What Was the Point of Pink Floyd's 1971 Compilation 'Relics'?

‘Relics’ is the weird little time capsule that Pink Floyd dropped in 1971, right between ‘Atom Heart Mother’ and ‘Meddle’. By then they’d fully moved on from Syd Barrett, but they had all these early singles and B-sides that were already vanishing from store shelves. The band had never been great about keeping their non-album tracks in print, so ‘Relics’ was basically a back-catalog cleanup — a way to keep the old stuff circulating without having to reissue every 45 separately.

It also gave them a chance to sneak in a leftover. The only previously unreleased track on the record was “Biding My Time,” a jazzy blues-rock rough cut from the 1969 sessions for ‘More’ and ‘Ummagumma’ that never found a home. That song alone makes ‘Relics’ interesting for completists, but the real value is seeing how the band’s early psychedelic pop — “Arnold Layne,” “See Emily Play,” “Julia Dream” — sat beside the heavier, more experimental B-sides like “Careful with That Axe, Eugene.” The compilation didn’t sell huge numbers, but it quietly preserved a crucial transition era that might otherwise have been lost to bootlegs and faded memory.