‘Atom Heart Mother’: The Pink Floyd album David Gilmour hates most
It’s rare that classic rock bands will happily look back at their work and decipher every single note for their audience. Most artists, Pink Floyd included, would rather their listeners spend the time trying to find their own meaning in their music’s lyrical and sonic structure. It means that only on a few occasions has David Gilmour, the group’s chief guitarist, said too much about the band’s catalogue in granular detail.
Gilmour once delivered a list of his favourite songs from the band and shared why, thanks to its attachment to the late Richard Wright, he refuses to perform ‘Echoes’ on stage. However, he has rarely shown much disdain for the group’s back catalogue, assumedly thinking that all of those small missteps captured on tape weave their way into the tapestry of the band.
However, one album has always stuck out to Gilmour as being below their best: Atom Heart Mother. Acting more as a six-part musical piece than a fully solid album, the record still has a lot to love for Floyd fans. Composed before they’d truly harnessed their spiralling sound, the record, released in 1970, is the manifestation of a group in transition.
However, for Gilmour, the LP falls way below the group’s impressive watermark. Speaking with Mojo in 2001 and asked about the late-1960s era of Floyd, which not only had to deal with the deterioration of Syd Barrett but the powerful sounds of the decade now being washed away, Gilmour said: “We didn’t know where we were going in terms of recording, but we were pretty good live. We were very good at jamming, but we couldn’t translate that onto record.”
Albums More and Ummagamma would suggest that Gilmour was correct. The records are often considered some of the band’s lowest in quality. But the band found their groove with time: “Gradually, a direction revealed itself to us, a line that began with the ‘Saucerful of Secrets’ track all the way to ‘Echoes’, via the long piece Atom Heart Mother.”
The guitarist didn’t hold back when describing the pitfalls of the LP: “That was a good idea, but it was dreadful. I listened to that album recently: God, it’s shit, possibly our lowest point artistically. Atom Heart Mother sounds like we didn’t have any idea between us, but we became much more prolific after it”.
In truth, this summation is a little tough on the album. There are some great moments to be found within the grooves of the vinyl. As well as the transporting title track, a song that takes over the entire side one of the album, the rest of the album is brightly polished, too.
On Atom Heart Mother, the path of Pink Floyd was beginning to be laid out in front of them. They had moved away from the band’s incendiary moments and were now beginning to construct songs to deliberately engage with the intellect of rock. Along with the title track, the record also features two classic songs, ‘If’ and ‘Fat Old Sun’. However, for Gilmour, the album will always be looked at as a stepping stone to their greatness.
