Yeah, I don’t get that little pencil at all. Thank you!
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Turns out there is a music video for Corporal Clegg…
I also forgot to mention the between-album single, Apples and Oranges. It’s… probably best forgotten. I include it for the sake of completeness.
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Just shy of a year after The Piper At The Gates Od Dawn Pink Floyd released their second studio album A Saucerful Of Secrets (June 1968).
It’s hard to believe now given how big the band got in the 70’s and beyond that the album did not even chart in the U.K. It is also the only studio album on which all five members would feature. Dave Gilmour makes his first recorded appearance and Syd Barrett largely fades from the songwriting credits but is still technically playing in the band.
Let There Be More Light (Waters) Starts with a repetitive jabbing bass attack that would be later mimicked decades after by the Chemical Brothers (Block Rockin’ Beats). The sound is immediately more urgent and rocky than anything on the band’s debut album. Triple vocals play out well all offering differing styles and levels of tone. The Beatles get a lyrical nod (“Lucy In The Sky”) before the track swells to a distant but definite guitar solo – Gilmour makes his mark already.
Remember A Day (Wright) almost sounds Beatles-Esque initially. A soft song that is still touched with psychaedelic vibes. Cymbals are teased by Nick Mason and this sound would become a main feature in early 70’s Pink Floyd. Although wholly unremarkable the song works and is a very nice listen.
Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun (Waters) is a favorite of mine and a song I first heard via the Live At Pompeii film which I used to play an awful lot on VHS when I was a teenager. The song is deep and mysterious. It is sparse but has a threat of explosion throughout. It does hold off and never blows-up but you can feel the tension build powerfully nonetheless.
Corporal Clegg (Waters) and Pink Floyd minus Syd Barrett tread a left of centre Beatles sound. The song fits the album even if it can be seen as a little over the top.
A Saurcerful Of Secrets (Waters / Wright / Mason / Gilmour) offers more evidence of Syd Barret being fazed out of Pink Floyd. The piece of music reflects how Pink Floyd moved on from Barrett but not away from experimentation. The song could be seen to see the true start of the second era for the group. Broken into four pieces part one Something Else is suggested to musically reflect the run up to a period of war. Syncopated Pandemonium suggests the battles within a war as it pads and rattles around. Storm Signal musically paints imagery of the dead after the war. Celestial Voices is the sound of mourning – and it is at this moment that Pink Floyd hit a sombre but sonic perfection for the very first time. It really is an ambitious track but one that is completely pulled off, it serves to take psychedelic music to an ethereal more accomplished place. It is early in this project (going through all the Pink Floyd albums) but this may be my favourite ever Pink Floyd track. The version on the Live At Pompeii film elevates it far above and wank noodling that could be levelled at the band and I will never tire of watching / listening to it.
See Saw (Wright) is a soft song that is simple in structure and delivery. It serves as a come down to the preceding epic.
Jugland Blues (Barrett) lyrically could be see as a farewell from Syd Barrett. Barmy yet beautiful it sits oddly at the end of the album and veers off at right angles practically throughout. It is hard not to feel sad listening to this now and probably the same emotion would have been accessed back in 1968 by the few that initially bought this near classic album…
The B-side is much better…
Listening now and I’ve had to switch Spotify to mono and ah, that’s much better. Can maybe enjoy this now.
My relationship with Pink Floyd is as long as my relationship with any other thing in this world - I literally cannot remember a time when I didn’t know something of this music. My father is entirely to blame for this state of affairs and apparently used to insist on playing comfortably numb to me whilst I was still In Utero. I never stood a chance really.
What’s odd though is that his relationship with them really starts with Meddle and doesn’t go any earlier - he remains really quite dismissive of anything prior to that (except Interstellar Overdrive, oddly). I’m actually sort-of grateful because it gave me a wealth of their weirder stuff to explore on my own terms and without a doubt my favourite record from the pre-Meddle days is Saucerful of Secrets. Remember when you used to be able to rent CDs from the library? I can still remember the librarian giving 12-year-old me a slightly perplexed look when I handed over my pocket money to take early Floyd home.
It didn’t click straight away, although Set the Controls and Let There Be More Light did. I found Corporal Clegg jarring and even a little embarrassing first time I heard it and couldn’t get my head around the title track at all.
That changed when I got around to re-visiting in a major way during my student years. All the weird edges that put me off before were exactly the hooks that pulled me in - Corporal Clegg’s weird combination of sarcasm and kazoo(!) solo, Saucerful’s prolonged excursion into off-piste oddness… and Jugband Blues.
Jugband Blues is the sound of someone who knows there is something deeply wrong, knows they are slipping away and powerless to prevent it and is toying with the idea of letting go completely. “I’m most obliged to you for making it clear that I’m not here” is absolutely heartbreaking, almost a cry for help but not quite. “I’m wondering who could be writing this song” followed by a moment’s silence broken in two by a manic marching band evoking depersonalisation and sudden mood-swings. I honestly don’t know and we can’t know how Barrett intended it but it feels like one of the most perfect artistic descriptions of mental illness it is possible to imagine - fragmented and disorganised but with enough of the person underneath it shining through to render it completely poignant. It must have been truly terrifying for him. In case it needs saying it is my favourite of the Barrett penned tracks and the one piece where I feel the execution lives up to the “genius” tag.
The only thing on the record that doesn’t hit home for me is Seesaw. Seems to cover similar territory to Apples and Oranges (see above) and although it does it slightly better, it is still territory I am happy to leave untraversed. If it was going to click for me it would have clicked by now after a good 20 years of loving this record. It provides nice breathing space between the title track and Jugband, I guess.
I gave it a 9. If I didn’t need to leave headroom for a couple of later albums it might even have received a 10. Going to go and listen to it now.
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Have gone back to the early singles and rarities on The Early Years 1965-1967 and they’re really good. ‘Apples And Oranges’ has an incredible bridge section, while ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Arnold Layne’ still hold up. ‘Paintbox’ was a nice surprise too!
‘Vegetable Man’ is very intense compared to a lot of that early material. ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ is pretty weird, can’t remember if I ever heard it before now. Wild that Nick Mason sings it and does a good job!
Looking at Wikipedia it seems I have my chronology slightly off too - It Would Be So Nice came out just before Saucerful of Secrets, backed with Julia Dream. Always thought they were between Saucerful and More.
Again, I much prefer the B-side. It Would Be So Nice is a cheery music-hall jaunt doing a barely passable job of mimicking the more irritating bits of the Beatles, whereas Julia Dream is just kind-of gorgeous.
I read somewhere that Vegetable Man and Scream Thy Last Scream were shelves because they were considered too dark to put out as singles and just never found a place on any subsequent releases. Not surprising I guess, as they were both Syd’s.
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Going to listen to those in a minute!
Finished my listen of Saucerful Of Secrets there. What a great album! I much prefer it to Piper…. I think the only misstep is ‘Coproal Clegg’ and even that’s a bit of a laugh. ‘Set The Controls…’ is so much faster than I remember it being, maybe because I used to play an extra slow doom version of it in a band.
Title track is genuinely great, manages to invent Tangerine Dream’s whole early career in the first three minutes. There is a glaring edit in the third part, I wonder how long that bit was originally?
‘Jugband Blues’ is genuinely haunting. It’s like if you dropped ‘Holocaust’ by Big Star onto the end of Radio City. A great piece of work but Barrett was in real trouble by this point. There’s a reason I don’t go back to his solo work.
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Slow start to this listening club for me, sorry. Really not that familiar with Pink Floyd other than the big ones so I’m interested to hear what I’ve been missing.
First time listening to these first two albums all the way through. Didn’t really care for Piper other than the first two tracks. Saucerful of Secrets was much more my cupful of tea. Love the opening three tracks and the final Syd one.
Also enjoyed (but disagreed with) this sniffy Rolling Stone review
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Bump for the weekend. Will do More tomorrow (and might even report the scores from the last two of I’m feeling generous)
So far then we have…
PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN - 6.85
SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS - 7.44
Was going to do MORE tonight, but I am still quite brutally hungover and struggling to concentrate for more than 5 minutes. Will do tomorrow evening instead…
In the meantime, we can all enjoy the single released between SoS and MORE…
Point Me at the Sky was a surprise in that I genuinely don’t think I’ve heard it before. A small gap in my embarrassingly complete knowledge. It’s alright - slightly undermined by its own chorus.
and…
The phenomenal Careful With That Axe, Eugene which I will probably eulogise in a bit more depth when we hit Ummagumma territory.
Didn’t get to More, did I? Turns out that there is a very good reason I only drink heavily 2-3 times a year. Those three-day hangovers are not conducive to anything…
Anyway, More… I’m busy and should be writing a dull technical paper right now, so I will let Wikipedia take over:
“The film More featured a young hitchhiker in Ibiza who had succumbed to heroin abuse with party scenes and drug taking. Director Barbet Schroeder was a fan of the group, and brought a rough cut of the film to London for them to work with.[6][7] Instead of typical background music, Schroeder wanted the songs to feature in the film, such as a record playing at a party. The group also speculated they could branch out into a career as film composers if their recording and touring career did not work out.[6] Drummer Nick Mason later said the film was “ideally suited to some of the rumblings, squeaks and sound textures we produced on a regular basis””
Notable as the first record without Syd Barrett and the fact it was written and recorded in two weeks, More sees the band trying to find a way forward after the loss of their talismanic frontman. The music roughly falls into three categories - pastoral acoustic psychedelia (including personal favourite Cirrus Minor) proto-hard-rock (Nile Song) and psychedelic jamming (Quicksilver).
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…and favourite track
- Cirrus Minor
- The Nile Song
- Crying Song
- Up the Khyber
- Green Is The Colour
- Cymbaline
- Party Sequece
- Main Theme
- Ibiza Bar
- More Blues
- Quicksilver
- A Spanish Piece
- Dramatic Theme
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This is probably the record in their catalogue I have spent least time with… will have to give it a couple of spins this week before rating.
More is the third album proper by Pink Floyd and was released in July 1969 by EMI. The album is latterly more commonly known as Soundtrack From The Film More but this hardly matters.
Dave Gilmour sings whenever there is a vocal and it is the first Pink Floyd album not to feature Syd Barrett. More peaked at Number 9 in the U.K. Album Charts upon release.
Cirrus Minor (Waters) intros with birdsong and floats musically as not one drum or cymbal is hit throughout its five minute duration. Richard Wright echoes the fourth quarter of A Saucerful Of Secrets (the song) and this gives it a similar feel to that track on the bands prededing album.
The Nile Song (Waters) is Pink Floyd almost toying with Heavy Metal. Probably the bands most blunt and brutal song ever it is another favourite of mine and a track we used to cover in the first band I ever played in way back in 1987. I do wish Pink Floyd had a whole album that sounds like the style of this song but hey-ho this will have to do. Listening to it now it is almost Nirvana-esque too, it really is a scorching song.
Crying Song (Waters) at just over three minutes really just floats by. Gilmour offers a sleepy sounding vocal and it fits the vibe of the album / soundtrack.
Up The Khyber (Wright / Mason) is as the songwriting credit suggests a more drum and keyboard inspired jam. For the first time the album does show its soundtrack purpose but it is not far removed from many of the pieces on the second album (which I’m seeing as a good thing).
Green Is The Colour (Waters) is a very pleasant acoustic feeling song. It shows the other side to early post Barrett Pink Floyd that balances out the avant-garde material well and gave the group a wider appeal.
Cymbaline (Waters) is soft again but sounds gently disturbing. The vocal delivery and pace of the music is perhaps a signal of the sound the group would expand upon when they truly blew-up. For a song that is not widely known it is very accomplished.
Party Sequence (Waters / Gilmour / Wright / Mason) is a very short tom-tom-a-thon where we are reminded again that the album is also serving as a soundtrack to a real movie.
Main Theme (Waters / Gilmour / Wright / Mason) and for the first time the soundtrack style and development from A Saucerful Of Secrets welds together. You can hear it fit the opening to the film and set up a great atmospheric vibe and also just be a great stand-alone piece of music. Every element of the band, be it the drumming by Nick Mason, that sliding guitar from Dave Gilmour or the fitting keys from Richard Wright locking to and drifting away from the bass of Waters – just works. Again, for a piece of music that generally is not that well known it is very strong.
Ibiza Bar (Waters / Gilmour / Wright / Mason) sees the style of The Nile Song return. This is no bad thing and I like the sound a lot even if it can be seen as maybe too much of a clone of The Nile Song.
More Blues (Waters / Gilmour / Wright / Mason) does what it says on the tin and see the developing Pink Floyd sound more bluesy than they usually do.
Quicksilver (Waters / Gilmour / Wright / Mason) pulls Pink Floyd back to their darker, more avant-garde side. From rising gongs to leading keyboards showered with unique guitar effects it can be seen as written for accompanying images or just Pink Floyd doing more of their way-out sounds.
A Spanish Piece (Gilmour) is a short (1 minute) spanish guitar break sung by Dave Gilmour in a rasping whisper.
Dramatic Theme (Waters / Gilmour / Wright / Mason) has a pushing forward walking at a fast pace vibe that is guided by the drums, bass and guitar. When the keyboards join it serves to show again what imagery and tones Pink Floyd can conjure up out of nothing.
Although More is guided by the fact that it was a soundtrack it does see Pink Floyd develop further both as musicians and further away from the unique psychedelia of Syd Barret. Although not quite as essential as A Saucerful Of Secrets it is an album that is – but should not be, overlooked…
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Hmm… seems pretty quiet in here. Happy to carry on but if no-one else fancies it then it might just get a bit… sad.
- The Show Must Go On
- Stop
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Just discovered this thread! I’d imagine people are waiting to get to the albums from Meddle onwards and then you’ll see a huge influx 
Actually even the next two should spark more curiosity than More.
Green is the colour is a weirdly heartbreaking little song
Yeah Nile Song, I love putting that on at parties
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