Pink Floyd: Atom Heart Mother

Atom Heart Mother

Best song: Fat Old Sun

Worst song: Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast

Overall grade: 5

‘If I were a good man; I’d understand the spaces between friends…’ Irrelevant, but I just like that lyric.

I probably know more about the history of Pink Floyd than I do about any other band, and they don’t at all seem like the kind of people I can imagine working with an orchestra – more than anything else, the way they work just doesn’t coordinate with the way orchestras work. Yet that’s exactly what they did for the title track of this fifth album in 1970, an album which generates opinions ranging across the spectrum from underrated masterpiece through flawed but worthwhile all the way down to total garbage.

I take issue with the total garbage idea, because while I can see the reasons for dismissing the title track and the final track, there are also three songs in the middle which are close in sound to a lot of the more ‘mainstream’ Floyd songs of their commercial mid-70s period. Surely ‘If’ is just a Roger Waters foray into musical and lyrical styles he’d then use for radio favourite ‘Wish You Were Here’? ‘If’ is even more minimalistic, barely a hint of guitar and a whispered voice giving you the chance to focus wholly on the lyrics – which are some of Roger’s best, since this is before he started trying to get too philosophical.

Rick Wright writes one of his last solo compositions for the band, ‘Summer 68’, a sad, nostalgic look at the relationship between rock star and groupie. The verses are softly sung but the volume and emotion behind the ‘how do you feel?!’ lines of the chorus always catches me off guard. If the song’s not based off a real event, he’s good at pretending.

But it’s Gilmour’s ‘Fat Old Sun’ that steals the show. I love its simple soothing melody and the relaxed, summery quality of Gilmour’s voice as the song gradually, almost unnoticeably builds. The electric guitar’s introduced for a solo with about two minutes to go and while it’s not one of his best solos, the interplay with the acoustic rhythm part is interesting. The song as a whole strikes me as a slightly more lightweight precursor to ‘On an Island’, Gilmour’s solo album from over thirty-five years later.

The title track, while often called ‘freaked out’, is actually pretty and melodious most of the way through. Example: the whole of the ‘Breast Milky’ section (although I can’t stand these subtitles). And is it ‘Funky Dung’ with the majestic horn part? Things like this stop the track from being just a bunch of atmospheric noises sandwiched together and turn it into something that actually has a flow – the only truly avant-garde section is ‘Mind Your Throats Please’, and I really enjoy the contrast of this with the classical-rock feel of before.

The complete opposite to ‘Ummagumma’, every member of the band seems to have been involved in the making of this piece. And while it might not always be obvious at times when the orchestra and choir are stealing the spotlight, there’s definitely been a significant development in both Rick and David’s playing – or maybe they’re just more engrossed in the material. The piece also makes good use of the technique of the ‘returning theme’, where a motif from the start of the piece is also included later for continuity.

My major criticism about the piece is that, while it’s jam-packed with great sounds, it’s not actually about anything. When the band wrote ‘Saucerful of Secrets’, it was an aural representation of a battle, and then would go on to write ‘Echoes’, about connections between human beings, but this one, which I’ve always seen as a kind of middle ground between the two, it just a showcase of the effects they’d been trying out.

But while I enjoy the first three quarters of this album without reservations, the final track, ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’, is a big letdown. Credited to the entire band, but mostly Nick Mason’s brainchild, this is basically a recording of Floyd roadie Alan Stiles eating breakfast. The crunching of toast and occasional appreciative words are an entertaining novelty on the first play, but after hearing the album ten times it’s lost its appeal and becomes annoying. The piano and guitar parts don’t excite me at all and more to the point, they don’t remind me of eating breakfast! And this is already pretty long for a single album, so a whole minute of listening to bacon crackling without any other instrumentation is really excessive. The only bit I quite like begins around the 9 minute mark, but still no breakfast related feelings.

Historically, this album is important because it’s Pink Floyd’s first sidelong, their only major songwriting collaboration with an outsider (Ron Geesin, who’s worked with Roger Waters previously, co-wrote the title track) and because it’s the first album to feature nothing but a picture of a cow on the cover. And for the most part, the material inside manages to match this importance.

I love the cow, though. Not surprised it took them to #1 in the album charts.