Some years ago I read biographies of the Beatles and Pink Floyd one after the other, and having finished the latter I remember thinking “gods, Pink Floyd look like grown adults next to the Fabs”. That said, the bullshit over the liner notes to the 2018 remix of Animals that meant it took four years to finally come out demonstrated that when all’s said and done Gilmour and Waters are still pissy little children at heart. Syd would’ve been more than usually bemused had he lived that long…
Anyway, I gave said remix another listen tonight… don’t know how great the differences are beyond one or two really obvious ones, more a case of the overall sound being kind of bigger and fuller. Works fine for me either way. Like Low, which came out only a week before this, it looks like a strange album to have appeared in 1977 when punk was starting to blossom, and yet, in its way, it was also about as punk as Pink Floyd could’ve got… also the point where they really turned into the Roger Waters Band; with Gilmour only contributing to one song and Wright not writing anything, Roger was running the show. Given how miserable the ensuing tour seems to have been for all involved (with Wright threatening to quit at one point), maybe the show should’ve stopped there? But then, of course, the misery of the experience gave Roger the idea for another album…
After listening to the live album the other day, I had to pull this out for another listen. I really didn’t get this the first time I heard it, though now I place it as my second favourite Dave album after Ziggy; but I was in good company in not getting it at first, cos in 1977 a bunch of critics (and his own record label) didn’t get it either. I don’t entirely blame them (though Charles Shaar Murray’s description of it as “an act of purest hatred and destructiveness” was kind of ludicrous), cos I suppose it was a fairly what-the-fuck album even in 1977, especially coming after Station to Station. Side two in particular must’ve seemed just alien. Somehow the thing was still popular once RCA grudgingly released it…
Revisiting this one tonight in belated honour of Dave’s birthday yesterday. I suppose this is a reasonably representative performance from the Isolar II tour, with the notable exception of “Sound and Vision” making its concert debut at the very end of the tour. George Murray is a pretty solid bassist here, isn’t he? And the intro on “Station to Station” is mad, markedly longer and noisier and more extravagant than the one on Stage.
Love the Fabs. Love Revolver (if not their greatest album, certainly the best thing they’d done by 1966). Still not 100% convinced by the remix, which I gave another spin this afternoon. I don’t think Giles did anything as egregious to this as he did to “She’s Leaving Home” (changing the speed/pitch of the stereo mix to match the mono version) or “Helter Skelter” (toning down Ringo’s blisters in the mix), but still. Despite the much-vaunted use of Peter Jackson’s audio technology to separate sounds out and all that, there’s still only so much you can do with four-track tape, and in the end it kind of reinforces my belief that you’re better off listening to almost anything recorded before 1969 on less than eight-track tape in mono.
