The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Pink Floyd · produced by Pink Floyd · engineered by Alan Parsons · Harvest · about 43 minutes
Mode
Art rock turned from long improvisation to plain songs, joined into one continuous suite with tape, synthesiser and spoken voices
Mythos
A life laid out as one day under the sun: first breath, flight, the clocks, death; then money, war, madness and an eclipse
Phase
Ten tracks without a break; side one runs from first breath to death, side two runs the course again through money, war and madness to the eclipse
Presentation
Album; ten tracks played continuously, about forty-three minutes; on the sleeve a prism splitting white light into a spectrum on black
Register
Slide guitar and organ, a synthesiser sequence, clocks and a till cut into rhythm, a wordless voice over piano, saxophone, a massed chorus, half-heard speaking voices
Scale
One life, any life: no name, no year, no city
Governing Proposition
A band known for long instrumental space rock turns to plain songs on one man’s words and joins them without a break between two heartbeats, so that the ordinary pressures of a life, time, money, the quarrel of us and them and the fear of death, arrive as one life meets them and are found continuous with the madness at their end. The studio is set to serve one argument, and the record rises high and has lasted long, on a meaning more named than uncovered.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins with a heartbeat. Over it, in the opening track’s short span, come clocks, a till, laughter, speaking voices and a scream, the whole record compressed before it has begun, and then a breath, and the first song. It ends with the same heartbeat fading. Between the two, ten tracks run without a gap for about forty-three minutes, and the continuity is the first thing to understand about the record: it is not ten songs but one passage, a life laid out between its first sound and its last, with every pressure arriving before the one before it has finished.
Harvest released the album in March 1973, with Capitol in the United States. It was produced by the band, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, and engineered by Alan Parsons at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in London, in 1972 and January 1973. Waters wrote all the words. Clare Torry sings the wordless voice of The Great Gig in the Sky, and Dick Parry plays saxophone on Money and on Us and Them. The sleeve, by Hipgnosis, shows a prism splitting white light into a spectrum on black: one beam entering, many leaving, which is a fair diagram of a record that takes one life and breaks it into its pressures.
The order is fixed and it carries the argument. Side one runs Speak to Me, Breathe, On the Run, Time, which closes on a return of Breathe, and The Great Gig in the Sky. Side two runs Money, Us and Them, Any Colour You Like, Brain Damage and Eclipse. The first side goes from first breath to death; the second runs the course again, through money, war and madness, to the eclipse. Inside that frame, sound is placed with unusual care: a speaking voice set low enough to be half heard, a footstep moving across the stereo field, a till that becomes a rhythm.
Movement II
Breathe opens the life warmly, floating on slide guitar and organ. On the Run follows with no words at all: a synthesiser sequence racing under footsteps, breath and engines, the dread of motion with no voice to soften it, until it ends in a crash. Then clocks, many of them, ringing at once, and Nick Mason’s roto-toms counting out an introduction that is itself a clock. Time is where the record states what it knows. The years have gone while one waited for life to begin (“Ticking away the moments”), and a man woken by the clocks finds them spent.
At the end of Time the melody of Breathe returns, the first song brought back at the moment the speaker finds his life half spent. It is the record’s best use of its continuity. A return that would be a reprise on a set of separate songs is, here, the shock of recognition, the same young man seen again too late. David Gilmour’s guitar solo breaks out of the song’s alarms at its centre, the first full rise of the record, and the height and the discovery come together.
What Time discloses is true and it is old. Its “quiet desperation” comes from Thoreau, and the observation that a life can be spent in waiting for it was not new in 1973. The record names the pressure more than it uncovers it; its words come close to aphorism, and they yield on a first hearing most of what they will ever yield. What the record adds is not a new thought but a setting in which the old one is undergone: the clocks, the breath, the returning tune, and a continuity that makes the listener spend the time the song describes.
Movement III
The first side ends in death, and the death has no words. Over Richard Wright’s piano Clare Torry’s voice climbs from keening to a cry and falls back, grief and transport in one breath, and the record reaches the highest point of its first side without a single sung line. A speaking voice says that it is “not frightened of dying”. The song carries the fear the words elsewhere name, and it is the clearest case of the record’s method: what the text states plainly, the sound carries further.
The pattern under the sequence is old. A heartbeat and a first breath, a run, a waking to find the years gone, a death: a life as one day under the sun, and then, on the second side, the same course again in public, through money and war to madness and an eclipse. The sun and the moon govern it. The last line sets everything under the sun “eclipsed by the moon”, and the title names the side of the moon that no one sees.
But the life is no one’s. The man of Breathe and Time has no name, the lunatic of Brain Damage has no face, and nothing in the record happens in a particular year or city. The pattern is reached by abstraction rather than earned through a person, and the figures are positions in an argument. That is the price of the record’s generality, and it is paid in the same coin as its words: a condition stated for anyone, and so held a little away from everyone.
Movement IV
Side two opens on a till. Coins and a cash register are cut into a loop in seven, and Money rides on it, the satire of greed set as blues rock, with a saxophone break and a middle that turns to boogie. It is the record’s most forceful track and its least elevated, and the sympathy elsewhere turns here to caricature. Us and Them answers it slowly, swelling from a hush to a massed chorus, on the quarrel of sides and on a general who orders the charge “from the rear”. The two share a saxophone and a theme, division, and between them the private life of side one meets the public world.
The inheritance is plain. Behind the record stand the band’s own long instrumental pieces, Echoes on Meddle (1971) above all, the rock concept album from Sgt. Pepper to Tommy, and tape collage brought into rock by the Beatles. What the band did with it was turn from long abstract improvisation to plain songs with plain words by one writer, and join them into one piece about a stated subject. Inside that piece every device had a precedent: the synthesiser sequence, the found speech, the session singer, the till in seven. The novelty is the integration, and the move toward the song was a move toward the larger audience.
That is why the making matters as much as it does. Alan Parsons’s engineering keeps a dense record legible, placing each sound where it can be heard and each voice where it stays half heard. Wright’s voicings carry Us and Them; Gilmour keeps one tone for the slide of Breathe and another for the solo of Time. The faults are audible and more than one: a generic saxophone, plain drumming outside Time, lead vocals that serve rather than command, and Any Colour You Like, which follows Us and Them as a jam on its colours, held in place by its production and the one track the record could lose.
Movement V
Brain Damage brings the madness home. The lunatic is first on the grass, outside, and then “in my head”: the friend lost to his own mind becomes the speaker, and the madness is shown continuous with the sanity that came before it. The song runs straight into Eclipse, which gathers every line into an inventory of everything under the sun, all one crescendo, and then the eclipse. The heartbeat returns and fades, and a last speaking voice remarks that “it’s all dark”. The record has run its course twice and ends where it began, in the body.
The inventory is the record’s reach and its limit. Time and death are held fully; money and labour, war and the state, sun, moon and breath, and the question of what follows death are all named, and one life-course joins them. But they are named more than held, the inventory is a list, and the family, history and place are absent. What the record holds is a single unnamed life under general pressures, and it holds that whole. The world beyond it enters as a word in a list, and stays there.
Its later life has been long and wide. The record made the whole album, not the single, the unit a generation bought and played; it set a standard of studio sound; it fixed the art-rock album as a mass form, and punk defined itself partly against what it stood for. It has been sold and broadcast continuously since 1973, and its sleeve is known to people who have not heard it. Some of its surface is of its year, in the synthesiser tones and the saxophone, and its meaning is one its listeners already knew. What it gave them was that meaning undergone, between two heartbeats, in forty-three minutes without a break.
Act III · The Twelve
Ten tracks in about forty-three minutes, joined without a gap, and most pass the subtractive test. Speak to Me looks removable and is not: it compresses the record into its brief opening, and its heartbeat is the one the record ends on, so that without it Eclipse would close on nothing. On the Run is wordless and required, the one place the dread of motion is set with no voice to soften it. The Great Gig in the Sky carries death without a sung word and could sit nowhere else. The test bites at Any Colour You Like, a jam on the colours of Us and Them that the record would survive losing, and lightly at the reprise of Breathe inside Time, which restates more than it turns.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the ordinary pressures of a life, time, money, the quarrel of us against them and the fear of death, drive a person out of his mind, and the madness is continuous with the sanity around it. Time sets the first (“Ticking away the moments”); Brain Damage the last, the lunatic first on the grass and then “in my head”. Sound carries it as fully as words: a speaking voice “not frightened of dying”, a last one remarking that “it’s all dark”. Held well below the gate on two counts. The meaning is general, near aphorism, stated more than discovered. And its parts were old: Time takes its “quiet desperation” from Thoreau, and the satire of money was a commonplace. White Noise, at 9.0, uncovers more of the same fear.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation comes often and in both temperatures. Breathe floats on slide guitar and organ. On the Run is dread without a voice, the sequenced figure racing under footsteps until the crash. Time breaks from its alarms into the guitar solo, the first full rise. The Great Gig in the Sky is the summit: Clare Torry’s wordless voice over Richard Wright’s piano climbs from keening to a cry and falls back, grief and transport in one breath. Us and Them swells from hush to its massed chorus, and Eclipse gathers every line into one crescendo that the heartbeat empties. Money has force, not height; Any Colour You Like drifts; the scream of Speak to Me is a shock, not a summit. Seven of ten tracks rise, the highest as high as the medium reaches.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth is built in the frame and evoked inside it. The load-bearing pattern is a life laid out as one day under the sun: a heartbeat and a first breath, a run, clocks that wake a man to find his years gone, death; then money, war, madness and an eclipse, and the heartbeat fading. The last line sets everything under the sun “eclipsed by the moon”, and the title names the side no one sees. The lunatic is nearly a figure, the friend lost to his own mind, and the general who orders the charge “from the rear” is an old type. What holds the axis below the gate is the particular: the figures are positions, not persons, with no face, place or name, and the archetype is reached by abstraction.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own long-form space rock, Echoes on Meddle (1971) above all, the rock concept album from Sgt. Pepper to Tommy, and tape collage brought into rock by the Beatles. The turn is from long improvisation to plain songs by one writer, joined into one continuous piece about a stated subject, with a synthesiser sequence as a track’s whole engine, a session singer improvising the centre, a till cut into a rhythm in seven, and recorded speech. Each device had precedent, and the move toward the song was toward the larger audience. A turn that consolidated more than it risked. OK Computer, at 8.4, names this band among its precursors and swerved further: a precursor can turn less than the work that answers it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because its knowledge is the continuity. Played as ten separate songs it would be a set of complaints; played without a break from heartbeat to heartbeat it is one life, each pressure arriving before the last has finished. The segues carry meaning: the clocks break into Time, the till begins Money, Brain Damage runs straight into the inventory of Eclipse. The reprise of Breathe returns the first song as the speaker finds his life half spent, and the speaking voices, set low, give the madness witnesses. The sequence is counted here, once: side one runs from first breath to death, side two runs the course again. Held from the top because Money and Us and Them would stand alone.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over fifty-three years, though its particulars, later multichannel mixes, whole-album re-castings by other musicians, performances of the whole by its makers and books on the making, are reported here rather than verified. The yield in the record is formal more than semantic. The speaking voices, half buried, surface on return, and the cross-references of sound, heartbeat, clocks and breath, reward close hearing. The words yield what they state on first hearing and little more, and part of the return is ritual, a known object replayed rather than reopened. A depth of sound over a plain text: level with White Noise at 8.6, under OK Computer at 9.0.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the rock album as one work, the art-rock tradition after Sgt. Pepper. The intrinsic force is real and is the smaller part: the record joined that tradition’s long-form ambition to plain songs and a stated subject, and made loops, synthesiser and found speech serve one argument without losing the listener. Little was invented; the force is the integration. It is held from the top because the reach is larger than the reorganisation: a tenth under OK Computer at 9.0, half a point under Revolver at 9.4. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record made the whole album, not the single, the unit a generation bought and played, set a standard of studio sound, fixed the art-rock album as a mass form, and gave punk something to define itself against.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-three years. The form is whole: the stereo master of 1973 is still the record sold. Presence is as wide as any album’s of its age, in continuous sale and broadcast and a sleeve known to people who have not heard the record; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric has aged better than most of its year’s, but the synthesiser tones of On the Run and Any Colour You Like, the saxophone breaks and the boogie of Money’s middle are of 1973, and the speaking voices are the London of 1972. It stands at the head of the records of its age, a tenth below Revolver at 9.0, seven years older, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing on most tracks. Alan Parsons’s engineering keeps a dense record legible: the clocks of Time, the till of Money cut into a loop in seven, the footsteps and engines of On the Run placed so that the panic moves. Richard Wright’s voicings carry Us and Them and the Great Gig; David Gilmour has one tone for the slide of Breathe and another for the solo of Time; Nick Mason’s roto-toms make Time’s introduction a clock of drums. The faults are more than one: a generic saxophone, a jam held in place by its production, lead vocals that serve more than command, plain drumming elsewhere. A rung below OK Computer and Revolver at 9.2.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the record: the pressures of an ordinary life, carried in one unbroken passage between two heartbeats, and the sanity they wear down. The two most distant elements obey it. On the Run, a synthesiser sequence with footsteps, and the Great Gig in the Sky, a wordless voice over piano, are the same fear, of motion and of death, set once as machine and once as body. Money’s satire and the hymn of Us and Them meet in their saxophone and in the theme of division. The range runs from tape collage and soul to blues rock, a sequencer and a choral finale. The law strains at Money, where sympathy turns to caricature, and at Any Colour You Like, which obeys by sound alone. Two strains, no break.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, and its breaking is the subject; time and mortality are held fully, in Time and the Great Gig. Money and labour are present in Money and the working day of Breathe; war and the state in Us and Them; the natural order as sun, moon and breath; the sacred as the question of death, raised by the speaking voices. One life-course joins them, and Eclipse names them in one inventory. What holds the figure is the join: the orders are named more than held, the inventory is a list, and the family, history and place are absent. No one in the record lives in a particular year or city.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made and The Sublime at 9.0, then The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 8.9. A making that sets the studio to one argument and keeps a dense record legible; elevation on seven of ten tracks, highest in a wordless voice and a closing crescendo; a form whose knowledge is its continuity, one life between two heartbeats; a reach that made the whole album the unit a generation played; and fifty-three years of presence as wide as any album’s of its age.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness, time and death are held fully, and money, war, the natural order and the sacred are named and joined by one life-course, but listed more than held, with the family, history and place absent. Below the rest, The Swerve at 8.0, a turn to plain song that consolidated more than it risked; then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, a meaning named more than uncovered and a myth of one day under the sun built in the frame but reached by abstraction, its figures positions rather than persons.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 and The Swerve at 8.0 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · the stereo LP as released by Harvest in March 1973, ten tracks in their original order, played without a break, about forty-three minutes; produced by Pink Floyd and engineered by Alan Parsons at Abbey Road; judged from knowledge of the recording, its words and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand, and running times are approximate. Later mixes and editions, the single of Money and the band’s stage performances are evidence for the record’s return, reach and survival, not the object. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words; the speaking voices are cited as voices. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact dates of release, the suite’s stage history before it was recorded, who supervised the mix, who the speaking voices are and how their words were gathered, the track timings, the chart figures, and the later re-castings, re-recordings and books, are not given or are given as reported.