I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd a lot recently. Until a few days ago, I only knew Wish You Were Here (1975) and ‘High Hopes’ from 1993’s The Division Bell. They are a strange band, not really typically 70s, not really typical of any time for all the psychedelia and prog-rock notes; the band itself has a shifting, chimeric identity with one of the four founders (Syd Barrett) leaving in ’68, followed by another (Richard Wright) in ’79, then the last (Roger Waters) in ’85, leaving the Pink Floyd brand to the drummer (Nick Mason) and relative latecomer Dave Gilmour, who joined the band 2 years after it was founded. As with Fleetwood Mac, only the name survived as three of the four originals left and were replaced, Ship of Theseus-like; but whereas Fleetwood Mac’s transformations mirror their fractured, selfish personae & love affairs, with Pink Floyd I feel it’s more a representation of their music’s fundamental theme: insanity, the fragility of personal identity.
The only photo of all four founders and Gilmour. Gilmour is at the bottom centre, then clockwise it’s Nick Mason with the stache, Barrett, Waters with the white scarf, and Wright.
Syd Barrett, as one would expect from the photo, went insane. Wish You Were Here features a long song suite, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ as a homage to the by-now vanished Barrett. Both the sound – an at times almost cacophonous jazz/rock – and the lyrics give me a sense of straying too far from sanity’s planetary orbit; all the promise, the potential of the young man turned against his own mind:
Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky
and the sense of being relentlessly assailed by an enemy you will never be able to face or confront, an enemy whose destructive intent manifests not as hatred but as ridicule, a cold, alien mirth
Come on you target for faraway laughter
as if angels (or demons, or aliens) delight in our mental anguish and disintegration, from an impossible cosmic distance. You step outside the protective dullness of the mundane, entering a psychic Van Allen belt; you return with a scarred mind, an awkwardness:
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon
Insanity, or rather the apprehension of formidable, inhospitable realities just an inch beyond our ordinary limits. For men like Barrett, the world itself is a terrifying challenge; the sky ambiguous:
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain?
Hence the album’s cover.
Just to be in this world is to be constantly imperilled. The corporate music world, presented in ‘Have a Cigar’, with its hint of Satanic temptation (“You’re never gonna die”), is one expression of this psychic attrition. The man on the cover, shaking hands and bursting into flames, is every unprotected soul in a world that is banal, drab (the grey hues, the warehouses) and yet utterly inimical to us; as if we don’t belong here – but then, in a sense we don’t even belong in our own minds: 1973’s ‘Brain Damage/Eclipse’ from the Dark Side of the Moon:
there’s someone in my head but it’s not me
Remainders 