The soundtrack music that they had recorded was there to serve a function: it was atmospheric. There’s the fizzing energetic opener One Of These Days which is the blueprint for half of the songs on Dark Side Of The Moon. It’s now generally agreed by Floyd aficionados that Meddle was the point where Pink Floyd as we know them really began. The kids who bought Meddle in 1971 didn’t ask ‘Where’s Syd?’ They increasingly asked ‘Who’s Syd?’ After Meddle, nobody called them ‘the’ Pink Floyd. Meddle, although it was an album that revelled in its use of the recording studio, was the first album to capture some of the potency and excitement of the Floyd live experience. By the end of the 60s they had developed into a formidable live touring band. They were still adventurous and experimental, but they were also more structured and stable. The psychedelic chaos was left behind and a new Pink Floyd emerged. They had come a long way from the hallucinogenic whimsy of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and its less satisfactory follow-up A Saucerful Of Secrets. Those albums, brilliant as they are in their way, are still the sound of the Floyd finding their way, trying to escape from the shadow of their brilliant erratic insufferable genius ex-front-man Syd Barrett. You couldn’t necessarily say the same about Atom Heart Mother or Ummagumma. In Meddle you can almost hear Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here and even The Wall. Echoes is the centrepiece of Meddle, an album that is now widely regarded as the one where Pink Floyd got everything just right.

Atom heart mother vs meddle