Hendrix died in the middle of recording which I think affected them a bit,” recalls engineer John Leckie, then recruited as a tape operator but eventually credited as engineer on Meddle. The seagull sound you hear on Echoes is that, the Cry Baby. I remember Dave Gilmour had just got the same wah-wah peddle that Jimi Hendrix used. Although Echoes is the centrepiece of Meddle, there are other songs like One Of These Days and Fearless that are just as important. It’s an album that they started without any overarching ideas as to what it was going to be. Things were just coming out of psychedelic music and the influence was still there, not completely gone.” It’s so warm and organic and so golden and there’s something about that. “It’s got that sound, hasn’t it?” says Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree, a long-time champion of Meddle as the great Floyd album. After Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, we thought I suppose that we should maybe make a group album, something that was maybe a reflection of where we were going live.” I don’t think we had anything already written when we went into studio. We weren’t under any pressure from EMI to release anything. “There wasn’t any great plan when we did Meddle other than it would be a group effort. “We’d done the individual solo tracks and decided that we worked better together,” says Nick Mason when Prog meets him in his North London offices, a haven of Floydian ephemera and reminders that, aside from the occasional musical flirtation these days, he is today more preoccupied with his passion for automobiles. According to David Gilmour in a recent interview, it’s one of the songs where their work was at its most collaborative. One Of These Days is still one of the best Floyd songs ever recorded. But One Of These Days, a great song (despite not having words other than a spoken phrase) proved that they were still able to turn out something approachable when they felt like it. In that way they were going with the flow of their contemporaries, becoming an albums focussed band.

While in their early incarnation they were a pop band as well as a psychedelic free-form freakout band, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play both being hit singles, the subsequent years saw them completely lose interest in the singles chart. The soundtrack music that they had recorded was there to serve a function: it was atmospheric. There’s the fizzing energetic opener One Of These Days which is the blueprint for half of the songs on …Dark Side Of The Moon. It’s now generally agreed by Floyd aficionados that Meddle was the point where Pink Floyd as we know them really began. The kids who bought Meddle in 1971 didn’t ask ‘Where’s Syd?’, they increasingly asked ‘Who’s Syd?’. After Meddle, nobody called them ’the’ Pink Floyd. Meddle, although it was an album that revelled in its use of the recording studio, was the first album to capture some of the potency and excitement of the Floyd live experience. They were still adventurous and experimental, but they were also more structured and stable.īy the end of the 60s they had developed into a formidable live touring band. The psychedelic chaos was left behind and a new Pink Floyd emerged. They had come a long way from the hallucinogenic whimsy of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and its less satisfactory follow-up A Saucerful Of Secrets. Those albums, brilliant as they are in their way, are still the sound of the Floyd finding their way, trying to escape from the shadow of their brilliant erratic insufferable genius ex-front-man Syd Barrett. You couldn’t necessarily say the same about Atom Heart Mother or Ummagumma. In Meddle you can almost hear The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here and even The Wall.

It’s a perfect opening, as iconic in its way as Elvis Presley belting out ‘ Well since my baby left me.’ at the start of Heartbreak Hotel, or death knocking at the door at the start of Beethoven’s Fifth.Įchoes is the centrepiece of Meddle, an album that is now widely regarded as the one where Pink Floyd got everything just right. The ’ping’ on the opening and close of Echoes was, as we all know, produced by Richard Wright playing a single note on a concert grand piano and feeding the signal through a Leslie rotating speaker.

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