He Who Plays The Piper

Y'know, I'm expecting some of the items on the Beeblebrox List to be hard, and some to be fairly easy. Some will be fairly easy once they pass a certain level of achievability - segway riding, horse riding etc, which have weight restrictions.

Then there's the Pink Floyd Challenge.

I'll be honest with you - I don't want to do this challenge. It has long been my contention that life is too short to listen to Pink Floyd. In fact, it's partly the fact that I've always contended this that's making me do it now.  My brother Geraint is, and for this statement I make no apology, much more of a musical geek than me. Which should scare the living crap out of any of you who know me.

While protesting to like music, though, my brother has these occasional bizarre blind spots. Some I share, others...notsomuch.
He's obsessed with B-sides, for one thing. Now that, I can sort of understand. B-sides are sort of like Easter Eggs on DVDs - they're the things that weren't quite good enough to be A-sides, but are still interesting enough to get an airing. One of my favourite Adam and the Ants tracks ever was a B-side.
Queen always did interesting B-sides. And so I can see where he's coming from with that.

But he also manages, somewhere in the labyrinthine meanderings of his brain, to hold two entirely contradictory opinions simultaneously - a kind of musical doublethink, if you like.

"I like music," he thinks, perfectly reasonably for a man whose iTunes account, while posibly not quite yet at the comuter-breaking levels of madness of my own (although I dunno...), still has a farily capacious collection of at least reasonably tuneful stuff.

"I like Pink Floyd," he thinks, at more or less the same instant.

The only way this can possiby work, I think, is that he's come to a realisation that allows these two statements to be something other than entirely contradictory. He's come to the realisation that Pink Floyd isn't music.

I'm now fairly strongly convinced that Pink Floyd was a 70s anarchist social experiment, a kind of pre-punk, pre-Cowell investigation into The Art of Getting Away With This Shit.

To his credit, my brother did advise against approaching Floyd's career in any kind of structured or linear way.
"You're much better if you cherry-pick," he said. "Some of them are real...erm...growers."

It's not that I don't understand about growers. Guns 'n' Roses' first album, Appetite For Destruction, for me, was a grower. I stil remember where I was when the growing happened. I was on a coach, coming back from a Gary Moore gig, trying to drown out the rumbling miles of motorway. In those circumstances, probably anything would grow on you.

But as yet, I have yet to discover a grower in the Pink Floyd stable. I have discovered squealers, shriekers, and run-away-yellers, if they're any use to anyone, but not, as yet, a grower.

I speak, ladies, gentlemen and assorted gits, as a man who has just gritted his way through the debut Floyd album, Piper At The Gates of Dawn. The nature of the experiment becomes clear quite early on through the album, and then they almost literally in some cases, just turn it up to 11, throwing things at the ear canals of their listeners in an increasingly desperate attempt to get them to turn off or tune out before they rumble the central idea, which is that the band have absolutely no idea what they're doing in a recording studio. And are more than likely miles off their tits.

This latter factor of course is absolutely no barrier to producing phenomenal, world-changing music. And I know of course that the ultimate in slapstick demands the greatest mastery over comic timing, meaning that the less rehearsed a thing looks, the more likely it is to have taken blood, sweat and tears to produce the effortless wonder in front of you.

Piper At The Gates of Dawn isn't that. It's quite clearly the result of a bunch of blokes who find themselves in a recording studio without any particular idea of how or why this has occurred, utterly taking the piss.

Still - one down...29 to go. On, once my lugholes have recovered and my nerves have been soothed, from 1967 to 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets. The title track is a 12 minute instrumental in four named parts, ranging from "Syncopated Pandemonium" on the one hand to "Heavenly Voices" on the other.

Sigh...I swear jumping out of a plane will be easier than this...