MUSIC: A trip through Pink Floyd's career

Grant Smithies takes a trip through Pink Floyd's career-spanning boxed set.

You may be aware that a new limited edition box set has been released to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's first release. It's called Oh By the Way and contains all 14 of their studio albums, with each CD housed in a teensy cardboard replica of the original vinyl sleeve, complete with fold-out gatefold covers on most releases.

But what you probably don't know is that the cardboard box this set comes in has been soaked in a potent strain of late-60s LSD, several litres of which were found hidden in Jim Morrison's undie drawer after he died then stockpiled by the record company for a cunning marketing stunt such as this. No, really. It's true! If you lick the Pink Floyd box for long enough, you will eventually disappear into your own personal kaleidoscope of colour. The room will spin, throb, fracture and shimmy. You can sit in your favourite armchair listening to A Saucerful of Secrets and feel yourself slowly melt and seep into the upholstery. Ten minutes later you'll be scampering between tufts of downy velvet, scaling the brocade of your favourite cushion.

Not that I recommend you do this. For one thing, it's illegal. For another, all that licking would ruin the box. No, if you're lucky enough to have received this for Christmas or rich enough to buy it for yourself (rrp $425), I recommend you simply sit down with a refreshing cup of tea and listen to the music with a sober and open mind. I guarantee you'll be surprised, entertained, frequently delighted and occassionally appalled.

Listen to the contents of this box in chronological order and you'll find, as I did, that the early albums are touched by the hand of God and the later albums are pants. The early albums show why The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Roxy Music all loved this band in the 60s, while the later albums show why middle managers with $8000 CD players, gold-plated speaker wire, acoustically treated "listening rooms" and zero taste love them today.

The early albums are a trip whether you lick the box or not, while the later albums are just the counselling sessions of rich old men set to music.

In the spirit of investigative journalism, I played all 14 albums back-to-back over the Christmas break. Here's what I found. 1967's Piper at the Gates of Dawn still strikes me as the best psychedelic rock album ever made in the UK, being both darker and stranger than The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's, which was released the same year. It beams in like a transmission from the scarier side of childhood, with former band leader Syd Barrett delivering whimsical nursery rhymes over a slightly menacing mix of spacey acid rock and experimental electronic noises. Barrett descended into psychosis soon thereafter and was sent packing to his mum's house in Cambridge.

Shorn of his extraordinary guitar freak-outs, 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets is considerably more ethereal, with hypnotic instrumentals orbiting around a central throb of bass. Both "Let There Be More Light" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" are extended head-benders of the highest order.

A soundtrack commissioned for a French movie, 1969's More veers between meandering mood pieces, pastoral folk tunes and electronic meltdowns.

Later the same year came the sprawling double album Ummagumma. One disc contains punchy live versions of earlier album tracks; the other a selection of solo vanity tracks written by each member. As you might gather from track titles such as "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict", much of the music is far from sensible.

1970's Atom Heart Mother has a fetching picture of a cow's arse on the cover and a set of drawn-out space-rock improvisations inside, each containing isolated flashes of genius.

Which brings us to 1971's Meddle, the band's best album since the their debut. Rich in surprising sonic textures, moody as a pre-menstrual alligator, with instrumentals that sound like focused compositions rather than lucky jams, it's a highlight of their catalogue.

After another patchy movie soundtrack, Obscured by Clouds, came the commercial mega-hits: 1973's world-conquering Dark Side of the Moon, 1975's superior Wish You Were Here, 1977's darker Animals and 1979's cod-operatic The Wall. Each contains a couple of marvellous tracks, but the studio sound has become horribly slick by this time, and The Wall in particular is sour with the taste of Roger Waters' narcissism and misanthropy.

Worse still was to come. Now a corporation as much as a band, Pink Floyd became mired in bitter power stuggles and, sadly, every subsequent album was bloated rubbish. After an acrimonious court case, Waters was elbowed out in the early 80s, and the rest of the band finally pulled the plug in 1994. The original post-Barrett line-up reunited for the London Live 8 concert in 2005, and I hope they never do it again, because this is a band whose best days are quite clearly behind them. But for a mere $425 you'll find the fruits of those days right here.

PINK FLOYD

Oh By the Way (Columbia)

Often sublime, occasionally ridiculous

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