Monthly Archives: December 2017

Wish You Were Here

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Some things to consider if you’re coming to this new:

You’ve made an album which has changed the way the world perceives not only your band, but rock music as a whole. What the hell do you do next?

Well, if you’re Pink Floyd, you start to make an album called Household Objects, for which you decided – in apparent seriousness – to make music using no actual instruments at all, just whatever you can find lying around. Work on this continued for a couple of months before everyone involved realised it was a truly shit idea, and went back to writing concept albums. The story goes that the only surviving bits of ‘Household Objects’ which remain were some notes played with a wet finger run round the rim of some wineglases, and that this was treated and mixed into the opening chords, but if they are there, they are very hard to hear.

In truth, the band were more than a little reluctant to go back into the studio. Whatever they produced would inevitably be compared to ‘Dark Side’, and found to be not quite as good, and for the first time in their lives there was no financial pressure to churn out another album to keep the money coming in. On top of that, there were side projects – musical or otherwise – appearing as time and money were suddenly less of a problem than they had ever been before. There had been a tour promoting ‘Dark Side’ which had become more than a little shambolic – the legendary pyramid stage set was almost unmanageable, and the whole thing was getting away from them, as it was all of their peers in the progressive rock field: 1975 marks the beginning of the end for a number of bands, who started taking years instead of months to make albums, lost and replaced members with startling regularity, and found their audiences as keen as ever for new music, but perhaps holding them to a higher standard than before. It’s been said many times before, but nothing stifles creativity quite like success.

While the band figured out how this was going to work from now on, Nick Mason did some session work for the newly wheelchair-bound Robert Wyatt. Pink Floyd had already done benefit gigs for the former Soft Machine drummer and singer (he was paralysed after falling from a fourth floor window during a party), and all sorts of people rallied round to help him get his career back on track. Nick produced and played drums on Wyatt’s album ‘Rock Bottom’. He even turns up on ‘Top of the Pops’ as Wyatt and band performed ‘I’m a Believer’:

You’ll notice that Fred Frith (he of Henry Cow) didn’t make the TV session; the miming around his violin solo is particularly spectacular!

EMI, in search of even more money, re-released the first two albums in a double album package called ‘A Nice Pair’, which at least allowed Hipgnosis to do a whole lot of visual puns, but must have confused some unsuspecting record buyers who didn’t know about Syd.

Eventually, they all went back into Abbey Road and conjured up ‘Wish You Were Here’. It was clearly harder to get right than its predecessor, but they now had a standard to hold themselves to, so – for instance – when neither Gilmour or Waters proclaimed themselves satisfied with their vocal take on ‘Have a Cigar’, they roped in Roy Harper who was not only a friend and labelmate, but was recording his own album next door. Interestingly, I’ve never seen any suggestion that the vocal was ever offered to Rick Wright, who was good enough to sing on ‘Dark Side’.

The cover is another Hipgnosis creation – even more complicated and intriguing than the last one, it reflects the themes of absence and the shark-like nature of the record business. In this age of Photoshop, it’s worth remembering that all the photographs were staged in real life (there is some airbrushing, of course, but they really did set a bloke on fire to do the front cover). It’s also been interesting to me how similar the covers of this and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Presence’ are; they are opposite ideas, but executed in a very similar way.

OK, we need to talk about Syd.

For me, this is the last Pink Floyd album created in the shadow of their former frontman – ‘Shine On’ is explicitly about him, and the title track touches on him, as well as Waters’ other obsession, the loss of his father. You can even read the other two tracks as being about the kind of pressure which got the better of Syd. After this, the lyrics move in other directions as Roger Waters completes his takeover of the band. It is possible that the famous incident with Syd marked the point at which they all realised it was time to move on; to accept that he wasn’t coming back, and that they need to write about other things.

The accepted wisdom is that Syd had been a hermit for years at this point, but that’s not true at all. After the two solo albums, he had done a few solo gigs, and did a few more with the aforementioned Fred Frith, as well as various others, including the drummer from Pink Fairies, the wonderfully named Twink. He was even in an actual, real, band called ‘Stars’ for a while – they never recorded anything, but there were some live performances. You can get an ides of what they all sounded like from this, which is a bootleg of a pre-‘Stars’ perfomance:

Syd even went back into the studio at Abbey Road in the summer of 1974, but nothing came of the recording sessions – I have heard a snippet of it – pretty much all that remains – and it’s just sad and awful. However, according to those who were there, he was still very much recognisable as Syd; he looked not so different from the 1968 version of himself, which is why what happened a year later came as such a shock.

Syd Barrett turned up at Abbey Road on June 5th, 1975. No-one seems to know how he got in, or why he had turned up at all; he was just suddenly there. He was significantly overweight, had shaved off all his hair, including his eyebrows, and appeared to be incapable of conversation beyond talking about how many pork chops he had in the fridge. Legend insists that the band were working on ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’; this may or may not be true, but there is photographic evidence of Syd in his disheveled state looking on in apparent bemusement. He listened to a playback of what they were doing; when asked if he’d like to hear it again, he said he couldn’t see the point. At the end of the day, he wandered off again, with everyone avoiding offering him a lift. As far as I can tell, no-one in the band ever had any contact with him again.

So, is it any good?

It is. Without ‘Dark Side’, this would be generally regarded as Pink Floyd’s masterpiece, I think; but of course, it wouldn’t exist without ‘Dark Side’ – they had to go through the process of making that to get to this.

It has a few more weaknesses than its predecessor; in particular, I’m not sure there was a need for two whole songs about how shit it is to work in the music industry; they both work, but but they cover pretty much the same ground. The sound effects are a little more cheesy than on ‘Dark Side’, and – I’d venture – not quite as necessary. Having said that, there is nothing quite like sitting through a live performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and feeling the hairs on your neck spring to life as it reaches the climax with that snippet you know so well…

Overall, though, it’s another work of genius. The way Pink Floyd worked at this time was that each member kept the others in check; if Waters and Mason were trying to throw in radical ideas, Wright and Gilmour were layering magnificent melodies and inspired soloing all over them; the whole is very much greater than the sum of its parts.

You may quibble about ‘Shine On’ being split in two, but it had to be that way for practical reasons (25 minutes of music on one side of vinyl would lead to some sound quality issues), and because it does emcompass the theme of the album – Syd’s troubles illustrated by what the track brackets. You may grouse (as I have done) at the fact that Stephane Grappelli is buried so deep in the mix on ‘Wish You Were Here’ that you can’t hear him, but you would also have to concede that adding anything more to that song might upset its delicate balance.

In the end, it doesn’t get played quite as often as some others, and I still haven’t got round to replacing my vinyl copy, but it’s a cornerstone of my musical experience. I can’t imagine life without it, and I can still remember with startling clarity the way we would huddle round the record player in the year area and try to figure out how the sound effects had been done. And I think – for all the talk of the words – that it contains the most poignant and lyrical elegy for a lost friendship in all of rock music as the final part of ‘Shine On’ fades out, and Rick Wright improvises sadly over the melody from ‘See Emily Play’, and for that alone it deserves full marks.

Dark Side of the Moon

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Some things to consider if you’re coming to this new:

I have no idea who, exactly, that sentence might apply to. If you’re in this thread, and you’ve stuck with it through all that’s gone before, I’m guessing it’s because you’ve heard at least some part of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ before. And, more than likely, you’ve heard pretty much all of the stories about it, and the semi-mythological aura it has. Contemplating that, I did wonder what on earth I could bring to the table here.

But that hasn’t stopped me so far.

Anyway, before we get down to the album itself, there is one final piece of pre-‘Dark Side’ business to take care of. As is well documented, this album came together over a couple of years of writing and refining things while completing other projects – you can hear pieces of it on the ‘Zabriskie Point’ soundtrack, for example, and the band were playing a version of it (sometimes called ‘Eclipse’, sometimes called ‘A Piece for Assorted Lunatics’) in early 1972; a full year before the album came out. Unusually, the recording sessions were spread out over this period as well, rather than being crammed into a couple of weeks of intensive writing and recording. Most of the other things which were happening during that year I’ve already looked at, but in that last few months before the release of the album which would permanently change everything about them, Pink Floyd were providing live music for Roland Petit and the Marseilles Ballet. They did at least a week of live shows, effectively being the orchestra for a piece which had been constructed to fit some of their existing music – there had been talk of composing something new for the ballet, but no-one seems to have been able to get their heads round what that should sound like.

You can see some excerpts here, although the sound is pretty ropey:

There were more performances of the ballet, although mostly with recordings rather than the full live experience. Nothing about what was going on in their lives at this point suggested that they were about to produce an album which would be one of the cornerstones of 20th century popular culture. Sure, they were going about the recording differently than before, and there was definitely a sense of purpose about what they were doing; it seemed that having tried all the other options available to them, they were going to seriously apply themselves to making a concept album; but it still looked a lot like this was going to be just another Pink Floyd album.

Concept albums were all the rage in the early seventies; while you can trace the idea back to Sinatra in the fifties (‘Songs of Swinging Lovers’ and ‘The Wee Small Hours’ are concept albums), the rise of ‘albums bands’ in the late sixties led to an explosion in the form – while everything from ‘Sergeant Pepper’ onwards gets tarred with the ‘concept album’ brush; I think it’s not unreasonable to insist that an actual concept album has an underlying theme – ‘Pepper’ may have started life as a concept, but beyond the segue into ‘A Little Help From my Friends’, not much of it survived the recording process. Albums like The Pretty Things’ ‘S F Sorrow’ or the Small Faces’ ‘Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake’ sit more squarely in the definition of concept album – there doesn’t have to be a story as such, but there should be an overarching theme, a cohesiveness to the whole thing.

Of course, you also have to look at things like ‘Tommy’; concept albums which do set out to tell a recognisable story – you might call those ‘rock operas’ (personally, I’m not wild about that label, but it serves a purpose) – we’ll come back to those in a while…

You can argue until the end of time about what does or does not count as a concept album, but you can’t deny that the period during which Pink Floyd were working on ‘Dark Side’ was the apogee of the form – it seemed everyone was having a go at producing an album which could stand as a single, cohesive piece of work, from ‘Ziggy Stardust’ to ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’; from ‘Thick as a Brick’ to ‘Three Friends’ (you should check out Gentle Giant, by the way…). The Who were about to release ‘Quadrophenia’, which is definitely more on the ‘rock opera’ end of the scale, while Mike Oldfield was about to release ‘Tubular Bells’ – not a traditional concept album in that it lacks actual songs, but which is definitely a single, unified piece of work.

Into this atmosphere comes an album of songs about the anxieties and stresses of everyday life…

So, is it any good?

After all this time, my favourite stat about it remains the fact that it stayed on the US album charts for 741 weeks unbroken; it finally dropped out of the chart some time in 1987. Albums which aren’t any good don’t get that kind of reaction. It may not be to your taste; you might not care for this particular period in music, or be turned off by the lyrics, or a hundred other things which can irritate the listener, but you can’t for a moment claim that it’s no good. In an enormously subjective area, one thing we can objectively say about ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ is that it has stood the test of time; it is, without doubt, a good album.

So, instead of arguing about the quality, perhaps I should take a moment to consider what exactly it is which makes it what it is. Just why does it work so spectacularly well?

I think one of the keys is that it is relatable. Roger Waters wrote a suite of songs which didn’t just catch the mood of the time – political and economic upheaval – but remain universal concerns. You may not agree with all his opinions, but he is writing about things which touch us all – what Douglas Adams would later describe as ‘Life,, the Universe, and Everything’ – the anxieties and uncertainties which come with life in a modern Western society. He worries about time slipping away, he worries about the fragility of sanity, he worries about fitting in and the way in which people pit themselves against one another; these are things we can all understand. In addition, when the music rather than the words does the talking, the concerns are still there – the pressures of travel (particularly, it seems, air travel; the entire band hated flying); the fear of death. You don’t listen to ‘Dark Side’ to be cheered up necessarily, but you might listen to it to be reassured that you’re not the only one who feels this way.

It also is the sound of a band who have figured out their strengths, and are playing to them. No more forcing Gilmour to write lyrics; no more solo pieces; everything gets worked on together, and the clearest indication of this is the way the singing duties are shared out – voices are allocated to songs according to whose voice fits, with the result that Waters’ voice is not heard until the end; it gives a sense of something changing and evolving as you go through it.

The sound effects and noises off serve the overall sound; they still sound unusual, even unique (who else was interviewing their crew and putting the results in between tracks?), but they are there for a reason, whether to illustrate or to serve as counterpoint. Voices weave in and out of the overall texture throughout, creating cohesion and driving a narrative, even when the elements don’t immediately appear to line up.

It has a logical structure. This and the next three Floyd albums have bookends – pieces of music or sounds which tie the end back to the beginning, but more than this, ‘Dark Side’ has in ‘Speak To Me’ an overture, and in the ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’ a musically and lyrically satisfying, powerful conclusion – this album doesn’t fade out with a relatively weak track tacked on at the end; it comes to a point with a song which appears to come to terms with what happened to Syd (is Roger apologising? Perhaps), and a song which uses a driving musical progression to tie together the image of the sun as life-giver and that of the moon as symbol of insanity in a final despairing cry. There really aren’t many better climaxes to albums anywhere, and then the heartbeat starts again, and you just want to flip it over and go back to the beginning.

It is produced. This may seem like an obvious thing to say about an album, but it has – in my view – been a weakness of Pink Floyd albums up to now. Initially forced to work with Norman Smith, who plainly didn’t understand them, the band took on production responsibilities for themselves fairly early on. There were always engineers and tape operators around, but the band – never the greatest at agreeing among themselves – were left with the final responsibility for how things sounded, and it often seemed that individual parts were polished at the expense of the whole. Listening to the 2016 remix of ‘Obscured By Clouds’ has served only to underline this point for me; it’s a much better album than it sounded in 1972.

The bulk of the album was recorded with Alan Parsons – soon to go on to fame and fortune as purveyor of concept albums in his own right – as engineer, and he definitely gets them and what they are trying to do; the layering of instruments, vocals and effects is down to him being able to fit together exactly what the band wanted. Subsequently, however, in a move which to my mind elevates this album from merely ‘great’ to ‘part of the cultural pantheon’, Chris Thomas was given the masters, and asked to make it sound as good as humanly possible. This was the missing final step on previous albums; the band would reach a mix which they were all reasonably happy with, and that would go into production. For this, they decided to let someone else have a go at making it better, and Chris Thomas is the unsung hero of this album; it is his mix which brings out all the various elements in just the right proportion; it is his ear which found the perfect balance between the musical factions, and it is his polish which sets this apart from its peers.

Finally, the collaborations on this are utterly perfect – Dick Parry’s peerless saxophone raises ‘Money’ above the lyrics which verge on cliche, and fills ‘Us and Them’ with a colour which Gilmour’s guitar alone could never do; it has a longing to it which elevates the sentiment above the mundane. Clare Torry’s voice on ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ is so perfect it defies human description. You can find out for yourself the sordid tale of how she was denied a creative credit on it for decades, but the performance itself, so full of naked emotion and raw feeling lives forever; you can copy it, but you’ll never touch what she dragged out of herself that day.

And, of course, the way Hipgnosis packaged the whole thing. So wedded to the sound is the image that it’s hard to imagine anything else representing it. Indeed, when presented with options to choose from, everyone involved looked at the prism and said ‘that one’. It doesn’t explicitly relate to anything on the lyrics, but it just fits perfectly.

I first heard it when I was about 13; I’ve played it constantly for over forty years; I’ve owned all sorts of versions of it. It has lived with me through all my fluctuating musical tastes, and I’ve always come back to it as something which is capable of demanding, and getting, my full attention whenever it is on. I must listen to it at least once a month these days, and I have never once felt the urge to skip a track, or turn it off halfway through; I’ve never felt like I couldn’t be bothered to get up and turn it over; I’ve never – not for a moment – tired of it. Obviously, it gets a 10.

Is it perfect?

No, in all honesty. First of all – imagine musical perfection having been attained in 1973; the idea that nothing better than this could ever be produced would be profoundly depressing. Also, in my weaker moments, I kind of wish that someone had persuaded Roger to have one more crack at the words to ‘Money’; it’s fine, and full of memorable lines, but I think the satire doesn’t quite sit with the tone of the rest of it. I think that, in the time of oil shortages, power cuts and the three day week (look them up, kids), there was something more to be said about the pursuit of money, but it’s a minor quibble, and I’d hate to think that further tinkering might have made it worse.

The first time I heard this, I knew my life would never be quite the same again. Just because I was an impressionable teenager doesn’t mean I was wrong.

Obscured by Clouds

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Some things to consider if you’re coming to this new:

It is, of course, another film soundtrack. That explains a couple of things, like why it’s full of short songs which for the most part don’t really sound like they fit between the end of ‘Meddle’ and the beginning of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. It also appears to explain some of the song titles, which were apparently glued on at the end of the process.

The album doesn’t bear the name of the film ‘La Valée’, mainly because Pink Floyd (for some reason, I assume that means Roger Waters) fell out with the film company and took the name of the film off the album. Subsequently, the name of the film was changed to ‘La Valée (Obscured by Clouds)’ – I have no idea if money changed hands, or, indeed, in which direction.

It was Clive James, I think, in his review of Bob Geldof’s autobiography, who explained that there are only two kinds of money to be made in the rock business – not as much as you might think, and more than you can possibly imagine. Pink Floyd in 1972 are still firmly in the first camp. Sure, there was money coming in – a couple of very successful albums had seen to that – but the outgoings were still pretty steep: world tours, often incorporating entire orchestras, expensive holidays, flash cars, more and better instruments and equipment; and paying off disgruntled hotel and restaurant owners. The lads were, it seems, prone to some ‘bored rock star’ behaviour at times, (Glimour riding his motorcycle through a restaurant; that kind of thing) and all of this debauchery including recreational substances for the band and crew had to be paid for somehow. In addition, one of the things which often gets overlooked is that once you have a contract with a record company, you become a profit centre for them; you need to keep the turnover up year on year if you want continued support.

Therefore, films. This one was another Barbet Schroeder one, as full of hippy nonsense and nudity as ‘More’, but with more wandering about in Papua New Guinea, and ritual slaughtering of pigs. I’ve had a look, but I don’t think the whole thing is available online – the trailer is here, and gives you the general idea:

(note the annotation on the map at 49 seconds)

There’s another cinematic outing for Pink Floyd in 1972 – the original version of the film ‘Live at Pompeii’ came out shortly after ‘La Valée’, but struggled in its original format as it was about an hour long and didn’t really fit with the normal cinema-going experience. Subsequently, it was padded out with ‘work in progress’ videos from the making of ‘Dark Side’, and had been further poked and prodded at over the years to try to make some kind of definitive documentary on the band as they were just as they became globally famous.

The original film, however, is a thing of rare beauty – the set as it was in late 1971, played in an empty amphitheatre in the shadow of Vesuvius. There were a few logistical problems getting it all done – chief among them the apparently surprising fact that the Romans didn’t have much of a ready supply of electricity to make things work. The final result, however (allowing for such things as most of the takes of ‘One of These Days’ having been lost or destroyed, making it a particularly Nick Mason-heavy section) is well worth an hour of your time. It’s all on YouTube, albeit chopped up a bit:

It’s really the only good quality film of the four of them in action (not counting 2005), and should be treasured.

So, is it any good?

Well, yes, I suppose so.

I mean, if you set up a playlist of all the albums from, say, ‘Atom Heart Mother’, you’ll probably be scratching your head a little at how this sounds wedged in between the more polished albums either side of it, but it does have its moments, and it does have an atmosphere all its own. Don’t skip over it in your impatience to get to the next thing – it’s worth a little of your time.

There are elements of experimentation on there (the very early electronic percussion and drone at the start could be a lost Joy Division track, for example), there are moments when the inner rock band comes out to play, and there are some signs of the more thoughtful lyrics about to come. There’s the next instalment in Roger’s endless search for meaning in his father’s untimely death in ‘Free Four’, and a couple of songs which call back to the simpler songs of the early days (I’m particularly fond of ‘Wot’s… Uh The Deal’, and ‘Stay’ is just gorgeous). ‘Childhood’s End’ is the last time Gilmour has a go at writing lyrics (and they’re not bad, but Waters has now established himself as the writer in the band), and ‘Absolutely Curtains’ rises above its idiotic title to give a glimpse of what’s about to come (not including the native chorus, of course). There’s a half-hearted Hipgnosis cover, and – I know this is me putting it into a context which didn’t apply at the time – almost a sense of a band taking stock before plunging on.

It was done quickly, as ‘More’ was, but it’s a band more in control of their material, and able to work the bits and pieces into actual finished songs. I have a theory that as this was being developed alongside what would soon become ‘Dark Side’, the songs which ended up on here were the ones which didn’t fit the feel or mood of the next album, which very definitely had a concept and a theme even at this early stage. I can imagine, for example, the words of ‘Free Four’ on ‘Dark Side’, but not the melody or arrangement.

Take this out of sequence, and it’s a perfectly good album of well-constructed songs; in its place (and in the context of what else was going on in 1972), it just sounds a bit odd.

Having said that, of the two soundtrack albums, this is the one I occasionally come back to.

Relax and listen to it again, because after this it all goes a bit nuts…

Meddle

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Some things to consider if you’re coming to this new:

Touring. In the early 1970s, the best way to get people to buy your records was to go out and play dozens of gigs. The UK touring scene had developed directly from the variety act tours of the 1950s and early sixties, a time when the Beatles might appear fourth on the bill behind Helen Shapiro, a ventriloquist and a comedian. These shows toured the cinemas and music halls of Britain, and so – for the most part – did the rock bands which followed. Pink Floyd, of course, toured ‘Atom Heart Mother’ with an orchestra in tow, which made for a logistical nightmare, and – as every band who has ever tried it will tell you – running at a loss for the whole tour.

Floyd also toured extensively in Europe and increasingly successfully in the US – they played Fillmore East in New York to somewhere around 3,000 people in 1970, a gig which brought home to them that they seemed to have a bigger audience than record sales would suggest, and that perhaps they should find a record company who were willing to do some promotion for them.

So the gap between records this time was filled with touring, and as a result, ‘Meddle’ was put together entirely in the studio. For a while, it appeared likely that it would be called ‘Return of the Son of Nothings’, such was the lack of progress.

One of the side-effects of doing so much touring was that the band had acquired a full-time road crew, managed by Peter Watts. This, of course, meant more expenses, but it did mean that they could get round pretty much everyone who wanted to see them live in some semblance of order. One of the bonuses of having this much organisation was that the whole company – band, wives, children, and crew with their assorted families, could occasionally take a holiday. In Saint-Tropez, for instance…

One of the people on that holiday in Saint-Tropez, and therefore in some minimal way part of the inspiration for the song, was Peter Watts’ infant daughter, Naomi. You’ve probably heard of her…

In a relatively unusual move, Floyd went to Australia in the middle of 1971, and met a film maker called George Greenough. They allowed him to use ‘Echoes’ in his film called ‘Crystal Voyager’, and in return received a piece of film taken from a body cam (an unthinkably novel way of doing things in 1971) of a surfer riding a wave. It went in the live show, and has stayed there ever since.

Meanwhile, to keep the money coming in, EMI released a ‘offcuts and rarities’ album called ‘Relics’. The only piece of music on it which no-one had heard before was called ‘Biding my Time’, and features Rick Wright on trombone:

It’s possible it might have appeared on ‘Meddle’ but for the record company looking for something new to persuade people to buy ‘Relics’. It’s, shall we say, different.

At the same time as all this was going on, Roger Waters and Ron Geesin had been asked to score a documentary called ‘The Body’ – how the hell they found time to do that as well is beyond me. ‘Music from The Body’ is notable for a couple of things: there’s a track called ‘Breathe’, which begins “Breathe, breathe in the air”, but otherwise bears no relation to the slightly better known Pink Floyd track of the same name, and there’s one track, ‘Give Birth to a Smile’, which features the whole band.

The whole thing is here:

and ‘Give Birth to a Smile’ is here:

One more person of note before we move on – the dog on ‘Seamus’ belonged to the late great Steve Marriott. This isn’t the place to point you at the Small Faces or Humble Pie, but do yourself a favour when you have a minute.

So, is it any good?

I’m tempted to say “of course,” but I don’t think there’s any ‘of course’ about it – the formula so far had been to do one band track, then make everyone come up with something on their own; ‘Meddle’ marks the first time they hit upon the idea of everyone mucking in together to make it all work. Roger writes the lyrics, and while they don’t quite reach the heights of the next few albums, they are generally better executed than a lot of what has gone before. The sound effects are toned down and don’t intrude on the music; they segue from one track to the next, but there’s ‘Seamus’.

It works because they’re closing in on the ‘Pink Floyd’ formula; it has its odd moments which don’t work because they don’t have an overarching purpose to it beyond ‘we need to get 40 minutes of music on tape, then get back on the road’, but I think it gives them a clear path toward success – Gilmour and Waters share vocal duties according to the needs of the song, rather than who wrote it; Gilmour and Wright add colour to Waters’ basic structures, and the egos seem, for the most part, to have been left at the door – this is exceedingly rare on any album featuring Roger Waters, and we should celebrate it.

And, in the end, it works because of ‘Echoes’ – in the pantheon of 20 minute prog rock epics, it’s right up there with the best (I was going to ramble on about ‘Close to the Edge’, ‘Supper’s Ready’, ‘2112’ and ‘Karn Evil 9’, but this is long enough already); from the opening sonar ping (it’s actually a piano note played through a Leslie speaker), to the closing fade into white noise, it really doesn’t put a foot wrong.

OK, I know some people don’t like the meandering about in the middle; for those people, there’s an edited version on the 1990s compilation called ‘Echoes’ which you might like. Mind you, if you’re like me, you’ll come away from it thinking that there’s something missing.

It’s the first in a run of genuinely classic albums from one of the greatest albums bands of all time.

Atom Heart Mother

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Some things to consider if you’re coming to this new:

It’s the fifth full-length Pink Floyd album released in a little over three years, but if we’re being entirely completist here, there’s another whole album’s worth of material between ‘Ummagumma’ and this. At the end of 1969, with the tour to support ‘Ummagumma’ in full flow, the band were asked to contribute to another film soundtrack; Antonioni’s less than successful ‘Zabriskie Point’. Unlike ‘More’, where they were pretty much left to their own devices to score the whole film, Antonioni had some very clear ideas of what he wanted to fill gaps in an existing score. This didn’t work particularly well – the impression you get is of two sets of egos never quite being comfortable enough to compromise on their vision. At one point, Floyd produced a full score, but Antonioni knew what he wanted, and in the end, a few pieces of Pink Floyd made it to the final version, including a reworked ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ over the multiple explosions which provide the climax to the film.

You can hear most of the music which was made for ‘Zabriskie Point’ here; some of it ends up on ‘Dark Side of the Moon’…

In addition, Gilmour and Wright (I think Roger Waters had given up by this point) worked on Syd Barrett’s second (and final) album, ‘Barrett’ while they were making this. You can hear that here:

I think it’s a terrific piece of Syd music, but he was clearly not coping with anything by this point, and he basically retired from life after this.

Partly because of that, this album, to me, marks the point at which the band stops being ‘Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd’, and start to carve out their own sound as ‘Pink Floyd’. I think it’s a useful distinction; although they don’t quite get the mix right, they are a lot closer to what people think of as ‘classic’ Floyd here.

Pink Floyd albums were never really made in isolation; much of their work is tied up with collaborators, and ‘Atom Heart Mother’ is really an album by Pink Floyd and Ron Geesin, who produced bits of it, arranged the orchestral pieces (not always successfully, it has to be said), and had a significant input into how the final album sounded.

The final sound, however, is a little compromised. Not only was it designed to be issued in quadrophonic sound (it was the Next Big Thing for most of the Seventies without ever really taking off), but it was recorded on brand new eight-track tape, which EMI had declared they didn’t want chopped up, edited or otherwise mucked about with. This meant that Mason and Waters had to record the entire rhythm track for the title track in one take. Mason isn’t the world’s greatest drummer; if it sounds like the tempo lurches about in places, it’s probably down to him. Also, recording over this track with an orchestra proved tricky, as the backing track kept leaking into the recording – if it sounds a bit weedy in places, that’s why.

It also proved difficult to get the orchestra to take any of this seriously, and it wasn’t until the choir arrived, complete with their choirmaster who was an actual, properly qualified orchestral conductor, that anything got done to anyone’s satisfaction.

The other principal collaborators on this are, of course, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, better known as Hipgnosis. This wasn’t Hipgnosis’ first Floyd album cover, but it was the first for which the only appropriate adjective is ‘iconic’.

Thorgerson and Powell were friends of Syd and David from Cambridge who were art students – they did the cover for ‘Saucerful of Secrets’ partly because they were cheap, having access to their University darkroom and equipment at the time. They subsequently became entwined with the visual part of the Pink Floyd experience, and this is the first full expression of what they could do – no clues on the cover to the band or album title; they fulfilled the band’s request for a cover without any of that psychedelic or space-rock stuff. Legend has it that the cow was literally the first thing Thorgerson photographed as he looked for inspiration. It bears no relation to the title (which was apparently a headline from a newspaper about a woman who had given birth after having a pacemaker fitted), and the cow is only related to the music because some of the parts of the title track were named after the picture had been agreed upon.

The cover, however, made ‘Atom Heart Mother’ one of those albums it was cool to own – whether or not you actually played it.

So, is it any good?

Yes.

And no.

It is the first album on which you hear the elements coming together to make the Pink Floyd sound; I could argue that this doesn’t happen enough. The title track is a triumph of perseverance – it is probably closer to the original intent that it has any right to be, given the chaos of the recording sessions. It’s a proper piece of music, with themes and recapitulations and everything – the reason it doesn’t overstay its welcome at 24 minutes long is that it’s very well written; it takes you on its journey without getting sidetracked too often, and the choral element is simply gorgeous.

The other side goes back to ‘everybody take one song each’, and is weaker because of that. Waters whinges on for four and a half minutes about what a wanker he is, but it’s not his fault that all these women keep throwing themselves at him, and his wife should just accept that he’s a bit of a wanker; life would be much easier. Extra marks for use of the subjunctive, though.

Wright’s evocation of when Syd was still in the band is fun, but hardly essential.

Gilmour apparently had to be locked in the studio until he came up with ‘Fat Old Sun’; it’s a great song, but if he’s struggling with the songwriting,maybe everyone could pitch in and help, rather than giving him detention. We’ve already established that Pink Floyd sound better when everyone is working together; this insistence on everyone contributing something is getting a bit silly.

Mason doesn’t really write anything for his bit – he apparently ‘arranged’ ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ – again, there are parts when this works, but the use of ‘voices off’ needs to be refined more than a little – they are still too interested in the rhythmic possibilities of dripping taps to see the whole picture. When it works, it works, though.

Overall, I like this more than the people who made it do; I think its reputation is driven as much by the cover as by the music, but it’s still moving everything forward, and what came after it wouldn’t have been possible if they hadn’t made this first.

Ummagumma

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Some things to consider if you’re coming to this new:

It’s December 1969. Pink Floyd are now an ‘albums band’, but I don’t think it’s at all clear what that means. As the idea of ‘rock bands’ took hold during the 1960s, a method for being successful emerged – you pumped out singles, catchy 3 minute songs which you hoped would get you airplay and into the charts, then collected all your best songs and put out an album to capitalise on those who wanted to own everything you did, as well as those few slightly older fans who didn’t really buy singles. By the mid sixties, the rock album was becoming a thing; you didn’t have to put all the singles on it (‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ aren’t on ‘Sergeant Pepper’, for example), and you could do some more interesting things than just churn out a dozen three-minute songs.

But by and large, bands who wanted to make money and be successful still put out singles every few weeks to keep the fan base engaged, to keep their name in the news (so to speak; pop music didn’t appear on the news unless someone was being arrested for something), and to keep the money coming in.

Having decided not to do that any more, Floyd were confronted with the fact that not only did they no longer have a chief songwriter and lead singer, but that they really didn’t know what they wanted to be. The live shows were still popular – this is the era of ‘happenings’, and Pink Floyd shows included psychedelic light shows, carpentry and cups of tea – but how did you get people to buy albums if there were no singles to get the music on the radio, and no other way to make direct contact with your fans?

The first disk of ‘Ummagumma’ is one answer to that – the live shows were the stuff of legend; the curious could now hear some of that for themselves.

To explain the second disk, however, I’m going to have to talk about Musique Concrete and progressive rock.

There was a mindset among certain musicians at the end of the sixties that everything was getting a bit stale. Guitar bands were ten-a-penny, and there seemed (Hendrix notwithstanding) to be a limit to what you could do with a guitar anyway. Keyboards offered one way out of the impasse – the development of keyboard technology around this time deserves a book of its own, but we were moving from electric organs, via the Hammond organ and Leslie speaker combo, the Mellotron and Farfisa organ, to the early experiments of Bob Moog and the emergence of the synthesiser. Keyboard music was where it was at if you wanted to sound different, but even that wasn’t enough for some people, Rick Wright and Roger Waters among them.

‘Rock & roll’ comes directly from the blues; I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial point of view. Some of those playing rock music at the end of the sixties asked themselves – what if it didn’t? What if it came from European folk traditions; what if it came from classical music? Classical composers at the time – from Messiaen to Boulez, and particularly Stockhausen, were doing things which far outstripped the ‘experimental’ end of rock music – this, for instance, is ten years old at this point:

(Don’t feel you have to listen to it all!)

Why, the question goes, can’t rock music do that, too? Why can’t rock music borrow from the avant garde ideas of musique concrete, where sound is manipulated and distorted by use of magnetic tape into things which can’t be produced by conventional instruments?

Rick and Roger, in particular, thought it was worth a try. In trying, they helped develop a movement which quickly became known as ‘progressive’ rock music – not beholden to the blues particularly; not tied to conventional song structures, and free to experiment in all kinds of directions. King Crimson are generally thought to have given first clear expression to this idea with ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’, which came out a couple of months before Ummagumma, but this is right up there in terms of sparking musicians to go off and do strange, unfathomable, album length things just because they can

(At this point, I’ll freely admit that I’ve overlooked the contribution of The Nice; maybe I’ll come back to them some day.)

OK, what else?

It’s a double album – a relatively new idea (I think ‘Blonde on Blonde’ was the first, only three years before); if you’ve never bought anything on vinyl, I can’t begin to explain how exciting the idea of a double album was – plus, the record company could charge more, and everyone made more money. Having the four live tracks lead things off was undoubtedly a key selling point, bearing in mind the lack of singles.

It’s the only record which features what we think of as the ‘classic’ Pink Floyd playing live. The live shows were the stuff of rock legend, yet, at a time when the double live album was the absolute high water mark for most bands, Pink Floyd never again visited the idea. ‘Live at Pompeii’ will come up in a couple of albums’ time – but it, of course, isn’t an album, and doesn’t in any case feature a live audience.

The second disk, in case it’s not clear, features each of the four members in turn showing what they can do. Some are, as we’ll see, more keen on this idea than others.

While they were pulling this together (and during the time when ‘More’ was being recorded), Gilmour and Waters were helping Syd record ‘The Madcap Laughs’; if you’re missing Sid’s contributions, or have simply never heard his solo stuff, it’s all here:

In many ways, Syd is still part of Pink Floyd, although the first track of ‘Ummagumma’ is his last concrete contribution to the band. Gilmour – possibly out of a strong sense of guilt – made sure that Syd continued to get his royalties from the early stuff, even at the times when Syd didn’t appear to want anything to do with it.

The title? Years ago, I was told it was pronounced ‘Oommagooma’, but I can’t give you any reliable source for that.

(I looked it up; apparently Nick Mason says ‘Oommagoomma’, so let’s go with that, shall we?)

There’s a bit here about Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis, but on reflection, I’ll leave that for the next one.

So, is it any good?

The live album is brilliant – it’s no coincidence that the band playing this music regularly honed it into a muscular, involving soundscape – it’s evocative and entertaining, and worth the admission price on its own, I think.

Lots of people are going to hate the studio side, and I completely understand why, but I love it. Not in a “I think I feel like some Pink Floyd; let’s put on ‘Ummagumma’ ” kind of way; more in a “I feel like something experimental and strange” kind of way.

In the context of what I’ve talked about up there, the first side makes perfect sense – Sysyphus channels Stockhausen; you can tell that Wright has studied composition, and is perfectly serious about being in a rock band which is blending into classical. Waters gives us both sides of his musical personality; the twiddly English pastoral stuff, and the full-on, let’s make music without any instruments stuff. ‘Pict’ had achieved legendary status for me before I ever heard it simply because of its name; it doesn’t disappoint.

The second side is less involving, mainly because I get the clear sense that Gilmour thinks this is all a bit daft, and why can’t they just play some rock music?, and because Nick Mason, lovely bloke though he is, isn’t a great drummer, and has no real interest in showing off his limitations, so they both just noodle about for a bit until there’s enough music to fill twenty minutes of vinyl. There are interesting parts, but nothing essential.

The flute bits by Mason’s wife are decent, and there are glimpses of what Gilmour’s mature writing style will be, but overall I’d rather be listening to properly experimental things than either of those.

But I still love it; there is much better to come, but if they had ended here, you’d forever want to know what this band might have developed into.