by Bill Kopp
Richard Wright’s “Remember a Day” follows. A gentle yet somewhat ominous introduction features slide guitar glissandi—allegedly from Syd Barrett—and some gently played, high-register piano chords. When the song-proper kicks in, the tempo increases significantly, with the drum figure (featuring not Mason but instead producer Norman Smith) using mallets on tom toms. Wright plays right-hand chords, jumping up by octaves, and more slide guitar is featured. Waters holds things together with a simple bass figure. As each verse comes to an end, the slow, gentle arrangement returns. The song’s bridge accentuates the song’s dreamy feel, and subsequent verses follow the earlier pattern of cutting the tempo toward the end of each.
Next comes the song that—along with the record’s title track—would provide a template for Pink Floyd’s future musical direction. “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” is built around little more than two chords, and the entire band plays in the most subtle manner possible. Mason performs most of his work using mallets, with occasional quiet taps on a large cymbal or gong. Wright overdubs multiple instruments: his oscillating Farfisa organ and vibraphone play separate yet complementary melodic lines that dance around the single-note center. The guitar—played either by Barrett or Gilmour; likely a combination of the two—provides effects that sound uncannily like humpback whale vocalization, an idea that would find more extensive use on 1971’s epic work “Echoes.” Vocalist Roger Waters never raises his voice above a whisper, but the combined effect of his vocals and the low-key instrumental work is seething with tension; “Set the Controls” feels more foreboding than calm and comforting.
“Corporal Clegg” opens with a stomping bass line, with Gilmour repeatedly hitting a dominant seventh sharp ninth chord (sometimes called the “Hendrix chord”). The song’s lyrics are Roger Waters’s decidedly less whimsical take on Syd Barrett’s storytelling style. In Waters’s tune, the title character loses a limb in the war; his wife drinks too much, and people laugh at him. The song’s bridge approaches proto–heavy metal in its intensity, creating an overall ambience that wouldn’t seem out of place to Pink Floyd fans familiar only with 1979’s The Wall.
The song’s midsection—in which Mrs. Clegg is addressed—moves in a more melodic direction, with high-pitched harmony vocals and some wah-wah guitar deep in the mix, providing some worthwhile musical contrast and variety. But rather than leave well enough alone, Waters—or someone—decided to add an instrumental break, complete with multiple kazoos, thus sounding like a children’s parade. In the process, the song’s entire mood is shattered. The entire pattern in repeated, and while the second kazoo-led refrain is joined by war sound effects (explosions, air raid sirens), the damage is done. What could have been a solid track to end the first side of the A Saucerful of Secrets LP is instead reduced to the level of a novelty tune. Still, “Corporal Clegg” deserves recognition as the first in a long series of obliquely autobiographical lyrics from the pen of Roger Waters. The bassist’s father was killed in the battle of Anzio in 1944, the same year that the fictional Clegg lost his leg.
The second side of Pink Floyd’s second album opens with its extended title track. Credited to all four post-Barrett band members, “A Saucerful of Secrets” is perhaps the first studio release from Pink Floyd that bears some of the stylistic flourishes that would come to be most associated with the group. Broken into four “movements,” the track opens with “Something Else,” featuring malleted cymbal from Nick Mason, and some spacey, somewhat amelodic keyboard lines from Rick Wright. Listeners and critics who wish to apply the “space rock” tag to Pink Floyd could easily turn to the opening moments of “A Saucerful of Secrets” to bolster their argument.
Two minutes in, a curious sound stabs into the mix: it’s the sound of an acoustic piano’s strings being strummed like a guitar. Keith Emerson would later use the same technique on Emerson Lake and Palmer’s self-titled debut, but whereas Emerson would employ the technique in a “musical” fashion, here Richard Wright uses it more as an effect. David Gilmour’s heavily reverberating guitar produces a sound that suggests the brass section of an orchestra, something Pink Floyd would actually use in 1970 on the album Atom Heart Mother. Just short of the four-minute mark, the movement ends abruptly.
The track’s second movement, “Syncopated Pandemonium,” is constructed out of a section of audio tape containing a Nick Mason drum figure played across multiple floor drums. The tape has been looped to create a repetitive percussive track. Wright adds some low register, seemingly random attacks upon a piano. A few cymbal crashes—played in reverse—introduce a swirling, heady squall of electric guitar from David Gilmour. The various sounds collide with one another to nightmarish, cataclysmic effect. More involved guitar work from Gilmour mimics the sounds of screeching missiles, and occasional piano note clusters from Wright sound as if he is playing the piano with a closed fist. The cacophony continues to unfold, with an overall air of violence and mayhem. Just past the seven-minute mark, the scene fades out, replaced by a long rumble that suggests the aftermath of a great explosion. Exemplifying Pink Floyd’s occasional lazy attitude toward naming works in progress, in its earliest form, “Syncopated Pandemonium” was provisionally titled “Nick’s Boogie.” But other than featuring some hypnotic drumming, the second movement of “A Saucerful of Secrets” bears little if any sonic resemblance to the “Nick’s Boogie” that Pink Floyd recorded for Peter Whitehead’s film Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London.
As “Storm Signal” begins, Richard Wright’s organ arises out of the aural smoke and ash, playing a slow and spooky figure that’s almost a parody of church music. The movement seems designed to elicit mental images of the wake of a savage battle; on its surface somewhat serene, but just below the surface, filled with unspeakable horrors.
At the eight-and-a-half-minute mark, the rumble subsides, and for the first time in “A Saucerful of Secrets,” a conventional melody—the movement “Celestial Voices”—is revealed. Wright plays a forlorn sequence of chords on a Hammond organ, making effective use of the organ’s bass pedals. At the ten-minute mark, a wordless choir joins Wright’s organ; the “chorus” is actually a Mellotron keyboard. With bits of guitar squall subtly added low in the mix along with Mellotron strings, Gilmour and Wright add some subtle vocalizing of their own as “A Saucerful of Secrets” draws to a majestic close.
Though it lacks lyrics, “Saucerful” can be seen as a musical statement on the horrors of war. Great Britain’s military deaths exceeded 380,000; untold numbers among those were fathers, sons, or brothers. Though World War II had formally ended in Great Britain with the May 8, 1945, declaration of V-E Day, bombed-out buildings, rubble, and unexploded bombs would be a feature of the London landscape well into the 1960s. Widespread rationing of food and consumer goods persisted until the mid-1950s. Thus, even a generation born in Great Britain during or shortly after the war would have suffered the direct effects of the conflict in a way that many of their North American Allied counterparts would not. In its particular Englishness, “A Saucerful of Secrets” may have had a resonance with British listeners, one lost upon American ears.
After a moment of silence that follows “A Saucerful of Secrets,” Rick Wright’s waltzing and melancholy “See-Saw” begins. While the earliest attempts at recording the song—then waggishly called “The Most Boring Song I’ve Ever Heard Bar 2”—were done at a session in which Syd Barrett was nominally present, he does not appear on the finished track in any form. The song itself doesn’t rank among Wright’s most memorable compositions, but the use of instruments in “See-Saw” is creative. Of particular note is Wright’s Mellotron, playing a string sound remarkably similar—and likely identical, as there were not many sound options on a Mellotron in 1968—to the ones used extensively on the Moody Blues’ second album, In Search of the Lost Chord. As it happened, the Moody Blues were recording their album at almost the same time as Pink Floyd was working on A Saucerful of Secrets. Wright employed numerous instruments—piano, F
arfisa organ, Hammond organ, xylophone—in the recording of “See-Saw,” and the contributions of the other band members are subtle at best. Only Gilmour’s occasional guitar figures pierce the keyboard-heavy arrangement.
When Pink Floyd decided upon the song sequence for A Saucerful of Secrets, the sole number written for the album by Syd Barrett was chosen for the last track. Coming as it does after the sonic explorations of “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and the title track, “Jugband Blues” sounds like a song by some other group, accidentally appended to the album. Syd Barrett sings a song about being lost, strumming on an acoustic guitar. The jagged, halting melody of “Jugband Blues” serves as a link between the fully formed (if at times unconventional) songs Barrett had written for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn a mere year earlier, and the song fragments he would later bring to the sessions that yielded his two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, both released in 1970.
Most everything about “Jugband Blues” is disjointed. Barrett’s final composition for Pink Floyd shifts between three time signatures, and features two separate brass sections. The first of these finds musicians from the local Salvation Army Band playing a pre-planned melody; the second is a totally spontaneous and free-form performance that bears no musical connection to what has come before. Whether or not such conjectures have any basis in reality, countless observers have pointed to Barrett’s cracked “Jugband Blues” lyrics as a farewell from the songwriter. Syd Barrett may or may not be ruminating on the lyrical nature of his fantasy-focused and/or playful body of work when in the final lines of “Jugband Blues” he asks, “And what exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke?”
By the time A Saucerful of Secrets was released in the United Kingdom—June 29, 1968—it was clear that if Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason, and new guitarist David Gilmour were interested in answering those rhetorical questions, they would be doing so without the man who had written all of Pink Floyd’s best-known material.
Critical reaction to Saucerful was mixed; some critics seemed unable to decide if they loved or hated the record. In his review for IT, Miles described various tracks on the album as “unimaginative . . . too long . . . too boring . . . uninventive.” He singled out the title track for praise and concluded with, “A record well worth buying!” A writer for Melody Maker encouraged its readers to “Give the Floyd a listen . . . it isn’t really so painful.”
Rolling Stone’s Jim Miller displayed far less enthusiasm in his review, calling the title track “eleven minutes of psychedelic muzak” and impugned the songwriting and musician skills of each of the band’s four members. “Unfortunately,” Miller wrote, “a music of effects is a weak base for a rock group to rest its reputation on—but this is what the Pink Floyd have done.”
Without question, Pink Floyd lost some of their fan base once Syd Barrett’s departure became known. Whether one liked the band’s musical direction post-Barrett, there was no denying that it was different. “I could straight away feel that there was something [different],” says Robyn Hitchcock, who was living in London when he turned fifteen in 1968. “There was a lack of power; there was a lack of intensity in what they’d become.” He characterizes the band’s work from 1968 onward as “a slightly more manageable version of what they’d been doing with Barrett,” but acknowledges that the new approach “was the beginning of their real success.” Hitchcock points out an additional factor that aided in Pink Floyd’s eventual fame: “David Gilmour was a virtuoso, which Barrett wasn’t.”
With the release of A Saucerful of Secrets, Pink Floyd was well on its way to becoming an “album band,” focusing on the long-playing record as the primary medium of putting its music across to listeners. Just prior to making a collective decision to not release singles in the UK—a resolution to which they would adhere for several years—the band would take one last stab at the singles market.
Co-written by Roger Waters and David Gilmour, “Point Me at the Sky” is a self-conscious attempt to write a hit single. Betraying hints of the rarely displayed sardonic humor that informed later songs like “Free Four” on 1972’s Obscured by Clouds, “Point Me at the Sky” weighs in on issues of overpopulation, insanity, and game-playing. Pink Floyd’s concern with “big” ideas such as these would find its most effective expression with The Dark Side of the Moon, but even within the confines of a three-and-a-half-minute single, “Point Me at the Sky” does a creditable job of moving past moon-june love songs. Considering the long shadow Barrett would cast upon Pink Floyd’s subsequent work, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the closing repeated lyrics of “Point Me at the Sky” might have been written and sung with him in mind: “All we’ve got to say to you is goodbye!”
The tune’s arrangement features an effective contrast between the waltzing verses with Gilmour’s lilting vocals and the stomping chorus featuring a notably insistent bass line from Roger Waters. Because the track was specifically intended as a non-album single, “Point Me at the Sky” was mixed to monaural, not stereo. “It was pretty awful,” says friend of the band (and drummer) Willie Wilson, who was present during the session. “I hope that [the band] would agree with me.”
The flip side of the single released in December 1968 would go on to become a signature Pink Floyd song and a durable part of the band’s live set for several years. “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” starts out with an arrangement and feel quite close to “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”—right down to Roger Waters’s whispered vocals—but unlike that album track, “Eugene” builds in intensity to a manic crescendo in which Waters lets loose with a bloodcurdling scream. Nick Mason’s drumming explodes on cue with Waters’s scream, and the effect is cinematic. (Fittingly enough, “Eugene” would later find use in various forms as the audio component of some motion pictures.)
Pink Floyd had long ago discovered the creative advantages of extending its songs beyond the confines of traditional single length, and the music business was beginning to catch up with that thinking. At nearly six minutes, “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” would be uncharacteristically long for a single—much less a B-side—but arguably the Beatles had paved the way for lengthy singles four months earlier with the release of the single “Hey Jude,” running in excess of seven minutes.
Two other studio recordings of note were made by Pink Floyd in 1968, though neither would see release until included in the 2016 box set, The Early Years. Until that time, the existence of “Song 1” and “Roger’s Boogie” had gone unnoticed by collectors of Pink Floyd’s unreleased material; even the 2010 edition of Glenn Povey’s exhaustive Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd makes no mention of the August 1968 recording sessions at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles.
That one-day recording session in Hollywood was Pink Floyd’s first without producer Norman Smith; the group would handle production duties without supervision. Neither recording was finished, but both explored the musical direction Pink Floyd would pursue on its next album project, the soundtrack for Barbet Schroeder’s More.
“Song 1” begins with a gently strummed E minor chord; the tune quickly settles into a stuttering meter. There’s a breezy, largely contemplative and pastoral feel to the song for most of its three-plus minutes. But toward the end, David Gilmour unleashes unexpected bursts of feedback guitar, making liberal use of the tremolo (“whammy”) bar on his electric guitar.
“Song 2” (also known as “Roger’s Boogie,” though like “Nick’s Boogie” before it, the tune is anything but a fast blues number) is an eerie, vocal-led tune. Progressive in its structure and use of different meters, “Song 2” suggests the influence of some of the West Coast psychedelic bands with which Pink Floyd might have come into contact on their American trip. Lead guitar is downplayed on the track in favor of some effective, almost jangling rhythm playing. A brief organ solo from Rick Wright takes the song briefly in another direction, while Mason’s drumming remains understated throughout.
Days after the L
os Angeles sessions, Pink Floyd was back across the Atlantic, continuing a rather frenetic schedule of concert and festival appearances; between Syd Barrett’s departure and the end of 1968, the group racked up no fewer than 125 live performances in England, the United States, Benelux, and France. All of these would be sandwiched between recording sessions, appearances on BBC radio, and work on the soundtrack for The Committee, an avant-garde motion picture.
Chapter 9
By Committee
“As long as the dialogue goes on,” suggests the main character in Peter Sykes’s 1968 film The Committee, “there’s a chance at rationality.” Inadvertently summing up critical response to the movie, another character responds, “Not everyone would agree with that.”
The Committee has not worn well. The hour-long, black-and-white film has been variously described as avant-garde, film noir, and experimental. At its heart, The Committee is a black comedy, an attempt at biting satire. A kind of poor man’s existentialist film essay, The Committee tells—after a fashion—the story of an unnamed man (played by Paul Jones, lead singer of Manfred Mann) who hitches a car ride, murders his driver, revives him, and at some point in the future takes part in a committee that seems to function as a kind of focus group. It’s never made clear what the goals of the titular committee might be, but the unnamed main character begins to suspect that the whole thing is a kind of ruse seeking to bring him to justice for his crime. That never happens, and the film ends with him driving away with a woman he met at the focus group. Apropos of absolutely nothing, she asks him, “Do you play bridge?” The credits roll.