There were always a few Pink Floyd albums knocking around when I was growing up: the first one I remember hearing all the way through would have been Relics, a singles compilation that had been rereleased on some MPF type of discount label in the early 80s. While some of it was interesting and Bike was mad, it hardly allowed me in to the more expansive sounds of the band. A friend’s older brother had a really cool Wish You Were Here album with blue translucent vinyl, but we were never allowed play it; we used to look at it a great deal. About this time came the release of The Final Cut but I don’t remember hearing that until much later (the single, Not Now John, was played occasionally, but not too much). The Wall was famous, of course, but nobody I knew owned a copy until around 1986 when someone spilt Home Brew over one and I took it on myself to clean it with Mr. Sheen, wrecking a needle on someone’s turntable in the process. They were all very expensive to buy, I seem to remember. My first listen to Dark Side of the Moon had an interesting context I’ll save for another day (it’s looking like Thursday when I ascend that particular Kilimanjaro). A slightly older friend was into the band much more, but that was confined to Meddle onwards, so Meddle formed the basis of my interest, at least until I got my hands on the full Dark Side. The albums before that were merely prologue.
There were a few of these records I never saw at all—when A Saucerful of Secrets was featured on a Marillion album cover, I didn’t recognise it, and I didn’t know anything about Animals until much later—and Atom Heart Mother was one of the ones I didn’t know anything at all about. In America, where I had access to tons of music, this one didn’t seem to be around at all; even now it’s a record I’ve never owned. The cover is famous, in that it features a large cow[1] but the music inside doesn’t seem to have made it to the outside world. Coming to it now, it’s not much of a surprise that it wasn’t played on the radio much. You can’t even air guitar to it.

From Prog magazine, courtesy of http://www.doctorofprog.blogspot.com. That prog enough for you?

While there’s nothing wrong with being so, it’s a Prog record. I’ve been listening to the title piece, a 23-odd minute suite complete with orchestra and choir, for about two hours now, and it can’t escape the label, except that Pink Floyd always seem to have done exactly that. It’s usually termed space rock or something like that, but while Yes and Genesis were accurately called Prog, while Emerson, Lake and Palmer only had to use manuscript paper to be called Prog, and while King Crimson had to go through years of inaccurate pigeonholing to escape the genre, Pink Floyd used concepts, extended suites and miked frying pans and dogs, crashing planes into the sun and mentioning ancient English kings, yet avoided that most unfashionable term. Why?
I think, for the most part, it’s because they were far more abstract and because they were, unlike King Crimson who are forever associated with their earliest, Proggiest statement, allowed a Year Zero, a chance to reset everything. It didn’t happen when Syd left, as there was (as we’ve seen in the reviews thus far) a bleed-through their music for several albums after his departure, where his lyrics, his temperament and his loss haunted the band. It happened after their decision to make a wholly studio-bound record, like this one.

Alan’s psychedelic breakfast, from the sleeve.

They learned the lesson from Ummagumma of monitoring each other’s work, and on the second half this album the contributions of individual members as composers and vocalists are clearly improved by the group participation clearly missing on the studio side of Ummagumma. The high point among these songs is If, where Roger Waters sounds introspective and confessional, anticipating their most famous MO. Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast sounds like a cross between common or garden Floyd and the indulgence of a band who record a frying egg (which it is, exactly), and the self-conscious Summer ’68 deals in nostalgia for a mere three years earlier, with a Beatles-nodding cornet. Gilmour’s song, Fat Old Sun, is one of his first, and sounds like it. All very nice but nothing earth-shattering.
The album’s first half, though, an attempt to deepen the sound using an orchestra, was almost a step too far. Mason claims in his book that they worried they’d never get out of the studio, and orchestral collaborations have taken their toll on many a band. Through force of will and the co-operation of a Scottish sound engineer named Ron Geesin (about whom Mason raves but whose name is absent from the credits, strangely enough) they got through it.

The Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, June 1970, saw AHM played with a reluctant orchestra.

Originally based on a riff from Gilmour, the notion of using an orchestra might have seemed alien to the former acid rock band, but it doesn’t seem too much of a leap when, as we can, the hindsight of the band’s last few albums is applied. At the time, they claim, it’s because there was something missing from a large piece they had been rehearsing and playing in 1970, titled at the time The Amazing Pudding. Opening, then, with a huge, brass-led fanfare declaring the AHM theme, must have sounded bizarre, not only sonically, but as a choice. Three minutes in we hear Richard Wright’s Fairsifa organ taking us back onto the Floydian map, but there are is a string theme playing behind his riff, reminding one of the opening music to a Hammer film. Mason’s drums increase the drama and there’s a doubling before some lovely slide work brings in the more relaxed Gilmour. There’s admirable restraint during the solo, with the odd brass swell augmenting the solo, swelling gradually until the breakdown at around the five-and-a-half minute mark. Then comes the choir.
First it’s a single soprano, then a counterpoint, bringing in the male voices. It doesn’t really sound like anyone knows where they’re going, so the drums come in. At ten mins it becomes a Floyd song, jamming between Gilmour and Wright. Strangely enough, the strength of this track comes from their bottling it a bit—whenever it gets too choral or two orchestral it gets pared back down into the band itself. There is ornamentation during these parts from strings, voices or horns, but unlike, say Deep Purple or ELP, who have an orchestra booked and are fucked if they’re not going to use it all the time, Floyd use the dynamic range much better; when the horns return at fifteen mins in, it makes a diffeèence. The following musique concrète bit doesn’t add much (it all sounds a bit White Album to me), but when at 19.40ish the organ theme returns, developed by the strings, it’s an effective return that works very well. At the end, it’s been a long 24 mins but it’s an enjoyable piece. None of it was especially necessary but it was nice.
It’s a hugely divisive album, one that some people really hate. If I was  spending my cash on this to the exclusion of one of the more fully-realised Floyd releases, as the teenage me might have done, I’d feel a little miffed. But it charts a point in Floyd before they had to leave quite a lot behind, and it’s of historical interest for that alone. Mason describes its report card as ‘good idea, could try harder[2]’. It’s an interesting hour’s worth, especially the first half-hour.

But it is Prog.

[1] Lulubelle III, according to Nick Mason (139). By now I’m sick of citing the same book, so look at one of the previous reviews. Sorry. This album has tired me out.

[2] Mason, 137.