Tag Archives: pink floyd

#1199: Pink Floyd – Sheep

Leave a reply

Looks like this’ll be the last song from Pink Floyd’s Animals that’ll be on here. But it also happens to be my favourite track on there. I’ve come to think of the record as the band’s almost, sort of reaction to punk at the time. Those gospel backing choirs and saxophones the group used on Dark Side and Wish You Were Here were done away with. The Floyd took a DIY approach to the making of Animals through building their own studio to record it in after leaving their usual work area of Abbey Road Studios. As a result, it’s truly an effort created and curated by the four members, even if Roger Waters will take credit for it all. And plus, there’s a lot of frustration and anger behind it all, which we can all do with sometimes. A lot of people are into ‘Dogs’. A lot of people are into ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’. And I swear, for a while, from what I saw, ‘Sheep’ was usually considered to be the weakest out of the three mammoth tracks that make up the meaty part of the album. Something that I couldn’t really understand. Because, in regards to listening to the entire LP, ‘Sheep’ is the track that the entire album has been building up towards.

‘Sheep’ had its origins from before the band even started work on Wish You Were Here a few years prior, as it was usually performed live under the name ‘Raving and Drooling’. Then Roger Waters was inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the lyrical content morphed into something completely different and now described a dire situation in which people were blindly following an ideology without thinking for themselves or willing to fight against it. Proceedings begin with the sound of sheep braying in a field, smooth chords on the Rhodes piano by Richard Wright and a bass riff that lingers on one note for the longest time. The three together make for a very ominous intro, made all the more so when the bass guitar finally slides down to a different key. Something big is about to go down. And it does, with the whole band entering and Roger Waters delivering a forceful vocal that seamlessly transitions into wild, freaky, spaced out note on the synthesizers. It’s a production trick that blew my mind when that happened the first time. Some genius stuff.

Once the band come in all together for that first verse, the whole track’s a juggernaut from that point forward. Roger Waters howling away on the vocals, while also taking on a rhythm guitar role (buried in the mix), with David Gilmour thrashing out these wild guitar chords. Nick Mason throws out these emphatic fills on the drumkit and Richard Wright fills the sound out with blaring Hammond organ chords. This is a band that’s locked in. It’s difficult for me to not just go through the song minute-by-minute and explain what happens here and there, that’s how quite strongly I feel about this track. This post may be one of my longest in a while. Sometimes you just have to leave it for someone to hear for themselves. But what I will say though, is that the outro to this song is quite possibly one of the greatest of all time. Like one comment on YouTube says, it’s the climax of the entire album. The way the whole track seems to rise in decibels when the cymbals crash and Gilmour’s monstrous descending guitar riff brings everything to a rapturous close as it eventually fades out. If there were musical definition for the words ‘glory’ or ‘freedom’, the two minutes of this song’s outro would be a fine contender.

#1168: Pink Floyd – See Emily Play

Leave a reply

Sometime in the autumn of 2010, I decided to listen to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album for the first time. I’d always seen/heard good things about it up to that point, and after being familiar with The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall by then, it only made sense to check it out. It came to the album’s final track, and while simultaneously reading the Wiki article about it, there was a mention of how keyboardist Rick Wright performs a short musical nod to the band’s earlier song ‘See Emily Play’, as a tribute to Syd Barrett, right at the end as it fades to silence. So then it only made additional sense that I went to find that song and figure which part the article was talking about.

And that’s how I came to know the subject of today’s post. It was a roundabout way of making my point, but I got there in the end. And the melodic phrase Wright borrowed for the tribute was right there in the melody of ‘Emily”s first line. Released in the sweet summer of ’67, ‘See Emily Play’ was only the band’s second ever single. It became something of a hit for the group and they appeared on Top of the Pops to promote it, both of which Barrett was vehemently against. But I enjoy it, at least. Definitely a highlight from the Syd Barrett-era of Pink Floyd. I do think after the initial hearing I may have thought it was a little strange. It could only ever have been released in the ’60s, especially 1967. But the more listens I gave it, the more used to the whole thing I became, as one would usually do.

This track by Barrett sees him write about another thing that he seems to find rather odd and yet strangely fascinating. He did it with a scarecrow, a gnome, a bike. I’m sure there are others. ‘See Emily Play’ is supposedly written about a real person though, a girl Barrett saw while sleeping in the woods under the influence of a ‘psychedelic drug’. It’s not really clear in the lyric whether Barrett actually knows this lady or not, so as far as I know, he was just so captivated by her presence – the drugs may have reinforced this feeling – that he went ahead and wrote a song about this stranger. The minor-key verses hint at the sadness she may be feeling at times. Something to ponder until those jubilant choruses come in which end with a joyful calling of the song’s title, which also closes out the song overall. It’s always a fun listen when this one comes on.

#1161: Pink Floyd – The Scarecrow

1 Reply

This track’s a relatively recent add to the music storage on the phone. It was back in 2021 or so. I can’t remember what made me do it. I was mostly likely on a Pink Floyd binge as a fan of Pink Floyd may do on occasion, came across the promotional video for ‘The Scarecrow’ (above) and liked it enough that it made sense to add it to the library. It was one of the last few songs I synced onto my phone before I made the decision to stop adding ‘new’ music, otherwise I’d end up never finishing this series. Or at least I would, but at a much further time than I think I would want it to go on for.

And with ‘The Scarecrow’ comes the only representation of the band’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn album that you’ll see on here. It’s not my favourite LP by the band. But with that being said, the Syd Barrett-era of Pink Floyd is an interesting, interesting one. Though I don’t think anyone will complain about any of the music that followed after his departure, it’s songs (for me) like ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘The Gnome’, ‘Bike’ and ‘See Emily Play’ (which’ll get a post on here fairly soon) that make me wonder how things would have gone for Barrett and the group had he not fried his brain with LSD and suffered a complete mental breakdown. It’s one of those great questions that’ll never be answered.

So, what’s ‘The Scarecrow’ about? Well, it’s in the title. Which specific scarecrow caught Barrett’s eye is anyone’s guess. But he saw it, and the sight of it was fascinating enough that it inspired him enough to write a song. There’s nothing to work out when it comes to the lyricism, which is a case when it comes to a lot of songs penned by Barrett. They’re written in a way that, really, a child could understand, which I say with no intention to undermine them. The accompanying music, I feel, reinforces this childlike wonder. You get this clip-clopping percussion and a wandering organ that separates the verses. I think Barrett comes in a bar or two earlier when singing the second verse. All nice and psychedelic. And then this majestic ending with swooping strings and 12-string guitar suddenly comes in from out of nowhere, fading out before you have time to process it. Could listen to that part on an infinite loop. But it’s a genius move. To end this song in such a way that leaves you wanting more after starting off so unassumingly. And that’s just one reason why I respect Syd Barrett’s craft.

#1037: Pink Floyd – Pigs (Three Different Ones)

1 Reply

Ah, Animals. I’ll tell you now, my favourite Pink Floyd album. I can remember the day I downloaded it and heard the whole thing for the first time. It was Halloween 2010, and the 1990 Roald Dahl Witches film was on the TV. Channel 5, to be exact. I was 15 years old. At the time ‘Pigs on the Wing Part One’ passed me by too quickly, and I don’t think I had devloped the bandwidth to pay attention to the almost-18 minute song of ‘Dogs’ just yet. The first track on the album that caught my ear immediately though was today’s entry. At 11-and-a-half minutes in length, ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ was just about in my comfort zone, and was the track that would pop into my head as I would be on the bus ride home from school.

Man, where do I even start? Animals‘s pissed off tone has already been established in the 20 or so minutes that come before ‘Three Different Ones’ starts. This track only further emphasises it. The three verses on here represent a different ‘pig’, with the first covering a general businessman, the second is widely agreed to be about former Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher, and the third explicitly calls out conservative activist Mary Whitehouse, who would dedicate a lot of her time campaigning against anything liberal. The verse isn’t about the White House in Washington D.C., as many thought for a while. Roger Waters chastises them all with the memorable, highly quotable refrain, “Ha-ha, charade you are”. You might ask, “If there are only three verses, why’s it 11 minutes long?” Well, in between the second and third verse comes a lengthy instrumental break that builds and builds, featuring heavy use of a talk box to mimic the sound of pigs during a guitar solo.

This song is fantastic. The groove that drags it along is undeniable. The use of every instrument present here is essential to the music, even down to the damn cowbell that appears in the mix between the verses. David Gilmour’s bass guitar performance is killer. Taking over from Roger Waters, who takes the rhythm guitar role here, Gilmour pulls off some melodic licks and scales that makes the track rip even harder than it does. Animals is noted for being the album in which Roger Waters’s grip on the band’s direction really began to take hold. It’s also the Pink Floyd album where I think he really came into his own as a vocalist. He’s not known for being the greatest singer ever. He’s probably the third best singer in the ‘classic’ line-up of the band. But even I try to copy the tone he gets on those ‘really a cryyy-hyyYYYYYyyy’s and the ‘charade you are’s every time I hear this one. A vocal take driven by seething resentment, for sure. Always a welcome time when this song pops up on shuffle.

#987: Pink Floyd – One of My Turns

Leave a reply

Within the story of The Wall, ‘One of My Turns’ comes at a point where the main character, Pink, finds out that his wife has been cheating on him while he, a rich musician, has been up to no good on the road himself. Despite his own wrongdoing, he obviously wasn’t prepared for the tables to be turned. He brings a groupie back to his apartment, sits down blankly staring at the television, and suddenly explodes in a fit of rage throwing his possessions around the room. Without properly delving into the whole concept, you’d only be able to sort of gauge what’s going on because of the sound effects that occur during the song. Thankfully, though, there’s a film where everything’s depicted in the frantic and frightening manner you would think a director would take if that situation happened in real life.

So this track is pretty much split into two sections. The calm before the storm, and the sudden explosion. Richard Wright’s synthesizer adds one note after the other to create this uneasy tension while we hear the groupie marvel at the size of Pink’s apartment and the amount of things he has. After she asks Pink if he’s feeling okay, FYI he isn’t, is when Roger Waters finally enters the frame to sing the first verse. Singing all calm-like alongside Wright’s synthesizer, he essentially describes Pink’s emptiness and overbearing depression with a short series of similes and heart-wrenching statements. Among them he warns the listener that he can feel “one of [his] turns coming on”. Not too soon after he says that, that turn arrives and the rest of the song is a hard-rock number with the guitars and drums entering the mix.

Just like many other songs on The Wall, Roger Waters makes it his mission to sound as unhinged as he possibly can, straining his voice to the peak of its limitations during this section of the track. Those are some high notes he’s reaching, but he pulls them off even though it’s like his voice could break there and then during the take. I personally have always got a kick of how he sings “Would you like something to eat?” There’s something a cartoon-ish about it. After a brief solo, the groupie runs out of the apartment, leaving Pink to scream into the night, which segues right into the next song on the album. If you want to listen to someone fall apart and lose it entirely, these are two songs which may pique your interest.