#31 - Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun from A Saucerful Of Secrets (1968)
Appeared On: 8 ballots (out of 33 . . . 24.2%)
Total Points: 64 points (out of 825 possible points . . . 7.8%)
Top Rankers: @Mt. Man @Joe Schmo @ericttspikes @BassNBrew @Ghoti
Highest Ranking: 11
TV Appearance - 1968,
Ummagumma,
St. Tropez - 1970,
Pompeii,
Brighton - 1972,
London - 1973
Roger - 1985,
Roger - 2000,
Roger - 2006,
Roger - 2007,
Nick With Roger - 2019
Live Performances: PF: 296,
RW: 243,
NM: 156
Covers:
Peter Bryngelsson,
Psychic TV,
Ruins Of Beverast,
Kylesa,
All India Radio,
Salem,
Twink And The Sitar Service,
Smashing Pumpkins <--- Solid Effort Here
The last song on the countdown from the ASOS album. Another song ranked in the Top 50 by all outside rankers. The second song Roger composed for the band. The only PF track to feature 5 members including both Syd and Dave. The guitar parts are shared between them. Syd put his guitar down first, and later Dave overdubbed his own guitar work. The title of the song came from a book by Michael Moorcock entitled Fireclown, also known as The Winds of Limbo. Roger admitted to borrowing the lyrics from a book of Chinese poetry from the Tang Dynasty period (which was later identified as the book Poems of the late T'ang, translated by A.C. Graham). The band intended to issue STCFTHOTS as a single, but that was squashed by their record label (which released Let There Be More Light instead).
The song is hypnotic, seductive; the bass line is intriguing and the melodic role played by Nick's drums is fascinating. The lyrics (other than the chorus) whisper of a quiet dawn, the awakening of understanding, and the wonderment of man at the cycles of nature—and the nature of life. Syd's influence on Roger's song writing is obvious here; the piece is every bit as 'psychedelic' and spacey as anything Syd has written. The song had a long life in live performance. It was finally phased out in 1973. Over this period it continued to evolve, and Nick's drumming in the song reached a peak around the 1971 period. The version on 1969's Ummagumma is also very good. The only thing missing from the live versions are the sound effects, which are used extremely well on the album version, changing the feel of the song and creating more of a science fiction atmosphere.
Roger: "Our lyrics aren't always immediately apparent, so it becomes very easy to let your imagination go." Nick: "People often listen to the music and come up with a visualization of what it is about. And when they visualize it, they think they've discovered the secret behind it. Sometimes they even bother to write us and say, 'I've got it — I've got the answer. It's cornfields, isn't it?'" Roger: "And when they say something like that, we tell them the truth — which is, 'If that's what itmeans to you, then that's what it is."
At his two solo concerts at Wembley Arena in 2002, Roger Waters performed the song with Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. It was the first time they'd performed publicly together in over twenty years, during which time they'd managed to go over a decade without speaking, despite being the best of friends for most of their lives. Nick firmly believes that when Roger asked him to join the band in the 60s that Roger only did so because Nick had a car and Roger didn't. As soon as Nick agreed, Roger asked to use the vehicle for multiple days.
Vulture Ranking (out of 165 songs): 35
UCR Ranking (out of 167 songs): 16
Louder Ranking (out of 50 songs): 28
WMGK Ranking (out of 40 songs): 14
Ranker Ranking (out of 132 songs): 34
Billboard Ranking (out of 50 songs): 10
Vulture Ranking (35 out of 165 songs): One of Roger Waters’s early markers. You can see as early as Secrets, the band’s second album, that he’s begun to step up, rewriting most of the album’s tracks. This ten-note riff gets beaten into submission, as do the nine words of the lyrics. It doesn’t really come across on record, but as you can see from
the performance in the Pompeii film, they could rock out creditably to it, this at a time when the band was helping invent the live psychedelic freak out. Upped ten notches for historical value.
UCR Ranking (16 out of 167 songs): More trivia: this 1968 song features guitars played by both Barrett and Gilmour, making it the only Floyd track to feature all five of the band’s members. It’s ironic, then, that the guitar parts are barely noticeable on a moody track that spotlights Waters’ Eastern-influenced bass and vocal murmur, Mason’s timpani mallet tribal drumming and Wright’s dancing vibraphone and spooky organ. Inspired by (or ripped off from) Chinese poetry, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun finds a dark pocket of the universe and hovers there for as long as it can stay airborne, making it all the more creepy – and alluring.
Louder Ranking (28 out of 50 songs): This woozy Saucerful Of Secrets highlight was the only Floyd track to feature all five members (both Barrett and Gilmour provide free form guitar). Yet it’s arguably the greatest showcase for Mason, the drummer thrumming his skins with timpani mallets in salute to US jazzer Chico Hamilton’s performance on the 1958 concert film Jazz On A Summer’s Day. “I thought that was just the cleverest thing I’d ever seen,” he told Rhythm. “Set The Controls is a great drum piece, lots of room for both dynamics and space, to stretch out.”
WMGK Ranking (14 out of 40 songs): One of the earliest Floyd songs that was entirely written and sung by Roger Waters; it’s also the only song that features all five members: Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason, Syd Barrett, and David Gilmour.
Billboard Ranking (10 out of 50 songs): The passing of the torch from the Barrett era to the Gilmour era of Pink Floyd — and it’s a chillingly beautiful, neon-green-glowing torch, at that. Controls is the only Floyd song with all five canonical Floyd members playing on it, and the balance it strikes between Barrett’s improvisational heat-vision jamming and the ultra-controlled cacophony of the band’s later highlights is downright eerie — unlike most of the band’s extended workouts, Controls never really detonates, instead producing a hypnotizing simmer that remains unmatched by the band before or since.
As we enter the Top 30, coming up in our next 5 entries . . . we say hello to a new album and say goodbye to two others. For everyone besides
@PIK95 , we will have another Wall selection (not one of the good tracks . . . just another one of dumpster fire songs). And Dark Side makes another appearance.
