Just for fun.
I had a giant poster of this image on my bedroom wall all through high school. It’s my favorite thing Storm Thorgerson ever did, a strangely haunting symbol of human-to-human communication and how it doesn’t always go the way we hope it will.
If there’s a legitimate criticism that could be leveled at most of the work Hipgnosis did over its long run as one of the most in-demand album art companies in the world, it’s that a lot of those cool images don’t really have much to say; they’re to be taken almost as decorative. That doesn’t apply to all of them, of course, but when I look at that Audioslave cover they did, there’s not a whole lot to it. The point is that it’s enigmatic.
The Division Bell is different, though. Communication is a theme running through the album, so it makes sense that the artwork would reflect this, of course, in much the same way that, say Thorgerson’s Wish You Were Here cover reflected the themes of that album back in 1975.
So you have these heads in a field. And they are actually big, metal head sculptures, placed in a field, with Ely Cathedral way in the background. They’re shot in real light, with no matting or computer graphics.
And they’re talking to each other, sort of. Their mouths are open, but they’re both open, as though they’re talking past each other as much as to each other. And then again, the overall expression on their faces suggests that maybe they’re not even talking at all. They’re poised to talk, but they can’t think of what to say. Stand back far enough, and it even looks a bit like a single face, surprised at something you just said.
These blank-eyed sculptures are much more effective ciphers for the difficulties of telling each other how we really feel than two actual people would have been; they don’t have anything about them that suggests class, race, ideology, or any of the other things that artificially divide us. They’re the ultimate equals, and that means they share equal credit for anything they work out and are equally complicit when they blow it.
This is, of course, an example of an album cover made with a real budget. That is increasingly not an option, and people find ways around it. I think a lot of people would default to doing this by computer today, maybe with 3D models. It may not even look that different, but it wouldn’t be quite the same. For one thing, with real sculptures, Thorgerson and his team were able to move these figures all over the place and take photos under different conditions for different effects, effects that they may not have been able to predict. Open air photography is an invitation to serendipity.
There may or may not be a very subtle message about religion being a bell that divides in this image—I’m not sure if they were thinking about that or not when they chose Ely Cathedral’s bell tower as the thing that would be between the mouths of these heads. What the cathedral’s placement does accomplish rather nicely, though, is something that the best surreal images are uniquely suited to do: it reminds us how very strange the world looks on a regular basis.
That cathedral just sticks up over the trees at the end of this winterized field. People take it for granted, but it doesn’t really look like it belongs there when you scrutinize it. I wish there were more images online of the photo shoot for this album cover. I’d rather like to see the staging.
I may do a lot of writing, but I’ve never thought of myself as a great communicator, at least as far as the people in my life are concerned. So when I look at this image—when I looked at it every day, up there on my wall, it reminds me that this is pretty tough for everybody; everyone has his or her own communication problems. Sometimes, they render us mute, other times, they make us talk over or past one another.
In either event, I also think it’s notable that these big head sculptures are missing ears. Half of communication is listening, and when we forget that, it leads to problems.
This is my favorite thing Storm Thorgerson did. I hope he knew how good it was.
500 Favorites, #008: Pink Floyd, “Dogs”
(from Animals, 1977)
…“Dogs” is the first real big thematic track on the album, and it says something about the band’s outlook at the time (or mine now) that I can’t really separate the idea of its critique of capitalism from the idea that they’re singing about actual organized crime figures. (“You’ve got to be trusted/by the people that you lie to/so that when they turn their back on you/you’ll get the chance to put the knife in” — sounds more like one of Donald Westlake’s Parker novels than an issue of Fortune, but that could be the narcissism of small differences.) David Gilmour’s got this great haunted, shaky cast to his voice, more so than usual, and he can turn on a dime from that unsettled mode into something more theatrically aggressive (the way he snarls “put the knife in”) or plummeting into oblivion (the third verse-ending line “just another sad old man/all alone, dying of cancer”). So it’s easy for him to make legitimate business sound like “legitimate business.”
… Full Post
Nate’s 500 Favorites series is only nine entries in and is already full of great writing and ideas. I enjoyed reading his take on Pink Floyd’s “Dogs,” a song I’ve listened to too many times to count—it’s fun to follow along as someone who’s obviously thought about it as much as you have rattles off an interpretation you never arrived at yourself.
I also like that Nate takes the time to talk about David Gilmour’s singing—I think he’s a very effective vocalist if not a spectacular one. It’s easy to overlook that next to his guitar playing. Which, hey, is amazing on this song. The first solo is pretty crazy stuff, a left hook at the end of the verse that I still remember hearing for the first time, almost twenty years ago. But it’s not just the solo. That open, rhythmic strumming behind the opening verses, and the big, electric chords he layers on top of it have their own genius to them—they make a polemical screed go down like candy.
Pink Floyd: “Embryo” (1970/07/16 Paris Cinema, London, Peel Session)
It’s pretty easy for me to know what the biggest event of 2013 will be for me: I’m going to be a father in June. My wife and I are a modern couple. We got married over ten years ago, and now, in our early 30s, we’re just getting to the parenthood phase. Seems like a lot of people I know are doing that (or waiting even longer).
Are we ready? Damn, is anyone ever really ready to be a parent? I don’t think it’s something you can ever fully prepare for. You read up on life stages and what to expect, but parenthood is still something that happens literally in an instant (hopefully not a terribly long one for the mother’s sake). One moment you are not a parent. The next you are. The nine months of pregnancy doesn’t ease you into it at all.
I’m looking forward to it. I’ll with deal with whatever happens. People ask me, “do you want a boy or a girl?” I don’t care. It’s not as though I’d value the child any differently if it were one or the other. I’d like a healthy child. But if there is some health problem, well, we’ll deal with that too.
We won’t know the gender for a few more weeks, but once we do, I guess I’ll start thinking about names and how I might raise that child in a way that helps them flourish. In the long run, that’s all I really want: for the child I have to have the best life possible for that child. It’s not an easy thing to achieve, but I’ll try.
(Source: yeeshkulmk2)
U.K. Prog, Volume 20: 1987-2010 What Happened Next 3
The third volume exploring how the ideas and sounds introduced by progressive rock bands passed through the punk rock filter and became part of the vocabulary of music made in the UK after 1979, from dark techno to rock.
1. Medal: Is Your Soul in Your Head? 6:10 (1999)
2. Talk Talk: Ascension Day 6:00 (1991)
3. Fairport Convention : Spanish Main 4:31 (1998)
4. These New Puritans: We Want War 7:23 (2010)
5. Radio Massacre International: Syd 2:47 (2007)
6. The Orb: Montagne d’Or (Der Gute Berg) 10:42 (1994)
7. Mansun: Television 8:22 (1998)
8. The Pineapple Thief: West Winds 8:54 (2007)
9. Peter Murphy: Just for Love 6:38 (2002)
10. Roger Waters: Four Minutes 4:00 (1987)
11. Pink Floyd: High Hopes 8:32 (1994)
Volume One: Mix. Notes.
Volume Two: Mix. Notes.
Volume Three: Mix. Notes.
Volume Four: Mix. Notes.
Volume Five: Mix. Notes.
Volume Six: Mix. Notes.
Volume Seven: Mix. Notes.
Volume Eight: Mix. Notes.
Volume Nine: Mix. Notes.
Volume Ten: Mix. Notes.
Volume Eleven: Mix. Notes.
Volume Twelve: Mix. Notes.
Volume Thirteen: Mix. Notes.
Volume Fourteen: Mix. Notes.
Volume Fifteen: Mix. Notes.
Volume Sixteen: Mix. Notes.
Volume Seventeen: Mix. Notes.
Volume Eighteen: Mix.
Volume Nineteen: Mix.
Meet Me on the Moon: Space Age Music for Neil Armstrong (1930-2012)
1. Orchester Roland Kovac: Space Station 1
2. Dick Hyman & Mary Mayo: Space Reflex (Blues in 5/4)
3. Os Brazões: Modulo Lunar
4. Russ Garcia: Birth of a Planet
5. The Tornados: Telstar
6. Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman: Mist o’ the Moon
7. Ferrante & Teicher: Man from Mars
8. Joe Meek/Rod Freeman & the Blue Men: Valley of the Saroos
9. Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra: Raumpatrouille (Space Patrol)
10. Pink Floyd: Moonhead
11. Tom Glazer & Dottie Evans: Why Go Up There?
12. Les Baxter: The Other Side of the Moon
13. Alain Goraguer: Les Fusees
14. Daniel J. White: Mer de la Tranquillite
15. The Ventures: Moon Child
16. John Keating: Unknown Planet
17. The Ames Brothers: Destination Moon
18. Perrey-Kingsley: Carousel of the Planets
19. Bernard Herrmann: Prelude/Outerspace/Radar
20. Tom Dissivelt & Kid Baltan: Song of the Second Moon
21. 101 Strings: A Disappointed Love with a Desensitized Robot
22. Louis & Bebe Barron: Forbidden Planet Main Title
23. Akira Ifukube: The Mystery of Planet X
24. Delia Derbyshire: Planetarium
25. Ernie: I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon
Pink Floyd: “Wot’s… Uh, the Deal?” (Obscured By Clouds, 1972)
It’s the curse of the middle child. Someone else came first and had all the attention to themselves, and then you were only the focus until the younger sibling came along and stole your thunder. When people talk about Pink Floyd, Obscured By Clouds usually rates little more than a passing mention, overwhelmed by the albums it sits between, Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon.
Meddle earns its rep as the one that set the mold for the band, the one where they stopped flailing, focused, and made a really killer, back-to-front. Dark Side is of course the one that tens of millions of people all over the world bought, the one that’s still in heavy rotation on the radio today, the one that put them on an entirely different level.
And Obscured By Clouds is… the soundtrack they recorded in two weeks for Barbet Schroeder’s La Valee. It is easily the most conventional rock record the band ever made, a collection of ten songs, four of which are instrumentals, and two of which are almost shockingly tender ballads. There are no concepts, no extended pieces, no bits of studio experimentation. Only three of the songs ever made it into their live set (“Obscured by Clouds,” “When You’re In,” and “Childhood’s End”), and none stayed there for long.
Even in Nick Mason’s own biography of the band, this album barely comes up. He spends a page talking about it, and introduces it as a distraction from the work of developing Dark Side. It’s really quite a good album, though, and rather makes me wonder what might’ve happened if the band had been put on a tight deadline more often.
It also rather casually marks a few landmarks in the development of the band. The title track and “Childhood’s End” feature Mason’s first use of electronic drums, which would rear their heads importantly on “Time” and “Welcome to the Machine” later one. The title track also features their first prominent use of the VCS3 synthesizer (those big, droning tones), which is one of the signature sounds of Dark Side.
The VCS3 also features on “Free Four,” but that song is more important for being the first song in which Roger Waters brought together his disillusionment with the music business and his resentment of his father’s death at Anzio during World War II. “Free Four” is essentially the seed that grew into The Wall, though it approaches the subject matter with considerably more humor and bounce—it was also the band’s first big radio hit in the US.
My favorite song was always the ballad that closed side one, “Wot’s… uh, the Deal?” I suspect that the hideously awkward title, which is actually sung in the song, was hilarious to the band at the time; now it’s just curious. Bu the song itself is lovely. the middle has both a guitar solo and a piano solo, but they’re quick, tight, and memorably melodic, and the lyrics, among the only ones on the album to tie in thematically to the movie, make for one of the band’s only direct love songs.
The movie itself is a product of its time, which was really the last era when any part of the map of the Earth could still be marked “obscured by clouds.” It’s a post-hippie back-to-the-land story in its own way, with an upper crust woman joining a few other Europeans on a one-way journey into the backwoods of Papua New Guinea. The film has documentary-style scenes of the Mapuga people.
The thing that keeps the film from descending into finding-yourself-through-primitivism/they-have-so-much-to-teach-us cliche is the fact that the travelers, idealistically searching for a Shangri-la in this uncharted, inaccessible valley are so obviously doomed. They have not even a fraction of the ability to survive in this place that the natives do, and Schroeder never pretends that they do. The movie essentially declares hippie idealism dead.
The band scored the film by watching rough cuts and timing them with stopwatches, which is not a very precise way to score a film. In the final cut, the songs are cross-faded in and out. A couple of them play diegetically over radios.
The band titled the album Obscured By Clouds after a dispute with the film studio, rather than title it after the film. The film was retroactively retitled La Vallee (Obscured By Clouds) after Pink Floyd became global stars.
“Wot’s… uh, the Deal?” song features the band at their most relaxed and easy-going, not a look we got often. It also provides a glimpse of the band we didn’t get, the one that settled into a comfortable groove making ten-song rock albums with no overarching themes. It’s probably a band that wouldn’t have gotten nearly so famous. But it could have been a good one nonetheless.
![doomandgloomfromthetomb:
PINK FLOYD - Live at the Hollywood Bowl, September 22, 1972
Pink Floyd aficionado Joe over at Every Great Song Ever called this gig “among the best shows they ever played,” in particular singling out the version of “Echoes.” Embarrassingly, I’d never heard it til today! But now we can all listen to it. It is indeed a killer show, with the full Dark Side of the Moon set kicking things off in glorious fashion. This is a little while before Dark Side would be released, so they’re playing an embryonic, not-quite-fully-formed version of the album, which is always cool to hear. Looser, groovier, you know? Then things get really loose as the Floyd moves onto an amazing second set of extended interstellar explorations. This “mastertape” audience recording ain’t perfect, but it’ll do! [Interestingly, there’s also some Super 8 video footage of this show too, giving a grainy glimpse of what the stage setup was like on the 1972 tour.]
Set 1: Dark Side of the Moon - Breathe, On The Run, Time, Breathe Reprise, The Great Gig In The Sky, Money, Us And Them, Any Colour You Like, Brain Damage, Eclipse.
Set 2: One Of These Days, Careful With That Axe, Eugene, Echoes, A Saucerful Of Secrets.
Via Mindbending Music, a treasure trove of Floydian delights.
Yeah, this is the show, good from front to back. I love the mid-1972 Dark Side, which so deftly strode the line between their loosely structured early material and their more song-oriented, arranged hits. I could listen to versions of “Any Colour You Like” for hours.
Edit: Oh, and! This is one of the evilest versions of “One of These Days” ever to make to tape.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4uwgzdITG1qzy30io1_500.jpg)
PINK FLOYD - Live at the Hollywood Bowl, September 22, 1972
Pink Floyd aficionado Joe over at Every Great Song Ever called this gig “among the best shows they ever played,” in particular singling out the version of “Echoes.” Embarrassingly, I’d never heard it til today! But now we can all listen to it. It is indeed a killer show, with the full Dark Side of the Moon set kicking things off in glorious fashion. This is a little while before Dark Side would be released, so they’re playing an embryonic, not-quite-fully-formed version of the album, which is always cool to hear. Looser, groovier, you know? Then things get really loose as the Floyd moves onto an amazing second set of extended interstellar explorations. This “mastertape” audience recording ain’t perfect, but it’ll do! [Interestingly, there’s also some Super 8 video footage of this show too, giving a grainy glimpse of what the stage setup was like on the 1972 tour.]
Set 1: Dark Side of the Moon - Breathe, On The Run, Time, Breathe Reprise, The Great Gig In The Sky, Money, Us And Them, Any Colour You Like, Brain Damage, Eclipse.
Set 2: One Of These Days, Careful With That Axe, Eugene, Echoes, A Saucerful Of Secrets.
Via Mindbending Music, a treasure trove of Floydian delights.
Yeah, this is the show, good from front to back. I love the mid-1972 Dark Side, which so deftly strode the line between their loosely structured early material and their more song-oriented, arranged hits. I could listen to versions of “Any Colour You Like” for hours.
Edit: Oh, and! This is one of the evilest versions of “One of These Days” ever to make to tape.
doomandgloomfromthetomb asked: Best ever version of "Echoes"?
Ooh. Good one.
There are a lot of fine candidates, and “Echoes” is one of the rare songs from their setlists of the early 70s that tended to vary only in small ways, whereas most of the other non-Dark Side material they played around that time could change shape and length radically from night to night.
I’ve always like the split-in-two Pompeii version, actually—the first half in particular is very intense. It’s also split in half, though.
A few full versions that come to mind include the May 19th, 1973 version at Earl’s Court (a generally incredible show), the Nov 16th, 1974 version at Empire Pool, and the September 22nd, 1972 version at the Hollywood Bowl.
This last ranks among the best shows they ever played, and this take on “Echoes” is amazing—the band was on fire when it hit southern California in 1972. The intro is super-spacey, with a prominent slide guitar lead, and Wright’s organ work is really interesting. Gilmour’s fuzzed-out lead after verse two gives me chills. Also, the middle “scream” section is really out-there, with a lot of dissonant organ.
The Earl’s Court version is one of the heaviest they did—the double stops after the final verse hit very hard.
A dark horse candidate might be the version from June 28th, 1975 at Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario. Gilmour does some really odd things on the intro, and they come in at an unusually slow tempo that gives it an even more ethereal effect. This is also one of the late versions that includes a sax solo after the second verse, which never quite equals Gilmour’s usual work on that section, but lends an interesting feel nonetheless. I have a fantastic crowd source of this show—I’ll try to find or put a link up later this week.
If you forced me to pick, I’d probably go with Hollywood Bowl.
