Pink Floyd: Ummagumma (2LP, 2016 remaster) [PINK FLOYD/COLUMBIA]

Why you'll love it

This 2016 Pink Floyd Records remaster puts both halves on 180g vinyl in a gatefold jacket. Disc one catches the band live in 1969 tearing through "Astronomy Domine" and "Careful with That Axe, Eugene"; it was a top-five hit in the UK.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Remastered
• 180g vinyl
• Gatefold jacket

About the album

Ummagumma is really two records in one sleeve. The first disc is Pink Floyd on stage in the spring of 1969, at Mothers Club in Birmingham and Manchester College of Commerce, playing the long, spacey pieces that defined their early shows. The second is a studio experiment in which each of the four members got half a side to fill entirely on his own. It was also their first album for the Harvest label.

Live, "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" and "A Saucerful of Secrets" stretch out into hypnotic, rumbling jams. In the studio, Richard Wright builds the keyboard suite "Sysyphus," Roger Waters offers the pastoral "Grantchester Meadows" and the gleefully strange "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict," David Gilmour assembles "The Narrow Way" and Nick Mason closes with "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party." Hipgnosis designed the famous picture-within-a-picture cover.

The house on that cover is in Great Shelford, near Cambridge, and the record propped against the wall is the Gigi soundtrack, put there purely to start arguments. It is still working.

Also at Kops: more Pink Floyd on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Pink Floyd Records / Columbia (cat# PFRLP4), a reissue of the 1969 album.