I'm svcanning extracts from publications I have contributed to over the years, and will post them here, for your interest.
I am posting them immediately after they have been scanned and OCR-ed, without any proof-reading. My OCR is 99 per cent accurate, but some errors are inevitable. Hopefully, I shall have corrected them when the book comes out. So here they are, unedited and un-proofread:
Despite the reputation 'Saucer' gave them as musical revolutionaries, they have never been innovative, as I wrote of them at the time of the 1977 'Animals' tour,'. . . but then they never claimed to be. Their use of electronics adds very little to the musical vocabulary. Their melodies are tonal, their harmonies consonant; their rhythms (with the notable exception of 'Money') four-square and almost flat-footed.
'And yet, somehow, using all these well-tried devices, they nevertheless indicate widening horizons.
'On the other hand, they are not really the greatest live band in the world, well though they play. If it were not for the necessity to go on the road promoting their albums, they could actually confine their work to the studio without any great loss to anyone. They make few obvious attempts to communicate, a failure which the proliferation of visual effects is presumably meant to fill.
'The improved sound, if anything, heightens the sense of being at home listening to the album if you close your eyes for an instant, and while the solos are longer, the greater freedom doesn't necessarily produce anything of greater moment than in the narrower compass of the album.
'And yet, here again, their very ordinariness on stage puts their work back into a human perspective. If they were the proverbial superhuman titans bestriding the auditorium like colossi, they would be unbearable.'matter was Bob Dylan. As Josh Dunson said after Dylan's first album had sold 150,000 copies, and Peter Paul and Mary's recording of 'Blowin' in the Wind' sold a million, 'His success forced other large commercial companies to listen to the audition tapes of topical singers with more interest than they had previously shown. Dylan had forced his songs and his contemporaries into the mass media.' ('Freedom in the Air', International Publishers, N. Y., 1965) After coming into contact with Dylan during their first US
The other thing that distinguished rock was that 'audiences or creators can determine the content of a popular art communicated through the mass media,' as Charlie Gillett wrote in 'The Sound of the City', the most important - probably the only important - book about rock. 'The businessmen who mediate between the audience and the creator can be forced by either to accept a new style. The rise of rock and roll is proof.' And so, though the music business was slow to come to terms with what was happening ... for a long time Bob Dylan, discovered by John Hammond, was dubbed 'Hammond's folly' within the big grey CBS building in New York, until the sales figures came in, that is - eventually they decided that they could make a buck out of this kind of thing as readily as any other. And so the rock poets became incorporated into the market system. They had no beef: it gave them huge audiences, larger than any other poet had ever had before, even Dylan Thomas in his heyday. Interestingly, the only previous comparison would be Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.
You can't blame the artists for grabbing their opportunities with both hands: anyone who thinks people like starving in garrets for their art just hasn't met any artists. And apart from the odd dilettante, the artist wants to reach an audience. Money is not so much the issue here as feedback, the response, in laughter or tears or jeers, which indicates that some kind of contact has been established. The real irony of mass circulation rock is that it provides money in plenty, but feedback becomes less and less possible as fame and fortune increase.
Pink Floyd were victims of this basic contradiction in the mass marketing of art. At the time of the recording of'Saucerful of Secrets', EMI staff producer Norman Smith was going round talking about forcing them to 'knuckle down and get something together' after the self-indulgences of this second album.
As Roger Waters tells it: 'It was the actual title track of 'A Saucerful of Secrets' which gave us our second breath. We had finished the whole album. The company wanted the whole thing to be a follow-up to the
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first. But what we wanted to do was this longer piece. And it was given to us by the company like sweeties after we'd finished; we could do what we liked with the last 12 minutes.
'It was the first thing we'd done without Syd (Barrett) that we thought was any good.'
In fact, it's pretty inconsequential and consists mainly of almost random assemblings of keyboard work by Rick Wright (as he said, 'we go into the studio with absolutely nothing and we sit around saying Look, we're gonna write something, with no preconceived ideas'), processed electronically, with some wordless voices at the end, though it certainly led the way to the mastery of 'Echoes' on 'Meddle', three years later.
Despite the reputation 'Saucer' gave them as musical revolutionaries, they have never been innovative, as I wrote of them at the time of the 1977 'Animals' tour,'. . . but then they never claimed to be. Their use of electronics adds very little to the musical vocabulary. Their melodies are tonal, their harmonies consonant; their rhythms (with the notable exception of 'Money') four-square and almost flat-footed.
'And yet, somehow, using all these well-tried devices, they nevertheless indicate widening horizons.
'On the other hand, they are not really the greatest live band in the world, well though they play. If it were not for the necessity to go on the road promoting their albums, they could actually confine their work to the studio without any great loss to anyone. They make few obvious attempts to communicate, a failure which the proliferation of visual effects is presumably meant to fill.
'The improved sound, if anything, heightens the sense of being at home listening to the album if you close your eyes for an instant, and while the solos are longer, the greater freedom doesn't necessarily produce anything of greater moment than in the narrower compass of the album.
'And yet, here again, their very ordinariness on stage puts their work back into a human perspective. If they were the proverbial superhuman titans bestriding the auditorium like colossi, they would be unbearable.' Of course, that's what many of the audience wanted, which is why a Canadian boy on that very tour found himself being spat on in the face by an enraged Roger Waters.
Though they didn't originate the concept album - that dubious honour belongs, arguably, to the Pretty Things''S. F. Sorrow', which inspired Pete Townshend to write his 'rock opera' (oratorio, strictly speaking), 'Tommy' - during this period they were edging towards
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