The album was produced by Pink Floyd, although Norman Smith is credited as “Executive Producer.” This was the last time he would be associated with the group. The technical team consisted once again of Peter Bown at the console, assisted by Alan Parsons, who ceded his place temporarily to John Kurlander and Nick Webb (for the mixing).
Technical Details
Pink Floyd recorded the bulk of Atom Heart Mother in Studio Two at Abbey Road, now that the Fab Four were no longer in residence (and no longer even together, for it was a month after the Floyd’s first session in March 1970 that Paul McCartney officially announced he was leaving the Beatles). By this time the 3M M23 eight-track tape recorder was well and truly in service, as was the TG12345 console. As for the mics and assorted studio effects, this equipment was essentially the same as it had been for the preceding albums.
The Instruments
On May 16, 1970 (May 22 according to some sources), toward the end of their third US tour, Pink Floyd found themselves in New Orleans and were due in Houston for their next gig. Unfortunately, they discovered that the truck containing a large part of their equipment had been stolen from outside the Royal Orleans Hotel, where they were staying. The stolen items included David Gilmour’s two guitars (his white Stratocaster and a brand-new black Stratocaster with rosewood neck that he had recently purchased at Manny’s Music in New York City); Roger Waters’s two basses (his Rickenbacker 4001 and his white Fender Precision); Nick Mason’s two drum kits; one of Rick Wright’s two organs and a piano; their 4,000-watt, twelve-speaker PA system; the five Binson Echorecs; and all the cables and mics needed for the sound system. Fortunately, most of the instruments were eventually recovered, with the exception of the guitars. The remaining dates on the tour were nevertheless canceled, and Gilmour returned to Manny’s Music, where he bought his famous black Stratocaster with maple neck, the legendary 1969 “Black Strat.”
When the group had started recording the new album in March, Gilmour was still using his white Stratocaster. After returning to the studio in June, he switched to his new “Black Strat” as well as a second Stratocaster, this time a Sunburst (a 1959 model with a 1963 rosewood neck that he would fit to his “Black Strat” not long after), given to him by Steve Marriott of Humble Pie. In terms of acoustic instrument, he seems to be using a Gibson J-45, as can be seen from the official promo clip of “Grantchester Meadows” recorded during a television appearance on KQED TV on April 28, 1970, in San Francisco. Roger Waters abandoned his Rickenbacker for good after the New Orleans theft, opting instead to use two Fender Precision basses, one black, which was to become his main instrument between 1974 and 1978. For the March sessions, he is thought to have been using his 4001 still (no doubt along with his white Precision). Nick Mason and Rick Wright were playing more or less the same instruments as before, with Wright also using the Abbey Road Moog IIIP.
As for amplification, Gilmour, Waters, and Wright were plugged into Hiwatt Custom 100 DR-103 All Purpose 100-watt amp heads connected to WEM Super Starfinder 200 (4x12) speakers, but it is also highly likely that they used the amplifiers that belonged to Studio Two. Gilmour and Wright also used a Leslie 147 speaker.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
In 1971, Stanley Kubrick approached Pink Floyd about using the music of “Atom Heart Mother” in his movie A Clockwork Orange. As a result of his indecision regarding the choice of extracts, and more importantly because of his demand to use the extracts as and when he saw fit, the group declined…
Again according to Ron Geesin, Roger Waters repeatedly confided to him in 1970 that he wanted to quit the group.
WASTE NOT, WANT NOT…
The two sleeve designs rejected by Pink Floyd for the album Atom Heart Mother would be used by Hipgnosis at a later stage: the young woman at the bottom of the staircase for the album The Asmoto Running Band (1971) by the Principal Edwards Magic Theatre and the diver for Def Leppard’s High ’n’ Dry (1981).
For Pink Floyd Addicts
Atom Heart Mother was released on CD in 1994 with, as a bonus, two recipes inserted: one for a traditional Bedouin wedding feast and the other for an original French breakfast.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
When Pink Floyd had their equipment stolen in the United States in May 1970, one of the staff members at the hotel where they were staying tactfully suggested that they offer the local police a reward in order to speed up their investigations. To their great surprise, the truck was found the following day…
SPOILED FOR CHOICE!
According to Ron Geesin, some of the other newspaper headlines that might have been chosen for the album title were “State of emergency to be declared (dock strike),” “Forest fires ring resorts,” “Blind masseur and an au pair,” “Are you a non-floater?” and “The strange case of razor blade in loaf.”
Atom Heart Mother
Nick Mason, David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, Ron Geesin / 23:43
Father’s Shout: 0:00–2:52 / Breast Milky: 2:53–5:26 / Mother Fore: 5:27–10:11 / Funky Dung: 10:12–14:56 / Mind Your Throats Please: 14:57–19:12 / Remergence: 19:13–23:43
Musicians
David Gilmour: electric rhythm and lead guitar
Rick Wright: organ, piano, Mellotron
Roger Waters: bass, percussion (?), sound effects
Nick Mason: drums, percussion, sound effects
Ron Geesin: arrangements
John Alldis: conductor (choir and brass)
The John Alldis Choir: sopranos: Eleanor Capp, Jessica Cash, Rosemary Hardy, Hazel Holt; altos: Margaret Cable, Peggy Castle, Meriel Dickinson, Lynne Hurst, Geoffrey Mitchell, Celia Piercy, Patricia Sabin; tenors: Rogers Covey-Crump, Peter Hall, John Whitworth, Kenneth Woollam; baritones: John Huw Davies, Brian Etheridge, Bryn Evans, Brian Kay; bass: David Thomas (according to Ron Geesin)
The Philip Jones Brass Ensemble: three trumpets, three trombones, three French horns, one tuba
Hafliði Hallgrímsson (?): cello
Recorded
Abbey Road Studios, London: March 2, 3, 4, 24, June 13, 16–24, July 8, 13, 15, 17, 1970 (Studio Two and Room Four)
Technical Team
Producer: Pink Floyd
Executive Producer: Norman Smith
Sound Engineers: Peter Bown, Phil McDonald
Assistant Sound Engineers: Alan Parsons, John Leckie, John Kurlander, Nick Webb
Genesis
Since recording “A Saucerful of Secrets” in spring 1968, and performing the suite The Man and the Journey at the Royal Festival Hall on April 14, 1969 (renamed The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes: More Furious Madness from Pink Floyd for the occasion), Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason had dreamed of writing a long work in several movements.
The first band member to get down to work was David Gilmour. At the end of 1969 he composed an “epic” theme that reminded him a little of the music for the movie The Magnificent Seven (1960), composed by Elmer Bernstein. Hence the title given to the piece at the very beginning: “Theme from an Imaginary Western.” During a rehearsal, Waters heard—and liked—this sequence of chords, which conjured up images of “horses silhouetted against the sunset.”53 Before long, David Gilmour began to work on the idea—to some extent an evocation of wide, open spaces—with Rick Wright. Gilmour recalls: “We sat and played with it, jigged it around, added bits and took bits away, farted around with it in all sorts of places for ages, until we got some shape to it.”53 As a result, the guitarist’s original composition developed into a considerably longer piece made up of several parts.
The earliest-known public performance of this work took place on January 17, 1970, when Pink Floyd included it in a concert at the Lawns Centre in Cottingham (near Hull) in England. Two further British performances followed on January 18 and 19, and then another at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on January 23. On this occasion, David Gilmour presented the as yet unnamed piece (“Here’s the last piece we’re going to do for you, although we don’t reall
y know what we are going do… we only wrote it last week and so… um… here we go!”)59 The initial version of the future “Atom Heart Mother” must already have taken shape by January 16, the day before its first public outing.
“Atom Heart Mother”: from Honing to Recording
In February, the Floyd continued to hone their new (and still untitled) piece across the length and breadth of England in at least five concerts. Finally, on March 2, they entered Abbey Road Studios to cut an initial version, referred to as “Untitled 1,” with Peter Bown and Alan Parsons engineering. The unusual length of their piece—more than twenty-three minutes—presented the group with a major problem. According to Nick Mason, EMI’s technical staff refused to edit one-inch eight-track tapes, which were a relatively new technological innovation. This implies that the musicians had to record their parts in a single pass with as few mistakes as possible. “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.”5 Given the absence of electronic clicks or quantization, the two unfortunate musicians had no other choice but to estimate the beat and rely on their memory to tell them where they were in the various sequences. (Neither Waters nor Mason could read music.) This explains a certain fluidity in the timing. However, Ron Geesin would dispute this version of events, maintaining that the tape he had been given as the basis for his arrangements was effectively a collage of various short sections.
The following day’s session (March 3) was given over to mixing and editing the third take, which had been marked “best.” Organ, guitar, voice, and piano overdubs were done the next day. Finally, on March 24, there were new drum and voice takes, followed by the editing and mixing of the various sequences. This session was supervised by Phil McDonald and John Leckie, and it was this mix that Roger Waters would pass on to Ron Geesin to work from. Assuming it bore a resemblance to the live recording of January 23 from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, this version must have differed appreciably from that on the LP. The piece opens with mewing seagulls, the main melody is not yet defined, and certain sections are either totally distinct or do not yet exist, notably the one with Gilmour and Wright singing falsetto. Overall, however, the framework is in place, and this “Untitled 1” would end up being played some twenty-three times between January and the end of April. “It was the full, or expected, length of around twenty-three minutes,” recalls Geesin, “and had all the drums, bass, organ, piano and guitar chord parts, with the addition of the guitar solos, in their final positions. The introduction was just a simple opening drone with some gong-like cymbals, and the first effects sequence was sketched in for length. The second effects, or ‘excursion,’ section was originally percussion only, but was changed by the group later.”60
The group wanted the Scottish composer-arranger to pad out the sound, and he proposed using a choir and brass. As the production budget would not stretch any further, Steve O’Rourke made it clear to him that there had to be a limit of twenty singers and approximately ten brass. This meant Geesin was unable to engage players from the New Philharmonia Orchestra as he had originally intended, but instead used the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. To conduct the choir, he suggested John Alldis. Finally, judging the second theme played by David Gilmour to be lacking in substance, he proposed adding a cello solo, and the name of the Icelandic virtuoso Hafliði Hallgrímsson was immediately suggested.
Geesin’s Final Shaping
On April 9, Pink Floyd kicked off their third United States tour with a concert at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York City. Geesin was therefore left to his own devices in London without any precise indication of what was expected of him: “With them in the States, I just couldn’t do anything with the tape […] I didn’t really know what they wanted.”9 For its part, the group continued to hone the piece onstage, but following the theft of its equipment in New Orleans on or around May 16, it canceled the final dates of the tour and returned home earlier than anticipated. “[…] when they came back, the panic was on,” recalls Geesin. “You know, everyone wanted it in a couple of weeks or so, typical show biz bloody panic. Nobody knew what was wanted.”9
Geesin got down to work with a vengeance on May 25, having, it seems, spent a couple of hours with Rick Wright on May 21 in order to work out how to begin the choral section and to choose some motifs, and with David Gilmour in order to spice up the initial theme of the piece that Gilmour had developed on the guitar. They reached a somewhat vague, tacit agreement that gave Geesin carte blanche to complete and fill out the rest of the piece. From May 29 to June 12, a time of stifling heat in the British capital, the Scotsman literally shut himself away in his lair at 208 Ladbroke Grove, London. Having listened to the tape over and over again, Geesin started to write a score that would link up all the various Floyd compositions and proceeded to make various changes. In the end it was he who gave the whole thing its structure: sixteen sections that he labeled A to Q (leaving out O):
A.Intro
B.First theme (ten bars at 72 bpm)
C.Development of the intro
D.Development of the first theme
E.Trio (bass, organ obbligato [sixteen bars at 144 bpm])
F.Bass, organ obbligato punctuated with drums
G.As before, but with slide guitar
H.As before, with more incisive slide solo
I.Choir and organ chords
J.Funky section
K.Development of the first theme
L.Solo percussion
M.Repetition of D
N.Repetition of E and F
P.Repetition of G and H
Q.First theme to the end
These sixteen parts would be organized into six movements during the final recording of what would later be named “Atom Heart Mother.”
A Difficult Task
The main difficulty encountered by Ron Geesin was the wide range of beats. “There were variations between sections that weren’t due to any progression, just to an accident,” he explains. “Dropping back in tempo when it really should have increased a bit, maybe; or it would be better to have a sudden change, rather than a very slight change.”53 And he continues: “So it was a problem, when it came to actually recording the live musicians on top of the prerecorded tracks, to get the tempo right. It’s normal anyway for classical musicians to have problems with the beat. Classical beat sense and rock beat sense are quite different.”53
The group was back at Abbey Road on June 10. Voices, timpani, and sound effects (skillfully devised by Waters and Mason for sections C and L) were added to the piece, now renamed “Untitled Epic,” and subsequently “Epic,” as Geesin notes on his score. Drum, guitar, and bell overdubs were added on June 16, and on the following day piano, more guitar, and a click track. On June 17, Geesin met the copyist George Bamford, who had the unenviable task of writing out the parts of all the musicians in just two days. On June 18, a Hammond organ, a Mellotron, voices, and various sound effects were recorded.
At 2:30 p.m. the next day, Friday, June 19, three trumpets, three trombones, three French horns, and a tuba were ready and waiting for Ron Geesin in Studio Two of Abbey Road. These were elite professional musicians who took little interest in the task in hand other than to get the job done as quickly as possible. The atmosphere was electric, and Geesin was somewhat on edge. He immediately met with hostility from certain musicians, in particular one of the three horn players, who sensed his nervousness. “One horn player was particularly awkward—making little remarks, and asking questions he knew the answers to,”53 adds Geesin, who was a composer-arranger rather than a conductor. The session became confrontational. Nick Mason recalls the episode: “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.”5
Just when Geesin thought he had completely lost control of the session, John Alldis, the choral director dropped in more or less by chance to gauge the atmosphere of this first recording. As a seasoned conductor, Alldis agreed, at Geesin’s urgent insistence, to take up the baton at this session, while the Scotsman made do with a supervisory role and took refuge in the control room. Order was thus restored, and a second overdub session on June 20 completed the brass players’ involvement in the recording.
In the first session of Sunday, June 21, starting at 2:30 p.m., also held in Studio Two, the group got down the organ as well as various percussion parts for section L (in Geesin’s configuration of the piece). According to the notes seen by Glenn Povey, this recording was named “Experimental percussion section with train sounds.” John Alldis then arrived with twenty choral singers for the second session, which started at 8 p.m. Directed by the hand of the master, the choir quickly recorded its part. Before reaching this point, however, Geesin discovered to his horror that he had made a mistake in his score over section J, the future “Funky Dung.” Nick Mason had pointed out that Geesin had taken the second beat in the bar as the first, which resulted in all the subsequent bars getting out of phase! Maintaining his composure, and above all simply not having the time to correct his score, Geesin commented, that even if there were a mistake in the music, he would not let it affect the recording!
The next day the choir returned to finish the job, and it seems that Hafliði Hallgrímsson recorded his cello part on June 23. Further sessions followed on June 24 and July 8 and 13, during which the Floyd added various other instruments and miscellaneous effects. July 15 and 17 were given over to the mixing (in Room Four). On July 16, “Untitled Epic” was definitively renamed “Atom Heart Mother,” after the article in the Evening Standard. Roger Waters would officially announce the piece under this name during the Hyde Park Free Concert in London on July 18.
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