Five Pink Floyd songs that should be deleted from history
Here’s a fun musical fact: Jimi Hendrix couldn’t stand Pink Floyd, well, not necessarily just Pink Floyd, but a lot of psychedelic bands.
He felt as though too many musical outfits relied on experimentation and great light shows as opposed to actually focusing on making decent music. “Here’s one thing I hate, man,” he said, “When these cats say, ‘Look at the band. They’re playing psychedelic music!’ All they’re doing is flashing lights on them and playing ‘Johnny B Goode’ with the wrong chords. It’s terrible.”
Hendrix passed away in 1970, which is arguably before Pink Floyd truly knew what kind of music they wanted to make. When you’re an experimental band, you need to play around with that experimentation before you figure out what works. As such, a lot of the band’s early music, and some stray songs that came after they had found their sound, leave a fair bit to be desired, to the extent that we could have never heard them at all.
Pink Floyd have certainly made a lot more good songs than bad, but their broad approach to music, especially in the early days, meant that some of the tracks they put out were pretty tough to get through. A lot of people, even the members of Pink Floyd themselves, who wrote these songs, would rather they didn’t exist.
Five Pink Floyd songs that shouldn’t exist
‘Point Me At The Sky’
This is arguably one of the most important songs in Pink Floyd’s discography. It was one of the first that the band put out after Syd Barrett left, and saw both Roger Waters and David Gilmour try to replicate his writing style. They needed to fail at this in order to understand that they should change the way they approached music.
It was this song that made the band want to move into longer, more complicated conceptual pieces of music, which they would eventually become famous for. As such, this was a pivotal moment in their career; however, while the ramifications of the song are important, the track itself is a pretty poor Pink Floyd performance.
Even Roger Waters admitted that this song was “one notable failure when Syd left the band”.
‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’
A lot of people look at the album Piper at the Gates of Dawn and revel in its innovative nature, saying it’s one of the precursors to what we now know as prog rock. While this might be a fair assessment, there are some songs which are simply too experimental to enjoy. ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ is a track which leans into unpredictability a bit too much, to the point it seems to lack all direction.
When Roger Waters was talking about the Pink Floyd albums he can’t stand, he cited Piper at the Gates of Dawn, saying that it lost all direction as they were making it. “I don’t want to go back to those times at all,” he admitted, “There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it’. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’.”
‘Remember a Day’
You know that a song isn’t great when the person responsible for writing it refuses to listen back, and this is what happened when Rick Wright put together ‘Remember a Day’, a song which sounded like it belonged at a fairground rather than on a Pink Floyd album. When talking about the song, Wright admitted that he wasn’t a fan and struggled to return to it.
“They’re sort of an embarrassment,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve listened to them ever since we recorded them. It was a learning process. Through writing these songs, I learned that I’m not a lyric writer, for example. But you have to try it before you find out. The lyrics are appalling, terrible, but so were a lot of lyrics in those days.”
‘The Narrow Way’
Pink Floyd, as a collective, struggled to agree on anything, but they can at least all take solace in the fact that they are unified in their hatred for the album Ummagumma. This is another one of their records that was too experimental for its own good, as the band couldn’t straddle the line between making something that was experimental while also being accessible.
David Gilmour used too many overdubs for his own good, and looks back at the song as one he regrets. “It was just desperation, really, trying to think of something to do, to write by myself,” he said, “I’d never written anything before, I just went into a studio and started waffling about, tacking bits and pieces together. I haven’t heard it in years. I’ve no idea what it’s like.”
‘Have a Cigar’
This track is one of the first that truly highlighted how disagreements within Pink Floyd would eventually lead to the band splitting up. Roger Waters wrote ‘Have a Cigar’ in a bid to highlight growing critiques within the music industry. Gilmour refused to sing on the track because he didn’t agree with the sentiment of it, and, as a result, Waters ended up asking Roy Harper for help, who didn’t sing the track in the style that Waters wanted.
“He was singing a sort of parody, which I don’t like. I never liked it, I regret it,” said Waters, “I think if I have persevered with it, I would have done it better. I think if I’d have sung it, it would have been more vulnerable and less cynical than the way he did it.”
