Why Pink Floyd's 'Apples and Oranges' Bombed Commercially but Became a Collector's Gem

The single “Apples and Oranges” was Pink Floyd’s third official 45, released in November 1967, right after the band had scored a surprise hit with “See Emily Play.” But it stiffed completely—didn’t even chart in the UK. The public wasn’t ready for a song that switched between a sunny pop verse and a jarringly dissonant, almost jazzy chorus, with Syd Barrett’s vocals sliding from a sweet croon into a detached, slurred drawl that felt like a different person.

The failure was partly self-inflicted. The band recorded a promotional film for the song on a tight budget, with Syd looking visibly uncomfortable and disengaged, and the single itself was poorly promoted by EMI. But for fans, that weirdness became the point. The arrangement—layered with a rickety rhythm, a toy-like xylophone, and a sudden key change—captures Syd’s last fully coherent moment in the studio before his mental health unraveled. His vocal delivery, especially the way he stretches “apples and oranges” into a sleepy, melancholic sigh, gives the song an eerie, childlike vulnerability that later Floyd never replicated.

Today, original copies of the “Apples and Oranges” single fetch hundreds of dollars among collectors, not because it’s a lost masterpiece, but because it’s a snapshot of a band on the verge of losing its founder. It’s the sound of Syd Barrett trying to write a simple pop song and accidentally making a psychedelic miniature that sounds like nobody else.