David Gilmour on the “fantastically overlooked” song that divided Pink Floyd
When discussing the greatest rock bands of the 20th century, it is hard not to mention the British titans The Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Each of these bands meddled in psychedelia but flourished in their own niches. In Pink Floyd’s case, the band migrated from its psychedelic era with Syd Barrett towards a more refined and eclectic sound.
Pink Floyd struck gold in 1971 with the arrival of Meddle and its enduring epic ‘Echoes’ and built upon this success throughout the 1970s with seminal releases like The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. However, in the late 1960s, the band navigated a transitional period of unbalanced material.
Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother still lurk profusely in record shops across the UK. They evidently sold well, but both received lukewarm reactions from fans and critics due to a lack of coherence. As a sprawling album of live and studio recordings, Ummagumma contained some truly brilliant moments but was let down by a lack of consistency.
Likewise, Atom Heart Mother suffered from inconsistency, a hodgepodge of lacklustre material. Many fans, and the band members themselves, deem the album among Pink Floyd’s worst, primarily due to its patience-testing Side One medley, often known as ‘Atom Heart Mother Suite’.
Guitarist David Gilmour considered the meandering track “a load of rubbish”. In an interview with the BBC in the 1980s, he continued, “We were at a real down point. We didn’t know what on earth we were doing or trying to do at that time, none of us. We were really out there. I think we were scraping the barrel a bit at that period.”
Fortunately, Roger Waters helped to refill the barrel shortly after as the band’s creative leader. He, too, looked back on Atom Heart Mother as an undiscerning stench in the Pink Floyd catalogue. Offering his thoughts on the LP as a whole, he said he would be content to see it “thrown into the dustbin”, never to be listened to by “anyone ever again”.
The long slog of ‘Atom Heart Mother Suite’ seems to detract from the album’s second side. While Waters is happy to throw the whole lot on the bonfire, Gilmour backs some of the music on Side Two. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only time these two differed in their opinions.
In a conversation with Johnnie Walker on BBC Radio 2 in 2002, Gilmour revealed his appreciation for ‘Fat Old Sun’ as a diamond in the rough. After airing the song, Walker commended Gilmour’s work and noted the brilliance of the live recording from the Royal Festival Hall as particularly captivating.
Quoting a concert review, Walker described it as a “fantastic song, rich with melody.” Gilmour concurred: “Uh-huh. Fantastically overlooked.” The guitarist revealed that he was somewhat alone in his opinion of the track. “I tried very hard to push the others in Pink Floyd into allowing it to go on our Echoes Greatest… whatever [Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd], last year, but they weren’t having it.”
It seems that Nick Mason and Richard Wright were also unenthusiastic about Atom Heart Mother. “At the time, I thought we were making the most incredible music in the world, but looking back, it wasn’t so good,” Wright once told Mojo. “Now we have become a lot more professional, and we don’t take risks like we used to.”
‘Fat Old Sun’ certainly seemed to be the best of a bad bunch. Gilmour takes lead vocals in a song from his lyrical catalogue. Over folk stylings, he sings of a romantic rural image not dissimilar to the pastoral image on the record sleeve. Listen to the song below.
