Rocks In The Attic #1204: Pink Floyd – ‘Obscured By Clouds (O.S.T.)’ (1972)

There are a bunch of records I want but might take me a while to get around to buying. I really want them, but I know them so well from having them on CD back in the ‘90s that I can’t bring myself to paying reissue prices, or inflated second hand prices. 

The Brian Johnson AC/DC albums after BACK IN BLACK fall into this category. I love most of these up to and including THE RAZOR’S EDGE, but I just can’t bring myself to paying $60 or more for something I know like the back of my hand. 

I’m missing a couple of Bowie’s too, and some earlier R.E.M., and those ridiculously overpriced Nirvana live albums (LIVE AT READING, LIVE AT THE PARAMOUNT). I’ll get around to them one day, but my familiarity with them is the thing that prevents me paying over a certain amount. 

So, I was happy to see a fellow Auckland vinyl head selling a tonne of albums at a sharp price to fund an overseas trip. I picked up Fleetwood Mac’s MR. WONDERFUL, Pink Floyd’s OBSCURED BY CLOUDS and Yoko Ono’s YOKO ONO/PLASTIC ONO BAND all for $30 each – well under their going rate. Good things come to those who wait. 

It’s quite strange that I’ve been waiting so long to pick up OBSCURED BY CLOUDS. It’s my favourite Floyd record after MEDDLE, and captures the band right smack-bang in the middle of their purple patch, written and recorded in a break from the sessions for THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. They had written, rehearsed and party recorded that other monolith of an album, before they got called away to quickly write and record some music for Barbet Schroeder’s film LA VALLEÉ. 

It shouldn’t be as good as it is, given that it’s something they quickly churned out in comparison to the lengthy sessions which produced TDSOTM. But some of the shine of that more well-known album rubbed off on this, and it’s a fucking cracker. Material-wise, it fits more closely with MEDDLE, and works better as a companion piece to that album. 

As for the film, LA VALLEÉ, the Pink Floyd music is unsurprisingly its strongest bow. Schroeder’s film is  the usually late-‘60s / early-‘70s hippy fluff, but the one thing I can’t get out of my mind after just one watch is a horrific scene where we see a Papua New Guinea tribe kill a pig (for reals). An awful sight. 

I’m a fan of Schroeder’s later films SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (1992) and KISS OF DEATH (1995), but I haven’t seen much else by him. I do need to check out MORE (1969), the other film that Floyd provided music for, and EXTREME MEASURES (1998), which I possibly may have seen. As for Schroeder himself, he appears in a cameo in Wes Anderson’s THE DARJEELING LIMITED as the owner of the garage where the trio’s deceased father’s Porsche has been stored. 

Hit: Free Four

Hidden Gem: Obscured By Clouds

Rocks In The Attic #1188: 10cc – ‘Deceptive Bends’ (1977)

On Saturday night, I saw a couple of films as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival at the glorious Hollywood Avondale; the first of which was a documentary by Anton Corbijn called SQUARING THE CIRCLE: THE STORY OF HIPGNOSIS. 

I loved it. Corbijn’s beautiful black and white photography for the interview sequences, great stories from all involved, and most of all the ability to hear things like 10cc’s Art For Art’s Sake, Zeppelin’s The Ocean or Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond out of a cinema sound system. Beautiful.

The film very much feels like Aubrey Powell’s story, as opposed to Storm Thorgerson’s, who died in 2013, and maybe a fair and equitable story by them both couldn’t have been made anyway considering how cantankerous Storm was – “A man who wouldn’t take yes for an answer,” as Nick Mason describes him; one of the film’s best lines. Imagine being in a social circle which contains two absolutely cranky bastards in Roger Waters and Storm Thorgerson. You’d never get a moment of peace.

The markedly detached artwork on DECEPTIVE BENDS is pure Hipgnosis, and as Powell recounts in the film, he wanted just the beautiful original photo of the diver and the lady against the stormy backdrop to be the cover. It was Storm’s over-engineering to add the other elements – the jetty, the unnecessary fellow divers, the fake-looking ocean, and the porthole framing. 

The band’s fifth studio album, this is the first 10cc offering without Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, who decamped to record as a duo, leaving Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman to carry the 10cc name (and not as 5cc as the British press had started referring to them).

Good Morning Judge is a banger, as is lead single The Things We Do For Love, and it’s clear that the band didn’t suffer commercially without Godley and Creme. In fact, DECEPTIVE BENDS peaked at #3 in the UK album charts, matching the band’s previous record for THE ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK and they would hit #3 – again without Godley and Creme – on their next record, BLOODY TOURISTS.

Hit: The Things We Do For Love

Hidden Gem: Honeymoon With B Troop

Rocks In The Attic #1165: Pink Floyd – ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon – Live At Wembley 1974’ (1974)

Well this is bloody lovely. I wish this sort of thing – ‘exclusive’ content from expensive boxsets given their own standalone release – would happen more. It happens with David Bowie and Fleetwood Mac, and now the mighty Floyd are doing it.

This LIVE AT WEMBLEY 1974 LP recently appeared on their 50th anniversary boxset, but who can afford such a lavish thing (in this economy!)? And even if I could, I’m not particularly interested in anything in the box other than the live album. I don’t want another copy of the studio album, I don’t want the hardcover book (though I’m sure it’s very nice) or the songbook, and I’m definitely not interested in 5.1 surround sound or Atmos mixes of the album on Blu-Ray. 

Just give me the shiny ‘new’ thing.

And so here we are. 1974’s Wembley Arena run-through of their landmark 1973 album, THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. I wouldn’t call myself a huge Floyd fan, but I do love them a lot – particularly the Roger Waters era. I can leave the Syd years and the post-Roger years. They have their highlights but it’s this gold in the middle that’s just so rich. 

I hadn’t heard this before I bought it, so I wasn’t sure how faithful it would be to the studio album. I know they play the album in its entirety on 1995’s PULSE, but it must be twenty years at least since I last heard that. I’m happy to report it sticks to those original recordings, but there’s still a loose-ish element of improvisation in some of the pieces. It’s just different enough to be interesting.

I recently watched the DELICATE SOUND OF THUNDER live film on YouTube, and just seeing that version of the band – all dressed in suits like they’re all wanky London stockbrokers by week, and musicians on the weekend – really makes me pine for the Roger Waters era of the band. He may be a bit of a cranky old bastard, but boy, did that version of the band put their head and shoulders above everything else, either before or since. 

Hit: Money

Hidden Gem: Time

Rocks In The Attic #1110: Pink Floyd – ‘Animals – 2018 Remix’ (1977/2022)

After being disappointed with the new remix of Dexys’ TOO-RYE-AYE, this new (well, four-year-old) 2018 remix of ANIMALS is fantastic.

It’s always been the murkiest-sounding of that purple patch run of massive albums between DARK SIDE and THE WALL, and the differences here are easy to hear. Production-wise, it now sounds closer to WISH YOU WERE HERE, as though a thick layer of grime has been removed from the master tapes.

I’ve always have a soft spot for this record after seeing Roger Waters on his last visit to Auckland, where he leaned heavily into this album, opening the second set of the night with PIGS (THREE DIFFERENT ONES) and DOGS – a decent half-hour of music right there – while a massive inflatable pig sailed around the inside of the arena and the band donned pig masks and sipped from champagne flutes – one of the craziest, yet most stunning, things I’ve seen at a rock concert.

Already looking forward to spinning this again and again…

Hit: Dogs

Hidden Gem: Sheep

Rocks In The Attic #829: The Alan Parsons Project – ‘I Robot’ (1977)

The Alan Parsons Project are a gap in my knowledge. I know he had something to do with Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon, and that one of his songs is on the Blades Of Glory trailer. But that’s it. I know they’re somewhat proggish, but I wouldn’t be able to spot a song on the radio.

But then I saw the documentary on Clive Davis, the famous record label head of Columbia and Arista, on Netflix. Aerosmith once sang ‘We all shot the shit at the bar / With Johnny O’Toole and his scar / And then old Clive Davis said / I’m surely gonna make us a star’ and so a made a point of learning more about him. About halfway through the film, there was a montage of music from the artists he released during his tenure at Arista, and I heard a massive groove. Something I’d never heard before.

The groove, as it turns out, was the title song of the Alan Parsons Project’s second studio album I Robot. It’s definitely a master groove, built around heavy synths and featuring some lovely choral singing in the style of Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother suite (a record Parsons also worked on).

Not sure if I’m a fan of the band’s other work though. Most of the other material has nothing of the robotic funk of its title track. The Floyd-esque side-two opener The Voice gets close, and Nucleus  could have been recorded by French electronica duo Air, but the rest is more akin to Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, although slightly more radio-friendly.

I’ll seek out more though, particularly as I remember that song on the Blades Of Glory trailer (Sirius) to be more of that kind of synth-groove.

Hit: I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You

Hidden Gem: I Robot

Rocks In The Attic #757: Carlo Maria Cordio – ‘Absurd (O.S.T.)’ (1981)

Absurd is an Italian horror film from 1981, originally released as Rosso Sangue (the literal translation being Red Blood) and directed by Joe D’Amato. It has also been released under the titles Anthropophagus 2, Zombie 6: Monster Hunter, Horrible and The Grim Reaper 2, so take your pick really and call it whatever you want.

I have to admit, it’s one of the very few soundtracks in my collection I bought before seeing the film. There’s just something about an LP sleeve featuring a madman holding his intestines – AND HIS INTESTINES ARE EMBOSSED ON THE COVER, SPELLING OUT THE NAME OF THE FILM – that I just had to have.

I finally got around to watching the film last week. As with the majority of films on the UK’s video nasty list, it’s unbelievably awful. The acting is sub-standard, the dialogue is laughable, the English-language dub is handled terribly, and the whole thing just left me wanting less.

The film’s only saving grace – aside from Wes Benscoter’s awesome artwork – is the music score by Carlo Maria Cordio. Sounding almost like it could have been recorded by Goblin, or a Meddle / Obscured By Clouds­-era Pink Floyd, it’s a lovely slice of prog-rock. The soundtrack does sound very repetitive though. I’m pretty sure some very similar sounding cues are repeated, in Death Waltz Records’ attempts to ensure that all of the film’s music is captured; I would have been happy with a single disc rather than a double LP.

Hit: Seq 1

Hidden Gem: Seq 8

Rocks In The Attic #749: Alice Cooper – ‘Live At The Whiskey A-Go-Go 1969’ (1969)

This live set, recorded in 1969 at Los Angeles’ famed Whiskey-A-Go-Go, represents one of Alice Cooper’s earliest live recordings. Compared to the classic rock of 1970s Alice Cooper, it sounds terrible, but still makes for an interesting listen.

At this point, the band were very much protégés of Frank Zappa, who co-produced their first album Pretties For You (1969). As a result, the style of music on this live album sits somewhere in the middle of Zappa-esque avant-gard rock and roll and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Side one closer Levity Ball even includes a descending passage, with howling vocals, lifted directly from Interstellar Overdrive.

There isn’t a great deal of promise on this record. I expect every acid-influenced band on the Sunset Strip sounded this bad.

Hit: No Longer Umpire

Hidden Gem: Levity Ball

Rocks In The Attic #696: Pink Floyd – ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ (1967)

Is there a more important year in music than 1967? It seems to exist as a pivot between then and now, the old and new, the past and the future. Thanks to that year’s rebooted technicolour of the Beatles, and similarly colourful debuts by (the) Cream and (the) Pink Floyd, the floodgates were opened and the rules were rewritten.

Pink Floyd must have been some whacky sight to behold around this time. Who would have thought that such a pretentious bunch of architecture and art students playing freak-out music in front of a trippy light show would become one of the world’s biggest stadium rock bands? At this point, it’s still very much Syd Barrett’s band – his off-kilter rhymes and childlike lyrics drive the record along, with very little of the form and function that would characterise the band after Roger Waters took control.

Compared to the comparatively conventional beat music that had peppered the charts over the previous five years, the primitive and experimental feel to Floyd’s early music is almost proto-punk, a pre-echo of that other seminal year in music a decade later.

Hearing a Pink Floyd song on the soundtrack to a film is thankfully a rare thing, but I appreciated the appearance of the brilliant Interstellar Overdrive on the otherwise dull Doctor Strange a couple of years ago. The outlandish asking price for last year’s Record Store Day 12” live version of the song was too much for me, but for this year’s Record Store Day I hunted down this mono reissue of the album, in a lovely redesigned outer sleeve by Aubrey Powell at Hipgnosis.

Far out, man.

Hit: Astronomy Domine

Hidden Gem: Lucifer Sam

Rocks In The Attic #678: Pink Floyd – ‘A Momentary Lapse Of Season’ (1987)

Floyd should have called it a day after Roger Waters left.

In fact, I dislike The Final Cut so much, they should have ended it after The Wall as far as I’m concerned. What was left after his departure was an empty shell of a band, driven by David Gilmour’s amateurish mundane lyrics – assisted by red wine and cocaine – and a vain attempt to recreate the musical feel of Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

Is this actually Pink Floyd, because it really sounds like Tears For Fears popped into the studio to write and record the instrumental Terminal Frost?

That said, Lapse is still the most listenable – and least offensively boring – of the three post-Waters studio albums. The production and sound effects hark back to the glory days of classic Floyd, and the cover art, by returning Floyd alumni Storm Thorgerson, is a great image of an endless row of hospital beds on the English coast.

But the most telling part of the record’s packaging is the band photo found inside the inner gatefold. With keyboardist Richard Wright officially out of the band due to legal reasons, and only credited in the liner notes for his contributions to the recording, David Bailey’s photograph of the 1987 version of Pink Floyd features just the pairing of guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason.

It marks the first time since 1971’s Meddle that a photo of the band has appeared in the artwork for any of their albums. But where the warts-and-all shot of Meddle presents the band as edgy students, Lapse now shows them as smug yuppy businessmen.

Hit: Learning To Fly

Hidden Gem: Signs Of Life

Rocks In The Attic #660: Roger Waters – ‘The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking’ (1984)

“Mum, you know I can’t drink that wine!”

“Why not?”

“Durr…” (rolls eyes, points to own stomach) “ – PREGNANT!”

Two nights ago, I saw Roger Waters in Auckland on his Us + Them world tour. I’ve seen him in concert before, six years ago in the same venue, performing The Wall (more on that overheard mother-daughter exchange later). That 2012 was a fantastic show, and something I’ll never forget, but you probably had to be a fan of The Wall to truly enjoy it. This current tour is almost a fully dedicated Pink Floyd greatest hits set, and so there was lots to like.

Opening, of course, with Breathe, the set included the lion’s share of Dark Side Of The Moon, a couple of songs from Wish You Were Here – its title track plus Welcome To The Machine – and the more well-known songs from The Wall – The Happiest Days Of Our Lives / Another Brick In The Wall parts 2 and 3, played as one continuous piece, and encores of Mother and Comfortably Numb.

What surprised me though was the portion of the set allocated to Animals – the oft-overlooked 1977 Pink Floyd album (overlooked only in relation to its chronological neighbours Wish You Were Here and The Wall). Up to that point, the concert had been your standard, straightforward arena show: one stage, band playing, big screen at the back projecting images alternating between the band playing, and artful, mind-bending imagery.

But as the band kicked into Dogs, a huge structure descended from the roof of the arena. The four chimneys of the Battersea Power Station emerged telescopically next to an in-scale flying pig, while the sides of the power station were projected onto massive screens. The whole piece looked like the front cover of Animals was floating in the middle of Auckland’s Spark Arena (as a sidenote, the former name of the arena – the Vector Arena – was a more fitting name to host Roger, particularly if Clarence Clemons from the E-Street Band was playing saxophone).

Dogs segued into Pigs (Three Different Ones), and Waters used this as his opportunity to shame Donald Trump. The band donned pig masks and sat around a dining table sipping from champagne flutes, while a selection of Trump’s inane (or should that be insane?) tweets were projected onto the walls of the power station. ‘TRUMP IS A PIG’ eventually appeared inscribed on the screens as the song climaxed.

I really appreciate that Waters is still (seemingly) a fan of the Animals record. When it was overlooked as one of the Immersion box sets a few years ago, it seemed to lose some of its cachet. Perhaps it was an absence of decent additional material that could have fleshed out such a set, but it just seemed to be a snub for a record that resonates so much with fans as the last true Floyd album (if you follow the theory that The Wall and The Final Cut are just Roger Waters solo albums in everything but name).

The other highlight of the set for me was the inclusion of One Of These Days, the bass-heavy opening song from 1971’s Meddle. I love this song – it’s in my top 5 Floyd tracks – and so when Waters strummed that first heavily-delayed bass note, I let out a squeal of excitement much to the amusement of my wife.

The rest of the show featured everything you’d expect from a Roger Waters show (or a Pink Floyd show for that matter): laser projections, a school choir for Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, a huge inflatable pig flying around the arena (much more manoeuvrable these days thanks to drone technology), and lyrics to die for. If there’s ever been a finer quartet than ‘And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking / Racing around to come up behind you again / The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older / Shorter of breath and one day closer to death’, I’d really like to know.

My only disappointment was the absence of Shine On You Crazy Diamond – but I presume this was substituted for the Animals suite due to its topicality in terms of world events. Hopefully he’ll return to New Zealand one day and I’ll get to see him play it.

My experience in seeing Roger Waters play live twice now is that he never fails to attract New Zealand’s cream of the bogan crop. When we saw The Wall, I invested in very expensive diamond tickets, just a few rows from the front. We’ll be away from the riff-raff here, I thought. How wrong I was. To my right sat a twenty-something blonde, dressed like a stripper, accompanied by her forty-something mother. They looked so similar – blonde with roots, caked in make-up, stumbling in ridiculously high heels – they could have been sisters. After the older one returned from the bar, forgetting that her daughter was pregnant (she drank the wine regardless), they proceeded to stand-up in their seat, and danced along to the show. Not a huge problem you might say, but the people sat behind them who had shelled out $400 a ticket thought differently. Security was called after they became belligerent and abusive, and they were thrown out.

This time around, we were sat in the cheap seats with a group of drunken bogans sat behind us. Before the show started, one of them kicked a full tray of drinks over, with the resulting liquids spilling under our seats. They apologised, and it wasn’t too much of a problem, so fair enough. The guy sat directly behind me then thought it was acceptable to put his feet up onto the top of my chair, which I just sat back on, his toes digging into my back, until he got the message and stopped.  Then during the show, one of the males spat his drink out, laughing at something one of his companions had said. My wife took the brunt of it to the side of her face, while a lady in front of her stood up and turned around to give him an absolute bollocking. As I was debating whether to notify security – I wasn’t too sure what had happened, or whether it was accidental or a malicious act – one of their party returned from the bar and passed my wife and I a whiskey and coke each to apologise.

I appreciated this greatly – but the exchange did take me by surprise and as a result I missed Roger singing my favourite lines from Wish You Were Here: ‘Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war / For a lead role in a cage?’

Oh well, maybe next time (and I hope there will be a next time)..

I don’t know The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking too well, despite having heard it a number of times. I really need to listen to it more – and probably through headphones so I can pick up on all the little nuances and snippets of dialogue. It’s an album that’s crying out for an accompanying film (like Alan Parker’s 1982 film of The Wall), and while such a project was initially mooted, nothing has emerged in the subsequent 35 years.

Hit: 5:01 am (The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, Part 10)

Hidden Gem: 4:47 am (The Remains of Our Love)