The unlikely Pink Floyd song about “good and evil”
There was a major shift in what Pink Floyd was interested in during the early 1970s. After years of relatively aimless experimentation, the British progressive rockers stumbled their way into a truly revolutionary outlook. Bassist Roger Waters began to assert himself as the band’s lyricist, preferring to tap into the darker sides of the human condition. On 1971’s Meddle, the band made a breakthrough with the 20-minute ‘Echoes’, establishing both their love of long-lasting song suites and Waters’ preoccupation with empathy and human connection.
The Dark Side of the Moon proved to be the true moment of realisation for both Pink Floyd and their audience. With an entire album focused on the pressures of modern life, including money, time, travel, madness, and death, the Floyd somehow made their dense miasma of psychedelic rock music into something palatable for the entire world. Even the album’s instrumental cuts were revelations.
The opening song to Dark Side, ‘Speak to Me’, is less of a song and more of a sound collage. Still, with its swirl of disembodied voices and sounds that would appear later in the album, ‘Speak to Me’ functioned as an overture of sorts for the album, eventually careening head first into the delicate tones of ‘Breathe (In The Air)’. The other instrumental on the album, ‘Any Colour You Like’, mainly acted as a bridge between the ‘Us and Them’ and the final pairing of ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’.
Although ‘Any Colour You Like’ mostly acts as a filler to flesh out the album and connect some of its disparate ends, the track still has its place within the wider concept of The Dark Side of the Moon. Specifically, the track’s title came to represent the choices, or lack thereof, that everybody has to make in life.
“In Cambridge where I lived, people would come from London in a van – a truck – open the back and stand on the tailboard of the truck, and the truck’s full of stuff that they’re trying to sell,” Waters told Phil Rose in the essays anthology Which One’s Pink? “And they have a very quick and slick patter, and they’re selling things like crockery, china, sets of knives and forks.”
“All kinds of different things, and they sell it very cheap with a patter. They tell you what it is, and they say ‘It’s ten plates, lady, and it’s this, that, and the other, and eight cups and saucers, and for the lot, I’m asking NOT ten pounds, NOT five pounds, NOT three pounds… fifty bob to you!’ and they get rid of this stuff like this,” Waters added. “If they had sets of china, and they were all the same colour, they would say, ‘You can ‘ave ’em, ten bob to you, love. Any colour you like, they’re all blue.’ And that was just part of that patter.”
“So, metaphorically, ‘Any Colour You Like’ is interesting, in that sense, because it denotes offering a choice where there is none,” Waters concluded. “And it’s also interesting that in the phrase, ‘Any colour you like, they’re all blue,’ I don’t know why, but in my mind it’s always ‘they’re all blue’, which, if you think about it, relates very much to the light and dark, sun and moon, good and evil. You make your choice but it’s always blue.”
Check out ‘Any Colour You Like’ down below.
