Pink Floyd in the 1970s E-Book

Georg Purvis

• Herausgeber: Sonicbond Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Decades
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 274

Beschreibung

It may have all started with Syd Barrett, but the persistence and creativity of Roger Waters, Rick Wright, Nick Mason and David Gilmour meant that Pink Floyd went from one of England’s top underground psychedelic bands to one of the biggest rock bands on the planet — all thanks to an album wondering if there really was a dark side of the moon. Pink Floyd in the 1970s: Decades focuses on the band throughout the 1970s — undoubtedly the peak of their success — from the weird brilliance of Atom Heart Mother to the epic, autobiographical storytelling of The Wall. In between, the band achieved tremendous success with Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon, yet struggled to come to terms with their place in the pantheon of rock music on Wish You Were Here and Animals.

The decade of Pink Floyd’s greatest successes was dominated by shifting musical trends and a balance in power in the band changing from democratic equality to Waters calling most of the shots. These factors, and the looming spectre of Barrett, their erstwhile founder, inspired some of the greatest albums of all time. The book explores the music, the defining moments and the personality clashes that very nearly destroyed the band.

The author: Georg Purvis is the author of Queen: The Complete Works, currently in its third edition. While Queen was his gateway band, he has come to appreciate all kinds of music over the years and considers himself lucky that his first-ever concert, at the age of 10, was on Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell tour at Veteran’s Stadium on June 2, 1994. He has since turned his love of writing about music into a hobby, with several unfinished manuscripts collecting dust on an external hard drive. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Meredith, and their two cats, Spencer and William.

Leseprobe

Sonicbond Publishing Limited

www.sonicbondpublishing.co.uk

Email: [email protected]

First Published in the United Kingdom2020

First Published in the United States 2020

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright Georg Purvis 2020

ISBN 978-1-78952-072-9

The right of Georg Purvis to be identified as the author of this work

has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Sonicbond Publishing Limited

Typeset in ITC Garamond & ITC Avant Garde

Printed and bound in England

Graphic design and typesetting: Full Moon Media

This book is dedicated to friends, family, and loved ones who are no longer with us but whose memories will never be forgotten:

To Donald Hawk, who gifted me my first-ever CD, Dark Side of the Moon, and my grandmother, Margie:

‘How I wish you were here.’

and to Finn:

‘That cat’s something, I can’t explain.’

Without Whom …

This book is the culmination of almost 30 years of appreciation, admiration, and (occasional) devotion for Pink Floyd. Thanks to Stephen Lambe for this opportunity to write this book, and for his immense passion and appreciation for good music.

Thanks to my friends and family who helped and supported me along the way: Scott Armstrong, Patrice Babineau, Chelsea Bennett, Bob Bingaman, Raoul Caes & Jess Roth, Mark Costello, Mike Czawlytko & Julia Favorov, Jacob Carpenter, Cameron Cuming, Joe & Danielle DeCarolis, Anthony DeLuca, Nick, Nikki and Mia DiBuono, Alex Docherty& Sam Baker, Daniel Douglass, Marissa Edelman, Rachael Edwards, Liz Evans & Chris Rattray, Eileen Falchetta, Matt Gorzalski, Dave Grow & Michelle Scott, Julia Green & Phil DeBiasio, Betty & Chris Hackney, Jim, Louise & Penelope and Jordan Kent, JD Korejko & Su-Shan Jessica Lai, Kristen Kurtis, Steph Larson, Dan Lawler, John Mahlman IV & Alessa Abruzzo, Brad McGinnis, Jeremy, Maria & Grant Nagle, Steve Orenshaw, Nick Prestileo, Kelley Riley, Kyra Schwartz& Syd Steinberg, Steve Sokolow, Eleni Solomos, John Dougherty & Valentina, Erin Tennity & Randy Richard, Amy Young, and Eric Zerbe. Incalculable thanks to Lori, Hugh, and Edward McGovern, as well as all members of the Hedrick, Purvis, Ransford, and Zimmerman families. Additional thanks to Philip Brooks for advice and for getting me through some tough times.

Special thanks to:

My father, Georg, for taking me to my first-ever concert (2 June 1994 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia) and allowing me to wow all my music-appreciating friends by telling them that Pink Floyd was my first concert;

My mother, Lynn, for buying The Wall for me on cassette so that I had some idea of what to expect at the concert, and for enduring me blasting the rest of their discography, and even trying to learn some of it on drums;

My sister, Leah, for humouring me;

And finally, my wife, Meredith, for her undying love and support, and for keeping William and Spencer out of my hair as I was trying to finish this book up.

Contents

Introduction: …We Came In?

Chapter One: 1970

Atom Heart Mother

Chapter Two: 1971

Relics

Meddle

Chapter Three: 1972

Obscured By Clouds

Chapter Four: 1973

Dark Side Of The Moon

Chapter Five: 1974

Chapter Six: 1975

Wish You Were Here

Chapter Seven: 1976

Chapter Eight: 1977

Animals

Chapter Nine: 1978

Chapter Ten: 1979

The Wall

Postscript: Isn’t This Where…

Books

Articles & Interviews

Internet

Introduction: …We Came In?

While studying architecture at the London Polytechnic in 1963, classmates Roger Waters and Nick Mason met and joined a band with mutual friends Keith Noble, his sister Sheilagh, and Clive Metcalfe. The quintet was augmented later that year by Richard Wright and finally given the name Sigma 6, with Waters on lead guitar, Mason on drums, and Wright on rhythm guitar. The band stuck to a repertoire of old Searchers songs and newly-written tunes by their manager and fellow classmate Ken Chapman, performing at private functions while honing their set in a tearoom at the Polytechnic. Waters and Mason immediately hit it off as friends, and moved into a flat together, eventually welcoming Bob Klose in the following year. Klose, a guitarist, was recruited into Sigma 6, and Waters switched over to bass, but as the band’s members fluctuated, so too did their name. Sigma 6 eventually became the Meggadeaths, which eventually became the Abdabs, then the Screaming Abdabs, then Leonard’s Lodgers, then the Spectrum Five, before they finally settled on the Tea Set.

Metcalfe and the Nobles departed late in 1963, just as Syd Barrett, Waters’ childhood friend, was invited to join on guitar. Mason recalled, ‘In a period when everyone was being cool in a very adolescent, self-conscious way, Syd was unfashionably outgoing; my enduring memory of our first encounter is the fact that he bothered to come up and introduce himself to me.’ Chris Dennis, a technician with the RAF, was introduced to the band by Klose and became the Tea Set’s lead singer, and, through connections with Wright, the band secured some recording time at a studio in West Hampstead. Dennis’ tenure with the band was brief: he was assigned a post through the RAF in Bahrain, leaving Barrett to become the lead vocalist and frontman. This marked a transitional period in the Tea Set’s career. Klose was pressured by his parents to abandon music, with Barrett now the sole guitarist. Additionally, the band became the resident band at the Countdown Club near Kensington High Street, where they would play three sets, each lasting upwards of 90 minutes. With their repertoire still very much in a nebulous state, the realisation struck them that they could fill out these sets by extending songs with lengthy solos, or, as they would later become known, instrumental freak-outs. Significantly, Barrett changed the band’s name late in 1965 when they discovered another group, also named the Tea Set, was to perform on the same bill as them. Thus, Barrett renamed themselves as the Pink Floyd Sound, an homage to Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, two bluesmen whose recordings were regularly spinning on Barrett’s hi-fi.

The band continued to build a strong following, and it was in December 1966 that Peter Jenner, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, spotted them at a performance at the Marquee Club. Impressed by the band overall, but especially the noises that Barrett and Wright produced, Jenner introduced himself to the band and suggested he and his business partner, Andrew King, become their manager, to which they agreed. The first order of business was to shorten their name to simply the Pink Floyd; the second was to acquire them new instruments, spending £1,000 (a princely sum, equivalent to £18,300 in today’s money) through Jenner’s inheritance. Blackhill Enterprises was also set up, allowing Jenner and King to take on additional clients.

The Pink Floyd developed their sound further, and incorporated rudimentary but especially striking light shows into their set, which was almost primarily lengthy instrumental freak-outs. They also continued to write new material. While Waters had penned two songs by this point, ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ and ‘Walk With Me, Sydney’, both of which were hardly worth the plastic they were pressed upon (and not at all indicative of the masterful wordsmith Waters would eventually become – but we all have to start somewhere, right?), Barrett had emerged as the dominant songwriter, coming up with evocative and thoughtful songs that hinted at a fragile mind who could take some of the most inane, everyday items (cats, bicycles, scarecrows) and turn them into truly magnificent works of art. There were also hints of drug use – one early song, ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’, was initially titled ‘Let’s Roll Another One’ – that seemed innocent enough, though Barrett had, by this point, become an avid user of LSD and other psychedelics, which not only broadly influenced his songwriting, but also his mental state of mind.

By the end of October 1966, a recording session was booked to prepare demos for Jenner and King to shop around for a record deal. Jenner recalled with awe the progress the band had made: ‘That was the first time I realised they were going to write all their own material; Syd just turned into a songwriter, it seemed like overnight.’ It helped that the band had the opportunity to road-test a lot of the material in the London underground music scene. One such venue, the UFO Club, became their regular stomping ground, and it was here that the venue’s manager, Joe Boyd, discovered the band and financed a recording session for them. On 29 January 1967, the Pink Floyd entered Sound Techniques to record their first single, ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’; three days later, the band signed a record deal with EMI and received a £5,000 advance.

‘Arnold Layne’, despite its brilliance as a pop song, was never going to be an easy sell for record promoters and radio play, considering its liberal allusions to cross-dressing, which led to a ban by several radio stations; realising that controversy was a huge seller, retailers were nevertheless able to spin the controversy into sales, and the single peaked at #20 in the UK. The follow-up single, ‘See Emily Play’, was an even bigger seller, charting at #6 and allowing the band to appear on the influential television program Top of the Pops. Unfortunately, by this point, Barrett had increased his intake of LSD, which meant that live performances were often erratic. Television appearances were even more chaotic, with Barrett often refusing to play the game by miming to playback recordings of the song. Mason later noted that the band noticed a significant shift in his demeanour around this time and that he was ‘completely distanced from everything going on’.

Barrett was still lucid enough to participate in the recording sessions for the band’s first album, released in August as The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, its title taken from chapter seven of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In the Willows. Sessions stretched out between February and May 1967, with producer Norman Smith (who had cut his teeth as an engineer on several of the Beatles’ albums), and were recorded at EMI Studios, later rechristened Abbey Road Studios. (The band even met the Fab Four, having been invited to a recording session of ‘Lovely Rita’; John Lennon also attended a concert at London’s Alexandra Palace on 29 April 1967, dubbed ‘The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream’, which Pink Floyd headlined.) Significantly, the band were given unlimited studio time at EMI, in exchange for a lower royalty percentage, which allowed them to experiment as much as their creativity allowed them.

While Mason later contended that the sessions were relatively easy, Smith countered this by saying that Barrett was already starting to show signs of mental health issues and that he was unable to take constructive criticism or suggestions. As the album soared up the charts, securing its final place at #6, Barrett was descending into mental illness, compounded by his almost daily use of LSD. Waters realised something was amiss and attempted to get Barrett to receive counselling, but Barrett refused to attend. A stay in Formentera with another doctor was met with a similar fate; the band had hoped that Barrett’s breakdown would solve itself, but Jenner was uncertain that it was simply a phase.

Regardless, Pink Floyd continued to build their sound and reputation and headlined a special concert on 12 May at the Queen Elizabeth Hall titled Games for May (‘a space-age relaxation for the climax of spring – electronic composition, colour and image projection, girls, and the Pink Floyd’). It was here that the use of found elements and everyday objects were introduced, and would become a staple of the band’s sets and studio albums for most of the rest of their career. It also introduced the Azimuth Coordinator, a primitive surround sound mixer that was essentially a joystick that, when moved, would pan sounds around the venue. More mundanely, ‘See Emily Play’ was written specifically for the event, and was initially titled ‘Games for May’.

The band’s reputation had been built up so much by the autumn of 1967 that a North American tour was booked. A rigorous schedule was drawn up, including television appearances on shows hosted by Dick Clark and Pat Boone. The band appeared to promote ‘See Emily Play’, but Barrett’s mental state had deteriorated so much that he refused to mime to the playbacks, and, when interviewed by the shows’ hosts, Barrett simply responded by staring off into space. Jenner and King immediately cancelled the rest of the tour, citing mental exhaustion on Barrett’s part, and sent the band home so that they could support the Jimi Hendrix Experience on a tour of England. This didn’t help matters, and by the end of the year, Mason, Waters, and Wright realised that Barrett had reached the point of no return, and they needed another guitarist and vocalist to help them out.

David Gilmour had been a friend of Barrett’s since the early 1960s: the two attended Cambridge Tech and would often perform as a duo, even hitchhiking to the south of France where they busked on the streets (and were later deported due to their lack of visas). In 1965, Gilmour’s group, the Jokers Wild, was on the same bill as the Tea Set, and Gilmour immediately took a liking to their sound. Almost three years later, he was recruited by Jenner and King to become Pink Floyd’s fifth member; the initial idea was for Barrett to continue writing songs for the band, with Gilmour, Mason, Waters, and Wright performing the songs. Just before Gilmour joined, the band held recording sessions for their third single, with several contenders – ‘Jugband Blues’, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’, ‘Vegetable Man’, and Wright’s ’Remember a Day’ and ‘Paint Box’ – ultimately being discarded in favour of ‘Apples and Oranges’, a chaotic, radio unfriendly single that was reflected in its complete failure in the hit parade.

Things reached a head in January 1968 when the band were on their way to a gig, and someone asked if they should pick up Barrett. According to Gilmour, the response was a simple, ‘Nah, let’s not bother.’ Their frustrations were compounded by Barrett’s latest song, ‘Have You Got It Yet?’, which the songwriter attempted to teach to the others, but which was really just a lengthy prank: Barrett kept changing the words and the structure, making the song impossible to learn, to which Waters simply set down his bass and walked out of the session. Waters would later recall of Barrett, ‘He was our friend, but most of the time we now wanted to strangle him.’

Two months later, a band meeting was held where it was agreed that Barrett would leave the band, with Jenner and King managing him, while Pink Floyd would be managed by Steve O’Rourke. His departure was announced to the press on 6 April 1968; a week later, the band’s fourth single, Wright’s ‘It Would Be So Nice’ (backed with Waters’ ‘Julia Dream’), was released and promptly stiffed in the charts. Undeterred by their fortunes in the hit parade, the band continued work on their second album, revisiting material that had been started but abandoned during their debut album sessions, as well as some of the rejected material from the sessions for ‘Apples and Oranges’. Several new songs were also written, including a lengthy, twelve-minute instrumental freakout that wasn’t so much written as it was drawn (Gilmour later recalled the method, instigated by Waters and Mason, as looking like ‘an architectural diagram’).

A Saucerful of Secrets was released in June 1968 and peaked at #9 in the UK. Barrett appeared on three songs – ‘Remember a Day’, ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, and ‘Jugband Blues’, fittingly positioned as the final track – while Gilmour was on the other four. The only time Barrett and Gilmour were on the same song was on Waters’ ‘Set the Controls’, though Gilmour’s contribution was recorded much later. The band also embarked on a lengthy tour of England, North America, and Europe, with sets incorporating much of the new album, though Barrett’s ‘Astronomy Domine’, ‘Flaming’, and ‘Matilda Mother’ were often played, as were the customary ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Pow R. Toc H.’, both standout pieces of exploratory improvisation from the debut album. Another new song was introduced to the set around this time. Initially titled ‘Keep Smiling, People’, and then ‘Murderotic Woman’, the song was an immediate live favourite, with its throbbing bassline, soaring guitar lines and falsetto vocals, and an explosive middle section where the band would launch into a frenzy as Waters screamed. This song, finally titled ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, would become the B-side of their final tailor-made single, ‘Point Me At The Sky’ (which, predictably, failed to chart; at this point, the band opted not to bother with writing and recording singles, instead focusing on albums).

The band started 1969 with recording sessions for a film by Barbet Schroeder, More. Released in June, the soundtrack became Pink Floyd’s first full album with Gilmour and first without Barrett, though it was hardly indicative of the band’s capabilities, as it juggled between plaintive acoustic ballads (‘Cirrus Minor’, ‘Crying Song’, ‘Green Is the Colour’, ‘Cymbaline’) and rip-roaring rockers (‘The Nile Song’, ‘Ibiza Bar’). While it still contained moments of psychedelic inspiration (‘Quicksilver’, ‘Main Theme’, ‘More Blues’), the album was a clear indicator that, without Barrett, Pink Floyd needed to find their way, and quickly.

A live piece, in the vein of Games for May, was constructed around this time. Known as The Massed Gadgets of Auxemines, the piece focused on two separate concepts: the first, titled The Man, was about a day in the life of a man, from waking up in the morning to going to sleep, while the second, titled The Journey, was a more sinister affair that drilled down on The Man and focused on the same man’s life, from birth to death. Incorporating several songs that had already been written or would appear on subsequent albums, The Massed Gadgets of Auxemines was a watershed moment for the band, as it allowed them to spin new narratives to old songs and present a cohesive, finalised concept. Astonishingly, they opted not to record it in the studio, nor would a live album materialise, as they instead recorded their fourth album, Ummagumma, separately from each other. Instigated by Wright, who wanted to make ‘real music’, the studio portion of the album featured four different pieces, each written and performed by their respective songwriters without participation from the others. While the listener’s mileage will vary on the studio album (both Wright and Gilmour dismissed the idea as pretentious), the live album was better received, as it contained electrifying performances of ‘Astronomy Domine’, ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, and ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’. While they may not have been happy with the sessions, the band must have been pleased when Ummagumma went to #5 in the UK.

As Ummagumma raced up the charts, so too did the band’s clout: they were still struggling to find a voice without Barrett as their leader, and, having enjoyed the recording sessions for More, were relieved when Michelangelo Antonioni contacted them and asked them to record the soundtrack for his film Zabriskie Point, solely based on the fact that he really liked ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’. And so the band ended the 1960s barely clinging to life; while Zabriskie Point wouldn’t revive them, it gave the shot in the arm they so sorely needed, thus paving the way for a decade in which they were practically unstoppable.

Chapter One: 1970

Atom Heart Mother

Personnel:

David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, Rick Wright.

Additional personnel: on ‘Atom Heart Mother’: Ron Geesin: orchestral arrangements, EMI Pops Orchestra: brass and orchestra, John Alldis Choir: chorus; on ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’: Alan Styles: voice and sound effects.

Produced at Abbey Road Studios, March – August 1970 by Pink Floyd and Norman Smith

UK release date: October 1970. US release date: October 1970.

Highest chart places: UK: #1, US: #55.

Running time: 52:00

Tracklisting: 1. Atom Heart Mother (a. ‘Father’s Shout’ b. ‘Breast Milky’ c. ‘Mother Fore’ d. ‘Funky Dung’ e. ‘Mind Your Throats, Please’ f. ‘Remergence’) (Gilmour/Mason/Waters/Wright/Geesin) 2. If (Waters) 3. Summer ’68 (Wright) 4. Fat Old Sun (Gilmour) 5. Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast (a. ‘Rise and Shine’ b. ‘Sunny Side Up’ c. ‘Morning Glory’) (Gilmour/Mason/Waters/Wright)

Pink Floyd started the 1970s off right away with a series of recording sessions at Abbey Road’s EMI Studios working on songs for the Zabriskie Point film they had been commissioned to record the previous year by Michelangelo Antonioni. His follow-up film to 1966’s landmark Blow Up, Zabriskie Point followed in the same vein of a disenchanted, politically radical dreamer named Mark who had been incorrectly identified as the shooter in the murder of a police officer in Los Angeles. To escape the heat, he hijacks a small, single-engine plane and happens upon Daria, a pot-smoking hippie who works for a property owner but had headed off to the desert in order to meditate. Unsurprisingly for the time, and in the spirit of the free love movement that had bled over from the late 1960s, the two make love and engage in orgies in Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park.

The band had initially been commissioned to write and record the entire score for the film, but they quickly discovered that Antonioni was a difficult man to please and work with. Despite the luxuries afforded the band by the director – Nick Mason later recalled that MGM Studios were paying a daily stipend for accommodation and food, and, due to Antonioni’s work schedule and the short notice of the project, ‘we could only get time in the studio between midnight and nine in the morning. This meant a routine of trying to sleep during the day, cocktails from seven to nine, and dinner until eleven – relying on the help of the sommelier to use up the $40 per head allowance – before we rolled down the Via Cavour, exchanging banter with the hookers on the street corners, to the studios where we would do battle with the director and his film’ – Antonioni wanted total control over the music and demanded finished takes instead of rough sketches. Despite the band’s best efforts, and attempts to kowtow to the director’s requirements, only three songs were used in the final result, with the rest of the soundtrack padded out with existing material by the likes of Jerry Garcia, the Rolling Stones, the Youngbloods, and Kaleidoscope, among others. Unfortunately for Antonioni, the film bombed, and MGM’s production throughout the 1970s slowed as a result.

If the band was concerned about Antonioni’s shift of direction, they didn’t let on: Mason later shrugged, ‘Continuing our policy of recycling anything remotely useful, we quietly gathered up all our out-takes. There was sure to be some opportunity to use them in the future.’ Indeed. A piece that Rick Wright had written, called ‘The Violent Sequence’, was squirrelled away for a future project (later worked on considerably and released on Dark Side of the Moon as ‘Us and Them’). However, a trio of songs ultimately released on the soundtrack – ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat’, ‘Crumbling Land’ (‘a kind of country & western number which [Antonioni] could have gotten done better by any number of American bands,’ David Gilmour later recalled, ‘but he chose us – very strange’), and ‘Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up’, the latter a reworking of ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, the very song that encouraged Antonioni to hire Pink Floyd in the first place – hinted at the direction that the band were heading. Four further compositions – ‘Country Song’, ‘Unknown Song’, and two variations of a piece called ‘Love Scene’ – were released on the 1997 expanded edition, while a large selection of outtakes was later released on The Early Years in 2016.

Instead of reeling from the defeat of their latest soundtrack excursions going nowhere, Pink Floyd worked on creating a piece for the live setting that would prove to be their most ambitious undertaking yet. Displeased with simply going out and performing a rather perfunctory set of old hits and newer tunes, the band wanted to create a suite of connected songs, preferably with the accompaniment of an orchestra and choir, and so they spent a good portion of January and February jamming, rehearsing, and eventually road testing their ideas. Roger Waters had overheard Gilmour noodling around on guitar and immediately became enthusiastic, eventually working up the piece with the working title ‘Theme from an Imaginary Western’. ‘It sounded like the theme to some awful Western,’ Waters recalled in 1976. ‘Almost like a pastiche. Which is why we thought it would be a good idea to cover it with horns and strings and voices.’

With the ideas coming quickly, someone had to take charge to turn the piece into a cohesive, presentable whole. Considering the band’s ambitions, and their self-described lack of musical notation knowledge, someone with more experience was needed. Luckily for the band, Mason and his wife had befriended composer Ron Geesin the year prior, who was duly introduced to Waters. After a game of golf in October, Waters and Geesin became closer and collaborated on the soundtrack for a rather strange documentary called The Body. The resultant soundtrack was equally bizarre, with 21 pieces of musique concrète featuring all sorts of bodily function sounds (farting, belching, heavy breathing, and children’s squeals) laid over a variety of styles of music – ragtime, classical, jazz, and gentle acoustic pieces from Waters. The most conventional piece of music was the final track,‘Give Birth to a Smile’, written by Waters and featuring an uncredited Pink Floyd on instrumental backing.

Having secured Geesin’s trust, and realising he was just the avant-garde midwife that was needed for the band’s latest ambitions, Waters asked Geesin to collaborate on the suite of songs they intended to perform live. At this early stage, there was no intention of recording the piece for an album; much like The Massed Gadgets of Auxemines, the untitled piece was to be strictly for live performances. Still, the piece needed to be recorded so that Geesin could write and arrange for the orchestra and choir, and so the quartet booked time at Abbey Road Studios between 2 and 4 March to record a backing track, with a rough mix created at the final session. Now known unimaginatively as ‘Untitled 1’, the piece was an impressive, sprawling 23-minute epic, though Geesin discovered that the tempo of the backing track wavered considerably. Mason and Waters had recorded the piece in one take, due to EMI’s arbitrary rule to ration tape supplies, and so the rhythm section had to nail it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Additional concerns came up when it was discovered that the band didn’t necessarily have a collective vision on how the piece should sound: ‘Rick came round to my studio one morning and we went through a few phrases, but that was it,’ Geesin later recalled. ‘I still have all the scraps of paper from those meetings with the band, and there are no notes at all from my meeting with Rick. With Dave, I still have a scrap on which I jotted down his suggestions for a theme, and on the other side, the theme I came up with.’

The hastiness was due to the band going off on a North American tour in March, their first since 1968. Upon their return in May, Pink Floyd was presented with Geesin’s score, and studio time was immediately booked for the following month, though familiar face Norman Smith was not asked back to produce the sessions. ‘I told them it was time they produced themselves,’ Smith explained, ‘and that they should call me if they got stuck. I only received one phone call for that album, so it was clear they could look after themselves.’ One of Smith’s final responsibilities was to book the orchestra, and with Geesin’s score finalised, it was naturally assumed that Geesin would be the conductor. ‘I was… not a conductor,’ he later admitted. ‘I made the mistake of giving the brass players more credit for thinking than they deserved. I’d been working with the top players from the New Philharmonic Orchestra on some TV commercials, and they would give you their ideas about a score. The EMI players were quality session musicians, but you’d ask them a question, and it was all, ‘You tell us’; ‘What do you want here?’; ‘I don’t understand!’ One of the horn players was being especially mouthy. I was getting distraught. I thought, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve wrecked myself doing this work, and it deserves to be done properly’. Eventually, when I went to hit him, they had me removed.’

Mason expanded further: ‘The session players baulked at being directed by Ron, who they perceived as belonging to the world of rock music. Revenge could only be exacted in the confines of the studio, and my God how the blood could flow! In the case of Ron, an actual human sacrifice in the studio itself was being offered up. As [he] waved his baton hopefully, they made as much trouble as they could. Ron had not only written some technically demanding parts, but the phrasing he wanted was unusual. The musicians hated this even more. With microphones open they knew every comment would be noted and their discreet laughter, clock-watching, and constant interruptions of ‘Please sir, what does this mean?’ meant that recording was at a standstill, while the chances of Ron being had up on a manslaughter charge increased logarithmically by the second.’

John Alldis, the choirmaster for the sessions and the Choral Professor at the Guildhall School of Music, was drafted as Geesin’s replacement, and the sessions went far smoother with a more ‘renowned’ face in the classical world. Geesin was pleased to be removed but was critical of the final product: ‘The way I’d envisaged the playing was a lot more percussive and punchy. I was very much into black jazz, like Mingus and Ellington, and my score reflected that. But John Alldis hadn’t a bloody clue about jazz, so the way he got them to play it was a bit wet … It was a good compromise. I wanted more punch, but then again the Floyd always seemed to need that pastel wash on their music, even on the punchy stuff.’

With the suite now largely finished, the decision was made to feature it as the centrepiece of their new album. The problem, now, was that the rest of the album needed to be written and recorded. Keeping with the confined solitude of Ummagumma, the three principal songwriters delivered one song each. While there was undoubtedly a general understanding of how they wanted the new album to sound, it’s surprising that Waters, Wright, and Gilmour each wrote pastoral and largely acoustic songs that were complementary to each other. ‘If’, Waters’ contribution, was a delicate ode to hypotheticals, with a particularly touching nod to Syd Barrett’s mental state and Waters’ fear of going insane; ‘Summer ’68’, penned by Wright, was an older song, from the A Saucerful of Secrets sessions (initially known as ‘One Night Stand’), and dealt with infidelity while on the road; Gilmour’s ‘Fat Old Sun’ took the bucolic, plaintive atmosphere of the previous year’s ‘Grantchester Meadows’ and turned up the poignancy a notch.

The album’s final song was anything but conventional: inspired by the musique concrète of ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat’, Mason constructed a lengthy piece that featured Floyd roadie Alan Styles making breakfast and describing his meal. ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ was a 13-minute joke that featured the sounds of eggs being cracked, bacon sizzling, juice being consumed, and milk being poured on cereal, overtop the band casually jamming away; an early form of ASMR, if the listener wasn’t hungry before listening to this piece, then they certainly would be clamouring for a good breakfast by the end of it. Remarkably, the piece was performed live a handful of times, with Styles being brought out to narrate the proceedings; Mason later joked that ‘he got to be such a big star that we were afraid to ask him to do things like lifting gear. In the end, we had to fire him.’

There was still the pressing matter of what to call the 23-minute sprawling epic. Dissatisfied with its live title, ‘The Amazing Pudding’, the band stumbled upon its eventual – and oddly appropriate – name entirely by chance. Having been booked to perform on John Peel’s Sunday Concert on 16 July, the band’s hand was forced by Peel who needed a title to be registered for royalties. Geesin’s recollection was that ‘we were sitting in the control room and John Peel had his newspaper [The Evening Standard] … I said, ‘If you look in there you’ll find a title,’ and then Roger picked up the paper and said, ‘‘Atom Heart Mother’,’ and the others said, ‘Yeah, that sounds good’.’ The article in question, ‘The Atom Heart Mother Is Named’, was about a 56-year-old woman, Mrs Constance Ladell, who had a plutonium-based pacemaker installed during her pregnancy.

With the album nearing completion, the band’s art directors of choice, Hipgnosis, were called upon to come up with a suitable cover. Comprising then of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, Hipgnosis was founded in 1968 when the duo approached the band and asked to design their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets