Hidden Message
Directly before the lyrical section, there is a hidden message. It is isolated on the left channel of the song. When heard normally, it appears to be nonsense. If played backwards, the following can be heard:
- -Hello, Luka ... Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont...
- -Roger! Carolyne's on the phone!
- -Okay.
Roger Waters congratulates either a girl named Luka, or 'hunters' (i.e. people who deliberately look for backward messages hidden in songs) for finding this message, and jokes that she (or they) can send her (or their) answer to "Old Pink" (being either a comical reference to Syd Barrett, or a foreshadowing of Pink's eventual insanity), who lives somewhere in a funny farm (a term to describe a psychiatric hospital) in Chalfont. Before he can tell the exact location, however, he gets interrupted by someone (James Guthrie) in the background who says Carolyne (Waters' wife) is on the phone. The wife's full name is Carolyne Christie.
Read more about this topic: Empty Spaces
Famous quotes containing the words hidden and/or message:
“Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,
But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes
Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Gossip, then, is content, a message about people; rumor is a process. It takes a bit of gossip and reshapes it, modifies it in some way, and passes it along from individual to individual in different ways.”
—Jack Levin (b. 1941)