Roger Waters picks out the dullest songs Pink Floyd made: “Just contrived rubbish”
Though it spent a week at number one in the US upon its release in 1973, Pink Floyd’s eighth album, The Dark Side of the Moon, remained on the charts for another 83 weeks. Clearly, there was a strong appetite among American audiences for the album’s experimental, expansive, and exploratory sounds. Further proof though—if any were needed—came when it re-entered the charts at the end of 1976, where it remained for a staggering 593 weeks until early 1988.
Featuring polished, textural, and spaced-out vistas and atmospheres that the group cultivated through the mastery of their instruments and their studio environment on songs like ‘Time’ and ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ or the funking, strutting sound collage of ‘Money’, the album was a relative far cry from the group’s earlier efforts.
Though they have always embraced experimentation and the more mind-bending avenues available to musicians with an open ear and a sense of adventure, their early albums were more rooted in their contemporary scenes. On the Syd Barrett-led The Piper at the Gates of Dawn or A Saucerful of Secrets, there’s an earthiness to the music—more influence from the dominant psychedelic rock movement of the time and stronger ties to blues and rock and roll. There’s more grounding, more warmth and depth, more corporeality. There’s more grit and soul.
By the time of Meddle and The Dark Side of the Moon, however, the band—now led by a combination of Roger Waters and David Gilmour—was pushing to create something more celestial. More far out. More unique. They had gone from feeling like another band in the scene to being the band that set the scene.
Around the time that Dark Side was first launching itself into the lives of its millions of fans around the world, Roger Waters spoke to ZigZag Magazine about the difference in the new Pink Floyd sound and shaking their reputation as a Sixties psychedelic group. He said: “I remember David Jacobs–or maybe it was Pete Murray–saying, in tones of a magistrate, ‘I understand that there is a lot of this psychedelic stuff in America, but I very much hope that it doesn’t catch on here’”.
In fact, it did. Plenty of British bands and artists would leap off the psychedelic deep end head first. Among them were Procol Harum, Donovan, Dream Police, Sharon Tandy and Fleur de Lis, The Creation and even the Beatles–maybe even especially the Beatles–and, of course, Pink Floyd.
Whilst hosting the BBC panel show Juke Box Jury, which ran from 1959 up until 1967, David Jacobs–or was it Pete Murray?–had indicated that he thought Pink Floyd “were a con”. As Waters remembered, “He thought it was just contrived rubbish to meet some kind of unhealthy demand”.
Acknowledging their earlier, more psychedelic sound and what Waters felt in hindsight were their shortcomings as a band, the outspoken singer went on in the ZigZag interview to admit that “both our first two singles [Arnold Layne and See Emily Play] were so bloody innocuous, there was nothing difficult about either of them”.
It’s a shame, looking back, though, that Juke Box Jury didn’t run for a few years longer, so the hosts could have analysed the then-new Pink Floyd lineup, sound, and, especially, album. Comparing their exciting, engaging and enervating early work now with their far more well-known and commercially successful albums of the 1970s, you can’t help but think that any criticism that wrote of Pink Floyd’s “contrived rubbish to meet some kind of unhealthy demand” was extremely premature.
