The Meddle Children, Part 3: Meddle

With Meddle, Pink Floyd had their "a-ha!" moment.

Roger Waters: bass, some guitar, lead vocals on “San Tropez”

David Gilmour, guitar, lead vocals, harmonica on “Seamus,” bass on “One Of These Days”

Richard Wright: piano, organ, co-lead vocals on “Echoes”

Nick Mason: drums, percussion, lead vocals(ish) on “One Of These Days”

Special guest: Seamus the Dog, lead “vocals” on “Seamus”

Produced by Pink Floyd

art by Hipgnosis

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

Let’s recap. More was a soundtrack, Ummagumma was a botched half-live half-studio exercise, and Atom Heart Mother was largely a collaboration with Ron Geesin. We haven’t had a full, standalone single LP of post-Syd Floyd studio material yet!

Playing the “Atom Heart Mother” suite got stale fast for Pink Floyd – not to mention it was a logistical nightmare to organize. “Something on the scale of Atom Heart Mother really takes a lot of getting together,” David Gilmour confessed. “The problem is that we’ve never done it more than twice with the same people. The choir is usually all right because they’re used to working together, but some of the brass people have been really hopeless.” The band’s next project would be a direct response to what they felt was Atom Heart Mother’s bloated nature.

Above: Pink Floyd performing the "Atom Heart Mother" suite, with footage from their 1971 Japan tour interspersed.

Rick confessed,

“We went through a stage of depression during the last few months, a sort of stagnation which occurs to everybody, but now we are going ahead again. It’s very important for the band to keep together musically and not drift apart.”

quoted from: Nick Hodges and Jan Priston, Embryo: A Pink Floyd Chronology 1966-1971 (1998.)

Itching to get back in the lab, Floyd booked time at EMI in January of 1971. Nevermind the fact that they didn’t have any songs written! Any time the guys had anything slightly resembling an idea, they’d go in and cut it. First came the fabled “Household Objects” project: made entirely with – you guessed it – household objects. “Wine Glasses” was quasi-successful; relegated to Floyd’s “save for later” pile. Elastic bands and lighters? Not so much!

Next, Floyd took a page from Zappa’s book. The guys would play whatever they wanted, so long as it was in the same key. The twist was that they couldn’t hear what the other guy had recorded before him; producing an entirely random composition. I love these guys, but none of them are Zappa-level musicians. (Least of all the guy who needed Rick to tune his bass for him!) This idea didn’t work either. How were Floyd allowed to do this? Or any of the nonsense they’ve pulled so far, for that matter? There was one very unusual stipulation in their contract with EMI: though they’d have to pay out-of-pocket (customary for the recording studio system at the time,) Floyd had unlimited studio time, and could do whatever they wanted with it. This absolutely enabled their nonsense. See the below headline:

Pictured: ...well, at least they're honest.

Eventually – through much more conventional means – Floyd produced thirty-some-odd song fragments, but still no song. On May 15^th, 1971, the band continued their Spinal Tap shenanigans at London’s Crystal Palace. It poured rain the whole day, and the band’s grand finale was a fifty-foot inflatable octopus emerging from the lake! The ice killed the fish in the lake (the guys were slapped with a hefty fine,) and a long-suffering roadie had to swim out to untangle the octopus’s tentacles.

Pictured: behold! The ill-fated inflatable octopus in Crystal Palace's lake, 5/15/1971

Aside from the mollusk blunder, this Crystal Palace was gig most notable for Floyd debuting their joining together of their thirty-something song fragments: “Return of the Son of Nothing.”

It didn’t come all at once. It was a series of epiphanies – or maybe happy accidents. One day in the studio, RickWright was noodling around on a piano hooked up to a Leslie cabinet. Usually, he had the Leslie hooked up to his Hammond organ, so to his surprise, hitting a certain key made a certain resonant...ding. The middle section of “whale noises” discovered by accident too; Dave wasn’t paying attention and accidentally swapped the input and output of his wah-wah. Soon to be known as “Echoes,” this piece was a response to the hell it was to stage the “Atom Heart Mother” suite. Though it was long and quite grand, clocking in at over twenty-three minutes, there were no choir, brass, or strings. The studio trickery, including the creepy rising delay effect with two tape recorders engineer Dave Leckie helped work out, was easy to replicate live.

“Echoes” was completed on June 2^nd, 1971; between consecutive tours of Europe. Like finishing “Tomorrow Never Knows” shaped the rest of Revolver, “Echoes” would shape the rest of what would become Meddle. To pad out their side-long number, Floyd threw some other numbers in: “One Of These Days,” “A Pillow of Winds,” “Fearless,” and, of course, typical Floyd shenanigans. Dave was dogsitting for friend of the band Steve Marriott. Steve’s dog Seamus howled whenever he heard music. Dave thought this was hilarious, so one day, Seamus went on a little field trip to the studio!

Of the four albums in this series, I was most familiar with Meddle. I’ve pretty consistently ranked it in my top five Pink Floyd LPs – at times usurping Animals in my ranking!

One Of These Days opens with thirty seconds of one of the sounds Floyd will trademark in the next four years: a wind machine, slowed to half-speed. It fades in, gradually building in intensity, until one slip-cut note on the bass and stray note on Rick’s organ.

Of the many blunders of Live At Pompeii production, some moron destroying most of the footage of “One Of These Days” has to be the worst. I longed to see the effects pedal that made that sound on Roger’s bass. He fed his instrument through an Echorec; double-tracked by Dave in the left channel on the LP. You can hear the slight differences in their playing styles; Dave handles the instrument like he would a guitar. I’ve been told the bassline’s similarity to the Doctor Who theme was an accident, but knowing these guys, I refuse to believe that. One of the symptoms of Floyd’s unlimited studio time was watching a lot of TV, see their financing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the Dark Side of the Moon days. Coincidentally, Delia Derbyshire, one of the composers of the Doctor Who theme, briefly worked with Peter Zinovieff, one of the developers of the VCS3 synthesizer.

Above: "One Of These Days," as performed in Live at Pompeii.

“One Of These Days” totally falls into the Pink Floyd formula of “ambient noise,” “buildup,” “quiet part,” “sound effect,” “big finish!” What sets “One Of These Days” and this album’s closer above the formula is that it does two things this stage of Floyd did best: atmosphere, and tension and release. Think of classical music. There’s tension and release all over the place. You don’t get “Ode to Joy” without...well, everything else. However much I make fun of Neil Young’s one-note guitar solos, they accomplish the same thing as Roger and Dave’s one-note thing here.

The payoff doesn’t come without an expert build. First come Rick’s Leslie-affected pings, a signature of Meddle. The reverse-echo applied makes it sound like it’s flying by us. Then come Nick’s backwards-echo cymbals, impossibly thin, and the first hit of Dave’s snarling slide guitar; unusually aggressive for his playing style. Theswitch-up is much welcome. It’s beefed up by Nick’s hard drum hits, which drop out for a full-bodied, double-tracked slide. You get the sense it’s not quite the drums’ time yet. We reach the “quiet part” of the Floyd formula when all drops out for Roger’s bass and some white noise. A cheat code for a song to show how its tension builds is to make you feel when all those elements drop out. The menacing static, feedback, and reversed synths threaten to pull you backwards in the rip current. The drums come back, you sense they mean it this time.

“ONE OF THESE DAYS, I’M GOING TO CUT YOU INTO LITTLE PIECES.”

How the hell did they do that? Nick said his part fast and in a really high voice so when it was slowed down, it’d sound right. No sources list it, but I’m pretty sure they slapped some backwards echo on it too.

The rip current is too strong, we are sucked back screaming. Let me break down the layers for you: forwards drums, backwards drums, at least one bass track, if not two (maybe one track backwards, but I only hear it for a few seconds.) It’s barely audible, but Rick’s on piano, he’s for sure wailing on the organ. Finally, Dave plays three tracks of guitar: double-tracked slide and his solo over top. That’s the power of 16-track recording. Dave first lobbied for 16-track recording all the way back in the Ummagumma days, but EMI turned him down on the grounds of it being too expensive and experimental. Atom Heart Mother used 8-tracks, and all the albums before made do with 4. Though Floyd were an EMI group, most of the Meddle operation was brought to George Martin’s AIR Studio for their 16-track console. Having to mix a track like “One Of These Days” down two or three times to fit comfortably on 8-track would’ve diminished its sheer forward momentum. It’s all balanced perfectly. Much as I love the above Pompeii performance, the guys had fewer layers of sound to work with. The keys were pushed forward in that mix, so the engine didn’t have the same drive as on the LP.

“One Of These Days” crash-lands back into the wind machine; our segue into A Pillow of Winds. From the riptide to the gentle stream.

The Floyd WAGs were avid mah-jong players, I guess that’s where the title came from. It’s certainly more erudite than working title “Dave’s Guitar Thing.” Note the opening lyric: “A cloud of eiderdown draws around me, softening the sound.” I have only heard the word “eiderdown” used in one other lyric in my life, ever. “Alone in the clouds all blue/Lying on an eiderdown/Yippee! You can’t see me, but I can you…” The musicinvokes the lyric; with multiple lush, winsome layers of Dave’s guitar. He plays acoustic, electric, and waxy flower-petal slide. The sparse, amble bass is like the vine from which the flowers bloom. It’s a little folk and a little country.

At surface level, “Pillow of Winds” is a love song. “Sleepy time when I lie with my love by my side/And she’s breathing low/And the candle dies.” It’s a simple, intimate moment. I sense paranoia, though, from the key change.

“When night comes down, you lock the door,

Your book falls to the floor

As darkness falls and waves roll by,

The seasons change, the wind is warm.

Now wakes the owl, now sleeps the swan

Behold the dream, the dream is gone.”

Wisdom usurps beauty. Life experience begets a new, more mature outlook. MicTheSnare on YouTube said something along the lines of, “As a guitarist, David Gilmour is one of the greatest of all time. As a lyricist, he is.” It’s easy to write Dave’s contributions off, especially in this amorphous phase of the band. This is one of my favorite lyrics Dave ever wrote. You’re staying up all night feeling this while your love is unaware, fast asleep beside you. The tension resolves, though, when she wakes with the morning sun.

I find Fearless tough to settle into, with the riff constantly building up and dropping back down again, a cymbal crash to mark. It’s kind of like Sisyphus and his rock. It reaches the top, only for it to roll back down to the bottom. This isn’t pleasing to my ear, but I like all the guitar textures that go into this song: acoustic, electric, and feedback. “Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd smiling” adds the caveat of, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” As stated by Andy Cush for Pitchfork, the lyric “focuses on the quiet dignity of an ‘idiot’ following his own path up a hill while a crowd jeers from below that he’ll never make the top.”

About including reverse-echoed “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a Rogers and Hammerstein-turned-Liverpool fan chant, Nick said he found it “odd Roger was so keen to do this, considering that he was a committed Arsenal fan.” Several texts on my reading list were either just as baffled as Nick or have gone to comical lengths to analyze the inclusion. Here’s your answer. On May 8^th, 1971, while the guys were recording Meddle, Arsenal and Liverpool played the FA Final Cup at Wembley Stadium. Arsenal won. The Liverpool chant is in the song to rub Arsenal’s win in. George Roger Waters, you petty bitch, I love you.

I don’t have much to say about San Tropez. It’s a silly tropical lounge-jazz sidequest from people who should not be tropical lounge-jazz sidequesting this late in the game. Literally why was it given the space on the record?

The real MVP of Meddle is Seamus. Good boy. That is all I have to say about “Seamus!”

“Illimitable Ocean without bound

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth

And time and place are lost; where eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold

Eternal anarchy…”

and so on, “Paradise Lost” is a really long poem.

This is not hyperbole, not exaggerating in any way. I have been waiting for this moment. Writing a minimum of 6,500 words about music a week, every week, for four fucking years. I finally get to talk about why Echoes is the best Pink Floyd song.

It’s the reason Meddle exists, for one. So many subsequent breakthroughs happened because of this song being stitched together. The funk section bears Dave’s simplest but lengthiest, most layered guitar work; among his best. Those fucking whale noises, how the instrumentation is thrust up from the deep through the last third of the song. I have been known to get misty-eyed when Dave’s shimmering arpeggios kick in with the crashing drums. It feels so hopeful. Each movement of “Echoes” showcases Nick’s understated, overlooked expertise on his instrument; showing the full breadth of what he could do. The creative direction of Meddle was driven by Dave, but “Echoes” is especially indebted to Rick. There’s a reason the surviving members of Floyd never performed “Echoes” again after Rick’s passing. About his late bandmate and friend, Nick wrote in his memoir,

“(Rick) once summed up his musical philosophy by saying, ‘Technique is so secondary to ideas.’ Many fine keyboard players could and did emulate and recreate his parts, but nobody else other than Rick had the ability to create them in the first place.”

quoted from: Nick Mason, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd (2017 ed.)

It was Rick who, completely by accident, crafted the note that bore a whole album. His voice sounds like it was ran through his Leslie cabinet on the final verse – Meddle really is the Leslie album. They should’ve just called the damn thing Leslie!

Roger originally wrote “Echoes”’s lyrics in the vein of “Astronomy Domine.” Realizing he wanted to ditch thepesky “space rock” label, and noting how the song was taking shape, he took the lyric in an aquatic turn. Rick and Dave sing the first verse in lilting harmony.

“Overhead, the albatross hangs motionless upon the air

And deep beneath the rolling waves, a labyrinth of coral caves.

The echo of a distant time comes willowing across the sand,

And everything is green and submarine.”

All the lyrics didn’t quite make it out of space, though: “No one flies around the sun.” “Echoes”’s verse-chorus cycle is another expert showing of tension and release; a gradual build you won’t feel until it pulls back. Dave delivers a descent-ascent riff so simple but so good, Andrew Lloyd Weber plagiarized it for “Phantom Of The Opera.” We know rock-and-roll was on his radar; see rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Roger said he probably could’ve sued, but instead deduced, “life’s too long to bother with suing Andrew Fucking Lloyd Webber.”

I first heard “Echoes” my junior year of college. A very bohemian time in my life, as I’ve detailed in the past.

My first semester of junior year coincided with the last few months before the pandemic. If you’re my age and were in school at that time, I think you’ll agree that in hindsight we all sensed something big was on the horizon. Of course, we didn’t know what. We were too young and stupid to have a lick of foresight, let alone the sheer amount of substance intake! But to the older and younger folk who watch my videos – my audience is pretty evenly split between boomers and zoomers born after 9/11 – September of 2019 through February of 2020 hadthis party-at-the-end-of-the-world atmosphere. That year, I lived in this L-shaped apartment with six other people. It was an outdoor complex and it was disgusting. Since my bedroom was the tail of the L and right up against the sidewalk, I had an inordinate amount of drunks pissing on the lower window. I’d gone through the worst breakup of my life three months before moving in, and on Thanksgiving break, my parents announced their divorce on the grounds of my father’s relationship with alcohol. Clearly, I was headed straight for a fall. I hit the ground hard. The music scoops back up into the second verse.

“Strangers passing in the street,

By chance, two separate chances meet

And I am you, and what I see is me.

And do I take you by the hand

And lead you through the land,

And help me understand the best I can?”

Twenty years old and drunk, laying on the floor while your six-foot-by-nine-foot bedroom spins around you like the rest of your life is. Imagine hearing “Echoes” for the first like that. How could it not become the best Pink Floyd song?

That passage ranks among my favorite lyrics ever written, with the “jewels and binoculars” chorus of “Visions of Johanna” and the opening lines of the Buffalo Springfield’s “Expecting To Fly.” That one line, “strangers passing in the street,” is Roger Waters’s entire mission statement. The inspiration for new “Echoes” lyrics camefrom back when Roger first moved to London. He felt a bit disconnected from it all – remember his friend group. The fact he’d only done acid twice and sworn hallucinogenics off completely afterwards would’ve set him apart from this crowd. He felt disconnected from the scene his band was a fixture of. This feeling maceratedin wake of Syd Barrett’s departure from Floyd.

The bitter, lonely journeys of individuals in a cruel, brutal, lonely world. Critics have been harping on that for decades. I’d argue the crux of Roger’s writing is the need to find connection in said brutal, lonely world. Think of “Pigs on the Wing 2:” “You know that I care what happens to you.” Or think of the moral of the story of The Wall. The walls we build up for self-preservation will be our undoing, on the micro and macro levels. “Together we stand, divided we fall.” You have to reach out, to connect, to survive. We’re all stumbling around this big rock flying through space together. No one knows the wheres or whys. Lead with empathy. Empathy is the food the indomitable spirit of man needs to survive. “All is not lost, the unconquerable Will.”

That empathy point may seem ironic today, but hey. John Lennon wrote about peace and love and that was the thing he struggled with most.

Being the Roger Waters Apologist in the room – a pretty tough position to fill these days! – I’ve wondered if my interpretation of his writing is rooted in me finding him nice to look at over the actual content. But no, it came from a very real place. Roger said to Disc & Music Echo in 1970:

“I wonder if there’s anything to say which I’m not capable of articulating. There’s words, obviously, but unless you know someone very well so you’re not at all frightened of them, it’s very hard to communicate with words. But we don’t say what we mean half the time, we either say what sounds right, or what the other person wants to hear, or any number of things.”

quoted from: Nick Hodges and Jan Preston, Embryo: A Pink Floyd Chronology 1966-1971 (1998.)

Think back to “If” on Atom Heart Mother. It’s so unusual among Roger’s Floyd material for how vulnerable it is. “If I were a good man, I’d talk with you more often than I do.” He openly longs for connection, recognizing his detachment. “Echoes” feel more in-keeping with Roger’s style because the lyrics craft with the detachment. The narrator looks down at strangers from their open window.

I think my demeanor does a lot to soften how intense of a person I actually am. Roger’s never had that issue. But when you separate my words from my presentation like I do here, things will come into focus.

The last verse of “Echoes” is a nod to the Beatles. You can’t go wrong with that. Roger pulled “Inciting and inviting me to rise” from “Across The Universe.” “Echoes” was moment Pink Floyd became Pink Floyd. Like the spooky, forever-rising Greek ghost chorus at the end of the song, this was the moment the group ascended. Michael Watts for Melody Maker said Floyd on Meddle were “all sound and fury, signifying nothing,” I say bullshit.

Dave agreed “Echoes” was experimental Floyd’s much-needed north star. “We were looking for something. During that whole period through Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, we were finding ourselves. ‘Echoes’ was the point at which we found our focus.” What a way to close an album.

Pictured: Pink Floyd performing "Echoes" at Pompeii, 1971

It’s tricky to evaluate Meddle as a whole. A viewer in the comments of my Highway 61 episode loosely quoted Todd In The Shadows: “A good song can make an album, but a great song can kill it.” Meddle is stuck in limbo. It’s got “Echoes,” the best Pink Floyd song. But does that make it the best Pink Floyd album? Not a chance! Any and all worthy material on side one, “One Of These Days,” “Pillow of Winds,” can’t hold a candle to the greatness of side two. Side one is dragged down by one okay track, “Fearless,” and one poor track, “San Tropez.” (We do not speak ill of Seamus!!)

As Nick pointed out in his book, Meddle was the first time Floyd had worked together on an album in the studio since A Saucerful of Secrets. People do a lot of growing up in four years! All the guys had settled down andbought houses. They were finding their directions in life.

Despite bearing the “space rock” label, Pink Floyd didn’t yet have a sound to call home. They molted pretty quickly from psych to prog to orchestra rock. Save for a couple crucial elements still to come, with Meddle, they landed upon a sound. Dave has found his direction in the band. He no longer feels like a hired gun. He’s a key player and asset! Over this album and the next, he really comes into his own. One has to acknowledge this album as key in Floyd’s development as a group. It brings the aimless wandering period to a close and ushers in a new one. They’re positioning themselves as musical pioneers, but not in quite a pretentious way as they could lean with Atom Heart Mother.

Meddle was Floyd’s "a-ha!" moment; the lightbulb going off. “We’ll take it from here.”

Personal favorites: “One Of These Days,” “A Pillow of Winds,” “Echoes”

Nick said, “Certainly, compared to its predecessor, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle seems refreshingly straightforward.” Despite Floyd being more satisfied with this album overall, only “One Of These Days” and “Echoes” were ever played live. (“Seamus,” too, if you count its retitling to “Mademoiselle Nobs” for Live at Pompeii.) The guys, especially Roger, were eager to continue in the direction of “Echoes.” Within a month of Meddle’s release, the band convened Nick and Lindy’s house so Roger could pitch his new concept. Pink Floyd had found their sound, they’ve found the muse. By all accounts, they’re more than ready to move on to their next studio album.

There was just one problem.

End of Part Three

– AD ☆

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

Costa, Jean-Charles. “Meddle.” Rolling Stone, 1/6/1972. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/meddle-100626/

Cush, Andy. “Meddle.” Pitchfork, 7/12/2020. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pink-floyd-meddle/

Guedson, Jean-Michel, and Phillipe Margotin. Pink Floyd: All The Songs. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2017.

Hodges, Nick, and Jan Priston. Embryo: A Pink Floyd Chronology 1966-1971. London: Cherry Red Books, 1998.

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.

Watts, Michael. “Pink’s muddled Meddle.” Melody Maker, 11/13/1971. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/UK/Melody-Maker/70s/71/Melody-Maker-1971-1113-OCR.pdf