The Pink Floyd anthem Roger Waters wrote off as sounding like “a theme from some awful western”
Whenever a pivotal member of a band leaves, there is always going to be an adjustment period. This was especially the case with Pink Floyd, who were left somewhat directionless when Syd Barrett left.
Barrett was the chief songwriter for the band, and he was responsible for putting together the majority of Pink Floyd’s early work. This was all being written during the early days of psychedelic music, where politics were dividing the world, and record labels opted to lean into apolitical and cinematic landscapes as opposed to music that could be seen to have an agenda.
Suffice it to say, while the genre was still establishing itself, there were a lot of fans of rock music who turned their nose up at the psychedelic sound because they believed it was overly complicated for no reason. Jimi Hendrix only ever heard the early offerings of Pink Floyd, and he wasn’t a fan of what he heard.
“Here’s one thing I hate, man,” he said, “When these cats say, ‘Look at the band. They’re playing psychedelic music!’ All they’re doing is flashing lights on them and playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ with the wrong chords. It’s terrible.”
Some members of Pink Floyd even agree with Hendrix on this front. When Roger Waters was talking about Pink Floyd’s most famous albums, he spoke poorly of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn because he thought the band were trying too hard to be experimental as opposed to putting together genuinely good songs.
“I don’t want to go back to those times at all,” he said when discussing the record. “There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it’. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’.”
The sound that Pink Floyd managed to achieve was one that Roger Waters was incredibly proud of. It involved stepping away from radio-friendly, short hits, and instead focusing on albums as a whole, putting together complex stories and overwhelming atmospheres throughout their records such as Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.
It took a while before the band got to this point, though. There had to be a lot of trial and error before Pink Floyd were putting out albums that all band members were thrilled with. This meant a few records were released after Barrett left the band which, while they weren’t bad, also weren’t a reflection of the best that Pink Floyd had to offer.
One of these records was Atom Heart Mother, named after one of the lead singles by the band. The titular track is a good reflection of Pink Floyd stepping into their storytelling side, as Waters picked up on the riff that Gilmour had put together and assigned a theme to it. While it may not be much, it was the beginning of a brand new arc for the band.
“Well, the idea came about because Dave, he came up with the original riff,” said Waters, “I can remember that very clearly strangely enough, he played it, somewhere or other, we were rehearsing somewhere or other and he played that riff.. and we all listened to it and thought, ‘Oh, that’s quite nice…’ but we all thought the same thing which was that it sounds like a theme from some awful western; it had that kind of… slight pastiche, heroic, plodding quality to it… of horses silhouetted against the sunset.”
He continued, discussing how they built on this western theme. “Which is why we thought it’d be a good idea to play on that really and cover it in horns and strings and voices and whatever else,” he said, “So that’s why we did it; because it sounded like a… very heavy movie score. I think we found… I have no idea why we fouled it up. I think we probably did it because we were… we felt rather inadequate to cope with it.”
While ‘Atom Heart Mother’ might not be considered a Pink Floyd classic, it’s a good representation of the adjustment period the band went through once Syd Barrett left the band.
