![]() ![]() Thorgerson and Powell's work for Pink Floyd is now so seared into the popular consciousness as to barely need mentioning: the Atom Heart cow, the wonderfully crisp prism-and-light motif that accompanied – and now denotes – The Dark Side of the Moon, the pig floating over Battersea power station on Animals, the flaming figure shaking hands on the front of Wish You Were Here (and, indeed, the logo of two robot-arms doing the same thing, a perfect illustration of the album's sense of musicians lost in a cold, mechanised industry). As the Powell quote above suggests, as of the early 1970s, they led the way into a world where the most ambitious groups dispensed with band-portraits, and even typography: to this day, even if album "sleeves" are now often boiled down to the size of a postage stamp, musicians usually serve notice of their ambition by leaving such fripperies off their artwork. And at a time when rock was moving way beyond the cheap thrills of the jukebox era and into the album-led period of FM radio and popular-music-as-art, their work quickly turned out to be a perfect match for the records it adorned: high-end, wilfully non-commercial, so of a piece with the music that one digested them both as a sense-filling whole. They were employed by the band, not their record label. The two of them had a bond with Pink Floyd that dated back to their early days at Cambridge, where Thorgerson had ended up after an early childhood in Potters Bar, and time spent at the famously utopian Summerhill boarding school in Suffolk. Thorgerson and Powell, though, had a few trump cards. 'Where's the lettering? What do you mean, there isn't going to be any? Well, I'd better speak to somebody upstairs about that.'" This lack of focus means Atom Heart Mother will largely be for cultists, but its unevenness means there's also a lot to cherish here."Whenever you went in there with something," Powell continued, "Ron Dunton would say: 'Well, what do you call that then? What's that? He hated Storm and me. That it lasts an entire side illustrates that Pink Floyd was getting better with the larger picture instead of the details, since the second side just winds up falling off the tracks, no matter how many good moments there are. So, there are interesting moments scattered throughout the record, and the work that initially seems so impenetrable winds up being Atom Heart Mother's strongest moment. "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast," the 12-minute opus that ends the album, does the same thing, floating for several minutes before ending on a drawn-out jam that finally gets the piece moving. Of these, Waters begins developing the voice that made him the group's lead songwriter during their classic era with "If," while Wright has an appealingly mannered, very English psychedelic fantasia on "Summer 68," and Gilmour's "Fat Old Sun" meanders quietly before ending with a guitar workout that leaves no impression. ![]() Then, on the second side, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Rick Wright have a song apiece, winding up with the group composition "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" wrapping it up. Still, it may be an acquired taste even for fans, especially since it kicks off with a side-long, 23-minute extended orchestral piece that may not seem to head anywhere, but is often intriguing, more in what it suggests than what it achieves. If anything, this is the most impenetrable album Pink Floyd released while on Harvest, which also makes it one of the most interesting of the era. Appearing after the sprawling, unfocused double-album set Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother may boast more focus, even a concept, yet that doesn't mean it's more accessible. ![]()
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