I loved it when I heard David asked in an interview about being slow, and he said, “I never could play fast, so I compensated by playing well.”
Agreed. It’s easy to take potshots at it precisely because it has been so popular. Being a contrarian is easy. But the record is absolutely brilliant. And it holds up after all these years, start to finish.
True, but I do think Echoes is their best song. It has everything that made Floyd Floyd. It’s incredibly ambitious, and it works.
A couple of points.
While Roger actually managed to fire Rick for not contributing to the songwriting, it’s Rick more than anyone who defines the PF sound.
Comparing Final Cut with Wish You Were Here (perennial winner of fan polls) is another good demonstration of that.
Of course, Rick got his revenge on the The Wall tour, where he, as a non-band-member, got paid scale. Roger’s overblown stage show lost money, so he was the only one of the 4 for whom the tour was not a loss.
Nick, while not a great drummer, had more to do with establishing the Floyd sound than he gets credit for. Look to his “tape effects” credits on the early records.
But like all the Floyd members except arguably Gilmour, and maybe Wright in his last solo effort, he went to excesses when on his own and couldn’t come anywhere close to what he was able to achieve as part of the band.
Not quite.
They ended up getting bilked out of the DSOTM money, which is why they had to do The Wall.
At that point, the band had broken up, but no announcement had been made.
When it turned out they were financially busted, they had to reassess.
Roger came back with a couple of solo projects he had been working on: The Wall, and The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking.
The band chose to do The Wall, and converted it from a Waters soundscape into actual music.
I saw Waters on his “In the Flesh” tour and it’s still one of the best shows I’ve been to. BUT! It felt like Waters, not Floyd, and frankly, things really sagged during his wordy and preachy solo material. Waters was maybe the “voice” of Floyd, but IMHO, Wright and especially Gilmour were the true “soul” of the band. Gilmour’s On an Island, for example, sound a hell of a lot more like a Floyd album than does Waters’ Amused to Death.
I love The Wall to bits, but it’s basically a collaboration between Waters, Gilmour and Bob Ezrin and in no way reflects Pink Floyd. “Echoes” is the best thing PF did as a band, and I think Meddle and Obscured By Clouds taken together encapsulate both the strengths and weaknesses of the post-Barrett quartet better than either DSOTM or even WYWH do.
What’s your source for all of this? It all intuitively fits, I must say. (The last two paragraphs I know about, but not the rest.)
Animals was the beginning of the end – it was basically WYWH offcuts.
I believe that after the Dark Side of the Moon they had three or four new songs which eventually became Shine On, Dogs, Pigs, and Sheep. Leading up to WYWH there was some discussion about what to do for an album with some of them wanting to just do the songs they had while I think Roger came up with the idea of making Shine On into an entire album and writing some other songs to go with it. So then Dogs Pigs and Sheep became the Animals album, but they were all written in a similar time period as Shine On. It’s unfair to call Animals WYWH off cuts. They’re no more related to WYWH than the Pros and Cons of Hitchiking is related to The Wall.
I’d compare it more to The Wall + The Final Cut. I mean, IIRC, the plan was to have “Shine On…” as a sidelong epic, a la “Echoes”, with the other side being “You Gotta Be Crazy” and “Raving and Drooling”. Of course, the plan later changed and the latter two songs became “Dogs” and “Sheep” respectively.
But my point was that Animals was not so much a new work as it was the completion of the post-DSOTM period. They’d already started to run out of steam (especially Wright, who added flourishes but was not contributing a lot by that point, by his own admission).
As for The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, I’ve got some recollection that “Sexual Revolution” was originally written for The Wall. But, like I said, I think the fairer analogy is WYWH + Animals = The Wall + The Final Cut. In both cases you’ve got albums comprised primarily of songs composed for a prior album, then repurposed after the fact.
I agree with all of those who have said that the Saucerful to Meddle period was their best. They have always been adventurous, but they pushed the boundaries further during that era. For example, they created a surround sound system to use in concerts (notably, and very boringly, in Cymbaline, where footsteps endlessly walk round the auditorium). They tried to make an album where the sounds could only be made with household objects (never finished, probably thankfully). Even their failures were interesting.
Their best album, IMO, was another one that was never officially released: The Man And The Journey. This was played in a concert tour, memorably called The Massed Gadgets Of Auxemines. It was broadcast on Dutch radio and was released on numerous bootlegs (for example Complete Concertgebouw 1969). Had it been officially released, it probably would have replaced Ummagumma and More, as it included songs that appeared on those albums.
I’ve just found a link to The Man And The Journey broadcast here, for those who would like to hear it. It starts after Fat Old Sun.
Nicolas Schaffner wrote a very good bandography called “Saucerful of Secrets” some years back which details the whole mess.
I’m looking forward to reading Nick Mason’s book “Inside Out”.
Btw, “Animals” was my first record, and I still dig it. 
IIRC the book Saucerful.…says they got a 1,000,000 pound advance to make the next album after DSOTM, and went on to say that they indeed lived like “landed gentry” for a time, and were extremely bored and not really into making another album at the time.
I haven’t read Saucerful of Secrets.
I do, however, own copies of Inside Out and Pigs Might Fly - The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake (Aurum Press, 2007). Additionally, I have read widely about Pink Floyd via other material. I have also seen the DVD Classic Albums: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon, and several TV documentaries about the band, all of which mention the album.
Not one of these sources even begins to recall any problems the band might have experienced in collecting their due reward from DSotM. In fact, Blake records that in 1974, each member of the band bought a new house in London. Wright also invested in a country manor house near Cambridge, installing his own recording studio to boot. During 1973-1975 (according to Blake) the band members all bought villas in either Greece or the South of France.
Again, according to Blake, they also acquired a number of flats in Ladbroke Grove, London. People they knew were on hard times were permitted to live in these flats for a peppercorn rent.
No band member interviewed for Classic Albums: The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon indicates any difficulties collecting the cash. Indeed, one of them (I think it is Gilmour) categorically states that DSotM put all of them into the financial stratosphere.
I have taken the trouble to read all 49 customer reviews of the book Saucerful of Secrets on Amazon. Not one review mentions any financial shenanigans concerning DSotM.
I’m looking forward to reading Saucerful of Secrets.
It’s not so much shenanigans concerning DSOTM, but the shenanigans of their investment managers, Norton Warburg, whose financial mismanagement nearly bankrupted them.
Yes they got their money alright but Norton Warburg fucked up and they lost a lot of it. I think a lot of the recording for the Wall was done overseas for tax reasons.
Here’s a quote from Roger Waters on the topic.
Ah it’s not that great really. I think Nick Mason is too close to everything to write an interesting book about it all. Pigs Might Fly is an excellent book in my opinion. Not just because it has interesting information about PF but it’s a good read in general about living in the 60s.
I wish I still had the book so I could look it up.
I hope I’m not misremembering, but my recollection was that there was no intention to make another record until something went south with the finances (I thought it was an embezzlement or something, but perhaps I’m confusing this with what happened to the Dead that time with Mickey’s uncle) and suddenly they had to for financial reasons. Otherwise, Nick, Rick, and David would not have even considered doing either of Roger’s projects as a Floyd record.
In your other sources, what reasons are given for the band going back into the studio for the Wall project?
Ok, thank you.
My recollection was that the money disappeared somehow, and I think I was indeed conflating this situation with what happend to the Grateful Dead.
To hijack a little, anyone familiar with Tomorrow? Highly reminiscent of Syd-era Floyd, and heavily psychedelic, especially My White Bicycle. And with the added trivia bonus of featuring a pre-Yes Steve Howe.
Oh, I can admire it a bit while not wanting to listen to it. I did my time as a self-indulgent depressive right around the time it was released, so the themes don’t age well with me now.