Pink Floyd keyboard player Rick Wright put his hand to his mouth during a 1971 press conference.

Music

The 2 Most Embarrassing Pink Floyd Songs, According to Rick Wright

Rick Wright was embarrassed by the first two Pink Floyd songs he wrote on his own, which came during a transitional period for the band.

by Jason Rossi

Published on July 17, 2023

3 min read

Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright said two of his songs were ‘sort of an embarrassment’

Pink Floyd parted ways with founding member, guitarist, and principal songwriter Syd Barrett in early 1968. His declining mental state made life hard on his bandmates. In concert, Barrett changed arrangements to songs on the fly, played the wrong chords (or none at all), and sang the wrong lyrics. So the rest of Pink Floyd — Wright, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and David Gilmour — decided to move on without him.

The only trouble was they sacked Barrett before finishing their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets.

So the remaining quartet picked up the slack and penned six of Saucerful’s seven songs (the album included Barrett’s “Jugband Blues”). Their inexperience writing music showed. Wright called his two tunes — “Remember a Day” and “See-Saw” — two of Pink Floyd’s most embarrassing songs (via the band biography Saucerful of Secrets):

“They’re sort of an embarrassment. I don’t think I’ve listened to them ever since we recorded them. It was a learning process. Through writing these songs, I learned that I’m not a lyric writer, for example. But you have to try it before you find out. The lyrics are appalling, terrible, but so were a lot of lyrics in those days.”

Rick Wright

Wright wasn’t the only person turned off by Pink Floyd’s earliest songs in the post-Barrett era. David Bowie wasn’t a fan either, saying Pink Floyd ceased to exist when the band canned their leader.

Wright was hard on his two A Saucerful of Secrets songs. He was embarrassed by his lyrics and also entitled to his opinion. Kudos to him for being honest about his shortcomings. At the same time, the making of the album was tumultuous for the band. Taking those missteps helped them eventually find their footing.

Wright didn’t like his lyrics, but it’s easy to understand why he penned the words he did. His only experience as a professional musician leading into A Saucerful of Secrets was playing in London’s foremost psychedelic band. Barrett often wrote mind-bendingly vivid and fanciful lyrics, and Wright followed suit. He didn’t like his efforts, but at least he tried and learned to hand off lyric-writing duties to his bandmates.

Between the embarrassing Floyd songs he wrote and a TV appearance he called one of the worst things the band ever did, the later stages of the band’s Barrett era and first moments without him weren’t easy times for Wright.

How did ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ perform on the charts?

Wright’s Embarrassing songs or not, A Saucerful of Secrets still managed to find success, albeit with mixed results.

In their native England, Pink Floyd climbed to No. 9 with their second album (in August 1968), which spent 11 weeks on the charts (per the Official Charts Company). The record faced some stiff competition from releases by Simon and Garfunkel (Bookends), Bob Dylan (John Wesley Harding), Faces (Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake), Otis Redding (Dock of the Bay), and The Sound of Music soundtrack around that time.

Audiences in the United States weren’t as receptive to A Saucerful of Secrets. The album only reached No. 158 on the Billboard charts — for a week in 2019. It achieved gold status from the RIAA — as part of A Nice Pair, a 1973 release pairing Saucerful with Floyd’s debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Wright said his first two Pink Floyd songs embarrassed him. A Saucerful of Secrets landed with mixed results, but the band overcame that awkward phase and created classic albums that left a lasting impact.

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