Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  Meanwhile, I realized that drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright were involving themselves less and less in the creative process. The situation continued to the point at which Waters—effectively considering himself the band’s leader—dismissed Wright from the band; Pink Floyd’s founding keyboardist would stay on for The Wall sessions and its limited-engagement tour as a paid employee.

  By most reports, guitarist David Gilmour was less than enchanted with the band’s late 1970s musical direction. Though some of the most musically fulfilling moments on The Wall come courtesy of Gilmour’s trademark lead guitar and mellifluous vocals, The Wall was never his project.

  The Wall would be performed live by Pink Floyd in only three cities: New York, Los Angeles, and London. The massive stage setup made regular touring impossible, and in any event the band wasn’t getting along very well. The Wall dates included four extra musicians—masked doppelgangers for Waters, Wright, Mason, and Gilmour—which meant that those lucky few who did witness Pink Floyd in concert on that tour could never really be sure of who they were watching and hearing.

  In 1982, a film version of The Wall was released. A nightmarish film with no dialogue, The Wall brought Waters’s terrifying vision to the big screen. I recall seeing it upon its theatrical release; my then-girlfriend was so emotionally distraught by the onscreen images that she vomited. In the film, the dark themes that had increasingly been at the center of Pink Floyd’s music were taken to their extremes, often stripped of subtlety and nuance. Without a doubt, Waters’s musical narrative had a great deal to recommend it, primarily in his addressing concepts like fascism, totalitarianism, and (not for the first time) mental illness. But musically, The Wall could be a bit ponderous; many of the songs were built around a single three-note motif. While that compositional method is impressive in its own way, as a listening experience, it can occasionally border on the dull.

  In 1983, Pink Floyd released The Final Cut. That portentous title signaled many things, few of which were good news for longtime fans of the group. Waters had assumed total control of the band; Wright was completely absent; Mason allowed session drummers to play his parts while he concerned himself with the album’s (admittedly stunning) three-dimensional “holophonics” soundscape. And Gilmour’s contribution to The Final Cut was limited to a co-write on one song, the somewhat dire “Not Now John,” a tune that—pointedly or not—contained the memorable line (sung by Gilmour), “Fuck all that.” Not unsurprisingly, the “classic” lineup of Pink Floyd ceased operations not long thereafter.

  Like me, many of those who followed Pink Floyd in the years between The Dark Side of the Moon and The Final Cut were largely unaware of what the band had done before that period. And that fact highlights a remarkable feature of Pink Floyd’s popularity: casual fans knew of the band’s work from The Dark Side of the Moon onward; more serious students of the group were familiar with the band’s 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, made when Pink Floyd was led by its founder, Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett.

  But only the hardest of hardcore Pink Floyd fans—a label with which I began to identify by the end of the seventies—had more than a passing knowledge of the music made after Piper and before Dark Side. Which raises a compelling question: how did Pink Floyd make the journey from early 1968—when Barrett left, and the band’s management departed with him—to spring 1973 when they released The Dark Side of the Moon? Syd Barrett had been the founder, the leader, the public face, the primary (nearly exclusive) songwriter of Pink Floyd since its start. With him gone, the band suddenly found itself adrift creatively.

  In the short space of just over five years, the Pink Floyd lineup of David Gilmour (taking over for Barrett on guitar), Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright would embark upon numerous experiments, follow many musical blind alleys, and pursue myriad creative directions, all in search of their collective musical expression.

  The Dark Side of the Moon didn’t create itself out of nothing. The seeds for most every enduring quality found in the Pink Floyd experience—the lyrics, the musical textures, the overall presentation—all developed across the six albums, related tours, and other projects that the band worked on in the years between Piper and Dark Side. At various points in their history, the band members have admitted as much.

  The goal of Reinventing Pink Floyd is to explore that little-known period, uncovering clues to the band’s eventual direction by examining what Pink Floyd did in those years. Happily, the band’s activities during 1968–1973 are surprisingly well-documented, if one knows where to look. The collectors’ community has amassed a huge trove of live Pink Floyd concert recordings; all of these are unauthorized, it should be noted. But taken together, those recordings provide a running chronicle of the band’s development as a creative, performing unit. Fans recorded approximately one hundred Pink Floyd concerts in the period after Barrett’s departure and before the band began presenting material that would see release as The Dark Side of the Moon.

  2016’s Pink Floyd—The Early Years box set (with all of its volumes—save one—released individually in 2017) helped fill many gaps in the band’s story; it included some of the bootlegged material in better quality, along with a heretofore unexpected cache of material that had not already made its way into the hands of collectors of ROIOs (“Recordings of Indeterminate Origin,” a term coined by hardcore Pink Floyd fans and collectors).

  Pink Floyd experimented with long-form compositions, collaborations with outside composers, writing for film soundtracks, and even cobbling together a kind of musical narrative by sequencing already existing material. Some of these musical excursions were very successful, and suggested directions the band might take in future projects. Others were seen by the band as failures, with Pink Floyd all but disowning the results. But with the benefit of nearly a half century’s hindsight, and with the added context of The Early Years material and current-day interviews with many people connected in one way or another to the band, all can be recognized and appreciated as relevant pieces of the overall Pink Floyd picture. Nearly everything the band did would, in one way or another, provide clues to the band’s eventual and wildly successful direction.

  In a 1979 career-spanning critical review of Pink Floyd’s catalog in the Rolling Stone Record Guide, reviewer Bart Testa made an astute observation: “Pink Floyd is a band that’s never thrown away a single idea.” While on its face that may seem a harsh assessment, there’s truth in the assertion. Fans of The Dark Side of the Moon and the band’s later work have reason to be thankful for that characteristic of Pink Floyd’s modus operandi, as a dogged return to partly developed ideas—along with ongoing refinement of those ideas—culminated in the creation of one of the most popular and critically acclaimed albums in the history of recorded music. What’s often forgotten—or at least overlooked—is the wealth of gems that Pink Floyd created in the run-up to making DSOTM.

  Reinventing Pink Floyd aims to help correct that oversight.

  Part I

  Apples and Oranges (1966–1967)

  Chapter 1

  Let’s Roll Another One

  On Friday, March 10, 1967, the debut single by Pink Floyd was released in the United Kingdom on Columbia Records. “Arnold Layne” and its B-side, “Candy and a Currant Bun,” represented two slices of the nascent pop-psychedelic sounds coming into vogue in the British music scene. Both tunes were composed by Pink Floyd’s leader, twenty-one-year-old Cambridge-born guitarist Syd Barrett.

  The group had been together in one form or another for several years; various permutations of the band had gone by various other names, including The Tea Set, Leonard’s Lodgers, Sigma 6, The Meggadeaths, the Abdads, and The Spectrum Five. As early as 1963, three original members of what would come to be known as Pink Floyd—Roger Waters and keyboardist Richard Wright (both born in 1943) and drummer Nick Mason (born 1944)—had played together in groups that performed in venues such as London’s Marquee Ballroom. Notably, at that stage Waters was on g
uitar, not bass.

  The first documented use of the Pink Floyd name came in March 1965 when the four-piece, Barrett-led group auditioned at London’s Beat City Club; their bid to get on the venue’s schedule failed. And while the band’s fortunes with regard to securing live gigs would soon change, the group had already made its first foray into a recording studio more than two years before the release of the Columbia single.

  Sometime between December 1964 and February 1965—perhaps on more than one occasion—the band visited Decca Studios in West Hampstead, London, where they recorded six songs. At that stage, the group was probably still going by the name The Tea Set; the band included lead guitarist Rado “Bob” Klose as well as guest vocalist Juliette Gale, later to become Rick Wright’s first wife. Dubbed copies of two songs cut at that session—the Barrett original “Lucy Leave” and a cover of blues singer-guitarist Slim Harpo’s 1957 B-side “I’m a King Bee”—circulated underground among Pink Floyd collectors as early as the 1990s; hardcore fans argued among themselves as to whether the tunes were indeed Barrett and company.

  With Parlophone Records’ November 2015 release—extremely limited at just over 1,000 copies—of a vinyl EP (Extended Play record) titled 1965: Their First Recordings, the embryonic Pink Floyd’s Decca session tapes received their first legal release. For those who had grown up on a sonic diet of Pink Floyd circa The Dark Side of the Moon and later albums, there would be little on Their First Recordings that would provide any kind of sonic continuity; the similarities between a slight tune like Barrett’s “Remember Me” and, say, DSOTM’s “Brain Damage” are all but nonexistent. With its shouted rhythm and blues arrangement, “Remember Me” has more in common with early sides by the Rolling Stones.

  Nonetheless, there are some clues to Pink Floyd’s early sound contained on those 1965 sessions. While Rick Wright focuses primarily on playing a Wurlitzer electric piano, the guitar work—courtesy of Klose and Barrett—exhibits a slashing style that would become a feature of the Pink Floyd sound circa 1967. Four of the six tunes from the Decca sessions are Syd Barrett originals, and “Lucy Leave” bears the greatest resemblance to the style the four-man band would employ two years later. “Lucy Leave” is based upon a familiar R&B melodic line, and Barrett repeatedly wails “leave,” extending the word across several measures. But what’s most distinctive about the tune—which is for most of its three minutes little more than a two-chord vamp—are the start-and-stop sections of the melody that punctuate the verses and choruses, and the slightly nonstandard (by pop measures, anyway) chord choices.

  Taken together, the seemingly out-of-place chords in “Lucy Leave” form the “Devil’s interval”—also known as the Devil’s tritone or flatted-fifth, a musical device employed since the Middle Ages to convey dread and doom. It’s wholly open to conjecture whether Syd Barrett discovered the interval via old blues records—he would name his band after little-known American blues artists Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, after all—or hearing it in the tony academic environs of his native Cambridge. Or perhaps the musically self-trained guitarist came up with it—savant-like—completely on his own.

  “Double O Bo” is a thin rewrite of any given tune from the catalog of Elias McDaniel (better known as Bo Diddley), but even it displays a few qualities that elevate the tune above being a faceless entry in the “shave and a haircut, two bits” rock style. Once again, Barrett inserts some unexpected chords to break up the musical monotony.

  “Butterfly” is another R&B tune, but the song’s arrangement presages Barrett’s later tendency in songwriting toward bending song structure to fit his lyrics. Like American country bluesmen of old—musicians to whom he would acknowledge a clear debt—Barrett developed a style that often meant inserting or dropping a beat or two (or more) into a musical phrase to allow his wordplay to fit into the song’s structure. While “Butterfly” is fairly conventional stuff, it is perhaps the earliest recorded example of Barrett moving in this direction, and—then as now—is somewhat unconventional by pop music standards.

  While the February 1965 demo (demonstration recording) sessions are primarily a showcase of Syd Barrett’s songwriting and vocals, bassist Roger Waters would place one of his original songs on the tape as well. Decidedly less prolific a songwriter than Syd, the twenty-one-year-old Waters nonetheless penned the chirpy “Walk With Me Sydney.” With a Barrett lead vocal and Gale doubling the lead vocal in an upper register, “Walk With Me Sydney” is, more or less, a love song. That alone qualifies it as something of an anomaly among Waters’s songwriting. And though humor is a rare—and under-recognized—part of Waters’s lyrics, “Sydney” is positively silly. With its lyrical complaints of flat feet, fallen arches, meningitis, peritonitis, delirium tremens, and other maladies, the song showcases Roger Waters’s love of the darker side of humor, all within the context of a melody that wouldn’t be out of place on a Herman’s Hermits record.

  Taken as a whole, the recordings featured on 1965: Their First Recordings are a flatly produced session, and represent little beyond a slice of Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett juvenilia. Their interest lies primary among Pink Floyd completists and those seeking to understand the group’s complete body of work. The contents of Their First Recordings would receive widespread release in 2016 as part of the box set The Early Years 1965–1972, and as part of a smaller break-out of that set, 2017’s four-disc 1965–1967: Cambridge St/ation. Viewed in context with the later “Arnold Layne,” the six songs from the Decca sessions provide a kind of aural benchmark against which the group’s subsequent work may be viewed.

  Notwithstanding a mid-January 1967 session for the soundtrack of the film Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, the January 23 “Arnold Layne” session at London’s Sound Techniques Studio would be Pink Floyd’s studio debut. With American expatriate Joe Boyd—an early champion of the band—producing the sessions, Pink Floyd recorded Syd Barrett’s song about a man who enjoyed stealing women’s clothing off of wash lines and then wearing the clothing. Near the song’s end, listeners learn Layne’s sad fate: he is arrested and sent to jail.

  The melody of “Arnold Layne” features descending chord progressions, a prominent feature of Barrett’s songwriting. Like many of the tracks recorded in the band’s first year under contract with EMI (Electrical and Musical Industries, parent company of Columbia, the label that would release the band’s music in the UK), “Arnold Layne” sports an instrumental break that spotlights Richard Wright’s Farfisa organ skills. While Barrett was the band’s chief songwriter, his instrumental skills were no equal to the more classically trained Wright, so giving the solo spot over to the keyboardist—at least on pop recording dates—made good sense. For his part, Wright was a multi-instrumentalist; he was adept on vibraphone and some brass instruments as well.

  In its original form, the B-side of “Arnold Layne” was controversial. The song’s first title was “Let’s Roll Another One,” a clear reference to marijuana. But a decision was made during the session to retitle the song and change its lyrics; the phrase “Candy and a Currant Bun” fit neatly into place of the potentially offending lyrics. Writing enthusiastically some years later about the tune, Creem’s Dave Marsh described “Candy and a Currant Bun” as “somewhere between truly cosmic Beatles and truly powerful Who,” and likened it to the best tracks on the Rolling Stones’ 1967 LP, Their Satanic Majesties Request.

  Not at all out of step with the prevailing practice of the music business in the mid 1960s, the band’s management team of Andrew King and Peter Jenner paid to boost the single’s chart placement; it would briefly reach #20 on the singles chart in the United Kingdom. Today, it is often mistakenly assumed that the staid “Auntie Beeb” (state-controlled BBC Radio) banned “Arnold Layne” because of its subject matter; in truth, it was the more commercial-minded “pirate” radio station Radio London (broadcasting from a ship operating in the North Sea, ostensibly outside the UK government’s jurisdiction), not the British Broadcasting Corporation, that would refus
e to play the single.

  While “Arnold Layne” would eventually appear on Relics, a compilation released on EMI’s budget label Music For Pleasure in 1971, “Candy and a Currant Bun” was widely unavailable on album until it was included on The Early Singles, a CD available only as part of the 1992 Shine On box set. It would appear again on The Early Years box set on CD and on a replica 45-rpm single housed in a picture sleeve.

  Chapter 2

  Interstellar Overdrive

  On February 1, 1967, Pink Floyd signed an exclusive contract with EMI, the same company with which the Beatles had signed. Less than a month after recording what would become their debut single, Pink Floyd commenced sessions for their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Sessions began at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in Southwest London under supervision of producer Norman Smith, and would continue—sandwiched between the band’s live dates and other engagements—through the third week of May of that year. A generation older than the band he was producing, Smith (born in 1923) was by 1967 an experienced hand in the studio; he worked as recording engineer on all of EMI’s studio recordings featuring the Beatles through their 1966 album Rubber Soul. As it happened, the Beatles were working variously in Studios One, Two, and Three, recording songs for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band while Pink Floyd worked at the same time with Smith in other rooms at Abbey Road. The sessions for Piper would be Smith’s first as a producer. “Norman Smith had a lot to do with helping Syd and the band in the studio,” says Peter Jenner, the band’s manager from 1966 to 1968.

  But mere days before the Piper sessions began at the Abbey Road Studios, Smith oversaw the recording of “See Emily Play,” a song eventually released as the A-side of Pink Floyd’s second single. Cut at Sound Techniques Studio in London, “Emily” was in many ways a distillation of all the qualities showcased on the subsequent The Piper at the Gates of Dawn album. Relying on its most accomplished musician, Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” features Richard Wright’s keyboards as a prominent instrument. His four-note descending motif repeatedly punctuates the song’s chorus. Norman Smith’s tape-manipulation skills—likely developed during his tenure working with the Beatles—are showcased here, as Barrett’s vocals are pitch-shifted down for a portentous feel. In contrast, a Wright piano solo is greatly sped up via tape, creating the ambience of a wind-up toy. Years after the song’s release, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named “See Emily Play” among its “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.”