Meddle

Meddle is the sixth studio album by English rock band Pink Floyd, by Harvest Records. The album was produced between the band’s touring commitments, from January to August 1971 at a series of locations around London, including Abbey Road Studios and Morgan Studios.

With no material to work with and no clear idea of the album’s direction, the band devised a series of novel experiments which eventually inspired the album’s signature track ”Echoes”. Although the band’s later albums would be unified by a central theme with lyrics written entirely by Roger Waters, Meddle was a group effort with lyrical contributions from each member, and is considered a transitional album between the Syd Barrett-influenced group of the late 1960s and the emerging Pink Floyd.The cover has been explained by its creator Storm Thorgerson to be an ear underwater; as with several previous albums designed by Hipgnosis, though, Thorgerson was unhappy with the final result.

The album was well received by critics upon its release, and was commercially successful in the United Kingdom, but lacklustre publicity on the part of the band’s American label Capitol Records led to poor sales there upon initial release.

Returning from a series of tours across America and England in support of Atom Heart Mother, at the start of 1971 Pink Floyd commenced work on new material at Abbey Road Studios in London. At the time, Abbey Road was equipped only with eight-track multitrack recording facilities, which the band found insufficient for the increasing technical demands of their project. They transferred their best efforts, including the opening of what became ”Echoes”, to 16-track tape at smaller studios in London (namely AIR, and Morgan in West Hampstead) and resumed work with the advantage of more flexible recording equipment. Engineers John Leckie and Peter Bown recorded the main Abbey Road and AIR sessions, while for minor work at Morgan, Rob Black and Roger Quested handled the engineering duties.

Lacking a central theme for the project, the band used several experimental methods in an attempt to spur the creative process. One exercise involved each member playing on a separate track, with no reference to what the other members were doing. The tempo was entirely random while the band played around an agreed chord structure, and moods such as ”first two minutes romantic, next two up tempo”. Each recorded section was named, but the process was largely unproductive; after several weeks, no complete songs had been created.

Leckie had worked on albums such as George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey, and was employed as a tape-operator on Meddle, partly for his proclivity for working into the early hours of the morning. He has said that Pink Floyd’s sessions would often begin in the afternoon, and end early the next morning, ”during which time nothing would get done. There was no record company contact whatsoever, except when their label manager would show up now and again with a couple of bottles of wine and a couple of joints.”The band would apparently spend long periods of time working on simple sounds, or a particular guitar riff. They also spent several days at AIR attempting to create music using a variety of household objects, a project which would be revisited between their next albums, The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.

Following these early experiments – called Nothings – the band developed Son of Nothings, which was followed by Return of the Son of Nothings as the working title of the new album. One of these early works involved the use of Richard Wright’s piano. Wright had fed a single note through a Leslie speaker, producing a submarine-like ping. The band tried repeatedly to recreate this sound in the studio but were unsuccessful, and so the demo version was used on what would later become ”Echoes”,mixed almost exclusively at AIR Studios. Combined with David Gilmour’s guitar, the band were able to develop the track further, experimenting with accidental sound effects (such as Gilmour’s guitar being plugged into a wah-wah pedal back to front, an effect they used live from 1970 for the central section of “Embryo”). Unlike with Atom Heart Mother, the new multi-track capabilities of the studio enabled them to create the track in stages, rather than performing it in a single take. The final, 23-minute piece would eventually take up the entire second side of the album.

”One of These Days” was developed around an ostinato bassline created by Roger Waters, by feeding the output through a Binson Echorec. The bassline was performed by Waters and Gilmour using two bass guitars, one on old strings. Drummer Nick Mason’s abstruse ”One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces” vocal line was recorded at double speed using a falsetto voice, and replayed at normal speed.

Meddle was recorded between the band’s various concert commitments, and therefore its production was spread over a considerable period of time.The band recorded in the first half of April 1971, but in the latter half played at Doncaster and Norwich before returning to record at the end of the month. In May they split their time between sessions at Abbey Road, and rehearsals and concerts in London, Lancaster, Stirling, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Nottingham. June and July were spent mainly performing at venues across Europe.August was spent in the far east and Australia, September in Europe, and October to November in the US.In the same period, the group also produced Relics, a compilation album of some of Pink Floyd’s earlier works.A quadraphonic mix of the album was prepared at Command Studios on 21 and 26 September, but remains unreleased.New 2016 stereo and 5.1 mixes of the album were inadvertently released as hidden tracks on the ”Reverber/ation” Blu-ray disc in The Early Years 1965–1972 box set.

Although the tracks possess a variety of moods, Meddle is generally considered more cohesive than its 1970 predecessor, Atom Heart Mother.[16] The largely instrumental ”One of These Days” is followed by ”A Pillow of Winds”, which is distinguished by being one of the few quiet, acoustic love songs in the Pink Floyd catalogue. These two songs segue into each other across windy sound effects, anticipating the technique that would later be used on Wish You Were Here. The title of ”A Pillow of Winds” was inspired by the games of Mahjong that Waters, Mason, and their wives played while in the south of France.

The song ”Fearless” includes field recordings of Liverpool F.C. fans in the Kop singing club anthem ”You’ll Never Walk Alone”, which brings the song to an end in a heavily reverberated fade-out. ”San Tropez”, by contrast, is a jazz-inflected pop song with a shuffle tempo, composed by Waters in his increasingly deployed style of breezy, off-the-cuff songwriting. The song was inspired by the band’s trip to the south of France in 1970. Pink Floyd uncharacteristically displayed their sense of humour with ”Seamus”, a pseudo-blues novelty track featuring Steve Marriott’s dog (whom Gilmour was dog-sitting) howling along to the music.Although ”Seamus” often tops polls of the worst songs Pink Floyd ever created, the band would use animal sounds again on Animals.

The final song on the album is the 23-minute ”Echoes”. First performed as ”Return of the Son of Nothing” on 22 April 1971 in Norwich,the band spent about six months on the track in three studios (Morgan, AIR and Abbey Road).The track opens with Wright’s ”ping”. ”Echoes” was recorded almost entirely at AIR Studios, and completed in July 1971.In the background of the track a Shepard tone can be heard. ”Echoes” also gave its name to the compilation album Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd, on which a much-edited version of the title track was included. On the compilation, multiple edits throughout the entire song cut the running length of the piece down by some seven minutes. Some of the material composed during the creation of Meddle was not used; however, one song would eventually become ”Brain Damage”, on The Dark Side of the Moon.

Pink Floyd

1971

46

5099902894225

United Kingdom

CD

N/A

Progressive Rock

50999 028942 2 5

5

AIR* Abbey Road

6

Album

N/A

1

2018-06-28 16:19:44

CD Digipak

NVT

~$25.03

2026-02-25

2018-06-28 16:19:44