‘Seamus’: Did Pink Floyd sabotage their own album?
The dazzling run of space rock gems to be conjured by Pink Floyd across the 1970s wasn’t so obvious at the decade’s start. Following original frontman and principal creative force Syd Barrett’s dramatic departure in 1968, a mushy string of unfocused experimental jams documented a band fumbling in the dark for a new direction. While there are gems among their pre-1973 output, Pink Floyd’s main appeal at the time was as an engrossing live show that transported with heady spectacle.
It took the sixth album, Meddle, to reveal the flashes of brilliance that were to come. While side one isn’t particularly memorable—save opener ‘One of These Days’ propulsive stomp— the 23-minute opus ‘Echoes’ that occupies Meddle‘s entire second side is the sound of four formerly wayward artists finally finding their cosmic niche.
David Gilmour’s whining guitar solos and textures begin to approach his later genius, and the cavernous mid-point break scores wounded isolation that bassist and emerging songwriter Roger Waters would conceptually imbue into all future work and solo career.
What keeps Meddle firmly in the feet-finding chapter of their discography is the bouts of in-joke silliness that pepper the LPs that came before The Dark Side of the Moon‘s laser focus in tone and experience. Ummagumma boasts the underwhelming gag ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict’, which isn’t as funny as its title. On the other hand, their roadie Alan Styles was honoured with a whole track devoted to his breakfast routine on Atom Heart Mother’s banal finale. The Wall, they weren’t.
Closing Meddle‘s first side with a similar guff of throwaway studio japery, Pink Floyd penned parody country and blues number ‘Seamus’ as a jokey ode to Humble Pie frontman Steve Marriott’s faithful Border Collie. Replete with the dog’s howls and barks, it offers little to the listener other than a window into a moment at London’s AIR studio when the band had time to kill.
A B-side at best, Pink Floyd wasn’t so much sabotaging their LP as they were flexing some irreverence, yet honing in on the rock-solid conceptual anchoring that would leave no room for such disposable filler.
‘Seamus’ made its way to their acclaimed Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii concert film, albeit in an amended form and retitled ‘Mademoiselle Nobs’. Featuring pre-recorded barks of a Russian Wolfhound, Gilmour chucks Waters his guitar to play the harmonica for the track’s only known live performance. For reasons unknown, this segment was excised from 2016’s The Early Years 1965–1972 box set, perhaps due to its bewildering distraction from the set’s otherwise majestic prog splendour.
There’d be no experimental mirth following Meddle, with Waters taking the creative helm and overseeing the space rock cruise into insanity and quasi-autobiographical self-dissection. Perhaps ‘Seamus’ stands as a welcome slice of Floyd before the monster sellers they’d come? Whatever it is, it’s a mark of the band yet to realise their greatness. “I guess it wasn’t really as funny to everyone else as it was to us,” Gilmour confessed years later. We can all agree that Animals‘ ‘Dogs’ is way better.
