Happy Anniversary: Pink Floyd, “Let There Be More Light”

47 years ago today, Pink Floyd issued the one and only single from their sophomore album, 1968's A Saucerful of Secrets, and failed to secure any chart action with it.

Of course, given the goings-on within the band as a result of Syd Barrett's departure, the fact that “Let There Be More Light” wasn't making much of an impact on the airwaves was the least of Pink Floyd's worries. Plus, for what it's worth, at least the limited commercial response to the song was only a problem for the band in America, as that's the only country where the song was even issued as a single. But as a song, “Let There Be More Light” definitely finds Roger Waters - who wrote the track - mining the same general sonic template that he and Barrett had forged during the making of the band's debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Based on what we've read in Andy Mabbett's invaluable tome The Complete Guide to the Music of Pink Floyd, “Let There Be More Light” - which features vocal contributions from Waters, Richard Wright, and David Gilmour before finally fading to a close - would seem to be about a UFO landing at the Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England. (Between this and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” it seems that Waters was having some seriously sci-fi thoughts in the late '60s.) Beatles fans will also note that there's a reference to “Lucy in the Sky,” and if you're a scholar of English history, then you might also nod knowingly at the namedropping of Hereward the Wake, an 11th-century resistance leader famous for battling back when the Normans when they invaded England.

As a single, “Let There Be More Light” may not have done much to sell A Saucerful of Secrets, but it serves as a great opener for the album that Nick Mason has called his favorite among Pink Floyd's discography.

“I think there are ideas contained there that we have continued to use all the way through our career,” Mason told Newsweek in 2014. “I think [it] was a quite good way of marking Syd's departure and Dave's arrival. It's rather nice to have it on one record, where you get both things. It's a cross-fade rather than a cut.”