Ummagumma live version:
Here they are, live on BBC 1, in 1967. Listen to the views of an old-fashioned musician and notice how the world has changed:
Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; this week there was a new explosion in the number of visits, a 69% increase compared to a week that had already had a record number of them. It's a new record, then... To put things in perspective, we have as many visits every day now, as we used to have in a full week 18 months ago. Thank you, everyone, for your vote of confidence and for reading the message in a bottle that I sent each time.
Which stories were the most visited? All the new ones did great, but the old ones did too. For instance, The Doors Top 50 Countdown (#40-36) was a story that was massively visited, becoming the most popular story of the week.
As far as countries are concerned, France rode a second wave of victory, scoring almost 8 times as many visits as this week's #2, the United States, once again amazingly contributing about two-thirds of this week's visits.
The huge presence of France made all other major players suffer a decrease in their all-time percentage. The countries mostly affected were France's direct "adversaries", the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece, and Russia. The others, less so.
Here are this week's Top 10 countries.
1. France
2. the United States
3. the United Kingdom
4. Greece
5. Italy
6. Cyprus
7. Germany
8. Spain
9. Canada
10. Australia
Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Argentina, Austria, Azerbaijan, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Finland, French Polynesia, Georgia, Ghana, Guadeloupe, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Martinique, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Palestine, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Vietnam, and Zambia. Happy to have you all!
And here's the all-time Top 10:
1. the United States = 33.7%
2. France = 16.6%
3. the United Kingdom = 9.0%
4. Greece = 8.3%
5. Russia = 3.8%
6. Germany = 2.7%
7. Italy = 1.35%
8. Cyprus = 1.33%
9. Canada = 1.07%
10. the United Arab Emirates = 0.48%
That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!
Excellent as always!!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your amazingly kind words, Nikolas!
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