Pink Floyd Meddle | Full Music Documentary | Michael Heatley | Tank Montana | Robin Larose

metal was the gateway to a future in which Pink Floyd would fulfill their creative [Music] potential and the world would lie back light to spliff medal is not a classic album perhaps in itself but it's a very interesting and important album if you're interested in Pink Floyd at all because it is the album where they they moved from post Barett experimentalists trying to find their identity it's where they began to find their identity and hit hit on the the motifs that they would then turn into the the tremendous and Transcendent Dark Side of the [Music] Moon [Music] it was the first really great album they made it really was it was the first sign that they really were going to be able to uh turn the corner and make something absolutely massive for themselves that didn't rely on anybody else and certainly didn't rely on recycling any of the old ideas they'd had with sear this was really Pink Floyd coming into their own [Music] life [Music] I think that atom Hart mother was less of a holding operation than the albums that preceded it because after Sid left the management that they had tended to side with Sid rather than the Pink Floyd you know the idea being that you know without their sort of creative pivot that they were something of a spent for [Music] for with atam har mother they tried using beg forces if you strep the beg forces away so that the band could play this on the road you were left with something that was lacking all the color of the album and I know that one of the American shows Leonard Bernstein the famous conductor composer turned up to one of their American shows and and and enjoyed the rest of it but was board steped by atam heart mother and they had a very interesting guy on board to do the arrangements for atam heart man called Ron Geeson God it's you Ron geen g s i n don't get that wrong um composer it's just a a it's a kind of a playroom um there's old and new here or Andor sound architect there's the old Fair light computer down there which is some people say just for holding open the door nowadays um but it's useful for some things and or professional [Music] [Applause] [Music] Nutter [Music] we were just friends and I think that they appreciated me for my individuality of thinking and deed doing this is the adjustable spanner collection there are interesting mechanisms that fascinate me and also the research side of me says there is no history of the development of in of adjustable spanners so I'm building one here I might then write the history uh do you use them all these are no of course not you only need this is the joke the the big joke is that you only ever need one adjustable spanner to use what happened in atom her mother was that because they were kind of exhausted because because of commitments and and demands by the manager and Emi records they needed some other input so because I was friends with them all I was asked to be that to do that input or be that input really they had lots of little or not so many actually maybe five or six six little sections that they had recorded at Emi ABY Road of what I call a backing track and they had then stuck these together as you do with magneti tape so with that they'd come up with a tape which was an an accompaniment tape lasting I can't remember 23 minutes or something I I mean 5 and a half or whatever was under 30 and over [Music] 20 and they gave me that a mix a rough mix of that tape and we had some discussions about what might go on it they said they wanted a big sound and we had a a very short session and I'm talking like a morning and a another bit of an afternoon somewhere I think where Rick Wright came around my studio in labber Grove London West 10 and we looked at the choir section so he maybe suggested some notes or a way of going but there was nothing written down I didn't there there was nothing written down for the choir at that time at that session and then Dave came around with a with a sort of an arpeggio and suggesting that for the for what was in fact the main theme the First theme the rest of it was [Music] me it was already a complete piece before um Ron came on the scene and uh we decided to get him to do some orchestrations Ron was given the task of doing the orchestral scores and the choir score for this and came up with all sorts of unusual phonetic sounds for the choir to sing and very Innovative and was a big influence on how Pink Floyd viewed themselves as being able to experiment after that Ron GES was a huge influence on them to open up many ideas Pink Floyd and the record producers Mii records dictated the limits and the limits would have been so many session players uh you know cuz they're adding up on oh £ 2396 and 83 p and whatever oh dear no can't have that we'll have to have two less choir you know [Music] oh but then Ron was sent into the studio to conduct all these session musicians in the orchestra and the choir and Ron had never done that before I had a bit of a go at a horn player cuz he was mouthy know he want he could see that I was nervous cuz I didn't know much about directing professional musicians I knew a lot about how to make a good form but not about directing so he was he could see this and he that suited him to have a bit of a go and I said I Le lent forward I said another word out of you mate and I'm over there bang you know and they in the B they're all going Christ oh M Ron's lost it I mean I'd actually pretty well cracked up I mean just due to the strain of working I mean i' done a lot of work I had done much work that year a hell of a lot films an album you know bah blah BM so I was ready for a bit of a [Music] rest that was why John Aldis the choir master was asked to uh conduct the rest of the whole sessions and I just sat at this side and said no I you want to get a bit more punch into that or didn't do this and so he took over but the main point about him taking over was that he was being a classically trained person didn't have that Punchy drive that a Juke Ellington standing up in front of the band would have had and I really needed that kind of Direction at that time Emi had just moved onto eight TR recorders with 2-in tape and no one had actually cut the tape at that point um it was considered that maybe there would be problems if it was edited consequently Roger and I had to do the backing tracks in one pass it was a 23 minute piece something like that we probably took about the third take where we actually got all the way through it because it was so difficult for us to remember where the hell we were in the piece um so from then on the thing in some ways went downhill when we'd finished all the recording sessions at abyo I said to Steve Oro the manager I said that was a good rehearsal can we do it again please for real um of course that was never to be because of the energy levels and the money constraints and the whole bit and Emi wanting to get the stuff out so reality prevailed which is a state of art it always has been I had written a whole section thinking that beat one was on a certain beat it from Reading from the tape but when Nick Mason saw that or we got to the session on that part cuz this was a choir one of the choir sections he said no beat one's not there beat one's One Beat back so he said you'll have to move everything one beat but I said no why not just take that as one beat it's only where the bar lines are written on the score and I didn't have time to go away and overnight move the bar lines One Beat cuz that's all you have to do the the the phrasing was all correct for the for what was in in the backing which was an off an what I call an off time offbeat Punchy section it's the one that's it's the funky section it's called if atam heart mother in itself was a more structured piece or if there was some way of pulling it out I'd still love to perform something like that again it's not one of the the great Pink Floyd albums that that was yet to come but it's certainly an important step in getting to the sound they got to on medal it's not bad it's not a bad little number um it's it's rather OB in the the the um the sections the a a a a b c back to a a b d finish uh with a couple of um sound effects um ambient atmospheres in set set into that um but it was again it was all that could be done with the the all the material and confinements [Music] various it went to number one in uh UK which was their first number one album and it also went to number 55 In America which sounds less impressive it is less impressive however it was their first top 100 album in the USA and also when they toured over there they really started to make an impression partly just in the commercial world because uh the company the record company uh had these huge Billboards uh on Sunset Strip of course was the most notable one but apparently alongside highways and so on around the country just showing that cow so it was the alleged marketing disadvantage of the cow there is no Pink Floyd name on this cover was converted into the advantage of the Enigma that cow what the hell's that advertising you know yes I was definitely surprised by the commercial success for one month stripped to my Underpants in the ladri Grove Studio my little Studio at the top floor in a very hot summer writing stuff that was a surprise when I've slaved away for years at projects and not got much obvious return or reward we're talking spiritual reward here not just money so it was a great surprise storm thorgerson was asked to come up with an original cover I mean all his covers are original um but they always say we want this one more original than the last one and so he said to somebody go out and shoot some [Laughter] cows so someone went out with a camera and shot some cows I mean you know he's with a camera not with a the cow on the cover was another part of the process of random composition that was going on in other words take ingredients from here and there and stick them together the title was got by me saying to Roger you'll find a title in that newspaper there and this was in the studio back room uh the BBC recording so Roger picked up the newspaper and it was one of the popular tabloids and found a title atom heart mother and it was about a woman who' just given birth and had an atomic a pacemate one of the first whatever pacemakers fitted that was it but that was the process and that was the kind of way that we were [Music] going Pink Floyd had a lot of critical brick bats because of the amount of equipment that they took on the road with them it's all just a gimmick to which Roger Waters would say well you know for the people who say that why don't they come up and stand behind the equipment and let's see them do a show with it if they hadn't been striving to advance what the live performance was and of course they they did to quite incredible degrees it was all in between touring they were always touring and so really they were at their most confident as a life band before they established a huge confidence in the studio and that confidence did come around as a result of um the masterful job they made of echos we have this context now of Abby Road it's just this Hallmark of fantastic recording history rightly so but there was an aspect of ABY road that was rooted back in the days when the Musicians Union held sway over recording and said you must record only life performances and what the Musicians Union were terrified of was tape recorders so in the UK at the time when Pink Floyd made their first album And The Beatles made Sergeant Pepper you still only had a maximum of four tracks in the studio America had eight track machines from the late 50s 1960s onwards but the first time that eight tracks appeared in the UK were 1968 by the time Pink Floyd were ready to record medal studios in the commercial world had gone into 16 track but Emi well you know I don't know if we're going to change they still had eight Pink Floyd wanted to use 16 they went to George Martin's air Studios above Oxford Street and another place called Morgan studios in Hamstead where they had 16 tracks and by that time Pink Floyd were big enough to say to Emi well we're not just going to come to the in-house Studio we want to go and create something on a bigger canvas we're going to go to these places and and work there the thing is that the Pink Floyd had reached a stage where they didn't have to have hit singles and I think that that's sort of to do with the fact that there was a greater emphasis on albums and record companies found themselves underwriting sort of concept albums rock operas and other sort of Magnum [Music] opuses one of these days is just really quite extraordinary it's got that very Galloping sort of Rhythm to it it's got two bass guitars just got a whole life of its own but the point is that it it illustrates something about Pink Floyd which is that it's got a very memorable riff but when pink floid have a riff they don't Bush your around the head with it they they make something of it they use it as a theme they return to it but they create huge spaces one of these days was an important track in the Floyd Cannon cuz while being a kind of a mix of what youed to be call Space Rock although they hate that term themselves and more of a rock feel it also has a kind of Proto techno Vine in that uh the dueling bases and the the the sort of the Doctor Who like feel of it Roger came up with the um thing I'd been playing with the the delay a tape delay on my guitar or for years I've been playing with it but just before then I've been doing some specific rhythmic things with it and he decided to try and do the same type of thing as I was doing on a guitar on the bass he came up with that basic sort of Riff which was same as one i' done on previous on a guitar and uh we went into a studio called Morgan studios in fact we recorded that at Morgan Studios and uh we we decided that we were both going to play it myself and Roger were going to double track it at the same time live with two bases so we got the spare base out of its box and the the strings were completely dead they were horrible on it so we sent one of our Ries off to rush out to buy a new set of Bas strings it became a very funny story cuz he didn't come back for like 5 hours and we were sitting in there with a clock running up and the the money disappearing down the dra we actually put the track down with without him you can actually hear it the first base that comes in I'm playing you hear sound when the second one comes in it's also cuz it's got these horrible dead old strings on that's it's still there on the record this is about Waters having a very good sense of what the bass can do although everyone says he's not a technically very accomplished bass player nonetheless he knows how it feels also I which I think is very important is that Rick Wright in a lot of this is playing Hammond Organ now that is the sound of rock and roll that's not the sound of space that's the sound of rock and roll it's the sound of R&B it's the sound of black music a bit of jazz and so on uh and that throaty sound along with the grunt of the base the voice in the middle is actually Nick Mason recorded using a faletto voice at the higher speed one of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces and then slowed down to give that growly days and if you see it like pump play you'll see that that's very much a drum tour to [Music] Forest certainly in that live at Pompei he really made a lot more noise it's it's very powerful and you see what a dynamic guy he is you know he's a a hail fellow well met middle class chappie um and all around charma but he had some of the spirit of Keith Moon in him and that setting brought it out in him I think I think that that Nick and Rick were you know very much um to the four still but I mean I think it would reach a stage where they'd end up somewhere in the hierarchy between the sort of high command of Gilmore and Waters and the road crew well it was around this time um Dave Gilmore actually achieved the kind of very emotional playing that Pink Floyd were looking for they they weren't interested in standard Rock stuff they they didn't want things to be sterile they were writing about emotional topics quite a lot of the time and they wanted to um convey that emotion through the music they played so if you listen to Pink Floyd from this era onwards it's very very emotional musically um and that is particularly evident in Dave Gilmore's playing you know he's not competing with any other guitarist on the planet he's just doing his own thing he's adding to the atmosphere of what they are for creating musically but it's so distinctive it couldn't be anybody else [Music] playing on the records on medal David Gilmore's strengths come to the FL much more than they had done in the past I think that was something that was developing in the live Pink Floyd because on atom heart mother there's a song called fat old son which on the record passes in 3 or 4 minutes and is a pleasant enough little episode and then it's gone but that actually in the live shows around about 1970 developed into something that could go for 15 minutes and really the what they were doing live with fat old Sun the way that it developed dynamically was much more of a cue towards what Echo would be and it seems that it's the strength of what David had developed as a live performer that was brought to the record with the time that medal came [Music] by when that sun in the sky is falling s got me into be a front person yes I mean to cover Sid's Parts I suspect at the time mostly to try and you know eek out our career a little bit longer the thing is that that Dave Gilman was brought in in 1968 not as a replacement Sid Barrett but as you know somebody to kind of supplement him because I mean Sid was actually becoming a bit of a liability on stage I mean sometimes he'd pull himself together but sometimes he sort of behav in a very erratic fashion um sometimes just sort of playing just one cord all the way through and sometimes going up to the microphone just mouthing the words without you know it actually coming out through the PA system and I think that that that that Gilmore was brought in as a sort of safety net and you know he brought in as first a sort of under study I suppose and people would turn up at Pink Floyd gigs when Gilmore was you know part of the four piece just to see how the new boy was set in and I think that medal was this kind of some sort of Turning Point I think the new boy had very much settled in in fact he wasn't a new boy anymore he was actually you know in the upper part of the hierarchy of the group by then you know he was not only the the guitarist he was actually a vocalist too and I think that it was certainly the cause of much um dispute later on [Music] the high-profile pair are obviously rer Waters Dave Gilmore but Rick Wright and Nick Mason are incredibly important too and uh Rick's one of the lead singers for instance he does a lead singing with Dave Gilmore on Echo I think that Rick Wright's keyboard style is very much a trademark of the Pink Floyd I think that certainly on a lot of tracks onle it was that that kind of held it together it was that that gave a lot of the song's character particularly the sort of if you like the folk songs on side [Music] one [Music] I think FIS is a good song the word was it was one of those buzzword of a time that people would just say Fearless the way that people say awesome and they picked it up from Tony gorich who was managing family um and used something that was a fashionable word at the moment into a lyric that's about well to to my mind there's there's two challenges there's there's a section that's about courage and then there's a section that's about stupidity dressed up as courage you say you like to see me [Music] TR you the song like so many Pink Floyd songs is supposed to relate to Sid Barrett and uh their loss of Sid into mental trouble and the idiot uh standing in front of the crowd smiling you know that people say that's uh a wat's image of Sid seems quite possible uh wonder if the magistrate looking at him disapprovingly as water as it might be you have that setting of The but with lyrics that don't really nail it down about what he's saying about this guy the idiot the madman The Lunatic who was on the grass later and was standing in front of this crowd being examined looking at them what's I don't know what's happening but then you have this resolution into the football crowd and what what is that about [Music] [Applause] [Music] I suppose in a particular mood you could you could find you know You'll Never Walk Alone very very irritating but that's an interesting song because there is a very sharp division between Lyricist and tun Smith rather as it was with Rogers and Hammerstein who incident wrote You'll Never Walk Alone I mean you know it was very much Roger wat's lyrics and Dave Gilmore's Melody I really like FIS I really like the Riff I I really really like it up to the point that that the singing comes in I can't bear the sound of crowds singing be that football cards or cards in gigs there's always that bit right let's have the left hand side of the hall singing let's have the right hand side Nic see can you sing louter than the left and that's where I just cringe and please no so I don't think it's it's a very nice part of the track but it's at the end so it doesn't matter you can always skip it at that point it's quite striking when it first happens uh You'll Never Walk Alone well that's it's sung you know how the Liverpool crowd is sounds friendly unlike many a football crowd on the at least on those occasions and back in that period Waters of course later had huge problems about the artist and the crowd now presumably this song in some fashion plays into his early thoughts on that the separation between the artist and the crowd the what he felt later in the that he expressed with the wall the mutual loathing between the artist and the crowd that is part of the fabric of the we hope mutual love Waters was probably still thinking the crowd wasn't too bad a bunch I guess at that point when he came to detest them at one stage later only a few years later you know so something's going on here and I can't track it I can't quite nail it down perhaps Waters hadn't quite nailed it down is the reason you know uh that he's puzzling away at something and not getting to it but he's placing Sid in the middle of this situation rather than himself and maybe that's what's losing him I think Fearless is probably the first wave of a kind of observational song that Roger Waters would polish more and more through albums like animals and onwards to the final [Music] cart Roger Waters was actually um Coming of Age as a songwriter with medal he you know he he was really starting to find a balance between between realistic and poetic expression and uh he's since gone on to be regarded as one of the great songwriters of our [Music] time I don't think Roger Waters takes a back seat on medal but later on Roger is much more to the four and this was I can't speak for them you know I don't know these guys I don't know what they lived through but it's strikes me that medal was perhaps the happiest time for the four of them working together after this time Waters was perhaps to get more and more predominant in the ideas Department he suggested the themes for Dark Side of the Moon he he came up with the you know over the top Madness of the wall and animals and so forth at this stage at medal he wasn't quite you know the sort of boss man in terms of ideas and Concepts but he was becoming more to the for or if Gilmore was coming more courageous in putting his own musical ideas forward Waters was beginning to put his own sort of conceptual ideas forward the demo sessions we did at ABY road for the medal album and we the each piece that we put along we say well what do you want to call that one nothing we said nothing so we see right so someone wrote down nothing part one so we then moved on and every piece that we did every little bit musical snippet that we came up with was was logged down as as nothing part one 2 3 so it's um so it became nothing Parts 1 to 22 or whatever it was when we and then we started cobbling all these pieces together into into the various tracks and things that went onto that album The pinging at the beginning was Rick and we had put a microphone onto a grand piano and run it through a lesli speaker which is what you usually use for the Hammond Organ and uh every time as Rick was tinkling away on the piano every time you got to one particular note it would pick up a resonance through the through the Leslie speaker and uh so he just started making up that intro piece the drama the Dynamics really individual distinctively guitar playing gorgeous Melodies Harmony singing that's um uh Rick Wright and Dave Gilmore singing together um fantastic interplay of instruments you know going from one to the next just just everything about it really hangs together very very well Echo was a centerpiece of Medal was a centerpiece of their life show at that time and was a melding together of many episodes and was something that they could replicate live very very well I think it's long and it doesn't tend to vary its Pace very much it varies its Dynamic a lot but somehow it stands its time pretty well I think it makes a good lesson Echo is absolutely a landmark in Pink Floyd's career it's the one which probably meant that they didn't just wind up round about now being just another psychedelic band who couldn't get a break it built the bridge to their next phase to Dark Side of the Moon basically it's when they leared how to come up with an extended expanded piece of music and um make it not just impressive is it just oral wallpaper and I I think that you know though the echo the sort of attitude on Echo the strategy of playing became a sort of trademark of the group um more so than than inter sell overdrive or power talk H or any of of the other sort of numbers that were perpetually in the ACT but but I mean surprisingly although it's actually quite a complex number it turned out to be quite easy to do on stage Adrian Maan the guy who directed it had gone initially to David Gilmore and Steve roor Pink Floyd's co-manager and suggested that he wanted to make an art film with Pink Floyd's music and modern art images and bits of Rene mcre cut into all this and as mayin said much later they politely turned him down and he was glad they had done because he went away and did some more thinking about it and then had been on holiday in that part of the world and thought well we've had the live rock documentary as in Woodstock we've had the cinema Varity thing of following the artist around as in penck has worked with Bob Dylan and don't look back so what can we do that just isn't going to replicate those two things well why don't we take a rock band and instead of going back and forward to cuts of the audience and their real reaction have virtually no audience at all so apart from a few children who got in and and were hiding away in [Music] the medal is one of those albums where the sleeve to me never really made sense it's called medal and I used to think that it was a nose that was in the front for a long long time I thought that was a nose it turns out it's an ear and Nick Mason said that when they were on the Japanese tour in 1971 they were coming back on a stop over in Hong Kong airport and they called storm thorguson at hypnosis the guy who did the artwork for most of their albums and uh they phoned up Storm and said we want an ear underwater and Mason said that even at the distance of thousands of miles they could feel storm groaning down the other end of the phone you just imagine this little nomic man back and those pink Floyds want an ear underwater what in Earth are they up to you know but he delivered an ear underwater for them and it it's it's got kind of strange look to it but I don't get why 2006 he said something to me which seemed to me dead right not surprisingly cuz he was there but it did seem dead right which was he said it was part of the process of coming to recognize myself and you could probably apply that to the whole band of in a fairly random way working towards finding your identity they didn't know how to do that process they just kept on going at it plus rubbing off one another of course it wasn't an individual activity solely alth imp part it was and so they would press and force and accidentally nudge one another into this getting the getting the identity the individual identity and then putting the four identities together you know uh which process was concluded more or less by Dark Side of the Moon I think but uh seems to me that that's what medal is odds and sods pretty good some of it's great U some of it's mediocre some of it's weird you know um utterly typical of uh early Pink [Music] Floyd climing you say you'd like to see me try CL you pick the place and I choose the [Music] time clim the here in my own way just wait a while for the right day and as I Rise Above the tree lines and the clouds I look [Music] down

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Id: LYXGo3uZFH0

Length: 41min 16sec (2476 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024