by bill wyman no less...he's pretty critical of the band as a whole and more specifically of mason and wright and seems to have a bit of snarkiness toward them, which makes for some interesting/funny critiques...ultimate TL;DR alert here...
https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/all-165-pink-floyd-songs-ranked-from-worst-to-best.html
All 165 Pink Floyd Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best
So, you think you can tell Meddle from The Division Bell?
By Bill Wyman
Pink Floyd may be the only rock band that can credibly be compared to both the Beatles and Spinal Tap.
Its mid-’70s sonic triumphs — including The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here— are both aural delights and meaningful works of art whose message is conveyed through sound. The members of the band — Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright — approached their work seriously and blew minds in the process.
And it’s possible this perennially popular band has had its popularity underestimated. Over the years, I’ve become extremely impressed with an amateur music-industry analyst who lives in France, Guillaume Vieira. He obsessively collects worldwide sales data. Not sales claims; sales data. You can read his 51 pages of Pink Floyd sales data here. The upshot: Pink Floyd has sold more albums worldwide than the Beatles. Floyd recorded over a longer period, of course, but both groups have released about the same number of albums, and had about the same span of decades to sell their work to new generations — and in new configurations.
And yet … the band’s famous works were recorded over an extremely short period, in a recording career that has now stretched nearly to five decades. Much of the rest of it was filled by wildly veering musical approaches, big misfires, aesthetic excesses, pratfalls, and wide-ranging acts of buffoonery you wouldn’t find surprising in a This Is Spinal Tap outtake reel.
Anyway, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the band’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Few Pink Floyd fans can read those words, taken from a chapter heading of The Wind in the Willows by the band’s fey original leader, Syd Barrett, without a twinge of sadness. If you’re not familiar with Barrett’s tragic tale, read on.
The list that follows ranks all of the band’s officially released studio work, from the worst song to the best.
In its massive confusion, this accounting — which, whether we like it or not, hangs above our cultural world, as the band itself might have put it, motionless upon the air, like an albatross — is a testament to the good humor of the gods of rock, which now and again smile upon otherwise unemployable, gangly British nitwits.
165. “Round and Around,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason(1987): To understand Pink Floyd, you have to understand that there are at least four, or arguably five, Pink Floyds. The first was a goofy and absurdist pop-rock band, led by one Syd Barrett, whose contributions were limited basically to a couple of singles and one album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; more on him anon. The second Pink Floyd had its origins before Barrett joined, and then reached full pretentious flower after his departure; this aggregation was one of the founders of progressive rock, a psychedelic, space-rock-y, quasi-improvisational ensemble; it proffered a whole bunch of those multipart suites and played around with atonal bashings and funny sound effects in soi-disant psychedelic happenings in Swinging London, most of it of little or no aesthetic interest this many years on. The third Pink Floyd is the one we know and love; the organic unit that created Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon,and Wish You Were Here. You could make the argument that this phase soon evolved into a different, fourth version of the band, which saw a domineering Waters taking control and producing increasingly what were essentially Roger Waters solo albums, starting with Animals, going through The Wall and The Final Cut, and then proceeding into his solo career. Pink Floyd Phase 5 was the band that continued after Waters left, and would have been an enormous joke were it not for its record sales (big) and tour grosses (even bigger). “Round and Around” is aimless even by the standards of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, the band’s first post-Waters album. The story is that Wright and Gilmour hashed out scores of instrumental tracks from which they picked promising tunes for their first Waters-less album. They’d had more than a decade to come up with new songs. This made the cut?
164. “Two Suns in the Sunset,” The Final Cut (1983): This is the final song on the final album by the band people feel is the “real” Pink Floyd. It was a watershed moment in the group’s career: Bassist Roger Waters, whose expanding vision and growing songwriting talents had given the band The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals,and The Wall, had become (by all accounts including his own) a hellacious asshole — he’d even insisted that the band fire its original keyboardist, Richard Wright, during the recording of The Wall. After The Final Cut, Waters himself left the band, and announced that Pink Floyd was over. Right about then, the two remaining members, guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason, realized that they controlled the name of one of the biggest entities in rock — and that, with that prick Waters gone, the conditions of actually being in that band had just improved remarkably. As for this song, to end the dreary song cycle of The Final Cut — subtitled “Requiem for the Post-War Dream by Roger Waters” — Waters rolls out a nuclear holocaust, a kablooey ex machina, and sings about it in a pinched little whiny voice that is an aesthetic holocaust just by itself. Speaking of disasters, Rolling Stone gave this overwrought, self-important, and almost unlistenable album five stars.
163. “Atom Heart Mother,” Atom Heart Mother (1970): This was the band’s fifth album. For the record, “Atom Heart Mother” doesn’t mean anything; it was taken from a newspaper headline. And the cow on the cover is a similar piece of absurdism. It’s just a cow. All that you can forgive. But this nonsense begins with faintly recorded horns as an intro into a six-part not-so-magnum opus. Are there passages that are vaguely interesting? Yes, but nothing to excuse the excessive length. These days the term “progressive rock” is generally used to denote ’70s aggregations that proffered hyper-noted assaults with lots of show-offy musicianship, abrupt stops and starts, and all other manner of awfulness. In the mid-to-late ’60s, though, the genre was pioneered by bands like the Nice (which featured Keith Emerson, later of Emerson, Lake & Palmer), the Soft Machine, and Pink Floyd, who were basically just poking around with what was possible. (King Crimson came along soon, too. There was even a time Fleetwood Mac, originally a blues band, was a considered a prog-rock outfit.) But truthfully, Pink Floyd guys never had the pure musicality, not to mention the vision, to pull anything like this together. About nine minutes in, in the part that I think is called “Mother Fore,” a stentorian choir comes in. It’s possibly the band’s most Spinal Tap–y moment. And in the next section, “Funky Dung,” the band lays down some hot grooves.
162. “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict,” Ummagumma (1969): Ummagumma, the group’s fourth LP, was the nadir of Pink Floyd Phase 2, from the doltish title on down. It’s a two-disc set; the first disc has extended live versions of the band at its most space-rockin’est. The rest of the album was divided between the four band members, each of whom was given about 15 minutes to play around in his own musical sandbox. This was part of Waters’s contribution. I would like to dock it a dozen notches for the surpassingly stupid title. The thing is, it’s actually a fairly accurate representation of what you get, which is the five minutes of chirrups and squeaks, along with the unidentified ravings of some maniac in a heavy Scottish accent. (The Picts were an early British tribe.)
161. “Obscured by Clouds,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): Three minutes of nice throbby scene-setting for the Barbet Schroeder movie The Valley, not much more. In Pigs Might Fly, the best biography of the band, author Mark Blake says that Waters passed up a chance to have the band’s music in A Clockwork Orange. (In 1970, the band also contributed music to Antonioni’s goofy Zabriskie Point.) The Valley is about some Australians who go tramping into New Guinea, where they find a remote tribe living in a valley whose position is marked “obscured by clouds” on maps. For their album of the same title, the band took their soundtrack music and added a few more songs.
160. “Pow R. Toc H.,” The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967): A very early experiment in sound-sculpturing from the band’s first album, with all sort of rollicking vocal effects, including crunches, hoots, and warblings, all while a patient bass and a decent jazzy piano line try, unsuccessfully, to hold it all together. It seems to go on for an eternity, but when you check it seems only four-and-a-half minutes have passed — but they are trying ones indeed. The band, thinking they were onto a hot groove, had to be persuaded to reduce its length in the studio.
159. “Cluster One,” The Division Bell (1994): The leadoff to The Division Bell, the second post-Waters album,beginswith almost a minute of rustling and other sounds, in order to show that this really was a Pink Floyd album. There’s then another minute of guitar noodling from David Gilmour, in order to ditto. Wright and Gilmour really get into it — so much so that they forget to include an actual song. Nothing ever happens. And the noodling isn’t that good.
158. “Julia Dream,” single (1968): After Barrett left the band, Floyd foundered. This single (the band, like many of its British counterparts at the time, released singles that didn’t appear on any of its proper albums), written by Roger Waters, has the distinction of being one of the worst singles by a major band ever released. If Stephen Bishop had come across Waters sitting on a frat-house stairway with an acoustic guitar serenading a couple of coeds, he would have grabbed the guitar and smashed it.
157. “Bring the Boys Back Home,” The Wall (1979):Just a chorus, really; this fragment from the soundtrack to The Wall should probably be part of the “Vera” sequence. The Wall was Waters’s magnum opus and highly biographical. The story is about a rock star named Pink, raised in the damaged postwar period and forced through a pointlessly rigid schooling system. (Waters’s own school teachers, he said later, “were absolute swine.”) Pink grows up to be a rock star, but finds out it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Waters gets that pampered rock stars don’t really have problems, but viewing his own history (he grew up in Cambridge raised by his mother; his father had been killed in the war), and his own emotional deficiencies, he thought he could craft something like a rock opera around some of the alienation he was feeling, even though he should have been content. Logistically, it really wasn’t a Pink Floyd album; it was created largely by Waters and the messy but talented hard-rock producer Bob Ezrin, who had overseen decent albums by Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, and Peter Gabriel. This was a herculean task, given the vast demands the album would make on a band that didn’t really have the manpower (or the talent) to pull it off.
156. “The Final Cut,” The Final Cut (1983): Like The Wall, The Final Cuttells a story. It is about the effects of the Falklands War, seen through the prism of the Second World War, which of course hurt the country deeply, and included the tragic death of Waters’s father. Here, we have a man returned from the previous war, becoming a schoolteacher, and watching the war cries begin for the Falklands. That conflict, forgotten now, started when the dictator running Argentina occupied some British-held islands in the South Atlantic, mostly to ramp up patriotic fervor on the home front. Margaret Thatcher dispatched some warships and the world watched for a week or so as they chugged their way down the globe. The absurd conflict that resulted included the senseless sinking of an Argentine ship, which cost more than 300 lives. To Waters, this represented an enormous betrayal on the part of the British government, whose rabble-rousing for the war overlooked the terrible cost of the last one. Anyway, that’s all fine. But this song is a puzzlement. It’s another hugely bombastic number, the album’s penultimate track. At this point in The Final Cut, you deeply, deeply never want to hear Roger Waters’s voice again. His big, climactic line, “Or is it just a crazy dream,” delivered in a porcine squeal, is just this side of painful. But that’s not what makes this song inexcusable. For some reason I can’t comprehend, Waters inserts himself into the story; that’s the only way one can interpret this song’s key line, which, having no relevance to the rest of whatever story Waters was trying to tell, has the distinction of being the worst single lyric in the Pink Floyd oeuvre, and that includes the one about the albatross hanging motionless upon the air: “If I open my heart to you / And show you my weak side / What would you do? / Would you sell your story to Rolling Stone?” This from the guy who might never have even been quoted in the magazine over the real Pink Floyd’s existence. Hey, Rog: It’s a small sacrifice. Lie back and think of England.
155. “Stop,” The Wall (1979): You have to give Waters and co-producer Bob Ezrin credit: They did fashion a passably coherent narrative, and the work that went into conceiving, arranging, and recording the more than two dozen tracks on The Wall were daunting. So occasionally you get songs like this one, where they need a piece of narrative-driving. A transition number, 30 seconds long. Pink’s awaiting “trial,” the poor guy.
154. “Seamus,” Meddle (1971): Like Sonic Youth, Pink Floyd was so bad when it started (the first album aside) that even with exponential growth it took five or six efforts before they released a listenable album. That was Meddle. This is the last song on the first side, a raggedy, kind of acoustic number, mumbled, with terrible sound. And if that’s not enough, the whole song is accompanied by a track of dogs howling. Har. Dee. Har. Har.
153. “When You’re In,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): This suffers from the same tonal monotony as the title track to The Valley soundtrack, but a little more energy ensues. Unfortunately it derives from a pretty lite guitar riff and some Deep Purple–y keyboard mewling. It’s not clear why the fadeout lasts 30-plus seconds.
152. “The Dogs of War,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987):
The exquisite irony of the result of Waters’s departure — which Waters has always been smart enough to acknowledge — was that in 1984 the members of Pink Floyd were by far the most anonymous superstars in the world. Interviews with the band were almost nonexistent, and their picture hadn’t been on the cover of an album since Ummagumma, in 1970. (The band was never on the cover of Rolling Stone until a piece about the breakup … which was published in 1987, years after it all happened.) Who the hell cared that someone named Roger Waters left Pink Floyd? All that said, Gilmour himself had no business creating a Pink Floyd album on his own — and it was on his own, because, once the album got underway, it was plain that Mason couldn’t even drum any more. Pink Floyd had to hire outside drummers to play drums for its drummer. Gilmour also brought in outside songwriters, a motley crew that extended even to former Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard. And the record company still rejected the album! Back to the drawing board. The ultimate result was as lame a work as you can imagine. “The Dogs of War” is about mercenaries. Bad guys! But that didn’t stop the thing from selling 4 million units in the U.S. and lots, lots more overseas. The band’s undiscriminating fans ate up the accompanying Waters-less tour as well, with all the ancient Pink Floyd accoutrements, like the floating pig and the exploding airplane, brought out of mothballs. The tour grossed $250 million. I saw it. It was awesome.
151. “Pigs on the Wing, Part 2,” Animals (1977): This is the closing track on Animals, a reprise of the first song: just 90 seconds of strummed acoustic guitar and a few short lines. More on Animals later, but I want to say this: Waters is a smart guy and I don’t want to be glib criticizing his conceptions. But I don’t understand the narrator’s voice here. He’s happy he has a place to “bury [his] bone,” so he has to be a dog. Is he a dog? I didn’t get that from part one. In that one, the characters don’t care for each other, and in this case they do, which I guess is a sign of resignation as they watch the pigs fly above. What this song is really about, however, is songwriting royalties. The two little “Pigs on the Wing” snippets on Animals — basically the same song with different words, 90 seconds each, nothing more than Waters playing a casual acoustic guitar and singing — are credited to Waters alone as songwriter. Accordingly, they represented two separate tracks on the album when it came to songwriting (or “publishing” or “mechanical” royalties) separate from the royalties the band as a whole made from the record. Waters probably took home 3 cents per album sold for each track he wrote, so he would have made a total of 6 cents per album just for these two basically identical little ditties. Now let’s look at Animals’ “Dogs,” which is credited to Waters/Gilmour, and lasts for 16 minutes. That would have given Gilmour about a penny and a half per album sold. Animals sold 12 million copies worldwide, meaning Waters the songwriter might have taken away three-quarters of a million dollars just from the two little “Pigs on the Wing” snippets, compared to about $90,000 for Gilmour for his work on the epic “Dogs.” Drummer Nick Mason, in his highly honest, highly enjoyable autobiography, says that inequities like these contributed to the resentment the band felt toward Waters. (Waters, of course, might have argued and no doubt did that it was his songs that drove the record sales that kept the rest of the band in English manor houses.)
150. “Outside the Wall,” The Wall (1979): This is the last track of The Wall. After all the bombast comes this soft little ditty. It actually works lyrically — it’s a pretty knowing acknowledgment of the cost to the people around those who have put the wall up. But as the last track of the record it’s pretty lame. In the film it runs over the credits and its import is lost.
149. “Absolutely Curtains,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): The final track of the band’s last album before it started getting good. An interminable instrumental, almost devoid of ideas, unless you count letting some out-of-tune kids make funny noises for the last several minutes of this six-minute track an idea.
148. “The Gunner’s Dream,” The Final Cut (1983): This song, coming toward the end of what was the first side of The Final Cut, is where you throw up your hands. The Second World War was a terrible event in world history, and took a devastating toll. This song is an acknowledgment that there were reasons for the war. But all of its victims deserve much better than this labored, clotted, and overwrought assault on the finer sensibilities of just about anyone who might actually listen to it. (Confidential to Roger W.: Constructions like “Take heed” went out with Keats.) And if you think there’s nothing worse than hearing Waters whimper, lugubriously, the line, “And no one kills the children any more,” just wait till he repeats it for effect.
147. “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,” Atom Heart Mother (1970): Another suite from the band’s dreariest period, on an album that had already given us 20-plus minutes of the title song, in no less than six parts. This one comprises a comparatively restrained three parts, and includes the sounds of an actual breakfast being made, complete with dripping faucet, which turns out to be kinda irritating. Gilmour noodles guitars in the middle, with a poorly recorded bass interfering. The third part is mostly keyboard, mixed horribly. The band actually used to play this nonsense live. The titular Alan, incidentally, was a roadie; the title is another example of the band’s jolly jocularity. The argument for this junk, I suppose, is that the band, despite its space-rock leanings, was much more down to earth and organic, as opposed to the flights of high electronic fantasy offered by your King Crimsons and the other, more energetic progressive-rock outfits of the time. Part of the reason it doesn’t work for me is the anonymity of the players. If this is supposed to be organic, there’s no personality to the music.
146. “See-Saw,” A Saucerful of Secrets (1968): Just what we needed, a pastoral, gossamer bit of wispy melody and fairy-tale vocalizing. A horrifyingly bad Wright composition from the band’s second album. The backing vocals are a parody of themselves.
145. “The Show Must Go On,” The Wall (1979):
Doo-wop vocals, synthesized drum rolls, and melodramatic lyrics. (“I didn’t mean to let them take my soul!”) One of the problems with The Wall is that it’s really not clear who the bad guys are. Why did Pink let anyone take his soul? The world Waters and Ezrin were now inhabiting was so far removed from the Floyd of old that Toni Tennille — of “Love Will Keep Us Together” Captain & Tennille fame — was brought in to do backup vocals. One of my favorite moments in the Pink Floyd story is when, after Animals, the other guys in the group decided they’d had just about enough of Roger Waters’s overbearing dominance. They were emboldened by the fact that they’d just recorded two of the biggest albums of the era, and were feeling pretty good moneywise. They’d done what they’d set out to do, and now was the time to let Waters know they were through with his Great Artiste act. Boy, was he going to be surprised! If this were a scene in This Is Spinal Tap, the band would be assembling in a room to give Waters the bad news when … the phone would ring, informing the members that — due to incoherently planned and overambitious tours, a lack of tax planning, bad investments, and inadequate oversight of their accountants — they were basically broke. At which point the members were all ears to hear what their resident genius had on tap for them next. “A two-record rock opera about an unhappy rock star rather like yourself, you say? Sounds intriguing!”
144. “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party,” Ummagumma (1969): There are three parts to this sad waste of vinyl (then) and innocent ones and zeroes (today): “Part 1 – Entrance,” “Part 2 – Entertainment,” and “Part 3 – Exit.” Ummagumma could have been the band’s breakout after the timekeeping More soundtrack. Instead, this is the one where they gave each member of the band 10 or 15 minutes to do anything he wanted — or as in this case, making them fill up the space even though they didn’t want to or had no business doing so. This is Nick Mason’s contribution, including lots of flute played by his then wife. And here’s the thing. It’s a rock band. Why not have each member of the “band,” you know, contribute something to each song? All that said, to be fair it should be noted that what the band was doing here wasn’t on a level worse than some of the painful stuff their peers in Jethro Tull or King Crimson were putting out. “Passion Play,” anyone? “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic”?
143. “Empty Spaces,” The Wall (1979): Nice eerie instrumentalizing as the pressures start to close in on poor little Pink, but it’s really just there to set up “Young Lust” — and give Roger Waters another publishing royalty. Here’s another bit of songwriter-royalties trivia, if you care: In crude terms, with The Wall, Waters almost certainly holds the record for the greatest songwriter windfall from one album in rock history. With a lot of short fragments like “Empty Spaces,” he had the equivalent of 24 solo songwriting credits on The Wall, which, with more than 30 million copies sold worldwide, is in the top-20-biggest-selling albums of all time. No other album close to that rarefied air has so many songwriting credits from one person. Again, given his stature, he should have been netting 3 cents per song, or about 75 cents in total, per record sold. Let’s say CBS had a cap on publishing points that took it down by 10 cents. (Foreign rates vary, of course, but he probably got more than that at least in Europe, where songwriters get 10 percent of the wholesale price.) Sixty-five cents times 30 million copies sold is pretty close to $20 million in gross songwriting royalties from just one album release. That’s probably equal to about what he made from being a member of the band, and he had royalty points as a producer in addition.
142. “Burning Bridges,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): While Pink Floyd should be given credit for improvisation and the aural pleasures that sometimes resulted, particularly in a live setting, it’s not clear that any of them, this early in their career, were thinking outside the box musically. Case in point is this lazy Wright/Gilmour composition. Wright, supposedly the band’s secret musical weapon, rarely produced an actual good, you know, song. It’s painfully plain how simple both the chords and progressions are. The lyrics are all about “ancient bonds” and “gilded cages.” In one sense, maybe this isn’t any worse than an embarrassment like Crimson’s “Moonchild,” but those guys had real chops. This feels aimless and uninventive.
141-128. The 14 tracks of The Endless River (2014): Pink Floyd’s last real album was The Division Bell; a few years ago, however, came this, an album that truly no one had ever asked for. Wright died in 2006; conceived as some sort of a tribute to him and billed as the final Pink Floyd album, it’s two discs based largely on Wright keyboard demos the band had lying around, gussied up with Gilmour playing guitar and Mason playing drums over them. You’ll remember that these tracks were desperately gone over once to produce decent material for Momentary Lapse, to no avail. You might think it was unlikely that there were better tracks that were somehow overlooked; you would be right. It would bore you even more to read about them than it would me to write about each track, so let’s just stick the 14 tracks in a group here. The last song, “Louder Than Words,” is a real song, and isn’t terrible. Despite the fact that The Endless River is a joke on the band’s fans it has nonetheless sold some 2.5 million worldwide.
127. “One of My Turns,” The Wall (1979): In Waters’s conception of The Wall, and it’s not a terrible one, Pink has put an emotional wall up around himself. I like the idea, because it’s hard; back then, “the Wall” was symbolic of the Soviet Union. I liked how Waters wrested the symbol away and tried to make a statement about personal isolation. Anyway, here, Pink gets a groupie and proceeds to get a little weird.
126. “One of the Few,” The Final Cut (1983): Another fragment. Waters’s hero this time is a war veteran who returns to be a teacher.
125. “Is There Anybody Out There?” The Wall (1979): A timekeeping song from The Wall, with an extended classical guitar segment. Pink’s behind the wall, asking for help. In the film it ends with the highly cinematic scene of Bob Geldof shaving his chest. Unsuspecting viewers wouldn’t know that this is a Syd Barrett reference: During the recording of Wish You Were Here, a strange man manifested himself in the control room at Abbey Road. He was portly and quiet, with his pants belted high over his stomach, his head and eyebrows shaved. It took a while before his crushed friends recognized their former bandmate.
124. “Marooned,” The Division Bell (1994): Marooned is how you feel listening to this pallid, five-minute-and-thirty-second guitar solo.
123. “Mudmen,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): A Wright/Gilmour instrumental. There’s a touch or two of drama, and a not-all-that-interesting funny guitar noise.
122. “Scarecrow,” The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967):
Lots — way lots — of cutesy percussion, which passed for experimental back in those days. Syd Barrett grew up in Cambridge, which was relatively protected from the damage the war did to England. He knew both Gilmour and Waters from a young age. Waters, who’d gone to architecture school in London, wound up in a band with keyboardist Wright and drummer Mason and eventually brought Barrett in. The group was into being wildly “creative” — they’d play “Louie Louie” for 30 minutes, improvising — but soon found themselves following the lead of the charismatic Barrett. (Barrett christened them the Pink Floyd Experience; this was soon shortened, but you can still find contemporary references to the band as “The Pink Floyd.”) He was an intriguing, protean figure — a cosmic rock-and-roll griffin, made of equal parts Ray Davies, Sebastian from Brideshead, Morrissey, and Lewis Carroll — considered by all to be brilliant and charming. His disarming off-kilter creativity early on was evidenced in things like a handcrafted book he titled Fart Enjoy. This is one of his second-tier songs. All of his tricks are here; the lines stuffed full of words, the uneven rhythms and gay little asides, the marveling at the wondrous world around us. It’s all fine but he could do a lot better.
121. “Wearing the Inside Out,” The Division Bell (1994): Another insubstantial, forgettable track on Division Bell. Waters’s dark sarcasm was looking better all the time. And then the pompous synthesized horns kick in. Repeat, for almost seven minutes.
120. “Sysyphus, Parts 1–4,” Ummagumma (1969): Starts out heavy and ponderous, then gets quickly lite, with some tinkling piano. And then it goes on and on — heavy but stalled, like that albatross hanging motionless upon the air — over four “parts.” Wright’s contribution to the second disc of Ummagumma shows off his limits. He was a pianist, and a keyboardist, there can be no doubt. But the difference between knowing how to play piano, even well, and crafting a 15-minute solo work worth listening to (and making people pay for) is a very big leap. You can laugh at Rick Wakeman or Keith Emerson, or even Tony Banks, from Genesis; but they were patently heavy, significant, even spectacular players. Wright would later write a couple or three good songs — one of them a significant track on TDSOTM. His textures and creativity on piano, organ, and synthesizer transformed many of the group’s tracks and some of their best ones. But he had no business writing 15-minute on-record epics. And one of the Cambridge boys in the band should have told him how to spell Sisyphus.
119. “Childhood’s End,” Obscured by Clouds (1972):
A Gilmour track some of whose sound would be repurposed for “Time” on TDSOTM. He’s singing in a much-lower register, and his voice loses some of its power. Gilmour’s not at his best when he’s writing his own lyrics: “And then as the sail is hoist / You find your eyes are growing moist.”
118. “Southampton Dock,” The Final Cut (1983): This is apparently a wife, standing at a dock watching the British soldiers head off to the Falklands, reflecting on the former losses of the Second World War. The lyrics include the title of the album, “In the bottom of our hearts we felt the final cut.”
117. “Dramatic Theme,” More (1969): Just what it says.
116. “The Post-War Dream,” The Final Cut (1983): After some scratchy radio-dial turning, à la “Wish You Were Here,” we get the intro to Waters’s dreary post-Wall indulgence. Way too much echo on his voice. We can see from the start this will be a much less subtle (!) operation than The Wall. I don’t have the time or the mental energy to chart the disparate tonal and geopolitical shifts in this short, 16-line intro. And that’s before we get Waters, full-volume, shrieking, “Whatever happened to the postwar dream?”
115. “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” single (1968):
For the B-side to “Point Me at the Sky,” which was a normal song, the band gave fans one of its live barn-burners. On record, though, it comes across just as six minutes of meandering. One of the other things about Pink Floyd that’s hard to process is that, while they could deliver odd pop and even rock songs with Syd Barrett, they were known on the London scene for their association with psychedelic freakout events, notably in a club called UFO, where the band would make weird sounds for hours at a time for the kids to groove to. They were right there at the forefront of such stuff, so they deserve to get credit for the innovation. I always say that inventing progressive rock was probably a dumb idea, but it was Pink Floyd’s dumb idea. One of the Spinal Tap ironies is that they weren’t that good at it!
114. “Take It Back,” The Division Bell (1994): Another long, droning, musically undistinguished track from this surpassingly lame album. It is perfect, however, in one regard. It’s a perfect mediocre song to fill out six-plus minutes on a mediocre album.
113. “Paint Box,” single (1967): The B-side to the band’s last Barrett single, “Apples and Oranges.” It sounds like exactly what it is, a slightly aimless, minor song from a minor British pop band. Written and sung by Wright, it’s not terrible, though his voice isn’t strong enough to carry it.
112. “The Hero’s Return,” The Final Cut (1983): Here the hero-teacher of The Final Cut, back from the war, ruminates on his new charges, how he can’t talk to his wife, and how the memories of the war won’t leave him. Aside from some U2-like delay on the guitar, it’s pretty unmemorable, though it works all right as a bit of plot.
111. “Coming Back to Life,” The Division Bell (1994): Another minute or so of guitar noodling — reminiscent of, but much less dramatic than, the stuff on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” — begins this tepid construction. It gets really irritating when the song takes on a sort of prancing rhythm. I hate that.
110. “Biding My Time,” Relics (1971): Relics was put out early in the band’s career (note the mocking title) to collect the Barrett-era singles, the accompanying B-sides and a few album tracks. This was the only unreleased track on it. One of the most distinctive things about Floyd at the time was how haphazard their sound was. This starts out as a sort of lazy blues, which segues into a sort of ’30s jazz feel, and then all the blues get all electrified … and then the thing goes on for another three minutes. In fairness, though, a lot of the experimental bands at the time would put out albums with oddly disparate tracks on them. (Think of “Anyone for Tennis,” on Cream’s Wheels of Fire.)
109. “Poles Apart,” The Division Bell (1994): This is a song about being “poles apart”! Well-produced track, but its lackluster (and sometimes overly literal) melody and dopey (and sometimes overly literal) lyrics sink it. The song is credited to Gilmour, a guy from Dream Academy (which had the hit “Life in a Northern Town”), and one Polly Samson, Gilmour’s then-fiancée, playing the part of Jeanine Pettibone.
108. “Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert,” The Final Cut (1983): Big explosion to start things out, then some delicate strings as Waters rattles off some geopolitical ironies, very pleased with the ironic musical setting. Length: 1:17.
107. “Sorrow,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987): This is supposed to be the big statement on Momentary Lapse. You can tell by the big swells of muzik and the highfalutin lyrics: “The silence that speaks so much louder than words,” etc., etc. Again, we have the droney sounds with some Gilmourian ruminations up top, again going on for minutes. Then comes something like a beat, which on inspection comes from a poorly programmed friendly local synthesizer rather than, you know, the band’s actual drummer. Latter-day Floyd records sound so samey; Gilmour’s sometimes effective, but generally weak, voice can’t hold things together when there’s no actual artistic spark, however perverse, somewhere in the background. Docked ten notches for its excessively dreary (8:45!!) length, even by Pink Floyd standards.
106. “The Narrow Way,” Ummagumma (1969): This was Gilmour’s contribution to Ummagumma, in three parts. (These guys and their suites.) There’s acoustic murmurings with shitty electronic guitar sounds over it … then a driving electronic riff with some other discordant noise over it, mostly without drums. Part two has some intoned vocalizings. Part three is a passable rock instrumental. Nothing holds these three horrid-to-mediocre pieces of music together. Waters would write a lot, in subsequent years, about the dehumanizing nature of the record industry, and persuasively so. But poor EMI sure put out a lot of shitty Pink Floyd albums early on. That’s something Pink Floyd could have written a song about. (“The hovering albatross takes its chances / We complain about everything except our advances.”) Ummagumma is by far the worst album by a major band of the progressive-rock era, and that includes Tales From Topographic Oceans,Brain Salad Surgery, and Leftoverture.
105. “It Would Be So Nice / Julia Dream,” single, (1968): A Richard Wright song, one of the band’s early singles, done amid the immediate post-Barrett chaos. Has everything a pop song should have — gossamer stylings, la-la-la’s, Beach Boys–y lilts — except a melody, or a point.
104. “Corporal Clegg,” A Saucerful of Secrets (1968): This is a downright comical example of how bad Pink Floyd was immediately post-Barrett. Waters’s junk heap of dumb musical ideas marries wan Beatle-isms to wacky rhythms, a circusy break, and sideways lurches into psychedelia, all recorded poorly and overlaid with a dreadful set of lyrics. These might have been meant as a jaunty McCartney-esque picaresque, but they come off as cruel; Waters’s own experience with the war (which took his father when he was a tot) surely argues against reading this as a mocking take on a war amputee, but it’s not entirely clear why or how.
103. “If,” Atom Heart Mother (1970): More of Pink Floyd’s incoherent aesthetics. How does the dynamic and forceful “Astronomy Dominé” square with the tuneless whispering (from Waters, who wrote it) and rudimentary guitar-plucking of this?
102. “Signs of Life,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987): The leadoff to the first post-Waters album begins, fairly cynically, with a “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”–like dramatic intro … and continues in that vein for minute after minute. I suppose the defense of the song would be that Gilmour wanted to make it clear he was taking the band’s focus back to the TDSOTM and WYWH era, not that of The Wall or The Final Cut. There’s a production sheen, sure, and some sound effects. But it displays none of the lucidity of the first parts of “Shine On,” and really just sounds like the band tuning up.And in any case any such attempt would be fraud, because it was not that band anymore, as the outside songwriters attested.
101. “Your Possible Pasts,” The Final Cut (1983): I can’t tell if this is about schoolyards or concentration camps. Most people will remember only the overdone echoes on the word closer. Gilmour plays some wrenching guitar, but it doesn’t seem like his heart is in it.
100. “Learning to Fly,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987): I hate this song for the same reason I hate “Owner of a Lonely Heart” or Permanent Vacation: It’s an overproduced, fraudulent piece of commercial crap designed to distract people from the fact that, while the name of the band on the label hasn’t changed, the creative people behind the music have.
99. “Green Is the Colour,” More (1969): An early Waters vocal track, in a tentative falsetto. (More was the first of two Barbet Schroeder films the band contributed a soundtrack to.) The kind thing to say is that the band was still trying to find its voice. Then you have to cope with poesy like, “She lay in the shadow of a wave / Hazy were the visions overplayed.”
98. “Party Sequence,” More (1969):A percussion-y tack of incidental sounds. More was the first film by Schroeder, a minor player in the French New Wave. It’s not a great movie, but it does capture a world fairly well, and it’s de-romanticized without moralizing. It’s about a male French college student who goes to Paris on an adventure. He gets into some wild stuff and then runs off to Ibiza with a female friend. Threesomes result, but so does heroin addiction, and things don’t end well. Schroeder went on to direct some U.S. commercial fare, including Single White FemaleandReversal of Fortune.
https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/all-165-pink-floyd-songs-ranked-from-worst-to-best.html
All 165 Pink Floyd Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best
So, you think you can tell Meddle from The Division Bell?
By Bill Wyman
Pink Floyd may be the only rock band that can credibly be compared to both the Beatles and Spinal Tap.
Its mid-’70s sonic triumphs — including The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here— are both aural delights and meaningful works of art whose message is conveyed through sound. The members of the band — Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright — approached their work seriously and blew minds in the process.
And it’s possible this perennially popular band has had its popularity underestimated. Over the years, I’ve become extremely impressed with an amateur music-industry analyst who lives in France, Guillaume Vieira. He obsessively collects worldwide sales data. Not sales claims; sales data. You can read his 51 pages of Pink Floyd sales data here. The upshot: Pink Floyd has sold more albums worldwide than the Beatles. Floyd recorded over a longer period, of course, but both groups have released about the same number of albums, and had about the same span of decades to sell their work to new generations — and in new configurations.
And yet … the band’s famous works were recorded over an extremely short period, in a recording career that has now stretched nearly to five decades. Much of the rest of it was filled by wildly veering musical approaches, big misfires, aesthetic excesses, pratfalls, and wide-ranging acts of buffoonery you wouldn’t find surprising in a This Is Spinal Tap outtake reel.
Anyway, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the band’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Few Pink Floyd fans can read those words, taken from a chapter heading of The Wind in the Willows by the band’s fey original leader, Syd Barrett, without a twinge of sadness. If you’re not familiar with Barrett’s tragic tale, read on.
The list that follows ranks all of the band’s officially released studio work, from the worst song to the best.
In its massive confusion, this accounting — which, whether we like it or not, hangs above our cultural world, as the band itself might have put it, motionless upon the air, like an albatross — is a testament to the good humor of the gods of rock, which now and again smile upon otherwise unemployable, gangly British nitwits.
165. “Round and Around,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason(1987): To understand Pink Floyd, you have to understand that there are at least four, or arguably five, Pink Floyds. The first was a goofy and absurdist pop-rock band, led by one Syd Barrett, whose contributions were limited basically to a couple of singles and one album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; more on him anon. The second Pink Floyd had its origins before Barrett joined, and then reached full pretentious flower after his departure; this aggregation was one of the founders of progressive rock, a psychedelic, space-rock-y, quasi-improvisational ensemble; it proffered a whole bunch of those multipart suites and played around with atonal bashings and funny sound effects in soi-disant psychedelic happenings in Swinging London, most of it of little or no aesthetic interest this many years on. The third Pink Floyd is the one we know and love; the organic unit that created Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon,and Wish You Were Here. You could make the argument that this phase soon evolved into a different, fourth version of the band, which saw a domineering Waters taking control and producing increasingly what were essentially Roger Waters solo albums, starting with Animals, going through The Wall and The Final Cut, and then proceeding into his solo career. Pink Floyd Phase 5 was the band that continued after Waters left, and would have been an enormous joke were it not for its record sales (big) and tour grosses (even bigger). “Round and Around” is aimless even by the standards of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, the band’s first post-Waters album. The story is that Wright and Gilmour hashed out scores of instrumental tracks from which they picked promising tunes for their first Waters-less album. They’d had more than a decade to come up with new songs. This made the cut?
164. “Two Suns in the Sunset,” The Final Cut (1983): This is the final song on the final album by the band people feel is the “real” Pink Floyd. It was a watershed moment in the group’s career: Bassist Roger Waters, whose expanding vision and growing songwriting talents had given the band The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals,and The Wall, had become (by all accounts including his own) a hellacious asshole — he’d even insisted that the band fire its original keyboardist, Richard Wright, during the recording of The Wall. After The Final Cut, Waters himself left the band, and announced that Pink Floyd was over. Right about then, the two remaining members, guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason, realized that they controlled the name of one of the biggest entities in rock — and that, with that prick Waters gone, the conditions of actually being in that band had just improved remarkably. As for this song, to end the dreary song cycle of The Final Cut — subtitled “Requiem for the Post-War Dream by Roger Waters” — Waters rolls out a nuclear holocaust, a kablooey ex machina, and sings about it in a pinched little whiny voice that is an aesthetic holocaust just by itself. Speaking of disasters, Rolling Stone gave this overwrought, self-important, and almost unlistenable album five stars.
163. “Atom Heart Mother,” Atom Heart Mother (1970): This was the band’s fifth album. For the record, “Atom Heart Mother” doesn’t mean anything; it was taken from a newspaper headline. And the cow on the cover is a similar piece of absurdism. It’s just a cow. All that you can forgive. But this nonsense begins with faintly recorded horns as an intro into a six-part not-so-magnum opus. Are there passages that are vaguely interesting? Yes, but nothing to excuse the excessive length. These days the term “progressive rock” is generally used to denote ’70s aggregations that proffered hyper-noted assaults with lots of show-offy musicianship, abrupt stops and starts, and all other manner of awfulness. In the mid-to-late ’60s, though, the genre was pioneered by bands like the Nice (which featured Keith Emerson, later of Emerson, Lake & Palmer), the Soft Machine, and Pink Floyd, who were basically just poking around with what was possible. (King Crimson came along soon, too. There was even a time Fleetwood Mac, originally a blues band, was a considered a prog-rock outfit.) But truthfully, Pink Floyd guys never had the pure musicality, not to mention the vision, to pull anything like this together. About nine minutes in, in the part that I think is called “Mother Fore,” a stentorian choir comes in. It’s possibly the band’s most Spinal Tap–y moment. And in the next section, “Funky Dung,” the band lays down some hot grooves.
162. “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict,” Ummagumma (1969): Ummagumma, the group’s fourth LP, was the nadir of Pink Floyd Phase 2, from the doltish title on down. It’s a two-disc set; the first disc has extended live versions of the band at its most space-rockin’est. The rest of the album was divided between the four band members, each of whom was given about 15 minutes to play around in his own musical sandbox. This was part of Waters’s contribution. I would like to dock it a dozen notches for the surpassingly stupid title. The thing is, it’s actually a fairly accurate representation of what you get, which is the five minutes of chirrups and squeaks, along with the unidentified ravings of some maniac in a heavy Scottish accent. (The Picts were an early British tribe.)
161. “Obscured by Clouds,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): Three minutes of nice throbby scene-setting for the Barbet Schroeder movie The Valley, not much more. In Pigs Might Fly, the best biography of the band, author Mark Blake says that Waters passed up a chance to have the band’s music in A Clockwork Orange. (In 1970, the band also contributed music to Antonioni’s goofy Zabriskie Point.) The Valley is about some Australians who go tramping into New Guinea, where they find a remote tribe living in a valley whose position is marked “obscured by clouds” on maps. For their album of the same title, the band took their soundtrack music and added a few more songs.
160. “Pow R. Toc H.,” The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967): A very early experiment in sound-sculpturing from the band’s first album, with all sort of rollicking vocal effects, including crunches, hoots, and warblings, all while a patient bass and a decent jazzy piano line try, unsuccessfully, to hold it all together. It seems to go on for an eternity, but when you check it seems only four-and-a-half minutes have passed — but they are trying ones indeed. The band, thinking they were onto a hot groove, had to be persuaded to reduce its length in the studio.
159. “Cluster One,” The Division Bell (1994): The leadoff to The Division Bell, the second post-Waters album,beginswith almost a minute of rustling and other sounds, in order to show that this really was a Pink Floyd album. There’s then another minute of guitar noodling from David Gilmour, in order to ditto. Wright and Gilmour really get into it — so much so that they forget to include an actual song. Nothing ever happens. And the noodling isn’t that good.
158. “Julia Dream,” single (1968): After Barrett left the band, Floyd foundered. This single (the band, like many of its British counterparts at the time, released singles that didn’t appear on any of its proper albums), written by Roger Waters, has the distinction of being one of the worst singles by a major band ever released. If Stephen Bishop had come across Waters sitting on a frat-house stairway with an acoustic guitar serenading a couple of coeds, he would have grabbed the guitar and smashed it.
157. “Bring the Boys Back Home,” The Wall (1979):Just a chorus, really; this fragment from the soundtrack to The Wall should probably be part of the “Vera” sequence. The Wall was Waters’s magnum opus and highly biographical. The story is about a rock star named Pink, raised in the damaged postwar period and forced through a pointlessly rigid schooling system. (Waters’s own school teachers, he said later, “were absolute swine.”) Pink grows up to be a rock star, but finds out it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Waters gets that pampered rock stars don’t really have problems, but viewing his own history (he grew up in Cambridge raised by his mother; his father had been killed in the war), and his own emotional deficiencies, he thought he could craft something like a rock opera around some of the alienation he was feeling, even though he should have been content. Logistically, it really wasn’t a Pink Floyd album; it was created largely by Waters and the messy but talented hard-rock producer Bob Ezrin, who had overseen decent albums by Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, and Peter Gabriel. This was a herculean task, given the vast demands the album would make on a band that didn’t really have the manpower (or the talent) to pull it off.
156. “The Final Cut,” The Final Cut (1983): Like The Wall, The Final Cuttells a story. It is about the effects of the Falklands War, seen through the prism of the Second World War, which of course hurt the country deeply, and included the tragic death of Waters’s father. Here, we have a man returned from the previous war, becoming a schoolteacher, and watching the war cries begin for the Falklands. That conflict, forgotten now, started when the dictator running Argentina occupied some British-held islands in the South Atlantic, mostly to ramp up patriotic fervor on the home front. Margaret Thatcher dispatched some warships and the world watched for a week or so as they chugged their way down the globe. The absurd conflict that resulted included the senseless sinking of an Argentine ship, which cost more than 300 lives. To Waters, this represented an enormous betrayal on the part of the British government, whose rabble-rousing for the war overlooked the terrible cost of the last one. Anyway, that’s all fine. But this song is a puzzlement. It’s another hugely bombastic number, the album’s penultimate track. At this point in The Final Cut, you deeply, deeply never want to hear Roger Waters’s voice again. His big, climactic line, “Or is it just a crazy dream,” delivered in a porcine squeal, is just this side of painful. But that’s not what makes this song inexcusable. For some reason I can’t comprehend, Waters inserts himself into the story; that’s the only way one can interpret this song’s key line, which, having no relevance to the rest of whatever story Waters was trying to tell, has the distinction of being the worst single lyric in the Pink Floyd oeuvre, and that includes the one about the albatross hanging motionless upon the air: “If I open my heart to you / And show you my weak side / What would you do? / Would you sell your story to Rolling Stone?” This from the guy who might never have even been quoted in the magazine over the real Pink Floyd’s existence. Hey, Rog: It’s a small sacrifice. Lie back and think of England.
155. “Stop,” The Wall (1979): You have to give Waters and co-producer Bob Ezrin credit: They did fashion a passably coherent narrative, and the work that went into conceiving, arranging, and recording the more than two dozen tracks on The Wall were daunting. So occasionally you get songs like this one, where they need a piece of narrative-driving. A transition number, 30 seconds long. Pink’s awaiting “trial,” the poor guy.
154. “Seamus,” Meddle (1971): Like Sonic Youth, Pink Floyd was so bad when it started (the first album aside) that even with exponential growth it took five or six efforts before they released a listenable album. That was Meddle. This is the last song on the first side, a raggedy, kind of acoustic number, mumbled, with terrible sound. And if that’s not enough, the whole song is accompanied by a track of dogs howling. Har. Dee. Har. Har.
153. “When You’re In,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): This suffers from the same tonal monotony as the title track to The Valley soundtrack, but a little more energy ensues. Unfortunately it derives from a pretty lite guitar riff and some Deep Purple–y keyboard mewling. It’s not clear why the fadeout lasts 30-plus seconds.
152. “The Dogs of War,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987):
The exquisite irony of the result of Waters’s departure — which Waters has always been smart enough to acknowledge — was that in 1984 the members of Pink Floyd were by far the most anonymous superstars in the world. Interviews with the band were almost nonexistent, and their picture hadn’t been on the cover of an album since Ummagumma, in 1970. (The band was never on the cover of Rolling Stone until a piece about the breakup … which was published in 1987, years after it all happened.) Who the hell cared that someone named Roger Waters left Pink Floyd? All that said, Gilmour himself had no business creating a Pink Floyd album on his own — and it was on his own, because, once the album got underway, it was plain that Mason couldn’t even drum any more. Pink Floyd had to hire outside drummers to play drums for its drummer. Gilmour also brought in outside songwriters, a motley crew that extended even to former Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard. And the record company still rejected the album! Back to the drawing board. The ultimate result was as lame a work as you can imagine. “The Dogs of War” is about mercenaries. Bad guys! But that didn’t stop the thing from selling 4 million units in the U.S. and lots, lots more overseas. The band’s undiscriminating fans ate up the accompanying Waters-less tour as well, with all the ancient Pink Floyd accoutrements, like the floating pig and the exploding airplane, brought out of mothballs. The tour grossed $250 million. I saw it. It was awesome.
151. “Pigs on the Wing, Part 2,” Animals (1977): This is the closing track on Animals, a reprise of the first song: just 90 seconds of strummed acoustic guitar and a few short lines. More on Animals later, but I want to say this: Waters is a smart guy and I don’t want to be glib criticizing his conceptions. But I don’t understand the narrator’s voice here. He’s happy he has a place to “bury [his] bone,” so he has to be a dog. Is he a dog? I didn’t get that from part one. In that one, the characters don’t care for each other, and in this case they do, which I guess is a sign of resignation as they watch the pigs fly above. What this song is really about, however, is songwriting royalties. The two little “Pigs on the Wing” snippets on Animals — basically the same song with different words, 90 seconds each, nothing more than Waters playing a casual acoustic guitar and singing — are credited to Waters alone as songwriter. Accordingly, they represented two separate tracks on the album when it came to songwriting (or “publishing” or “mechanical” royalties) separate from the royalties the band as a whole made from the record. Waters probably took home 3 cents per album sold for each track he wrote, so he would have made a total of 6 cents per album just for these two basically identical little ditties. Now let’s look at Animals’ “Dogs,” which is credited to Waters/Gilmour, and lasts for 16 minutes. That would have given Gilmour about a penny and a half per album sold. Animals sold 12 million copies worldwide, meaning Waters the songwriter might have taken away three-quarters of a million dollars just from the two little “Pigs on the Wing” snippets, compared to about $90,000 for Gilmour for his work on the epic “Dogs.” Drummer Nick Mason, in his highly honest, highly enjoyable autobiography, says that inequities like these contributed to the resentment the band felt toward Waters. (Waters, of course, might have argued and no doubt did that it was his songs that drove the record sales that kept the rest of the band in English manor houses.)
150. “Outside the Wall,” The Wall (1979): This is the last track of The Wall. After all the bombast comes this soft little ditty. It actually works lyrically — it’s a pretty knowing acknowledgment of the cost to the people around those who have put the wall up. But as the last track of the record it’s pretty lame. In the film it runs over the credits and its import is lost.
149. “Absolutely Curtains,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): The final track of the band’s last album before it started getting good. An interminable instrumental, almost devoid of ideas, unless you count letting some out-of-tune kids make funny noises for the last several minutes of this six-minute track an idea.
148. “The Gunner’s Dream,” The Final Cut (1983): This song, coming toward the end of what was the first side of The Final Cut, is where you throw up your hands. The Second World War was a terrible event in world history, and took a devastating toll. This song is an acknowledgment that there were reasons for the war. But all of its victims deserve much better than this labored, clotted, and overwrought assault on the finer sensibilities of just about anyone who might actually listen to it. (Confidential to Roger W.: Constructions like “Take heed” went out with Keats.) And if you think there’s nothing worse than hearing Waters whimper, lugubriously, the line, “And no one kills the children any more,” just wait till he repeats it for effect.
147. “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,” Atom Heart Mother (1970): Another suite from the band’s dreariest period, on an album that had already given us 20-plus minutes of the title song, in no less than six parts. This one comprises a comparatively restrained three parts, and includes the sounds of an actual breakfast being made, complete with dripping faucet, which turns out to be kinda irritating. Gilmour noodles guitars in the middle, with a poorly recorded bass interfering. The third part is mostly keyboard, mixed horribly. The band actually used to play this nonsense live. The titular Alan, incidentally, was a roadie; the title is another example of the band’s jolly jocularity. The argument for this junk, I suppose, is that the band, despite its space-rock leanings, was much more down to earth and organic, as opposed to the flights of high electronic fantasy offered by your King Crimsons and the other, more energetic progressive-rock outfits of the time. Part of the reason it doesn’t work for me is the anonymity of the players. If this is supposed to be organic, there’s no personality to the music.
146. “See-Saw,” A Saucerful of Secrets (1968): Just what we needed, a pastoral, gossamer bit of wispy melody and fairy-tale vocalizing. A horrifyingly bad Wright composition from the band’s second album. The backing vocals are a parody of themselves.
145. “The Show Must Go On,” The Wall (1979):
Doo-wop vocals, synthesized drum rolls, and melodramatic lyrics. (“I didn’t mean to let them take my soul!”) One of the problems with The Wall is that it’s really not clear who the bad guys are. Why did Pink let anyone take his soul? The world Waters and Ezrin were now inhabiting was so far removed from the Floyd of old that Toni Tennille — of “Love Will Keep Us Together” Captain & Tennille fame — was brought in to do backup vocals. One of my favorite moments in the Pink Floyd story is when, after Animals, the other guys in the group decided they’d had just about enough of Roger Waters’s overbearing dominance. They were emboldened by the fact that they’d just recorded two of the biggest albums of the era, and were feeling pretty good moneywise. They’d done what they’d set out to do, and now was the time to let Waters know they were through with his Great Artiste act. Boy, was he going to be surprised! If this were a scene in This Is Spinal Tap, the band would be assembling in a room to give Waters the bad news when … the phone would ring, informing the members that — due to incoherently planned and overambitious tours, a lack of tax planning, bad investments, and inadequate oversight of their accountants — they were basically broke. At which point the members were all ears to hear what their resident genius had on tap for them next. “A two-record rock opera about an unhappy rock star rather like yourself, you say? Sounds intriguing!”
144. “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party,” Ummagumma (1969): There are three parts to this sad waste of vinyl (then) and innocent ones and zeroes (today): “Part 1 – Entrance,” “Part 2 – Entertainment,” and “Part 3 – Exit.” Ummagumma could have been the band’s breakout after the timekeeping More soundtrack. Instead, this is the one where they gave each member of the band 10 or 15 minutes to do anything he wanted — or as in this case, making them fill up the space even though they didn’t want to or had no business doing so. This is Nick Mason’s contribution, including lots of flute played by his then wife. And here’s the thing. It’s a rock band. Why not have each member of the “band,” you know, contribute something to each song? All that said, to be fair it should be noted that what the band was doing here wasn’t on a level worse than some of the painful stuff their peers in Jethro Tull or King Crimson were putting out. “Passion Play,” anyone? “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic”?
143. “Empty Spaces,” The Wall (1979): Nice eerie instrumentalizing as the pressures start to close in on poor little Pink, but it’s really just there to set up “Young Lust” — and give Roger Waters another publishing royalty. Here’s another bit of songwriter-royalties trivia, if you care: In crude terms, with The Wall, Waters almost certainly holds the record for the greatest songwriter windfall from one album in rock history. With a lot of short fragments like “Empty Spaces,” he had the equivalent of 24 solo songwriting credits on The Wall, which, with more than 30 million copies sold worldwide, is in the top-20-biggest-selling albums of all time. No other album close to that rarefied air has so many songwriting credits from one person. Again, given his stature, he should have been netting 3 cents per song, or about 75 cents in total, per record sold. Let’s say CBS had a cap on publishing points that took it down by 10 cents. (Foreign rates vary, of course, but he probably got more than that at least in Europe, where songwriters get 10 percent of the wholesale price.) Sixty-five cents times 30 million copies sold is pretty close to $20 million in gross songwriting royalties from just one album release. That’s probably equal to about what he made from being a member of the band, and he had royalty points as a producer in addition.
142. “Burning Bridges,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): While Pink Floyd should be given credit for improvisation and the aural pleasures that sometimes resulted, particularly in a live setting, it’s not clear that any of them, this early in their career, were thinking outside the box musically. Case in point is this lazy Wright/Gilmour composition. Wright, supposedly the band’s secret musical weapon, rarely produced an actual good, you know, song. It’s painfully plain how simple both the chords and progressions are. The lyrics are all about “ancient bonds” and “gilded cages.” In one sense, maybe this isn’t any worse than an embarrassment like Crimson’s “Moonchild,” but those guys had real chops. This feels aimless and uninventive.
141-128. The 14 tracks of The Endless River (2014): Pink Floyd’s last real album was The Division Bell; a few years ago, however, came this, an album that truly no one had ever asked for. Wright died in 2006; conceived as some sort of a tribute to him and billed as the final Pink Floyd album, it’s two discs based largely on Wright keyboard demos the band had lying around, gussied up with Gilmour playing guitar and Mason playing drums over them. You’ll remember that these tracks were desperately gone over once to produce decent material for Momentary Lapse, to no avail. You might think it was unlikely that there were better tracks that were somehow overlooked; you would be right. It would bore you even more to read about them than it would me to write about each track, so let’s just stick the 14 tracks in a group here. The last song, “Louder Than Words,” is a real song, and isn’t terrible. Despite the fact that The Endless River is a joke on the band’s fans it has nonetheless sold some 2.5 million worldwide.
127. “One of My Turns,” The Wall (1979): In Waters’s conception of The Wall, and it’s not a terrible one, Pink has put an emotional wall up around himself. I like the idea, because it’s hard; back then, “the Wall” was symbolic of the Soviet Union. I liked how Waters wrested the symbol away and tried to make a statement about personal isolation. Anyway, here, Pink gets a groupie and proceeds to get a little weird.
126. “One of the Few,” The Final Cut (1983): Another fragment. Waters’s hero this time is a war veteran who returns to be a teacher.
125. “Is There Anybody Out There?” The Wall (1979): A timekeeping song from The Wall, with an extended classical guitar segment. Pink’s behind the wall, asking for help. In the film it ends with the highly cinematic scene of Bob Geldof shaving his chest. Unsuspecting viewers wouldn’t know that this is a Syd Barrett reference: During the recording of Wish You Were Here, a strange man manifested himself in the control room at Abbey Road. He was portly and quiet, with his pants belted high over his stomach, his head and eyebrows shaved. It took a while before his crushed friends recognized their former bandmate.
124. “Marooned,” The Division Bell (1994): Marooned is how you feel listening to this pallid, five-minute-and-thirty-second guitar solo.
123. “Mudmen,” Obscured by Clouds (1972): A Wright/Gilmour instrumental. There’s a touch or two of drama, and a not-all-that-interesting funny guitar noise.
122. “Scarecrow,” The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967):
Lots — way lots — of cutesy percussion, which passed for experimental back in those days. Syd Barrett grew up in Cambridge, which was relatively protected from the damage the war did to England. He knew both Gilmour and Waters from a young age. Waters, who’d gone to architecture school in London, wound up in a band with keyboardist Wright and drummer Mason and eventually brought Barrett in. The group was into being wildly “creative” — they’d play “Louie Louie” for 30 minutes, improvising — but soon found themselves following the lead of the charismatic Barrett. (Barrett christened them the Pink Floyd Experience; this was soon shortened, but you can still find contemporary references to the band as “The Pink Floyd.”) He was an intriguing, protean figure — a cosmic rock-and-roll griffin, made of equal parts Ray Davies, Sebastian from Brideshead, Morrissey, and Lewis Carroll — considered by all to be brilliant and charming. His disarming off-kilter creativity early on was evidenced in things like a handcrafted book he titled Fart Enjoy. This is one of his second-tier songs. All of his tricks are here; the lines stuffed full of words, the uneven rhythms and gay little asides, the marveling at the wondrous world around us. It’s all fine but he could do a lot better.
121. “Wearing the Inside Out,” The Division Bell (1994): Another insubstantial, forgettable track on Division Bell. Waters’s dark sarcasm was looking better all the time. And then the pompous synthesized horns kick in. Repeat, for almost seven minutes.
120. “Sysyphus, Parts 1–4,” Ummagumma (1969): Starts out heavy and ponderous, then gets quickly lite, with some tinkling piano. And then it goes on and on — heavy but stalled, like that albatross hanging motionless upon the air — over four “parts.” Wright’s contribution to the second disc of Ummagumma shows off his limits. He was a pianist, and a keyboardist, there can be no doubt. But the difference between knowing how to play piano, even well, and crafting a 15-minute solo work worth listening to (and making people pay for) is a very big leap. You can laugh at Rick Wakeman or Keith Emerson, or even Tony Banks, from Genesis; but they were patently heavy, significant, even spectacular players. Wright would later write a couple or three good songs — one of them a significant track on TDSOTM. His textures and creativity on piano, organ, and synthesizer transformed many of the group’s tracks and some of their best ones. But he had no business writing 15-minute on-record epics. And one of the Cambridge boys in the band should have told him how to spell Sisyphus.
119. “Childhood’s End,” Obscured by Clouds (1972):
A Gilmour track some of whose sound would be repurposed for “Time” on TDSOTM. He’s singing in a much-lower register, and his voice loses some of its power. Gilmour’s not at his best when he’s writing his own lyrics: “And then as the sail is hoist / You find your eyes are growing moist.”
118. “Southampton Dock,” The Final Cut (1983): This is apparently a wife, standing at a dock watching the British soldiers head off to the Falklands, reflecting on the former losses of the Second World War. The lyrics include the title of the album, “In the bottom of our hearts we felt the final cut.”
117. “Dramatic Theme,” More (1969): Just what it says.
116. “The Post-War Dream,” The Final Cut (1983): After some scratchy radio-dial turning, à la “Wish You Were Here,” we get the intro to Waters’s dreary post-Wall indulgence. Way too much echo on his voice. We can see from the start this will be a much less subtle (!) operation than The Wall. I don’t have the time or the mental energy to chart the disparate tonal and geopolitical shifts in this short, 16-line intro. And that’s before we get Waters, full-volume, shrieking, “Whatever happened to the postwar dream?”
115. “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” single (1968):
For the B-side to “Point Me at the Sky,” which was a normal song, the band gave fans one of its live barn-burners. On record, though, it comes across just as six minutes of meandering. One of the other things about Pink Floyd that’s hard to process is that, while they could deliver odd pop and even rock songs with Syd Barrett, they were known on the London scene for their association with psychedelic freakout events, notably in a club called UFO, where the band would make weird sounds for hours at a time for the kids to groove to. They were right there at the forefront of such stuff, so they deserve to get credit for the innovation. I always say that inventing progressive rock was probably a dumb idea, but it was Pink Floyd’s dumb idea. One of the Spinal Tap ironies is that they weren’t that good at it!
114. “Take It Back,” The Division Bell (1994): Another long, droning, musically undistinguished track from this surpassingly lame album. It is perfect, however, in one regard. It’s a perfect mediocre song to fill out six-plus minutes on a mediocre album.
113. “Paint Box,” single (1967): The B-side to the band’s last Barrett single, “Apples and Oranges.” It sounds like exactly what it is, a slightly aimless, minor song from a minor British pop band. Written and sung by Wright, it’s not terrible, though his voice isn’t strong enough to carry it.
112. “The Hero’s Return,” The Final Cut (1983): Here the hero-teacher of The Final Cut, back from the war, ruminates on his new charges, how he can’t talk to his wife, and how the memories of the war won’t leave him. Aside from some U2-like delay on the guitar, it’s pretty unmemorable, though it works all right as a bit of plot.
111. “Coming Back to Life,” The Division Bell (1994): Another minute or so of guitar noodling — reminiscent of, but much less dramatic than, the stuff on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” — begins this tepid construction. It gets really irritating when the song takes on a sort of prancing rhythm. I hate that.
110. “Biding My Time,” Relics (1971): Relics was put out early in the band’s career (note the mocking title) to collect the Barrett-era singles, the accompanying B-sides and a few album tracks. This was the only unreleased track on it. One of the most distinctive things about Floyd at the time was how haphazard their sound was. This starts out as a sort of lazy blues, which segues into a sort of ’30s jazz feel, and then all the blues get all electrified … and then the thing goes on for another three minutes. In fairness, though, a lot of the experimental bands at the time would put out albums with oddly disparate tracks on them. (Think of “Anyone for Tennis,” on Cream’s Wheels of Fire.)
109. “Poles Apart,” The Division Bell (1994): This is a song about being “poles apart”! Well-produced track, but its lackluster (and sometimes overly literal) melody and dopey (and sometimes overly literal) lyrics sink it. The song is credited to Gilmour, a guy from Dream Academy (which had the hit “Life in a Northern Town”), and one Polly Samson, Gilmour’s then-fiancée, playing the part of Jeanine Pettibone.
108. “Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert,” The Final Cut (1983): Big explosion to start things out, then some delicate strings as Waters rattles off some geopolitical ironies, very pleased with the ironic musical setting. Length: 1:17.
107. “Sorrow,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987): This is supposed to be the big statement on Momentary Lapse. You can tell by the big swells of muzik and the highfalutin lyrics: “The silence that speaks so much louder than words,” etc., etc. Again, we have the droney sounds with some Gilmourian ruminations up top, again going on for minutes. Then comes something like a beat, which on inspection comes from a poorly programmed friendly local synthesizer rather than, you know, the band’s actual drummer. Latter-day Floyd records sound so samey; Gilmour’s sometimes effective, but generally weak, voice can’t hold things together when there’s no actual artistic spark, however perverse, somewhere in the background. Docked ten notches for its excessively dreary (8:45!!) length, even by Pink Floyd standards.
106. “The Narrow Way,” Ummagumma (1969): This was Gilmour’s contribution to Ummagumma, in three parts. (These guys and their suites.) There’s acoustic murmurings with shitty electronic guitar sounds over it … then a driving electronic riff with some other discordant noise over it, mostly without drums. Part two has some intoned vocalizings. Part three is a passable rock instrumental. Nothing holds these three horrid-to-mediocre pieces of music together. Waters would write a lot, in subsequent years, about the dehumanizing nature of the record industry, and persuasively so. But poor EMI sure put out a lot of shitty Pink Floyd albums early on. That’s something Pink Floyd could have written a song about. (“The hovering albatross takes its chances / We complain about everything except our advances.”) Ummagumma is by far the worst album by a major band of the progressive-rock era, and that includes Tales From Topographic Oceans,Brain Salad Surgery, and Leftoverture.
105. “It Would Be So Nice / Julia Dream,” single, (1968): A Richard Wright song, one of the band’s early singles, done amid the immediate post-Barrett chaos. Has everything a pop song should have — gossamer stylings, la-la-la’s, Beach Boys–y lilts — except a melody, or a point.
104. “Corporal Clegg,” A Saucerful of Secrets (1968): This is a downright comical example of how bad Pink Floyd was immediately post-Barrett. Waters’s junk heap of dumb musical ideas marries wan Beatle-isms to wacky rhythms, a circusy break, and sideways lurches into psychedelia, all recorded poorly and overlaid with a dreadful set of lyrics. These might have been meant as a jaunty McCartney-esque picaresque, but they come off as cruel; Waters’s own experience with the war (which took his father when he was a tot) surely argues against reading this as a mocking take on a war amputee, but it’s not entirely clear why or how.
103. “If,” Atom Heart Mother (1970): More of Pink Floyd’s incoherent aesthetics. How does the dynamic and forceful “Astronomy Dominé” square with the tuneless whispering (from Waters, who wrote it) and rudimentary guitar-plucking of this?
102. “Signs of Life,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987): The leadoff to the first post-Waters album begins, fairly cynically, with a “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”–like dramatic intro … and continues in that vein for minute after minute. I suppose the defense of the song would be that Gilmour wanted to make it clear he was taking the band’s focus back to the TDSOTM and WYWH era, not that of The Wall or The Final Cut. There’s a production sheen, sure, and some sound effects. But it displays none of the lucidity of the first parts of “Shine On,” and really just sounds like the band tuning up.And in any case any such attempt would be fraud, because it was not that band anymore, as the outside songwriters attested.
101. “Your Possible Pasts,” The Final Cut (1983): I can’t tell if this is about schoolyards or concentration camps. Most people will remember only the overdone echoes on the word closer. Gilmour plays some wrenching guitar, but it doesn’t seem like his heart is in it.
100. “Learning to Fly,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987): I hate this song for the same reason I hate “Owner of a Lonely Heart” or Permanent Vacation: It’s an overproduced, fraudulent piece of commercial crap designed to distract people from the fact that, while the name of the band on the label hasn’t changed, the creative people behind the music have.
99. “Green Is the Colour,” More (1969): An early Waters vocal track, in a tentative falsetto. (More was the first of two Barbet Schroeder films the band contributed a soundtrack to.) The kind thing to say is that the band was still trying to find its voice. Then you have to cope with poesy like, “She lay in the shadow of a wave / Hazy were the visions overplayed.”
98. “Party Sequence,” More (1969):A percussion-y tack of incidental sounds. More was the first film by Schroeder, a minor player in the French New Wave. It’s not a great movie, but it does capture a world fairly well, and it’s de-romanticized without moralizing. It’s about a male French college student who goes to Paris on an adventure. He gets into some wild stuff and then runs off to Ibiza with a female friend. Threesomes result, but so does heroin addiction, and things don’t end well. Schroeder went on to direct some U.S. commercial fare, including Single White FemaleandReversal of Fortune.
