“Found our focus”: David Gilmour on the moment Pink Floyd kicked into gear
It can take a band years to figure out what kind of group they want to sound like on record. It’s easy to figure out how to make music that sounds competent, but no one wants to go and listen to a band play their songs to the best of their ability and bore the audience the rest of the time they’re onstage. The true artists need to go above and beyond for their fans both in the studio and on the stage, but Pink Floyd had the kind of situation that no other band would wish on their worst enemy.
The ship seemed to be moving steadily with Syd Barrett writing most of the tunes, but after a massive turn in the late 1960s, he started to slowly lose his mind to drugs. While there has been a lot of conjecture as to whether Barrett’s decline was due to his experiments with LSD or undiagnosed schizophrenia, the end result meant that he was in no shape to lead the band anymore, eventually being forced to leave and David Gilmour playing in his place for the time being.
Despite being welcomed in as a full member of the group, Gilmour felt the rest of the band were incredibly shaky following Barrett’s departure. After all, he had written every one of their classic tunes, and while Roger Waters did try his hand at writing and came out with some fantastic stuff like ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, it was going to take a while before the rest of the band found their feet.
And listening to albums like the More soundtrack and Ummagumma, it was clear that they were fiddling around with what format they wanted to work in. They could do a lot of different things on record, like heavy metal on ‘The Nile Song’ and strange avant-garde experiments like ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, but there wasn’t really any direction that they wanted to go in whenever they walked into the studio. That is, until Meddle came out.
While no one would have necessarily seen this album coming, the main focus always goes to the final track, ‘Echoes’. For anyone who swears by Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon era, this is where that incarnation of the band first starts, complete with the shifting musical sections and Waters’s lyrics perfectly capturing that sense of empathy that runs through every human heart.
Fans would have to wait a little bit longer to get one of their first stone-cold classics, but Gilmour always pointed to Meddle as the first time that the band truly kicked things up a notch in the studio, calling it “the point at which we found our focus.” But to truly appreciate this version of the band, fans needed to look at what they could do once they played some of these epics onstage.
Although an album like Live At Pompeii doesn’t really count in the band’s discography, it’s one of the best showcases for what they could do. Not only do they manage to turn ‘Echoes’ into this lavish piece in the middle of the famous amphitheatre, but earlier tracks like ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ and ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ are given even stronger performances that the ones on record, complete with striking imagery like watching Waters in silhouette beating the hell out of a gong.
There had been a group named Pink Floyd for years before this album dropped, but when Meddle reached people’s speakers, they were already dealing with a different band in many respects. These were artists meant to show people what could be done with an epic tune, and compared to what would come on Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd proved they were only getting started.
