Pink Floyd 165. “Round and Around,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987)

165. “Round and Around,” A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987): To understand Pink Floyd, you have to understand that there are at least four, or arguably five, Pink Floyds. The first was a goofy and absurdist pop-rock band, led by one Syd Barrett, whose contributions were limited basically to a couple of singles and one album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; more on him anon. The second Pink Floyd had its origins before Barrett joined, and then reached full pretentious flower after his departure; this aggregation was one of the founders of progressive rock, a psychedelic, space-rock-y, quasi-improvisational ensemble; it proffered a whole bunch of those multipart suites and played around with atonal bashings and funny sound effects in soi-disant psychedelic happenings in Swinging London, most of it of little or no aesthetic interest this many years on. The third Pink Floyd is the one we know and love; the organic unit that created Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon, and Wish You Were Here. You could make the argument that this phase soon evolved into a different, fourth version of the band, which saw a domineering Waters taking control and producing increasingly what were essentially Roger Waters solo albums, starting with Animals, going through The Wall and The Final Cut, and then proceeding into his solo career. Pink Floyd Phase 5 was the band that continued after Waters left, and would have been an enormous joke were it not for its record sales (big) and tour grosses (even bigger). “Round and Around” is aimless even by the standards of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, the band’s first post-Waters album. The story is that Wright and Gilmour hashed out scores of instrumental tracks from which they picked promising tunes for their first Waters-less album. They’d had more than a decade to come up with new songs. This made the cut?