“For the first time”: David Gilmour on the first Pink Floyd album that actually worked
Most bands have a lot of time finetuning their sound before bringing it out into the world. As much as someone can try to put together the perfect album from scratch, no one gets there that easily, and some of the greatest artists spend time writing countless songs before they have something that could stand alongside the all-time classics. In the case of Pink Floyd, though, the band were lost in the woods for a long time before David Gilmour thought they had a sound that actually worked on this album.
Because no one is really prepared for one of the key band members to up and leave out of nowhere. In a perfect world, Syd Barrett was meant to be the main songwriter for the band, but thanks to one too many bad trips throughout his career, he started to lose his sanity and eventually left the fold after playing on only a handful of songs on their sophomore album, A Saucerful of Secrets.
With Roger Waters now left to take the reins, the band’s album became more like a committee of musical scientists rather than a band. Looking through records like Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, everyone seemed to be starting to hit upon an idea but traded that in for something a bit more avant-garde rather than tying together some grand concept.
Once they got different movie soundtracks like More out of their system, though, Meddle was the first time that they honed in on something. Every song had been developed through jams, but between fumbling around in the dark for riffs, tracks like ‘One Of These Days’ and ‘San Tropez’ set them on the path towards the band many know today. And that’s before even getting to ‘Echoes’, which may as well be considered the definitive Pink Floyd song.
Regardless of the number of times that people might shudder at the 23-minute runtime, hearing the few words of the song about relating to one’s fellow man strikes a nerve with anyone who hears it. Considering everything else was about making fanciful music for the masses, this was the first time that Pink Floyd displayed any amount of empathy with the audience, which would make Dark Side of the Moon heartwrenching to listen to and The Wall more than a little bit uncomfortable to work through.
Although Gilmour was proud of the group’s endeavours before, he felt that Meddle marked the first time that they truly jammed together as a unit, saying, “We did loads of bits of demos which we then pieced together, and for the first time, it worked. This album was a clear forerunner for Dark Side Of The Moon, the point when we first got our focus.”
Despite having some of the greatest songs at their disposal, this was only the beginning. The performance of ‘Echoes’ on record was already fantastic, but listening to them reimage it live on Live at Pompeii managed to take the song into a completely different universe, especially when working out the strange detours when they simulate the listener sinking to the ocean floor.
So even though Meddle isn’t as celebrated as Wish You Were Here or Animals, it deserves to be mentioned in the same esteem among rock and roll fans. While Floyd had spent years in the dark figuring themselves out, this teaser promised more spellbinding tracks to come.
