The Meddle Children, Part 4: Obscured By Clouds
- Abigail Devoe
- Sep 26, 2025
- 16 min read
If “Echoes” at Pompeii is the father of Dark Side of the Moon, Obscured By Clouds is the mother.
Roger Waters: bass, lead vocals on “Free Four”
David Gilmour: guitar, lead vocals, some bass, VCS3
Richard Wright: organ, piano, keyboard, VCS3, lead vocals on “Stay,” co-lead vocals on “Burning Bridges”
Nick Mason: drums, percussion
Produced by Pink Floyd
art by Hipgnosis
This is part four of a four-part series on Pink Floyd’s post-Syd Barrett, pre-Dark Side experimental period. To read parts three, two, and one, click here.
Assorted Lunatics
Though Meddle was Pink Floyd’s “a-ha!” moment, it underperformed compared to its predecessor. Where Atom Heart Mother peaked at number 1 in the UK, its more digestible follow-up failed to reach the top spot. Not only that, but EMI's American distributor, Capitol Records, neglected to promote Meddle stateside. It languished around the seventies on the Billboard albums chart before dropping off completely. Despite commercial setbacks in both their main territories, Pink Floyd (especially Roger Waters) were eager to continue in the direction of “Echoes.”
“I remember Roger saying that he wanted to write it absolutely straight, clear and direct. To say exactly what he wanted to say for the first time and get away from psychedelic patter and strange and mysterious warblings.”
quoted from: Mark Blake, Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (2008.)
Roger’s idea of “absolutely straight” was working out his changing world view in song. Playtime was over for the guys. Roger was about to turn thirty. Like a lot of men that age, he was having a bit of an existential crisis. The three main themes he’s mulling over right now are fear, madness, and mortality. This would be a much more serious “The Man and The Journey.”
From the jump, “A Piece For Assorted Lunatics” was different. This was the most focused Roger's writing had been. Basically, he locked the fuck in. “It had to be quick, because we had a tour starting,” he remembered in Glenn Povey’s Echoes. “It might have been only six weeks before we had to have something to perform.”
This would be the first time Floyd had ever taken a full album on the road. Remember, most of Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, and Meddle were never played live! After sitting down together to make a list of all the things that were dogging them – aging, death, travel anxiety – the guys booked time at EMI to noodle around with very early concepts. Rick Wright’s “Violent Sequence” from 1969’s Zabriskie Point sessions was resurrected. He also presented a new “Mortality Sequence.” A seven-minute jazz-rock noodling called “The Travel Sequence” evolved into the expression of the band’s collective travel anxiety. As “A Piece for Assorted Lunatics” took shape, it was retitled “Eclipse,” then…
Merry Christmas kiddies, this is the closest you’ll get to a Dark Side of the Moon redux for a very, very long time!
“Assorted Lunatics” premiered at a series of gigs in early 1972. It’s a good thing the guys had these shows to tinker with the project; play-throughs were frequently marred by technical difficulties. Its debut at the Brighton Dome fell apart when their playback malfunctioned during “Money.” (You can’t really play “Money” without the pocket change tape loop, can you?) Things went much better in February at the…Rainbow. Ironic.
But as so often goes with Floyd, they had some loose ends to tie up first.
“After the doldrums we had encountered around the time of Atom Heart Mother, we had a revitalized sense of purpose. Obscured By Clouds was the first of the interruptions.”
quoted from: Nick Mason, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd (2017 ed.)
The Gold It's In The...
Floyd were on the hook for one more soundtrack for Barbet Schroder, director of More. His latest bizarro hippie film, La Vallee, “demystifies the ideals of a hippie generation more concerned with personal growth than with inventing alternative social methods.” Barbet tackles this idea through following a group of wealthy travelers and hippie expats through the jungles of New Guinea. Doing this soundtrack wasn’t a bad distraction from the fact an “Assorted Lunatics” bootleg from the Rainbow Theater performance was already on the market; as was a collection of Zabriskie Point outtakes called Omayyad.
Time and time again in Floyd history, Obscured By Clouds is treated as an afterthought. Glenn Povey’s book treats it as if it didn’t exist. Nick’s memoir doesn’t give it much more than two-and-a-half pages! I had to scour for information on this thing! What makes Obscured By Clouds not an afterthought? One acquisition that changed rock-and-roll history forever.
In 1972, Rick Wright bought a VCS3 synthesizer; one of the first sequencers on the market. This blew Obscured By Clouds – and their “Assorted Lunatics” project on the back burner – wide fucking open. Cue Pink Floyd, mach three.
According to Nick Mason and Glenn Povey, the whole of Obscured By Clouds was hammered out in all of a few days, from February 23rd through 29th, 1972, at Chateau Herouville; AKA Elton John’s Honky Chateau. (Authors Jean-Michel Guedson and Phillipe Margotin allege Obscured By Clouds was recorded in two halves:the February gigs, plus March 23rd through 27th.) Schroeder, Floyd, and their wives and girlfriends worked, lived, and ate at the Chateau for those few weeks. They came with only vague ideas of the music. Schroder remembers the guys often leaving the tapes running as they jammed stuff out. They worked like an assembly line. You work on this music, I work on that music, he works on the lyrics, boom! Ten songs in fourteen days. Barbet remembers, “...with minimal preparation, (Floyd) literally made the record on the spot, in the studio, to the amazing of the technicians.” “Burning Bridges” came first, then “Stay,” and the rest were to follow. This manic stroke of productivity is amazing when you consider Floyd’s EMI work ethic. A hapless, nameless EMI engineer noted, “They could take forever to do anything.”
This efficiency is made all the more remarkable when you remember Obscured By Clouds was interrupted by a whole tour of Japan! It produced the below tour bus photo, in which Ginger looks into the camera like it’s The Office.
(From the sounds of it, this moment of Ginger breaking the fourth wall was the vibe of the whole tour. Floyd later confessed they didn’t know who half the people on their bus were!)
After a rumored “altercation” with the film company, Floyd allegedly retitled the soundtrack Obscured By Clouds to distance themselves from La Vallee. According to this telling of the story, Schroeder went ahead and retitled La Vallee to Obscured By Clouds in retaliation. But here’s the thing: across every major source I used for this project, I couldn’t find even a hint as to what this supposed “altercation” was. Not even Barbet Schroder himself has elaborated on it! Straight up, I think this supposed falling out is rock-and-roll myth. The film retitling was likely either a bid to capitalize on Obscured By Clouds’s success in the French market or a nod to the title track, which was Schroeder’s favorite song on the project. While Schroder has accused Hipgnosis and Floyd of sabotaging the album cover, he was happy with soundtrack overall.
“I do think it surprised the Pink Floyd that they could make such a good album in just two weeks. Perhaps they shouldn’t have taken so long in the studio on all those other records.”
quoted from: Mark Blake, Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (2008.)
During all of this, one of Floyd’s most bizarre collaborations took shape. Back in the Atom Heart Mother days, choreographer Roland Petit approached Floyd to compose music for his new ballet based on Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The original idea was for Floyd to compose all-new music for Petit to choreograph to, but both parties agreed that between Obscured By Clouds and the impending Dark Side, Floyd were way too busy as is. Petit instead choreographed the third of a three-act ballet to “One Of These Days,” “Careful With That Axe,” “Obscured By Clouds,” “When You’re In,” and “Echoes.”
Being married to a dancer, Nick had a surprisingly sunny attitude towards doing the ballet. Dave? Not so much.
“...the reality of all these people prancing around in tights in front of us didn’t feel like what we wanted to do long-term.”
quoted from: Glenn Povey, Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd (2010 ed.)
Wots...Uh The Deal
Of the four albums I chose to highlight Pink Floyd’s experimental period, Obscured By Clouds was the one I was least familiar with. The question I sought to answer in this chapter was (with respect to More, of course): is Obscured By Clouds the last truly “underrated” Pink Floyd album?
I intentionally saved this album for last, because I knew by the time I was wrapping up this series I’d be so sick of the typical Pink Floyd sound in this stage. There’s only so much celestial noodling one woman can take! Obscured By Clouds is different. It sounds American; indicative of 1972 into ’73 being the first years Floyd were primarily focused on breaking in the States. They’d had tours focused on America, but they always toured Europe more and other territories. (You really want your American connection, Mark Blake? Here it is!)
We drop the needle on one buzzing synth fading in. After a few bars, an early drum machine plays two measures of four. On the third measure, the synth cord is filled out. The drum machine adds a couple toms, Nick sparsely drums over top of it. Obscured By Clouds wastes no time. Now think of how long it took for “One Of These Days” to build the tension and release. Three whole minutes passed until “One of these days, I’m going to cut you into little pieces!” Right? “Obscured By Clouds” completes the tension-release cycle in all of twenty-nineseconds. It’s indicative of the rest of the album: no wiggle room, no time to waste. More synths layer in, the drum machine switches the places of the measures, and Dave’s guitar is outlined by – you guessed it! – more synths. These are primitive digital sounds. In spite of all the layers, it somehow feels minimalistic. It gets you excited for what’s to come.
“Obscured By Clouds” is followed by a second short instrumental track, When You’re In. This was named for the catchphrase of roadie Chris Adamson, who we’ll hear admitting he “was really drunk at the time” on Dark Side. (This Chris guy sounds like a real character: Roger once dared him to eat fourteen stone [196 pounds??] of potatoes in one sitting, but he gave up after two.) When someone asked Chris how any given task was going, he’d get them off his back by saying, “I’m in. And when you’re in, you’re in.” At first, I wondered whyObscured By Clouds felt so odd in Floyd’s canon. Around my third listen-through, I realized it’s because Rick feels absent. He mostly mans the synthesizers on this album instead of his home instrument. Dave’s stamping riff with Rick’s eventual organ fills feels like a natural continuation of title track. It’s a cool, sturdy anticipation.
This momentum is dropped by Burning Bridges. It’s quite pretty, but I question its place here on the track listing. Since this is a songtrack, sequencing should follow the order of how things appear in the movie. But this is also a Pink Floyd studio album. “Burning Bridges” indulges in Floyd’s dreamier side. It’s a gorgeous instrumental, with a pretty co-lead vocal from Dave and Rick. Their two voices just worked together. They had the same soft quality, but they diverge just enough in their accents and timbre for a point of aural interest. It’s very pleasing to the ear. The lyrics tell the story of someone looking ahead and seeking to shed invisible bonds that hold them. Society, maaaan. “Stolen moments floating softly on the air/Borne on wings of fire and climbing higher,” who knows what the hell that means. Dave’s lyrics in these days could be quite abstract. Rick grounds it.
“Ancient bonds are breaking,
Moving on and changing sides
Dreaming of a new day,
Cast aside the other way.”
The new generation seeks to dismantle the conventions of their elders. It’s a very “sixties” way of thinking. By 1972, that frame of thought would’ve been ancient history. It’s in-keeping with the plot of La Vallee, though. A rich lady ditches her superficial life to indulge in free love and live off-the-grid. It’s very hippie sixties. You can tell Floyd were watching the film as they wrote. The lyrics quite plainly reference the main character’s break from conventional Western life. “Beyond the gilded cage, beyond the reach of ties/The moment is at hand, she breaks the golden band.” (The “golden band” being her marriage vows.)
Of Obscured By Clouds, I’d have most expected The Gold It’s In The... to be Floyd’s first hit Stateside. With its ridiculously hooky riff, Floyd cosplays as...a standard pop band? It’s jarring considering who this is coming from! A turnaround followed by a reverb-less guitar solo? Who are you people?! The band is tight. This is a fun, pumped-up tune. “Gold”’s lyrics tell of setting off on an adventure looking for gold and uncharted land. This sounds like the modern man’s equivalent of the expedition: the rock-and-roll tour! You could just as easily set this song to a tour bus montage as you could to a hippie caravan in the jungle. The fun is in the journey.
Wots...Uh The Deal is so excruciatingly close to being a “Stairway” song. (Someone’s gotta have Vinyl Monday bingo at this point!) This is a soft Dave guitar ballad with a wonderful harmony. Even the stop-time when he sings, “Wots...uhhthedeal” is sticky. “Let me in from the cold, turn my lead into gold/’Cause there’s a chill wind blowing in my soul, and I think I’m growing old” Here, Dave revisits one of the themes of “A Pillow Of Winds”: loss of innocence. Themes of getting older and feeling like you got a late start in life are very relevant to what would become Dark Side. “Got to make it to the next meal, Try to keep up with the turning wheel.”
Unfortunately, Obscured By Clouds is the beginning of Floyd material that didn’t push Nick’s skill set. The days of “A Saucerful of Secrets” and similar drum kit gymnastics are long gone.
Side one closes with a reprise of “Burning Bridges” called Mudmen. Maybe it’s because this is such a compact package from these guys, but it feels a little soon for a reprise. This is more for the atmosphere than anything. In any way, Rick plays wonderful, gliding organ, and Nick either plays celeste or vibraphone. It mingles with the organ in a totally seventies way, as do the round synth sounds with Dave’s guitar. The arrangement ramps up into a powerful, full-on organ showcase; which feels like the germination of “Great Gig In The Sky.”
Obscured By Clouds really kicks off with Childhood’s End; named after the sci-fi book by Arthur C. Clarke. Roger mentioned Clarke in interview all the way back in the Ummagumma days; he wanted Floyd to compose for Clarke’s next screenplay. “Childhood’s End” all but a proto-“Time.” The synths, the drum machine, the manner of which instruments are introduced, and Dave’s vocal melody all scream “Time.” It’s so fully-formed from the beginning! Dave’s “Childhood’s End” solo pales in comparison, though. “Time” was the greatest solo he ever played, if not the greatest guitar solo ever recorded. Perfect structure, perfect phrasing. It’s astonishing hearing where that came from. It takes a keen ear to pick up on the seeds of Dark Side on side one of Obscured By Clouds, but side two hits you right over the head!
In terms of the rhythm of his lyrics, Dave treats the structure of “Childhood’s End” a little differently than Roger would handle “Time.” Having your closing line be, “So all things time will mend/And so this song will end” is clumsy. It’s what’s in the middle of the song that I’m interested in. Dave digs into realizing just how small youare in an unfathomably wide universe and the unending procession of time. “You awake with a start to the beating of your heart/Just one man beneath the sky/Just two ears, just two eyes.” It doesn’t surprise me that Pisces Dave gets watery with the imagery in his lyrics. The guy loved sailing. Our narrator sails through his past.
“And then as the sail is hoist
You find your eyes growing moist
And all the fears you never voiced
Say you have to make the final choice.”
It’s your choice to use your past as your compass, or your future.
“Who are you and who am I
To say we know the reason why?
Some are born, some men die
Beneath the infinite sky.”
Dave agrees no one knows the wheres or whys.
Where “The Gold It’s In The...” really should’ve been Floyd’s breakout radio hit here, somehow it was Free Four! If there’s anything I’ve learned from this project, it’s to expect the unexpected with this band! Don’t let itsbouncy, hokey, hand-clap feel fool you. With “Childhood’s End,” “Free Four” might just be a Rosetta stone of the Pink Floyd classical period. As put by Nicholas Schaffner, “Rarely, in fact, had the form of the three-minute-plus pop song ever encompassed a world view of such breathtaking cynicism.”
“Life is a warm short moment
And death is a long cold rest.
You get your chance to try in the blink of an eye,
Eighty years with luck, or even less.”
Life is short. Make the most of it. Rog also smacks the music industry; a machine he will slam on Wish You Were Here. “So all aboard for the American tour/And maybe you’ll make it to the top/And mind how you go, and I can tell you, ’cause I know/You may find it hard to get off.” You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Roger wrote “Corporal Clegg” about a World War II veteran all the way back in 1968, but “Free Four” was the first time he directly references his father’s death in song.
“You are the angel of death,
And I am the dead man's son.
He was buried like a mole in a fox-hole,
And everyone's still on the run.”
While Dave and Roger look forward, Rick looks back. Stay is him revisiting the central theme of “Summer ’68”: seeking genuine connection where there is none. It’s the flipside of Roger’s core songwriting philosophy, yes? Reaching out to and leading with empathy for your fellow man will save us. But what if you reach out and there’s just...nothing? That’s the risk you take. “Stay” is bittersweet. These one-night lovers’ paths will never cross again. She exists only in this moment. “Midnight blue, burning gold/A yellow moon is growing cold.” Our narrator is pleasantly surprised to find his partner still there in the morning, but he can’t even remember her name to bid her goodbye. Midnight blue turns to grey. The night will fade away in his memory, as her name did. It’s tragic, really. “Stay” is yet another echo of the “Burning Bridges” melody, but I like the way the guys prepare it here. The feel is hazy, the guitar affected and watery. Rick plays lovely piano, and I believe Nick contributes more celeste.
The closing track of Obscured By Clouds and La Vallee is one hell of a closer for Pink Floyd’s experimental period. Even the title works: Absolutely Curtains. Keen ears will hear a sliver of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” in “Curtains”’s introduction, though this sounds more organic than cold and futuristic. The synthspeek through thick vegetation. Beautiful cymbal washes by Nick bubble up from underneath. Rick plays what sounds like twinkling harpsichord. The buzzing, droning synths make me feel lightheaded. Then, the rumbling drums and high-flying organ. We’ve found Shangri-La, some lost wonder of the world tucked away in the fabled valley. The song closes with the chanting of the Mapuga tribe; some, if not all of it is reversed. It’s euphoric. All of a sudden, you’re no longer the directionless traveler. “Curtains” is of just two tracks on this album clocking in at over five minutes, and it necessitates each second of its run time. It’s hard not to have your breath taken away as the subtle beauty of the soundscape unfolds in front of you.
Nick doesn’t think Obscured By Clouds is much of a Pink Floyd album; rather a collection of songs that everyone liked. Dave shrugs off the album’s “stop-gap” label, saying this was one of his favorite things he did with the band. He even incorporated “Wots...Uh The Deal” into his solo tour set lists in the 2000s.
Given the nature of this body of work, I can’t believe Obscured By Clouds was whipped up in two weeks. Despite their TV-watching, foosball-playing habits in the studio, Floyd were, in fact, capable of discipline! This album shows a completely different side of them; an alternate universe where they were just another rock-and-roll band. There are very atmospheric romps and no spacewalks. It employs a lean and powerful – but not exactly unforgettable – style. It’s weird. I have all these songs liked on Spotify, but if you asked me to sing something back to you? I’m not sure I could come up with much. But if you played me a cut from this album, I would be able to tell you it’s from Obscured By Clouds within seconds. Floyd had never sounded like this before or since. It’s an earthy, organic, thick, green interpretation of Floyd’s signature “pastel wash.” Povey called it “as striking as it is subtle.”
You can absolutely tell Dark Side was on their minds. Obscured By Clouds was undoubtedly a medium for the band to test out some of their new musical ideas and equipment. It was a new source of inspiration; a test-drive before embarking on what they felt was “the real thing.” While it might feel like a regression to some listeners, I get the feeling this album is a band tying up loose ends before their next big – very big – mission. If “Echoes” at Pompeii is the father of Dark Side, Obscured By Clouds is the mother.
Personal favorites: “The Gold It's In The...” “Mudmen,” “Childhood’s End,” “Free Four,” “Stay,” “Absolutely Curtains”
Floyd didn’t wait until the body was cold to move on. Save for the title track and “When You’re In”’s appearances Petit’s ballet, most of Obscured By Clouds was never performed live. These three numbers werefully retired by the time Dark Side came out, and any hits to follow blew “Free Four”’s chart performance out of the water. Obscured By Clouds was buried like a mole in a foxhole, and everyone’s still on the run.
In the fall of 1972, an early version of Adrian Maben’s Live At Pompeii film was screened at the Edinburgh Arts Festival. Run time complications had delayed its release – and would push its commercial release out by another year-and-a-half. It turns out those goofs worked to Maben’s benefit. This cut of Pompeii featured a chitchat with oysters and some revealing (if very stoned) interview footage. In interview, Maben asked about the group’s previous reliance on their gear. Rick said,
“...it’s a danger that we could become slaves to all our equipment. And in the past, we have been. But what we’re trying to do is to sort it all out so that we’re not...it worries me sometimes that we have this much equipment. And you can hide behind it.”
Dave had a more confident point of view.
“I mean, it’s all extensions of what’s coming out of our heads...You’ve gotta have it inside your head to get it out at all anyway, and the equipment isn’t actually thinking of what to do any of the time. It couldn’t control itself.”
Give a man a Les Paul guitar and he doesn’t become Eric Clapton. At last, Pink Floyd are no longer slaves to their equipment. They’re finally able to graduate to their classic period.
– AD ☆
End of Part Four
Blake, Mark. Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. Boston: Da Capo, 2008.
Gilmour, Ginger. Memoirs of the Bright Side of the Moon. London: Angelscript International, 2015.
Guedson, Jean-Michel, and Phillipe Margotin. Pink Floyd: All The Songs. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2017.
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.
i'm not enough of an expert on the Floyd to spot the this and that of what was syphoned off into dark side. you've highlighted a lot of what was significant and moreover, in these four pieces, shown how essential these albums were. obscured is the album i liked least.
hey if a redux of dark side is a very very long time away then i deduce that vinyl monday/abigaildevoe.com is going to be around for a very very long time and this makes me, today, very very happy and very very content.