Favorite Song #3

Flaming by Pink Floyd (from Piper at the Gates of Dawn, 1967)
Back during the mid-1990s, I went on a tear, collecting old albums of various artists whose works I knew and liked from the radio play of their bigger hits. I thought that there may be some hidden treasures in these albums. And there were! Among the artists I did this with was Pink Floyd. When they first hit the big time, they had put out some hit singles (in Britain) like See Emily Play and Arnold Layne. Their singer and main creative force was Syd Barrett, who would suffer a severe mental breakdown (and never fully recover until his recent death) following the release of their first studio album (and their best, in my opinion) Piper at the Gates of Dawn. If you’re accustomed to the later Roger Waters tunes with Dave Gilmour’s rough voice and virtuoso guitar work on Pink Floyd’s 1970s albums, then you may find that Syd Barrett’s version of the band was quite different. There was a very strong psychedelic bent to the songs he was involved with, but also they purveyed a feeling of simple joy and innocent wonder at the world, much the way a happy, wide-eyed giggling little child may see things. And Flaming, the third track on the album, is just such a song. It’s a typical case of Barrett letting his imagination run wild while putting out one vivid, bizarre image after another. To me, Flaming is just a strange, happy, pretty song that celebrates the imagination. And I didn’t hear it for the first time until almost thirty years after it came out!

After Syd Barrett left Pink Floyd, Dave Gilmour replaced him (in a manner of speaking, no one could replace Syd) and bassist Roger Waters gradually assumed more of the band’s creative direction, coming out with progressively more cynical and autobiographical material. Ironically, my second favorite Pink Floyd album, Wish You Were Here (1975), was their tribute to their friend and former bandmate, Syd Barrett himself. Every track from that album is a favorite of mine. Other Pink Floyd songs that I like are Remember a Day, Fearless, Pigs (Three Different Kinds), Goodbye Blue Sky, and Run Like Hell.

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