“You must be fucking joking”: Roger Waters on why he wouldn’t play ‘Atom Heart Mother’ even for £1m
Musicians never get a choice as to which one of their songs ends up becoming a major hit. Anyone can spend their lives trying to make the perfect pop song, but there’s a fine line between making something catchy and making the kind of earworm that gets people annoyed the minute they hear it. Although Pink Floyd were never a singles band in that respect, Roger Waters admitted that he couldn’t be bothered to play this classic no matter how high the price of the gig was.
Because to understand Pink Floyd, that means going through some of the roughest patches that any rock band has had to suffer through. Having to deal with someone like Syd Barrett leaving the group after losing his mind would be one thing, but having to figure out where to go in real-time led to a wilderness period that most of the band would have rather forgotten about.
There are still some great songs to come out of that era, like ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, but the more you listen to them, it’s clear that the band didn’t have their heart in making music that catered to the space-rock approach that their leader had. They needed to grow, and that meant sacrificing songs for a lot of ambient noise that went nowhere.
‘The Nile Song’ may have been a great trip into hard rock on the More soundtrack, but listening back to Ummagumma, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all the members of the band had collectively lost their minds on the studio disc of ambient pieces, especially when Waters tried to make some piece of sound design on ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals…’.
Of all the pre-Meddle albums, though, Atom Heart Mother does have its fair share of highlights. ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ may have been yet another example of them making something strange for the hell of it, but David Gilmour’s ‘Fat Old Sun’ is a breezy delight, and the title track does have some interesting moments. But even if they swung for the fences, Waters can only look back in disappointment whenever anyone asks him to perform the massive 20-minute piece.
Despite making even more ambitious works later in his career, Waters felt that no amount of money could dissuade him from hating the track, saying, “If somebody said to me now, ‘Right, here’s a million pounds: go out and play ‘Atom Heart Mother,’ I’d say, ‘You must be f–king joking.” But perhaps part of the problem comes with bringing up some bad memories from that particular session.
Since the tape machines they were working with couldn’t handle the amount of cuts required for the song, both Waters and drummer Nick Mason had to complete most of the rhythm track in one pass, meaning they had to memorise every bit of the arrangement and have no mistakes from top to bottom. Say what you want about perfectionism, but no one would want to relive a song that would most likely give them PTSD from those hours in the studio.
Then again, Waters is probably being far too harsh on a song that honestly wasn’t as bad as he thought it was. If anything, fans would be much more happy to hear this song played live than having to go through any of Waters’s modern incarnations of what Dark Side of the Moon should be.
