THE EARLY SINGLES

This is exactly what the title says it is. Early Pink Floyd singles from the psychedelic years, starting off with Syd Barrett led songs (the first 5 tracks) and the rest are from other members. But it doesn't include all of their singles from that same period of time. The reason for this is this particular recording features those singles where the A-sides were not found on albums. In fact, the only song on here that is found on an album is "The Scarecrow" but it was the B-side to "See Emily Play". It makes it very nice and convenient to have most of the non-album singles on one disc.

So, these songs are mostly rare. There are some that appear on other collections, but not together like they do here. The sound is dated like one would expect. None of these songs are the symphonic prog that most people recognize as the signature Pink Floyd sound, so don't expect to find that here. What you will find are some very good psychedelic 60s style rock, all with lyrics, except for the experimental "Careful With that Axe, Eugene" which has Roger Waters screaming midway through. It's a nice way to bridge Barrett-era PF with the experimental PF (namely "More" and "Ummagumma" albums). Twenty years ago, I would have told you that I hate this era from PF and would, for the most part, ignore it even over the experimental years. I never really had a problem with those experimental years. Even in the 70's, this early music sounded dated. Now, I am strangely attracted to the music and love it for it's charm and naivety. You can hear where a lot of gothic and modern-psychedelic music got their inspiration. There are some great sounds here and a lot of genre breaking music. It took me a long time to accept this as Pink Floyd, now I find it a very important and integral part of the PF discography.

Anyway, if you have wore out your older PF albums and wish that you could hear more music like this, then I would search out this album. It originally was only available as part of the "Shine On" box set. Now you probably can only find this at used CD stores, however, I had a co-worker a few years ago tell me that her father owned this album on vinyl. I have to wonder about that, but hopefully he didn't give it away before vinyl had its resurgence, because it would be worth a lot now.

So, out of all the early collections, I rank this the highest because it collects all the hard to find, early, non-album singles together on one disc. To me, that ranks it at 4 stars and makes a lot of the other early collections mostly obsolete.