My recent listening to the likes of Opeth, and Eloy in particular, plus a spin of Atom Heart Mother last week, has led me back to some more Pink Floyd this week.
Wish You Were Here was my favourite album of theirs when I was younger (in fact, my favourite album of all time by anyone for a while). It's still excellent with the centrepiece of Shine On You Crazy Diamond of course, the futuristic Welcome To The Machine, and the rock of Have A Cigar. Objectively the title track is undoubtedly a great song too with brilliant lyrics and a catchy acoustic progression, but now a tad over familiar.
Meddle is a little aged but quite a step up from its predecessor Atom Heart Mother. The celebrated side long track Echoes is more fully formed than the bombastic Atom Heart Mother Suite and the acoustic songs are better than that album's comparatives.
But actually I now think Animals is the best Pink Floyd album. It's just well, so cool. It's one of the band's heaviest albums, and angriest... pointing the way to the more bloated The Wall which followed, but with only 3 long songs simply bookended by a matching acoustic intro and outro it's a lot more focused. One senses Roger Waters was really beginning to take over the song writing with some of his most politically charged lyrics:
You got to be crazy, gotta have a real need
Got to sleep on your toes, and when you're on the street
Got to be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed
Then moving in silently down wind and out of sight
You got to strike when the moment is right, without thinking
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| Johnny Rotten in his I Hate Pink Floyd T-Shirt |
In the face of political and economic turmoil and the burgeoning punk movement (in actual fact there was mutual respect between quite a few of the old dinosaur rock bands and the new wave of young punk bands - Johnny Rotten actually said some years later that he loved Dark Side Of The Moon) this powerful album released in January 1977 and described by NME as...
one of the most extreme, relentless, harrowing and downright iconoclastic hunks of music to have been made available this side of the sun
...couldn't have been better timed.
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Van Morrison - Hard Nose The Highway
Van Morrison - Veedon Fleece
Pink Floyd - Meddle
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd - Animals
Opeth - Damnation
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| The famous Pink Floyd pig still floating over Battersea Power Station during the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony |
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