They said they wanted a big sound, they wanted a choir section here and probably some kind of louder, raucous section here, possibly brass, and we had a very short session, and I’m talking a morning and another bit of an afternoon somewhere, where Rick Wright came round to my studio in Ladbroke Grove, London and we looked at the choir They’d come up with a tape which was an accompaniment tape lasting twenty-three minutes and they gave me a rough mix of that tape, and we had some discussions about what might go on it. They had then stuck these together, as you do with magnetic tape. It was quite a thick texture but it was a backing track. They had five or six little sections that they had recorded at EMI Abbey Road, of what I call a backing track. He later recalled the creation of the piece: ‘The recording process for Atom Heart Mother was a collage. Working from the tapes supplied, Geesin scratched his head for a while before he finally took the plunge and got down to work. Once this preliminary process had been completed the band handed the tapes to Ron Geesin and went off to tour America. The delights of quantising – using computers to digitally adjust tempos without affecting pitch – were still some twenty years in the future.’ Playing the piece without any instruments meant that getting through it without mistakes demanded the full range of our limited musicianship matters such as tempo had to be left in abeyance. In order to keep tracks free for the overdubs we had bass and drums on two tracks, and the whole recording had to be done in one pass. Roger and I embarked on what can only be described as an Odyssean voyage to record the backing track. It proved eventful to say the least, as Nick Mason recalled in Inside Out… ‘Unfortunately, Atom Heart Mother is twenty-four minutes long. With a structure now beginning to take shape it was time to really get down to work in the recording studio which was once again EMI’s Abbey Road now something of a second home for the band. In any event the piece that ultimately became Atom Heart Mother had by now been performed many times on the road. I think we had always intended to record the track, but the songwriters must have all felt they had hit a specific block, as in the early summer we decided to hand over the music as it existed to Ron Geesin and asked him if he could add some orchestral colour and choral parts.’ Gradually we added, subtracted and multiplied the elements, but still seemed to lack an essential something. One way to develop such a piece was to play it live, so we played shortened versions, sometimes dubbed The Amazing Pudding, at a number of gigs. After some lengthy sessions in early 1970, we had created a very long, rather majestic, but rather unfocused and still unfinished piece. I can’t remember now if we had decided to create a longer piece or whether it just snowballed, but it was a way of operating we were starting to feel comfortable with. Once we settled on the nucleus of the piece (a theme supplied I think by David), everyone else had contributed, not only musically, but also in devising the overall dynamics. ‘Atom Heart Mother had been assembled during a number of rehearsals. Clearly the rather woolly approach to creating the music was unlikely to bear any great fruit given the confused beginnings of the work as recalled by Mason. Writing in his book Inside Out Nick Mason described the vague genesis of the piece. Atom Heart Mother was an incredibly difficult piece and the studio version that finally It was also performed live at the Bath Festival where the surviving film footage demonstrates just how difficult it was to get the thing right. Regarding live performances, the full scale work was toured extensively in Europe and America. In it’s full scale incarnation it was transmitted live on the BBC and on the Europa satellite. The piece was performed live by the four piece band on dozens of occasions. Once The Amazing Pudding emerged from the development process it had metamorphosed into Atom Heart Mother and had gained additional instrumentation in the form of a ten piece brass section and full choir. In 1970 the band began trying out an extended piece known as The Amazing Pudding. As we have seen Careful with That Axe was one example which was originally known as Murderistic Woman. During this process familiar tracks would often be given working titles. It was in the concert hall where emerging new compositions would be tested and refined over a long series of live dates. This is particularly important when one considers how much of Pink Floyd’s output was worked out on the road. Although Pink Floyd are today remembered for the brilliance of their work in the studio it’s important not to overlook the fact that the band was very much a working touring live unit.
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