Pink Floyd

HerbieTheRadDorklift

I consider myself a big Pink Floyd fan, however.... I really have only listened to the BIG FOUR (DSOTM, WYWH, A, TW) as well as a handful of other songs.

I know they're more of an album band, but can some of you recommend a playlist of tracks to listen to that don't include anything off the above albums? Ta

Gassage

Meddle is the obvious one you're missing- and the Div Bell. I loved the Final Cut but not to everyone's taste.

Saucerful is another obvious one.

I'd actually listen to Floyd live, DG live, Rog live and Saucerful of Secrets live albums as all of the reference tracks are on those live recordings.

ICBM

All of The Final Cut.

As Gassage says it's not to everyone's taste - but for me it's Waters' greatest piece of writing. It's rather bitter and depressing, with a strong anti-war theme and deeply political, but if you like that sort of thing it's one of the finest albums ever made in my opinion.

Gassage

ICBM said:

All of The Final Cut.

As Gassage says it's not to everyone's taste - but for me it's Waters' greatest piece of writing. It's rather bitter and depressing, with a strong anti-war theme and deeply political, but if you like that sort of thing it's one of the finest albums ever made in my opinion.

Ironically it's got two of David's finest solos in it too.

MagicPigDetective

I've found The Early Years 1965-72 a good way to get into lesser-known cuts. That led to me Obscured by Clouds which is excellent. 

ICBM

Gassage said:

Ironically it's got two of David's finest solos in it too.

Yes. I find it quite sad how much he's slagged it off as 'songs not good enough for The Wall' - when in fact I think it was more that they didn't fit the narrative of it, some of them (Possible Pasts/Hero's Return and the title track especially) the equal of anything he's ever written. And I think The Gunner's Dream may be Waters' single best song - Southampton Dock is very powerful too, if like me you remember the exact image that inspired it on the news back in 1982...

It's a real pity they could never see eye to eye from then on - they really were much better together than apart, even though I like some of DG's playing on the later albums and Waters' writing on Amused To Death in particular.

Danny1969

The Final Cut is my second favourite Floyd album, only beaten by The Wall. Highly recommend that and also Meddle and Obscured by Clouds. 

HerbieTheRadDorklift

The Final Cut will get a listen. I'm more of a Roger fan anyway

idiotwind

There's some nice stuff in the post Syd/pre DSOTM era - Obscured by Clouds has been mentioned already.  Some tracks I like from around then are:

Fat Old Sun
Childhood's End
Wot's... uh the Deal
Green is the Colour
Cymbaline
Granchester Meadows (this live version is better than the studio one:  )
The Embryo

munckee

I would certainly recommend meddle a beautiful album with echoes which is surely one of the best songs ever written. 

maharg101

Rather than a playlist, I'd recommend to listen to the albums. They're easy enough to find online, on Spotify for example. I'd recommend Meddle and Obscured by Clouds.

Springywheel

I also recommend sticking to albums rather then playlists.

Check out Piper At the Gates of Dawn, which is essentially a Syd Barrett album. Really good, if a little bonkers. Then listen to A Saucerful of Secrets and Meddle, in that order. 

Grangousier

Thing about Pink Floyd is that it's several quite different bands, with mostly the same personnel. 

The Piper At the Gates of Dawn band are, as has been said, the Syd Barrett band. 

The Saucerful of Secrets band is the 1967 PF minus Syd trying to fulfil the obligations of the Syd band - it's a really interesting album, in a lot of ways, capturing loose Floyd jams (Set the Controls On the Heart of the Sun), English psych (Remember A Day, Corporal Clegg), and one actual Syd song (Jugband Blues) - interesting to compare and contrast with King Crimson's In the Wake of Poseidon, which was just as much about the fallout from ITCOTCK. And Crimson also only really found their feet again in 1973 (with Lark's Tongues In Aspic).

Then there are a few interstitial albums (which I loved when I was young) - Ummagumma, the movie soundtracks, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle - and then what we think of as Pink Floyd snaps into focus with DSOTM, which is a complete, perfectly realised artistic statement, while everything that comes before is high points and filler. 

Final Cut is the Roger Waters Band; After that it's the Dave Gilmour Band, and to be honest I don't really complain. It's it's own thing, and that's fine. 

TLDR: After Piper At the Gates of Dawn, it's really about getting to Dark Side of the Moon, but there are all sorts of interesting sights on the way. Meddle, in particular, is great. 

Grangousier

(IMO, BTW.)

ToneControl

From the earlier phase, I always liked

• Obscured by Clouds 
• Meddle - most importantly Echoes, the Live at Pompeii version is great to watch
• Atom Heart Mother - the whole album is worth listening, very different

Personally, I've really enjoyed all of the post-Waters PF albums


For a playlist

Disc 1 of Pulse is almost entirely not those 4 albums:
https://open.spotify.com/album/74tqjrWZBNwQz4LMzal2eN?si=401nvGjPQISjPHEuLqh2MA

disc 1 & 2 of "Later Years" has a good selection
https://open.spotify.com/album/4l4ry48IeNbMCZl5PoI6Lo?si=kQb_dECiTRqdC23-1bgKoA

ToneControl

btw 
Spotify has a load of PF material that was not available until recently, Live concerts, "Early years remixes and out-takes", etc

TheBigDipper

True Story. My childhood best friend Kevin was a PF fanatic. The mother of one of his schoolmates was a cleaner at Abbey Road Studios. Somehow, Kev ended up with a couple of acetates she'd rescued from a bin. Which is how we were able to hear a version of Animals about 6 months before it actually was released. Kev played it once just to get it onto cassette and there we were... 

If you're doing to dive into live and bootleg recordings, Kev used to have a live bootleg called "Eclipse" which was, essentially DSOTM when it was still a work in progress and being played at gigs. I expect that's still retrievable from somewhere. Also, he had a live version of Atom Heart Mother played by just the four in the band, before they orchestrated it up. Really interesting. 

scrumhalf

Live in San Diego 1971 - well before DSOTM and fantastic.

axisus

I disliked the Final cut for decades. It seemed rubbish compared to the Wall. A couple of years ago I decided to get the CD and play it to death and now I love it. Superb album.

I love Pink Floyd from Meddle onwards, I'm not mad keen on a lot of the earlier stuff. And anyone who thinks that Syd was a genius is having a laff.

ICBM

axisus said:

I disliked the Final cut for decades. It seemed rubbish compared to the Wall. A couple of years ago I decided to get the CD and play it to death and now I love it. Superb album.

I actually stopped listening to it some time in the mid-late 80s because the politics in the lyrics made it seem very dated - but at around the time of the Iraq war I rediscovered it and found it resonated even more strongly if anything. The only exceptions are the first and the last two songs, which seemed the best on the album back then (Two Suns especially), but now do seem less relevant. The rest of it is just as powerful and accurate as it was then.

If you're a Waters fan, Amused To Death is even more so - it's astonishingly prophetic given that it was written very nearly thirty years ago now.

HerbieTheRadDorklift

Thanks guys