18 Sept 2011

PINK FLOYD - LEGACY FATIGUE

Once again, those caring, sharing people at EMI are, in all their beneficence, inviting you to part with your shekels to buy the music of Pink Floyd.

In this era of heritage rock, when anyone who managed a top 20 single sometime between 1965 and 1985 can be called legendary, there are few bands held in higher esteem than Pink Floyd. Hardly a month goes by without them gracing the cover of one of the few remaining music magazines. Classic rock radio stations bulge at the seams with the sound of Dark Side of the Moon, while legions of new bands queue up to proclaim the genius of those terribly well- spoken chaps with a penchant for concept albums about the nature of human despair.

In short, they are everything I should hate. I once attended a concert by the Australian tribute act, called, with breath-taking literalness, The Australian Pink Floyd, at the Albert Hall in 2004. Expecting an evening of hilarity amid like-minded freaks, I was disappointed to find myself amongst an audience seemingly comprised of engineering graduates and members of provincial college rock societies. There were mullets and satin bomber jackets, for Christ’s sake. Even more worryingly, there were acres of Division Bell t-shirts.

Yet, of all the bands I have followed over the years, its Pink Floyd I keep coming back to, like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime. What is it about this most peculiarly English of bands which so appeals? Brett Anderson of Suede, in a rare moment away from using the word gasoline as an inappropriate adjective, once pointed out that they are simultaneously enormously popular but incredibly obscure, and therein lays their appeal.

As a youth, I vaguely remember my dad having library copies of Wish You Were Here and Animals lying about the living room. I was transfixed by these weird covers. Pigs floated serenely over grim industrial landscapes, while faceless business men from the pages of nightmares made incomprehensible offers in the wilderness and burning men shook hands on deserted back lots. It was the kind of landscapes which populated dreams, the kind of landscapes which were somehow intriguing to my eight year old self but which also said, somehow, that this was something you approached with caution. I had a similar feeling when I opened one of my dad’s art books and found a Magritte painting which transposed a facial portrait into the form of a naked woman. In short, this was something decidedly adult and therefore attractive.

Imagine my surprise when these strange beings appeared in the charts in 1979. Not only that, they hit the Christmas No. 1 spot. With a weird disco type tune about hating your teachers. And it was in my Christmas stocking. Hooray!

I listened to Another Brick in the Wall obsessively. I even listened to the B-side, One of my Turns, but had no fucking idea what it was going on about. I wondered at the strange cartoons in the video, and though how cool it would have been to be one of the kids in the video, running happily through a wet council estate while pondering the inequities of a cruel system. Or something. To this day, I could probably whistle you every single note of the guitar solo, infinitesimal semi-tone bends all.

Throughout the eighties I was obsessive about The Wall. I even, for a few years, thought the follow-up, The Final Cut, was one of the greatest records ever made. Thatcher was in power, you see, and anything which reinforced my opinion of her as an evil hag was all right by me. (Incidentally, I don’t think Pink Floyd ever got enough credit for coming out in opposition to the Falklands war on that album. Can you imagine any other pickled 60s survivor doing something similar? Genesis? Yes? Eric “Enoch was right” Clapton?) And, as Wham! reigned supreme and most of the people at my school looked to U2 and Simple Minds for their thrills, I found solace in the portentous strains of Comfortably Numb, Not Now John and The Fletcher Memorial Home.

Of course, I came to realise that The Wall is an album which is best listened to when angst ridden and fourteen. The Final Cut is altogether too personal to ever be considered a proper Pink Floyd album, and, apart from some searing solos from David Gilmour, is pretty much a Roger Waters solo album in all but name. I can’t say I listen to them at all these days, unlike many of the people at the Albert Hall, who probably have side three of The Wall on repeat in their fucking Vauxhall Insignias.

However, what they did do was open the door to the exploration of a remarkable back catalogue, which even these days continually reveals itself anew to me like a shy lover in the waxy light of a stolen bedsit tryst. The peculiar English misery of many of Waters latter day lyrics seems to strike a melancholy chord as our world becomes increasingly confusing. Of course, it’s also worth remembering that we approach most things with the arrogance of all generations, assuming that our particular version of impending Armageddon is somehow more valid than any other. When “Dark Side of the Moon” came out, the Vietnam War was drawing to its bloody denouement, Israel and her neighbours were littering the deserts of the middle east with burning tanks, the Bahder Meinhoff gang were getting busy, and the streets of Northern Ireland were already running with blood. Apart from the latest series of X-Factor and the upcoming global financial meltdown, what do we really have to worry about? As the years go by, it all seems rather quaint, and it seems quite sobering to think that Pink Floyd’s magnum opus was released only thirty years from the battle of Stalingrad. Of course, it’s all relative. We think we are in dangerous times, therefore we are.

The band have all but dismissed the music made between the departure of Syd Barrett and their eventual commercial flowering with Dark Side of the Moon, but I maintain that it is here that their most enduring music is to be found. Take “Obscured by Clouds”, the album immediately preceding “Dark Side…,” made for the soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder’s hippy flick “La Valee” . Knocked off in a couple of weeks it contains some wonderful moments, not least Rick Wright’s lovely piano ballad “Stay”, which finds its writer once again grappling with guilt at rock and roll’s illicit pleasures of the flesh, like any nice grammar school boy would. There is also the marvellously portentous drone of the title track, where synths gather like storm clouds over a primitive drum machine while Gilmour’s stately slide guitar soars like a B-52 overhead.

I’d quite happily never hear most of the orchestral cow pat that is Atom Heart Mother ever again (apart from the funky middle section) but the second side comes alive with “Summer 68”, a strange kind of chamber pop piece totally out of kilter with just about anything else the band ever did. Gilmour still retains a soft spot for “Fat Old Sun”, his first good Floyd tune, and it’s easy to see why, even if Nick Mason’s drumming is hilariously inept during the guitar solo.

Virtuosity, though, was never the main reason to like Floyd, which is why their music has weathered the storms of the great Prog Rock Purges better than some of their more studied contemporaries. At the heart of many of their finest moments is a sense that they were just, well, arsing about, such as the fortuitous piano note which kicks off “Echoes”, which to me beats the more favoured “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” for the title of “Best Floyd Epic”. At times, this could be embarrassing, such as most of the studio half of “Ummagumma” or “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast”, but occasionally it would yield enduring hallmarks of experimental rock such as “One of the These Days”, built around an echoing pattern on the bass. When Pink Floyd stopped arsing around, their music suffered and became predictable.

Of course, predictability is the one word which could never be used to describe Syd Barrett. His time as leader of the band was brief, yet his presence casts an enormous shadow over everything they have done since. To many, Pink Floyd ended the day the rest of the boys decided not to pick him up for a gig. Syd, his mind blown either by incipient mental illness or a massively heroic dose of LSD and Mandrax, drifted off into reclusive legend, leaving the legacy of a pair of remarkable solo albums and one full album with The Floyd. But what an album.

“Piper at the Gates of Dawn” certainly has its faults, but there as an artefact of Brit psych it makes Sgt Pepper look like Brothers in Arms. Certainly, it toned down aspects of the band’s live act to suit the straight laced EMI studios, and the version of Interstellar Overdrive doesn’t really measure up to the Joe Boyd produced original featured on the soundtrack of Peter Whitehead’s movie “Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London”, but to listen again to Astronomy Domine and try to figure out just where this music was coming from in 1967. Barrett’s chromatic chord changes and glistening, echo-laden guitar glissandos have no precedent in British pop music, while his focus on the dark inner space of childhood resonated with the acid drenched climate of the times. And has there ever been a song as gleefully and unselfconsciously mad as “Bike”?

So, we are now promised “immersion” sets of the classic albums, starting with “Dark Side…” and “Wish You Were Here”, replete with reproduced memorabilia, various rarities, posters, coasters, alternative mixes – in fact, all the usual bollocks we expect when a major record label decides to make the pips of loyal fans squeak one more time. How much more re-mastering can they take, I wonder, before the oddities and foibles which made them unique are leeched out and we regard the albums as little more than the musical equivalent of the remains of a plate of half time oranges at a school football match? Can we, as fans, really take any more of this?

I don’t think we can, and I think EMI’s policy of drip-feeding Floyd fans with the occasional rare nugget bundled with new versions of the same old albums is flawed. Why not release a series of CDs containing all the rarities, outtakes and rare live recordings in one place, including the final Syd Barrett recordings, “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream”, in proper quality at last? I’d be willing to replace all the bootlegged mp3’s and old cassettes for a proper, official release, and I’m sure many others would too. Look at the success of The Beatles’ Anthology to see how it could be done.

Alas, they probably won’t, and the music industry will continue to vanish up its own arse while selling ever more spurious collector’s items to superannuated “fans” who last bought a new album sometime around the turn of the century. And, as the last member of the Australian Pink Floyd is buried beneath the last re-mastered, quad sound, 5.1 DVD Audio SACD super heavyweight vinyl mix copy of “Dark Side of the Moon” (with special 3D backstage pass reproduction), those of us who actually cherish the maverick spirit of the band’s original incarnation as avatars of the English underground will breath, breath in the air and let out a sigh of relief.