Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  Ever so slowly, additional instruments enter the mix; a second, Leslie-treated piano plays a series of broken ascending and descending chords. Around the one-minute mark, David Gilmour enters on single-note slide guitar. Wright adds Hammond organ to the mix, playing a two-chord figure. A half minute later, Roger Waters plays the first note on his bass guitar. As the minor-key arrangement approaches the two-minute mark, Nick Mason enters with his trademark drum fill. At this point, the entire band is playing, and repeats the entire opening melodic line, exercising subtlety and restraint.

  Seconds shy of three minutes into “Echoes,” David Gilmour and Richard Wright begin their harmonized dual lead vocals. Writing of albatrosses, rolling waves and coral caves, Roger Waters’s lyrics explicitly aim to conjure a dreamy, seafaring ambience. For the next two and a half minutes, “Echoes” takes the form of a soothing, highly melodic folk-rock song.

  Right around the five-and-a-half-minute mark, the vocals cease, replaced by a soaring David Gilmour lead guitar solo. One of his most expressive and oft-imitated instrumental breaks, Gilmour’s solo flies above repeated restatings of the verse, adopting its own melodic lines rather than following the ones used by the vocals. The technique of switching between minor and major chords adds emotional heft to Gilmour’s guitar solo in support of Waters’s lyrics.

  One of the many distinctive qualities within “Echoes” is its refrain, one that does not feature vocals. Instead, this chorus-of-a-sort is built around a five-note descending melody that leads the underlying chords from C♯ minor down to A and back again several times, before resolving to E major, then B major, and then—after a passing chord—back to C♯ minor. Prior to the hit songs on The Dark Side of the Moon, the refrain of “Echoes” is among the most enduring and memorable instrumental passages in the Pink Floyd catalog.

  With each repeating of that phrase, the band plays with increasing intensity, emphasizing and accenting certain beats. As ensemble performance, this section of “Echoes” represents Pink Floyd playing as a greatly improved, “tighter” musical unit.

  Seven minutes in, “Echoes” shifts tone radically. Led by a muscular Roger Waters bass line, Mason and Wright lay down a solid two-chord jam. That jam provides the backdrop for David Gilmour’s second guitar solo section, one in which he again soars above the rhythm section. Once again with “Echoes,” repeated stating of an instrumental theme finds the band increasing its musical intensity. Wright’s heavily distorted Hammond organ adds some grit and texture to the rhythm as well.

  After continuing for three and half minutes, the jam sequence fades out, leaving an eerie, desolate soundscape in its place. A howling sound evocative of ocean depths provides a musical backdrop, and David Gilmour introduces his now-refined technique of imitating whales with his guitar and wah-wah pedal. Through the process of overdubbing, Gilmour creates multiple “whale” voices that seem to call out through the depths to one another. This impressionistic interlude continues as the fifteen-minute mark approaches, joined by a lengthy sustained organ chord. At fifteen minutes, the “sonar ping” returns. Using a volume pedal to remove the “attack” of his bass notes, Roger Waters reintroduces the song’s earlier chord sequence. Richard Wright adds a two-chord line atop the bass figure, and David Gilmour plays a faraway-sounding, stuttering guitar line.

  The guitar sounds moves “closer” (in other words, louder in the mix) as Nick Mason reenters, first on cymbal, then on floor toms. Wright adds a simple yet fetching melody on Hammond. Just past the eighteen-minute mark, David Gilmour adds two electric guitar parts. One is a majestic, slightly distorted, single-note melodic line; the other is a chiming, repeating figure. Roger Waters plays root notes on his bass with great emphasis, leading the band into a brief, dramatic bridge.

  Just past nineteen minutes, that bridge leads “Echoes” back into the pop-song part of its construction, with more Gilmour–Wright lead vocals and additional lyrics. The descending riff appears once again, played multiple times (again) with the musical force increasing with each successive run-though.

  After the twenty-one-minute mark, “Echoes” engages in liftoff. The rhythmic part of the song falls away, and an ever-ascending whooshing sound seems to lift the song into the skies. Wright’s Leslie-effected piano once again plays the song’s introductory broken chords, and eventually all sounds disappear into the sonic mist, leaving behind only the “ping.” And with that, Meddle concludes.

  Pink Floyd’s now extensive experience creating music for films—specifically the development of musical passages that fit into a defined span of time—may well have influenced the making of “Echoes.” It’s remarkable that—as outlined above—many of the work’s changes from one musical section to another tend to occur right around a minute or half-minute mark in the song. Moreover, the architectural education background of Waters and Mason—with its emphasis on tidiness, order, right angles, and level construction—may have subtly manifested itself within the twenty-plus minutes of “Echoes.” The song would endure as a centerpiece of Pink Floyd’s live set well into the 1970s, and would be resurrected—albeit briefly—in 1987 when the Waters-less lineup of Pink Floyd embarked on a world tour in support of A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

  Meddle was released worldwide on October 31, 1971. While it charted impressively in the United Kingdom (#3) and the Netherlands (#2), in the United States the album reached only #70 on the Billboard 200. But after the runaway success of The Dark Side of the Moon, many listeners delved into Pink Floyd’s earlier work, and Meddle would become one of the most popular items in the band’s catalog; the album would eventually be certified Double Platinum (more than two million copies sold).

  Initial sales notwithstanding, critical reaction to Meddle was decidedly positive. In a review that began by reminding readers that Atom Heart Mother had been “nothing short of disaster,” Rolling Stone’s Jean-Charles Costa enthused about “One of These Days” and “Echoes” and summed up Meddle as “killer Floyd start to finish.” Recognizing that it represented a progression, NME’s Tony Stewart wrote, “‘Echoes’ was only possible because of [Atom Heart] Mother, and it expressed more.” Writing with the hindsight gained over more than three decades, BBC’s Daryl Easlea wrote in 2007, “‘Echoes’ dominates the entire work. It has a majestic grace, filling every one of its 23 minutes with the sophisticated mystery that came to define everything about Pink Floyd; slightly obscure; extremely special.” He went on to characterize Meddle as “everything right about progressive rock; engaging, intelligent and compelling.”

  The members of Pink Floyd knew that the epic track that grew out of meandering, exploratory experiments was something special indeed. For his part, Roger Waters would look back upon “Echoes” as a turning point in his development as a songwriter. “It was the beginning of all the writing about other people,” he observed in an interview for a 2003 documentary. “It was the beginning of empathy, if you like. There’s a sort of thread that’s gone through everything for me ever since then, and had a big eruption in [The Dark Side of the Moon].” David Gilmour commented on “Echoes” in the same documentary. Speaking about Pink Floyd’s experimental nature, pushing musical boundaries while retaining melody, he said, “When you get to Meddle, quite clearly ‘Echoes’ shows the direction that we’re moving in.”

  Pink Floyd fan, expert, and host of the syndicated radio show Floydian Slip, Craig Bailey sees Meddle as a key moment in the band’s history. He characterizes the 1971 album as “the point where things really began to gel into what was going to become the type of music that they would put on The Dark Side of the Moon.”

  By the time Meddle landed on retail shelves, Pink Floyd was on tour in the United States. Set lists from that period included “Echoes” and “One of These Days” plus older material, and encores often took the form of twelve-bar blues instrumentals. Two weeks before the start of that American tour, the band had traveled to Italy to film a live “concert” in the desolate, unoccupied ruins of a coliseum in Pompeii. A mo
nth after the release of Meddle, Pink Floyd was back in the studio, developing ideas for a new stage show to be called “Eclipse.” In time, that work would come to be known as The Dark Side of the Moon.

  Part VI

  Burning Bridges (1971–1972)

  Chapter 21

  BBC Four

  Pink Floyd would be busier than ever in 1971. The band played at least seventy concerts, at venues in England, Europe, and the United States. The band performed “Atom Heart Mother Suite” on a number of occasions with local brass ensembles, orchestras, and choirs. And the year found the group touring for the first time ever in Australia and Japan. In addition to the numerous studio recording sessions for Meddle, Pink Floyd traveled to Italy to film sequences for a music performance film directed by British filmmaker Adrian Maben. With that schedule, there would be less time for the band to schedule a visit to BBC’s Paris Cinema. In 1971, Pink Floyd performed for BBC Radio only once, on September 30. Most of that concert would be broadcast at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, October 12, on the Sounds of the Seventies radio program. One track performed, “Blues,” would not be broadcast. The concert—sans the missing “Blues,” which does circulate among collectors—is included on Pink Floyd’s massive 2016 box set, The Early Years.

  Until 1988, Musicians’ Union rules in the United Kingdom enforced a so-called needle time policy that limited the amount of pre-recorded music that could be broadcast on the BBC. The original impetus for the rule was to keep records from putting live performing musicians out of work. Even in 1971 such a rule may have seemed quaint, but in retrospect, the policy would mean that many otherwise undocumented live rock and pop performances would be recorded and preserved for the enjoyment of future generations. Not counting rare interviews and a 1974 concert broadcast recorded at London’s Wembley Arena (featuring The Dark Side of the Moon), the September 1971 appearance would be Pink Floyd’s final concert for the BBC.

  Once again, popular deejay John Peel would be the host for Pink Floyd’s BBC show. Introducing the program to an in-house audience coached ahead of time to cheer after each phrase, Peel jokingly scolds those in attendance: “No, you blew it. You did it all wrong. Anyway, the Pink Floyd!” The quartet immediately launches into Atom Heart Mother’s “Fat Old Sun.” Unlike the version played for BBC Radio a little more than a year earlier, the 1971 performance of the song extends beyond fifteen minutes. From its opening strains, this arrangement is quite different than the previous one. Richard Wright introduces the song with a simple, melancholy pattern of two minor chords on his organ. The entire band joins in, but Wright’s organ takes a larger role in moving the melody forward than on the studio or earlier BBC versions wherein the organ part is quite subtle. When David Gilmour reaches the “sing to me” bridge, Wright’s organ carries the tune completely, with that same two-chord break imbuing the song with a dolorous ambience.

  After a second verse that closely follows the arrangement of the first—and as “Fat Old Sun” approaches the five-minute mark—David Gilmour tears into a rousing solo on his electric guitar. Gilmour continues for a full minute, with Waters, Wright, and Mason playing at full strength behind him. At that point, all musicians scale back the intensity of their playing, beginning a hushed and understated interlude that restates the song’s verse structure. The band plays quieter and quieter still for another minute, until only Richard Wright’s organ remains.

  After the briefest of silences, Wright effectively restarts “Fat Old Sun” with the same two-chord figure on his organ. As the entire band enters the arrangement, David Gilmour plays a slashing rhythmic figure, leaving space for Wright to turn in an extended, percussive organ solo of his own. Once again, the band reaches the heights of instrumental intensity. Right at the nine-and-a-half-minute mark, the song changes radically into a funky, laid-back, and hypnotic three-chord blues jam, with breaks for both Wright and Gilmour to take turns at solos. The musical bed of the jam’s second half has a feel quite like the ending moments of Meddle’s “Echoes.”

  Right before the twelve-minute mark, the band seamlessly returns to the core melody of “Fat Old Sun,” and David Gilmour sings through the verse and “sing to me” refrain one more time. After a bit of Gilmour’s wordless vocalizing, the song touches down for a landing, to rapturous applause. Host John Peel makes the observation that the song has “changed quite a bit during the last twelve months.”

  Peel introduces “One of These Days,” quoting Roger Waters. “‘It’s a poignant appraisal of the contemporary social situation.’ Err . . . you can make what you will of that!” He also teases the audience, letting them know to expect the vocal debut of drummer Nick Mason. “Although,” he cautions, “at no time will you see his lips move . . . which is something of a technical tour-de-force.” This would be the public debut of “One of These Days,” a month ahead of its release as part of the Meddle LP. The live performance of the song differs from its studio counterpart in only one significant way: after the playback of Mason’s ring modulator-treated phrase, the band continues with the existing musical phrases for a few more beats before launching into the more “explosive” section of the song. In light of the effectiveness of the vocal’s timing on the LP, it’s safe to assume that the premature triggering of the tape onstage was a mistake. For good measure, once the song ends, the spoken-word tape playback is activated a second and final time.

  The 1971 performance of “Embryo” for BBC Radio is something of a curiosity. The arrangement of the song doesn’t differ significantly from that of a year earlier, but the song’s most distinctive feature—the taped sounds of a cooing baby followed by children playing outdoors—are conspicuous in their absence. Peel’s introduction does make clear that Pink Floyd was quite displeased at the studio version having been released on Harvest’s Picnic sampler LP, but it’s unknown why the band would leave out such a crucial component of the live arrangement on the occasion of a radio performance. Waters, Wright, Mason, and Gilmour are all in fine form for this reading, but the performance seems skeletal without its remarkable extra-musical sounds.

  A radio performance of “Echoes” demonstrates the degree to which Pink Floyd has worked out an extended piece that began its life as a collection of short pieces. In a live context and without the benefit of overdubbing, the BBC Radio recording of “Echoes” is an authentic document of the manner in which the band would present the work in concert. Save the absence of additional guitar and keyboard parts featured on the Meddle studio recording, the live reading of September 1971 is nearly identical to its studio counterpart, and to the version performed in the ruins of a Pompeii, Italy, coliseum for Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, filmed less than a week after the BBC date.

  American underground publication Great Speckled Bird often covered Pink Floyd album releases and concerts, and writing for the paper, Steve Wise observed, “Pink Floyd possesses a remarkable sense of how discordant elements and sound effects can be fitted together and made, believe it or not, melodic.” But despite the band’s burgeoning popularity in the United States, Pink Floyd remained a cult band. In a 1971 interview with a KPPC-FM disc jockey, Richard Wright admitted as much: “It’s possible we haven’t reached the stage yet where we could fill up huge sports stadiums anyway in America, and that’s why we are in small halls.” The cost of the band’s live presentation—massive amounts of gear, a custom quadraphonic audio system, lights and other visual effects—meant that touring would not yet be a lucrative proposition.

  And despite the addition of a handful of new pieces, the band members realized that it was time once again for new material. The set list had not changed appreciably in several months, and critics were beginning to pick up on that reality. In that same KPPC interview, Nick Mason observed, “you can get trapped by your own greatest works, like ‘Interstellar Overdrive.’” On the prospect of new music, he said, “Every time we finish an album we say, ‘Right. Now, let’s do another one, and we’ll have two a year.’ [But] we’ve never managed it yet.”

 
; But a creative breakthrough lay just over the horizon. By November, Pink Floyd would begin working on musical ideas that would eventually take form as The Dark Side of the Moon. By the end of 1972, that album would be nearly complete, as would another album, the soundtrack LP Obscured by Clouds. And in between those projects, the group would perform ninety-three concerts in 1972, as well as involve itself in an ambitious project that aimed to combine rock music and ballet performance.

  Chapter 22

  Childhood’s End

  In an unprecedented burst of creative flowering, Pink Floyd spent the better part of the first three weeks of January 1972 at Abbey Road Studios in London. The band’s recent commercial success with Meddle, however modest when viewed on a global scale, would mean that Pink Floyd could afford to book time in one of London’s most in-demand studios, simply to develop and write material for a forthcoming album. By the middle of the month, an embryonic stage presentation was readied with three days of rehearsals at the Rainbow Theatre; the live premiere of The Dark Side of the Moon took place on a Thursday night, January 20, at the Dome, a popular venue fifty miles south of London in the English seaside resort town of Brighton. Though technical problems plagued the premiere, the following night’s show in Portsmouth went much more smoothly, as did most of the remaining dozen shows, all in England.

  Three days after the mini-tour, Pink Floyd left for Strawberry Studios at Château d’Hérouville, near Paris, for the first of two one-week recording sessions. (Days earlier, Elton John had recorded his fifth studio album at Strawberry; he named the album Honky Château in honor of the studio.) Putting aside for the moment all of the band’s new material from The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd instead set about the task of recording music for another motion picture. Once again working for director Barbet Schroeder, the group would come up with ten brand-new songs, this time for a film set in the lush jungles of Papua New Guinea and called La Vallée. Breaking mid-project for a five-night run of concerts in Japan, the band would return for a second week-long recording session in France. Save for a few days of post-production mixing back in London, the twelve days spent at Château d’Hérouville provided all of the music Schroeder needed for his film. They also yielded a new Pink Floyd album—one not explicitly marketed as a soundtrack—called Obscured by Clouds.