Pink Floyd-A Saucerful of Secrets (1968)
Artist: Pink Floyd
Title: A Saucerful of Secrets
Label: EMI United Kingdom
Format: CD
Cat #: 7243 8 27951 2 0
Year of Release: 1968
Country and Year of Edition Issue: Europe 1994
Listed Condition: VG+/VG+
Sell Date: 5/3/25
Sell Price: $8.40
Discogs Last Sold: 4/26/25 NM/NM $9.33
Low: $3.99
Median: $7.99
Average: $7.94
High: $13.64
Current low price: $3.00
Current Number on Sale at Discogs: 6
Have/Want: 415/311
Where Sold: Miami, FL
Time it took to sell: 1 year
Where and When Bought: Facebook CD lot
Gwiz-gau Letter Grade: A+
Sad To See It Go: No
It took a bit of futzing with the hard stereo 1994 remaster of A Saucerful of Secrets to get my stereo's balance right. Seems I had just written about Syd Barrett's Floyd exodus recently since it was contained in its entirety on my copy of A Nice Pair which sold a few weeks back. Looking back at the write up, I wrote absolutely nothing about any of this album's content since the write-up was in the context of a cash in re-package. This is despite the fact that until the CD era, you could not easily find this album on it's own unless you had that double album. This means in the US you inevitably heard Piper first without taking Saucerful as it's own individual work throughout the 70's and most of the 80's until the first CD issue happened in 1987. The rest of the world, even Canada in 1980, had the original album reissued, so there were import copies floating around.
Somebody bought this import 1992 CD remaster reissued in 1994 that I got last year in a lot, so here we go again with this classic. It is odd that I would be so redundant considering how little I've written about my second favorite bands overall discography, but there you go. I sold/traded off the vinyl in the 80's when I got the CD's and sold off the CD's when I got the box set. The box set sold before I started the blog, so there isn't much left of my complete many times over of my Pink Floyd collection save for a title here and there picked up in a lot the last few years. Floyd has kept it's value across the board, so you tend to not come across it as much on the low end unless the vinyl is beat to hell. CD remasters are the exception as people liquidate their collections in the streaming era.
As for the music, this is a psychedelic rock masterpiece. 7 tracks capped off by Syd Barrett's "Jugband Blues." This was Syd's true conceptual swan song for Pink Floyd complete with a Salvation Army Band booked at Syd's recommendation.
Compared to Piper, he contributes very little else to the album. He did overdub guitar on Rick Wright's "Remember A Day" during October 1967 sessions. David Gilmour came on board at the end of '67. In January 1968 an increasing vacant Syd was not at those sessions and was soon out of the band. Although "Let There Be More Light" was recorded at those sessions, there are many theories that Syd contributed to Gilmour's band debut. The title track nears 12 minutes. "Corporal Clegg" has Roger Waters writing and Nick Mason's (!) vocals. The other Rick Wright sung track, "See-Saw" was listed on the recording sessions as "The Most Boring Song I've Ever Heard Bar 2." He goes up. She goes down. Makes you wonder what the other 2 were.
The remaster is unencumbered by surface noise and by 1994 the harsh digital remastering was sounding cleaner but I decided I needed to take the opportunity for a headphone listen direct from the CD player while I still had the physical CD as opposed to a 320 bit stream on a laptop from an album I can play in my head. There is some hard panning going on here.
"...and what exactly is a joke?"
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