![]() The only trouble he encountered came from the orchestra. (Other section titles, such as Breast Milky and Funky Dung, were ‘inspired’ by the sleeve artwork.) Geesin doesn’t recall getting any further feedback about the work he’d done, other than being called to Abbey Road studios to assist in the actual recording. They also kept his suggestion for naming the opening section Father’s Shout, after the American jazz pianist Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines. “Nobody knew what it meant, it just sounded right,” says Geesin now. ![]() Not for the title of just the Floyd’s most ambitious piece yet, but of the entire album. When John Peel requested the title ahead of a Radio 1 broadcast a month later, Geesin drew Waters’s attention to a story in the Evening Standard about a woman being fitted with a nuclear-powered pacemaker, headed: ‘ATOM HEART MOTHER NAMED’. It was this version that the band debuted at the Bath Festival in June 1970. Just a few notes on the first themed section and the first few bars of the choir, and how that might start.”īy then, Geesin had retitled the piece Epic. Rick and Nick came in right towards the end, but only to have a bit of a listen. “Since none of them could read or write music, I was left to get on with it,” he says. ![]() Geesin worked out of his Notting Hill basement through the sweltering summer of 1970, often stripped to his underwear. It’s a wonder they were still standing up.” But they were knackered, from all the touring. And their egos were pushing them as well. “But they needed to do something because EMI were pushing them. “They had only made a backing track, and they genuinely didn’t know what to do with it,” says Geesin. But the band were now off on tour, and clueless as to what to do next on the record. They had demoed five untitled instrumentals, strung together as one continuous piece titled The Amazing Pudding. When Pink Floyd found themselves foundering over their next album, Waters invited Geesin to attempt a musical rescue mission. Geesin had invited Waters to collaborate with him on his soundtrack for filmmaker Roy Battersby’s extraordinary documentary The Body (cue a bewildering series of burps, farts, sighs and heavy breathing). And while side two of the album comprised three five-minute tracks, each written by one member, culminating in a final ‘suite’ of sound effects largely concocted by Nick Mason, it was the title track – co-written with the aforementioned Scottish avant-garde musician and composer Ron Geesin – that finally cemented Floyd’s burgeoning reputation as creators of both art and music. Not simple pop-psychedelia, nor mere prog showmanship, but a clearly thought-out, if occasionally wavering, attempt at something that could neither be categorised as rock, nor classical, nor indeed anything else outside of what it is: its own faltering, frustrating, enticing, fundamentally flawed yet gloriously individualistic musical form. And yet the album that Pink Floyd’s two main protagonists at the time were so quick to dismiss was a landmark on many levels: the first British ‘rock’ album to feature one track covering an entire side of vinyl the first to appear without any indication on the sleeve of who the group was or what the album was called, or indeed any information whatsoever the first Floyd album to feature an outside writer (Ron Geesin, who co-wrote the monumental 23-minute title track) the first Floyd album to be specially mixed for four-channel quadraphonic sound as well as conventional two-channel stereo and, despite all this, the first Floyd album to go to No.1 in the UK chart.Ītom Heart Mother marked the moment that Pink Floyd came in from the cold of their post-Barrett malaise and found the way forward, towards everything we now remember them best for.
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