"Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" is a Pink Floyd song on their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, released in June 1968 on EMI Columbia. Roger Waters wrote the music and lyrics in mid-1967 around a riff, and recording began on 8 August 1967 at Abbey Road. The English lyrics were taken from a book of Chinese poetry, Poems of the Late T'ang in A. C. Graham's translation, with lines borrowed from Li He and Li Shangyin. The title derives from Michael Moorcock's 1965 novel The Fireclown. Nick Mason plays drums with timpani mallets, and Richard Wright plays Farfisa organ, vibraphone and celesta. It is the only Pink Floyd song with material from all five members. Its genres are given as space rock, psychedelia and avant-garde. The band played it live from 1967 to 1973, Roger Waters used it on solo tours, and Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets played it later. Jim Miller of Rolling Stone called it boring and too long, while Mason described it as the most interesting track on the album. It inspired the band Disaster Area in Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and its lyrics are quoted in LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" and Old 97's "Please Hold on While the Train Is Moving".
