Pink Floyd: The Dinosaur That Lived

Sometimes you can just never tell how people will react. People whom you have known for yonks turn out to have the most unexpected responses in certain situations. Personality surprises can often be shocking.

Take my sister, for example. I’ve known her for, well, all her life and musically, we couldn’t be more different. I still haven’t recovered from being forced to listen to all her vast collection of interminable 12-inch disco singles from the 1970s blaring through the wall into my bedroom when we all lived at home. My sister was a clubber and a dancer, whereas I was a stay-at-home-with-the-lava-lamp type of listener. And never the twain.

So you will probably be as amazed as me when you learn that her all time favourite album is not ‘Saturday Night Fever’ nor anything by Chic or KC and the Sunshine Band…but ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. Just what is it about this album that seems to cross all known boundaries? You can’t dance to it (well, not until the Scissor Sisters get hold of it), yet my sister loves it. In fact, when you come to think about it, Pink Floyd is a mass of contradictions. Underground, yet mainstream. Experimental yet accessible. Dinosaur, yet loved. Let’s face it; anyone who can make a hit album out of something like ‘Umma Gumma’ deserves some respect but then bands were indulged and encouraged to develop once upon a time.

I watched some of the ‘Live at Pompeii’ extracts on YouTube the other day and hearing the live versions of ‘Echoes’ and ‘Saucerful of Secrets’ offers a few hints to the answer and it is quite simply this: they are (or were) a damnned good band. They managed to do exactly all those things I mentioned above. They were weird yet wonderful, edgy yet musical and above all, talented and committed. I think the real reason DSOTM succeeds is that it is genuinely tuneful whilst being a bit quirky and it deals with timeless themes of the human condition, which affect us all whether you’re a wallflower or exhibitionist.

Not all art appeals to everyone yet Pink Floyd seemed to have managed it with DSOTM whilst thinking they were being wilfully experimental. This must be true otherwise there’s no way that my sister would have it as her number one, it would be ‘Spirits Having Flown’ by the Bee Gees and then where would we be?

15 Minutes

Andy Warhol famously postulated that ‘In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes’, and although I still seem to waiting for my golden quarter of an hour to turn up, there is no doubt that some ‘ordinary’ people have had theirs and then some as the limit gets extended by fate to infinity (and beyond). I love those old black and white iconic photographs of unknown people that are now instantly recognisable years after they were taken – the two women on a windy Margate seafront trying to keep their skirts down whilst eating ice-cream springs to mind. Other, perhaps more serious examples would include the student in Tiananmen Square and the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima.

But it’s not just photographs that allow the statutory 15 minutes to extend over the decades in contravention to Warhol’s law. There are many instances in music where the average man-in-the-street is called upon to contribute a small favour which inadvertently becomes part of a rampaging monster.

This thought occurred whilst I was listening to 10 cc’s ‘I’m not in Love’ where in the middle section a woman’s voice scolds, "Be quiet, big boys don't cry...” Who said that? I did a bit of research on this and it turns out that they were spoken, not by anyone in the band or associated with it, but by a woman named Kathy Warren, the receptionist of the Strawberry Studios where the band recorded the track, probably in between doing her nails and answering the phone. It is instances like this where Kathy’s 15 minutes of fame is extended to 15 years and maybe 15 centuries for all I know on the back of a massively successful single, that show how fate moves in a very mysterious way indeed.

Further examples are provided by the voices recorded for ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by various members of the Pink Floyd management, road crew and sundry studio doormen. They had their 15 minutes almost immortalized by one of the biggest selling albums of all time but probably didn’t expect to at the time. Reportedly, Paul McCartney’s responses were considered too cautious and thus missed out. I’ll bet he’s kicking himself now (or not).

It is a rather pleasing irony that those who specifically set out to make themselves world-famous have often failed miserably, yet those that have no such intent have had notoriety thrust upon them. Of course, they weren’t paid for it, but who said fame pays?