The least inspired Pink Floyd album, according to David Gilmour
The key theme running throughout every Pink Floyd classic always comes back to empathy.
David Gilmour and Roger Waters didn’t quite know what to do after losing Syd Barrett in the late 1960s, but even if he was in no shape to make a record anymore, the least they could do was try to pay tribute to him by bringing their own personalities into the music. They weren’t going to settle for giving their audience a bunch of odds and ends anymore, but it took them a long time for them to get to that point.
Gilmour was already brought in as an auxiliary player after Barrett wasn’t in good enough shape to perform, but he wasn’t a songwriter when he first joined the group. All he wanted to do was add the right guitar part to whatever he was playing, and even though he turned himself into a decent soloist on A Saucerful of Secrets, the next few albums were the sound of a band truly lost and wondering where the hell they should even go.
No one knew what to do, so this period was almost like an art project as the band decided where they were going to go. More and Obscured By Clouds were always going to be lesser entries in their catalogue since they were film soundtracks, but Ummagumma was the sound of them throwing absolutely everything at the wall and praying that they would find their next creative direction.
And while the live disc is fairly decent, the studio side is still one of the most questionable pieces of their entire body of work. Gilmour wasn’t cut out to make a song like ‘The Narrow Way’ just yet, but even if the songs range from fairly interesting to downright unlistenable, the guitarist felt that there was no reason for them to bother salvaging the songs that they had when they went back into the studio.
This was them desperately trying to make music, but Gilmour was the first to admit that they weren’t as inspired as they should have been, saying, “We were fairly brave, and would put anything on a record that amused us one way or another. But in some of those moments we were floundering about, and didn’t have our forward momentum very clear, and inspiration might have been a bit thin on the ground at times.” If I’m being completely honest here, though, Ummagumma might be the most important album that the band ever made.
I know that sounds like the ramblings of a Floyd fan that’s had a few too many, but when you think about how their career played out, Ummagumma is the real turning point before they got to Meddle. Their way of working out songs on the spot and trying their best to find their identity was novel for the time, and after years of making whimsical tunes, this was the line in the sand where they could move on to something different.
And even if the songs weren’t done justice on the record, they got their due when they eventually played them live. Their performance in Pompeii includes a virtual greatest-hits journey through their discography, and while ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ was a decent piece of sound design here, watching them crescendo into it when they perform is a lot more impactful, especially when Waters hits that massive scream.
So while Ummagumma isn’t really meant to be the kind of record that most Floyd fans can vibe to behind the scenes, it did establish a bit more of a pattern for the band. The spectre of Barrett was going to be behind them for the rest of their lives, but if this record did anything, it did away with every other hangup so that Pink Floyd could move on.
