On April 14th 1969, at the Royal Festival Hall in London, Pink Floyd kicked off a concert tour that continued to the end of September. The tour was titled ”The Man and The Journey”, and that first show was billed as “The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes – More Furious Madness from Pink Floyd”. It was one of drummer Nick Mason’s favorite performances, who recalled that, “It is possibly less so for David Gilmour who, courtesy of some bad earthing, received a bolt of electricity sufficient to hurl him across the stage and leave him vibrating mildly for the rest of the show.”
The setlist for the show was split between songs that appeared on Pink Floyd’s previous albums The Piper at The Gates of Dawn and Saucerful of Secrets, and material later to be released on the band’s two 1969 albums. These albums are the topic of this article.
More
Barbet Schroeder spent his early career in Paris working as assistant to director Jean-Luc Godard and as part of the production team on the first two “Moral Tales” films of Eric Rohmer. At the end of 1968 he pivoted to a director role and his debut project was a film about 1960s counterculture, depicting a descent into heroin addiction on the island of Ibiza. Rather than seek a typical soundtrack that accompanies the movie, he was looking for diegetic music – music that originate in the scenes, the characters being aware of it. As an active follower of underground music, he wanted to utilize music of that genre as the natural style his film characters were immersed in. He later said: “I was a big fan of the first two Floyd records. I thought they were the most extraordinary things I’d ever heard, and just wanted to work with them. I went to London and took a print of the movie More, and showed it to them. I didn’t want typical film music – made to the minute and recorded with the image on the big screen. I didn’t believe in film music. I wanted this to be the music the characters were listening to. At a party, the music came out of the loud speaker in a room, so we recorded it to sound as if it was playing in the room.”
The offer came at the right time. Pink Floyd were eager to get involved with films as a medium in which their music can provide a meaningful supplement to the visuals. Rick Wright said at the time: “Films seem to be the answer for us at the moment. It would be nice to do a science-fiction movie—our music seems to be that way oriented.” The band gladly accepted Schroeder’s offer to provide the soundtrack for the film More. As David Gilmour explained, “We would have done almost anything in terms of films. We wanted to break into big-time movie scores and we said OK and he gave us 600 quid each and off we trotted and we did it.” Pink Floyd had previously dabbled lightly into film music on a few occasions. In 1967 they appeared in Peter Whitehead’s psychedelic movie Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. A year later they provided a score for a film called The Committee by Peter Sykes in what Nick Mason described as, “more of a collection of sound effects than music.” They now had their first shot at a bona fide film score.
Roger Waters, who was starting to assert himself as the main creative force in the band after the departure of Syd Barrett, recalls that Barbet Schroeder’s feeling about film music was, in those days, “That he didn’t want a soundtrack to go with the movie. All he wanted was, literally, if the radio was switched on in the car, for example, he wanted something to come out of the car. Or someone goes and switches the TV on, or whatever it is. He wanted the soundtrack to relate exactly to what was happening in the movie, rather than a film score backing the visuals.”
Waters wrote most of the songs for the soundtrack, with additional instrumental pieces written and performed by the band. He remembers: “I was sitting at the side of the studio writing lyrics while we were putting down the backing tracks. It was just a question of writing eight or nine songs with instrumentals.” Working at Pye Studios, Pink Floyd spent two intense weeks of writing, improvising and recording the full score for the film. Schroeder remembers: “Roger was the big creative force. I remember this incredibly hectic two weeks. The sound engineer couldn’t believe the speed and the creativity of the enterprise.”
One of Roger Water’s crown achievements in the movie is the song that opens the soundtrack album, Cirrus Minor. Barbet Schroeder said of Pink Floyd’s music for the film: “They were making the music that was best adapted to the movie at that time – spacey and very in tune with nature.” Indeed, the first full minute of Cirrus Minor consists of birdsong sounds, courtesy of EMI’s sound effects library. The meditative song is a showcase piece for David Gilmour who sings and plays acoustic guitar, and Richard Wright who plays Farfisa and Hammond organs. The ethereal quality of the Hammond on Cirrus Minor is similar to the Celestial Voices section of A Saucerful of Secrets from their previous album.
Schroeder’s preference for music that comes out of the scenes rather than plays along them, gave the Floyd freedom to create film music without the complexities of accurate timing to fit the pace of the movie. Nick Mason: “There was no budget for a dubbing studio with a frame-count facility, so we went into a viewing theatre, timed the sequences carefully (it’s amazing how accurate a stopwatch can be), and then went into Pye Studios in Marble Arch, where we worked with the experienced in-house engineer Brian Humphries.” In essence, the band was recording a collection of songs and instrumentals that matched the mood of the movie scenes. As Barbet Schroeder said, he “was using extracts from the album for this or that scene.”
Another highlight from the soundtrack was also written by Roger Waters. Cymbaline, originally titled ‘Nightmare’ when performed live, reference the character Doctor Strange, a popular 1960s Marvel Comics superhero, who also made it to the cover of the album A Saucerful of Secrets.
The soundtrack to the movie was released in June 1969, two months ahead of the film premiere, and became a successful Pink Floyd album. It was the band’s first complete album without Syd Barrett, and as David Glimour summarized it, “Doing film music was a path we thought we could follow in the future. It wasn’t that we wanted to stop being a rock ’n’ roll group, it was more of an exercise.” The Floyd would record one more soundtrack to a Barbet Schroeder film, La Vallée, released as Obscured by Clouds in 1972.
More made it to the top 10 on a number of European album charts, most successfully in France, where it reached No. 2 and received rave reviews in local music publications. French magazine Rock & Folk wrote: “More is a disc of stunning quality, and Pink Floyd are quite definitely one of the most mature groups of the day. More reflects perfectly the spirit in which Pink Floyd have always conceived their music: technique of unwavering rigor at the service of a tumultuous imagination. The impossible marriage of madness and reason.”
Ummagumma
We come back to The Man and The Journey tour. Shows from that tour played a key role in Pink Floyd’s next album, to be released in November 1969. Ummagumma is a double album, consisting of one album recorded live during that tour, and a studio album with music that debuted at the same shows. Two live shows were recorded, one at Mother’s in Birmingham on April 27, the other at Manchester College of Commerce on May 2. Each of them contributed two tracks to the live album. Richard Wright said of these shows: “The first time, we felt we’d played very well, but the equipment didn’t work so we couldn’t use nearly all of that one. The second time was a really bad gig, but as the recording equipment was working well, we had to use it. The stuff on the album isn’t half as good as we can play.”
The recording on May 2nd captures Pink Floyd playing one of their best songs from that period. Originally appearing on A Saucerful of Secrets, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun is one of Roger Waters’ early compositions, the title taken from the 1965 book The Fireclown by science fiction writer Michael Moorcock. Most of the lyrics are influenced by Chinese poetry, mostly from works by Li Shangyin, a poet of the ninth century Tang dynasty. Talking about the subject matter, Waters said it is, “about an unknown person who, while piloting a mighty flying saucer, is overcome with solar suicidal tendencies and sets the controls for the heart of the sun.” A key part on that song is the drumming by Nick Mason, who plays a rhythmic pattern on the toms. He was influenced by a completely different type of drummer, as he later revealed: “It gave me a chance to emulate one of my favorite pieces, ‘Blue Sands,’ the track by the jazz drummer Chico Hamilton in the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day.” He later admitted that he lacked the ability to truly emulate Hamilton’s drum pattern: “It was only when I re-watched that film, many years later, that I realized that what I was playing had absolutely nothing to do with what I thought I heard! But so much of what we played around that time has that jazz feel, which makes it perfect for reinterpretation.”
The studio album is a different story altogether. Starting in September 1968, Pink Floyd began a new project, allotting each of the band members half the length of an LP size with a solo project. The idea stemmed from Ricard Wright’s interest in creating serious music that stylistically fell outside the band’s normal sctivities. He was listening to classical composers such as Aaron Copland and Henryk Górecki and needed an outlet to express this side of his musical palette. The other band members went along and each created solo pieces, branching outside their comfort zone.
In April 1969, Zig Zag magazine, anticipating the release of Ummagumma, commended Pink Floyd for exposing experimental music to popular music listeners: “At one time their kind of experiment and exploration was the prerogative of a small group of avant-garde enthusiasts who left people outside their small sphere way behind. But now such experimental music is no longer purely experimental and thanks to groups such as the Floyd it reaches a wide audience who think the same way and who appreciate what is going on. I think the Floyd are one of the few groups who not only could fill a double album successfully but actually need a double album to give them enough space to move in.”
While each of the solo pieces in the studio album is interesting and has its merit, musically they fall short compared to the music they made as a collective. Nick Mason commented: “It was fun to make, and a useful exercise, the individual sections proving, to my mind, that the parts were not as great as the sum.” Talking about his contribution, The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party, he added: “To create my section 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.”
Richard Wright defended the studio album when he talked to Beat Instrumental magazine in January 1970: “We didn’t write together, we just went into the studio on our own to record and then we got together to listen to them. We all played alone on our pieces. I thought it was a very valid experiment and it helped me. The result is that I want to carry on and do it again, on a solo album. But I think that maybe Roger feels that if we’d all worked together it would have been better. That’s something you just don’t know, whether it would or not. I think it was a good idea.”
Roger Waters contributed two very different pieces of music to the album. Grantchester Meadows is a pastoral ballad rich with sounds of nature and acoustic guitar, his ode to the British countryside. The other, with the curious title of ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ is a sound collage predating Waters’ collaboration with Ron Gissin on Music from The Body, released a year later. He said of that experiment: “Those were sounds that I made, the voice and the hand slapping were all human generated – no musical instruments.”
Summarizing the studio album experience, Waters was both critical and complementary: “I think the idea for the studio side, doing one track each, was basically good. I personally think it would have been better if we’d done them individually, and then got the opinions of the others, put four heads into each piece instead of just one. I think each piece would have benefited from that, but by the time they were done, we’d used up our studio time. I was quite pleased by the way it came out, though. It sold a lot, which is something.”
A better effort from Roger Waters as composer and the full band as performers was recorded at the end of 1968 during the sessions that yielded the solo pieces for Ummagumma, but was not included in the album. The song, titled Embryo, is told from a viewpoint of, well, an embryo. It is a slow, atmospheric tune with Richard Wright accompanying beautifully on mellotron and piano. After a few recording sessions the band mysteriously abandoned the track. It took it over a year to see the light of day when producer Norman Smith was tasked with creating a stereo mix in order to include the song on the Harvest Records compilation Picnic: A Breath of Fresh Air. That album also featured some of the label’s staple artists including Deep Purple, Barclay James Harvest, the Pretty Things and Kevin Ayers.
Sources
Pink Floyd All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin
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