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Records

Meddle: Pink Floyd.

Reviewed by Gordon Burt.

Animals, human ones too, are credited with a "strong sense of territory". My trespass may be as offensive as that of those that trespass against me: if it were mitigation of the crime, I should plead self-knowledge to my general-knowledge, my trespassers have entered no such plea. But then, as we all know, we are entering the age of aquarius (the admission fee is about $5 and collectors will be in Wellington soon) and territorial rights blurred anew by the joyous integration of mankind into a new species - 'homo-global-villageois.'

Helping us along the yellow-brick way come Pink Floyd with Meddle: in my new orientation as past-renaissance man I rush to my P.F. back numbers to compare notes. Yes, I agree, Atom Heart Mother is transcended (it was a necessary phase, I agree further, and made less evil by the abscence of the comprehensive vapidity of Blood Sweat and Tears or Chicago in similar vein), yet the old raw, the gutsy drive of Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets, is given a thin spread indeed.

Given that the current cultural thing is a sort of open slather on what-have-you, Pink Floyd have come to the happy realisation that there is more to what-have-you than artfully spliced brass bands, Or. Who effects, triggers and ring-modulators - there is even rock and roll and maybe some blues. There is also just about every musical type to have been aired in the last twenty years (try Revolution 9 or Stockhausen's Hymnen; Echoes, side II is an effect for whose excessive indulgence the electronicians were reprimanded in the mid-fifties). The real point is that Pink Floyd appear keen to do the artists 'art' thing for them: despite an elegant leavening of rock and rock-derived numbers (intricate ballad, a clever barking blues dog, vintage Pink Floyd dream sequences,) there is a sense that it all occurs at one cultural remove -what Leroi Jones called "the debris of vanished emotional references."

Most of the record seems as fucked up as I'm assured I am, and for the same reasons. Maybe territorial limits (or limitations) need re-defining.