I’ve been listening to a ton of Pink Floyd recently. You know how you get in those “moods”—there’s that one album or maybe a particular genre is really speaking to you at the moment? I’m going through that with Pink Floyd. I’m not sure what sparked this. I’ve always been a fan, but I’ve only had the big four albums on CD. Ok, maybe the big 3 plus a smaller 4th: “Dark Side Of The Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “The Wall”, and “Meddle”. Oh yeah, I did have “Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” for a long time too. Oh, and “Momentary Lapse Of Reason” and “The Division Bell”. Oh well. So I had a few of the very well known ones and some others.
I never owned a copy of “Animals”. Not sure why. I just never did. I had many other albums on cassette when I was in high school. “Final Cut”, “Atom Heart Mother”, etc. But something spurred this Pink Floyd kick in me so I went out and picked up pretty much all the CDs I didn’t have, and for about the past month now I’ve been listening to them a lot. Man! What good stuff. Of course those classic albums are amazing, but there are so many good songs on their other albums. They may not be a strong on whole but there are several great tunes from “Obscured By Clouds” and that live disk of “Ummagumma” is fantastic.
My buddy Ben gave the the “Live At Pompeii: Director’s Cut” DVD a while back and I hadn’t gotten around to checking it out. So that’s gone into heavy rotation too. I have to say, the original concert film is great. Sure, it’s pretty dated with its special effects, but it all fits with the time period. And the performances are awesome. It’s actually pretty similar to the “Ummagumma” live disk plus 3 songs from “Meddle”—“Echoes”, “One Of These Days”, and “Mademoiselle Nobs” (an early version of “Seamus” ).
I’m very disappointed with the Director’s Cut of the film however. Adrian Maben did himself a big disservice by releasing that cut. He had this great concert film, and he shot a lot of interesting stuff of Pink Floyd in the studio while they were making “Dark Side”. He should have simply released a separate documentary of that material. Instead he combines the two together and adds in a bunch of extra new b-roll—NASA space archive footage, newly shot footage at various Ancient Rome museum exhibits, and some really cheesy CGI outerspace planet fly-by stuff. What he winds up with is a bizarre hodge-podge of seemingly unrelated material.
If there is one thing that’s bummed me out about my recent music kick, it’s that I wish I’d had these albums in my collection years ago, particularly “Animals”. I don’t know what I was thinking. One of the best parts is when Dave Gilmour’s solo kicks in right around 3:30 in “Dogs”. I might just have to do another Cool Song Parts with Pink Floyd tunes.