Pink floyd
Relics

THE REVIEW

“Today it rains, but I have the sun in my eyes; memories always exaggerate, and nothing is more false and true at the same time. It's just that the lack requires a counterbalance of vivid colors or the black-and-white light of a forties noir film. Either way, let me laugh or cry as if I were always listening to one of those songs that leave you dry” (From the poems of the apple seed).

“Emily” left you dry, seed. And it was you who spoke of a light gas.

“Emily” is in “Relics.” And it is a Floyd anthology, released in seventy-one.

Yes, “Emily” is there.

But I would start with “Bike.” Which is pure and childlike pop magic. With whistles, hissings, toy pianos, shots, firecrackers, bass drum, playful voice: sweet and disorienting exclamation points (and perhaps even ellipses) of a now hopping march, now careless and carefree.

Then in this crazy assortment of ramshackle and circus-like special effects are mixed the notebooks of a imaginative student, and you see just-sketched figures of mice, gingerbread men, cloaks, bicycles, and clocks that then are songs.

Notebooks we say, but also school diaries, slips in pockets, letters to girlfriends.

Oh yes, letters to girlfriends, which I think is the case with “Bike,” where, between formalism and children's book language, you offer a blooming girl your very own personal world,

But with a very subtle ambiguity, because with every offer, words follow that dampen, and in a way negate, the very offer. So “I'd give you the bike if I hadn't lent it...and I have a red, black, and torn cloak and if you think it could seem nice to you, then I believe it is...I know a little mouse who has no home, only that now he is quite old...and I have a tribe of gingerbread men, if you really want them, they're there on the dish”.

And what does the chorus say? Something like I'll give you things if you really want things, but. aw, do you really want things?..

Apart from subtle ambiguities, everything is however very lighthearted and simultaneously fresh and strange, as only certain pop can be, especially if English (right, Uncle Robyn?...right, Uncle John?...right, Uncle Julian? You had a room full of songs too, right?)

Songs like clocks, which are in rhyme and jingle, yes songs, "Let's go to the other room and make them work," says Uncle Syd..

And then madness for madness, “Bike” has a finale of frenzied sound effects, where you hear sirens, cuckoos, bass drums, bells, rusty chains, animal sounds.

Only the coffee grinders are missing...

However, I would have left the frenzy for just a few seconds, the apple seed wouldn't, he's a fan of the noise machine and in Disney's Pinocchio he gets thrilled when the clocks all go tick-tock together and, in general, he likes all the silly and irritating things,.

But maybe here Uncle Syd copied from the nerdy friends who were recording Sergeant Pepper in the studio next door; you know, right, the crazy orchestra at the end of "A Day in the Life"?

Or should we say that for once the nerds copied?

And now let's talk about "Candy".

"No look you can't talk about Candy"

"And why not?"

"There's no "Candy" in "Relics".

"What????????????????????????????????????????????????"

"There's no..."

“There's no "Apples and Oranges and there's not even Candy?"

"No..."

"There are horrible songs like "Paintbox!, "Cirrus Minor", "Nile Song" "Biding My Time" and there's no "Candy?"

"No, it's not there."

Let's pretend it is.

"Oh girl sitting in the sun go buy a candy and a currant bun, I like to see you run that way". Apart from the fact that I love the rhyme bun/sun, this song reminds me of the tripped out guys of my time, especially, how some of them treated the girls.

And it also reminds me how certain little drugs lead to consuming food, especially sweet junk, oh my how much Nutella my wilder friends ate, I mean those for whom not all the girls were like Our Lady. Bread and Nutella, but also breadsticks with mayonnaise, or with a nasty tuna sauce, never mind currant buns...but what do you expect, Syd was terribly cool.

By the way, who said Syd was a guy for buttered buns and faeries? I don't remember,

But I agree.

Anyway, this song is delightful, even though generally no one talks about it. It’s the B-side of “Arnold Layne,” Floyd's historic first forty-five, which tells of a guy who steals women's underwear from the clothesline at night,

In “Arnold Layne,” Syd's voice sounds like a wasp, and at a minute and thirty-six, Wright's organ veers off the main road for fifteen seconds fifteen of crazy and trembling celestiality,...

But here we talk about “Candy,” even if Bowie doesn’t sing it live.

Yes, let's talk about “Candy.” i.e., young blood that irrigates the nerves with the sweetest sixties freshness, bold, cheeky, carefree...with those kids who still smell of milk and rhythm'n'blues, but who are also inventing the psychedelic canon.

But let's hear the apple seed "a mischievous voice, propelled by a gothic wind, babbles blues indecencies past their prime, until a clattering guitar harnesses the naive fluttering of the organ creating that feverish magical balance known as the Floyd sound, then it all dissolves into the brief chaos of a mad moment"

Oh how I love these little songs with messed up voices that then allow themselves in less than a minute to sum up psychic whirlwinds generally diluted in fabulous lengths like "Interstellar Overdrive"

Here you have the sugar and chaos one after the other...like diving the gaze into the stained glass of a gothic church and watching it explode.

Then, even if it isn't the case with "Candy," maybe ending with that same little voice that puts all the pieces together again almost as if it were a psychedelic super glue.

These are things that bring satisfaction.

Ah, and anyway, Syd wasn't entirely like the Nutella and mayonnaise eaters of my times and at some point he says "you know, I feel fragile" and the skilled machismo comes down from the tower...

Ah, I mentioned "Interstellar Overdrive," at least that one's in "Relics.” But you’re crazy if you hope I'll talk about it. I'll just say that it devours all of "Ummagumma live part" in one bite. Chaos versus structure. And I am for chaos.

"Ummagumma live part" is still a great record, no one denies it. Even though "Astronomy Domine" has no need for structure. "Astronomy Domine" only wants power and madness.

Let's clear up this madness story then. That no one thinks of glorifying its dark and asylum aspect, because when there's that, creativity disappears altogether. Here, it's meant, as has been understood since ancient times, the divine madness.

And nothing is achieved without divine madness, the Greeks said.

And divine madness is also trust in the moment, it's the purity that doesn't fear error. The Floyd were great even without Syd, but they were always too clean, too precise, too restrained. And they never had, not even for a moment, the freshness that comes from accepting the gifts of the sky, the expressive urgency that ignores control.

That freshness they will seek, imitating in certain songs of “Saucerful” (which is still a great record) Syd's style, but the light gas wasn't their thing.

But let's move on to “See Emily Play.” "I was sleeping in a wood, after a concert in the north, when I saw a girl coming through the trees, shouting and dancing, it was Emily"

Were you sleeping in a wood, Syd? Or were you playing at being Lennon who declared that the name Beatles was suggested to him, in a dream, by a man who came out of a blazing cake? Rock, after all, is full of fabulous liars, think, just to name two, of the legends about the apprenticeship of Dylan, or Tim Buckley. But lies are a great thing. And the self-creation of one's legend comes from the blues.

But returning to “See Emily Play,” what is there to say? Amateur celestiality of the organ? Sharp guitar? Tricks and pranks worthy of Bugs Bunny? That light gas we were talking about?

Yes, let's do that lightweight gas we were talking about...

And pop transcendence and assault on heaven and blah, blah, blah...

And Stop.

Ah, "Remember a Day" and "Julia Dream" are really beautiful, even though they aren't Syd's. They have a quasi-watercolor delicacy, an almost folk purity. Characteristics that will return, though too little.

Considering especially from the cow onwards, it will almost always be the most disconcerting banality...

Stop two.

Ah no, returning to the almost folk purity, we must say that too comes from Syd. Think of “Scarecrow” B-side of “Emily”....

“Not even “Scarecrow” is in “Relics.”

“But how come “Paintbox” which is the B-side of “Apples and Oranges” is there and “Scarecrow” isn't?”

“No, it's not there.”

Let's pretend one more time then.

With that head that doesn't think, with those arms that don't move, many have identified the scarecrow with Syd, almost a kind of forewarning of future catatonic days, but even if it's sweet to imagine a psychedelic scarecrow, all silk, velvets, and puffed shirts, what do we really know about it? Someone with that writing ease, for whom songs were born just like that, like breathing,

“What do I put here, a scarecrow, yes, a scarecrow” Maybe these aren't things to make a big deal about.

Then the scarecrow we take me and the seed, we take it as a double I mean, that in youth we had some nice little psychic shirt, I really looked like a scarecrow, he didn’t.

But, beyond these silliness, we gladly take it because we find identification easy, also because we got called a scarecrow many times by various mom/dad/uncle/aunt...”tan vid cum ci amased?”.. and we also got it from many other jerks who didn't speak in dialect though.

But if I think of the scarecrow, I think of barley coffee, the one that pleased “all the children, from the Scots to the little Chinese” and I think of Guardacampo the scarecrow from Carosello, a nice and not at all sinister type, who when he fell asleep had hundreds of birds on him, maybe even the birdie Hop...

But Guardacampo isn't our double, what interests us is “the wooden heart,” what interests us is the catatonia, ours, eventually, not Syd’s.

We are interested that, as the seed says, the scarecrow doesn't have a thought and therefore it must be sweet to be a zero.

But the scarecrow is sadder than me” Syd says...and that's the point...that it's not sweet at all to be a zero...even if it could be...

And a bit like the mice scurry at the feet of the Barrettian scarecrow, an incongruous sound of similar castanets pervades this strange fragile and ethereal song of two minutes two...almost as if ours can't enjoy in peace even the music of the spheres, the unlikely nocturne of barley fields.... for the entire song the castanets don't relent...but in the end, Wright’s organ seems almost to silence them...

seems...

Stop, really...