The Meddle Children, Part 2: Atom Heart Mother

“We were saying, ‘Why?’, but the band were like, ‘Why not?’” With Atom Heart Mother, Pink Floyd got weird with it.

Roger Waters: bass, guitar and lead vocals on “If”

David Gilmour: guitar; bass, drums, and lead vocals on “Fat Old Sun”

Richard Wright: piano, organ, Mellotron, lead vocals on “Summer ’68”

Nick Mason: drums, percussion, sound effects

Special guests: Ron Geesin, band and choir arrangements for “Atom Heart Mother;” the EMI Pops Orchestra, brass on “Atom Heart Mother;” the John Alldis Choir, vocals on “Atom Heart Mother;” Alan Styles...kitchen?Breakfast?

Produced by Pink Floyd, engineered by Peter Bown and Alan Parsons

art by Hipgnosis

This is part two of a four-part series on Pink Floyd’s post-Syd Barrett, pre-Dark Side experimental period. To read part one, click here.

Holy...Cow?

“Let’s just do a cover that’s completely meaningless, has no meaning whatsoever. What’s the most meaningless thing we can do?”

quoted from: Squaring The Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis (dir. Anton Corbijn, 2022.)

Thus, boom. Cow ass.

Lulubelle III lived in a field in Essex until one day, she became the most famous cow in rock-and-roll history. Storm Thorgerson took a drive and hopped a fence to photograph the first cow he saw; who happened to be lovely Lulubelle. In one of my favorite Storm Thorgerson quotes ever, he described her as “the ultimate picture of a cow; it’s just totally cow.”

An EMI exec exploded on Storm upon presenting the cover:

“What’s a cow got to do with Pink Floyd?! Are you fucking mad??”

Storm blamed the whole thing on Pink Floyd. If you know much of the story of Hipgnosis, you’d know that absolutely tracks! Looking back, Storm said, “I think (Floyd) were one of the few bands who at the time could get away with this kind of rubbish.”

Pictured: Atom Heart Mother back cover (photographed by Storm Thorgerson, 1970)

Of course they “could get away with that rubbish.” These guys had set quite the precedent for bullshittery!

Father’s Shout

In May of 1969, before Ummagumma was even out, Roger Waters spoke to Melody Maker about Floyd’s interest in working with an orchestra. As much a roller coaster as “The Man and The Journey” and Ummagumma were, the band still liked the idea of one big composition in several movements. Roger in particular was still quite hung up on the choir-and-orchestra element of “The Final Lunacy.” And what Roger Waters wants, Roger Waters gets!

Back in April of 1967, Floyd played the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream. Composer/virtuoso banjo player Ron Geesin was also on the bill. Former Rolling Stones tour manager Sam Jonas Cutler set up Nick Mason and Ron’s meeting in '68, and Nick introduced Ron to Roger. Together, Ron and Rog scored The Body.

In late 1968, Bryan Morrison sold his agency to NEMS. Exec Vic Lewis was old-school. He’d commissioned this orchestra-plays-the-Beatles album, a la Deram Records trying to get the Moody Blues to make a rock-and-roll Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Just as the Moodies were horrified by the idea of “Dvorak rock,” Floyd were horrified by Vic’s proposition of a stuffy orchestra playing their songs. They figured if they did the orchestra thing themselves with someone willing to indulge their vision, they’d avoid a butchering of “The Gnome.”

Ron got the job with Floyd because a., he knew three of the band members pretty well; b., those three guys were familiar with and liked his work; c., Ron was experienced with electronic music; and d., it was time to make the next album, and Ron was just kinda there.

Pictured: Ron Geesin in the control room during Atom Heart Mother sessions (1970)

Once Floyd returned from Zabriskie Point boot camp in Rome, they got to work rehearsing a piece Dave had. A piece with the working title “The Amazing Pudding” debuted some time in January of 1970. By late March, Ron Geesin was officially on board as composer. Roger and Nick hammered out a backing track under the working title “Untitled Epic” for Ron to work from.

But there was a problem. For some reason, EMI was on a tape ration. Instead of stopping after each movement, then splicing all the tape together at the end, our dear rhythm section had to do it all in one go. Nick was nohuman metronome, Rog wasn’t much much better. The tempo was all over the place. And they couldn’t do shit about it, because they’d just barely squeezed this in between tours of Europe and America! Aside from the barest of bones, including a first movement with choir suggested by Rick, a “funky section,” and a naive direction of “do something big,” Ron had free reign. He resorted to band manager Steve O’Rourke for pointers while the band were on tour. Together, Ron and Steve deduced “something big” meant brass, choir, and solocello.

While Floyd had all their gear stolen in New Orleans, Ron was across the pond, stuck in a heat wave and composing in his skivvies. Upon returning in June, Ron presented the score to Floyd. They loved it, and booked time at EMI, sans Norman Smith. This was the first time they’d done this for a studio album. They never looked back.

Mind Your Throats Please

It might have been a tad too soon for Norm to leave the boys without adult supervision. For this session, Ron served as conductor. He did not, in fact, know how to conduct. Hilarity ensues!

Ron wrote barely any dynamic markings into his score either. He just assumed they’d work it out in the studio. But these were session guys, they play what’s on the sheet music and leave. The players had no idea what they were supposed to do, and they were not happy about it! Remembering the debacle in his memoir, Nick said, “In the case of Ron, an actual human sacrifice in the studio itself was being offered up.” Whatever the fuss was, the brass band were milking it for all it was worth. Ron locked horns with a horn player, trying to physically fight him, and was promptly ejected from the session. John Aldiss, a real conductor, took his place. Though he wasn’t due at EMI until choir day, he just so happened to be there anyway. God bless.

On the day the choir were booked, Nick sheepishly pointed out that the first bar of Ron’s sheet music was missing. Or, at least, Nick insisted it was. His beat two was everyone else’s beat one. Ron admits “I mistook beat two in Section J” (AKA the Funky Dung movement) “for beat one.” Later, “If I had had an extra hour or two in a quiet cupboard, I would have moved all of the bar lines back one beat and everyone would have been happy. But time was tight and I did not.”

Pictured: John Aldiss conducting his choir and the EMI Pops Orchestra for Atom Heart Mother (1970)

In the eleventh hour, even after an appearance at the Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music so zany the Spinal Tap writers must've been in on it, “The Amazing Pudding,” and therefore the rest of Floyd’s album, still didn’t have a proper title. A copy of the evening paper was passed to Roger by John Peel or someone else, Steve O’Rourke said something to the likes of, “Come on man, there’s gotta be a title somewherein there. You can’t seriously call this thing ‘The Amazing Pudding.’” Roger flipped to a story about a pregnant woman outfitted with an atomic pacemaker (or something convoluted and sci-fi like that.) From this, he deduced: Atom. Heart. Mother. BBC producer Jeff Griffin remembers, “We were saying, ‘Why?’, but the band were like, ‘Why not?’”

Somehow, of all the albums to do it, Atom Heart Mother was Pink Floyd’s first number one album! Mailing inflatable pink cow udders to stores, parading cows down the mall, and loading one up in a trolley with Dave must’ve worked for Floyd’s home territory. The giant cow billboard on the Sunset Strip didn’t have quite the same effect - it barely cracked the Top 50 in the States.

Pictured: a cow being loaded on an Atom Heart Mother-themed trolley, with an amused David Gilmour looking on (c. 1970)

Mother Fore

I was pleasantly surprised by how many people requested Atom Heart Mother. Sure, I knew the Tago Mago reveal on YouTube would have people requesting Tago Mago for months. But Atom Heart Mother? Atom Heart Mother. The album that even Pink Floyd themselves don’t like. People showed the hell up for it. Once they saw I own Atom Heart Mother, they wanted Atom Heart Mother. So here’s Atom Heart Fucking Mother.

This album is controversial among Floyd fans, even today. The camp is firmly divided between those who see it as fluffy, self-indulgent crap, its defenders pretentious and awful; and those hailing it as the second coming of Beefus Christ, and all the others are heretics and non-believers. I’ll admit, I’ve scoffed at Atom Heart Mother defenders in the past.

My prog reviews consistently perform well. I do not know why! I am not a trained musician, let alone in classical music. So I can’t really explain to you the ins-and-outs of what happens on Atom Heart Mother’s title track. For that much, I will occasionally defer to Ron Geesin’s book, The Flaming Cow. I’ll also be using time stamps, as the title track is a very long piece!

I felt the pressure headed into Atom Heart Mother, but I was shocked by how into it I was.

It begins similarly to Days of Future Passed. The Moodies faded in on a reversed gong, we fade in on a low hum with what sounds like bells. How the brass enters reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey; a combination of classical and space-age futurism. If “Atom Heart Mother” were a true work of classical music, Father’s Shout would be its overture. It contains the piece’s leitmotif, a piece we will come back to several times through the course of the song. 0:53 teases the piece’s core motif. The parts orbit each other; paths begin wide, but aregradually pulled together. There’s less space between notes and parts, the trumpets spiral until the gas planets meet.

I only managed to count this thing in correctly once without sheet music. The syncopation moving into Dave’s “Imaginary Western” is crazy! It sounds like there’s a measure of 2/4, but no! The triplets and placement of the rests just make it sound that way. I can imagine without dynamic marks written in, this would’ve been a bitch to record!

Pictured: excerpt from early draft of Ron Geesin's "The Amazing Pudding" arrangement

I love those last few spurts from the trumpets, creating a little shock when the band comes in. Geesin’s score as a whole emphasizes irregularity. He’s not super atonal, but he’s not afraid to muck with syncopation. It’s well-suited to prog. Father’s Shout works because the band isn’t trying to compete with the brass. Dave’s just playing chords, the rhythm section plays straight 4/4.

Dave said the “Atom Heart Mother” suite’s core motif reminded the theme of The Magnificent 7. The horses galloping, police sirens, and Easy Rider motorcycle are a little too on-the-nose, but only emphasize the absurdity of this operation. Rick doesn’t come in until after all that madness. It’s subtle as he sticks to playing chords, but he bridges the gap between the ensemble and the guys. Roger introduces “Atom Heart Mother”’s second core motif on bass. Rick has custody of this it for most of the rest of our time here; denoting our transition into the unfortunately-named Breast Milky movement. (The guys came up with the cow-themed movements after Hipgnosis presented the art. I can picture all the Floyd hunched over the same table in the EMI canteen, minus Nick who’s got to be complaining about his pie having crust, as they came up with Breast Milky.)

The solo cello was a fantastic addition. I think Ron recognized this would be a both a pretty, organic counterpart to Rick’s electric instrument, making Roger’s electric bass as kind of the middle ground being an electrified instrument with strings, and a way to ground the so-far bombastic arrangement. A solo instrument is a little easier to connect with. Roger reverts to his comfort zone; big steps and lateral movements. Dave replaces the cello with dreamy, echoing flits. Nick’s drumming getting heavier and more pronounced provides the necessary weight in the band’s portion for the brass to come back in and not stick out like a sore thumb. Rick’s parts are layered in, further bridging the gap. He plays some classical flourishes on piano, and some organ.

I think the introduction of the solo soprano denotes the beginning of Mother Fore? There’s lots of open movements, extended notes, and nonverbal vocalizations over Rick’s organ. The altos come in, and gradually the rest of the choir is introduced. Having no lyrics aside from the baritones’ grandiose “la la la”s might be a source of audience disconnect. It reads as operatic, and operatic reads as stuffy. In any way, Nick’s drumming is superb through the Mother Fore movement. I have always love when he uses the hollow sounds he had in his kit. Think of something like “Us and Them.” It’s a drum track focused more on closed sounds. He gets lost in the fray; bubbles under the surface. His rolls on Mother Fore are able to come right up.

At 10:12, Rick abruptly takes us out of the choir box and into Funky Dung; mostly a band jam. Roger modulates it into something very reminiscent of the last movements of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Nothing ever truly went to the “scrap pile” with Floyd; they recycled their own stuff all the time! Even the placement of what Rick plays invokes that later track. What sets Funky apart is itsemphasis on the downbeat, like (you guessed it) funk. 1970 was a big year for funk music. Sly and the Family Stone released what was arguably the genre-defining track, “Thank You Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin,” Funkadelic said “free your mind and your ass will follow.” (The kingdom of heaven is within!!) As a result, funk was now in a lot more bands’ vocabularies; including Floyd’s. This loose, easy feel Floyd wore so well is something the rock-and-roll listener can sink their teeth into. Everyone’s in their comfort zone, especially Dave.

Pictured, L-R: Roger Waters and David Gilmour recording Atom Heart Mother (1970)

Pictured, L-R: Ron Geesin, Pete Bown, and Roger Waters in the control room during Atom Heart Mother sessions (1970)

Then we take a hard left turn. The choir gets weird with it. About the choral arrangement, Ron said,

“I wrote all the rhythmic phonetics against Pink Floyd’s pre-recorded accompaniment to cavort, dialogue with and generally enhance that irregularity. Where my bar lines occurred did not matter; they simply constituted markers in a grid with even lines every four beats to serve as a relative time map.”

quoted from: Ron Geesin, The Flaming Cow: The Making of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother (2013.)

Hence the “beat one” debacle.

You know by now I have an affinity for people doing weird shit in the name of art. This is a highlight of the record for me. Atom Heart Mother is the album of, “Sure man, why the hell not?” This is the very essence of that. Hearing Rick on piano in the spaces between the choir is a treat. This shit works because of dynamics, harsh textures, and playing with consonant sounds. Rolling "r"’s. Soft sounds like “shh” among hard ones. Dark vowels. Ron takes language and breaks it down, like the parts of a cell as it actively splits. He was on some other shit for this! At a certain point, you have to surrender to the absurdity, whether out of genuine enjoyment or simply to make it through. This is where “Atom Heart Mother”’s absurdity won me over.

We return to the Western before Mind Your Throats Please. Ron said, “If you were unkind, you would say that the repeats were milking it, frantically paddling water waiting for the rescue boat.” I don’t disagree, especially in “Atom Heart Mother”’s last movement. For now, I’ll give it grace and call it a necessary return to the familiar before our spacewalk. Mind Your Throats “suggests Waters, hank of hair hanging over his face, cigarette smouldering between his fingers, hunched over the console at Abbey Road, teasing out as many shivery sound effects as he can…” Don’t threaten me with a good time! The only thing I love more than artists doing Odd Shit in the name of Art is an ugly-hot man doing it! Playing with weird textures is a hallmark of experimental Floyd: tape loops, sharp notes, eerie howls, negative space, and industrial blasts of steam. This has all of it.

The final movement layers a highlights reel of the past eighteen minutes, with a constantly ascending band. The tension might have the chance to build if there weren’t so much going on over top. We have a repeat of the Western with some more trumpets. Some tracks got degraded, but that’s what happens when you mix stuff down two or three times to fit on the eight tracks EMI had. I love what the sopranos do at 23:00, it fully leans into the sci-fi.

And that’s “Atom Heart Mother.” Cows in space. Why not?

Remergence

Side two opens with one of my favorite Pink Floyd deep cuts, If. Being the first song on the band side of the LP, it takes an important spot. These are also the first honest-to-goodness lyrics we hear. With gentle finger-picking on guitar, Rog softly sings,

“If I were a swan, I’d be gone

If I were a train, I’d be late

And if I were a good man,

I’d talk with you more often than I do.”

Later, “If I were a good man, I’d understand the spaces between friends.” He expresses guilt for being so shut off. He does admit he’s closed-off emotionally. “If I were alone, I would cry/If I were with you, I’d be warm and dry.” Loneliness is a brave thing for any man to admit. Rog wrote off his delivery of this song as “fae.” It is a little odd he never flipped his “r”s before or since this. It’s almost...sweet. He almost whisper-sings, as if he’s ashamed to admit vulnerability.

Some points are a little on-the-nose; see the machine hum when he sings “If I go insane, please don’t put your wires in my brain.” Dave plays just the right stuff, though. His harmonic guitar squeals are at just the right level as not to overpower the song. Rick hangs light finery on the walls. It’s all carefully assembled. A frank and confessional moment for our megaphone man. This moment means something. It clearly meant something to Rog too, he revived “If” for his post-Floyd solo tours in the eighties. Ron argued, “'If' shows more of the real Roger than all that bloody political shouting his head off.” I think it shows a different facet of Roger. He’s a multifaceted guy, as all people are. “If” is the man behind the curtain, or the man behind the wall.

Singing about the summer of 1968 was ancient history come 1970. If Summer ’68 is any indication, Floyd spent their summer of 1968 with groupies. Rick recounted,

“In the summer of ’68, there were groupies everywhere...They’d come and look after you like a personal maid, do your washing, sleep with you and leave you with a dose of the clap.”

quoted from: Mark Blake, Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (2008.)

Clearly, Rick doesn’t think too highly of this one either!

"I hardly even like you, I shouldn't care at all

We met just six hours ago, the music was too loud

From your bed, I gained a day and lost a bloody year..."

Rick continually tries to pull her real feelings out of her; seeking interpersonal connection where there is none. It sounds sterile, clinical, and horribly cold for having spent the night together. He feels empty. They didn’t so much as say a word to each other. “Occasionally you showed me a smile, but what was the need?” And “How do you feel?” is echoed many times.

If you wanna reach for the fruit, one could argue this groupie scene is a metaphor for the generational rejection of the free-love attitude. It’s an extension of the anti-psychedelic sixties cow on the cover, if you’ll indulge Storm on that. One of the drawbacks of the happy hippie sixties was a mass-glossing over individual feelings for the state of the collective. It’s us versus the man, maaaan. It’s not about how you feel, it’s how we feel. That’s part of why the seventies were such a broad, sweeping turn inwards; in visual aesthetics, songwriting, and political concerns. The arrangement is a little ambitious. I appreciate the attempt to link side two with side one, but the horn setting on the organ through the song’s back half overpowers the lightness Rick had about him. His piano playing, his voice, even his penchant for positively un-rock-star cozy sweaters. There wasn't a square edge on him from which to hang a big ornate frame.

Endlessly quotable as it is, one of the several issues I take with Mark Blake’s Comfortably Numb is Mark’sobsession with linking Floyd to what was going on in Laurel Canyon. He insists Fat Old Sun was inspired by Crosby, Stills & Nash. Literally no! There’s a twist of country, I’ll allow that much. Yes, Dave occasionally wore a fringe jacket.

...and Rick wore whatever the hell that was.

But “Fat Old Sun”’s brand of folk influence is still distinctly British. It’s more Led Zeppelin III’s blend of country and folk than CSN’s. If anything, it’s got a twinge of San Fransisco. The Grateful Dead would incorporate steel guitar on their 1970 LP American Beauty.

For following a song called “Summer ’68,” “Fat Old Sun” feels a lot more hippie. Or at the very least stoned. It’s a simple, pretty appreciation of nature from Dave. He even shouts out the sweet smell of mowed grass! Roll me up and lay me down! It reminds me of the Moody Blues’ “Tuesday Afternoon.” This guy’s just laid in the grass, watching the fat old sun set on a summer evening. The birds are calling, childrens’ laughter in his ears. “Fat Old Sun”’s solo is Dave’s best guitar work on the album. It’s constructed simply, with no frills. His barely-audible humming dances around it, as does what I swore was a flute. Upon further inspection, it’s Dave playing slide! These bird-song notes are off the fretboard! It’s not about volume with Dave’s playing, it’s about touch.

Marmalade. I like marmalade.

Partly recorded in Nick and Lindy Mason’s kitchen, Atom Heart Mother closes with the much-derided Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast. About the...song? Roger said, “I’ve always felt that the differentiation between a sound effect and music is all a load of shit. Whether you make a sound on a guitar or a water tap is irrelevant.” I think the “Psychedelic” in the song title is a reference to juice? This might be a reach, but indulge me here. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, author Tom Wolfe describes Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters mixing the titular acid with whatever sweet liquid drink they had on hand. Acid also makes sweet things, particularly citrus, taste very good. Nevermind how I know this information.

Pictured, L-R: Alan Styles, Peter Watts, and Roger Waters (c. 1970)

In this...do you call it musique concrete? Or is this a field recording? We follow Floyd roadie Alan Styles as he makes a full English breakfast. He could possibly be making this breakfast psychedelic after a night spent awake tripping. It’s oddly endearing. The music is nice, especially Rick on piano. It invokes images of morning, with the bugs in the lawn quieting for the day and the cool breeze still lingering. The first rays of light come in through a dewy window. The star of the show is Alan. He bumps into the corner of the table and mumbles to himself about macrobiotics. He pours a bowl of cereal. He fries eggs, sausage, bacon, and tomatoes. He puts the coffee on. Makes toast. Quite audibly scarfs it down.

It makes me think of the mornings after I partied all night in college. There was this diner on Main Street that would open at 4 AM, seven days a week. The walls were yellow and the booths were green. The cups and dishes were chipped, and we probably looked like hell, but no one cared. They gave us our eggs and toast, and coffee in the pot, and we mumbled among ourselves. I don’t know. Maybe “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast” is frivolous and silly and takes up worthy space on the LP. It makes me think of that diner.

Pictured: Pink Floyd performing at Hyde Park, 7/18/1970. This performance included the "Atom Heart Mother" suite.

Even I wonder how on earth Atom Heart Mother was these guys’ first number one album. Why does this album get such a bad rep?

The cover, for one. It’s trolling on the level of Duchamp unveiling an upside-down urinal as art. Either you’re in on the joke, or you’re not. Dave said Atom Heart Mother was “a failure” in this sense. People know the cover better than they know the music on the record! I also think it has to do with how we perceive high prog, particularly the orchestra-rock subset, today. The Moody Blues built their whole golden age off orchestra rock. Few were as lucky as them. Emerson, Lake & Palmer did Pictures At An Exhibition and got unilaterally trashed by critics. Floyd only tried orchestra rock on for size. The results are divisive.

By 1970, Floyd were already put on a high pedestal by critics. When the stuffy types of their day said, “Rock-and-roll doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a passing fad!” Floyd were on their shortlist of rock-and-roll bands who did mean something. The Atom Heart Mother period reinvented them from snot-nosed stoners to sophisticates.

Ergo, something to the scope of Atom Heart Mother put the spotlight right on them. These guys assume the challenge. The pure scope of side one renders the whole album a Roger Waters-Ron Geesin collab, featuring the rest of Pink Floyd. I see the Atom Heart Mother non-believers’ point here.

I appreciate this album for the chances it takes. A twenty-four-minute orchestral suite with a rock-and-roll band, a brass section, a solo cello, tape loops, and a full choir filling out the entirety of side one, and a guy making his breakfast on side two. But its own sense of humor might negate that anyway. This album takes the piss out of itself before you can! Just look at it! This music is the most demanding of the listener Pink Floyd ever put to tape, but I like it for that. This album, and the band who made it, have balls.

“Why Atom Heart Mother? Fuck you, that’s why!”

Personal favorites: the whole thing.

British fans loved Atom Heart Mother, American fans didn’t “get” it. As for Floyd themselves? Dave said it was“probably our lowest point artistically” and “a load of rubbish, to be honest with you. We were at a real down point. We didn’t know what on earth we were doing or trying to do at that time, none of us...I think we were scraping the barrel a bit at that period.” Nick started out keen on the album, but his feelings cooled. About the title track, Nick wrote such illustrious praise as, “the kitchen sink must have been unavailable for session work,”“Unfortunately, (it’s) 24 minutes long,” and that his report-card notes would be “good idea, could try harder.” Even Ron admitted “It wasn’t how I envisaged it, but it was a good compromise. I wanted more punch, but then again the Floyd always seemed to need that pastel wash on their music, even on the punchy stuff.”

I find it hilarious that one of the few things the surviving members of Pink Floyd can agree on these days is dunking on Atom Heart Mother. There’s so little common ground nowadays, but come the end of 1970, they allshared frustration over how this thing turned out. They abandoned their spacesuits for overalls and muckboots, but did it really work?

Okay. So we don’t want to be space rock, but we also don’t want to be orchestra prog. Much as Roger would have liked to, I’m sure, we can’t continue heckling the audience every time someone requests “Interstellar Overdrive.” Something’s gotta give.

End of Part Two

– AD ☆

Blake, Mark. Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. Boston: Da Capo, 2008.

Blake, Mark. “Pink Floyd: The Story Behind Atom Heart Mother.” Louder, 10/24/2024. https://www.loudersound.com/features/pink-floyd-atom-heart-mother

Corbijn, Anton, dir. Squaring The Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis. Amazon: Raindog Films, 2022.

Dubro, Alec. “Atom Heart Mother.” Rolling Stone, 12/10/1970. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/atom-heart-mother-111812/

Geesin, Ron. The Flaming Cow: The Making of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. Kindle Edition. Stroud, Gloustershire: The History Press, 2013.

Mason, Nick. Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. San Fransisco: Chronicle Books, 2017 ed.

Povey, Glenn. Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010 ed.

Schaffner, Nicholas. Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey. New York: Dell Publishing, 1991.

Thorgerson, Storm, with Peter Curzon. Mind Over Matter: The Images of Pink Floyd. London: Omnibus Press, 2017 ed.

Watts, Michael. “The Floyd on Rock Today…” Melody Maker, 9/26/1970. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Melody-Maker/70s/70/Melody-Maker-1970-09-26.pdf

Welch, Chris. “Now it’s Pink Floyd plus the London Phil.” Melody Maker, 5/3/1969. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Melody-Maker/60s/69/Melody-Maker-1969-0503.pdf