According to David Gilmour, Pink Floyd were keen to get into high profile film scores – the reason they wrote the music for More – so they were delighted when Michelangelo Antonioni approached them to compose the soundtrack of Zabriskie Point, a sprawling but beautifully filmed collage of images of the American hippie and anti-war movement. Antonioni had first seen Pink Floyd at the IT launch party at the Roundhouse in 1966 but it was hearing ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ that made him send them plane tickets to Rome.
Recording the soundtrack took two weeks, spread over November and early December, 1969, with at least two trips back to Britain to fulfil already contracted gigs. Because of the short notice, it had only been possible to book a studio from midnight until nine in the morning. The band were put up at the luxurious Hotel Massimo D’Azeglio near the Termini Station where they were on a fixed rate which included a $40 a day food allowance to be spent at the hotel’s famous turn-of-the-century restaurant; an enormous amount of money. It did not take them long to realise that the allowance was wasted if they did not order the very best on offer.
Roger: “Every day we would get up at about 4.30 in the afternoon. We’d pop into the bar and sit there until about 7.00 then we’d stagger into the restaurant where we’d eat for about two hours and drink. By about halfway through the two weeks, the bloke there was beginning to suss out what we wanted; we kept asking for these ridiculous wines so by the end he was coming up with these really insane wines.”
Nick: “The peach melba was good too. I used to start with sole bonne femme followed by the roast leg of lamb cooked with rosemary. Then a peach melba or a crepe suzette, or perhaps both.”
The studio was only a short walk away, down the Via Cavour, where the group would exchange pleasantries with the hookers who worked there. Roger: “We could have finished the whole thing in about five days because there wasn’t too much to do. Antonioni was there and we did some great stuff, but he’d listen and go – and I remember he had this terrible twitch – ‘Eet’s very beauteeful but eet’s too sad’ or ‘Eet’s too strong.’ It was always something that stopped it being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong and he’d still be unhappy. It was hell, sheer hell.” The band worked until eight in the morning, returned to the hotel for breakfast, then slept.
Rick: “It’s all improvised, but nonetheless it was really hard work. We had each piece of music and we did, say, six takes of each, and he’d choose the best. Antonioni’s not hard to work with – but he’s a perfectionist … every night for two weeks to get twenty minutes of music, it was hard, but it was worth it.”
In the end Antonioni felt he needed a more American sounding score and only used three of the tracks:* ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat,’ ‘Crumbling Land,’ and ‘Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up,’ an improvised remake of ‘Careful With That Axe,’ which was utilised very effectively over the multiple slow motion shots of a luxury desert home exploding. The Floyd were understandably irritated when Antonioni flew the Grateful Dead to Italy to provide more music. Roger felt it was because the band’s sound was beginning to pervade the whole film: “He was afraid of Pink Floyd becoming part of the film, rather than it staying entirely Antonioni. So we were quite upset when he used all these other things. I mean if he had used things which we found better … there were only two pieces of music in the film that we did, really, and the other piece of music we did, was like, any other group could have done, really. A direct imitation really of Byrds, Crosby, Stills and Nash, or something.”
Zabriskie Point was released in March, 1970.
After this relaxing interlude, the Floyd returned to the more rigorous life on the road. Steve O’Rourke certainly pushed them and, though it was an exhausting pace, the band was finally making decent money. Their overdraft was being paid off and each member was earning a decent income. But along with the touring came the need to record yet another album and, as usual, they had very few ideas. Pink Floyd music has always been about illusive atmospheres, textures, changes in timbre, soundscapes; they are not regarded for their catchy melodies or memorable lyrics even though, undoubtedly, there are some. Assembling an album was always a long slow process for the Floyd but the main theme they had for their next LP looked like developing into a long piece, enough to take up the whole of one side.
David came up with the original riff for what became ‘Atom Heart Mother’ in a rehearsal hall. Roger: “He played that riff … and we all listened to it and thought, ‘Oh, that’s quite nice …’ but we all thought the same thing which was that it sounds like a theme from some awful Western; it had that kind of … slight pastiche, heroic, plodding quality to it … of horses silhouetted against the sunset. Which is why we thought it’d be a good idea to play on that really and cover it in horns and strings and voices and whatever else. So that’s why we did it; because it sounded like a … very heavy movie score. I think we found … I have no idea why we fouled it up. I think we probably did it because we were … we felt rather inadequate to cope with it.”
Keeping to the cinematic sound, each member contributed to David’s original theme, adding and taking away parts until they had a long piece that they were satisfied with. Using the working title that accurately described its construction, ‘The Amazing Pudding’, they premiered it live at the Theatre des Champs Elysées in Paris on January 23, 1970.
In March they toured Europe, playing five cities in Germany before going on to Sweden, Denmark and France. This was a year of festivals including the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, the Isle of Wight Festival – where they contributed to the PA for the whole event and David Gilmour mixed Jimi Hendrix’s sound – the Great Medicine Ball in Canterbury, the Holland Pop Festival in Rotterdam, the First Open Air Pop Festival at Aachen in Germany, and a whole group of festivals in the South of France: the XI Festival International de Jazz in Antibes, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Festival Maudit de Biot, Popanalia in Nice, the St. Tropez Music Festival and the Fête de St Raphaël.
In Britain they premiered their new piece, now called ‘Atom Heart Mother’, at Blackhill’s Garden Party, a free concert held in Hyde Park on July 18 organised by their ex-managers. They used a brass ensemble and a choir and, according to Disc and Music Echo, “gave an hour of beautifully mature music, soothing and inspiring to listen to.”
Whenever they could the band squeezed recording dates between gigs: after a couple of weeks in March and a week in April they had the 25 minute title track blocked out, but not all the time signatures were the same and a beat was missing here and there from the edits. Though the pieces sounded great on stage, the band recognised that it was really a bit dull and in need of some colour. As none of them could write music well enough to properly arrange the piece they approached Ron Geesin to fix it. Nick Mason knew Geesin through a mutual friend, Sam Cutler, as they lived near to each other in Notting Hill.
Ron had been approached to compose the soundtrack (released on Harvest) for a documentary called The Body, directed by Tony Garnett. It was a film of a journey through the body itself using micro-photography that was originally intended to have no words, just music as its soundtrack. Ron: “It was great – it told its own story of travelling through the human body, but then they were forced to get Vanessa Redgrave and someone else to narrate. They did all sorts of pansy stuff over the top of it.”
Atom Heart Mother was released in October, 1970.
Roger Waters was brought in to add some lyrics to the music, urgently required by the distributor, resulting in the whole of Pink Floyd playing on the closing track, ‘Give Birth To A Smile’. Roger’s recordings took place between January and March 1970 at Geesin’s Ladbroke Grove studio and during that time they became good friends and even golf partners, so when the Floyd needed an arranger for ‘Atom Heart Mother’, Ron was the first person they thought of. In April, with EMI pressuring them for an album, they handed the tapes over to Geesin, asking him to write melodies and arrangements for choir and a horn section to liven up the less interesting bits.
The band then left for their third American tour, taking along their Azimuth Co-ordinator. In New York, Bill Graham had only offered them a 40 minute slot at the Fillmore East on a bill with three other groups so they rented the venue from him themselves and sold it out. They also took with them their own 4000 watt PA sound system because they didn’t like the Fillmore’s acoustics; Graham had put very little money into the place, which was the old Village Theatre, and there were no acoustic baffles on the high ceiling to absorb the sound. With their live show now showcasing ‘Atom Heart Mother’, and the record company agreeing to subsidise a horn section and a choir for the New York and Los Angeles segments of the tour, the band was particularly anxious that the sound be good. They had not been looking forward to the trip.
Rick: “I don’t like living in hotels for weeks and there is a lot of violence in America.” The Floyd now had several years of experience of being on the road, and the groupies and room service food no longer held the same romantic appeal. Their concerns were justified because the band almost missed the last date of the tour when all their equipment – the PA system including 12 speakers, Rick’s electric organ, two drum kits and four guitars – was stolen in New Orleans. Roger: “That was nearly a total disaster. We sat down in our hotel thinking, ‘Well that’s it, it’s all over.’ We were pouring out our troubles to a girl who worked at the hotel and she said her father worked for the FBI. The police hadn’t helped us much, but the FBI got to work, and four hours later it was found. £15,000 worth.”
Back in England, Ron Geesin was sweating over the Atom Heart Mother tapes at Abbey Road. Ron: “I think that they had hit creative exhaustion. They had been battling away with each other and had not learnt the skills of pulling off, retreating from each other, and I think they were rather heavily battling. I think they were creatively exhausted and they needed the influence of an outside view … so as I was their mate at the time, they proposed this thing that they wanted brass and choir on, this long piece, and they provided me with really what I would call the backing tracks, probably they were a bit more than backing tracks – they did have the sound that was the astral slide guitar on them in places.”
Geesin wrote a score for a 10-piece brass section and a 20 voice choir, plus one solo cello. Unfortunately the EMI studio session mafia did not like to play anything difficult, and made his life as difficult as possible by continually asking unnecessary questions and playing badly. Eventually an agreement was worked out after Ron suggested that he and one of the recalcitrant brass players go outside and settle their differences man to man, and the session men plodded their way through the score. Matters were not helped by the fact that it was a swelteringly hot May, and the backing tapes were not all in the same time signature, having been poorly edited together. Geesin quickly got himself into a desperate state but was rescued by choirmaster John Aldiss who saw how obdurate the session men were being. In June, Aldiss took over as conductor and managed to get a useable recording out of them with Ron advising from the sidelines. But Geesin was not satisfied. He regarded the recording as “a bloody disaster”. Ron: “I turned to Steve O’Rourke and said, ‘That’s a good rehearsal, can we do it again?’”
Though Geesin is on a one fifth royalty for what became one whole side of the album, and some of his arrangements, like the solo cello, contributed greatly to the album’s success, the band did not list his name among the credits. This was something his wife was particularly incensed by, but Ron was more circumspect, having worked in the music business for years and knowing how musicians behave. He was bitterly disappointed at how it turned out, mostly because in order to compensate for the fact that Nick Mason plays behind the beat, the orchestral parts were all played exactly one beat late, ruining his arrangement.
Geesin told Nick Schaffner: “It turned out that from Nicky’s point of view, beat number one was one beat off that – and he insisted that everything I’d written for that section had to be moved one beat. So that whole part has all my writing one beat away from where it should have been. I should have just rubbed out all the bar lines and moved them one beat up, but I wasn’t clever enough.” When learning this, it becomes immediately apparent and the horns in particular seem to drag unbearably.*
The album went to number one in Britain, thanks largely to Ron’s work on the title track: “I took the backing tracks and formed all the top, all the … I don’t know, icing on the cake … working, most of the time on my own, but part of the choir section was done with Rick. Say the first half of it was done in collaboration with him, but I did all the writing. It was really just him and I discussing where the float should go, where the wisps of smoke and lines ought to go.”
On July 16, two days before the Hyde Park concert, the Floyd were recording a version of the track – still known as ‘The Amazing Pudding’ – for a John Peel In Concert programme at the BBC Paris Cinema on Lower Regent Street. As they were relaxing outside a pub at 7pm on a sunny evening, enjoying a break from recording, BBC producer Jeff Griffin asked what it was going to be called as forms had to be filled in for collecting performance royalties. They still didn’t have a proper name for the piece. Peel walked down the street and bought a copy of the Evening Standard and, looking through the headlines, seeking inspiration, they came upon a small story about a woman that had an atom powered pacemaker fitted in her chest. The headline was ‘Atom Heart Mother’. “Oh, yes,” said Roger, “that’s a nice name, we’ll call it that!”
Rick was never very happy about the album recording but said, “I did enjoy playing it live when it worked, particularly in America, where for some reason musicians just got into the thing a lot more. I don’t know why. I certainly enjoyed playing it live ‘cause it was a totally new experience of working with other people. The actual recording of it is not that good.”
Roger had stronger opinions: “Atom Heart Mother is a really awful and embarrassing record. But most of the albums were good in one way or another. I honestly believe we were very progressive for the time.” He thought it was a good thing to have attempted but didn’t think they brought it off successfully. “People accuse us of being pretentious, but if you don’t push the boundaries, if you don’t verge on the borders of being pretentious, I don’t think you advance an awful lot. You’ve got to have courage and not care what people think about you at that moment.”
The sleeve was the first truly striking Hipgnosis production for Pink Floyd; a very conscious attempt to get away from the obvious psychedelic designs that other progressive rock groups used. Storm Thorgerson: “The idea came from a friend of mine in conversation. He just said, ‘How about a picture of a cow?’ as an example of something pretty damn ordinary, and immediately he said it, I kind of twigged and went out and shot a cow, and I took a picture like how I remembered at school, in an animal textbook – it’s supposed to be the ultimate picture of a cow – it’s just totally cow … it should say ‘COW’ to you.”
Sadly the photo of Lulubelle, the pedigree Friesian, was not taken in Grantchester Meadows and so therefore does not support my ‘Pink Floyd-as-a-Cambridge-band’ theme; it was shot outside Potters Bar in Hertfordshire. It was a brilliant choice and oddly, it suited the Floyd whereas it would have looked merely absurd on a Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer sleeve. Somehow it corresponded to the stately, processional, anthemic theme of ‘Atom Heart Mother,’ evoking some notion of a timeless England.*
Pretentious or not, Atom Heart Mother was tuned in to the Zeitgeist of that moment: the tiredness after all the late nights and drugs of the Sixties, the more introspective reflection on life as that generation grew up, established more permanent relationships, started families, decided how to live in the new world they had made. It also included Roger Waters’ best lyrics to date, the intimate self-analysis of ‘If’. Rick’s candid confessional ‘Summer 68’ was equally revelatory, the lyrics describing his mixed feelings about a groupie encountered on the road combined with some of his more confident piano playing and a rock arrangement equal to the singer-songwriter work emanating from Laurel Canyon at the time.
The singer-songwriter tradition was continued in David’s ‘Fat Old Sun’ which owed more than a nod towards the Kinks’ ‘Lazy Old Sun’, from their 1967 LP Something Else – as he said later, ‘They’ve never sued me’. The solo in ‘Fat Old Sun’ also shared similarities with Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’ – recorded and released at the same time – with Gilmour’s beautiful long solo with its high tracking harmony, like grace notes, buried low in the mix. The church bells and countryside sound effects came from the Abbey Road tape library but are a definite reference to David’s upbringing on Grantchester Meadows. Though the band were later very critical of ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ with its stereo recording of their roadie, Alan Stiles, frying eggs, the public enjoyed the result and it was possibly this touch of levity that just tipped sales of the album to enable it to reach number one (in the UK; number 55 in the US).
‘Atom Heart Mother is a really awful and embarrassing record. But most of the albums were good in one way or another. I honestly believe we were very progressive for the time.’
Roger Waters
Simultaneous with recording Atom Heart Mother, David had been at work producing Syd’s second solo album at EMI Studios. He had decided to try and unite the tracks by using the same session men throughout and brought back Jerry Shirley, who was now drumming in Humble Pie, and Rick Wright on keyboards. David played virtually everything else, as needed. Peter Bown was to be the balance engineer at Abbey Road but he had not worked with Syd since 1968 and was a little surprised when David warned him: “Are you prepared to do this Peter, because it’s going to be pretty heavy” The tape operator was Alan Parsons who was also concurrently working on Atom Heart Mother.
The first session was on February 26, 1970* when ‘Baby Lemonade’ was cut in just one take (though there were later overdubs). This was an encouraging start as they also recorded ‘Maisie’ that same day. But Syd was in bad shape for most of the sessions. He had no studio discipline and Bown had to hit record and then stand near Barrett in the studio with a microphone in each hand trying to keep him within six foot range because Syd would wander away from any fixed mikes. The next day ‘Gigolo Aunt’ and decent demo vocal tracks of four other songs were laid down. Syd had a habit of stopping after a few bars and it was a major battle trying to get him to sing all the way through a take, but if he was encouraged to continue by the musicians carrying on playing he would sometimes pick up where he left off. By transferring all the vocal tracks to multi-track tape, they were able to jump from one track to another and assemble complete vocals but it was a laborious task.
David: “Trying to find a technique of working with Syd was so difficult. You had to pre-record tracks without him, working from one version of the song he had done, and then sit Syd down afterwards and try to get him to play and sing along, with a lot of dropping in. Or you could do it the other way around, where you’d get him to do a performance of it on his own and then try to dub everything else on top of it. The concept of him performing with another bunch of musicians was clearly impossible because he’d change the song every time. He’d never do a song the same twice. I think quite deliberately.”
Barrett trusted Gilmour and would often not communicate to anyone else. He would whisper what he wanted and David would then tell the engineer or musicians what was required. Some days he was so out of it that he even had to be escorted to the toilets. Though Gilmour did eventually construct an album by playing codas and bridges and cleverly looping fragments to extend tracks, there is ultimately an ethical question of whether Syd really knew what was going on. It was rather like Willem de Kooning’s last years when he had Alzheimer’s and didn’t even know who he was. His minders would take him to the studio, show him pictures of his earlier work and give him paints and canvas. He painted pictures, each one worth hundred of thousands of dollars, but many critics felt they were the work of child, not a genuine continuation of the great work that had gone before.
Syd did not approve the final takes and mixes of his songs but he did seem to be aware of how much his friend David was doing for him. Gilmour told Guitar Heroes: “I’ve no idea if they were how he wanted them to be, but as he didn’t offer opinions, we had to take it onto ourselves to decide how it should be – which is quite a normal thing with producers – but it wasn’t because we were trying to assert that on him, it’s just there wasn’t anything coming from him to tell us how he thought it should be … The only thing he ever said about it was at the end of the second album, when we’d finished. We were going up the lift in his block of flats in Earls Court, and he turned round to me and he said, ‘Thanks – thanks very much.’ And that’s the only expression of approval or disapproval of anything that I got out of him through two albums I think.”
Barrett was released on November 6, 1970 in a sleeve showing insects on the cover, not unlike the ones his father drew in the Botanical Gardens, just up Hill Street, when Syd was a child.
Pink Floyd’s career seemed to be taking a textbook trajectory; Atom Heart Mother was followed by consolidation and strengthening in weak markets. 1971 was marked by a very heavy workload which included a European tour as well as concerts in Japan, Australia and a 26 city tour of the USA and Canada. The band had not yet cracked America where they remained something of an underground sensation. This was partly, if not largely, to do with their record company. The Floyd were switched from Tower to the progressive Harvest counterpart for the release of Atom Heart Mother but the corporate culture at Capitol was essentially about hype and money; art, culture, emotion, and commitment didn’t really come into it. Tower had done well locally, stocking unorthodox outlets such as the Infinite Mind headshop on Fairfax, and making sure that Lewin’s Record Paradise in Hollywood, that specialised in UK imports, were always fully serviced; it was outside LA that the problems arose in marketing.
In Los Angeles it was relatively easy, from their first album onwards Pink Floyd were a cult band and, as rock critic Harvey Kubernik says: “If a girl had those Tower Pink Floyd albums, or brought one to a music/LP party to spin in high school, you usually could make out with them at the invited gathering beyond spin the bottle action … Floyd was the first trance music for many kids in Hollywood. More electronic, spacey, and metallic jazz and not R&B driven and defined. A real eye (and ear) opener.”
To help push Pink Floyd up that extra notch a long US tour was planned. They also had to quickly follow up their UK success by recording a new album. Inevitably the band felt the pressure, particularly the stress of two months on the road, every day waiting at a different airport, staying in soulless American hotels and motels. Though hardly the kind of band to destroy hotel rooms and throw TVs into the pool, they did amuse themselves by playing practical jokes on their crew, extra-marital activities and the sort of behaviour that puritan America frowns upon, such as the time when David Gilmour rode a motorcycle through a crowded restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona.
David: “Funnily enough, it didn’t get any reaction at all. People were frightened by it that they all stared very hard at their plates.” Though making a point of not going onstage drunk or high, there were plenty of backstage parties afterwards. Roger: ‘There was a split. Nick and I were the drinkers. I really didn’t start smoking dope until I gave up the fags. I was out of my brains on hash in the early Seventies but I’d given that up by 1975. Floyd was ever really a very druggy band, it was just hash and a bit of acid, except in Syd’s case which was tragic because he had a tendency towards schizophrenia and the acid made it infinitely worse.”
Recording sessions for Meddle began on January 4, 1971 at Abbey Road. Always conscious of how long it took them to put an album together, the Floyd operated on the principle that any time anyone had a musical idea they would go into the studio and record it, no matter how bizarre.
David: “Some of the ideas we put down were just completely stupid and insane, but we did them just for laughs. We did things like … we’d tell everyone the key and then they’d have to leave the studio while one person would come in and he’d know the key and that’s all. He’d play on the same piece of tape without hearing what the other person had played. And we got all of us to do that. Awful, absolutely awful! Still, it was jolly good fun anyway.” They eventually finished up with 24 separate usable pieces with a working title of ‘Nothing, Parts 1-24’ and experimented with editing them together in different ways.
The idea was to repeat the successful formula of Atom Heart Mother and create one long experimental side and a group of short, more conventional tracks for the other. They got off to a good start with a fortuitous discovery that set the musical tone for the whole of the long piece. The band was in the control room at Abbey Road with the exception of Rick who was in the studio, fooling around with a piano that was miked up through a Lesley amplifier that he had turned up reasonably loud. There was a specific harmonic that always came out louder than any other.
David: “Every time you ‘pinged’ this one particular note on the piano it came out louder, and that is the ‘ping’ note on the thing, and then he started playing a little bit and every once in a while he’d hit that note again and we just pottered around a little bit and then we actually put a bit of it down with him actually playing and hitting the note … and that was the start of ‘Echoes’.”
By using it at the start of the piece it set the tone for what was to come. At first this new long track was called ‘The Return Of The Son Of Nothing’ and it developed quite quickly once the band had established the atmosphere they were looking for to create a sound poem.
In July they were ready to re-record the whole thing properly, plus the short pieces for the other side, and, as they were no longer contracted to use EMI Studios exclusively, they booked themselves into George Martin’s AIR studios on Oxford Street which had a 16-track set-up. It was obvious they had to go elsewhere because if there was ever a group that needed a multi-track facility it was the Floyd who in many ways used the studio itself as an instrument.* When they came to record ‘Echoes’ at AIR, the band found that they couldn’t duplicate the particular piano harmonic so they edited the original studio demo onto the master tape.*
‘Echoes’ is pure Floyd: rich, emotional, ethereal and it’s easy to see how this led to Dark Side Of The Moon. The piece is really a vehicle for Gilmour to soar over the rooftops while the group maintains a solid, even slightly funky, beat. The lyrics, like all the others on Meddle, are in no way memorable; what counts are the sonic textures, the changing atmospheres: a blustery night on Grantchester Meadows? Do we even hear crows being blown around by the windy gusts? The creepy wailing of Rick’s synthesiser, the layers of misty textures, all combine to build one of Pink Floyd’s most memorable and solid pieces. Out of the swirling mist emerges that throbbing, bleeping, trademark something from miles away that is the Floyd rhythm section in full echo. It is a tremendous achievement, burned into the brain cells of a million revelers who listened to it the next morning while coming down from too much drink or drugs.
‘Echoes’ was not the only quintessential Floyd track on the album. ‘One Of These Days’ featured Syd’s old Binson Echorec that even in the early Seventies could still get some delay effects that were not available elsewhere. David had used it on ‘Echoes’ and Roger decided to take some of the techniques that Gilmour had developed and try them on the bass. This was how he came up with the basic riff that powers ‘One Of These Days’. It is the bass sound that makes the track. There was also another important piece of technology involved; an H&H amplifier set on vibrato. The opening section of the song features both David and Roger playing bass. The first bass is David, Roger comes in one bar later and the difference can easily be heard when listening through headphones.
Meddle was released in November, 1971.
This was the only Floyd track to feature Nick as vocalist, intoning the line, “One of these days, I’m going to cut you into little pieces,” so altered that you would never know it was him. Nick was often amusing about his reticence as a singer: “Possibly the most interesting thing about ‘One Of These Days’ is that it actually stars myself as vocalist, for the first time on any of our records that actually got to the public. It’s a rather startling performance involving the use of a high voice and slowed down tape.”
The other tracks were less significant – indeed some regarded them as filler. ‘St Tropez’ could be a Randy Newman or Harry Nilsson outtake, whereas the joke of Rick’s dog howling on the blues sing-a-long ‘Seamus’ soon stops being amusing after a few plays while ‘A Pillow of Winds’ could have been by any contemporary singer-songwriter. But ‘Echoes’ was undoubtedly a great leap forward.
Meddle appeared in November ‘71 and despite its undoubted improvement over Atom Heart Mother, it failed to climb higher than number three on the UK album charts.
* Antonioni rejected the lyrical Rick Wright piano piece that later became ‘Us And Them’ on Dark Side Of The Moon.
* When Geesin saw the Floyd perform ‘Atom Heart Mother’ at Blackhill’s Garden Party he was so frustrated that he left in tears before the end.
* The sleeve also looked terrific on the huge billboards on Sunset Strip when the album was released in October 1970.
* The Barrett sessions ran February, April, June and July, 1970.
* EMI Studios was notorious for its antiquated equipment and even when they did buy new machinery, it was already supplanted. The company finally upgraded to eight-tracks just as 16-track machines came in. The Pink Floyd’s early albums were all done on four-track, with the consequent overdubbing and tape transfers reducing quality.
* The new recording doesn’t kick in until the first chord change.