John Alldis, whose choir were also to perform on the track, had experience in dealing with orchestral musicians, and managed to conduct the recorded performance in place of Geesin. During the recording of his work in June with the EMI Pops Orchestra, the session musicians present were unimpressed with his tendency to favour avant-garde music over established classical works, and, combined with the relative difficulty of some of the parts, harassed him during recording. Nobody knew what was wanted, they couldn't read music …" According to him, Gilmour came up with some of the melodic lines, while the pair of them along with keyboardist Richard Wright worked on the middle section with the choir. Geesin described the composing and arranging as "a hell of a lot of work. Geesin was handed the completed backing tracks the band had recorded, and asked to compose an orchestral arrangement over the top of it while the band went on tour to the US. The band had been introduced to Ron Geesin via the Rolling Stones tour manager, Sam Cutler, and were impressed with his composition and tape-editing capabilities, particularly Waters and Mason. īy March, they had finished recording the track, but felt that it was rather unfocused and needed something else. Mason recalled the final backing track's lack of precise timekeeping would cause problems later on. The other instruments the band played were overdubbed later. Consequently, band members Roger Waters and Nick Mason had little choice but to play the bass and drums, respectively, for the entire 23-minute piece in one sitting. Recording of the track commenced at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London, and was somewhat cumbersome, as it was the first recording to use a new eight-track one-inch tape and EMI TG12345 transistorised mixing console (8-track, 20-microphone inputs) in the studio, and, as a result, EMI insisted the band were not allowed to do any splicing of the tape to edit pieces together. The band felt that the live performances developed the piece into a manageable shape. The title track of Atom Heart Mother resulted from a number of instrumental figures the band had composed during these rehearsals, including the chord progression of the main theme, which guitarist David Gilmour had called "Theme from an Imaginary Western", and the earliest documented live performance was on 17 January 1970 at Hull University. A number of out-takes from the Rome sessions were used to assemble new material during these rehearsals, though some of it, such as "The Violent Sequence", later to become " Us and Them", would not be used for some time.
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They headed back to London in early 1970 for rehearsals. Pink Floyd started work on the album after completing their contributions to the soundtrack for the film Zabriskie Point in Rome, which had ended somewhat acrimoniously.
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One of the earliest live performances of the album's title track was at this show. Roger Waters onstage at Leeds University, 28 February 1970.
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Ron Geesin, who had already influenced and collaborated with Waters, contributed to the title track and received a then-rare outside songwriting credit. A remastered CD was released in 1994 in the UK and the United States, and again in 2011. This was a trend that would continue on subsequent covers throughout the 1970s and beyond.Īlthough it was commercially successful on release, the band, particularly Roger Waters and David Gilmour, have expressed several negative opinions of the album in more recent years. The cover was designed by Hipgnosis, and was the first one not to feature the band's name on the cover, or contain any photographs of the band anywhere. It was recorded at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London, England, and was the band's first album to reach number 1 in the UK, while it reached number 55 in the US, eventually going gold there. It was released by Harvest on 2 October 1970 in the UK, and by Capitol on 10 October 1970 in the US. Atom Heart Mother is the fifth studio album by the English progressive rock band Pink Floyd.