Hot take: I absolutely adored that list. Not the order, or even the viewpoints, but the observations were engaging, often hilarious and steeped in 40 years of all of us living with this band. I loved how he broke down how Waters wrote fragments to give himself more writing credits, and hence, more publishing (a trick he says Gilmour learned later on) -- and how that contributed to the many band problems. I love how he's kind of on the fence in a lot of places as to whether he even cares for the band that much (a view that I share). And I like how he was unashamed to go through every fucking note the band played in often painstaking detail and then put a top 5 together that every dipshit waving a lighter would agree with.
“Sorrow": Again, we have the droney sounds with some Gilmourian ruminations up top, again going on for minutes. Then comes something like a beat, which on inspection comes from a poorly programmed friendly local synthesizer rather than, you know, the band’s actual drummer. ...
104. “Corporal Clegg,” A Saucerful of Secrets (1968): This is a downright comical example of how bad Pink Floyd was immediately post-Barrett.
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100. “Learning to Fly,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987): I hate this song for the same reason I hate “Owner of a Lonely Heart” or Permanent Vacation: It’s an overproduced, fraudulent piece of commercial crap designed to distract people from the fact that, while the name of the band on the label hasn’t changed, the creative people behind the music have.
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From the live Astronomy Domine on Ummagumma: “This is a Barrett song, so it has more energy and melody than most Floyd excursions like this. But also listen to Wright’s contribution, coming between the four- and five-minute marks. This is not a dynamic player.”
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Shine On 6-9 (this is a particularly good one): The first five parts of “Shine On” kick off the album and as a whole remains one of the band’s most beloved compositions. The secret is that the second iteration of the song, which closes the album with another four parts, goes off the rails after the first of these. Had it ended after six minutes it would have been an effective reprise. The last two parts mar this fairly magnificent conception with overindulgent, aimless, musically uninteresting, and out-of place wankery. Someone really needed to take Richard Wright’s clavinet away from him, too.
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Meanwhile, Richard Wright’s contributions to the band had become marginal. As the band had to hustle to get The Wall ready for a 1979 release, Wright bridled at losing some of a planned vacation. (Note that it had been two-and-a-half years since Animals had come out.) Waters fired him — or rather, made his manager fire him, a great rock-star dick move — and the other band members, with one eye on their suffering bank accounts, went along. Amazingly, the band hired Wright back as a session player for the shows. In his autobiography, Nick Mason notes that Wright was in fact the only person who made money on that tour;
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Sheep: “This is accompanied by some appropriate and long-overdue actual rock at the end — Gilmour pulls a great-sounding guitar sound out of his ass — and you can even hear Mason breaking a sweat. (Sometimes you actually feel for Waters when it comes to his lazy bandmates.)”
― Naive Teen Idol, Wednesday, 20 September 2017 13:22 (six years ago) link