Fifty years after the release of Wish You Were Here, we count down the best of the band’s Syd Barrett years, their difficult recovery and later reunion
Low on memorable tunes, big on racked, strangulated lead vocals, possessed of a worldview that makes every other Pink Floyd album look like a gushing font of Pollyanna-ish optimism, The Final Cut is a slog. But The Gunner’s Dream cuts through the gloom, thanks to a heartbreaking, fragile melody.
Overshadowed by the albums that preceded and followed it, Obscured by Clouds might be the most underrated release in Pink Floyd’s catalogue: it boasts fantastic instrumental experiments, musical signposts to The Dark Side of the Moon and, in Wot’s … Uh the Deal?, a beautifully careworn, Beatles-y ballad undersold by its daft title.
The studio half of Ummagumma is a mess – a band audibly searching for direction without success – but it contains one unequivocal triumph: Roger Waters’ evocation of the parkland on the banks of the River Cam, its pastoral calm spiked with a curious sense of menace, as if something nasty is lurking in the undergrowth.
The More soundtrack throws up everything from proto-heavy metal and mock-flamenco to bongo solos. But Cymbaline – soaring choruses, Rick Wright-heavy coda – is both splendid and oddly prescient: “Apprehension creeping like a tube train up your spine” sounds like a Dark Side of the Moon lyric that arrived four years too early.
