It was 1966, and Pink Floyd were warming up for their first definitive show. They’d tried a few tracks out in local pubs in ’65, but since then, they had found themselves as an outfit. Now, they were about to announce themselves as the red sock in the all-white wash of the scene, lending counterculture a tie-die swirl by taking to the dingy underbelly of a church.
One of the attendees at the first show was Peter Mercier. He was a photographic student at the Ealing School of Photography in 1966. “We were having a lecture about fashion photography,” he wrote on the Pink Floyd forum. “We were being assisted in this exercise by a young model who at the end of the afternoon invited me along ‘to a gig in a church hall where one of the new psychedelic bands will be playing’.”
“Believe me, it was another time and another place, for it turned out to be a very early Pink Floyd gig, featuring Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright,” he adds. Beyond the music, the alternate time and place that the band created was a photographer’s dream. It prognosticated a colourful new future in which they were bound to be central players. However, no sooner than their meteoric rise came to fruition, and by 1968, Barrett could no longer function in the band.
This tragic moment set the trend for the continual cycles of rises and falls that have been part of Pink Floyd’s make-up ever since. It’s a miracle that they managed to survive Barrett’s untimely departure, let alone what followed. David Gilmour knew the band closely, and, of course, he has proven himself in the subsequent years, but finding success with a very singular figurehead only to have him depart at the height of it caused disarray.
Their first full album without Barrett, More, is the forgotten oddity of the band’s discography. Reviews at the time were ambivalent to the point of being moot, and the band themselves have pretty much continued that legacy to this day by leaving it in the dark as a strange little relic. However, with label pressure mounting and people wondering whether they could continue without Barrett, the band had to deliver with Ummagumma. On a personal level, they felt that they let themselves down; Roger Waters called it a “disaster”, while Gilmour dubbed it “horrible”.
However, it was the next outing that really caused them to squirm. The band felt the need to correct past mistakes, but with Atom Mother Heart, they were perhaps a little too eager. The band had just finished their contributions to the Michelangelo Antonioni film Zabriskie Point, and the creative well was rather dry. Thus, the recording process was a struggle, and Gilmour would call the results “a load of rubbish.”
He continued to explain on BBC radio: “We were at a real low point. We didn’t know what on earth we were doing or trying to do at the time, none of us. We were really out there. I think we were scraping the barrel a bit at that period.” And seeing as though bashing their own albums is one of the few things Gilmour and Waters can agree on, the bassist ratified his bandmate’s appraisal, stating: “If somebody said to me now, ‘Right, here’s a million pounds, go out and play Atom Heart Mother‘, I’d say ‘you must be fucking joking’.”
Nevertheless, the experience of going into a studio unloaded and being forced to create a record on a whim proved to be a major turning point for the band. In the past, they had scraped together nuggets of old material and tempered their creative impetus with a sense of ‘how they should sound’. Afterwards, they wiped the slate clean and just let things flow, and this calmer, more measured approach ironically made them “more prolific”, according to Gilmour.
