Jungle Rock
What Pink Floyd did next. The story of Obscured By Clouds – the band’s “production line” tour-de-force
FOUR MONTHS AFTER the release of Meddle and just four weeks since they’d introduced the work-in-progress Dark Side Of The Moon song-suite into their live set, Pink Floyd forgot about all of that and instead decamped to France to make Obscured By Clouds, the oft-overlooked tissue connecting those two landmark records.
On February 23, 1972, 23 miles north-west of Paris, they took up residence at the Château d’Hérouville, the studio where the previous month Elton John had recorded his fifth album, Honky Château, its title immortalising the tumbledown charms of this hideaway facility behind ivy-covered 18th century walls. It was to prove a hugely creative setting for Pink Floyd, who wrote and recorded Obscured By Clouds there in an uncharacteristic 12-day sprint (broken up by a short Japanese tour).
Seriously considering film soundtracks as one of their possible futures, the band had accepted another commission from French film-maker Barbet Schroeder. After their successful scoring of his 1969 film More, they were to provide the music for La Vallée, his vogueish, impressionistic tale of hippies on a search for spiritual discovery in the jungles of Papua New Guinea.
There at the château, Floyd watched footage and sat with stopwatches, timing possible cues for their music. It was a valuable creative exercise for a band renowned for hoovering up expensive studio time in the name of (sometimes unproductive) experimentation. There was no time for self-indulgence on a project that needed to be nailed in a fortnight.
“We stayed in a room, wrote, recorded, like a production line,” David Gilmour recalled to MOJO in 1998. “Very good for one to work like that sometimes – under extreme constraints of time and of trying to meet someone else’s needs.”
But, more than a stopgap soundtrack album, Obscured By Clouds was to quietly showcase some of the lyrical themes that would recur in The Dark Side Of The Moon and beyond: the passing of time, ambivalent feelings about fame and the music industry, and even, in Free Four, the first reference to Roger Waters’ father, killed in World War II, and set to reappear in The Wall and The Final Cut.
“We had huge arguments about what exactly to do on some of those soundtrack albums,” Gilmour reflected.
“Some of us thought we should just put songs on them. Others thought we should turn the whole thing into [a] one-subject concept for the whole album.”
OBSCURED BY CLOUDS veered towards the former. In fact, it’s a surprisingly melodic set of songs for an arthouse movie score. Drop the needle on side one today and its opening title track sounds disorientatingly modern, thanks to Nick Mason’s muted, looping drumming and synth drones supplied by Rick Wright using his just-purchased EMS VCS 3, which was to feature so prominently on Dark Side. “The first time we ever used any form of a synthesizer was on Obscured By Clouds,” Gilmour recalled.
Meanwhile, the ticking tom-tom pulse at the beginning of Childhood’s End provided a pre-echo of the intro of Time and – like the similarly slow-lane Burning Bridges and Wot’s… Uh The Deal? – foregrounded Gilmour’s dreamy, semi-detached vocals and soulful, unhurried guitar playing. Elsewhere, and in the tradition of The Nile Song from More, Floyd seemed to now view soundtracks as the place for their out-and-out rockers, with The Gold It’s In The… being a sturdy up-tempo blues number inspired by the Steve Miller Band.
Roger Waters’s sole turn at the microphone, Free Four, showcased his dark whimsy, with its jaunty acoustic arrangement the deceptive backing for pithy commentary on ageing, touring and war. Remarkably, it was released as a single in the US – flopping, but picking up more American radio airtime than for any Floyd 45 since See Emily Play in ’67.
If La Vallée the film proved to be slow, indulgent and ho-hum, Obscured By Clouds was anything but. Although Pink Floyd’s last soundtrack record, it can now be revisited as a playground where the band’s collective imaginations ran free as they staked out new territories for their future creative manoeuvres.
Today, Nick Mason is a big Obscured By Clouds fan. Childhood’s End appeared in early Saucerful Of Secrets’ setlists, while the addition of Burning Bridges to their upcoming shows is conceived partly as a tribute to Wright. “What’s quite nice is that Burning Bridges is a bit of Rick,” he says. “It’s nice to remind people of his input into the whole thing. His writing as well as his unique way of playing.”
Mason admits that he’s also keen to add The Gold It’s In The… to future Saucers shows. Although he’s yet to convince his bandmates…
“I couldn’t get much enthusiasm from the rest of them,” he laughs. “So, it’s going to be a bit more of a battle to make it happen.”
on October 31, 1971, Floyd recorded what was to become the definitive performance version of Echoes, between October 4 and 7 in a ruined Roman amphitheatre for the filming of the Adrian Maben-directed Live At Pompeii.
For this purpose, Echoes was chopped in two, and bookended the film. Visually, Maben tapped into both the primeval (“No one showed us to the land”) and disconnected human (“Strangers passing in the street”) lyrical strands of the song, with shots of bubbling lava and the band members wandering aimlessly, lost on dusty hillsides. Roger Waters later explained his lyric as concerning “the potential that human beings have for recognising each other’s humanity and responding to it, with empathy rather than antipathy.”
The star of the two-part Live At Pompeii Echoes, however, is arguably Nick Mason, who can be seen absolutely throwing himself into his jazzy fills and hammering through Wright’s Hammond-led section with a beat that is almost proto-hip-hop.
“If you think back to Pompeii,” says Gary Kemp, “and how much drum work was in that and how much the camera landed on Nick, it was much more about him.”
“He’s an absolute ox on the drums,” attests Saucers’ keyboard player Dom Beken. “It’s hysterical. I don’t quite know how he does it. I mean, he’s clearly technically skilled as a drummer. But what goes above and beyond that is his musicality and his ability to understand exactly what a song needs.
“Y’know, you never look to Nick for insane jazz licks,” he adds. “But his ability to sail through changes in time signature and to perfectly complement what’s happening musically, and to use a drum kit as a real musical instrument, is just jaw-dropping all the time.”
Mason himself is modest where his drumming prowess in Live At Pompeii is concerned. “Well, I view it with a pinch of salt in a way,” he chuckles. “There is a story that what happened was there was a lot of other footage that got lost. And all they’d really got for One Of These Days was the footage from the rail track they’d put round the drum kit with me in the middle of it. So, they were very short of material…”
WHILE SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS WERE SHY OF airing their new take on Echoes for this writer, they will admit to the various challenges recreating the track has presented. “It’s fucking long,” Dom Beken laughs. “It goes on forever, mate.”
“The interesting thing with Echoes,” says Mason, “and the same occurs with the original Atom Heart Mother to a little extent, is that I love it, but in my opinion, it’s a bit too long. Things are repeated unnecessarily often. The Nothings 1 to 24 are probably more like Nothings 1 to 10, recycled as 24. There’s quite a lot of returning to the same sequences on the original album.”
As such, Mason suggests that modifying Echoes for the Saucerful Of Secrets set was necessary: “The challenge is, do we play it exactly as it was on the record? No, thank you. Not what I think we should do. So, it’s to do a bit of a rearrangement of it – deciding which parts have to be there, which shouldn’t be there, and so on.” Then there’s the problem of which Echoes to use as a template. “Do we go to the Pompeii version?” asks Gary Kemp, rhetorically. “Do we go to the Meddle version? I think we lean more to the
Meddle version. But we never see ourselves as a tribute act, so it’s not second-by-second how it is on Meddle.”
The post-Waters Floyd of the 1980s faced the same problem. The Gilmour/Mason/Wright line-up of ’87’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason tour initially installed a truncated, 17-minute version of Echoes in their set. It was aired only 11 times, however, before being dropped in favour of Shine On You Crazy Diamond.
Guy Pratt, the Waters-replacing bassist on that tour, remembers Gilmour identifying the main difficulty and telling him, “‘The trouble with modern musicians is they just don’t know how to disintegrate.’ People [in the extended band] wanted bar counts and stuff like that.”
Gilmour subsequently revived Echoes for his On An Island
tour in 2006, performing it nightly in its original form as a duet with Wright, before respectfully shelving the song following Wright’s death in 2008. “This version has to be more about Nick,” Kemp reckons. “So, y’know, there’s no point doing extended guitar or keyboard solos. We want to get to the bits that are about Nick, and so that’s how we’ve been working it.”
One key Gilmour-performed element is crucial to Echoes, though – namely the ‘seagull’ guitar sounds foregrounded in its ambient passage. It was another effect originally arrived at by accident.
“A roadie had plugged the input cable into the output of the wah-wah pedal, and vice versa,” explains Lee Harris, whose task it is to recreate the sound live. “There’s a guy in America who’s a guru of distortion called Analog Mike. He runs a company called Analog Man and I bought a wah off of him. He’s just rewired it inside with a switch for me to get the sound.”
“I think I’m keener to retain the electric seagulls,” Mason says, implying that it might well feature in their new arrangement. “Because the seagulls… apart from anything else, there’s the opportunity to play it slightly differently every time.”
AS BEFITS ITS TITLE, THE INFLUENCE OF ECHOES HAS reverberated down the decades. It’s been covered by artists as weirdly disparate as Alien Sex Fiend and Rodrigo y Gabriela, while its symphonic ambition left its mark on Radiohead during the making of OK Computer. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s extra-curricular passion at the time was kite-flying, which he soundtracked by playing Meddle through his Walkman headphones.
His enthusiasm for ’71 Floyd wasn’t matched by all his bandmates, however. Colin Greenwood told this writer back in 1997: “Jonny made us all watch Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii. I just remember seeing Dave Gilmour sitting on his arse playing guitar, and Roger Waters – with long, greasy hair, sandals and dusty flares – staggers over and picks up this big beater and whacks this gong. Ridiculous.”
Ridiculous, maybe, yet still iconic. Five years earlier, in the video for Gratitude from 1992’s Check Your Head, the Beastie Boys paid homage to Live At Pompeii by recreating its visual environment in Rotorua, New Zealand, complete with amps stencilled with the words, “Pink Floyd London”.
There was one “homage” too far for Roger Waters, however. Namely Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Overture for The Phantom Of The Opera, which seemed to crib the chromatic “da-da-da-da-daaah” riff from Echoes.
“I couldn’t believe it when I heard it,” Waters ranted to Tom Hibbert in Q magazine in 1992. “It’s the same time signature – it’s 12/8 – and it’s the same notes and it’s the same everything. Bastard. It probably is actionable. It really is!”
Back in 1971, Echoes changed everything for Pink Floyd. Up until that point their experiments with lengthy, episodic tracks had ranged wildly between the brilliant and disorientating A Saucerful Of Secrets to the lumpen orchestral rock of Atom Heart Mother. “I think they were lost at that point,” John Leckie says of the latter. “They were desperate for a hit single. Even then, people wanted radio play singles. [Manager] Steve O’Rourke was always kicking them, saying, ‘Come on lads, you’ll get dropped from EMI.’”
“We were very good at announcing we weren’t a singles band,” agrees Nick Mason, before adding a self-deprecatory dig. “But really it was because no one would buy them.” By fully repositioning them as an albums band, Echoes – a defining, showstopping track that could only exist on an LP – effectively saved Pink Floyd. It was the key that unlocked the door that led to
The Dark Side Of The Moon, and, in 2021, it’s still sustaining them (or, at least, one third of their surviving number). Just like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s spooky musical, this one will run and run.
“Well, funnily enough we refer to Echoes as ‘The Phantom’,” laughs Mason. “When was Phantom Of The Opera done? Who was there first?”
The Phantom premiered in 1986, replies MOJO.
“Well then,” he says, brightly. “I must remember to sue him!”