Well, I like Ummagumma, and I also think that Amused to Death is better than The Final Cut (aside from the conceptual element). Sorry, what was the question again?
Oh, and hearing the live versions of (finally!) the entire AMLOR album live finally convinced me I did, actually, want to award the album the "best" rating. Yes, I love those songs. Deal with it
ZiggyZipgun wrote: ↑Mon Apr 12, 2021 12:49 pm
Yucateco wrote: ↑Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:25 amI must have somehow missed those albums with enjoyable music.
Sorry about your luck. Even on Gilmour's last two tours, less than half of the show was Roger-era material, even though they could've fit several more songs in place of "Sorrow" and "High Hopes", but at the shows I attended, those two songs got the same reaction as "Shine On You Crazy Diamond".
I agree. Sorrow was a... not quite surprise? Since I had seen the setlists. But it was a major highlight, proving that song's endurance. With hindsight, it's interesting to look at DG's choice to resurrect Sorrow and WDYWFM. I assume he was already involved to some degree with The Later Years, and this probably gave way to reassessing those songs, as well as including Money and Run Like Hell, both of which were mainstays of the late-era Floyd set.
ZiggyZipgun wrote: ↑Mon Apr 12, 2021 12:49 pm
Well according to Roger, you don't buy enough of his albums to make it worth his while to perform them. He considered touring
Amused to Death after it was released, but only "if it sold between three to four million worldwide. I'd have to feel sure in my own mind that there was enough interest." Yes, he was in a bad place, and had been let down by fans, and had hemorrhaged money since leaving the band, but he never considered moving forward on a scale more proportionate to
his fanbase - he just stopped making albums for the next quarter of a century. The timeline is interesting, because artists made less and less from album sales through the 1990s, and more and more from ticket sales. Gilmour repeatedly turned down huge amounts of money to continue touring after
Pulse was released, with even Roger trying to get him onboard with a full tour after Live 8, which he promptly shot down.
I'm not entirely sure about the significance of this, though. Roger's first three solo albums came up against 1) the competition of his former band (when PACOHH came out, PF were not officially disbanded; KAOS and ATD were clearly overwhelmed by AMLOR) and 2) the fact that Roger had not built his name as a solo artist yet. Even if I think PF without him clearly had stronger music than Roger without PF, it's fair to point this out. He did compete against himself to a degree. Had he managed to keep 3-man Floyd together and done those solo albums under the Floyd name, they would have sold more (as you can see by the fact that The Final Cut, even if it's a commercial disappointment compared to previous albums, still charted higher than his solo records). David had the same problem with About Face.
I think Roger's big mistake was, after finally gaining a solid following with the In the Flesh tour, not capitalizing on it. Of course, at that time he probably didn't realize PF were essentially done with TDB, but there was a vacuum that opened up, and David filled that with OAI and a sort of half-Floyd tour. For somebody who always wanted to be creative and threw four LPs worth of material at the band in 1978, it IS indeed remarkable he couldn't come up with more than a few orphaned tracks in that long period. Still, doing those DSOTM and Wall tours raised his profile to the point where the reissue of ATD actually charted higher than the original, and ITTLWRW got a lot of attention and praise. But I feel time won't be kind to the album - take away the lyrics, and the music is so indistinct it might not even be there. By comparison, songs like Learning to Fly, On the Turning Away, Sorrow and High Hopes will survive because they have their merits, and even if the lyrics aren't spectacular, they are still better than the majority of pop music. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, David would've not wanted to touch a lyric like
"wake up and smell the phosphorus, who knows, it may be a loss for us" or
"and the piano lid comes down and breaks his fucking fingers" with a ten foot pig. He already didn't want to sing Have a Cigar because the lyrics weren't to his liking. If someone had been able to keep ol' Rog in
"hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" or
"you wore out your welcome with random precision" mode, things would've been different. They grew apart and I'd rather get what they could come up with separately than watch two people who've become incompatible suffering just because they feel obliged to fulfill the fans' wishes.