‘Childhood’s End’: The Pink Floyd song that predicted their success
Pink Floyd was never meant to stay in one place for very long. They could have very well kept on being the psychedelic precursor to space rock during the 1970s, but as soon as Syd Barrett started to become less and less reliable as a frontman, they knew that they couldn’t keep riding his coattails for the rest of his career. While it would take a long time before they reached something as grandiose as Dark Side of the Moon, the seeds of their future were already being planted on some of their early albums.
Although many of the post-Barrett albums suffered from weak writing or the occasional song where nothing seemed to work, there was still plenty of room for growth. Roger Waters was slowly developing into a great songwriter, while David Gilmour, often more focused on refining the music, was making his solos an integral part of their sound—especially by the time they began working on film soundtracks like More.
While that album did give us a taste of what a heavy metal Pink Floyd song would sound like in ‘The Nile Song’, they were always trying to parse out what made their sound work compared to everyone else. They weren’t cut out to release singles like their contemporaries, but when looking at some of their epics, everything before ‘Echoes’ left a sour taste in their mouths, especially when having to go back to a song like ‘Atom Heart Mother’.
Right as they started finding their groove on Meddle, they had a few more pitstops before working on their true masterpiece. The pieces of material Waters had picked up on surrounding themes of madness were being laid out, but Live At Pompeii was the first time people heard them in action, taking pieces of their early career and pumping them up on steroids, like the ending of ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ or the cinematic feeling of ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’.
When making the film soundtrack Obscured By Clouds, though, there was a certain lyric that stood out above everything else. ‘Burning Bridges’ had already started to show us the moodier side of them a bit more, but ‘Childhood’s End’ was the first overt sign that they had lost their innocence and could never go back, with Waters writing lines about having to move on after the world wasn’t as bright as he thought it was.
Most Pink Floyd songs are rarely a pick-me-up, but ‘Childhood’s End’ feels like the test run for the kind of lyrics that Waters became used to later. Because had he not started here, the dark subject matter of an album like Wish You Were Here, or the foreboding nature of Animals is some of the most important artistic statements they have ever made, even if it makes people think a bit harder than they were used to.
Even an autobiographical project like The Wall feels like the fully-realised version of ‘Childhood’s End’. The protagonist may have had to get used to the idea of things not being as simple as he thought, but his decision to close himself off behind a wall may as well have been a cautionary tale of what could happen when someone becomes truly lost after that realisation.
But does that mean all of Pink Floyd’s music is dark and dour? Absolutely not. Because listening to an album like Dark Side of the Moon, everything has to do with open-ended questions that we are left to answer on our own. Most people may have to come to the stern realisation that the world is filled with light and darkness, but it’s our choice whether to move towards the light or not.
