Pink Floyd's Young Lust – explained and demystified

https://telephoneworld.org/landline-telephone-history/pink-floyds-young-lust-explained-and-demystified/

by jbledsoe2112 • 5 years ago

102 45 5 years ago

If you're a fan of Pink Floyd's Young Lust (from the album "The Wall" released in 1979) but are scratching you head as to all the beeps and boops you hear during the telephone call portion of the song - this article explains it all.

tsomctl• 5 years ago

As a nerd, and a huge Pink Floyd fan, I'm embarrassed to say I never really paid attention to those noises.

dylan604• 5 years ago

Whaaat? You've just earned enough demerits that requires you to return your Floyd Fan Nerd card in. You will be able to have it back when your suspension has been completed.

Immediate reinstatment will be possible by naming the year and result of the match the crowd was recorded for Fearless.

jbledsoe211210• 5 years ago

Love all the 2600 Hz tones! :)

dotancohen3• 5 years ago

Oh freunde, nicht dies tone!

I hope that you're referencing the magazine. It's actually named for the tone, though I'm sure anybody familiar with it already knows that.

jbledsoe211210• 5 years ago

I'm well aware of both.

valleyer2• 5 years ago

Is the assumption that the middle of the phone number area was spliced out for privacy reasons? The article doesn't appear to say...

dotancohen3• 5 years ago

Not at all. Nobody was thinking of phone number privacy in 1979. Quite the opposite, at the time we had books - dead trees - of phone numbers complete with names and even physical addresses.

jbledsoe211210• 5 years ago

It was. I guess you didn't read the article?

valleyer2• 5 years ago

Forgive my ignorance: where is it mentioned that the splice was for privacy reasons?

RyJones• 5 years ago

Neat! As a former Pink Floyd maniac, and a reformed phreak, I found this excellent!

farmerstan• 5 years ago

When I first started reading, I thought it was going to be explaining to the Millennials and GenZ what a telephone operator was, what a long distance call was, and why they used one to make a long distance phone call!

jbledsoe211210• 5 years ago

Not the purpose of the article.

foobar1962• 5 years ago

I remember when the album was released and bought a copy. Much was made at the time that this was a real call: one of the PF guys (don’t remember who) told a friend in the UK that if they received a call from “Mr Floyd to Mrs Floyd” just hang up.

The genius part was the the real phone operator quickly tweaked onto the fact that the call was to Mrs Floyd, who should have been alone, but a man answered…

UncleEntity• 5 years ago

The fake collect call from the US to England…

Yep, unfortunately TFA got that part wrong.

jbledsoe211210• 5 years ago

Well, it was staged. There obviously no Mr. or Mrs. Floyd. :)

billpg• 5 years ago

That was a real operator?

I can grimly imagine someone calling the phone company to locate her so she can agree to appear on the published record.

"No, we made a call an hour or so ago. I'd like to speak to the same operator who placed the collect for us please."

jbledsoe211210• 5 years ago

It was a real call, but staged.

robomartin• 5 years ago

Excellent Pink Floyd exhibition in Los Angeles until January 9th. Lots of really interesting insight:

https://www.vmmla.com/the-pink-floyd-exhibition/

WARNING: Music plays as soon as you enter this site.

We went a couple of weeks ago. You can probably be in and out of there in about an hour. It depends on just how much of it you want to read and watch (they have videos with interviews, etc.).

I love the band. Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon and after), Mozart and sometimes Bach are my favorites to "get into flow and stay in flow".

milleramp• 5 years ago

Thanks for posting that, definitely will get some tickets.

GauntletWizard• 5 years ago

Dangit, I'm in LA for Kubecon, and if I'd seen this yesterday would definitely have had time to go - Not so much today.

danans• 5 years ago

I love the band. Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon and after),

I gotta respectfully disagree . Meddle was peak Floyd for me. The whole album is a transporting experience, including IMO the best Gilmour guitar solo ever.

throwawayboise2• 5 years ago

I honestly can't stand any of it. I've often told friends that if I ever owned a radio station I would ban Pink Floyd.

Can't really explain why. Just don't like it.

dotancohen3• 5 years ago

Thank you. Echos is like a book or a movie for me. I could get so lost, then ten minutes has gone by. And whatever was bad before - well its still bad but now I'm insulated.

coolgeek• 5 years ago

My introduction to Pink Floyd started (late 70s) with Dark Side, and worked its way backwards.

"A Saucer Full of Secrets" and "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" - collected together as "A Nice Pair" - was the peak for me.

I like "Animals" and "Welcome to the Machine". I respect "The Wall" as an artistic piece. But it's not an album I ever bought or had a strong desire to listen to.

mellavora• 5 years ago

Any fans of Poor Man's Whiskey?

They've done a fantastic bluegrass revision album, "Dark Side of the Moonshine". Well worth a listen if you like PF.

first youtube hit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v46u1ZwfohE

BuildTheRobots• 5 years ago

Easy Star All Star's "Dub Side of the Moon" is also done with a lot of respect for the source album (and not a hint of 4/4 transposition). [1]

Les Claypool's Flying Frog Brigade also covered the entirety of the Animals album as the second half of their live set which is also obscenely respectful to the original and actually benefits from Claypools heavy bass driving it. [2]

If you enjoy bluegrass covers, then Hayseed Dixie are worth a look at :) [3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJEZWsnIECo

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn66deEvUW8

[3] https://www.hayseed-dixie.com/discography/

EvanAnderson2• 5 years ago

If you're into vintage telephone network sounds (and some really excellent technical descriptions of phone phreaking) take some time to listen to Evan Doorbell's recordings: https://www.evan-doorbell.com/

I grew up in the tail end of analog switches near my home. I remember the sounds of making phone calls changing over a few years. They became a lot less interesting and a lot more uniform. The sounds you'd hear calling the bigger towns in the area slowly took over the sounds you'd hear when calling smaller towns or out into the country.

jbledsoe211210• 5 years ago

I'm a friend of Evan Doorbell. :)

EvanAnderson2• 5 years ago

I really appreciate the work that he's done with documenting and narrating his tapes and curating the work of others. I've learned so much about the telephone network of yore from his recordings and, very specifically, about the sounds of the network that I remember from my youth. (I also get a big kick out of Dom Tuffy...)

daledavies• 5 years ago

Just spent over an hour listening to these and I've only scratched the surface. Absolutely fascinating, thanks for sharing!

e40• 5 years ago

Who remembers the ol' collect-call-to-yourself as a sign you made it home OK? I remember my family, when I was little, was mindful of the cost of phone calls to an extent that we used this trick a few times.

ghaff• 5 years ago

Or person to person calls which indicated that the other (refusing) party could call you back with direct dial much less (relatively) expensively. Also traded cassette tapes with parents in college.

throwawayboise2• 5 years ago

Yep I remember my mother sending tapes back and forth to her mother and her sister who both lived in Europe. Small open-reel tapes, not cassettes. They later started doing voice calls once a month or so, when the costs had dropped some (or their income had gone up -- maybe both). Lots of letter writing also, on very thin paper to reduce weight and postage costs.

bombcar• 5 years ago

Learning to Fly also has some accurate radio chatter

amatecha• 5 years ago

I believe it's because David Gilmour was in fact learning to fly! Some background here: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-gilmour-fear-of-flying-in...

twodayrice• 5 years ago

I worked as an electronic tech back repairing 4/5ESS switches. Those things were built like tanks.

dave333• 5 years ago

I worked on the systems used to implement various switches such as #4ESS and #5ESS and the goal was less than 2 hours downtime in 40 years which means you can't even reboot and have to upgrade software method by method on the fly. Needless to say 40 years later the average smartphone is about 1000x more powerful than those switches.

jbledsoe211210• 5 years ago

Oh nice! Did you ever work on crossbar switches?

fortwuny• 5 years ago

James Guthrie made the call back to his residence as a joke to create the basis of the call to incorporate it into the album. I was told by his ex-fiance in 2009 when I met her while doing computer work for her father. He was playing a prank and called himself Mr. Floyd and the recipient wasn't having it.

Pink Floyd's Young Lust – explained and demystified

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