“Perfect”: the album David Gilmour says will make anyone love Pink Floyd
For a band like Pink Floyd, one look at their back catalogue seems intimidating. Since this group was known for taking people on journeys whenever they placed one of their records on the turntable, it’s hard to think of a place to start when getting into their music for the first time. While every album was meant to be taken in as a whole, David Gilmour believed that their compilation Echoes was the best way to get acclimatised to the world of Floyd.
Granted, anyone who’s ever taken a deep dive into Pink Floyd’s body of work usually starts with an album like Dark Side of the Moon. Aside from being one of the most recognisable album covers ever made, the conceptual story about the journey through life and what is most important to hold onto is usually what hits people the hardest once they first hear it.
That was just from one period of Pink Floyd, though. While those magical years of the 1970s all the way up until the early 1980s gave us one grand spectacle after the next, there were many more phases to the band than that. Because if you were to start at Dark Side of the Moon, you’d be missing out on the entirety of the Syd Barrett era.
Barrett’s unique approach to rock and roll was always an oddity in the 1960s, but the space-rock-tinged tracks like ‘Astronomy Domine’ definitely made them stand out among their contemporaries. And on the Echoes compilation, there’s a taste of almost every great song they made afterwards.
Hardcore fans may miss some of the beloved deep cuts, but the switches between pieces like ‘See Emily Play’, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ sound like you’re listening to three different groups. Even the most recent songs from Floyd by that point, like ‘Marooned’ and ‘Keep Talking’, go over reasonably well, if only because they add some nice texture to the whole album.
For Gilmour, he thought that this would be the perfect jumping-on point for anyone morbidly curious about what the prog legends had to offer, telling Record Collector, “I was delighted with the whole package. It’s pretty near the perfect Pink Floyd primer. I mostly put it all together and got my way 99% of the time. It’s a very good career overview.”
The only drawback is that they did edit down some of their greatest songs for mass consumption. While most Floyd fans will tell you that ‘Echoes’ was already perfect the way it was, having it trimmed down to 16 minutes instead of 24 almost robs the piece of some of the sonic journey it takes you on.
The same thing happened with portions of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, but Floyd probably didn’t edit them down to neuter the listener’s experience hearing their music. This was about getting people used to the group’s sounds, and if they loved the version of ‘Echoes’ that turned up on here, just imagine what they would be in for once they got to the real version on Meddle.
