PINK FLOYD

"I know all those words but that sign makes no sense!" -- Lisa referring to the Yahoo Serious Festival

i've been listening to a 1974 bootleg that smokes, w/ early versions of animals tracks + "crazy diamond" + full dark side + echoes! awesome. they sound kinda more raw/rocking here. not like the stooges or anything, but ...
Seems weird that the Floyd haven't put out a rad career-spanning live set or something.

ps pink floyd rules

name of bootleg, please?

tylerw otm

(and tyler, ps -- just checked your blog to see if you'd posted the floyd show . . . to answer your keef question, i think johnny depp's supposed to be reading the audio)

i think i am going to post the floyd bootleg soonish! it's manchester 1974 ...

thanks!

double thanks!

Tylerw, what is your blog address? Thanks in advance
Iago G.

http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com
will probably put this floyd thing up this weekend. it is pretty great stuff.

That's great--thanks so much

heyyy, i just finally got around to posting that floyd show on my blog if y'all are interested.

need this so bad
http://www.neptunepinkfloyd.co.uk/images/news/2011/20110728_pink-floyd-platinum-division-bell-sculpture.jpg

also
http://www.neptunepinkfloyd.co.uk/images/news/2011/20110728_pink-floyd-platinum-leather-wallet.jpg

PINK FLOYD RULES

PINK FLOYD RULES
dang are those images not showing up.
www.pinkfloydplatinumcollection.com

they don't need to show up because

PINK FLOYD RULES

http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/assets/pink_floyd.jpg

christ

talk about dark side of the moon

pink floyd rules. i was drunk and wanted to know the lyrics!!!!THNKS SOOOOOOOOOO MUCH!!!! YOU FUCKIN RULE FOR POSTIN THE LYRICS. I WROTE THEM DOWN AND I LOVE YOU NOW>>!!!! EMAIL ME AND ILL MARRY YOU. DONT WORRY IM HOT!!!hahahahaha
love always, shaina

yea pink floyd rules!!! once i heard this kid in my school say that they suck and i almost kicked him in the teeth. i had to point out to him that they invented almost every style out today. one they didn't was rap, and well i hate rap..... ~out~

[fuck this guy and his question mark]
Pink Floyd Rules?
I've actually felt better about Pink Floyd. After listening to a lot of their songs on radio, I've developed a liking to them. I still some of their songs are crap, but "comfertabally numb" "another brick in the wall, pt 1, 2, and 3", "Money", "Hey You" and other songs are very good. They're pretty good, let them pass.

My brother hates Pink Floyd, but a lot of my friends like them. Some user (Bart247) suggested once I listen to the Dark Side Of The Moon. All I've heard is Money, but that's a good song. I will put these guys on my "Master's Of Rock" series, and expect to see more episodes in the future.

I'd thought I'd post this up to tell you my changed opinions on Pink Floyd. Although they might not be the best band ever, they're one of the best. I have The Wall album already, but maybe I'll look forward to listening to them more.

http://img.wonderhowto.com/images/gfx/gallery/634108584756730283.jpg

that RULES
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/14/19806695_e587452ded.jpg

http://tendenciesrock.com.br/murilotatoo/galeriafoto2/album/slides/Pink_Floyd_The_Wall.jpg

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lp02hfrLy61qzma4ho1_500.png

kids these days!

http://www.offbeat.com.au/Floyd%20Painting%202.jpg

^^^ just the kind of thing I was looking for

hee hee
http://fuckyeahpsychedelics.tumblr.com/photo/1280/3756986829/1/tumblr_lhtp1bhwQO1qcncte

^^^ WOW

http://www.culturalpartners.org/images/gypsy.jpg

belly dancing for floyd. that rules.

when I saw that my hs physics teacher had a Dark Side poster in his classroom, I knew that I'd really made i

er: made it

http://media.ticketmaster.com/tm/en-au/dbimages/49415a

PINK FLOYD RULES

RULE #1: PINK FLOYD RULES

internet, never change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEXzTXmLlpU
(not really safe for work fyi)

FLOYD IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK

http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs36/i/2008/242/0/8/Pink_Floyd___vector_work_by_propaganda_81.jpg

http://ih2.redbubble.net/work.5954841.1.flat,550x550,075,f.pink-floyd-cow.jpg

i kind of dig that the division bell dudes have been incorporated into the floyd iconography. must make waters so mad.

I've been thinking the same thing. High hopes etc.

I worked at Iceland in the early 90s, a frozen food supermarket in the UK. It's kinda grotty, and in class-war Britain it's a feature of blown-out high streets and known for stuff like prawn rings and cheap, shitty cider. A kid (he was short; we called him Short Boy) rose to assistant store manager and spent ALL of his money on stereo equipment for his Citreon ZX - filling it with absurdly powerful bass bins and the like. Anyway, out the back of the shop, among the cardboard piles and the wasp-filled wheelie bins, he would play *The Division Bell* at ridiculous, floor-shaking volume. He played a lot of shit purely to show off the bass and what I remember -despite not knowing Floyd at the time - is how pristine the thing sounded, like being out at sea and looking for familiar lights on buoys and other boats.

It's actually been a while since I've listened to _The Division Bell_ so I decided to listen to it again, without prejudice.

I think it sounds better today than it did in its original context. It was just deeply out of touch with its times when it came out. Like, this was a record that came out in the US on the day Kurt Cobain died. The general vibe I had at the time, a lot of people had, was oh, look, another shitty classic rock reunion album. It's like their old albums, but not as good. Also, it's an album by a band best that was known for their lyrics without the guy who wrote those lyrics.

The thing is that a lot of those "classic lyrics" haven't necessarily held up. A lot of them have, mind you, but some of them... See, again, one of the main things I can say in defense of The Division Bell's lyrics is that at no point are they racist or misogynist, which is something Roger Waters hadn't managed to do since, I don't know, 1975? And I do regret giving Waters as much slack for that bullshit as I did.

Does it sound a lot like '70s Pink Floyd? Well, yeah. It's, like, basically the same band? In '94, it sounded like an imitation of Pink Floyd... in '24 it just sounds like Pink Floyd.

I mean it's not a perfect album by any means. First off it's pretty long, by '24 standards. Not excruciatingly long, but it is a pretty big time commitment. Back in the '90 everybody thought filling up a 70 minute CD was necessary, it was "value for money". These days... Just a lot of five and six minute songs with a lot of "atmospheric" stuff thrown in. At the same time... as much as I love "Echoes" it's padded. So it's not necessarily a bad thing that there are all these five- and six- minute songs. Compared to "classic" Floyd they're fairly compact - but not so compact that Gilmour doesn't get to play guitar.

And Gilly, God, he is about at his peak as a guitarist here. Seriously, his playing is _so fucking good_ here. A whole album packed to the gills with absolutely top-notch Gilmour guitar playing is nothing to sneeze at. That said, nobody else in the band is quite on his level. Pink Floyd are working as a band here, and that means they're working within the limitations of the core trio. Nick Mason's drums are _very_ prominent, at least on the "360 Reality Audio" mix I heard (through decent speakers, not headphones like they suggested). Nick Mason isn't a great drummer. There's a lot of mid-tempo 4/4 here, because, well, that's what Mason could do. On tour they had, I think, Gary Wallis to complement Mason, but if Wallis is here, it is to _complement_ Mason. It's very obviously Nick Mason on drums.

Richard Wright... I mean, he writes a song here. His playing isn't as front and center and distinctive as it was in the '70s, he doesn't really _solo_ like Gilmour does, but he's _there_, which he just wasn't on _Momentary Lapse of Reason_.

I do want to talk about the songs. Gilmour isn't a great songwriter. By and large these songs aren't great songs, with the exception of "High Hopes", which is an all-time fucking Floyd classic, and has been recognized as such since day one. Even 30 years ago as a Gilmour hater - I mean yeah. Certified Floyd banger. The flipside is that by contrast the rest of the songs are very obviously _not_ certified bangers. None of them are _bad_ - which is pretty important, I think. It's a pretty consistent record. None of the others are great, though.

As much as Gilmour isn't a great songwriter, he _is_ a songwriter. Always was a songwriter. These songs aren't imitations of Waters-era Floyd (you could possibly make a case for "Poles Apart", but I'd call it more pastiche than imitation). They're PINK FLOYD songs, largely by a guy who, like, wrote a bunch of Pink Floyd songs. And there's a Rick Wright song. It's not bad. I don't think "Wearing the Inside Out" . I don't think it's up to the standard of his early Floyd compositions, like "Stay" or "Paintbox", but it's not bad.

The thing is, it's not like Roger Waters was ever a great songwriter himself. He's way better as a lyricist as a songwriter. I'm not listening to this album and saying to myself "God, I wish this had the rich sense of melody of a song like 'Money'." So why are the songs not as good as '70s Floyd songs? I guess to me, what made classic (post-Syd) Floyd's songs great, I think, is the _synthesis_ of the three songwriters. Waters did contribute more than lyrics. To me, a song like "Poles Apart", which _does_ try to sound like Waters' writing, makes that clear. The songs are lesser for lacking Waters' contributions. They're not bad. It's just that he's missed.

-

That's the fucking thing, though, isn't it? He's _missed_. It's time for me to talk about those lyrics. On consideration, I _genuinely think these lyrics are good_.

When _The Division Bell_ was released, they came in for a lot of shit, of course, for not being "as good as" Waters' lyrics. Today I'm not really inclined to compare them to Waters' lyrics. I think the lyrics are their own thing. If they sound a little like Waters... they were in the same band. For a long time. Gilmour just isn't trying to say the same thing Waters is, though. _Dark Side of the Moon_ is a magisterial meditation on the darker side of human existence. Is Gilmour capable of that? Probably not. He writes a song about sociopolitical issues like "Take It Back" and the message is, uh... we should take care of the environment or we'll lose it? It's not exactly profound. Here's "A Great Day for Freedom", about the fall of the Berlin Wall. A great political statement? Not really.

Except it's not a political statement at all. There are superficial references to, like, lines on a map moving from side to side, but there's something there that just _isn't_ in Waters' lyrics.

Loss. Hurt. And recovering from it.

What the fuck _happened_ to Roger Waters? He was funny. He was caring. He was _hopeful_. Gilmour, Wright, Mason, they were there. 15 years ago. He became paranoid. He became cruel. He became abusive. He belittled them. Treated them like they were useless, like it was _his_ band, like it had always been _his_ band. And then he decided they were useless. Then he threw them away.

And, I mean, what if they weren't useless? What if they were a band, with or without Waters? So they tried, and Rick Wright, he was a wreck. When they tried to record an album, he could barely play two notes, but he recovered. He recovered and they went on this tour, on this world tour, and Waters sued them and mocked them and people _loved_ them. With or without Waters.

That's kinda the story I hear in _The Division Bell_. The way it reaches me. There was somebody they cared about, they liked, who started being abusive and treating them like shit and it didn't make sense why. And the things he said about them weren't true. As much as they missed him, they could stand on their own without him. They were more than Roger Waters' backing band. Always had been.

That just... that just clicks with me more than "Fuck You Margaret Thatcher". Doing an album about how terrible Margaret Thatcher is seems kind of... obvious. Unsubtle.

great post tyvm

jfc can’t we spray for this

There was a really cool lofi cover version of “learning to fly” playing at the record store I went to today, it was all modulated and weird.

I started listening to the 2011 Dark Side CD last night but fell asleep during “Great gig in the sky” :/ “time” just about wrecked me.

Compelling post. I'm 82% through my first listen. This is indistinguishable from a Gilmour solo album.

idk i’ve heard every gilmour album and i think it’s pretty distinguishable from those!!!

It seems pretty conventional, to me.

I started. I made it through the instrumental intro and "What Do You Want From Me" (which was the single; I remembered it pretty accurately) but then I got distracted and went off to listen to about a half dozen versions of the country song "In the Jailhouse Now." I'll try again later.

There was a really cool lofi cover version of “learning to fly” playing at the record store I went to today, it was all modulated and weird.

― brimstead

i wonder if it was anthony moore's demo, which was just released

OK, I'm listening to "Poles Apart" now and this is very bad. The groaning strings and the stupid carnival keyboard noises on top sound like an idea late-period Rush would have rejected, and the part where it almost speeds up but then doesn't, and the "just play a basic beat and we'll put in something more interesting later" drumming... oof. That might have to be it for today.

Ughh do I need to listen to the division bell again? it hasn’t been *that* long since I tried, I think less than five years. Peak Gilly Noodle is very tempting.

I found the “synthesis of the three songwriters” part of your post very persuasive but then again I’m pretty down to listen to this guy solo over a synth pad drone for ages.

i wonder if it was anthony moore's demo, which was just released

Oh that I wanna hear

Excellent post, Kate!

https://reflectionsonsound.bandcamp.com/album/home-of-the-demo

picked up a copy of Anthony More's World Service single yesterday, was free as the store was giving me a deal with everything else I bought. It holds up better than anything Pink Floyd's done in the same period of time.

At his worst, More's late 70s/early 80s pop/new wave records are like the bastard child of John Cale and Brian Eno, without sounding like John Cale and Brian Eno.

Flying Doesn't Help is a great album.

It's actually been a while since I've listened to _The Division Bell_ so I decided to listen to it again, without prejudice.
[…].

iirc there are a few YT essays about it, the lighting guys must have been in on it, I saw two of the nights at Earl's Court in '94 and both times the words appeared during an oil-projection section and were hastily scribbled out, very perplexing.

I would probably read a big book on Usenet lore in general lol

I agree with all of this. Also, interesting to recall how this album came out just at the dawn of online culture and gave birth to this really confused publicity stunt on Usenet called the “Publius Enigma”: basically the band or its management greenlighted some weird on-line treasure hunt that was never resolved (there were “clues” in concerts and on record covers, as I recall) — stimulating some really weird online fan behaviour, as I recall. Someone should write something on that, as it’s almost lost in history by now.

― johanlif

heya, good to know you're still around Johan. been a while :)

the thing that gets me about the publius enigma is how much the "weird internet mystery" youtubers get _wrong_, how much bullshit they talk about it.

the publius enigma posts came from anon.penet.fi, that was _the_ big anonymous posting server before scientology lawsuits shut it down (that's probably what it's best remembered for, if anything - its involvement in the scientology thing). that light show at that floyd concert, i guess that's what got people buzzing about it really. i guess somebody connected with floyd. i don't know if they ever talked about it or admitted it. there was a lot of ill-conceived online marketing. maybe douglas adams was involved. he was really big on the internet - really big on anything that allowed him to avoid actually writing. used to post some on alt.fan.douglas-adams, if i remember correctly.

anyway i was on amp-f (alt.music.pink-floyd, that's what we call it, to this day) from the beginning... i think it was founded around '94, with the tagline "Sold out shows everywhere." i'd been on the Echoes listserv before then. i didn't take the publius enigma seriously, and i was kind of a loud asshole about it. i pissed a lot of people off, back in the day. sometimes they even had good reasons for being pissed off. even when the light show came around at - what was it, giants stadium? - sometime in july, i didn't take it seriously for a second. it was a bunch of meaningless new-age mystical bullshit. "There is an Enigma. Trust." What the fuck? I'm supposed to trust some blithering asshole posting through a server literally anyone could post to? So there were a couple of words at a light show. It still didn't _mean_ a goddamn thing. There was no _substance_ to it, no purpose. Just like The Division Bell itself, really. Utterly superficial, utterly meaningless.

and then of course there were the crackpots. joe and sandy, who insisted that the publius enigma was about jesus, that they knew dave gilmour _personally_ and he was _very into evangelical christianity_. this was... not a credible claim. and then there was denise sharpe, who outright had erotomania. believed that dave gilmour was in love with her and was sending her messages through lucky charms cereal. gilmour was on a mission, she said, to spread the truth that carl palmer was homosexual. i mean on paper it's funny but it's also terribly sad. terribly sad. she wound up voting for trump, of course.

a lot of us still talk. mostly on facebook, though, so i'm not really part of it, not having been on facebook in ages.

I would probably read a big book on Usenet lore in general lol

― brimstead

usenet was great - i mean a lot of it sucked, it wasn't _that_ great - but it was great and i miss it. not sure whether mary ann horton writing uuencode doomed it or is the reason anybody knows about it all today. structurally it wasn't good. too much "trust", not enough "verify". usenet was where spam started out, if i remember correctly. serdar argic's denial of the armenian genocide, john gruber, the green card lottery. i heard a lot of people here came from alt.music.alternative. never my stomping ground. my main stomping ground was, well, alt.music.pink-floyd. anyone who spent any time at all over there ran into my posts one way or another. :) shittest part about usenet is that it's basically inaccessible... one is that it was ephemeral, it really doesn't make any sense going back and reading it, and two is that even if you did, there's no interface like tin or Agent to give it structural context. i consider all that stuff basically lost.

I was going to post that Usenet is archived on Google Groups, but I just learned that Google announced earlier this year they're no longer allowing new posts to usenet. Existing usenet posts will remain archived, but their search tools are supposedly awful so it's hard to find anything there. So I guess Usenet is officially dead now...

less'n you fuck with nzb files :) (i don't, for the record)

anyway google groups was never really usenet. not even close. their usenet archive is something i'd call out specifically as being bad. there's also a question of completeness. back when DejaNews was first coming around there was a whole movement to put the X-No-Archive: Yes header in so that archiving services wouldn't archive those posts. i don't know if that header is being respected these days. i'd argue against it, since usenet is now a historical archive. also, i used X-No-Archive: Yes from the time it started up, and obviously no Usenet archive could be worth a damn if it didn't have my old shitposts in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRvJB7DsIi4

That guy's interviews are absolute must see for Floyd fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2vIPnzY90w

this rules

i never really understood "echoes" until i recently heard one of the live versions with the sax. that completely makes it

Did I say this upthread? It's always struck me as a nice little psychedelic pop song ridiculously padded out to 23 minutes.

yeah i'd agree with that, the studio version isn't their most compelling noodling but they figured out how to make it work live at least

y’all are crazy echoes rules in all forms

indeed, i am baffled by anything other than unqualified praise here. epic foreboding awesomeness.

i watched all the extended interviews that the guy did about syd like the one posted above and they are all great and you really get why everyone loved syd and the only bad interview is the long one with nick kent. which makes sense because he was the only person who didn't have anything to do with pink floyd. i didn't care about his "famous" pan of the wish you were here gig and he was totally unfair in that youtube interview to roger waters. in my opinion. he paints him as this awful misanthropic crank which he very well might be now but that only really showed up on the last two albums that he made with PF. and he calls him humorless and that his music is humorless but again this is just the last two albums! no fair. roger waters was the one who came up with the small furry animals! aside from welcome to the machine/have a cigar, PF were not humorless scolds at all in their music up to and even including WYWH. it just bugged me. you can tell that nick kent just really doesn't like him. and while lots of people don't like him now it seems unfair to paint all that wonderful music with the same brush. also he says without gilmore and wright roger waters would have just made cranky solo albums in the 70s that nobody bought.

Nick Kent wrote the 1974 article that pretty much kickstarted the whole Syd Barrett cult - or re-started it, or whatever - but I don't remember if that was even mentioned in the interview. I assume that's why he was interviewed in the first place, given that the interviews were for a Syd Barrett documentary, but instead it was mostly about the slagging off he gave them in '75(?) I think he what he had to say on Roger Waters (and Gilmour) were fair comment though!

they did talk about his syd piece and the positive response to it. the most mail he had ever gotten for something he wrote.

it was in 1974 that A Nice Pair came out and sold a ton of copies on the back of DSOTM. people were Floyd-crazy. so, that definitely introduced a lot of people to Syd as did the 1974 reissue of Madcap/Barrett which was released on a double LP that also sold a bunch. those are how i heard Syd for the first time. didn't need Nick Kent for that. if anything, Nick's 1974 piece was really good promo work for Harvest at the time! corporate synergy. i was obsessed with The Piper album in 1979 which is funny because everyone at my school was talking about The Wall and all I knew of The Wall was my 45 of Another Brick...that i bought after hearing it on the radio. Syd spoke to me.

Pretty sure the Nick Kent piece was the first serious attempt to tell the story of Syd Barrett and paint him as the lost genius of the band, a lot of the Syd legends stemmed from it.

it was also the first time the band had talked to anyone about syd, i think. but he does make it sound like, in that interview, that it was a surprise that anyone would have wanted to write about syd at that time because he was considered a 60s burnout/has-been and he kinda FAILS to mention that there was a world-wide reissue campaign going on that very year which reissued all of Syd's released recordings! no big deal. the music is what people remember. that stuff has been in print ever since. the madcap laughs was reissued before the twofer in the u.k. as well. in 1973. so, someone at Harvest thought it should still be out there. which was nice of them!

Relics also in print since 1971. syd has been in print in some fashion every year since 1967. you can't say that about every cult hero. he was out there!

when I was 12 at the height of my Floyd/Syd fandom, I was already a die-hard Syd fan, from hearing Piper, then Relics, then the two-fer. I saw the Momentary Lapse of Reason tour and the Radio KAOS tour and both of them featured Syd-era clips projected on the big screen. I don't think they played any songs, but it was like "look at this broadcast" followed by the old Arnold Layne or See Emily Play black and white films.

he does make it sound like, in that interview, that it was a surprise that anyone would have wanted to write about syd at that time because he was considered a 60s burnout/has-been

Yes, but nobody had! I think it was more that people didn't know that much of the story because it hadn't been told before - well, not in such detail. Remember I'm talking about the UK here, everybody read the NME or the Melody Maker or both.

i can imagine a lot of people were grateful that someone had written that article about him. people in the u.k. were very fond of syd and still had relatively recent memories of his music.

meanwhile, also in 1974, he was still at it! well, kinda. i wonder what he thought about that article. he must have read it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YywweGClCoE

i always liked that 1971 interview with mick rock. shows you how tenuous things were at the time.

https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/syd-barrett-interviews/december-1971-rolling-stone-magazine.html

looking good in 1981...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fon4eKvWAAMBDUy?format=jpg&name=large

Couple more late 1974 copyright dumps from the band...

https://open.spotify.com/album/4xriw2c0YTFEW4Xy7wEcYf
https://ravinganddrooling.com/forum/general-discussions/pink-floyd-related/383263-copyright-dumps-1974

i always liked that 1971 interview with mick rock. shows you how tenuous things were at the time.

https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/syd-barrett-interviews/december-1971-rolling-stone-magazine.html

― scott seward

god damn, i find syd in that interview to be uncomfortably personally relatable

i swear i _am_ trying to get out more

lol come take a road trip to Eugene, we'll make dinner and we have a spare bedroom

Man, just random comments Syd uttered in an uncomfortable interview were poetry that year. His description of The Madcap Laughs, good lord.

You're right about tenuous, Scott, it doesn't sound like somebody who'd already made his final album.

lol come take a road trip to Eugene, we'll make dinner and we have a spare bedroom

― sleeve

i had a panic attack about a year ago now and totalled my car, haven't really driven since unfortunately

shit like that is a lot of why i vibe so much with syd barrett lately haha

i guess i could look into the bus, though!

in the meantime i am gonna actually go out to the communist bar tonight, a girl i haven't seen in a while is gonna be there

i know this is the pink floyd thread, i've been talking about weird personal shit on pink floyd message boards for 30 years now. it's kinda my personal brand.

https://www.posteramerica.com/cdn/shop/files/syd-barret-pink-floyd-rare-photo-by-barry-plummer-rock-poster-24-x-34-425_720x.jpg

I had this poster in my room in high school (minus the text).

Brimstead, that poster was on the wall in my older brother's room.

xps take the train Kate! it's nice, I used to take it up to Seattle all the time.