Music Arcades: Pink Floyd: Ummagumma

I think this is probably my favourite Pink Floyd album — specifically the 'live' half of it, as the 'studio' half is pretty awful, by common consent. I first heard it one Saturday night in 1981 or early 1982, when Richard Smith played it to me. We just turned the lights off and listened. We didn't have anything to smoke, but with this on in the dark when you're 16, you kind of get the picture without needing drugs. (That is to say, when you're older, the appeal of drugs is that they help conjure the feeling you had when listening to weird music in the dark and being 16.)

I remember the sound being very hissy back then; it's all been remastered now, and sounds better. But it would be wrong if it sounded too good.

Then I didn't listen to any Pink Floyd for nearly 20 years, with possibly two small exceptions. I've never heard anything they've released since 1980, and have no wish too. But somewhere the realisation, or the hunch, dawned that the stuff before Dark Side might be worth checking out, and I had a splurge of buying their old stuff at the end of 2001 and beginning of 2002. I bought this CD on Winter Solstice, 2001.

Last year I went to see Ummagummaa, the tribute band that promise to play no Floyd material after Meddle, which is just what I wanted. Much better than seeing Pink Floyd themselves: more intimate and better set-list. Guy was saying last week how one of his sons had said that he wanted to see the Rolling Stones, and Guy advised him he'd be much better off seeing a good tribute band. You get a truer sense of what the band was really about in the first place — and of course you save 95% of the price of a Stones ticket. Phil Oakey has said The Human League are now their own tribute band, and that attitude is probably what makes them still worth seeing.

The one bright spot on the studio CD, which is four mini-solo-albums, is Roger Waters' Grantchester Meadows. I like the way they've close-miked the left hand playing the frets, so you can hear each movement of the fingers, which everyone would normally seek to avoid. It's little experiments like that that I find effective — more so than audio collages of cash registers etc.

One thing I've noticed is that, in 1969, David Gilmour looks incredibly beautiful in almost ever photo, whereas Waters looks like his facial features don't really fit on his head. Thirty five years later, Waters, who always had a reputation for being an awkward bastard, gradually began to look more distinguished and characterful, while Gilmour was looking like a bloated stockbroker (though I think he's lost weight again recently). There something odd going on there, as if one is the Dorian Gray and the other is the painting.