Pink Floyd - Let There Be More Light
Pink Floyd - Matilda Mother
Pink Floyd - Paintbox
Syd Barrett had some strange titles for his songs. “Terrapin” is a love song that doesn’t even mention any reptiles, much less terrapins. “Dark Globe” doesn’t mention globes at all, much less a dark one. After more than a decade of being a fan, I still have no idea what a “Gigolo Aunt” is even supposed to be. But the one that’s vexed me the most is “Matilda Mother.” The “mother” part is straightforward enough; it’s a song about a child being read fairy stories, and the song actually mentions the mother is telling them. But who’s Matilda? Is she the mother? What does her name have to do with anything? Or is it just something I can’t explain, like Lucifer Sam?
As it turns out, there is an answer, and it’s a long story, and one Edward Paule in his article “Syd’s Fractured Fairy Tales” tells quite ably, but with some serious problems.
Before I get to the answer, I have to talk about Hilaire Belloc. He was born in France, and emigrated to England at an early age. Eventually, he became an associate of English writer G.K. Chesterton, and along with H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, became the most famous writers of the Edwardian Era. He wrote in a great number of genres, from travel writing to essays on the history of the Catholic Church to poetry. One volume in particular, Cautionary Tales For Children, has remained popular long after his death, and was recently republished with Edward Gorey’s illustrations.
It’s a book I highly recommend, especially for someone who likes Roald Dahl books. One of the many people who enjoyed the book was a young boy named Roger Keith Barrett. He would later call himself Syd.
Early on, Pink Floyd was a blues band, mostly doing covers, but, eventually, their guitarist Syd Barrett decided he wanted to write a few songs himself. Many of them would appear on their first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and Matilda Mother was one of them. However, the version of “Matilda Mother” Syd originally wrote wasn’t the one that made it on the album.
In Paule’s article, “Syd’s Fractured Fairy Tales”, he details a version of “Matilda Mother” whose lyrics are made up almost entirely of lyrics from Cautionary Tales for Children. In order, they make up the first Stanzas of Matilda, Jim, and Henry King’s poems, with a chorus taken from Matilda,
Finding she was left alone
Went tiptoe to the telephone — Ringing!
Summoned the immediate aid
Of London’s Noble Fire Brigade
The only original lyrics were “Oh what a drag./Out with a bang” For the record, this isn’t the only early Pink Floyd song with lifted lyrics; “Chapter 24” comes directly from the I Ching, and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’s” lyrics are basically a mash-up of several poems from A.C. Graham’s Poems of the late T’Ang. Unfortunately, while Paule implies he transcribed the lyrics from some other recording, I cannot, for the life of me, find a recording with the lyrics he specifies. But, before you write this off as an urban myth, I was able to find another version.
On February 21, they recorded “Matilda Mother” with the original lyrics, but, while Syd does lift several passages wholesale from Belloc, it still had more embellishment from Syd Barrett.
There was a boy whose name was Jim
His friends, they were very good to him
They gave him tea, and cakes and jam
And slices of delicious ham
Oh Mother tell me more
Why’d’you have to leave me there
Hanging in my infant air, waiting
You only have to read the lines of
Scribbly black and everything shines
The chief defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of string
At last he swallowed some which tied
Itself in ugly knots inside
Wondering and dreaming
The words have different meanings
Yes they did
Finding she was left alone
Went tiptoe to the telephone, 999
Summoned the immediate aid
Of London’s Noble Fire Brigade
For all the time spent in that room
The doll’s house darkness old perfume
And fairy stories held me high
On clouds of sunlight floating by
Oh Mother tell me more
Tell me more
t was this version the band recorded on February 21. While they recorded this, the song was in a state of limbo; when Pink Floyd were just some amateurs, there was no reason for them to seek permission from the Belloc estate. When they signed the contract with EMI and there was a good chance they’d have to release the song, they realised they would need to get permission. Assuming this was a done deal, they recorded it.
Unfortunately, the Belloc estate denied Pink Floyd permission to record. They never explained exactly why. Maybe it was because the Belloc family didn’t approve of rock and roll. Maybe it was because they didn’t like the fact that the poems were cut off from their original context. Maybe it was just because they asked too much for the rights. Either way, Syd needed to change the lyrics. On June 7, the band returned to “Matilda Mother,” and wrote a new set of lyrics, one that didn’t infringe on anyone’s copyrights.
From: https://anglotopia.net/british-music-british-entertainment/brit-music-barrett-vs-belloc-true-story-behind-matilda-mother/
47 years ago today, Pink Floyd issued the one and only single from their sophomore album, 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets, and failed to secure any chart action with it.
Of course, given the goings-on within the band as a result of Syd Barrett's departure, the fact that “Let There Be More Light” wasn't making much of an impact on the airwaves was the least of Pink Floyd's worries. Plus, for what it's worth, at least the limited commercial response to the song was only a problem for the band in America, as that's the only country where the song was even issued as a single. But as a song, “Let There Be More Light” definitely finds Roger Waters - who wrote the track - mining the same general sonic template that he and Barrett had forged during the making of the band's debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Based on what we've read in Andy Mabbett's invaluable tome The Complete Guide to the Music of Pink Floyd, “Let There Be More Light” - which features vocal contributions from Waters, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour before finally fading to a close - would seem to be about a UFO landing at the Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England. (Between this and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” it seems that Waters was having some seriously sci-fi thoughts in the late '60s.) Beatles fans will also note that there's a reference to “Lucy in the Sky,” and if you're a scholar of English history, then you might also nod knowingly at the namedropping of Hereward the Wake, an 11th-century resistance leader famous for battling back when the Normans invaded England.
As a single, “Let There Be More Light” may not have done much to sell A Saucerful of Secrets, but it serves as a great opener for the album that Nick Mason has called his favorite among Pink Floyd's discography.
“I think there are ideas contained there that we have continued to use all the way through our career,” Mason told Newsweek in 2014. “I think [it] was a quite good way of marking Syd's departure and Dave's arrival. It's rather nice to have it on one record, where you get both things. It's a cross-fade rather than a cut.” From: https://www.rhino.com/article/happy-anniversary-pink-floyd-let-there-be-more-light
By November of 1967, Pink Floyd had definitely reached an erratic phase in their career, and trips to the studio to record became less and less frequent as Syd was less frequently in a condition to cope with recording. However, a B-side for Apples and Oranges was finally cut on 2 November, and the single was released later that month.
Paintbox was Rick Wright's first sole writing credit with the band. As more of Syd's songs were marked 'unacceptable' for release, other members of the band began writing more material to take up the slack (Roger's Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun had been written by this time as well). Certainly an under-rated song musically, Paintbox starts out strong lyrically but meanders to a non-conclusion. The first two verses touch on the shallowness of superficial socializing, when everyone plays the game of trying to impress (including the singer), and no one seems willing to break the rules, or shake the empty feeling inside created by that falseness (a theme further explored in 1975's Welcome to the Machine). The singer's disgust with that social scene expresses itself in the lyric 'What a way to spend that evening... I should have been/Far away.' And yet, when his significant other rings to arrange other plans, he seems reluctant to leave the club. Or has he already left? From: https://floydlyrics.blogspot.com/2010/03/paintbox.html
As it turns out, there is an answer, and it’s a long story, and one Edward Paule in his article “Syd’s Fractured Fairy Tales” tells quite ably, but with some serious problems.
Before I get to the answer, I have to talk about Hilaire Belloc. He was born in France, and emigrated to England at an early age. Eventually, he became an associate of English writer G.K. Chesterton, and along with H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, became the most famous writers of the Edwardian Era. He wrote in a great number of genres, from travel writing to essays on the history of the Catholic Church to poetry. One volume in particular, Cautionary Tales For Children, has remained popular long after his death, and was recently republished with Edward Gorey’s illustrations.
It’s a book I highly recommend, especially for someone who likes Roald Dahl books. One of the many people who enjoyed the book was a young boy named Roger Keith Barrett. He would later call himself Syd.
Early on, Pink Floyd was a blues band, mostly doing covers, but, eventually, their guitarist Syd Barrett decided he wanted to write a few songs himself. Many of them would appear on their first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and Matilda Mother was one of them. However, the version of “Matilda Mother” Syd originally wrote wasn’t the one that made it on the album.
In Paule’s article, “Syd’s Fractured Fairy Tales”, he details a version of “Matilda Mother” whose lyrics are made up almost entirely of lyrics from Cautionary Tales for Children. In order, they make up the first Stanzas of Matilda, Jim, and Henry King’s poems, with a chorus taken from Matilda,
Finding she was left alone
Went tiptoe to the telephone — Ringing!
Summoned the immediate aid
Of London’s Noble Fire Brigade
The only original lyrics were “Oh what a drag./Out with a bang” For the record, this isn’t the only early Pink Floyd song with lifted lyrics; “Chapter 24” comes directly from the I Ching, and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’s” lyrics are basically a mash-up of several poems from A.C. Graham’s Poems of the late T’Ang. Unfortunately, while Paule implies he transcribed the lyrics from some other recording, I cannot, for the life of me, find a recording with the lyrics he specifies. But, before you write this off as an urban myth, I was able to find another version.
On February 21, they recorded “Matilda Mother” with the original lyrics, but, while Syd does lift several passages wholesale from Belloc, it still had more embellishment from Syd Barrett.
There was a boy whose name was Jim
His friends, they were very good to him
They gave him tea, and cakes and jam
And slices of delicious ham
Oh Mother tell me more
Why’d’you have to leave me there
Hanging in my infant air, waiting
You only have to read the lines of
Scribbly black and everything shines
The chief defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of string
At last he swallowed some which tied
Itself in ugly knots inside
Wondering and dreaming
The words have different meanings
Yes they did
Finding she was left alone
Went tiptoe to the telephone, 999
Summoned the immediate aid
Of London’s Noble Fire Brigade
For all the time spent in that room
The doll’s house darkness old perfume
And fairy stories held me high
On clouds of sunlight floating by
Oh Mother tell me more
Tell me more
t was this version the band recorded on February 21. While they recorded this, the song was in a state of limbo; when Pink Floyd were just some amateurs, there was no reason for them to seek permission from the Belloc estate. When they signed the contract with EMI and there was a good chance they’d have to release the song, they realised they would need to get permission. Assuming this was a done deal, they recorded it.
Unfortunately, the Belloc estate denied Pink Floyd permission to record. They never explained exactly why. Maybe it was because the Belloc family didn’t approve of rock and roll. Maybe it was because they didn’t like the fact that the poems were cut off from their original context. Maybe it was just because they asked too much for the rights. Either way, Syd needed to change the lyrics. On June 7, the band returned to “Matilda Mother,” and wrote a new set of lyrics, one that didn’t infringe on anyone’s copyrights.
From: https://anglotopia.net/british-music-british-entertainment/brit-music-barrett-vs-belloc-true-story-behind-matilda-mother/
47 years ago today, Pink Floyd issued the one and only single from their sophomore album, 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets, and failed to secure any chart action with it.
Of course, given the goings-on within the band as a result of Syd Barrett's departure, the fact that “Let There Be More Light” wasn't making much of an impact on the airwaves was the least of Pink Floyd's worries. Plus, for what it's worth, at least the limited commercial response to the song was only a problem for the band in America, as that's the only country where the song was even issued as a single. But as a song, “Let There Be More Light” definitely finds Roger Waters - who wrote the track - mining the same general sonic template that he and Barrett had forged during the making of the band's debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Based on what we've read in Andy Mabbett's invaluable tome The Complete Guide to the Music of Pink Floyd, “Let There Be More Light” - which features vocal contributions from Waters, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour before finally fading to a close - would seem to be about a UFO landing at the Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England. (Between this and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” it seems that Waters was having some seriously sci-fi thoughts in the late '60s.) Beatles fans will also note that there's a reference to “Lucy in the Sky,” and if you're a scholar of English history, then you might also nod knowingly at the namedropping of Hereward the Wake, an 11th-century resistance leader famous for battling back when the Normans invaded England.
As a single, “Let There Be More Light” may not have done much to sell A Saucerful of Secrets, but it serves as a great opener for the album that Nick Mason has called his favorite among Pink Floyd's discography.
“I think there are ideas contained there that we have continued to use all the way through our career,” Mason told Newsweek in 2014. “I think [it] was a quite good way of marking Syd's departure and Dave's arrival. It's rather nice to have it on one record, where you get both things. It's a cross-fade rather than a cut.” From: https://www.rhino.com/article/happy-anniversary-pink-floyd-let-there-be-more-light
By November of 1967, Pink Floyd had definitely reached an erratic phase in their career, and trips to the studio to record became less and less frequent as Syd was less frequently in a condition to cope with recording. However, a B-side for Apples and Oranges was finally cut on 2 November, and the single was released later that month.
Paintbox was Rick Wright's first sole writing credit with the band. As more of Syd's songs were marked 'unacceptable' for release, other members of the band began writing more material to take up the slack (Roger's Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun had been written by this time as well). Certainly an under-rated song musically, Paintbox starts out strong lyrically but meanders to a non-conclusion. The first two verses touch on the shallowness of superficial socializing, when everyone plays the game of trying to impress (including the singer), and no one seems willing to break the rules, or shake the empty feeling inside created by that falseness (a theme further explored in 1975's Welcome to the Machine). The singer's disgust with that social scene expresses itself in the lyric 'What a way to spend that evening... I should have been/Far away.' And yet, when his significant other rings to arrange other plans, he seems reluctant to leave the club. Or has he already left? From: https://floydlyrics.blogspot.com/2010/03/paintbox.html
