Release date:
June 29th, 1968
Recorded at: EMI Studios, Abbey Road, London
The success of Pink Floyd's two first singles and Piper proved to
be too much for Syd. The other members of the group decided to
bring an additional guitarist to cover for Syd. With the addition
of Gilmour and Syd's declining state, it was shortly decided that
the band could carry on without him, and so one night they simply
didn't pick him up on the way to a show. Incorrectly sensing the
end, managers Peter Jenner and Andrew King jumper ship. Pink
Floyd went to be fantastically successful.
Peter Jenner: "It was really stressful waiting for Syd to come up with the songs for the second album. Everybody was looking at him, and he couldn't do it. Jugband Blues is a really sad song, the portrait of a nervous breakdown. The last Floyd song Syd wrote, Vegetable Man, was done for those sessions, though it never came out. He wrote it round at my house; it's just a description of what he's wearing. It's very disturbing. Roger took it off the album because it was too dark, and it is. It's like psychological flashing."
Rick Wright: "I did the title track and I remember Norman saying, You just can't do this, it's too long. You have to write three-minute songs. We were pretty cocky by now and told him, If you don't wanna produce it, just go away. A good attitude I think. The same reason why we'd never play See Emily Play in concert."
David Gilmour: "I remember Nick and Roger drawing out A Saucerful Of Secrets as an architectural diagram, in dynamic forms rather than in any sort of musical form, with peaks and troughs. That's what is was about. It wasn't music for beauty's sake, or for emotion's sake. It never had a story line. Though for years afterwards we used to get letters from people saying what they thought it meant. Scripts for movies sometimes, too."
Syd plays on some tracks on the album, including "Remember a Day" and "Jug Band Blues". He's also on a tiny bit of "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun". Also, some people say that he played on "Corporal Clegg" and "See Saw".
In many ways, "A Saucerful Of
Secrets" is the Floyd's strangest album. Something of a
transitional work, it features recordings made during the
"Piper" sessions the previous year alongside tracks
from May 1968, after Syd Barrett had left the group. It is, in
the words of the late PF biographer Nick Schaffner, "a
hodgepodge of possible Floyds".
Tracks:
Total Playing Time: 37'54
Musicians Featured: