Pink Floyd and the collections: 45 years of surprises and confirmations

Pink Floyd’s relationship with collections has never been the best. Taking a look at their discography, from 1971 to today they have released “only” five official collections, including the just announced “8-Tracks”.
If we exclude the official collection “Relics” of 1971, which looked at the songs from the band’s 1967-1969 period – to be clear, that of the first 45s and only one unreleased song – we had to wait until 1981 to be able to put a collection of songs relating to the Seventies on the turntable. His name was “A Collection of Great Dance Songs”an obviously ironic title as Pink Floyd’s music was unlikely as a background for dancing. “Fucking danceable”, the curator of the cover of that album would have written in one of his books, Storm Thorgerson of Hiognosis, who had included in the collection a photo of two dancers tied to the ground with ropes, demonstrating that that music was truly unsuitable for dance floors.

From 1981 we then had to wait until 2001 to obtain a new official collection from the band. It was called “Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd” and featured 26 songs, spread across two CDs (there is also a tasty quadruple vinyl edition, which would fit right in your library). “Echoes” is the first Pink Floyd collection born after the split in 1986. It is said that, to choose the songs, each of the four members of the band was asked to draw up a list of favourites. As can easily be imagined, it had not been possible to get them to agree and some had turned up their noses at the natural propensity of Roger Waters to boycott the material recorded by the band after his departure. If you read the list of songs chosen for “Echoes”, you will be amazed by the presence of five songs from the period with Syd Barretttestifying that the love and esteem towards him had remained unchanged over time.

In 2011 there was then a major operation to recover and valorise Pink Floyd’s catalogue, almost a need born immediately after the death of Pink Floyd. Richard Wright in 2008. The intention was to bring order to the large catalog to offer a series of thematic releases, a desire that was initially satisfied with the box sets “Immersion” of three of their most important albums: “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, “Wish You Were Here” and “The Wall”. It should be underlined that from this operation two gigantic caskets were also built: “1965-1972: The Early Years” published in 2016 and “The Later Years 1987-2019” of 2019.

Returning to 2011, the “Immersion” operation had also given birth to what is remembered as their third official collection, “A Foot in the Door: The Best of Pink Floyd”. Distributed on a single CD (and from 2018 also on double vinyl, make room in your library), it collected sixteen tracks from their discography between 1967 and 1994. Between “Echoes” and “A Foot in the Door” there are some songs that are repeated; ultimately the 2011 collection contains most of the songs from the 2001 one.

It should not be surprising if today Pink Floyd have put into production a new collection, “8-Tracks”reducing the songs chosen from their esteemed discography to just eight titles. We focused on the Seventies, drawing from the six albums ranging from 1971 to 1979, namely: “Meddle”, “Obscured By Clouds”, “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals” and “The Wall”. The choice to bypass once again is surprising “Atom Heart Mother” from 1970, a record already snubbed in 2001, when no song from the “della mucca” album was chosen for “Echoes”. However, there is a point of contact between “8-Tracks” and “Echoes”: in the press release there is talk of a link between the songs and the inclusion of some effects taken here and there from the multitracks of the songs. It was one of the peculiarities of the 2001 “Echoes” collection, combined with the choice to insert the songs in a purely emotional and non-chronological sequence. Steven Wilson was therefore inspired by “Echoes” and we expect wonders from him and not only in terms of sound quality.

What 8 Tracks contains

Statistics in hand, “8-Tracks” offers six songs already present in other previous collections and two brand new songs. Let’s go in order.
Opens the collection “One Of These Days” (5:54), already available on “Echoes” but in a shorter version (5:15). The second track is from 1972 and is “Wot’s…Uh The Deal” (5:09), taken from the soundtrack of the film “La Vallée” and is a novelty never previously offered in the band’s collections. It had never been performed live by Pink Floyd and was only recovered in 2006 by David Gilmour – author of the song – for his solo concerts.
Unmissable and essential, it arrives “Money” (6:28), present in the three previous collections. It should be remembered that the version of “Money” that ended up on “A Collection of Great Dance Songs” in 1981 featured, due to rights issues, a track re-recorded by David Gilmour without the help of the other three Pink Floyds.
Same fate for “Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2” (3:58) e “Wish You Were Here” (5:30), which also remained happily in the three previous Floydian collections.
For the next two songs on “8-Tracks”, “Time” (6:58) e “Comfortably Numb” (6:22), we note that they were absent only in 1981’s “A Collection”.

Pigs On The Wing

In closing, the only real surprise of “8-Tracks”, a song among the most desired by the most diehard fans: it is “Pigs On The Wing” (3:34), which has its own little story that deserves to be told.

Some of you will certainly remember one of the most fascinating but also least practical formats of the fabulous seventies: cassettes. Stereo 8. They were bulky and equipped with a particular technical feature: the tape was divided into 4 stereo tracks (for a total of 8 channels). Since it was an infinite loop, at the end of the path the player automatically moved on to the next track. To accommodate the duration of the four blocks, long songs often underwent an annoying soft cut to allow the track to change, then continuing into the next block. The album “Animals”as is known, contained three very long songs which, on Stereo 8, underwent precisely this treatment. It therefore happened that “Dogs”, “Pigs” or “Sheep” were cut into two parts, which made listening frustrating.

The 1977 album, in its original version on vinyl, opened and closed with two songs similar in structure but different in lyrics: “Pigs On The Wing (Part 1)” and “Pigs On The Wing (Part 2)”. For the Stereo 8 edition (attention: only for the UK and USA markets), it was decided to combine the two songs into a single piece, linking them together thanks to a guitar solo, offering it at the beginning of the album so as to fill the technical times of the tape. The peculiarity of this version is linked to the choice to use instrumental intervention for this Snowy White and not David Gilmour. Snowy White had been chosen by the band to play in the concerts of the famous 1977 tour (the one that inspired Waters for “The Wall”, but that’s another story) alongside Gilmour. It was a necessity linked to the complexity of the scores of “Animals”, so David felt safer having a second guitarist on stage (a practice that Gilmour continued on all subsequent tours).
Snowy White, by the way, also played bass during those concerts, allowing Roger Waters to perform with his choice of acoustic or electric guitar.
The fact is that, if we exclude the original English and American editions of Stereo 8 and a couple of very rare promotional 45s distributed in France and Brazil, that “united” version of “Pigs On The Wing” is practically impossible to find. Before today, Pink Floyd had only authorized Snowy White to include it in his collection “Goldtop”released on CD in 1995.

Now the wait becomes frantic because – and here I put a flea in the ear of the fans – if in the version published by White on “Goldtop” the song lasted 3:25, on the “8-Tracks” collection it lasts 3:34. Nine seconds difference? What will there ever be? And now who will sleep more peacefully until June 5th?