Pink Floyd - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: 1969

I've got a lot of Pink Floyd material to post, because I think they're fantastic and a lot of their stuff didn't make it onto their studio albums at the time.

This is the fifth Pink Floyd album I've posted so far. Two are stray tracks collections covering 1967 to 1969. Two others, plus this one, contain BBC performances, also from 1967 to 1969. The way I look at it, these five albums all go together, gathering up all the little bits and pieces of their musical output during that time. After 1969, Pink Floyd no longer played only a few short songs each time they showed up at the BBC. They did return to the BBC a couple more times, but each time, they performed entire concerts. Similarly, they began thinking in terms of cohesive albums and not individual songs. So 1969 was the last time they released a single that wasn't taken from an album.

Thus, this album is kind of an end of an era. The first four songs come from the last "normal" BBC studio performance Pink Floyd did, in May 1969.

The next song, "Merry Christmas Song," was written by Pink Floyd and apparently recorded by the BBC in 1969. However, it didn't actually get played by the BBC until 1975. It's a jokey Christmas number, and it's sung by the drummer Nick Mason.

The song after that is an instrumental called "Moonhead." It came about because the BBC thought it would be clever to have Pink Floyd play their "spacey" music during the broadcast of the first person landing on the moon in July 1969. The song is about seven minutes long. I edited out about 30 seconds of it, because about a minute into the song, a BBC announcer spoke over the music. I wouldn't have minded since he was talking about the moon landing, except what he said was inane or dumb, ending with the comment that when people finally land on the moon, they'll be able to find out if it in fact is made out of green cheese. I hope that was supposed to be a joke! Luckily, the half minute of talking takes place during a lull in the music, so I think I was able to remove it without it being noticeable or affecting the flow of the song.

I must confess that the final song here isn't associated with the BBC at all. I'm just sticking it here because I don't have a better spot in my musical collection to put it. Pink Floyd performs their instrumental "Interstellar Overdrive" later in 1969. What makes this special and unique is that Frank Zappa joins in and does a lot of soloing. In case you want to see it and not just hear it, there's a high quality video of it on YouTube.

As an aside, I find it amusing that when both Zappa and the members of Pink Floyd were asked about this musical collaboration decades later, they all had no recollection of it happening, though they did remember meeting each other. However, the video and audio definitely proves it happened.

01 Grantchester Meadows (Pink Floyd)
02 Cymbaline (Pink Floyd)
03 The Narrow Way, Part 3 (Pink Floyd)
04 Green Is the Colour (Pink Floyd)
05 Careful with that Axe, Eugene (Pink Floyd)
06 Merry Xmas Song (Pink Floyd)
07 Moonhead [Instrumental] [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
08 Interstellar Overdrive [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd with Frank Zappa)

https://www.imagenetz.de/hN9iH

I purposefully made the cover art to match the two earlier Pink Floyd BBC albums I made. For the band photo in the middle, I chose a publicity photo from 1969. It uses a fish-eye lens.. That was the hip thing to do in those days, but I like the effect in this case.