The band eventually decided that the missing ‘something’ was an orchestra and a choir. “But it still seemed to lack an essential something.” “We added, subtracted and multiplied the elements,” said Mason. Pink Floyd had been playing the piece live for some weeks by now, tweaking the arrangement. There are moments on Atom Heart Mother when you get a taste of what Pink Floyd would soon achieve on Meddle and The Dark Side Of The Moon. “It demanded the full range of our limited musicianship,” Mason said in his memoir, Inside Out. The company insisted this tape was not to be spliced and used for edits, which meant Waters and Mason had the unenviable task of recording the backing track for their new composition in one 23.44-minute take. EMI had just installed state-of-the-art eight-track recorders that used a specific one-inch tape. Instead, Pink Floyd entered EMI’s Abbey Road studios in early March to begin recording their new work. “It’s rather Yellow Submarine-ish, about a little boy in space.”īut Waters never mentioned Rollo again. “We’re going to do the music for an Alan Aldridge TV cartoon series called Rollo,” Waters announced in Melody Maker. But they were still undecided on their next recording project. It’s believed Pink Floyd performed the first version of their new instrumental on Januat the Lawns Centre in Hull. The piece was fashioned out of found sounds, with its composer ranting in a Scottish accent. They’d stopped releasing singles after December 1968 and had followed their second album, that year’s A Saucerful Of Secrets, with a soundtrack for the art house movie More.įloyd’s next release, 1969’s half-studio/halflive double album Ummagumma, included Roger Waters’ musique concrète experiment, Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict. The early Pink Floyd embraced the unexpected and the concept of being, as drummer Nick Mason put it, “more than just a pop group”. They arrived in Rome to start recording in November ’69.Īntonioni’s 1966 movie Blow-Up had been a clumsy portrayal of Swinging London, and Zabriskie Point was a drama about US student radicals fighting ‘the man’, blowing stuff up and having lots of sex. Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni had commissioned Pink Floyd to score his next film, Zabriskie Point. An album that ended with a cow in a field in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire began more than a year before in Rome.

Atom heart mother cover photo