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:
“Look
There he is now, look:
There is no interrogation in his eyes
Or in the hands, quiet over the horse’s neck,
And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving indifferent.
O hidden under the dover’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast....”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Here [in London, history] ... seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)