The songs Pink Floyd refused to play live: “Irrelevant”
No words are more important in any entertainer’s life than ‘give the people what they want’. Even though some fans don’t know what they want until you unleash something new on them, it’s also the artist’s duty to give fans their money’s worth every time they show up to a show and hear their favourite hits. But while Pink Floyd was happy to be a part of the 1960s counterculture when they started out, Roger Waters made it a point to play tracks like ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Arnold Layne’ as little as possible.
Given where Pink Floyd was at their inception, though, one wouldn’t necessarily guess they would become one of the biggest names in progressive music. They had made songs that were certainly experimental for the time, but they weren’t exactly breaking boundaries for rock and roll in the same way that acts like King Crimson were.
But musical sophistication wasn’t what Syd Barrett was going for. He had immersed himself in psychedelia, and the entire point of his material was to look at every song like a mini-art project, whether it was flirting with the sounds of skiffle music or trying his best to give the audience the sensation of launching into space.
Then again, ‘See Emily Play’ indicated that he could still write a great pop song. A few common tropes were left over from The Beatles’ more experimental moments, but the track’s fanciful lyrics and child-like wonder feel like something ripped out of Alice in Wonderland.
However, that wasn’t the kind of song suited for a Pink Floyd show. Looking at their stage setup, how the hell was anyone supposed to shoehorn a pop song into the same performance that had ‘Astronomy Domine’ as part of the set? It would be a hard sell for both parties, so the group didn’t even try.
Despite the follow-up single ‘Arnold Layne’ doing well on the charts also, Waters remembered the common consensus among the group not to play them, saying, “‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’ were both minor hits. We would not perform them live because we considered the three-minute form to be irrelevant to the idea of live performances, and so we did a lot of gigs where people would stand on the balcony and pour beer on us because we would not play [them].”
That didn’t mean that we wouldn’t see performances of them eventually. Years after they became rock giants and then subsequently collapsed on themselves, artists like David Bowie would turn up at various gigs to perform renditions of Barrett’s singles, almost to celebrate the kind of playful spirit he brought to the world.
No matter how much time Pink Floyd tries to get you to think with their music, there’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun in between the heavy material, and both of their singles were cheeky bits of playfulness for the Summer of Love. At the same time, maybe the band would have enjoyed playing the tunes a lot more had they known how little time they had left with Barrett.
