30 Days of Floyd, Day 5 - January 27, 1967

January 27, 1967

UFO Club, London, England

Welcome to the month of Pink Floyd, where I’ll be celebrating the 30-day countdown until the release of the Early Years box set. Technically, it’s 31 days, but I’ll be celebrating the 31^st day differently… maybe. I’m bad at commitment.

The plan is to look at 30 random concerts from Pink Floyd history, even going past the content covered in the Early Years.

I’m on vacation, so I’m cheating today. It’s, as far as I know, the first concert bootlegers have of Floyd, which is from the Granada TV documentary “Scene Special”, recorded January 27, 1967 and broadcasted on March 7, 1967.

Actually, the DVD Pink Floyd – London 1966-1967 has footage from the January 13^th performance, also from UFO, but I’m not sure what the length of those songs are.

Early 1967, those uptight old people were afraid of Pink Floyd. It’s noise, they said. It belonged in the underground, they said. Not even the people who liked Pink Floyd knew what to do. There’s videos of Floyd miming to their songs in front of an audience, who dance like it’s a ballroom dance song.

The January 27^th performance at the UFO was Pink Floyd’s third appearance at UFO in 1967. They four times before, twice in 1966, and eight times afterwards. Nothing is really known past these performances past Matilda Mother and Interstellar Overdrive. Even the order of those two songs are unknown. So I’ll just present it in the order I have it.

Matilda Mother starts already in progress. There’s a lot of everything in this performance: a lot of guitar, a lot of drums, and a lot of energy. Also, a lot of voice overs from the documentary this comes from. The end of the song makes you yearn for more, as Waters starts to get a groove going with his bass, but it fades out. It’s a straight ahead performance with bits of jamming thrown in.

Interstellar Overdrive is the other song, where the voice-over explains what UFO stands for. You know, U-fo. Man, behind the voice over, is some fantastic keyboard and guitar sounds you can’t hear. Distortion galore for that guitar and such a satisfying drum work. Once everything quiets down, you can actually hear Wright a bit, but that needs to be high in the mix, because there’s another song going on that we can’t hear.

It's historically important, but it just leaves you wanting more. You hardly get any Syd vocals, and it's only two songs. There's so much more!

This is a scheduled posting because I am on vacation. Hopefully it works, because I'm keeping the streak alive so far.