Thinking of Birthday songs as this is indeed my Birthday, I can't help but choose The Sugarcubes. So, for those of you who didn't know, this is where Björk came from, and as you can see in this video, a very young Björk at that.
The Sugarcubes were the darling punk band from Iceland. I remember hearing about them from my friend Mark in college, then a couple years later, my sister was just in her nascent stage of a very successful career behind the camera in film, was at NYU for a film program. They used The Sugarcubes for one of the shorts, and it was just perfect. So, with that memory, I decided to dredge the up from the annals of history again.
Amazing that you can have The Sugarcubes and Sigur Ros from such an unexpected place. Music truly is something that never ceases to amaze me.
There was a time in my life that you might say I was
slightly “obsessed” with (The) Pink Floyd. Along with Rush and Led Zeppelin at
the time, there was not much else I listened to, as well as reading interviews
and trying to “figure out” certain lyrics. Forget the Stones and the Beatles,
for me it was all about Pink Floyd who were really taking music to a different
level of experimentation with such albums/soundtracks as Mettle, More, Obscured by the Clouds, Animals, Ummagumma, Piper at the Gates
of Dawn, and so on.
Pink Floyd did not really break onto the “public” scene
until the LPs Wish you Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon, which led then to
The Wall, which ultimately was their demise for some time due to the internal
rift of the band. Though it had been brewing for years between Roger Waters and
everyone else in the band, championed on the other side by David Gilmour, who
had replaced Syd Barrett after his complete mental and physical breakdown. For
one, as a result of coming in later into the band, for Waters, Gilmour remained
the “new guy,” something he apparently never let him live down.
When I was first really into Floyd (around 8th
grade, easy to remember as our Vice Principal was named Floyd J. and he was
wont to wear a pink blazer at times…too easy mark), I thought it was all about
Waters and that the others were merely musicians who supported his genius.
However, over the years, that began to change, slowly at first, then ultimately
quite a turnaround.
The more interviews I read, then later saw during
documentaries and whatnot, the more irritating Waters became and the better
Gilmour came off as the “silent partner,” without whom Waters would not be such
the genius. This is further apparent when you check out their respective solo
careers when Pink Floyd first split. Aside from some brilliant work on The
Final Cut, Waters has not really produced much of anything worth mentioning.
However, Gilmour’s solo album is great and then when he re-formed the band
without Waters, inviting back Nick Mason on drums and Rick Wright on keyboards
(whom Waters had “fired” without the consent of the rest of the band), they
produced some very good music. Meanwhile, Waters continued whining about how he
was “Pink Floyd,” ironically bringing the warning of “Have a Cigar”
to life about mistaking the fact that there is no “Pink” (not, of course,
referring to the current Pink).
What for me, though, was the final cut was seeing Gilmour at
the helm for the “Learning to Fly” tour in 1987-88. My friend Nevin and I were
sitting in our dorm room and we heard the announcer on the radio (when people
still listened just to the radio…) describing the scene about the Pink Floyd
show downtown. He was literally at a loss of words to describe the tension and
the stage set-up, and this was an hour before the show! So, Nevin and I looked
at each other and basically not even having to say it, jumped up and ran to my
car, not caring that we had no tickets and less than an hour to get through
concert traffic in downtown Dallas. We were going to see Pink Floyd. (This
scene was repeated some years later in Freiburg, Germany driving down to Bern,
Switzerland within two hours to see them again.)
So, we are driving down and the traffic looks impossible,
but we were so close, not turning back now. And, the scalpers then began to
become desperate as the show was about to begin. One came up to us offering 4th
Row, Floor seats at an insanely low price. Was he swindling us? Not sure,
didn’t care. We bought them, found a parking place five minutes before the show
was to start, ran to the door, handing the Security our tickets, waiting to see
if we would get in, or get busted for counterfeit tickets. He looked at them,
and moved aside, saying “Enjoy the show…” We were in.
Those next 3 hours (yes, it was a 3-hour concert!) were
mind-blowing and without a doubt to this day perhaps the most amazing spectacle
I had ever seen. What also happened was that Gilmour won me over for good. It
is difficult to describe, in fact, I won’t even try, a Pink Floyd concert, as
the radio announcer also found out. It is the greatest assault on the senses
that can be comparable to walking down a street in downtown Madurai.
And yet, there were Gilmour, Mason, and Wright with a very
large supporting band, having the time of their lives. Gilmour was wearing a
white t-shirt and jeans and was the most relaxed person in the arena, and he
never stopped smiling, knowing that Pink Floyd was back as this was one of the
first concerts in over a decade for them. When the spotlight went to Wright for
the first time, the crowd went nuts. Nobody missed Waters, who throughout the
entirety of the tour gave interview after interview saying that was not Pink
Floyd. Well, he was not Pink...
Recently, a friend of mine said he saw a documentary on the
making of Dark Side of the Moon, which I am pretty sure I saw the same one, and
he commented on how annoying Waters is in comparison to Gilmour and the others.
He does speak of them as if they really were quite inferior to him.
Now, the backstory. All of Pink Floyd members went to
Cambridge University, which is where I am currently writing this post in a
coffee shop called “Indigo.” As you may well know, Cambridge is one of the
finest Universities in the world, so the fact that all of them went here, and
knew each other at the time, makes it pretty hard to swallow Waters’ bitter
pill that he had a leg up on the others. They were just more modest as it has
come to pass.
The follow-up LP to A
Momentary Lapse of Reason (the Learning to Fly tour impetus) is The Division Bell. Here, the gloves come
off, and the three other Cambridge fellows give Waters the knock-out punch,
even using a boxing metaphor in one song, and Rick Wright is given the
spotlight again to basically tell Waters to go f**k himself. This was after
nearly two decades of silence and it is quite hard to feeling sorry for Waters
for all of the acid he had spewed over the years. The final song, “High Hopes,”
co-written by Gilmour and his wife Polly Samson, goes back to the hallowed
halls of Cambridge, with haunting lyrics and music, and suggests that perhaps
here along the Backs and along the River Cam, this is where it all went wrong.
Though this was not in the first concert I saw, I did see
this song live years later, and it literally gave me a chill up my spine, and
solidified Gilmour as the final voice of Pink Floyd. He moved on. Waters did not. The fight was over.
