(Credits: Far Out / Sony Music)
There’s a fine line between genius and insanity in music. Particularly during the crossover of the 1960s and the 1970s, when creativity was at it’s loosest and hedonism at it’s most rife, you’d be forgiven for thinking the lines between genius and substance-inspired chaos became blurry. When Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon rolled around it seemed as though a band had cracked the code and streamlined the ability to articulate the esoteric.
But it wasn’t always that way for the Floyd. Like a dodgy tap, they had to let it run before crystal-clear water revealed itself. Syd Barrett’s glimpses of genius were soon drowned out by his downward drug-induced spiral, and when he officially left the band, leaving David Gilmour as it’s co-leader alongside Roger Waters, they were seemingly hell-bent on finishing whatever abstract painting he started.
In 1970, the band laid down Atom Heart Mother in a bid to stretch the boundaries of avant-garde rock. It was a valiant and uninhibited attempt at wild creativity that listened more as a six-part theatrical piece than a coherent album. Pink Floyd had developed a fierce live reputation at that point for their improvisational and jam-led style, and tried to bottle that into a record.
Gilmour explained, “We didn’t know where we were going in terms of recording, but we were pretty good live. We were very good at jamming, but we couldn’t translate that onto record.”
He later expressed his general disdain for the record, saying, “I listened to that album recently: God, it’s shit, possibly our lowest point artistically. Atom Heart Mother sounds like we didn’t have any idea between us, but we became much more prolific after it”.
It was a performance of individuals on the record and flourished momentary genius in an otherwise sprawling mess of ideas. But it wasn’t just the band’s performance that hindered the execution of the record, so much as it was their judgement.
To add the finishing brass touches, the band enlisted the help of session musicians. But the opportunity to share the studio with the ethereal and enigmatic Pink Floyd proved to be an invitation to some, who turned up in less than a fit state to play. “The musicians didn’t give a shit” keyboardist Richard Wright said. “It was basically a brass band but they didn’t give a shit, they just wanted to have their beer and get pissed. It was very weird” he continued.
While Nick Mason said, “If Atom Heart Mother was more in itself a structured piece or if there was some way of pulling it out, I’d still love to perform something like that again. Just the vocal section. I’m less fond of the brass parts”.
It’s somewhat ironic that Atom Heart Mother has gone on to become a cult classic among Floyd fans, who consider it their premier piece of abstract work. But what retrospective views on the album point towards is that if anything, the moments of genius fans obsess over were largely performed by drunk session musicians, while their rock gods stood in the corner rolling their eyes.
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