The Pink Floyd songs that Pink Floyd hated: “They’re sort of an embarrassment”
Pink Floyd’s story is one of greatness and fracture. Creators of the definitive concept album Dark Side Of The Moon, their story has been one of two shades. Their creative genius has paved the way for seminal records while behind closed doors, relationships were ruptured, and band members were fired and hired at will.
After the 1960s, creative spearhead Syd Barrett was ousted from the band due to his ongoing struggles with mind-altering drugs, and the band muddled its way through a confused and directionless landscape. The strengthening of Roger Waters and David Gilmour’s collaborator-challenger relationship brought with it a period of creative fruitfulness.
While Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall cemented the band in rock’ n roll history books, individual tracks within them hinted at their fractious inner workings. The latter album, in particular, saw keyboardist Rick Wright both fired and re-hired as Waters staunchly pushed on to create his expansive double album.
Such is the nature of casting such a wide creative net that now and then, a diluted version of a great idea makes it into the tracklisting. With Dark Side of the Moon as arguably their only ‘all killer, no filler’ album, the rest of their discography shows what happens when they exist elsewhere in the galaxy and fly a little bit too close to the sun. As the years have gone on and the band members have reflected on their careers, their individual taste differences have come to the fore, they’ve each taken aim at a number of Pink Floyd songs they’d rather forget.
The following record, The Final Cut, saw the band finally part ways after a tumultuous 15 years of sonic innovation. The picks below seem more like a soundtrack to a messy breakup. Most of these songs live fondly in the memories of Pink Floyd fans for their sonic originality but are unfortunately steeped in confrontation for the band members, who truly suffered for the benefit of their art.
The worst Pink Floyd songs, according to Pink Floyd:
‘Remember a Day’ & ‘See-Saw’
On Saucerful of Secrets, Syd Barrett’s final record with the band and David Gilmour’s first, the scope for innovative songwriting was perhaps at its widest. With two of the band’s most prolific creatives in the same room, the record did nod toward a future for the band that would crystalise a sound that existed somewhere between robust rock and colourful psychedelia.
But on this record, keyboardist Rick Wright contributed as both a lyricist and vocalist. On the album’s second and penultimate track, ‘Remember a Day’ and ‘See-Saw’ Wright performs a slightly subdued vocal take on top of whimsical fairground-type melodies. The result was a more delicate point of difference from other vocalists that, to Wright’s ear, doesn’t make for enjoyable listening.
“They’re sort of an embarrassment,” he explained. “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.”
‘Have a Cigar’
Two years after Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd released Wish You Were Here. The expansive five-song LP, which still spans 44 minutes in length, is perhaps most memorable for its title track, an acoustically led classic rock ballad that incites sing-alongs to a chorus musing on companionship and existentialism.
But just before the track sits ‘Have a Cigar’, an overlooked Pink Floyd track that the band rarely look back on with fondness. In what foreshadowed a growing political rift between Waters and Gilmour, the former penned the track as a critique of the bureaucracy within the music industry. When Gilmour refused to sing on it due to a disagreement with the track’s principal, Roy Harper stepped in to provide vocals, much to Waters’ dismay:
“He was singing a sort of parody, which I don’t like. I never liked it, I regret it”. Waters continued, “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”.
‘The Narrow Way’
Much has been said about Pink Floyd’s 1969 album Ummagumma. If the band unanimously agrees on one thing, it’s their dislike for this album. It was expansive to the point of structurelessness and, if anything, provided the necessary foundation for how to refine experimental music that would serve them so well in later records.
The album saw the band write their material individually, which was later stitched together to make the finished record. ‘The Narrow Way’ was written and performed by Gilmour, who used multiple overdubs in order to play all of the song’s instruments, a method he doesn’t look back on fondly: “It was just desperation, really, trying to think of something to do, to write by myself,” he said.
The guitarist continued: “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”.
‘Echoes’
This may be shocking to some Pink Floyd mega fans, as this song sits firmly within the pantheon of favourites. Spanning 23 minutes long, it’s widely considered a masterpiece amongst fans for its crystallised performance of kaleidoscopic ideas that foreground Waters’ subtle but effective lyrics on the human condition.
But retrospectively, it’s a record the band looks on as an overspill of ideas, with drummer Nick Mason simply labelling it “overly long”. While fans who’d seen the Floyd live loved their sets of sprawling instrumentals and relished a track that had a similar disposition, Gilmour told Mojo magazine in 2001: “We were very good at jamming, but we couldn’t translate that to a record”.
While the live version of the track would sit more happily for Gilmour, he would hang up the track indefinitely following the death of Richard Wright.
The Wall
Very much Roger Waters’s baby, this particular record was a project that saw him plunge the band into the depths of his individual ideas. The dust from the tensions caused during the recording of this album still hasn’t settled, and while exhibiting moments of greatness, it’s a record that acts as more of a symbol of Pink Floyd’s downfall.
While no particular song lives poorly in the memory of members of the band, the overall recording process marks a time when the creative divide had indeed been struck, and the band had entered an environment that they would inevitably never return from.
In an interview with Charlie Kendall, Gilmour reflected on the record saying, “He [Waters] gave us all a cassette of the whole thing, and I couldn’t listen to it. It was too depressing and too boring in lots of places”.
