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Imagine, if you will, surfing through Youtube from music video to music video and finally ending up here; Paint Box, by Pink Floyd. As the video loads, I read several of the comments: “Syd’s great! David’s great! Syd’s lip-synching! He’s not; you suck!” Standard stuff. Now, when the video finally loads, and I’m prepared to see an old Pink Floyd video that I may or may not have ever seen, instead I see….Christopher Walken! Sitting in a chair in a deserted hotel! It all looks kind of familiar. I figure this will be one of those videos in which the scene cuts back and forth from the band to the actor. Fine.

Now the music begins in earnest, and Christopher Walken is dancin’ around like all get-out. I have the volume set really low because the hour is wee. It’s pretty amusing, really, and still kind of familiar, like I saw this video a single time long ago. But the music… the music is completely unlike any Pink Floyd song I’ve ever heard. “That can’t possibly be Syd Barrett,” I say to myself; “It must be Gilmour. It must be after Roger Waters left, and they’re doing some weird one-off job to help out their dear friend Christopher Walken.”

I watch the entire video, and it’s pretty funny. But the song simply can’t be from Syd days, or even Waters days, like some of the posters are saying. I know that much. And David Gilmour sounds really odd, like he’s intentionally disguising his voice, and the music sounds completely unlike any Floyd music I’ve ever heard. And how on earth did the posters’ conversation about lip-synching get started? All I saw was Christopher Walken shimmyin’ and flyin’ around. Did I look away from the computer at some point? I don’t remember that.

Really: what’s the story behind this video? It’s got to be from some album from the ’90’s, when I didn’t care anymore. And what’s Floyd’s connection with Walken? Who’s reviving whose career here?

So after the video ends, I wander through Google, just to connect some unconnected dots. I google through to another “Paint Box” video on Youtube. It loads up, and…it’s black and white! With jangly sixties noises! There’s Syd! WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST SEE?

This is what I saw, somehow in place of the actual Pink Floyd video. And for seven or eight minutes, I’d convinced myself that I was watching some odd David Gilmour-produced thing that somehow escaped my attention when it came out. I haven’t been that disconnected with reality in a long time, and the return to earth was bone jarring.

In conclusion, it takes a special kind of idiot to confuse Fatboy Slim with Pink Floyd.