Pink Floyd - Bedlam And Breakfast (1974)

Time for another guest post, and this one is from Geof Moody, who has put together a rather interesting Pink Floyd album. 

Following the release and subsequent global success of 'Dark Side Of The Moon' in 1973, Pink Floyd started to think about how they were going to follow it. During 1974, the band sketched out three new compositions, 'Raving And Drooling', 'You Gotta Be Crazy' and 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond', and these were performed during a series of concerts in France and England, culminating in a concert at Trentham Gardens, Stoke-On-Trent in November, which was recorded for the superb 'British Winter Tour 74' bootleg. This was required listening for a Floyd fan at the time, containing as it did not only brand new material which had never been heard before, but in some of the best sound quality that had been heard at that time. When the band eventually went back into the studio to start recording their next album in January 1975, the three new compositions from 1974's tour were at least a starting point, and 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' seemed a reasonable choice as a centrepiece for the new work. Mostly an instrumental 20-minute-plus piece similar to 'Echoes', the opening four-note guitar phrase reminded Waters of the lingering ghost of former band-member Syd Barrett. He wanted to split 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond', and sandwich two new songs between its two halves, but although David Gilmour disagreed, he was outvoted three to one, and so with 'Welcome To The Machine' and 'Have A Cigar' being barely veiled attacks on the music business, their lyrics worked neatly with 'Shine On...' to provide an apt summary of the rise and fall of Barrett. 'Raving And Drooling' and 'You Gotta Be Crazy' had no place in the new concept, however, and so were set aside until they were re-worked for the 'Animals' album two years later. But what if, in another timeline, the band had decided that those two songs were good enough for their next album, and had recorded them in the studio as they had been performed onstage, then the follow-up to 'Dark Side...' would have been a very different record indeed. The recording of their gig at the Empire Pool, Wembley is such good sound quality that Geof has taken those recordings and removed as much audience noise as possible, and replaced it with a few sound effects and overheard conversations, such as was evident on 'Dark Side Of The Moon'. In a homage to 'Shine On..., he's split 'You Gotta Be Crazy' in two to bookend the album, although mostly it was to even out the running time of what would have been the two sides of a vinyl album of 28 minutes each. He's titled it 'Bedlam And Breakfast', as there is a definite theme of madness running through the three songs, even to the point of the inclusion of words like 'raving' and 'crazy' in the song titles. So here is what could have been Pink Floyd's 1974 album if they'd decided to stick with the music that they'd already written, and many thanks to Geof for putting it all together.

Track listing
  
01 You Gotta Be Crazy
02 Raving And Drooling
03 Shine On You Crazy Diamond
04 You Gotta Be Crazy (Reprise)

Additions to the music are:

Tracks 1 & 4 - general chatter and mumbling, experts from The Avengers episode 'The Hour That Never Was'.

Track 2 - extracts from a Youtube video simulation of Paranoid Schizophrenia, vocal sound and scream from 'Live In Pompeii'.

Track 3 - general thunderstorm, running water, seagulls.