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Title: A Saucerful Of Secrets

Artist: Pink Floyd

Label: EMI

Year of release: 1968

Their first album a surprise hit, the years 1967 and 1968 brought trouble for the Floyd as Syd Barrett's frequent bad trips came to have an increasingly detrimental effect on his reliability. At first merely supported by Cambridge chum David Gilmore, Barrett had been effectively replaced by the time the second album - 'A Saucerful of Secrets' - was recorded. Yet if the album cover merely hints that Pink Floyd still embraced the acid culture that destroyed their original frontman, the music in it will dispel any lingering doubts. Turn the lights off, light the candles, and prepare yourself for some of the most influential music of the '60s. Under Barrett's direction, Pink Floyd's sound, with its absurdist lyrics and strange riffs, was a paragon of English whimsy-psychedelia. And while his influence lingers (there is one Barrett song on the album), it's the atmospheric, bass-and-drum-driven head trips on 'A Saucerful of Secrets' that today's post-rockers will still get off on. Perhaps one of the reasons for this unabashedly experimental approach to noise-making was Gilmore's relative inexperience. He was still more male model than guitar hero. Of course, that would soon change. If any of the Floyd had their creative peak with 'A Saucerful of Secrets', it was keyboardist Rick Wright, who claims songwriting credit on three of the album's seven tracks. However, since it was Roger Waters' writing that was to became responsible for the familiar 'Pink Floyd Sound', it is his compositions that are the easiest to appreciate. 'Corporal Clegg' combines Barrettesque lyrics and musique concrete, but Waters is incapable of being totally silly and so inserts the first of his many references to war casualties. 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' is the best of Waters' songs on the album. With its insistent rhythm and oblique, often whispered lyrics it still sounds ominous today. 'A Saucerful Of Secrets' is not merely an essential purchase for fans of Pink Floyd, it says "London, 1968" better than any other recording.

James Swift