Pink Floyd Biography
Obscured by clouds (1968 - 1972)
 In the late sixties,
Pink Floyd designed a concept of their live shows. Originality on the
stage has always been one of the band's great qualities. It had its
roots in the almost theatrical style of their More Furious Madness From
The Messed Gadges Of Auximines gigs, where the show had two parts, The
Man and The Journey, and consisted of songs from the first two albums as
well as new tracks written for the More OST and later released as an
album of the same name. The names of the songs were changed to more
scary ones for the show. The roadies put a table on the stage during
the show and made tea. Then they turned on a small radio and let the
fans listen to it via microphone while the band drank the tea.
Pink Floyd continued experimenting when recording their subsequent
double album named Ummagumma, which is slang for sexual intercourse used
by Cambridge students and brought to London by the members of Pink
Floyd. The first LP contained four songs recorded live at Mother's,
Birmingham in the late 1969, while the second LP was divided into four
parts and each was recorded by a different member of Pink Floyd. Waters'
track was named Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered
Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict, which is perhaps the
longest name for a rock song ever. The song itself could be one of the
craziest. Waters used various synth-generated animal sounds, played them
at different speeds and from many directions, recorded them and then
recited his lyrics over it using Scottish accent. By that time, Gilmour
wrote his first song for the band. The three-part The Narrow Way is
considered a significant and very good piece.
After the successful collaboration with the makers of More, Pink
Floyd were chosen by Michelangelo Antonioni to compose the score for
his new movie Zabriskie Point. However, no matter how hard Pink Floyd
tried, none of the themes they wrote was good enough for Antonioni. In
the end, he only chose two songs and a cover of an older song called
Careful With That Axe, Eugene, which was renamed to Come In Number 51,
Your Time Is Up for the film and which contains Waters' screaming. It
accompanied the final exploding building scene.
The experimental style Pink Floyd adopted in the early seventies led
to unusual things. Pink Floyd even participated in writing music for a
ballet. Perhaps it was this experience that inspired the twenty-minute
Atom Heart Mother, which was unheard of at that time and was an attempt
to do "something big" from Pink Floyd. It seems to be written for an
orchestra. One of its working titles was A Theme From An Imaginary
Western and some of its string and choir parts are really majestic. It
made the whole A side of the LP, overshadowing the B side, which
contained just as interesting, but much more conventional pieces. There
is a notorious story about the origin of the album's name. By that time,
Pink Floyd collaborated with radio speaker John Peel, who liked to air
new, original songs including Atom Heart Mother which, however, had no
name then. When Pink Floyd came to the studio and were asked by Peel
about the name, they suddenly realized it had none. Finally they chose
to use some newspaper headline and they picked on an article about the
possibility of cardiac pacemakers being driven by nuclear energy. That
is how the album got the name it's got.
The other unusual thing about the album is the artwork. Pink Floyd
decided to use something that has nothing to do with the music. They
wanted something normal, ordinary, but not too ordinary, because that
would make the album indistinctive. Storm Thorgerson and his Hipgnosis
art design group got a special task and did very well. After a bit of
thinking, Storm decided to drive his car and take a picture of the first
thing he runs into. Coincidentally, he went along a pasture, where cows
were grazing... The beauty's name is Lulubella III. and its owner
claimed he had gotten £ 3.000 from Thorgerson for letting him take the
picture. Storm denied that, saying he had no idea why "he would pay such
an amount of money to some farmer for his damn cow."
The ear intercepting sound waves shown as circles on water is the
artwork of another great Pink Floyd album, Meddle. Reportedly, the name
is a wordplay on the words "to meddle" and "medal." The album's core
consists of two lengthy instrumental pieces, first being the scary One
Of These Days (I'm Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces), which is
influenced by Carefully With That Axe, Eugene. The other is a song
called Echoes, which is the entire B side. The original aim was to
record various musical themes and then choose one and use it, but in the
end Echoes consist of 24 different themes that merge into each other.
The working titles included names such as Nothing, Part 1-24 or Return
Of The Son Of Nothing, which is a reference to a Japanese horror film
character. Many people consider Echoes the best song ever recorded by
Pink Floyd.
The band enjoyed the peak of its creativity at the time and its
members got along with each other with ease. Waters acted as the leader
of Pink Floyd, but the other musicians kept largely anonymous, so that
hardly any fans knew their names or anything about them.
In 1972, Pink Floyd wrote and recorded the musical score for a movie
called La Vallée, which was distributed in English-speaking countries as
Obscured By Clouds, and later released the soundtrack as an album of
the same name. The album has now largely fallen into oblivion, but is
significant for many reasons, the most important being the fact that it
is the first Pink Floyd album not to be heavily influenced by the style
of Syd Barrett. Years after Syd left, Pink Floyd music sounded as if he
co-wrote it. In the seventies, Syd kept recording music with the help of
David Gilmour as a producer. He started a band called The Stars, which
only existed for several weeks. The quality of his albums was decreasing
and soon it was clear that Syd was not able to play anymore. He became a
fat bald man, who was intrested in abstract art rather than music and
from the early seventies to his death in 2006 he lived in suburban
Cambridge, not keeping in touch with anyone.
The other significant thing about Obscured By Clouds is that it
became both musically and lyrically the base of the phenomenal Dark Side
Of The Moon album.
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