0.25.1 - And how we found, the same old fears
So I opened my doors to my enemies
And I asked "Could the slate be wiped clean?"
But they told me to please go and fuck myself
I guess you just can't win
While I am pretty sure this is not the reason my subconscious has decided to serve this up to me this week, I remember feeling a weird, visceral shock on hearing this song back when I listened to 1994's The Division Bell, the album it hails from, because this was the first time I'd heard (or registered) hard R rated language from a band I had been listening to since I was three years old.
The trick I've learned over the years when faced with a song fragment cycling endlessly through my brain is to just go and listen to the song. Apparently, the psychological reason is that the brain ends up trapped in a loop it can't complete which is why the same section repeats over and over. You can break the cycle by completing the loop, which means putting the song on and listening to it all the way through and your brain goes "Oh right, that's how that ends" and moves on to remembering, in retrospect, every time I did or said anything stupid or ignorant instead. That's how this started, a skipped groove in my brain's mental playback; step two, and it's time for my failing memory to get a hand on this ball.
"Let's kill two birds with one stone," I thought, "I can listen to A Momentary Lapse Of Reason and cover it for the blog and also get this song out of my head." Observant readers will already have noticed that the song that fragment comes from doesn't appear on that album. By the time I'd realised my mistake, and googled the lyrics so I could find the actual song, then checked back in my long database of albums I've listened to this year only to find I already listened to The Division Bell back in April, I was already thoroughly turned around. On top of that, when recording the fact that I'd listened to A Monetary Lapse Of Reason in what would turn out to be a thematically appropriate reading of that album title, it pulled into sharp focus that I'd probably be listening to my 600th album this week, another of those pointless rollover checkmarks that is rationally meaningless but our pattern-loving monkey brains can't help but celebrate. So a plan was born out of the rubble of my idiocy. It was time to tackle Pink Floyd.
Well, some of Pink Floyd.
As a habitual completionist, the fact that I don't much care for, and have no plans to listen to any of the Pink Floyd material recorded before Meddle in 1971 makes me weirdly uncomfortable. In the back of my head, my own voice tells me that "you can't really appreciate a bands whole body of work unless you understand the origins and musical progression of what they are trying to achieve with their entire collection of albums" to which my only real response is to ask what if the early albums were kind of boring and I didn't like them? It would be easier if those early 60's psychadelic rock albums were considered bad, but they aren't - there's a definite critical appreciation of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets and I am here, choosing wilfully to just disregard that part of their discography. But to me, in my head, that's some other band called Pink Floyd, comprised of some of the same people but playing a different kind of music for a different audience. To me, when One Of These Days slowly builds to life with bass and synths galloping over the blowing wind at the start of Meddle, that's the first Pink Floyd song I recognise as being the band I know and love - but even then, there will be albums to come that I hate, and listened to only reluctantly this time through.
It doesn't sound like I am much of a fan of Pink Floyd at all, but I chose them to sit on the 600th album threshold for a reason - when not mired in personal turmoil across their cast of lead vocalists and creative forces, Pink Floyd are responsible for multiple albums I'd choose to save over the vast majority of other music ever created. Even deciding which of their two titanic masterpieces would occupy the actual number 600 spot I left to the very last minute, before the contrarian in me decided Dark Side Of The Moon gets enough credit anyway, and my childhood memories conjure with far greater clarity a young Rich being mesmerised by the man on fire on the cover of the album as the headphones filled my tiny brain with twelve minute laments to hope and melancholy.
Wish You Were Here gets top billing, but this is not just that album. Long time readers will know that I have a pathological aversion to talking about established classics, known quantities in the music criticism sphere and this is no different just because its Floyd. So before I try and say anything of value about my album number 600, lets scoop up the albums that exist inside what I think of as "The Real Pink Floyd" discography.
In my darker, self-reflective moments I worry that I would end up as the Roger Waters of any band which would be foolish enough to have me. I don't normally go for history lessons in my articles but the context here is important - as the lead singer and self-appointed creative force behind post 1970's Pink Floyd, Waters would infuse Pink Floyds output liberally with his own psychological trauma - he is the very epitome of the "Men will do anything else to avoid going to therapy" meme. While Waters deep thoughts and meditations on life, death, and politics infused Dark Side Of The Moon and his feelings on the mental illness and consequences of psychedelic drugs on their previous lead singer, and his dissatisfaction with the machinations of the music industry turned Wish You Were Here into (in my opinion) the best Pink Floyd album, each success only made him feel like his vision, what he wanted to talk about, his ideas were what made Pink Floyd who they were. His increasing misanthropy and desire to isolate himself from his fans, as well as the first glimpses of his exploration of wartime trauma, were the guiding force behind The Wall. By this time, the contributions by the rest of the band were shunned, rejected as not vital to Mr Waters Important Creative Vision. On the verge of implosion, and dominated by an egomaniac unwilling to compromise or listen, Pink Floyd released The Final Cut, a 46 minute meditation on the death of Roger Waters father during the Second World War, and the effect it had on him, as well as several other Roger Waters Deep Thoughts About War Being Bad scattered throughout.
I hate The Final Cut. It's truly poisoned by its creative process, and it killed Pink Floyd in the thrashing labour of its creation. Waters and the band parted ways; Waters assumed he was Pink Floyd and the others would just slink off into retirement; the other members of Pink Floyd disagreed. Waters launched a solo career, and assumed Pink Floyd was no longer a going concern, and for a time he was right. In the process of disintegrating, the relationships between guitarist Dave Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Rick Wright had fallen apart through a hundred little arguments. Wright had been fired from the band, Mason had left. But, perhaps united only by a desire to spite their former frontman, they came together over a series of songs penned by Dave Gilmour for a potential solo project, and released it as Pink Floyd. A Momentary Lapse Of Reason isn't a great Pink Floyd album, but it's certainly significantly better than the album which preceded it. Learning To Fly has an incredible drum section and is the highlight of the whole album, but I have a fondness for this album over and above its own creative merit because of what it represents - a group of people coming together in the face of years of animosity and dysfunction. That they would go on to produce The Division Bell, an album which stands shoulder to shoulder with the great albums from their 1970's heyday, but without Water's poisonous influence, is the phoenix-from-the-ashes story Pink Floyd deserved, rather than the record books showing them destroyed by internal divisiveness and ego.
Meddle, as I've said, represents the debut of 'modern' Pink Floyd; the same experimentation, the layering of sound and rhythm which marks their progressive explorations of what you can do with the form of 'rock music' in the 1970s is here, but lyrically its far less focused, less 'on message', and I like it for that. Its a perfect bridge from the old form to the new, a hint of esoteric psychedelia merged with the newer musical sensibility. Obscured By Clouds, well, I'm going to be honest here - I needed to listen to 6 albums to get me to 600 and that meant I could cover everything from Meddle to the present day and that would get me to exactly 600, and while Obscured By Clouds is a studio album by Pink Floyd released after 1970, in reality its a kind of obscure soundtrack album for a film I've never seen and I have no love for it. I listened to it here for the sake of completeness and to get my numbers in the right place, and I have little more to say about it. God, maybe I don't like Pink Floyd albums?
In the last of the post 1970's albums apart from the important ones, I don't know where in the general critical canon Animals sits, but as a kid I loved it - not as much as The Wall or Wish You Were Here, but I guess in my day we didn't let kids listen to Baby Shark endlessly on repeat, and my parents would make me listen to other albums on occasion, and so Animals became part of a group of 20 or so albums that would rotate in and out of my listening habits as a child. I loved the album art, and on a trip to London in 1980 (to see Return of the Jedi at the cinema for my birthday), we made a point to see Battersea Power Station just so I could behold the real place I'd seen on that album cover so many times. There was no flying pig above it on that day that I recall. You can see where the emotional through line goes when you map the trend from Animals, to The Wall and on to The Final Cut, though I will say that the conversations about policing and control and oppression the album uses as its central theme continue have rolled back around to the current day with very little difference in tone.
And then there were two.
So here we are, two albums I can't talk about in any terms apart from the personal - too much far smarter, better researched*, better written missives have been penned about the impact of Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here for me to try. Look, here's one written and published by Harvard University, you think I am going to compete with that? So instead, lets cover just a small piece of my relationship with this album and give people more unfettered access to my own personal box of crazy.
I spent a lot of time (as opposed to now, where I spend only a small, well managed amount of time**) envisioning what it might look like when finally, inevitably, nuclear weapons were exchanged between nations too dogmatic and proud to do anything other than destroy the world. I'd think about a broadcast, a 20 minute warning, no time to do anything other than fill an increasingly finite window of time with something. I didn't want to be caught having not considered what to do when the sirens went off and waste a whole 15 minutes of my remaining 20 even coming up with a plan. My plan, my predetermined reaction was to go to a rooftop wherever I was, and lie on that roof looking up at the sky and as closely as possible, try and time my remaining twenty minutes to end as the final notes of Eclipse from Dark Side of the Moon played in my ears from my personal media player of choice. I'd timed it out and my best reckoning was that if you started Us and Them at that start and played the last four tracks in sequence, that would be just over 15 minutes, which gives me 5 minutes to get to a roof and get settled. Then I could just look up, and as the synths climb, and the lyrics proclaim
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that's to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
Flash, boom, quiet oblivion. For a while I had a blank cassette which just had those four songs recorded on it. When technology moved on, I burned a CD which was just those four songs and wrote "Apocalypse Mix" on it. To this day, my Spotify for has the last four songs of the album downloaded locally - you don't want your final moments to be ruined because of bad internet connectivity, after all.
How then, if Dark Side Of The Moon is my predetermined companion in the face of nuclear armageddon, can I have chosen to elevate Wish You Were Here over it in prominence?
The answer is simply that the title track is one of my favourite songs of all time. While I will prevaricate when someone asks me what my favourite song is, that's because there's a list - shortish, no more than a dozen - of songs which I believe are transcendent experiences, sublime moments of performance which, in the experiencing of them, bring us closer to perfection. I think Wish You Were Here is one of those songs. I love Shine On You Crazy Diamond, the sprawling expansive love letter to Syd Barrett, the former band member who's mental health fractured under the weight of fame and drugs; which is beautiful and celebratory and sad in perfect proportion, orchestral in scope, intensely personal in messaging. The songs complaining about the music industry, Have a Cigar and Welcome To The Machine would be trite if they were not so darkly comic; bands complaining about their managers and representation is a trope to end all tropes by now, but in 1973, maybe that wasn't the case. In the middle of these songs about lost friends and cynical music execs sits a five minute song, opening with just a single guitar and a voice of such resigned, exhausted sadness that it broke my heart when I was younger, and now just feels like I feel. Wish You Were Here wants to make a connection, to ask you if you'd make the same choices you made again, wondering if you have doubts like the singer does, and what could we even do about it now it's done? If the Wish You Were Here album were 5 minutes and 34 seconds long and contained only this track, it would still be my favourite Pink Floyd album.
I feel like I've been typing for longer than usual at this point, so just a couple of Wish You Were Here stories before I walk away from the computer and figure out which nearby rooftops might have easy access should I need it. When my cousin Paul and his now wife were due to get married, only weeks before the ceremony, the musician they had retained for the big day had to drop out. Left with minimal time to find a replacement, they asked my Dad who, as I've mentioned before, is no slouch. The ask was not too great, they just wanted some simple acoustic music to play Paul and his fiancé down to the officiant and then play them out again, and maybe a little light interstitial music while the guests were seated before the ceremony kicked off. Dad took his guitar to the wedding, and sat on a stool slightly off to one side, he got the sign from one of the wedding party to start playing because the bride was on her way. I've never really got to the bottom of what happened, but for one reason or another, the time between the signal that the bride was on her way being given and the bride actually arriving at the venue was very nearly 50 minutes, during which my father gamely continued to play, never being sure when he might be signalled to switch to the wedding music Paul and Edwina had requested. Improvising 50 minutes of acoustic jams on the spot is no mean feat, and my dad obviously soon started to run out of ideas. He never switched wholesale to just playing full covers of songs he knew, though he could have I am sure. Instead, he'd mix and match bits of songs together, 2 bars from James Taylor's You've Got A Friend, the bridge in the middle of The Beatles Blackbird, and so forth. That is, until more than 30 minutes in, his improvising took on a greater structure. I'd been shuffling in my seat, gazing with boredom at the room decor for the eighteenth time, when I realised my Dad had moved fully into just playing Wish You Were Here. I looked over at him, sensing no change in the mood of the seated wedding party, and he winked at me knowing for sure I was the only one in the room who knew what he had done.
Seeing Wish You Were Here live defined my love of live music. We were a very secular household, and so I didn't have much experience of large groups of people singing in acoustically pleasant environments apart from school assemblies, and none of what happened in the school hall at Newbold Green Community School would have been considered sonically enriching. So when the radio babble which prefaces the start of Wish You Were Here began inside the Earls Court Arena in 1991, I wasn't prepared for what would happen next. The entire room, with one voice, sang at Dave Gilmour as he sat with his guitar on stage. The symphonic roar of it, the sense of incredible community and total devotion I experienced in that moment converted me instantly into a true believer in the power of live music. I've spent years chasing that experience; I once thought I'd never find it again - modern arenas are too tuned away from crowd noise, too well amplified for the bands performance to make that single-throated roar carry and overwhelm the song in the way I experienced it that night. Then, in 2024, at the Eras*** tour in Edinburgh, when Taylor Swift played Haunted and Exile as her surprise songs for the night, 90,000 people across Murrayfield performed the song with such passion that I felt the air moving around me, the seat vibrating, the building swaying with the force of it. You can see it here, but the power of it in the moment cannot be captured on video. It was spectacular.
Till next time.
*That is to say that any amount of research at all was done; here you get what I think I remember and then checked on wikipedia to make sure I hadn't dreamed it.
** Therapy is great and all and I'm a much healthier person but the crazy is still in there, lurking.
***If you thought I was going to get to a hungred-number album without somehow making at about Taylor Swift well more fool you.
