by Nick Mason
Part of the show also involved a piece called ‘Work’ using percussive noises as we built a table. We manufactured this piece of furniture on stage, using wood, a saw, hammer and nails, timed to segue into the next section by the sound of the whistling kettle on the portable stove (smoking was strictly prohibited on stage, but a stove seemed perfectly acceptable). Much of this was subsequently reused in the studio either on ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ or in the abandoned Household Objects album. There was a plan to link with John Peel’s radio show as we relaxed with the tea, although I can’t recall how successful this was. The idea later resurfaced on Wish You Were Here, where the sound of a radio playing a song is eventually cross-faded with the recorded music. Perhaps this underlines the fact that tenacity has always been a group quality – if we like an idea we rarely give it up and then only if it has been declared clinically dead.
Over the summer we worked on Ummagumma, a double album. The first two sides captured our live sound at the time with a set – ‘Astronomy’, ‘Careful With That Axe’, ‘Set The Controls’ and ‘Saucer’ – recorded in June at Mother’s in Birmingham (a kind of Midlands version of Middle Earth, and a club we were very fond of) and Manchester College of Commerce. On our later live albums, we would record up to twenty separate nights. For Ummagumma the choice was limited to the better of the two versions, and there was very little repair or overdub work. The second album on Ummagumma was made up of half a side from each of us. On its release in October 1969, the record got generally enthusiastic reviews, although I don’t think we were that taken with it. It was fun to make, however, and a useful exercise, the individual sections proving, to my mind, that the parts were not as great as the sum.
To create my section, ‘The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party’, I drew on available resources, recruiting my wife Lindy, an accomplished flute player, to add some woodwind. For my own part, I attempted to do a variation on the obligatory drum solo – I have never been a fan of gymnastic workouts at the kit, by myself or anyone else. Norman Smith was particularly helpful on the flute arrangements, the studio manager less so by reprimanding me for editing my own tapes.
Rick was perhaps the most enthusiastic of all for the format of the record, embracing the concept of a more classical approach to his part, while both David’s and Roger’s sections included songs that ended up as band repertoire. I think that both ‘The Narrow Way’ and ‘Grantchester Meadows’ were played in the ‘Massed Gadgets’ show while Roger’s ‘Several Species…’ indicated the influence of his budding friendship with Ron Geesin, whose arranging skills we later called on to assist us in completing ‘Atom Heart Mother’.
Roger and David had also been working with Syd, helping him put together his first solo album, The Madcap Laughs with input from Robert Wyatt and other members of the Soft Machine. There was still a belief that Syd’s creative flow could be restimulated, but it proved extremely difficult to marshal his songs into any kind of order, or to realise their potential. Syd released a second solo album, Barrett, later the same year. This proved to be his last recording, despite further attempts to encourage him back into the studio. From then on, Syd became increasingly reclusive, eventually returning to Cambridge and rarely venturing out. There is something particularly sad about such a gifted songwriter producing so much good work and then being unable or unwilling to continue.
We rounded off 1969 with a bizarre experience in December working for the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni on his film Zabriskie Point. After our happy encounter with Barbet Schroeder we liked the idea of working with film – it fitted with our desire to work outside the normal round of records and gigs. Antonioni’s project – a movie mixing together student radicals, West Coast psychedelia and the destruction of society as we then knew it – was part of the death throes of MGM studios, who in a final desperate bid to survive had offered Antonioni a hefty budget, hoping that the success of his film Blow Up heralded a new era of European cinema.
Suddenly we were in Rome, staying at the palatial Hotel Massimo D’Azeglio. What we took a short time to adjust to was that the studio was paying a fixed daily rate for accommodation and food. If you didn’t use it you lost it. Due to the short notice of the project, and Michelangelo’s work schedule, we could only get time in the studio between midnight and nine in the morning. This meant a routine of trying to sleep during the day, cocktails from seven to nine, and dinner until eleven – relying on the help of the sommelier to use up the $40 per head allowance – before we rolled down the Via Cavour, exchanging banter with the hookers on the street corners, to the studios where we would do battle with the director and his film.
The problem was that Michelangelo wanted total control, and since he couldn’t make the music himself he exercised control by selection. Consequently each piece had to be finished rather than roughed out, then redone, rejected and resubmitted – Roger would go over to Cinecittà to play him the tapes in the afternoon. Antonioni would never take a first effort, and frequently complained that the music was too strong and overpowered the visual image. One device we tried was a mood tape. We sub-mixed various versions and overdubs in such a way that he could sit at the mixer and literally add a more lyrical, romantic or despairing feel by sliding the mixer fader up or down. It still didn’t work. Antonioni ended up using an assortment of pieces from other musicians like Jerry Garcia and John Fahey, and despite a dramatic and explosive finale, the film bombed critically and commercially. Continuing our policy of recycling anything remotely useful, we quietly gathered up all our out-takes. There was sure to be some opportunity to use them in the future.
THE BATH & WEST Showground in Shepton Mallet, a small town in Somerset, was the site of the Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music in June 1970. We had chosen this event, in the depths of the English countryside, as an opportunity to perform ‘Atom Heart Mother’, an ambitious piece we had recently recorded complete with French horns, tuba, trumpets, trombones, a solo cello and a twenty-strong choir – the kitchen sink must have been unavailable for session work.
The festival, a two-day extravaganza, in an attempt to emulate the scale of Woodstock the year before, had imported an array of groups from both sides of the Atlantic. There was a hefty quota of headline acts from the States, including Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Byrds and Steppenwolf, alongside the British bands: as well as ourselves, the bill featured Fairport Convention and Led Zeppelin. In an attempt to keep up with the John Paul Joneses, it seemed entirely appropriate that we should make the grandiose, but logistically challenging, gesture of herding the entire complement of backing musicians out to the wilds of the West Country.
Rock festivals by nature tend to start off with good intentions and then slide gently into chaos as the crowds increase and technical problems multiply, particularly if Mother Nature takes a hand – although on this occasion the weather was idyllic. This volatility has since become one of the things people seem most to look forward to: much of the anticipation for attending Glastonbury seems to be the prospect of continuing the great Woodstock tradition of some decent mud bathing.
The police would be warned to expect an attendance of approximately half the expected number, since if they knew the true total in advance each event would have been banned for failing every conceivable health and safety provision. At this particular festival I think Freddy Bannister, the promoter, finally had the requisite nervous breakdown as the full horror of what he had taken on revealed itself.
In order to get past the traffic clogging up every major and side road on the way, we had enjoyed a desperate drive up the wrong side of the road. The coach carrying our backing musicians had a driver with a far less cavalier approach. He took the safer, surer, but eight-and-a-half-hour option. Even the brass players, noted as a breed for their resilience, were showing signs of wear and tear by the time they were finally decanted. After all their tribulations, they found they had in fact arrived far too early since the festival was running well behind schedule: th
e programme note All times subject to change’ was frequently a euphemism for ‘Everything will be running about half a day late’.
Sensing the way things were going we tried to negotiate an earlier slot by changing places with one wild-eyed guitar hero. Anxious but unable to help, he apologised explaining that having just loaded up on the pharmaceuticals he thought necessary to give his best performance, he lacked sufficient supplies to reach those heights again, and so would be obliged to stick to the running order.
Our original slot had been 10.15 p.m. By the time we were finally able to lead our merry band of musicians on stage – most of whom had never encountered anything quite so chaotically magnificent even in their long and varied careers – dawn was breaking. As a result events conspired to give us a dramatic backdrop that really lifted the impact of our arrival on stage. The choir’s conductor, John Aldiss, did a magnificent job of controlling the choir and orchestra, and we managed to stagger through the show, even though the tuba player found that some bucolic reveller had poured a pint of beer down the horn of his instrument.
One might have thought that after such an event a short rest would have been in order. However, it was festival time, so we found ourselves leaving the stage and on another demon drive through the early morning mist straight back to London to catch a flight to Holland to play another, but less extravagant, festival the following night. With no time to recover, we were plunged back into exactly the same kind of scenario, although at least this time we were minus the orchestra, a merciful release for both parties.
‘Atom Heart Mother’ had been assembled during a number of rehearsals after we returned from our stay in Rome courtesy of Michelangelo Antonioni. Once we had settled on the nucleus of the piece (a theme supplied I think by David), everyone else had contributed, not only musically, but also in devising the overall dynamics. I can’t remember now if we had decided to create a longer piece or whether it just snowballed, but it was a way of operating we were starting to feel comfortable with.
After some lengthy sessions in early 1970, we had created a very long, rather majestic, but quite unfocused and still unfinished piece. One way to develop such a piece was to play it live, so we played shortened versions, sometimes dubbed ‘The Amazing Pudding’, at a number of gigs. Gradually we added, subtracted and multiplied the elements, but still seemed to lack an essential something. I think we had always intended to record the track, but the songwriters must have all felt they had hit a specific block, as in the early summer we decided to hand over the music as it existed to Ron Geesin and asked him if he could add some orchestral colour and choral parts.
I had been introduced to Ron through Sam Jonas Cutler. Sam had given up a career as a special needs teacher to become a tour manager. His earlier skills no doubt helped him greatly in his involvement with the world of rock’n’ roll: he had worked with the Rolling Stones on their 1969 tour of the US, including the ill-fated free concert at Altamont, and later with the Grateful Dead.
Ron Geesin is a talented musician and arranger, as well as a virtuoso performer on banjo and harmonium, when his style might best be described as ragtime poetry on speed. He had also built for himself what was effectively one of the first electronic home studios. Ron, who was not much older than us, but appeared significantly wiser with his demeanour of a wild-bearded professor, had a basement in Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill where he pursued his craft, surrounded by a collection of recording machines, spools, miles of tape, and a number of bespoke and proprietary musical devices.
Although this might sound chaotic, one of Ron’s great strengths was that he was very well organised. Working with recorded music on tape has one inherent and major problem: all tape looks exactly the same, which is a logistical nightmare. Unless you keep very close tabs on which bit of tape has been transferred from one spool to another and immediately keep a record of the changeover, it can take you days to find the piece of tape you need again. Due to his meticulous organisational skills, Ron never seemed to have a problem laying his hands on the correct piece.
Ron had been working on his own for quite some time, so his idiosyncratic techniques and modus operandi were entirely his own. He had interested both Roger and me in home production and his influence can clearly be detected in one element of Roger’s contribution to Ummagumma, namely ‘Several Species’. Roger and Ron also worked together on the music for an unusual medical documentary called The Body – based on the book by Anthony Smith – which was released in 1970 and on one track of which, ‘Give Birth To A Smile’, Rick, David and I also played.
Ron passed on a variety of tricks with Revox tape recorders hooked up in tandem that went well beyond the bounds of standard use as recommended in the manufacturer’s manual. He did all his own wiring and instructed me in the rudiments of soldering. With stereotypical Scottish parsimony he would collect discarded tape from professional studios. After erasing the tape for reuse, he would then splice together any half reels to make up a full one, or painstakingly re-make any of the studio’s edits that failed to come up to his own high standards. Apart from anything else Ron taught me to splice tape beautifully.
One pleasant spin-off of this relationship was that Ron wrote the music for the soundtrack of one of my father’s documentaries – The History Of Motoring – and I like to think they both enjoyed the experience. My father in particular was delighted by the fact that Ron always turned up not only with the music but also with some new home-made gadget or cable that he had purpose-built to simplify the transfer of the music from Ron’s machine to the film.
Ron seemed an ideal choice to create the arrangements on ‘Atom Heart Mother’. He understood the technicalities of composition and arranging, and his ideas were radical enough to steer us away from the increasingly fashionable but extremely ponderous rock orchestral works of the era. At the time arrangements of such epics tended to involve fairly conservative thinking; classical music graduates had been indoctrinated with a lack of sympathy for rock and ‘crossing over’ was still seen as something of a betrayal of their years of discipline and training. The good news was that with Ron at the helm, it was unlikely that we’d end up with ‘The London Symphonic Philharmonia Plays Pink Floyd’.
Ron set to work on our piece, and with little further input from us, he arrived at Abbey Road armed with a sheaf of scores ready to record. He immediately ran up against a major hurdle. The session players balked at being directed by Ron, who they perceived as belonging to the world of rock music. Revenge could only be exacted in the confines of the studio, and my God how the blood could flow! In the case of Ron, an actual human sacrifice in the studio itself was being offered up.
As Ron waved his baton hopefully, they made as much trouble as they could. Ron had not only written some technically demanding parts, but the phrasing he wanted was unusual. The musicians hated this even more. With microphones open they knew every comment would be noted and their discreet laughter, clock-watching, and constant interruptions of ‘Please sir, what does this mean?’ meant that recording was at a standstill, while the chances of Ron being had up on a manslaughter charge increased logarithmically by the second.
This was not his only problem. At the time the piece was recorded EMI had just taken delivery of the latest in recording technology, the new eight-track Studer recorders. These utilised one-inch-wide tape, and with admirable caution EMI issued a directive that no edits were to be done on this, as they were worried about the quality of any splicing.
Unfortunately ‘Atom Heart Mother’ is twenty-four minutes long. Roger and I embarked on what can only be described as an Odyssean voyage to record the backing track. In order to keep tracks free for the overdubs we had bass and drums on two tracks, and the whole recording had to be done in one pass. Playing the piece without any other instruments meant that getting through it without mistakes demanded the full range of our limited musicianship; matters such as tempo had to be left in abeyance. The delights of quantizing – using computers to digitally adjust
tempos without affecting pitch – were still some twenty years in the future.
Sure enough the finished piece lacked the metronomic timekeeping that would have made life easier for everyone. Instead the rhythm track accelerated and then lurched back to the correct tempo in a volatile fashion that Ron now had to take into account. The day was saved by John Aldiss, the choirmaster. John was a former King’s College, Cambridge choral scholar who had formed the John Aldiss Choir, noted for performing works by contemporary classical composers. At the time, he was also Choral Professor at the Guildhall School of Music in London. His disciplined classical choir had (it must be noted) a far more positive attitude and plenty of experience of dealing with orchestras. With their unruffled help, the recording was completed. However, there was another problem we were unaware of at the time. We had been forced to supply relatively high levels of backing track to the orchestra on monitor speakers, some of which had been picked up by their microphones. This unerasable spill forever ensured that ‘Atom Heart Mother’ lacked the sonic clarity we have always strived for.