“Great in its way”: the song David Gilmour never wanted to hear
Every artist is going to have those few songs that stand out whenever they listen back to their records. There are the occasional moments where they absolutely nail it from a sonic perspective, but when it comes to their own playing, it’s easy to see them look back with pride on tracks that are either outside their comfort zone or take things in a slightly different direction. While Pink Floyd were known to switch things up on almost every single album, David Gilmour admitted that some moments were best left forgotten in their catalogue after a while.
But that’s the nature of any great rock band, isn’t it? The great stuff always rises to the top over time, but listening to how Pink Floyd shaped up, they managed to grow up in real time after 1966. Syd Barrett was never going to work out with them, and after starting back at zero without him, every album seemed like a necessary step in the right direction before getting to records like Dark Side of the Moon.
Does that mean that every one of the records is a classic? Hell no. Listening to an album like Ummagumma fluctuates from genuinely interesting moments to pure torture to get through for minutes on end, but even that record is a necessary step for the band to leave the avant-garde side of their sound behind, even if it did mean listening to Roger Waters go through the hellscape of ‘Several Species…’.
That didn’t mean that they couldn’t make some strange avant-garde detours, but they were a lot more fleshed out on future records. The experimental sections of ‘Echoes’ are among the greatest parts of the track, and while ‘On the Run’ is never going to be considered anyone’s favourite track on Dark Side of the Moon, the manic energy it creates is the best way of getting people immersed in the themes of the record.
“Moving on from our ‘Psychedelic Breakfast’ moments – which is great in its way, but I’d never want to listen to it.”
David Gilmour
Compared to their magnum opus, though, Atom Heart Mother has had the strangest shelf life of any of their albums. It does have some great tunes that the band have praised in the past, but both Gilmour and Waters have also said that it would be a cold day in hell before they played the title track again, complete with the strange Western themes and the horn section that were slightly out of step throughout the recording.
Whereas that song does at least have its merits, Gilmour said that he wouldn’t even go out of his way to listen to ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’, saying, “We were fairly brave, and would put anything on a record that amused us one way or another. But in some of those moments, we were floundering about, and didn’t have our forward momentum very clear, and inspiration might have been a bit thin. Moving on from our ‘Psychedelic Breakfast’ moments, which is great in its way, but I’d never want to listen to it really, to something more concrete like ‘Echoes’ was much more satisfying.”
And even by diehard Pink Floyd fan standards, no one would say this was their favourite Floyd song. Being another one of their avant-garde experiments, hearing their uninterested roadie making breakfast in the morning isn’t really something that broadens the mind by any stretch of the imagination.
Still, it’s not like the song doesn’t have some merit behind it if you’re willing to look for it. There are different sound effects that might get a touch annoying, and Alan might be describing one of the most boring activities in the world, but it’s easy to see the effects here, setting the path for how they would use background sounds in The Wall or toy around with sound during Animals.
