Pink n'Oil #3

So, we’re down to the Top 3 of my Peak n’Oil series of music to listen to as you contemplate how screwed up things have become. I originally only had about three bands in mind, so we’re now down to those three. 

Just to recap, the bands/artists so far – all of them picked from the shallow pool of my own CD collection - are as follows:

10 – Julian Cope

9 –   Fleetwood Mac

8 –   Led Zeppelin

7 –   Simon and Garfunkel

6 –   Neil Young and Crazy Horse

5 –   The Beautiful South

4 –   Morrissey

So, without further ado …

Peak n’Oil #3 – Pink Floyd

In my last post I mentioned what I thought were the important things we should bear in mind when confronted with our low energy future. One of the most crucial of these is that we have to develop different ways of relating to the universe and relating to one another. The track ‘Echoes’ by Pink Floyd, I think, says this point beautifully.

It’s a long track; almost half an hour all in all. When we listen to it it takes us back to the beginning of time, reminding us of the primeval chaos from which we emerged and to which we will one day return. It is, in a word, heavy. It then takes us on a surreal trip in time back from the point of humankind to those beginnings to hear ‘the echo of a distant time comes willowing across the sand’.

The instrumentals continue, and we pass through a very bleak phase with what sounds like howling alien voices crying out on the face of a scarred, desolate planet. That's us, now.

[Note how things undergo a 'rebirth' after this point. That's the future I talked about in my last post.]

The key lyric for me is something that one of the members of Pink Floyd (I forget which one, probably Dave Gilmour) once revealed that this single lyric underpinned everything the group was ‘about’. That verse is:

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 that, to me, is what our whole predicament is about right now.

The rest of the lyrics go as follows:

Almost 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 lullabyes
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky....

And that's what I'm trying to do with this blog - throw the windows wide and call to you across the skies!

Turn the lights down low and the volume up high, get your pouch of 'shrooms out and let the Floyd take you away …