Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  After applause for “If,” Peel makes a few program announcements, and then introduces the final performance of the day from Pink Floyd. Describing the work as “the high point of the recent and much-discussed” Bath Festival (June 27, 1970), Peel explains that the piece has a working title of “The Atom Heart Mother.” The piece—which had previously been known variously as “The Amazing Pudding” and “Untitled Epic”—had only gotten its name minutes before broadcast. “I was present for that,” says “Atom Heart Mother” co-composer Ron Geesin. “That was where the newspaper was picked up and the title was found: in the control room of the BBC studio.”

  Not even counting the several video versions included, the 2016 Pink Floyd box set, The Early Years, features audio of no fewer than three previously unreleased recordings of “Atom Heart Mother.” One is an early studio version, done before Geesin added the work’s signature brass, string, and choral parts. Another is a band-only performance from a Montreux, Switzerland, concert in 1970, without the “classical” elements (“That one should be called ‘The Amazing Pudding,’” Geesin insists). The third is a recording from the July 1970 John Peel program and includes choir, cello, and the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble alongside Waters, Wright, Gilmour, and Mason.

  Jones’s ensemble was a well-established outfit founded in 1951; the ensemble’s recent work at EMI on Atom Heart Mother was its tenth documented studio performance. The choir was led by a highly regarded conductor and choirmaster, forty-year-old John Alldis. And Peel’s introduction notes that “the arrangements are written by the Floyd in conjunction with Ron Geesin.”

  That word arrangement still rankles Geesin nearly half a century later. At the VIP-only opening of a 2017 exhibit of Pink Floyd memorabilia called Their Mortal Remains and hosted at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Geesin spied a caption card accompanying an original handwritten score for “Atom Heart Mother.” He was incensed by the wording on the card: “Vocal and instrumental arrangements for Atom Heart Mother.”

  “They keep talking about orchestration and arrangement,” he says. “Well, it fucking well isn’t orchestration or arrangement; it’s composition.” Noting that the display features two sheets of the hand-colored original score for “section i”—the main choir section—Geesin is adamant: “Every note was written by me as an original.” It is worth noting that—Peel’s introduction and the V&A display’s wording notwithstanding—every copy of the Atom Heart Mother album since its 1970 release has credited the composers of the title track this way: “Mason, Gilmour, Waters, Wright & Geesin.”

  And while Geesin—like may composers of ambitious works—has misgivings regarding the accuracy with which the assembled musicians and vocalists delivered “Atom Heart Mother” on John Peel’s radio program, he is proud of the performance. The fact that the work is performed live for radio would mean that some of the problems with the studio version—dodgy tempo, limitations of multi-track recording—were sidestepped. Of course there would be no room for error in a live concert that featured dozens of musicians. But all involved would turn in a splendid performance. The BBC recording is a bit “brighter” than its studio counterpart, and benefits from the interplay—however tightly structured—among the assembled musicians. In particular, Alldis’s choir members seem to put even more gusto into their vocal parts. Other than pre-recorded sound effects—presumably horses and motorcycles were not welcome on the stage of BBC’s Paris Cinema—“Atom Heart Mother” would be performed and recorded absolutely live, with no post-production “sweetening.” As such, it’s a tour-de-force and could well be regarded as the definitive version of the work.

  Returning to working on his own, Geesin would release more than a dozen albums, and immersed himself in “sound installations,” compelling and boundary-pushing audiovisual exhibits. Geesin recounts the making of “Atom Heart Mother” in his entertaining and idiosyncratic 2013 book, The Flaming Cow. A dedicated collector of wrenches (known “spanners” in British parlance), he wrote and published The Adjustable Spanner: History, Origins and Development to 1970. “There was no history,” he writes on his website, “so I wrote it.”

  Though at sixty minutes the July 1970 Peel Sunday Concert is a bit shorter than a typical Pink Floyd concert of the era, it stands as one of the best-recorded (and best-performed) concerts by the band from that time. Those who saw the group onstage circa 1970 report similarly impressive performances. Longtime music industry professional Barney Kilpatrick was only thirteen when he saw Pink Floyd play at The Warehouse, a New Orleans concert hall, on May 15, 1970. The band was part of a somewhat odd bill that also included The Allman Brothers Band, and the set list included “Embryo” as well as “Grantchester Meadows” from Ummagumma, along with chestnuts like “Astronomy Dominé” and “A Saucerful of Secrets.”

  “Atom Heart Mother” was performed, introduced on this night as “The Amazing Pudding.” On its release, Atom Heart Mother would become a favorite of Kilpatrick and his friends, but hearing a live, early version of the tune didn’t make a lasting impression. “Whatever they played that night must not have sounded much like what eventually came out on the album,” he says.

  Kilpatrick was unfamiliar with most of Pink Floyd’s music at the time of the show, though he did own and treasure a copy of Ummagumma. Referring to a diary he kept from a young age, Kilpatrick says, “I remember being frustrated that I could not see any of the band members, because there was no ‘follow’ spot[light]. The stage was bathed in murky purple, blue and red for most of the show; It was unlike any concert lighting I can recall from shows I attended around that time.” Recalling that the concert was not especially well-attended (“The Warehouse held about 2,000 people when full, but there could not have been more than half as many people at that show”), Kilpatrick recalls that the venue afforded “enough room to lie down on carpet remnants,” and that joints were being passed at random among the concertgoers.

  But Kilpatrick’s most enduring memory—one supported by his contemporaneous note-keeping—is also its most remarkable. Little is known about Pink Floyd’s touring personnel of 1970 beyond the names of key crew members, and it’s generally accepted that wives and families did not typically join Pink Floyd on tours. Yet Kilpatrick recalls—and his diary notes clearly—that “a woman introduced as ‘Jude’ was screaming at the top of her lungs during ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene.’”

  The week prior to Pink Floyd’s two dates in New Orleans included concert dates in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Atlanta, Georgia (the latter on a bill with The Guess Who). It’s conceivable that Roger Waters might have overextended his vocal cords on a reading of “Eugene” at one or both of those shows, necessitating an exceedingly rare guest vocal on the song. In 1970, the bassist’s wife was Judith Trim Waters, known to her friends as “Jude” (and identified as such in a photo on the inner gatefold sleeve of Ummagumma). Assuming Kilpatrick’s notes and memory are correct, this May 1970 guest vocal would be the first time a non-band member would join the group onstage to sing, and the last time until performances of a work called Eclipse, later to be known as The Dark Side of the Moon.

  Meanwhile, Pink Floyd was earning admirers in high places. No less a figure than Jimi Hendrix—a skeptic of the Syd Barrett–era lineup’s music—would go on the record about the band in two of the last interviews he would give before his untimely death at age 27. Speaking to Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth, he observed, “They don’t know it . . . but people like Pink Floyd are the mad scientists of this day and age.” And to Record Mirror’s Keith Altham: “Sometimes you . . . lay back by yourself and appreciate them, you know. That’s the type of music they’re into.”

  As 1970 tumbled into 1971, Pink Floyd would begin work on its sixth studio album, one which would refine everything the band had learned up to that point. One side of Meddle would feature a collection of standard-length songs that showcased everything from folky, pastoral textures to wild, rocking instrumentals; the other would feature the band’s most fully
realized long-form work, “Echoes.”

  Chapter 20

  Fearless

  Amid a UK concert tour dubbed “Atom Heart Mother is Going on the Road,” Pink Floyd scheduled dates in early January 1971 to begin work on the band’s sixth album. Those sessions at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in London would continue on and off into August, though available reports suggest that the early sessions for what would become Meddle were largely unproductive. The band did manage to develop a number of short pieces—none of which would have constituted a song in itself—and began to refer to those snippets as “Nothing.”

  By April 22, at a concert at the Norwich Lads Club in England, the various “Nothing” bits had been put together in a form the band deemed worthy of performance. Playfully introduced onstage as “The Return of the Son of Nothing,” the lengthy work was clearly still in development. But a bootleg recording made three weeks later demonstrates that the song did eventually come together. That earliest known live recording of the piece, eventually known as “Echoes,” is a poor-quality audience recording from a show at London’s Crystal Palace, billed as “Garden Party” and featuring Pink Floyd on a bill with Mountain, Quiver and the Faces featuring Rod Stewart. That concert finds the band in a very tentative mindset, with several minutes of tuning between each number. The amateur recording renders the vocals somewhat garbled, but it’s clear that Roger Waters’s lyrics are still in flux, with different words and vocal parts extending over the top of what would eventually be instrumental sections. But this early live performance of “Return of the Son of Nothing” runs between 23 and 24 minutes long—within seconds of the run time of the finished studio “Echoes”—showing that the arrangement was nearly fully formed by April.

  On the Meddle album, the epic-length “Echoes” would occupy the entire second side of the vinyl disc. The first side would feature five songs of more conventional length and scope.

  Some of the most compelling songs in the Pink Floyd catalog would arise out of the musicians’ (often accidental) discovery of a new and intriguing sound or sonic texture. That’s certainly the case with Meddle’s opening track, the instrumental “One of These Days.” Credited to all four members of Pink Floyd, “One of These Days” opens with the sound of gale-force winds. Within seconds, that soundscape is joined by a trebly thump on Roger Water’s electric bass guitar. But here the bass signal has been routed through a device called the Binson Echorec. The Italian-made device allows users to create and control echoed versions of the sounds emanating from their instruments. But unlike the popular tape-based echo devices of the day (digital echo and reverb technology was still many years in the future), the magnetic drum-based Binson unit was more reliable and provided improved fidelity. As used on “One of These Days,” Waters’s Echorec-filtered bass guitar sounds take on a distinctive tone unlike anything most listeners would have heard before.

  The Echorec had been used to good effect by Syd Barrett on early Pink Floyd tracks including “Astronomy Dominé” and “Interstellar Overdrive,” but its use on “One of These Days” is likely the first instance of Pink Floyd applying the Binson effect to bass guitar.

  “One of These Days” is constructed primarily around two chords, with a third appearing only occasionally. The work is carried forward on the strength of Roger Waters’s throbbing, repeating bass lines, with Nick Mason adding flourishes of drums—including plenty of carefully placed cymbal crashes—as the song unfolds. Richard Wright adds dramatic runs on Hammond organ, and David Gilmour eventually joins in on distorted, careening slide guitar.

  The insistent, deeply intense bass-led melody continues; around the two-minute mark, some tape-reversed cymbal hits from Mason can be heard deep in the mix. Seconds later, the drummer lays down a series of forceful floor-tom beats that evoke the sound of a door being knocked by someone in the paroxysms of suppressed rage. As David Gilmour’s guitar lines churn and twist, the song’s intensity builds to near the breaking point. As the three-minute mark approaches, all instruments, save Waters’s bass, drop out of the mix, leaving only the heavily effected instrument to carry the music forward. At first, the other instruments reenter tentatively and subtly, and then Mason’s “knocking” drum beat returns. Without further warning, heavily treated spoken vocals from the drummer make a prominent appearance. Reciting the tune’s only words, Mason says in a voice redolent of an evil, British cousin of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, “One of these days, I’m going to cut you into little pieces!”

  With that, the song explodes. For the remaining two minutes of “One of These Days,” the four musicians careen their way through the instrumental, staying within its arrangement but doing their best to unleash controlled fury. Gilmour’s electric guitar is at the head of this effort; Richard Wright has added a straightforward piano part to provide a melodic dimension to the song’s rhythmic foundation. “One of These Days” ends abruptly, with David Gilmour’s guitar letting out a final, extended groan as the howling wind subsides into the next tune.

  From its live concert debut in September 1971, “One of These Days” would become a popular number in Pink Floyd’s live set. The song remained in the band’s repertoire well into 1974, and in later years the David Gilmour–led band included “One of These Days” in its set lists for years in the 1980s and 1990s. In the twenty-first century, both David Gilmour and Roger Waters would feature the tune in their respective concerts.

  With a title that builds literally upon the background sound that introduces it, “A Pillow of Winds” is a Gilmour–Waters co-composition. David Gilmour gently sings Waters’s intimate love-song lyrics, marking at least the third mention of eiderdown in a Pink Floyd song. (Popular in England, eiderdown is a duvet or comforter filled with duck feathers.) Gilmour’s inventive sequence of chords moves the melody forward as Roger Waters’s fretless bass—an instrument he would use only rarely—is confined primarily to a drone-like root note. David Gilmour overdubs at least four guitar parts on the song, including strummed and picked acoustic and electric slide guitars. Richard Wright adds some understated chording on his Hammond organ. Beginning at the song’s halfway point, Nick Mason provides a subtle beat with gentle taps on his hi-hat cymbal. Pink Floyd would never play “A Pillow of Winds” live.

  A classic country and western feel on David Gilmour’s strummed, open-tuned acoustic guitar provides the introduction to “Fearless,” the third track on Meddle. Nick Mason supplies a solid yet light-touch backbeat, while Roger Waters plays a solid root note figure on his bass. A soaring, gentle slide guitar over the song’s chorus leads to the tune’s signature ascending melodic guitar riff. Another memorable instrumental flourish in “Fearless” is its repeated yet judicious use of a break (the quickly-played chord sequence C—B♭—G), which imbues the song with a slightly bluesy feel. For the first half of “Fearless,” Richard Wright’s piano is more felt than actually heard; when it does enter the arrangement, the piano serves as a simple addition to the rhythm section.

  David Gilmour overdubs his vocal line, sometimes doubling the melody, other times harmonizing with himself. Roger Waters’s lyrics speak—sometimes in first person, other times in third person—of a character who, despite being called an idiot and a fool, rises above circumstances and defies limitations.

  Were the ascending riff and break on “Fearless” not memorable enough, for the studio recording, the band decides to add a “field recording” featuring fans of the Liverpool Football Club singing the club’s anthem, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein III’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the 1945 musical Carousel. Though the song would appear as the B-side of the 1971 “One of These Days” 45-rpm single, there is no record of Pink Floyd having ever performed “Fearless” live in concert or for radio broadcast.

  The remaining two songs on the first side of the Meddle LP are sometimes considered throwaways, but each has something to recommend it. “San Tropez” is a bouncy, jazz-flavored Roger Waters solo spotlight piece. Solely composed by the bassist, “
San Tropez” is a musical cousin to his earlier “Biding My Time,” a song featured in 1969’s live “The Man and the Journey” suite and finally released (in a studio version) on the rarities collection Relics (released in summer 1971). A brief tale of idyllic days spent on the French Riviera, “San Tropez” features a shuffling beat, bits of slide guitar from David Gilmour, and an extended, often single-note piano solo from Richard Wright.

  “Seamus” is an acoustic blues song highlighted by bottleneck slide guitar from David Gilmour and acoustic piano from Rick Wright. Sounding as if it were recorded around a campfire, the tune features “vocals” from a collie dog owned by Humble Pie guitarist Steve Marriott. Gilmour had been dog-sitting the pet while Marriott was on tour, and “Seamus” (named after the dog) showcases the creature’s ability to “sing” whenever music is played.

  Notwithstanding the “Seamus” variant, “Mademoiselle Nob,” featured in the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii film, neither of the two songs that conclude the first side of Meddle would ever be played onstage by Pink Floyd.

  Following on from the epic construction of Atom Heart Mother’s album-side-long title suite, “Echoes” is a glacial and majestic twenty-three-plus minute piece of music that distills all of Pink Floyd’s accumulated musical virtues circa 1971 into a fully realized work. The group-composed “Echoes” begins with a “pinging” opening note, evoking thoughts of a submarine’s sonar, a transmission that can be heard more than 100 miles away. The group achieves the distinctive effect by means of routing the sound of Richard Wright’s grand piano through two effects in sequence: a rotating Leslie speaker and the Binson Echorec.