I must plus Pyraxis and Ren for their contributions.
I'm really liking the way this thread is shaping up, thus far with the same tunes turning out to be evocative for multiple people, so we're winding up with a patchwork of interwoven reminiscences, which is actually
better than the radio show, IMO (which focusses on one person per episode, so you get a full life story, which is good, but then you don't get this interweaving).
And I'm liking the way it's sort of bringing out our sincerity
I almost went off on an Enigma tangent here (or should i say intensifying of the Enigma tapestry? ) but there were too many potential tangents beckoning and i eventually seized on this one:
Poor little Py! That reminded me of when I brought Pink Floyd's Echoes into music class, thinking it might interest the teacher in the light of recent lessons about Electronic music and symphonic structure. Actually, I was right, it did interest her; she eagerly seized it off me and immediately made the whole class to the whole 20 minutes from end to end; which was the moment i found out that I was only kid in whole 30-strong class who liked Pink Floyd *wince * . Even though they were already pretty close to attaining "superband" status, that didn't mean that yer average teenage girl liked them , or that they got much airplay on Radio 1
But damn! I still regard that track as the definitive track of my teenage years, and the recurring theme of the soundtrack to my life. Pretty sure I posted it before,in some other thread mind, My discovery of Pink Floyd in the early seventies (just as they were reaching their peak, IMO) was a total revelation to me. Wow! Somebody wrote music that sounded like the inside of my head! nothing had ever got so far inside me before. And, like the modern poetry we were studting in english Lit, it had the effect of making me feel less alone; very intimately (if oddly distantly) connected with other people.
Echoes offered me the perfect synthesis of lyrics and sound to express that strangely close, strangely distant connection:
Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine
And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the where's or why's
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light
Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can?
And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
No one speaks and no one tries
No one flies around the sun
Cloudless every day you fall
Upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky
A year or so later, i fell in love with an older teenage boy from my town, who'd started at Uni already (though he was only 17, just two years older than myself. His school liked to fastrack the brightest ones) who also liked Pink Floyd, and who brought back a fascination with telepathy experiments from his first term away. I'd known him awhile (we had a mutual best friend) , but i didn't even like him until he tried those experiments on me; still didn't really
like him, but that encounter engendered adesperate thirst to
connect with him, and a stubborn determination to teach myself
not to shrink back and throw up all manner of automatic defences. I was shocked by my own innate defensiveness.
So then, i had a very clear image, for a while, of whom i was calling to across the sky. The attraction was mutual, but distance and the old communication issues utterly defeated us. And my fate was eventually sealed by the arrival on the scene of a big breasted, self-assured blonde with immaculate fashion sense , who represented absolutely everything i wasn't.
Story of my life.
To be fair to myself Pretty-but-Vacuous was no more capable of following Scarily-Intense-and-Socially Inept-but-Interesting than the latter was capable of competing with the former. She only lasted a few weeks, before she bored him to tears, but the downfrade from romance to friendship stuck.
Well, anyway, as a self-indulgent addendum, i'm gonna add my other favourite Floyd track, "'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun"., and i'm choosing the performance from the utterly wonderful movie "Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii", which I actually saw at the cinema, along with a French college girl who was staying with my family over the summer, as part of some sort of not-exactly-exchange scheme . It was really unusual for me to go the cinema, because insofar as I had friends who shared my tastes, they were rarely available for one reason or another (mostly connected with them all being older than me, and having Lives of Their Own) and my liitle group of school friends were a mottley crew of miscellaneous weirdos, you know? the oddments left at the bottom of the box, having nothing in common, really, save for all being social outcasts of one description or another. And none of thém were the least bit intersted in seeing that movie. They'd sooner drag me along to a disco, *wince *. I once persuaded one of them to watch ""2001: a space odyssey" with me in exchange for my watching a James Bond movie with her, but there was only so much of that kind of exchange that either party could stand. Well, hey! it pretty much defeats the object of sharing an experience if one party is there under duress, doesn't it?
