Painting Fakes

I promise to stop banging on about Pink Floyd after this but I just wanted to share one more thing with you. It's one of my favourite pieces of Pink Floyd music, 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene'.  It was apparently first performed in 1968, written by Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason, and it exists in a number of different recorded forms as it morphed slightly from day to day and from year to year.  Here's a live performance from 1972. Pink Floyd's earliest studio recordings, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets,  give a very imperfect idea of the kind of band they were.  Their early producer Norm Smith wanted them to be a pop band like The Beatles.   Syd Barrett and then Roger Waters and Rick Wright did their best to oblige, writing and recording their best approximations of three minute pop songs, and these formed the bulk of the first two albums. Their live performances, on the other hand, were highly improvisational affairs...

So, to continue my Pink Floyd odyssey. One of the most intriguing things about Pink Floyd is the fact that although  Syd Barrett was only part of the band for such a short time his influence and, in a sense, his presence lingered long after he left. In the early years after his departure it's not necessarily so obvious.  Their songs didn't openly reference him and they seemed to be carrying on smoothly with David Gilmour in his place.  However, although their music gradually became more structured and sophisticated, it still had Syd's fingerprints on it.  For instance, even though Syd was the only member whose use of hallucinogens went beyond the odd experiment, they continued to write "psychedelic" songs after his departure.  You would swear Roger Waters' 'Cirrus Minor'   and 'Julia Dream' or Rick Wright's 'Remember a Day' and 'Paintbox' were inspired by LSD, but neither Waters nor Wright used the stuff.  They were copy...

Speaking of Syd Barrett , as I was, here's what I think is probably Syd's cleverest and most revealing song, and certainly one of his most popular - Bike .  It's the last song on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and it appears on virtually every Pink Floyd compilation you could lay your hands on.  Written at the latest in early 1967, it also sheds some very disturbing light on Barrett's state of mind well before any obvious symptoms of mental illness started to appear. Perhaps the closest comparison to this song among Pink Floyd's contemporaries is The Beatles' Can't Buy Me Love , written mostly by Paul McCartney and recorded in 1964. Pink Floyd and The Beatles weren't exactly friends but there was a lot more contact between them than you might imagine.  Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney attended early Floyd performances.  Yoko Ono was a regular at the UFO Club where Floyd cut their teeth, staging semi-improvised pieces of performance art i...

After reading lots of stuff about Pink Floyd over the holidays, I've spent the last couple of weeks reading about their founder and muse Syd Barrett.  His death in 2006 released a new wave of writing and re-evaluation of his life and legacy.  I've just read two quite detailed and thoroughly researched examples - Julian Palacios' Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe and Rob Chapman's A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett.   Pink Floyd had a rapid rise to fame.  In early 1966 they were playing R&B covers at university socials.  By the end of 1967 they had a top 10 hit and successful first album, were playing concerts in USA and Europe and were at the forefront of the new wave of psychedelic music that was sweeping the Western world.  Most of this success was down to Barrett.  He played lead guitar, operated as the main singer and wrote most of the songs.  The creative vision that made them so successful was almost totally his...

More Pink Floyd ruminations for you... You could divide Pink Floyd's work into four periods. The first, spanning 1967 to 1969 and including their first album Piper at the Gates of Dawn and some of the second, A Saucerful of Secrets , was dominated by guitarist, singer and chief songwriter Syd Barrett and involved experimental, off-the-wall songs and musical pieces with strange sounds and bizarre lyrics. The second began when Barrett's mental illness made his ongoing participation impossible. It involved the remaining members - bass player Roger Waters, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Rick Wright along with replacement guitarist Dave Gilmour - trying to work out what they should do next. The result is a number of interesting musical experiments - quirky extended songs and musical pieces which tested the limits of late 1960s and early 1970s recording studios but which these days are more curious than compelling. In the third period they finally found the answer. B...

Many people can tell you exactly where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot.  For myself, I'm not quite sure but most likely I was safely tucked up in my cot on the other side of the world, totally unaware that there even was such a person. I do remember clearly the moment I first heard of John Lennon's murder.  I was working in the dingy upstairs office of the Maryborough Housing Action Group, and the guy whose business rented the next office popped his head in to tell me about it.  I was sad, of course, but not deeply affected. A much more significant moment for me is the time I first heard Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.   I must have been about 14 years old, riding my bike along Breton Street in Sunnybank.  It was evening.  On one side of the street was the railway, on the other a row of houses.  The chorus of 'Brain Damage' rolled across the street from one of these houses.  And if the d...