Atom Heart Mother Review

Both Waters and Gilmour spent the rest of their lives disowning this, and while musicians are often wrong about their own work, here they are right. The title suite was largely arranged by an outside composer brought in to score brass and choir over chord sequences the band supplied, and the result is a procession of grand gestures with nothing underneath them. It swells, it recedes, a cello plays, a choir hums wordlessly, and after six or seven minutes you notice that no idea has developed.

Side two is three individual songs of no great consequence and then Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast, thirteen minutes of a roadie frying bacon with music in the gaps, which was a joke that was already thin when it was new. Fat Old Sun is genuinely nice and is the only thing here that survives outside a completist's shelf. The band needed a year to work out that scale is not the same thing as ambition. This is the record where they got that lesson wrong in public.