What’s That Sound? How Roger Waters made the clock sound in Pink Floyd song ‘Time’
Following their appearance on ‘Top of the Pops’ to perform ‘See Emily Play’ in 1967, Pink Floyd seemed set to conquer the world. However, early bandleader Syd Barrett had become increasingly unreliable amid LSD overuse and associated mental health issues. When Barrett was finally replaced by David Gilmour, bassist Roger Waters took over as the band’s creative leader.
Through the late 1960s, Pink Floyd developed their psychedelic sound with an open-minded, eclectic approach. Alongside the likes of Genesis, Led Zeppelin and King Crimson, the group pioneered the prog-rock wave with a style characterised only by its colourful experimentalism.
In 1971, Pink Floyd released Meddle, one of their most eclectic releases, which housed synthesised sound effects on the rhythmic opener, ‘One of These Days’ and embraced expansive, atmospheric composition in the famous side-two epic, ‘Echoes’. Although the digressive movie soundtrack album Obscured by Clouds arrived in 1972, Meddle is regarded as precursory to the seminal triumph of 1973, The Dark Side of the Moon.
Like Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon is a rich platter of styles, tempos and emotions, from the heavy blues of ‘Money’ to Richard Wright’s arresting piano composition in ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. What made The Dark Side of the Moon a cut above the rest was its seamless cohesion as a balanced concept album.
With Waters taking the conceptual reins, the record deals with existential anxiety, pointing fingers at greed, death, insanity and time’s relentless march. Impressively, Pink Floyd produced The Dark Side of the Moon in such a way that the songs on each side bleed into one another as a continuous piece. The band also gelled the concept with several recurring motifs, including the heartbeat, a clinking cash register, insane laughter, footsteps, clock ticks and alarms.
The introduction to ‘Time’ hears several clocks ticking before a cacophonous chorus of alarm tones. This effect was recorded by the legendary engineer Alan Parsons as a quadrophonic test in an antique store. While he hadn’t made the recording specifically for the album, it fits Waters’ concept like a glove.
As the alarms abate, a new clock tick is introduced as a run-in to the main composition. Remarkably, as Pink Floyd’s late career bassist Guy Pratt revealed in a 2023 appearance on the Scott’s Bass Lessons podcast, this sound was actually made by Waters simply using his bass guitar.
“That’s why Roger was brilliant, for coming up with things that a bass player wouldn’t do, using the instrument not necessarily just in a technical way,” Pratt told podcast hosts Scott Devine and Ian Martin Allison.
The bassist, who frequently stood in for Pink Floyd following Waters’ departure in 1985, remembered encountering difficulty replicating the sound on stage. “With Floyd, I had to do it in time with this giant cartoon of a spinning clock, and you have to be in time with the clock,” he explained.
Watch Guy Pratt replicate the clock tick sound in the full podcast episode below.
