Pink Floyd: Excerpt 1!
Today, I'm going to begin a series of short excerpts from my upcoming book Pink Floyd: Album By Album, out on 31 May. I thought I may as well open with the introduction.
One night when I was about fifteen, I put a cassette of The Dark Side Of The Moon into the little tape machine my sister and I owned, pressed the play button, then placed my headphones over my ears. It was evening, bedtime not too distant. I lay back and shut my eyes.
Only a few months had passed since I’d suddenly got into rock music. Most likely, that was the hormones, changing my whole perception of the world. But this album was somehow different from all the music I’d heard before. There was a track at the end of side one which moved me in a way I’d never been moved before. It somehow spoke – without using words – of the profundities of the human condition, of those great questions we all have to wrestle with, and, in the end, find an answer for. It evoked depths, distance, transcendence. I’d never heard anything like it. The Great Gig In The Sky stirred an emotional response in me for the first time. Even the mighty Tangerine Dream had not done that.When I mentioned it to my parents the next day, my father, with all the sarcasm and mockery he reserved for his pronouncements on music, asked: “Did it send you then?” He used the terminology appropriate to his generation. Did it move you?
Yes, it did.
This was the beginning of my love for the music of Pink Floyd. I can visualise the moment with clarity. I don’t forget moments like that. Music lovers never do.
That was 1977, and soon enough, I’d discovered that this was not a new band. They had been making albums since 1967, but those early offerings were different – weirdly different – to the smooth, spacious and synth-inflected music of the 1973 album. Their debut release sounded nothing like their most recent. That was confusing. As I went back in time to the 1960s then forward to Animals, which I heard for the first time on Annie Nightingale’s radio show, I realised this was a band like no other. Their music changed, progressed and expanded, just like the music of my other main love, Tangerine Dream. The Floyd were amazing! This was a group I wanted to be a fan of, just like Edgar Froese had been.
Four years later I found myself at university in a leafy suburb of Greater London. Pink Floyd were going to play The Wall live at Earls Court in June, and a girl student was advertising a couple of tickets for sale. I bought one, and went along. That was amazing too. Unforgettable, in fact. I bought the sweatshirt, of course, a white garment in cotton. It was a terrible fit.
Now, forty-three years later, with Pink Floyd missing Richard Wright and Syd Barrett, and no original members left in “Tangerine Dream,” I find myself about to make a long journey, a journey in music, from the melodious whimsy of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn to the elegiac dream of The Endless Journey. Along the way I’m going to hear music forgotten, half-remembered, and recalled with intensity: the studio disc of Ummagumma, that song they did after Roger Waters left, with the rowing boat introduction, and the sublime Echoes. I’m going to write about all those albums: the tracks and songs, their background, the group’s influences, but most of all the effects of the music the albums contain on the human mind. For we are all people of music, whether we know it or not.
Music touches us. It moves us all.
