The Great Gig In The Sky

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Whoa whoa whoooooa whoooa whoooa. Top lyrics.

The Great Gig In The Sky is a load of cunt.

No, I am not referring to any sort of reference to a possible afterlife (yeah right).
I am, of course, writing about the Pink Floyd ‘tune’ that resides on Side 2 of ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’.

Now, me and the Mrs like a bit of Pink Floyd. But I personally have never been able to stand this particular so-called ‘masterpiece’. Initially, it’s a nice song. Rick Wright (RIP) plays his piano beautifully and Dave Gilmour swoops in and out with subtle guitar.

Then Nick Mason’s drums kick in and it all turns to shit. Some session singer (Clare Torry, I think) just screams a load of ear splitting lyricless yelling, sounding like someone has put chili sauce, fireworks and itching powder down her knickers.

It really is the most awful noise, and if Yoko Fucking Ono had done it on a Beatles record, it would rightfully be called out for the tuneless racket that it is. But because it’s on ‘Dark Side’ and it’s ‘Ver Floyd’ it rarely gets any criticism. But the truth is it’s fucking awful.

The most laughable bit being Torry later astonishingly got a co-songwriting credit with Wright for the song. A songwriting credit and royalties for a done on the spot fucking flailing noise?!! Music by R. Wright and incoherent screeching by Torry? Fucking priceless. I bet Roger Waters was happy about that one, eh?

It is an awful record, but the lesson being? Women and top rock bands should not be mixed, simple as that. Zep and The Who never did it, so there is no Plastic Ono Band or Great Gig In The Sky to taint their legacies and no Clare Torry or Yoko to bite them on the arse and interfere later down the line.

The original version of Great Gig is far superior. With Wright’s music being allowed to breathe as the (then current) coverage of Apollo XVII replaces Torry’s squawking.

The song

Nominated by – Norman

86 thoughts on “The Great Gig In The Sky”

  1. I think you’re nom is a bit late Norman. The album came out in the early seventies ffs.

  2. You know I never thought about it. But yes it is a bit shit come to think.
    I am not sure ‘Money’ is that great either.
    My favourite is ‘Breathe’.

  4. Pink Floyd?
    Most overrated bunch of “geniuses” I have ever known.
    Dreary, miserable, overlong, pretentious.
    Fucking dire.
    Other opinions may differ of course, but prefer a spot of The Black Crowes meself.
    Off now before Norman tells me off! 🏃‍♂️😀🏃‍♂️

    • Agreed Vernon, Pink Floyd were pretentious shite and Roger Waters is a batshit crazy anti semite.

      • The generals sat,
        While the lines on the map moved from side to side…

    • ‘Time’ is by far the best song on the album.

      Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
      You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
      Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
      Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

      Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
      You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
      And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you.
      No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

      So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
      Racing around to come up behind you again.
      The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
      Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

      Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
      Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
      Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
      The time is gone, the song is over,
      Thought I’d something more to say…

      • Thirded, RTC. ‘Genius’ is an apt description of that track. My favourite album of all time is ‘Wish You Were Here’. Never get tired of it. Impossible to overate. In fact I will put it on later to accompany the washing up!

  7. I also think Pink Floyd are overrated. Songs of pretentious teenage angst. Can’t stand listening to them now. And Roger Waters is a cunt. But, I loved them when I was 15.

    And I quite agree – The Great Gig in the Sky is a dire racket.

    • Im normally first to stick the boot into rich hippy millionaires Pink Floyd.
      But sorry Norm,
      I disagree.
      I think its fuckin great!!
      And Torrey’s singing makes it so.
      I remember tripping my fuckin cock off to this as a young man and floating into inner space.
      While not my favourite band in the world I grudgingly admit in momentary lapse of reason that they could knock out some good stuff.
      Id like to chin that Rodger Waters though.
      Hate that fucker.

      • No Miles, your right!
        Shes not that bad……shes fuckin awful!!
        Fuck me.
        Thatl nice Mark Chapman should of clipped her too.

      • Syd Barrett (RIP) was the man. What I don’t get is how Torry can get a songwriting credit when the thing has no bloody lyrics?! How do you get a writing credit for a noise? I wonder what Rick Wright (RIP) thought about handing half of his royalties to this bird? ThIs song was a template for the sort of wailing almost all female singers did in the future. Crap like Mariah Carey, Beyonce, Leona Lewis and every X-Factor type who tries to out-shout each other and do ridiculous cadenzas on every record that they do.

        Mind you, looking at that picture at the top, I wouldn’t have minded a go on her back then.👌😉

  8. You need to listen to it when you`re off your face with substances.
    Like when they did it.

      • No! You sure about that ruff? Waters and Mason were your basic stuck-up teetotallers but both Gilmour and Wright both experimented with drugs quite frequently

        Wright having a cocaine addiction they have just been very hush about it They don’t kiss and tell like yank rock n rollers do

  10. Pink Floyd are a great example of something is both amazing and awful at the same time. There’s no doubting that their best moments are amazing, but there is also a cringing pretentiousness about them that got worse as time has gone by. When you first heard their music when you were 13-25 (those crucial formative years) it blows you away but as you get older it becomes apparent that they were – and still are – up their own arses, ironically drowning in “Money” and the music, even the best of it, is hard to listen to. It’s the lack of humour that grinds me down. Same goes with the Eagles, who I used to think had profound songs, but I listened closer a few years ago and go douche-chills from many of their songs, as the lyrics are a combination of great metaphors but also bad rhyming, fake and phony hippy dippiness and Henley himself is a grade-A ass-cunt. Sorry for digressing.

    Yeah, it’s crazy that Clare Tory gets royalties from “Great Gig in the Sky” as that ain’t chump change. Dark Side still sells 4 million copies per year, according to Dave Gilmour. She has made $10 million from that legal decision. That precedent should have opened up a TON of performers scooping up the shekels. The Motown singers and session musicians come to mind as Berry Gordy basically treated them like indentured slaves, paying them standard rates (chump change) when they came up with amazing ideas, riffs, licks, rhythms and the records sold in their millions every week for at least 15 years and Berry made into a Solomon of Showbiz. Sleazy cunt.

    • Lennon and McCartney were cunts for that too. George Harrison thought of the ‘waltz time’ part of ‘We Can Work It Out’. He also invented the guitar riff of ‘And I Love Her’ and many other guitar parts that he played, and even Ringo came up with the ‘Father McKenzie/Darnnig his socks’ verse of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and his drum solo on ‘The End’. But neither were credited or got royalties from those tunes.

      Mind you, it’s well known that Macca is as tight as a shark’s arsehole. And that’s watertight.

  11. “I’ve been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks.”

    “I’ve always been mad, I know I’ve been mad. Like the most of us. Very hard to explain why you’re mad, even if you’re not mad.”

    😂

    • Im not mad, not even disgruntled.
      Im sanguine.
      And the poster boy of good mental health.
      If they had a mental health Olympics id get gold.

      • Afternoon Miserable. I know you’re not mad, you’ve never been mad, unlike the most of us. Easy to explain why you’re not mad, even if you aren’t mad.

      • Afternoon Ruff,
        I’ll tell you who is mad,
        That Toyah Wilcox.
        proper head the ball.
        That frail old husband of hers from King Crimson needs to get her sectioned.
        Shes a danger to herself and others.
        I was him id take swift action.

  12. I was fortunate enough to watch there very first performance of DSOTM at Brighton Dome 1972 , a year before it was released. Early live versions of it were much better than the studio recording in my opinion. More trippy sounding. I went off them after DSOTM . It all became more corporate.

    • Beat me by a few days Fenton . Saw the same show at Wembley Arena and the puzzled looks around the hall as the cash registers cranked up were something to behold. The gig only really got going when One Of These Days came up.
      Memo to self : be careful attending gigs with unreleased material…. as four sides back to back of Tales From Topographic Oceans taught me!!

  13. Used to jam this with a mate, me grinding out half formed piano chords and him riffing the vocal line on guitar… much better.

  14. I’m not on board with this cunting. Floyd did far worse, especially the Final Cut, which is a dire Waters creation. I can see though that the Great Gig is a bit marmite in its appeal. Nick Mason qualifies as a cunt for making millions and barely knowing how to hold a drum stick.

    • Nick Mason is worth $180 million, damn! That shows you how many copies of Dark Side have been sold. Yeah, he’s a basic drummer. Meanwhile Mick Fleetwood went bankrupt about ten times! Cocaine is a helluva drug!

      • Pompeii was also the band’s finest hour!

        Great versions of Echoes and A Saucerful Of Secrets, on a par with the live half of Ummagumma, which was playing when I lost my virginity at a party in 1969. Happier, more exciting times.

  15. I thought Great Gig in the Sky was very impressive upon first hearing it many moons ago (pun intended)
    Over the years though I think it has come to resemble the type of deliberate oversinging annoying warbling more akin to something you’d unfortunately hear on X-Factor or from Beyonce fucking Knowles, mockney fatty Adele or worse.

    Not the biggest Pink Floyd fan myself though I don’t mind them. My brother in law loves them (post Syd Barrett era) and much to his annoyance I have always insisted that Piper at the Gates of Dawn was their best album.

  16. Think it stands the test of time, best enjoyed whilst slightly wasted, it’s music to be enveloped in rather than listen to.

    I may light one up and listen to some Floyd later, that’s if I can recover from the shock of Jessie Nelson deleting her entire Twitter feed.

  18. David Gilmour , a great guitar style , nice voice and back in the day was a handsome bastard.
    Now look at the old sod . Looks like an old white crumbly dog shite.
    Although i can’t stand the opinionated up his own arse Roger Waters he has worn well.

  19. I have to confess, i bought a Japanese cd Pink Floyd box set . Every album release in mini replica card. Gatefolds where applicable. It cost me a packet but it’s an amazing indulgence.

    • Floyd fans have spent early-retirement-level money on remasters of the albums, boxed sets etc over the years. Dark Side alone has been “remastered” about 20 times since 1993. Great marketing ploy in the CD age, which has now ended. Streaming is convenient, but also sucks. I wonder of any music will exist by the end of this century. Archiving of digital material is a cunt.

      • Agree. Cunty,
        I cannot get my head around paying for something i can’t physically hold.
        It’s that sense of possession , looking at the artwork etc that appeals to me.

        Fuck streaming and downloading

  20. I loved the album when I was much younger, but now I can’t listen to it. Too depressing, like everything else by PF. I must’ve been a right angsty cunt when younger. I used to listen to a lot of depressing music looking back (Nirvana, Radiohead, Floyd, Joy Division etc). Couldn’t do that now, would make me a right grumpy fucker. The band members of PF are cunts too and yes, GGITS is shite.

    Oh and they’re pretentious twats an’ all. And massive champagne socialists, of course (who seem to fall out an awful lot amount money!)

  21. I’ll give you the original version was better as a standalone track and easier to tolerate, but the album version is perfect on the album because it helps cement the overall album concept and continuity as one long track/journey.

    Try and find a singer these days who could do that improvised singing without autotune and also convey that sort of emotion on the fly.

    I’d rather cunt Gilmour and Waters for both being egotistical dickheads. Neither work without the other; Polly faģğed up all the lyrics of Dave’s solo work and Water’s just can’t sing.

    Still 2nd on wiki for best selling album of all time worldwide. Personally I say it’s 1st.. ‘Thriller’ isn’t that special and we all know why it sold so many copies.

    • Most bands are like that: two decent(ish) ones and two cunts.

      Waters and Gilmour = Cunts
      Mason and Wright = OK Blokes

      Clayton and Mullen = OK Lads
      Bonio and the Edge = Supercunts

      Glenn Frey and Don Henley = Megacunts
      The other Eagles = Not as bad as those two cunts

      Ian Brown and John Squire = Cunts
      Mani and Reni = Top lads

      • I wonder if music company heads actually require that formula now, Norm…

        “So which two are the cunts and which two are chill? Is it the one with the massive hipster beard and the one who sings about Black Lives Matter? And the other two who look like clones of Adrian Mole are the chill ones? It’s the other way around? Oh, whatever. Get the contracts, Linda.”

      • No need to say who the cunts in Oasis were….😉

        It’s hard to think of a band who doesn’t have a sprinkling of cunts. Slade were alright though.

      • The Osmonds were cunt-free.

        But seriously, cunt-free bands are indeed rare. Beach Boys had Mike Love. The Byrds had to kick out David Crosby and even then they tried to murder each other. I think I’m safe in saying that cuntery pervaded The Beatles to various levels, especially after 1967. So even in the Golden Age of Rock, cuntitude played a role in the musical magic and as time went on, it got virulent.

        Maybe Kraftwerk are a great exception, but I’m not an expert on Kraut Rock despite loving it. Germans have a different form of cuntery than the classic definition, of course.

      • Listened to Oasis recently and what a pair of cunts. Can’t believe I liked them once as it now sounds like nursery rhymes put to the music composed on a recorder by a retard (and probably was!). No cunts in Iron Maiden!

      • Norman@ – Yep, little Paul Hewson doesn’t send his favourite Cousin Christmas or Birthday presents.
        Tight fker he is..

  22. I think Clare Torry can also be heard squawking on Culture Club’s ‘The War Song’. One of the worst records of the 80s.

    I always imagined Torry to be a girthsome Helen Terry or Alison Moyet type. But – again – looking at that picture, I most definitely would have…

  24. You’re right Norman, women and top rock bands shouldn’t mix.

    The Pink Fairies and Jaki Windmill. I rest my case.

  27. I think this should have been included on the album?
    sung to the tune of ‘where do you go to my lovely’?

    you talk like marlene dietrich
    and you dance like biffo the bear
    your clothes are all made by ‘Bernards’
    and there’s lice and spunk in your hair, yes there is
    .
    so where do you go to my lovely, when your alone in your
    in you’re pit, tell me the thoughts that surround you
    when you’re having a spine shattering shit….Oh yes you are.

    Oh you live in a fancy compartment
    in one of her majesty’s ships’
    with four hundred and twenty young fish heads each one of them gives you the shits, yes they do!
    your name is heard in high places, you know the buffer quite well,
    he gave you a dildo for christmas and you use it for ringing bell..ding a ling.

    Do you remember the embassy party, i recall you caused quite a stir
    sliding down the bannisters with you’re piss flaps going Brr Brr Brr
    I remember the back streets of lowestoft
    you’re arsehole all gaping and wide, i remember i popped my head in
    and the rest of the crew were inside,playing draughts for a larf Ha ha ha!I

    I remember the back streets of naples the children begging in rags
    i remember you stole all their money
    for a pint and a packet fags,yes you did half a quid
    i know where you go to my lovely
    when you’re alone in your pit
    i know the thoughts that surround, cos i know that you’re full of shit.

  28. 1969 RTC ??!!? You’re fucking even older than me! Seen gig performed live a few times (Floyd post Waters, Waters post Floyd and Aussie Floyd) and all the backing singers get a screech each, followed by rapturous applause. Never cared for it much but sounds better live. Surprised The Wall hasn’t been mentioned more, greatest musical work in the annals of human endeavour imho. Yes Waters can be a cunt, but he is also the finest lyricist in modern musical history. Dylan? Cunt. Cohen? Not a cunt but not as good. Lennon/Mccartney? Occasionally not cunts (lyrically speaking). Ray Davies, flashes of genius but lots of meh. Got some seriously good Pink Floyd collectables if anyone wants to pay significantly more than they’re currently worth, look on it as an investment for when another one dies.

  29. Still, on the bright side, Clare Torry’s royalties bonanza upset Roger Waters. She said she met Waters one day in a London park by chance, and he moaned and harrumphed about The Great Gig In The Sky. So, as much as I dislike the actual song, it can’t be all bad if it annoys that moaning miserable horse faced old cunt.🤣

    Little known fact: Torry also sang the gentle theme to TV comedy ‘Butterflies’. So she is capable of more than screeching incoherently.

    • She deserves the writing credit imo Despite it being up to debate as being a bad or good song is merely subjective like it or not her moaning vocals are all over that track

      I think the Corporate shits at the record company were more angry then any member of Floyd tho they are all bitter cunts

  30. “I’m not afraid of dying. Anytime will do, I don’t mind.

    “Why should I be afraid of dying? There’s no reason for it you’ve got to go sometime”

    GGITS was Rick Wright’s masterpiece.

    A crescendo, that is filled with emotion.

    The prelude with Wright’s utterances, followed by the build up to the song’s centrepiece, and then the gentle tapering back down again, to the final note played on Rick’s piano.

    Torry’s vocals really did it justice also.

    What is not to like?

    Along with Time, it’s the best song on the album.

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