Hear the isolated rhythm section for Pink Floyd’s Pompeii version of ‘Echoes’
When Pink Floyd arrived in Pompeii to perform material from their 1971 album Meddle, it was less of a live performance and more of a sonic experiment. For one, it’s hard to have a live show when there’s no crowd. Secondly, the band cut up and resequenced their live playing with studio additions and overdubs that give Live at Pompeii a highly unique feeling.
For the band’s performance of ‘Echoes’, the lengthy philosophical take on live underwater, it was decided to split the track into two separate sections. ‘Echoes’ would both open and close the film version of Live at Pompeii, with its two sections bookending the rest of the band’s live performance. After about 11 minutes of structured jamming, the song devolves into a torrent of noise (spliced in with their studio performance in Paris) before returning to Pompeii for the song’s conclusion.
‘Echoes’ is a track that required a lot of Pink Floyd. There was a necessity to be both highly improvisational and eerily precise within the song’s arrangement. Sections of heavy jamming rubbed elbows with structured verses and wide-open freeform noise interludes. It was highly ambitious, but Pink Floyd continuously returned to the song throughout their career, so it clearly had a strong impact on the band.
For Waters, it was one of the first times his lyrics dealt with the human condition in a meaningful way. “[Echoes] was a 20-minute piece, A, it was a ‘construct’, and B, it was the beginning of all the writing about other people,” Waters observed in 2003. “It was the beginning of empathy, if you like. […] There’s a sort of thread that’s gone through everything, for me, ever since then.”
With a long specified structure and a heavy lyrical focus on the way people interact and deal with each other, ‘Echoes’ became the prototype for what would eventually morph into The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973. Waters extended his vision to include greed, madness, anxiety, and death, while the rest of the band refined the exploratory segments of ‘Echoes’ and placed them within one album-long story. It was a major extension, but it all started with ‘Echoes’.
Check out the isolated bass and drums from the first part of ‘Echoes’ live at Pompeii down below.
