This is also not a Pink Floyd album.
But for a different reason.
Relics, from 1971, is a compilation of early Floyd singles released to bridge the 13-month gap between Atom Heart Mother and Meddle— more on both of those albums later. I’m including it here for two reasons: as a stand-in for the large amount of early material in general that (following the style of British popular music in the wake of the Beatles) did not find its way onto an LP of its own, and because of its notable cover art.
Apart from two songs each from More and Piper at the Gates of Dawn (which I’ll exclude from discussing highlights), Relics mostly collects the most notable of early Pink Floyd singles and B-sides, along with one previously unreleased track entitled “Biding My Time”, which had been part of a live suite entitled The Man and the Journey that Floyd regularly performed live in 1969 and 1970. The Man and the Journey was itself largely a reworking of several existing songs into a sequence, combined with a few original pieces and live performance art, including the band taking a break to build a table and prepare, serve, and drink a formal tea on stage. For decades it was available only in the form of rare bootlegs, but in the 2010s was finally issued as part of the The Early Years 1965-1972 boxset. I like it a lot and kind of wish it had been released as an album in place of one of the lesser ones from that period, maybe Ummagumma. If you choose to consider this a Pink Floyd album it represents Syd Barrett’s last appearance on one, as most of those early singles are from his era in the band.
Its original issuing featured a conceptual sketch of an organ-like contraption drawn by drummer Nick Mason, who had been an architecture student before he was a rock star. For the 1996 CD reissue, frequent Floyd collaborators Hipgnosis, who did the covers for every official Pink Floyd album from Saucerful onwards except The Wall and The Final Cut, built the damn thing for real and beautifully photographed it. You should be seeing that version as the featured image. The Hipgnosis version later featured as one of the album covers included on that dumb “Back Catalog” poster everyone’s meathead college friend owned with the album covers painted on naked women’s backs.
Some songs to definitely check out from the forgotten era of Pink Floyd include the charming “See Emily Play”, which to my mind is the signature Syd Barrett jam; the frightening “Careful With that Axe, Eugene”, a menacing Roger Waters tour de force in which he exhibits his signature screaming sound effect (also check out the live performances of it on Ummagumma‘s live disc and in the Live at Pompeii film, this was a song that changed a lot from show to show); and “Work”, a percussion piece that was part of most performances of The Man and the Journey but is not included on Relics (though it is in The Early Years)
