Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  As a song, “Crying Song” is a slight piece of work, but as a hint of directions Pink Floyd would pursue, it’s instructive. David Gilmour turns in a distinctive, unforced lead vocal while Rick Wright adds some melodic vibraphone. Overdubbed vocal harmonies—again from Gilmour—preview what would soon become one of Pink Floyd’s chief musical assets. Gilmour’s electric slide guitar, too, would take its place in the group’s sonic arsenal, but the solo on “Crying Song” seems offhand, as if it were laid down in a single take so that the band could move on to another track. And songwriter Waters—who doesn’t take a lead vocal at all on any of the More songs—clearly still has a thing or two to learn about David Gilmour’s vocal range; the lead vocal line pushes the bass-note limits of Gilmour’s ability.

  “Up the Khyber”—the title an example of Cockney rhyming slang (in this case for “up the arse”)—is equal parts Nick Mason drum solo and Richard Wright playing some very exploratory, jazz-flavored chordal runs on an acoustic piano. The song may have grown out of a similar-sounding section in the band’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” and would appear again under a different title as part of Pink Floyd’s 1969 live set piece, “The Man and the Journey.” A dizzying bit of tape manipulation ends the song.

  The next two songs on More would provide Pink Floyd with some of its most compelling live material, in greatly expanded and extended versions. But for Schroeder’s film soundtrack, both “Green is the Colour” and “Cymbaline” would be presented in acoustic-based, relatively brief readings. Another folk-flavored tune with a sprightly tin whistle, “Green is the Colour” is built around Gilmour’s acoustic guitar and high-pitched vocals. The rest of the band enters the arrangement gradually, with Wright turning in a country-and-western-flavored piano melody that begins simply and develops as the song winds out, eventually evolving into a Floyd Cramer–styled solo.

  The moody minor key melody of “Cymbaline” provides a suitable backdrop for David Gilmour’s heavily reverberated lead vocal. “Cymbaline” sports one of the strongest melodic lines on More, and, for that matter, in the post-Barrett Pink Floyd catalog to this point. By 1969, Roger Waters was putting more care and effort into his lyric writing, and “Cymbaline” reflects this. The song makes a reference to Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange, and trades in some compelling lyrical imagery (likening the feeling of apprehension to a tube train creeping up one’s spine). And humor makes a fleeting appearance as Gilmour sings lyrics that ask if the song’s final couplet will rhyme. It doesn’t.

  A very brief instrumental, the unimaginatively named “Party Sequence” features Nick Mason on several overdubbed bongo drums, with wife Lindy trilling along on penny whistle.

  Side Two of the original More album opens in grand fashion with “Main Theme.” The gong would become an integral component of Pink Floyd’s live set as well as its studio recordings, and the gong that opens “Main Theme” provides a dramatic introduction to the number. Richard Wright plays a series of dissonant chords and melodic lines on his Farfisa; it is only with this song that the experimental side of Pink Floyd—so thoroughly explored just months earlier on A Saucerful of Secrets—is displayed on the More soundtrack. But here that experimentalism is couched in a format that effectively reconciles Pink Floyd’s ambitious ideas with conventional songcraft. Built mostly around a single chord, the impressionistic “Main Theme” is more songlike than many other Pink Floyd instrumentals of the era. It shows the band channeling its energies into music that could be considered more accessible.

  The opening chords of “Ibiza Bar” are nearly identical to “The Nile Song,” but as the song unfolds, it shows a greater emphasis on melody, and a lead guitar solo from David Gilmour is placed up front in the tune. Even as the vocals come in—buried deep in the mix here—Gilmour’s lead playing continues, and remains the song’s most distinctive feature. For once, Waters’s lyrics may have a connection with the film; his lyrics speak of an epilogue that reads like a sad song.

  The self-explanatory “More Blues” is a very brief and airy twelve-bar blues instrumental. And while Pink Floyd was never most people’s idea of a blues band, twelve-bar instrumentals would become a regular part of the band’s live set in the early 1970s. Curiously, Mason’s drums are mixed significantly louder than David Gilmour’s guitar. Waters’s bass and Richard Wright’s organ are subtle almost to the point of inaudibility.

  Musique concrète is a kind of experimental music making with beginnings in the 1920s; modern-day listeners might describe it as “soundscapes” or even sound effects. Whether or not the band’s use of it was predicated on familiarity with earlier experiments by composers like Stravinsky, Stockhausen, and Varèse, there are commonalities between the work of those serious composers and Pink Floyd tracks like “Quicksilver.” Like “A Saucerful of Secrets” before it, this lengthy and atmospheric piece from the More soundtrack is composed of seemingly random effects amid more conventional musical sounds from organ, vibraphone, and percussion.

  The final two tracks on the More soundtrack are examples of writing to specification. Even the titles make that clear: “A Spanish Piece” and “Dramatic Theme.” The former is an exceedingly brief Flamenco piece with Gilmour playing nylon string guitar while whispering Spanish phrases. The More soundtrack ends with a spare tune based on the film’s “Main Theme,” and prominently features David Gilmour’s slide guitar with layers of reverb and echo.

  Pink Floyd would write and record additional songs for Barbet Schroeder’s More film soundtrack, though none would appear on the album. Four of these are included in the 2016 box set, The Early Years. The verse sections of the short instrumental track “Hollywood” are a two-chord vamp based on the opening chords of “Cymbaline,” and the chorus—a few bars—provides enough variety to qualify “Hollywood” as a separate song. David Gilmour plays a simple, appealing melody on his guitar through a wah-wah pedal. At its core, “Hollywood” displays the bare bones of what could have been developed into a proper song.

  A “beat version” of the More theme wasn’t used in the film or on its soundtrack, but does showcase Pink Floyd’s ability—largely untapped—to make relatively conventional pop music when the inclination or need arises. Many of the group’s signature sonic qualities—a simple, throbbing bass line, driving yet straightforward drumming, lengthy and exploratory organ runs, chugging electric rhythm guitar, and shifting musical dynamics—are all present in the “beat” version, and are corralled into a catchy tune.

  The Early Years includes an alternate take of More’s “More Blues.” Unlike the take used on the soundtrack, the alternate version is mixed so that all four instruments—guitar, bass, drums, and organ—are audible. Still, it’s relatively undistinguished and is notable primarily as an anomaly in the Pink Floyd catalog. “Seabirds” did find its way into the film, but was left off of the soundtrack album. Rather than having a drum beat, “Seabirds” uses the resonating sound of a gong as its percussive device. Wright plays Farfisa organ lines and some subtle vibraphone; eventually David Gilmour adds some slide guitar, used here more for texture than as a vehicle for any sort of melody. Near the track’s end, the gong is struck again, more forcefully, and allowed to ring out completely as the organ lines fade into oblivion.

  Looking back on the More album, Nick Mason said, “It wasn’t a Pink Floyd album, but a group of songs.” The band came away from the experience with generally positive feelings about soundtrack work; Pink Floyd would assist Schroeder again on another film (Obscured by Clouds/La Valée), and would team up—albeit less successfully—with another popular filmmaker for a project in 1970.

  The More experience had one important benefit for Pink Floyd: it helped break the band in Europe. “The Continent has just exploded for us now—particularly France,” Waters told Georgia Straight’s Mike Quigley. “What really made it for us in France was the film More.”

  The Rolling Stone Record Guide awarded More merely one star, but in his accompanying review, Bart Testa characterized t
he record’s music collectively as “suggestive of impressionist sketches” and “far more sentimental than the film.” Long hard to find on home video, in 2016, Barbet Schroeder’s More received release on DVD and Blu-ray in Pink Floyd’s The Early Years box set.

  Chapter 12

  Sysyphus

  As 1969 began, the four men of Pink Floyd found themselves short of creative ideas. The band had recently completed and released the soundtrack for Barbet Schroeder’s film More, but that record’s mix of pastoral, near folk-rock tunes and pastiches of hard rock didn’t accurately represent the breadth of the group’s collective musical nature. Pink Floyd’s concert dates of the era would include only a handful of More tunes, and save two, none would remain in the band’s set list for long. A typical Pink Floyd concert in early 1969 included two or three songs from the Barrett era (usually “Astronomy Dominé,” “Pow R. Toc H.,” and “Interstellar Overdrive”), perhaps an instrumental improvisation, and three from June 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets. The only new material in the group’s set was “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.”

  But EMI expected another album, and so sessions began in April for what would become Ummagumma. Like More before it, Ummagumma was perhaps not what fans might have expected: rather than a collection of new material that would form the basis of Pink Floyd’s live concerts, it would be a double album. The first disc features live tracks: concert versions of songs from the group’s still rather slim catalog, recorded in England during early 1969. And the second disc dispenses with the group concept completely, featuring instead solo works from each of the band’s four members.

  Though by April the band had put together a stage show that combined old and new material into a loosely defined thematic work (a pair of suites called “The Man” and “The Journey”), a decision was made to record at least three concerts around England in hope of capturing material for a live album. The shows at which the mobile recording setup was used did not feature the new set, but instead fell back on older tunes.

  The first show to be recorded live was an April 26 set at Bromley Technical College, billed as “Light & Sound Concert.” In the end, none of the recordings from this date would be used for Ummagumma, none has surfaced on the collectors’ circuit, and none appeared on the 2016 box set, The Early Years. The following night, Pink Floyd had a club date scheduled at Mothers in Birmingham. The popular club had opened the previous August above a furniture store on Birmingham’s High Street, and would host hundreds of rock, blues, and jazz acts, including the Who, Fairport Convention, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, and King Crimson, during its two-and-a-half-year run. Birmingham’s own Traffic (featuring former Spencer Davis Group vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Steve Winwood) made its debut live appearance at Mothers.

  Pink Floyd’s five-number set would be recorded, and two of those tracks would be featured on Ummagumma. “Astronomy Dominé” had changed a great deal in performance since the departure of Syd Barrett; in some ways the band’s live readings of the song would bear greater similarity to the studio version on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn than earlier live performances. David Gilmour and Richard Wright provide the dual lead vocal lines, and Gilmour’s more accomplished guitar work lends the song a greater musicality than it had with Barrett. Gilmour also makes judicious and effective use of a wah-wah pedal as he spins out leads on his guitar. For his part, Roger Waters displays great facility on bass guitar; undoubtedly, the band’s heavy live performance schedule had served to improve his instrumental skills.

  The midsection of “Astronomy Dominé” as recorded at Mothers shows the band’s mastery of nuance and dynamics; at one point, the song’s arrangement is brought down to near-silence; seconds later, the band is firing on all cylinders, playing loudly and aggressively while Nick Mason pounds his drum kit furiously. And moments later, the band plays quietly again. When Gilmour and Wright reach Barrett’s “Pow! Pow!” lyrics, the foursome explodes once again, only to drop into a relatively quiet approach for the song’s end. The Ummagumma performance of the song would be the most successful example of Pink Floyd recasting songs from its Syd Barrett days into a framework that reflected the band’s new musical personality.

  So successful was the Ummagumma version of “Astronomy Dominé” that when Harvest/EMI repackaged Pink Floyd’s first two albums (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets) as a 1973 double LP for American release, that album—playfully titled A Nice Pair—dropped the original studio version of “Astronomy Dominé,” replacing it instead with the live Ummagumma recording. “Astronomy Dominé” would remain in Pink Floyd’s live set into 1971, and many years later it would be featured as a concert opener on the Gilmour-led Pink Floyd 1994 world tour. As recently as 2016, Gilmour still sometimes included the song in his concert set lists.

  In contrast to Barrett’s “Astonomy Dominé,” Roger Waters’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” displays the post-Syd band’s nascent ability to create a song/soundscape that showcases its evolving musical aesthetic. The band’s rhythm section provides a deeply hypnotic musical bed for the song—Waters’s repetitive bass line joined by Nick Mason’s pseudo-tribal mallet work on the drums—as Waters delivers his vocals in a near whisper. Initially, Richard Wright lays down a simple and straightforward melodic line on his Farfisa organ, doubling the vocal melody. But as the song unfolds, Wright ventures into some exploratory keyboard work. David Gilmour provides occasional stabs of electric guitar chording, and peppers the song with ambient tones from his guitar as well. Like “Astronomy Dominé,” the live reading of “Controls” showcases Pink Floyd’s now finely honed skill at employing dynamics—chiefly volume and intensity—to create the desired ambience.

  “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” would remain in the band’s set list up until tours for The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973. It would become a staple of Roger Waters’s post–Pink Floyd live set for many years to come as well.

  Five days after the Sunday show in Birmingham, Pink Floyd ventured ninety miles north on the M6 motorway for a gig at the College of Commerce in Manchester. The night’s set list would be identical to that at Mothers, and the night’s recordings would yield two tracks that would see release on Ummagumma.

  Yet another example of Pink Floyd’s shade-and-light approach to musical dynamics, the version of “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” on Ummagumma hews closely to the studio recording. Opening with some subtle, rhythmic cymbal tapping by Nick Mason and a two-note (octaves apart) Roger Waters bass line, the rhythm section lays the groundwork upon which Rick Wright enters on Farfisa. With Gilmour adding near-ambient shading on guitar, it’s Wright who provides the melodic elements of the first few moments of “Eugene.” After more than a minute of instrumental introduction, David Gilmour provides some faraway-sounding scat vocals in a yearning, melancholy fashion. By this point, Mason has settled into a simple rhythmic pattern, mostly on snare, with occasional subtle flourishes on cymbals.

  Waters begins to increase the volume and intensity of his two-note bass figure, while he and Mason hasten the song’s tempo almost imperceptibly. Waters leans into the vocals to loudly whisper the song’s title lyrics—the song’s only words—and the music swells. Just after the three-minute mark, Roger Waters lets loose with a terrifying series of screams that sustains for almost a full minute; the band follows suit instrumentally, playing with ferocious intensity while holding fast to the song’s still-deliberate pace. Gilmour scat-vocalizes over his guitar, and as the six-minute mark approaches, the foursome settles back into a groove that slowly reduces the musical intensity. Mason punctuates the arrangement with some aggressive drum fills. Near the seven-minute mark, “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” has returned to the spare, quiet ambience of its opening section, with Wright’s organ once again dominating the melody. The band plays more and more quietly, taking more than a full minute to approach silence at the song’s end, nearly nine minutes after it began.

  The group-composed �
��Careful With That Axe, Eugene” would, in various forms, become a staple of many Pink Floyd projects of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Eugene” would remain in Pink Floyd’s live set through 1973, and another live version is featured in the Live at Pompeii concert film; the soundtrack to that 1972 film would receive belated official release as part of the 2016 box set, The Early Years.

  The last song recorded for Ummagumma’s live disc would be the title track from A Saucerful of Secrets. Lasting nearly thirteen minutes, the Manchester recording of “Saucerful” demonstrates just how much tighter Pink Floyd has become instrumentally. While all of the work’s free-form characteristics remain, there is a sense of purpose that permeates the Ummagumma version. The playing remains abstract in places, but there is a palpable sense that the four musicians know where they are going musically; as such, this reading of “Saucerful” feels substantially less improvisational, more deliberate, and thus more effective and conventionally accessible.

  “A Saucerful of Secrets” would be performed at various Pink Floyd concerts until it was retired from the band’s set list in 1972.

  For the second disc of Ummagumma, the band decided to allot one half of each album side to each of the four musicians. This highly experimental outing would feature some music that had become part of Pink Floyd’s new live set piece, “The Man and the Journey,” but none of the works from Ummagumma’s second disc would become a long-standing part of the band’s live set beyond that.