The fifth section opens (around 15:00) with the dying down of the Waters-manufactured wind and the emergence of the Farfisa organ. The atmosphere here is more ethereal and less harrowing. The ping from the beginning can once more be heard, Mason does some excellent cymbal work, and Wright produces bass tonalities on his organ that are drenched in Fuzz Face distortion (April 27 session). Gilmour then joins them with a palm mute B on the guitar (probably doubled by means of ADT), which he maintains through several key changes. This section is actually the final outcome of “Nothing Part 14” mentioned previously. The general tension then increases with a long crescendo, Waters comes in on bass, Mason on toms, and Wright with melodic lines on the Farfisa. Gilmour allows his Fender to ring out again at 18:15 with a highly melodic and rhythmic motif, playing along with the delay from his Binson Echorec. The effect is awe inspiring and generates a feeling of elation and solemnity at the same time. Waters is now playing fuzz bass, thereby underpinning the flights of fancy of the “Black Strat.”
In the sixth section (from 19:12), the vocal line returns with the final verse sung by Gilmour and Wright, their voices this time apparently fed through a Leslie speaker. This sequence concludes with a threefold reprise of the main riff.
The seventh and final section (from 21:18) is built around a nostalgic atmosphere in which Wright and Gilmour answer each other with interlocking instrumental parts, the first on his piano fed through the Leslie and the second on his “Black Strat” with a clear tone and as expressive a sound as before. From 22:10, what sound like synthesized voices surge forward. In reality, as John Leckie explains, these were the result of a rather-out-of-the-ordinary sound effect: “We had two stereo tape machines on either side of the room. We put the tape on the first machine, and then ran it maybe five feet across the room on to a second machine, with both of them recording. The signal started on the first machine, and as much as eight or nine seconds later, it would come out of the next one—and then feed back. You could sit there for hours, with everything you played being repeated; and after a while, incredible things would start to happen. The abstract bit at the end of Echoes—the part that sounds kind of choral—was done like that.”6 This brings to a close the extraordinary rock epic, one of Pink Floyd’s greatest successes.
Not all the band members shared the same enthusiasm for the work, however. Waters would later speak of a “foretaste” in the work and Gilmour would describe it as casting a useful light on the future direction they were to take, while Mason pronounced the piece “a bit overlong.”74 Only Rick Wright had a sense of its true worth, declaring shortly before his death that he still regarded “Echoes” as “one of the finest tracks the Floyd have ever done […]. It was a highlight.”72
A SONG OF NO FIXED TITLE
The title “Echoes” went through a number of mutations. After changing from the “Son of Nothings” to “Return of the Son of Nothings” and finally to “Echoes,” the piece was occasionally renamed by Roger Waters for individual concerts: on November 15, 1972, at Böblingen, a suburb of Stuttgart, Waters (it was always him) introduced it to the audience as “Looking through the Knotholes in Granny’s Wooden Leg,” and the following day in Frankfurt as “The March of the Dam Busters.”
Among the various sketches for music not in the end used in “Echoes” is Roger Waters’s “Brain Damage,” which would be revived for The Dark Side of the Moon.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
A disturbing coincidence: if “Echoes” (from Wright’s first note) is started at the same time as the last part of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, entitled “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” the synchronization is absolutely perfect. A second analogy is that in the version named “Return of the Son of Nothings,” the words begin with Planets meeting face-to-face, exactly as the heavenly bodies do in “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.”
For Pink Floyd Addicts
John Lennon inspired Roger Waters. The bassist demonstrates this in “Echoes” by “borrowing” a line from “Across the Universe,” a song on the Beatles album Let It Be (1970): Inciting and inviting me in the case of Lennon; Inviting and inciting me to rise in the case of Waters…
Andrew Lloyd Webber was evidently greatly inspired by “Echoes” when composing the theme of the overture for his musical The Phantom of the Opera. Roger Waters nobly decided not to take legal action…
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, the Last Hurrah of Psychedelia
In 1971, three European television channels—ORTF (France), Bayerischer Rundfunk (West Germany), and RTBF (Belgium) decided to make a documentary about Pink Floyd performing in an unusual location. The young Scottish (now French) director Adrian Maben was chosen to shoot the movie. After lengthy deliberations and repeated contact with the members of the group and manager Steve O’Rourke, the filmmaker, who was also a great lover of art and history, had the unusual idea of shooting the musicians in a Surrealist setting, among paintings and sculptures by Delvaux, de Chirico, Magritte, and Tinguely… However, following a trip to southern Italy, he eventually opted for the magnificent and ancient setting of Pompeii, and he managed to persuade Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason to play there… without an audience: “This was a time when the thing to do, so it seemed to me anyway, or the big thing not to do, was to film a group and the audience reaction,” explains the director. “This all culminated in Woodstock, where you have I don’t know how many millions of people. […] And I thought would there be any point in doing that again with the Floyd? […] So maybe the main idea of the film was to do a sort of anti-Woodstock film, where there would be nobody present.”73 Although agreeing to perform, the group refused to mime. The director took up the challenge, despite live performance imposing certain awkward technical constraints, not least that of “recording a whole group on an eight-track tape recorder, which is very difficult,”38 as David Gilmour would explain in a later interview.
A Concert with No Audience
This live concert with no audience was shot in the amphitheater of the ancient city of Pompeii between October 2 and 7, 1971. Three numbers were performed and recorded in situ inside the amphitheater. “Echoes” (parts one and two) is the wonderful long suite from the album Meddle, which was to be released a few weeks later and whose music assumes its full mystical power as it reverberates around the ancient stones of the theater, permeated with the spirit of classical drama. “A Saucerful of Secrets,” a track that had given its name to the group’s second album, is a composition whose cosmic atmosphere was also ideally suited to the locale, the first three sections of the work, “Something Else,” “Syncopated Pandemonium,” and “Storm Signal” expressing a kind of chaos that could be thought to evoke the destruction of Pompeii by Vesuvius, with the fourth and final part, “Celestial Voices,” restoring a sense of serenity. Finally, “One of These Days,” the opening track of Meddle, an instrumental driven by two bass lines and punctuated by a single utterance made by a voice (Nick Mason’s) that sounds as if it is emanating from beyond the grave: One of these days, I’m going to cut you into little pieces. Curiously, with the exception of a few shots that happen to have Gilmour in them, the Floyd drummer is the only member of the group to appear on-screen during this piece. The reason is that the reels containing the shots of the other musicians had all been lost, leaving only the images filmed by this particular camera! Mason would retain a mixed memory of the shoot: “The deal we did turned out to be very hard work, and we never saw any money from it for a long time. On the other hand, it turned out to be a very useful and, I think, a very good film.”71
The Dark Side of the Movie…
Unfortunately, various timing problems and technical setbacks would force Pink Floyd to record all the other songs for the documentary in the studio in Paris (at the Europa Sonor on Avenue des Ternes and at the Studios de Boulogne) between December 13 and 20, 1971. The tracks in question are: “Careful with That Axe, Eugene” (Ummagumma), “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” (A
Saucerful of Secrets) and “Mademoiselle Nobs” (a version of “Seamus” on Meddle, Nobs being the name of Madona Bouglione’s Russian wolfhound,, who “sings” the blues. In the final edit, these shots are intercut with views of the Pompeii site and flowing lava.
The movie, a musical UFO of sixty minutes’ duration consisting of the live concert at Pompeii and the scenes shot in Paris, opened in September 1972 and met with great success. A second version (since released on DVD) was released two years later. Having been extended to eighty minutes, it contains a number of extra scenes shot at Abbey Road during the initial recording sessions for The Dark Side of the Moon. Finally, a third version, longer still (at ninety-one minutes), and also the most fascinating, was released in 2003 with the label Director’s Cut. Various sequences have been added: the Abbey Road footage offering an insight into the making of some of the masterpieces that would end up on The Dark Side of the Moon (“On the Run,” “Us and Them,” and “Brain Damage”), some short conversations between Adrian Maben and Pink Floyd, images of the Apollo missions, and a sequence of computer-generated images depicting the disappearance of Pompeii beneath the flows of lava from Vesuvius. In a nutshell, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii is a captivating record of one of the most unusual concerts in the history of rock…
For Pink Floyd Addicts
All the rushes of the movie, which were stored at the Archives du Film de Bois-d’Arcy in France, have been destroyed. Having decided they were of no interest, the curator, a certain Monsieur Schmidt, had the 548 35mm reels incinerated…
Forty-five years after the Pink Floyd concert in Pompeii, David Gilmour returned on July 7 and 8, 2016, as a solo artist, this time performing in front of an audience. The city of Pompeii took the opportunity to make the guitarist an honorary citizen.
OBSCURED
BY
CLOUDS
ALBUM
OBSCURED BY CLOUDS
RELEASE DATE
United Kingdom: June 2, 1972
Label: Harvest Records
RECORD NUMBER: SHSP 4020
Number 6 (United Kingdom), on the charts for 14 weeks Number 1 (France); number 3 (the Netherlands); number 46 (United States)
Obscured By Clouds/When You’re In/Burning Bridges/The Gold It’s In The… /Wot’s… Uh The Deal ?/Mudmen/Childhood’s End/Free Four/Stay/Absolutely Curtains
Obscured by Clouds: A Touch of French Exoticism
In February 1972, Pink Floyd interrupted preproduction work on their new album (The Dark Side of the Moon) for a few weeks in order to compose and record the soundtrack for Barbet Schroeder’s new film La Vallée. Following their successful experience with More and the relative failure of Zabriskie Point, this was the third time the group would throw itself into the task of writing a movie soundtrack. The result is an album of disparate songs with a carefully controlled sound. It seems that the director’s request came at just the right time, that is to say as something of a distraction following the Floyd’s hard work on Meddle and their no less testing preparation for The Dark Side of the Moon. More than a few fans, however, would accuse the latter of eclipsing Obscured by Clouds.
Good Things Sometimes Come in Threes
Following More in 1969, this was the second and last time Barbet Schroeder would turn to Pink Floyd for a soundtrack to one of his movies. La Vallée depicts a journey to utopia that demystifies the ideals of a hippie generation more concerned with personal growth than with inventing alternative social models.
The movie describes the journey of self-discovery of a group of six people in search of a legendary valley located in a “white spot” on the map, a place in which no Westerner has ever set foot. The main character is Viviane. The young woman leads a monotonous existence as wife of the French consul in Melbourne, Australia. Her only real interest lies in tracking down Oceanic artifacts, in particular rare feathers, which she sells in Paris. During a stay in New Guinea, Viviane meets Olivier, a member of a group of hippie explorers who have fled Western civilization, and their mentor Gaëtan. It is at Gaëtan’s instigation that the small band decides to set out in a Land Rover for the mysterious valley that symbolizes “liberty regained.” Viviane throws her lot in with the band of travelers and before long becomes Olivier’s lover, and then Gaëtan’s. She is deeply transformed by life in the community and her discovery of its aboriginal rites. For her there is no longer any question of returning to the well-ordered, high-society existence she had previously led. Especially once she has seen the valley emerging through the thick mist…
The Album
“We must destroy time to become one with it.” Along with the themes of sexual liberation and experimentation with narcotics, this phrase spoken by Gaëtan in Viviane’s presence, shortly before setting out on their expedition, perfectly sums up Barbet Schroeder’s cinematographic concerns, which he asked Pink Floyd to transpose into music. “It was similar to More,” reveals the director. “This was clearly the music the characters in the movie were listening to. I also have to say, however, that as far as the title music is concerned, it was fantastic to have this music soaring above the zones the plane was flying over […], zones that were otherwise just white spots on the map. During this part, then, it was not the music the characters were listening to, it was movie music proper.”69 And the director continues: “The music was recorded within two weeks at a château located a hundred or so kilometers from Paris. We slept and recorded in the château and they composed there. Everything was done on the spot. And as with More, it was done with great intensity and in great excitement. It was the same style of working, except that there [at Hérouville], we did at least show the movie in order to check how the pieces worked once they were recorded. This was already something of an improvement on More.”69 “Standard rock song construction was optional,” explains Nick Mason, “one idea could be spun out for an entire section without worrying about the niceties of choruses and middle eights, and any idea in its shortest, most raw version could work without the need to add solos and frills.”5 And it was this very creative freedom that enabled the four members of the group to find new inspiration at a time when they had already started to record the future The Dark Side of the Moon.
The album comprises a total of ten tracks, some with vocals, some instrumental. Ten tracks that reflect the atmosphere of Schroeder’s film extremely well. There is even some music here that must count as among Pink Floyd’s best—definitely “Wot’s… Uh the Deal,” and perhaps “Free Four” too. As Mason himself would say, this was not a Pink Floyd record, but rather a collection of songs that everyone liked. It may even be the last Floyd album to be born of a real collaboration among Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason, despite the fact that it was David Gilmour who, following “Echoes” on the album Meddle, once again played a dominant role in his double capacity as singer and soloist (he plays an impressive number of solos on the soundtrack) and also, in a certain sense, as co-creator of the musical atmospheres (in particular with Rick Wright). Nevertheless, the member of the group Barbet Schroeder had the most time for was the bassist. “Roger Waters was an extraordinary individual and someone I greatly admired,” the director would later say. “I realized he was the genius of the group. His personality stood out from the others.”74
The album was released in the United Kingdom (and continental Europe) on June 2, 1972, and in North America on June 17, not with the title La Vallée, but as Obscured by Clouds (due to a disagreement with the film company). Not surprisingly, as it was a French-made movie, it was in France that Pink Floyd’s seventh studio album performed best, reaching number 1 on the charts. It would climb to number 3 in the Netherlands and Denmark, and number 6 in the United Kingdom, where it was unanimously acclaimed by the critics. “There are still examples of those soaring, whirling Floyd numbers, just to dispel any doubts they’re ‘becoming too commercial,’”78 wrote Peter Erskine in Disc. For Andrew Means in Melody Maker, the album contained “some of the most aggressive instrumentals the Floyd have recorded.�
�79 In the United States, by contrast, Obscured by Clouds made it only to number 46 (but then Schroeder’s movie was not distributed there until 1977).
A Movie Soundtrack Made in Hérouville
The château referred to by Barbet Schroeder is Hérouville, located not far from Auvers-sur-Oise and Pontoise and a mere thirty or so miles from Paris. Built in 1740, composer Michel Magne purchased it in 1962 (with a friend, the painter Jean-Claude Dragomir, who died in 1965). Magne turned the “left wing” of the property into a space for his creative work. Following the destruction of this wing in a fire in 1969, Michel Magne set up a production company (SEMM) and fitted out a 328-square-foot recording studio, benefiting from natural light, this time in the “right wing,” which he named the Strawberry Studios. At the same time, Michel Magne developed the concept of a residential recording studio (that is to say a venue that offered recording facilities plus meals and accommodations), and the rest is history. With the help of the sound engineers Gérard Delassus, Gilles Sallé, Dominique Blanc-Francard, and Andy Scott, some of the most important albums of the 1970s were recorded at the Château d’Hérouville, including Camembert Electrique (1971) by Gong; The Slider (1972) by T. Rex; Honky Château (1972)—named for obvious reasons!—Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player (1973), and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) by Elton John; Saturday Night Fever (1977) by the Bee Gees; Pin Ups (1973) and Low (1977) by David Bowie; and of course Obscured by Clouds by Pink Floyd. There was also an infamous concert given by the Grateful Dead on the grounds of the château on June 21, 1971. In the meantime, Michel Magne had also equipped France’s first sixteen-track mobile studio, the Strawberry Mobile, and kitted out a second studio at the château, the Frédéric Chopin.
Pink Floyd All the Songs Page 33