The Floyd would probably prefer it if I didn’t talk about “Apples And Oranges.” In the first edition of the Guinness Book Of Top 40 Charts “Another Brick In The Wall Part II” is described as their first UK single release since “See Emily Play,” and most of their fans accept this to be the case. But there was one further single, towards the end of 1967, as Syd was manoeuvring himself towards the exit door. “Apples And Oranges” has become the great unmentionable item in the otherwise seamless Floyd discography; deemed by most involved parties at the time to be an irredeemable mess, neither the band nor EMI went out of their way to promote it, relatively few copies were pressed, it received virtually no radio play, did not trouble the Top 50 and was quickly deleted in a presumed attempt to save face. Although its B-side “Paintbox” resurfaced on Relics, the A-side didn’t, and since then it has only been made available on a very few occasions, as part of a bonus CD included with an extravagantly priced retrospective boxed set, as one of six tracks on a blink-and-you-missed-it stand alone CD EP, and most recently as part of the bonus third disc of the deluxe 40th anniversary edition of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, which has now (in London at any rate) sold out its limited run.
Rather than an embarrassment to be swept speedily under the Saucerful Of Secrets carpet, it is perhaps a final tribute to Syd and to “Apples And Oranges” that the track now sounds utterly contemporary. To make a completely unoriginal comparison, it sounds like late nineties Blur; a vaudeville swagger undermined and detoured by wayward guitar and unexpected interludes. Today it doesn’t sound at all unusual – Syd’s eager chasing of the girl around town (“Feeling good at the top/Shopping in sharp shoes/Walking in the sunshine town feeling very cool”) actually summing up the dying days of King’s Road psychedelia with great acuity, while his guitar roars and snaps on the sidelines before the band land graciously on the harmonies of the song’s title as chorus, followed by an extended pregnant quaver of uncertain guitar drones before abruptly veering back into the second verse as Syd tries to get closer to her – “I catch her by the eye then I stop and have to think/What a funny thing to do ‘cos I’m feeling very pink.”
This then gives way to a gorgeous, semi-tortured sequence of proto-blissout with Syd’s “I love she, she loves me,” the group’s escalating triple “see you”s; bridged by the most ecstatic of collective swoons, Richard Wright’s electric piano introduces a wedding bells motif which Syd’s guitar picks up immediately, followed by Waters’ sliding bass, some more ruminative guitar chimes, and finally a hallucinatory antiphonal choir and church organ turning the Chelsea girl into a hymn. For the final stretch, Syd utters an emphatic, ecstatic “Thought you might like to KNOW!” before informing us that “I’m her lorry driver man,” still watching her, now perhaps a little more sinisterly (“She’s on the run/down by the riverside/Feeding ducks in the afternoon tide” – immediately answered by a group “quack, quack”) before the final chorus, which itself dissolves into a curious Cockney scat singing segment, some Goon-type nonsense syllables and a final high-pitched feedback signoff. On the Piper bonus disc, the tune appears in both mono and (for the first time) stereo mixes; at the end of the latter Syd assures the rest of the group, somewhat poignancy given his eventual fate, “I’ll explain it all to you sometime…one day.” He never did, but as with that other Hurricane Smith-produced masterpiece of late 1967 psych-pop, “Defecting Grey” by the Pretty Things, he seemed to approach “Apples And Oranges” with a brief strictly to have as much experimental fun as possible, and it deserves permanent rescue from the sub-carpet debris.
Rather than an embarrassment to be swept speedily under the Saucerful Of Secrets carpet, it is perhaps a final tribute to Syd and to “Apples And Oranges” that the track now sounds utterly contemporary. To make a completely unoriginal comparison, it sounds like late nineties Blur; a vaudeville swagger undermined and detoured by wayward guitar and unexpected interludes. Today it doesn’t sound at all unusual – Syd’s eager chasing of the girl around town (“Feeling good at the top/Shopping in sharp shoes/Walking in the sunshine town feeling very cool”) actually summing up the dying days of King’s Road psychedelia with great acuity, while his guitar roars and snaps on the sidelines before the band land graciously on the harmonies of the song’s title as chorus, followed by an extended pregnant quaver of uncertain guitar drones before abruptly veering back into the second verse as Syd tries to get closer to her – “I catch her by the eye then I stop and have to think/What a funny thing to do ‘cos I’m feeling very pink.”
This then gives way to a gorgeous, semi-tortured sequence of proto-blissout with Syd’s “I love she, she loves me,” the group’s escalating triple “see you”s; bridged by the most ecstatic of collective swoons, Richard Wright’s electric piano introduces a wedding bells motif which Syd’s guitar picks up immediately, followed by Waters’ sliding bass, some more ruminative guitar chimes, and finally a hallucinatory antiphonal choir and church organ turning the Chelsea girl into a hymn. For the final stretch, Syd utters an emphatic, ecstatic “Thought you might like to KNOW!” before informing us that “I’m her lorry driver man,” still watching her, now perhaps a little more sinisterly (“She’s on the run/down by the riverside/Feeding ducks in the afternoon tide” – immediately answered by a group “quack, quack”) before the final chorus, which itself dissolves into a curious Cockney scat singing segment, some Goon-type nonsense syllables and a final high-pitched feedback signoff. On the Piper bonus disc, the tune appears in both mono and (for the first time) stereo mixes; at the end of the latter Syd assures the rest of the group, somewhat poignancy given his eventual fate, “I’ll explain it all to you sometime…one day.” He never did, but as with that other Hurricane Smith-produced masterpiece of late 1967 psych-pop, “Defecting Grey” by the Pretty Things, he seemed to approach “Apples And Oranges” with a brief strictly to have as much experimental fun as possible, and it deserves permanent rescue from the sub-carpet debris.
