The song both David Gilmour and Roger Waters both called a masterpiece
By the time that Pink Floyd finished making The Wall, there was a good chance that nothing could truly heal the bond between David Gilmour and Roger Waters.
Both of them had completely separate agendas about what the band should be making, and since Waters was becoming more of a dictator than a bandleader, it made sense that the band would continue without him after The Final Cut. Still, that doesn’t dull any of the moments when both frontmen got the best out of each other.
Granted, a lot of the time they spent together meant finding their feet. A lot of the best moments of the band’s career may have come once the 1970s began, but after losing Syd Barrett, both Gilmour and Waters were practically adrift. The guitarist was the makeshift replacement for his friend when playing his bluesy guitar solos, and while Waters had the potential to be a songwriter, he was clearly trying too hard to recapture the whimsy that Barrett did on their debut record.
But with every single step of the way, they were slowly inching closer to their classic sound. More showed different shades of the band reaching its final form, and while Gilmour and Waters are both in agreement that Atom Heart Mother is one of the worst things they have ever made, it actually has a few pieces that show them starting to gel, like Waters’s lyrics on ‘If’ and Gilmour’s knack for hooks on ‘Fat Old Sun’.
If there was such a turning point for the band, though, it’s when they reached Meddle. Before they were directionless, and while the first side of the album isn’t necessarily the most straightforward listening experience in the world, ‘Echoes’ established that the band were into creating as many musical textures as they could from the moment Richard Wright hit that first high note.
Although Gilmour has had plenty of favourites over the years, he had no problem calling ‘Echoes’ one of their high points, saying, “Well, I think ‘Echoes’ is the masterwork of the album – the one where we were all discovering what Pink Floyd is about. ‘One Of These Days’ is a little subsidiary piece that came out of the work on ‘Echoes’.” And for someone like Waters who disavowed most of Floyd’s later work, ‘Echoes’ still held a special place in his heart.
Even though The Wall is a more gargantuan experience and Dark Side of the Moon is their most celebrated work, Waters said that the message he put into ‘Echoes’ is still a constant in his life, saying, “I only got one message. ‘Two strangers passing in the street, by chance, two person’s glances meet, and I am you, and what I see is me.’ That’s my message, and that was on Meddle. My message hasn’t changed.”
Not to take away from Waters’s assessment, but there’s a lot more going on than those simple lines of lyrics. Throughout all 23 minutes of the song, you can hear the band slowly tinkering with their sound until they hit on something that works, whether it’s that great breakdown section where Gilmour gets to stretch out, the brilliant pieces of sound design, or that descending riff that Andrew Lloyd Webber wished he could have made himself.
There are plenty of artists who have made more daring conceptual pieces or taken their music into more eccentric directions, but the reason why ‘Echoes’ has resonated is because of the empathy people can feel in every single line. This was a band learning how to sound human again, and much like its title, this 23-minute juggernaut is still going to reverberate long after all the members have gone.
