Pink Floyd: More

Soundtrack To The Film ‘More’

Best song: Up the Khyber

Worst song: A Spanish Piece

Overall grade: 3

This is the oddest record of all among early period Floyd, and when I say that, I mean it’s odd because it’s so normal. The amount of experimental stuff you’d expect from listening to the surrounding albums is drastically reduced. There are a few exceptions, which are generally the high points, but for the most part, when you’re trying to concentrate on a film about hitchhikers, former Nazis and heroin, you don’t want to be distracted by sound collages in the background.

Yeah, that’s why the album’s such an anomaly: it wasn’t actually ever planned by the band themselves. Instead it was commissioned by a Barbet Schroeder, who was a weird French film director, for his new movie ‘More’. Now, I have never seen it, since from what I understand its only real appeal is that it features a bunch of songs by one of the all time greatest rock bands.  But I’ve read an online summary which actually just confuses me more than ever: knowing the gritty subject matter it covers, I would expect some dark and foreboding type music, rather than this album.

Because what you actually get is a whole bunch of folky tunes! Which is unexpected but not unpleasant. Songs like ‘Cirrus Minor’, ‘Crying Song’ and ‘Green Is The Colour’ have very little to them, and while they’re fairly enjoyable, they and most of the instrumentals on this album are a real sidenote in the band’s catalogue; somewhat surplus to requirements. These songs, since they were meant to be backing music, as an album are not very satisfying.

The one ‘song’ I really can’t deal with is ‘A Spanish Piece’, an unlistenable collection of every Spanish music cliché and a whole bunch of inaccurate stereotypes. Gilmour should be ashamed of this one. It’s only just over a minute long, but even so, I find it very difficult not to skip it. I would probably put the album a whole grade higher without it, to be honest.

The only other songs I have minor issues with are ‘The Nile Song’ and ‘Ibiza Bar’. I love Pink Floyd, in the main, because they were very good at playing to their strengths, but these two songs are something of a misstep – the cock-rock style doesn’t suit them at all. Luckily they’re balanced out by one really fantastic tune, an instrumental called ‘Up the Khyber’ that mostly just features Rick Wright and Nick Mason. It’s experimental and jammy and was originally played live as part of an unreleased ‘The Man and the Journey’ suite, and the interplay between these two musicians that we rarely see is fascinating.

If you’re a big Pink Floyd fan, then get this because it’s decent, but get it last because it pales in comparison to everything else they did. I’d probably be more likely to recommend this album to someone who’s a big fan of folk rock. That’s a style of music that nobody ever really thinks of when they think of the Floyd, but it can be seen in a lot of Roger Waters’ songwriting, particularly in this 1969-72 period, and these songs are simultaneously among the band’s prettiest and most overlooked. Although I guess that if you wrote The Wall almost singlehandedly, it’s easy to have a lot of your simpler stuff overlooked.