Moving straight from Atom Heart Mother (via some Solpadine) to Meddle is such a pleasure. That old familiar strain of bass, throbbing, the chugging rhythm and arching guitars, the stubborn drums before the falsetto-then-slowed-down Nick Mason declaring ‘One of these days I’m going to cut you into tiny pieces’. It’s all like the return home from a few weeks away in Prog land, when the low ceilings and slightly darker atmosphere lead you up the stairs to sleep off your jetlag. Then A Pillow of Winds welcomes you under its duvet. You kick off your shoes and don’t bother taking off your socks, nestling down and returning home. This is their breakthrough, the album where they allowed the studio to work for them.

The Binson Echorec unit, used for One of These Days. From our friends at Vintageamps.com

The bassline from One of These Days is played in unison by David Gilmour and Roger Waters then put through an old Italian reverb unit, and roots the sound with an urgency clearly at odds with the spaced-out lack of focus that some found so frustrating on the last couple of albums. Once the dust is blown away, the band is free to space out some more, but there’s a comfortable sort of experimentation here that offers more certainty. Echoes, a bona-fide Pink Floyd classic, is only 14 seconds longer than Atom Heart Mother but at the end of this newer piece you feel like turning over rather than switching off.
I can take or leave Fearless and San Tropez, both of which are warm but unspectacular. Of course we know that the Kop provides backing vocals for Fearless, which is a surprise because Waters is a Gooner[1]. I’ve always had a soft spot for Seamus, more recently because it was used in the opening of Tom Stoppard’s film of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The dog, by the way, belonged to Steve Marriott of the Small Faces.
I’m told that Echoes originated with the submarine-sounding ‘bing’. It’s a piano note through a rotating Leslie speaker, and clearly explains the cover of the album, which depicts an ear underwater with some ripples. I’ve never liked the cover, which seems different, wrong, compared with the slick precision of many subsequent Floyd sleeves. The biggest development on Echoes from their previous long pieces is that 16 track recording allowed them to take runs at small parts, to mix better and to allow the thing to expand more gradually than the efforts of, say, AHM, where the rhythm section had to run through the whole thing in one go. Paradoxically, the increase in precision during the recording process results in Echoes sounding much more relaxed than its six-month genesis might have suggested[2]. It’s much better than AHM because it moves through moods in a way that makes sense; it’s not trying to expand the breadth to account for its length. Sure, it’s much druggier, but the orchestra was only disguising the fact that AHM hasn’t got that much to say.

The cover of Live At Pompeii.

A month before the November 1971 release of Meddle the band recorded a set in the amphitheatre at Pompeii for a movie directed by Adrian Maben. Among the strong performances is a version of Echoes which rivals the studio one. The film moves slowly and painstakingly around the performers in the empty open-air stadium, like a geeky 17 year-old checking out the chops and equipment of a band he can’t wait to be asked to join (see the tracking shot at 7.38 above). As such it’s a delight for fans[3]. As recently as his 2008 Live in Gdansk album Gilmour was playing a 25 minute version of this; it’s been a hugely popular Floyd song since its release. As the song ebbs back into its theme an the power chord descent gives way to the softly-spoken magic spells of Gilmour’s vocal, the listener is left, then and now, with one thought.
This band is just about to become really huge.

They had no idea.

[1] Note for aliens: The Kop is the name given to the stand behind the goal at Anfield, the home ground of Liverpool Football Club. You’ll Never Walk Alone is the song the fans sing to express unity at the beginning and end of pretty much every home match. Gooner is the name given to a fan of Arsenal, a rival team in the same league (correct as of June 2012).

[2] One of the engineers on this record was John Leckie, who went on to produce XTC and, most famously, the Stone Roses.

[3] The director’s cut of the Pompeii film features a couple of songs from the then-unreleased Dark Side of the Moon, but that’s cheating.