by Nick Mason
My report card comments for the ‘Atom Heart Mother’ track would be: good idea, could try harder. ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ on the second side is a similar example. This was a sound picture of an English breakfast, starting with the flare of a match lighting a gas ring, followed by the sound of the bacon sizzling away, along with dripping taps and other old favourites from the sound library. Why we used our crew member Alan Styles as the protagonist, I have no idea. Roger, Rick and David each managed to produce a song to complete the second side – including a favourite in David’s ‘Fat Old Sun’. It would appear that the threat of being incarcerated in Abbey Road for life, with no chance of parole, was sufficient to galvanise even the most reticent songwriters to perform.
The title of Atom Heart Mother was a last-minute affair. Under pressure to come up with a name we scanned the evening papers for an idea, and saw an article about a woman who had given birth after being fitted with a pacemaker. The headline provided the title. The cow cover was an inspired piece of work, conceived by Storm and John Blake, which we linked to the album by giving the individual sections of the ‘Atom Heart Mother’ track names like ‘Funky Dung’ and ‘Breast Milky’. Storm remembers that when he showed the cover to EMI, one of the executives screamed at him, ‘Are you mad? Do you want to destroy this record company?…’
Having committed ‘Atom Heart’ to vinyl, and after the pastoral adventures at Shepton Mallet, the next orchestral rendition of the piece was at Blackhill’s second free concert in London. ‘Lose Your Head At Hyde Park’ on 18th July 1970 promised to present ourselves, Edgar Broughton, Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, the Third Ear Band, ‘and thousands of beautiful people’. This event had a much less spontaneous feel than the original free concert: more restrictions, a larger backstage area and a VIP section as hierarchical as anything organised by the court of the Sun King. The experience had lost a certain amount of its charm, or maybe we had become more jaundiced.
We also took the show to Europe that month. By now we were becoming more adept at working with an orchestra. There were still plenty of opportunities for crises, though – there was one gig in Aachen where we arrived, set everything up and then discovered that all the sheet music had been left behind. Tony Howard was phoned in London and given the mission of flying them over on the next plane. Determined not to have to face the humiliation of admitting our mistake, we stalled for time by doing an endless sound check. At the very least we must have impressed the brass section with our commitment to perfection.
We interrupted the protracted recording work on Atom Heart Mother to do a short French tour, and used the opportunity to meet Roland Petit, the director of the Ballet de Marseille. Sometime earlier, Roland had contacted Steve asking us to write a new piece of music for his company – and we arranged to have a brief meeting with him in Paris during the summer of 1970, en route to a combined holiday/mini-tour of the south of France. We still hadn’t learnt that work and pleasure is a combination to be avoided if possible.
In four second-hand E-types and one Lotus Elan – yet another car dealer had spotted us all coming – we hammered down the long, straight French roads, leaving ominous trails of blue oil smoke in our wake. We had a particularly successful time with Roland, not least because on a French public holiday he managed at short notice to find Roger, myself and our respective wives a terrific hotel, and a sensational restaurant to eat in for the evening.
We then sped on down to the Côte d’Azur to rendezvous with Rick and David, who had not lingered in Paris. Initially we stayed in a hotel on the front at Cannes. This was pure vacation: we learnt to waterski under the tuition of an extraordinarily strong Frenchman, who was able to hold up his pupils bodily while they learnt to ski. His great experience on skis was only undermined by his tenuous grasp of English. It was only later on we discovered that his insistent command of ‘No pushing’ should actually have been ‘No pulling’.
We were on the Riviera for a package of Festival appearances, playing at lovely locations surrounded by pine trees and with a view of the Mediterranean. After performing at the Antibes Jazz Festival, we rented a huge villa near St Tropez where the base crew, band and management, plus families, could stay while we did further gigs at Fréjus and other resorts along the Côte d’Azur. These were still quite low-budget days, and the house we rented was not on a promontory jutting into the ocean, but inland in the middle of some scrubland.
The atmosphere was not always a scene of domesticity despite the presence of wives and assorted children. On one occasion I met a couple of strange women acting suspiciously in the villa. Challenging them to explain themselves I suddenly recognised them as being Steve O’Rourke and Peter Watts getting ready for a night out at a St Tropez club, both in full drag. Thankfully I was suffering from a combination of food poisoning and sunstroke and so was unable to join them. As an experiment in communal living it was not a huge success. Although when there were just four of us travelling in close proximity on tour it could occasionally get quite tense, with so many more people, there were endless opportunities for friction.
My relationship with Roger was in any case going through a temporary froideur. The trouble stemmed from an earlier incident when Roger and I and our respective wives had somehow got onto the subject of Roger’s infidelity on the road. Roger had found some difficulty in tolerating my joining in with the girls’ censorious tutting at his behaviour, mainly because I had been no better, I’d simply left out the confession part. On this occasion I would have to concede that the meter was well into the duplicity rather than diplomacy zone, and it took Roger some time to forgive this particular episode.
Judy Waters remembers the pang of jealousy she felt when Lindy and I contrived to come up with an excuse to leave St Tropez early. Waving gaily we put another few litres of oil in the increasingly smoky Lotus and headed for Yugoslavia…
The chance for rest and recuperation was short. The American tour that followed almost immediately coincided with the release of Atom Heart Mother, and so we felt obliged to repeat the orchestral experience. David and Steve flew to New York to book the musicians, putting together separate brass sections and choirs for the East and West Coast legs of the tour – announced in Los Angeles by a forty-foot billboard of Storm’s cow over Sunset Strip. The American session players, under the baton of Peter Phillips, were both very able and relaxed about playing different kinds of music – and I am happy to report the total absence of any recalcitrance, jobsworthiness or beer-drenched tubas.
By now American touring was becoming more routine as the novelty wore off: this was our second tour in 1970 – we’d already been over in May for several weeks. In addition, a communal fear of flying often led us to undertake eight-hour car trips in the mistaken belief we would find this less stressful. In fact, of course, these mammoth journeys simply induced terminal boredom. In the Hilton in Scottsdale, we fell back on any opportunity for a wager – I recall David riding a motorbike through our hotel restaurant for one particular bet. The diners either thought that this was normal, or that he was packing a gun, because they completely ignored him.
On the first tour of 1970 the most significant show had to be playing the Fillmore East in New York. Bill Graham was not sure we could fill a 3,000-seat theatre, especially as our last date in the city had only been a 200-seater club, so instead of promoting the show himself he rented the theatre out to us for $3,000. We sold out. It was the most money we had made, and contributed to an ongoing dissatisfaction with the Tower label, which was then EMI’s American operation. We were building good audiences, but this was not being reflected in our record sales. Someone or something was at fault and, confident as always that the blame was not ours, we made a note to do something about it as soon as possible.
Fillmore East was also notable for two other reasons. We had a scruffy-looking bunch of blokes ejected from our dressing room only to discover later that they were members of the Band, Bob Dylan’s backing group – which included Robbie Ro
bertson and Levon Helm – and of course recording artists in their own right. This was particularly embarrassing for us since Music From Big Pink was a favoured album in all our record collections. And we also met Arthur Max, the lighting designer who was working for Bill at the theatre. Arthur added his own lighting to our show that night, and his innovative skills were noted and filed away for future reference.
That May 1970 tour of America had come to an abrupt end when all our equipment, parked in a rental truck outside the Royal Orleans Hotel in the centre of New Orleans, was stolen during the night. Thankfully this was by far the most luxurious hotel of the tour so if we were to be marooned, better it should be there than anywhere else. The other advantage was that the luxurious pool on the first-floor terrace was staffed by attractive girls who diluted our grief with a complimentary bar service.
More practically one of them had a boyfriend in the FBI and he came down to see if he could help. He indicated as tactfully as he could that it was not impossible that the local police might be able to be more helpful if we offered a reward. We left it up to Steve to resolve the problem. To our astonishment the equipment reappeared a day later (short of a couple of guitars). There was obviously an imaginative community policing initiative in place whereby officers could offer an all-in, one-stop service of removal and recovery…The only real puzzle now was what the reward should be to the police who returned it. Their suggestion of ‘Let your conscience be your guide’ was not much help since our conscience thought they deserved nothing. However, pragmatically we decided we might want to return to New Orleans one day. Although we had the equipment back we decided not to reinstate the gigs we had cancelled, and returned home forthwith.
After the Atom Heart tour of the States that autumn, we were on an English tour all the way through to the end of the year. Although we wanted the workload, we were probably unaware how exhausting it all was. But at the start of 1971, we turned our attention and any energies we did have to our next album, which we started at EMI in January.
With no new songs, we devised innumerable exercises to try and speed up the process of creating musical ideas. This included playing on separate tracks with no reference to what the rest of us were doing – we may have agreed a basic chord structure, but the tempo was random. We simply suggested moods such as ‘first two minutes romantic, next two up tempo’. These sound notes were called ‘Nothings 1–24’ and the choice of name was apt. After some weeks not much of value had emerged, and certainly no complete songs. There were few even worth considering as working ideas. After ‘Nothings’ we went on to produce ‘Son Of Nothings’, followed by ‘Return Of The Son Of Nothings’, which eventually became the working title for the new album.
The most useful piece was simply a sound, a single note struck on the piano and played through a Leslie speaker. This curious device, normally used with a Hammond organ, employs a rotating horn that amplifies the given sound. The horn, revolving at a variable speed, creates a Doppler effect, just as a car passing the listener at constant speed appears to change its note as it goes by. By putting the piano through the Leslie, this wonder note of Rick’s had an element of the sound of Asdic, the submarine hunter, about it. We could never re-create the feeling of this note in the studio, especially the particular resonance between the piano and the Leslie, and so the demo version was used for the album, cross-fading into the rest of the track.
Combined with a wistful guitar phrase from David, we had enough inspiration to devise a complete piece, which evolved into ‘Echoes’; its final, slightly meandering shape had a rather pleasant sense of slow pacing and elongated construction. This felt like a real development of the techniques we had hinted at in A Saucerful Of Secrets and Atom Heart Mother. And it certainly felt much more controlled than having to do the damned thing in one take as we’d had to on ‘Atom Heart Mother’, since we could assemble the music using cross-fades on the mixing desk.
The guitar sound in the middle section of ‘Echoes’ was created inadvertently by David plugging in a wah-wah pedal back to front. Sometimes great effects are the results of this kind of pure serendipity, and we were always prepared to see if something might work on a track. The grounding we’d received from Ron Geesin in going beyond the manual had left its mark.
This experimentation could be seen as either a brave radicalism or an enormous waste of expensive studio time. Either way it allowed us to teach ourselves techniques which might at first be clearly nonsensical but eventually lead to something usable. One still unused experiment from this time was an exploration of backward vocals. A phrase written out backwards letter for letter and then read out will not sound correct when reversed, but a spoken phrase recorded and played backwards can be learnt and recited. This gives a very odd effect when it is in turn played backwards. ‘Neeagadelouff’ was one I remember: it should come out as ‘fooled again’.
The final version of ‘Echoes’, running at twenty-two minutes, took up one entire side of the album. Unlike CD technology, vinyl imposed a certain set of restrictions, since loud passages actually took up more of the surface, and in any case even playing pianissimo throughout it would be difficult to record more than half an hour on any one side. We now had to find the rest of the record. It seems a little strange in hindsight that we ran ‘Echoes’ as the second side. It may be that we were still thinking, perhaps under record company influence, that we should have something suitable for radio play to open an album.
‘One Of These Days’ was built round a bass guitar sound that Roger created by feeding the output through a Binson Echorec unit. The Binson had been a mainstay of our sound for many years, starting in the Syd Barrett era – noticeably on ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, ‘Astronomy Domine’ and ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ – and it was really only digital technology that superseded it. The Binson used a rotating steel drum surrounded by tape heads. By selecting different heads it gave a range of repeat patterns to any signal fed into it. The sound quality was horribly degraded, but if you describe hiss as white noise it makes the effect more palatable.
There were various alternative echo units around which were similar in technology but lacked the same sound quality. The Italian-made Binson, though, was highly fragile and not suited to the rigours of a life on the road. Like a highly trained rifleman, Peter Watts could often strip them down and reassemble them at speed during a gig to perform running repairs in order to get at least one moved back up to the front line.
The bass line on ‘One Of These Days’ was played in unison by Roger and David. One of the basses needed new strings and we dispatched one of the road crew to the West End to replenish our stocks. He went AWOL for three hours, during which the recording was completed, using the old strings. When he eventually returned, we suspected he had been visiting his girlfriend who ran a boutique. His protestations of innocence were rather undermined by the smart new pair of trousers he reappeared in. The song included, unusually, a bass solo as well as one of my rare vocal performances, and an example of one experiment that did make it out of the lab. The line was recorded at double-tape speed using a falsetto voice; the tape was then replayed at slow speed. There are times when it really does seem necessary to do things in the most complicated way possible.
The titles of the other songs on that side related very much to our lives of the period. ‘San Tropez’, a song Roger brought in complete and ready to record, was inspired by the Floyd expedition to the south of France the previous summer and the house we had rented there. Roger, Judy, Lindy and myself used to play the Chinese tile game mah-jong on a fairly regular basis and this craze provided the inspiration for the title ‘A Pillow Of Winds’, the name of one of the scoring combinations.
‘Fearless’ was an overused expression – a soccer-inspired equivalent of ‘awesome’ – that had come from Tony Gorvitch, the manager of Family and a good friend of Steve and Tony Howard’s. The football theme was continued in the fade-out with Liverpool’s Kop choir singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ – it was o
dd that Roger was so keen to do this, considering that he was a committed Arsenal fan. Tony Gorvitch had also supplied us with the expressions ‘elbow’ – as in ‘being given the…’ – and ‘Who’s Norman?’ The latter was a band room phrase we used to indicate somebody we didn’t know and whom we might wish to have removed – maybe the technique we had used on the Band at the Fillmore.
Finally there was ‘Seamus’. In a rather embarrassed way I can only describe this as a novelty track. Dave was looking after a dog, the Seamus in question, for Steve Marriott of the Small Faces. Steve had trained Seamus to howl whenever music was played. It was extraordinary, so we set up a couple of guitars and recorded the piece in an afternoon. Curiously we did it all over again when we made the Live At Pompeii film, this time using another dog, called Mademoiselle Nobs. On the positive side, even when hard pressed, at least we resisted the temptation to construct an entire album of barking dogs, and to audition a clutch of session dogs desperate to make it in the music business.
Overall, the whole album was immensely satisfying to make. As Atom Heart Mother had been a bit of a sidetrack, and Ummagumma a live album combined with solo pieces, Meddle was the first album we had worked on together as a band in the studio since A Saucerful Of Secrets three years earlier. It is relaxed, and quite loose, and ‘Echoes’ has, I think, lasted well. Certainly, compared to its predecessor, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle seems refreshingly straightforward. David certainly has a great deal of affection for this album, which for him contains a clear indication of a way forward.
The principal Meddle recordings were split between EMI and AIR London with a small amount of work carried out at Morgan Studios in West Hampstead. This was because EMI, in another display of their innate conservatism, would not commit to the new sixteen-track tape machines. In a fit of high dudgeon, we insisted we had to have access to one and marched off to AIR, where we did the bulk of the work.