A Saucerful of Secrets Review

The only Floyd album featuring all five members, and it plays like a handover note. Barrett contributes one song, Jugband Blues, which is a man describing his own absence while a Salvation Army band is instructed to play whatever it likes, and it is by far the most disturbing thing here. Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun is the template for the next five years: one chord, mallets on toms, a whispered vocal and enormous space.

The title piece is twelve minutes of scored noise, a crash, a drift and a slow organ resolution, and it is the first evidence that the band could build long form music without a single riff to hang it on. Against those, Let There Be More Light and Corporal Clegg are weak, and Remember a Day is pleasant filler. The writing has no centre because the writer has gone. Historically it is essential. As a listen it is the thinnest thing in the catalogue before the very late records.