PINK FLOYD Atom Heart Mother (S.E.)

Special Edition love for a relatively unloved Floyd album.

Famously, Pink Floyd claim not to be too fond of their fifth studio album (their first to go to No.1 in the UK). “A really awful and embarrassing record,” said Roger Waters. “[It was] a load of rubbish,” said David Gilmour, in a rare show of solidarity.

Released in October 1970, ‘Atom Heart Mother’ — Floyd’s first album not to have the band or their name anywhere in the album packaging — makes for odd but compelling listening 50 years on, and must be one of the oddest albums to top the UK chart.

The first side/half is a six-part instrumental orchestral suite, spliced together from Gilmour’s layered guitar, choral vocals, pulse-beat keyboards and various sound samples. Due to studio restrictions, Waters and Nick Mason played bass and drums for the entire 23-minute track in one take. There’s plenty to explore and spark the imagination here, though, not least because in its dense, encrusted magical melee the listener can hear distinct traces of what was to come — specifically, the side-long Echoes on follow-up album ‘Meddle’, and various sounds and motifs later used on the monumental ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’. (Not the French horn-led brass sections. Which are ace, by the way.)

The second side/half begins exquisitely with Waters’s ballad If — channelling the Velvet Underground through a folk filter into a quite beautiful lament — followed by the Kinksian Summer ’68 and a forgettable Beatles-esque Gilmour track, before trailing off into the frankly unlistenable 11-minute Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast — a ‘humorous’ track featuring roadie Alan Styles discussing and eating breakfast. In fairness, some fans list this among their favourite Floyd songs, loving its doleful English whimsy. There again, fans will love anything, right? Either way, it’s a rather peculiar end to a rather peculiar album.

The reissue comes as a lovely two-disc package in a seven-inch gatefold sleeve, containing the album on CD, and a Blu-ray disc featuring a (long thought lost) concert film of Floyd playing at Japan’s Hakone Aphrodite in August 1971 and a behind-the-scenes mini-documentary. The package includes a replica Hakone Aphrodite pamphlet, show poster, etc., and a 60-page photo book.