The Pink Floyd songs David Gilmour said were for “real enthusiasts”

There is an old music industry adage that every mainstream success wishes they had a dedicated cult following, and every cult band yearns for mainstream success – the grass is always greener. While this is certainly true for many, it doesn’t quite capture the spirit of Pink Floyd. After all, the pioneering group saw their fair share of commercial successes, what with the release of groundbreaking records like The Dark Side of the Moon, but they also boast an obsessive, cult-like fanbase, too.

First emerging from obscurity during the counterculture age of the 1960s, Floyd typified the psychedelic experimentation of that era, crafting some utterly groundbreaking efforts in the process. Under the leadership of Syd Barrett, the band endeared themselves towards a small but ever-expanding audience of hippies and musical experimentalists during those early days, and even found some chart success with tracks like ‘See Emily Play’. However, when Barrett was pushed out of the group in 1968, the group found themselves at something of an impasse.

Although Roger Waters quickly took the reins of the band, continuing on with diverse, ambitious, and exceedingly experimental records like Ummagumma, that mainstream hit, which arrived with ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Arnold Layne’, was long gone. It took the band quite a while to regain the attention of widespread audiences, with the immensely successful release of The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973 – a full five years after the departure of Syd Barrett.

Inevitably, that album ushered in an incredibly successful period for Pink Floyd, followed up with albums like Wish You Were Here and, later, The Wall. In the wake of this global attention, though, the various projects produced by Floyd between The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and The Dark Side of the Moon were largely forgotten about, save for a devoted cult fanbase.

Even today, there are those who will cite Ummagumma or A Saucerful of Secrets as some of the greatest albums of the psychedelic era, even if the band members themselves have since denounced those efforts. David Gilmour, for instance, has criticised those early post-Barrett releases on multiple occasions. Brought into the band in 1967 to alleviate the strain of an increasingly absent Syd Barrett, Gilmour was naturally suited to the experimental leanings of the group, yet even he could not see the appeal in albums like A Saucerful of Secrets.

During a 1993 interview with Goldmine, the guitarist declared, “There are lots of tracks on those early albums, on Saucerful of Secrets and these early singles, which are for real enthusiasts only, if you know what I mean, to put it delicately.” In other words, those early records only tend to appeal to Pink Floyd obsessives and experimentalists, rather than the vast, mainstream audiences who adored later records like The Wall.

“Certainly, there are tracks that I hate on some of these things,” Gilmour added. Although the guitarist didn’t cite any specific tracks from this period that he hates, he didn’t accumulate many songwriting credits during that time. On Saucerful of Secrets, for instance, the four-part title track is Gilmour’s only songwriting credit, with the rest filled up by Wright, Barrett, and, predominantly, Waters.

It is fair to assume, therefore, that Gilmour’s intense, decades-long feud with Roger Waters plays into his dismissal of that early era of the band. Still, that has never stopped legions of Pink Floyd devotees from hailing those late 1960s and early 1970s projects as some of the band’s most compelling.