Top Five Rare Pink Floyd Gems

This is my Top 5 rare Pink Floyd songs which, in my opinion, have never received the credit they deserve.

First off, yes, I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan. I, too, hated their psychedelic stuff, so don’t worry about that. I’m just going to give you great, well-written songs; inventive, strong and attractive but generally overlooked over the years.

Got to say, there’s probably a lean towards the acoustic sounding stuff, but that’s really where the band’s early strength lay. That and Gilmour’s guitarwork – wow. At their best they could out-compose and out-imagine The Beatles; yet they were always under the shadow of insanity, then their trippy rep, anti-war propaganda and later the Watersless days.

My basis for picking the songs was that they not have appeared in mainstream compilation albums nor have they turned up regularly in live sets.

5. Green is the Colour

The oldest of the selection, this song appeared in 1969 on the soundtrack to the film More. It was the first Floyd album to not have Syd Barrett involved in any way. Apparently in 1970 Roger Waters said the song was about being on Ibiza – I guess that must have been before they covered the island in night clubs.



4. Fearless

Pink Floyd was just churning them out as the 70s rolled around. In 1971 was seminal album Meddle – the first of their post-Syd Barrett albums to prove without doubt that the band didn’t need the troubled genius at the reins.

That’s not to say Barrett’s influence wasn’t still there. Roger Waters wrote the song but used an open G major tuning he’d learned from Syd. Mix into that the Liverpool football club’s fans singing You’ll Never Walk Alone and you have a jewel of a song.

Considered a bit of an underground hit for Floyd, it was nevertheless not released as a single and is seldom heard in their live work. It did also appear on the rare 1983 American compilation album Works.




3. Mother

One of the first songs I really enjoyed on The Wall (1979). Yes, the lyrics are a disturbing portrait of a mother smothering her child. But the song's structure and style are so simple. After a killer solo from Gilmour, you can feel the singer’s anger coming through. It’s an anthem of teen angst that carried right through to adulthood. It’s also a bloody good song.




2. Two Suns in the Sunset

“Like the moment when your brakes lock, and you slide towards the big truck, you stretch the frozen moments with your fear. And you’ll never hear their voices, and you’ll never see their faces, you have no recourse to the law, anymore.”

As his official swansong from the band Roger Waters gave us a wonderful song about being caught in a nuclear blast. It appeared on an album considered the band's first flop. True The Final Cut (1983) is largely inaccessible, and apart from this the Fletcher Memorial Home (for incurable tyrants and kings) is the only decent song on it. Yet I’m still hypnotised by the farewell sax solo. Just beautiful.




1. Wot’s … uh the deal

In 1972 Pink Floyd released super-smash album Dark Side of the Moon. A classic in all respects that fully deserved its 11 years on the Billboard charts. However, it was not the only album the band released that year, the other was a movie soundtrack called Obscured By Clouds. Perhaps Obscured by Dark Side of the Moon would have been a more appropriate title.

This song was a stand-out on the album and in fact was resurrected by Gilmour and Mason in some of their 2006 sets. OK, the production values are still very 60s but you can see the strength of the Gilmour/Waters songwriting team shining through without the distraction of fancy synthesizers, sound effects, or temptations of the psychedelic.