Mason’s one line, aimed at a BBC DJ
One of These Days opens Meddle. Pink Floyd released the album on Harvest in Britain on 5 November 1971. The track was recorded between January and August that year, in the gaps between tours, at EMI Studios on Abbey Road, at AIR on Oxford Street, and at Morgan Studios in Willesden. The band produced it. John Leckie was among the engineers.
David Gilmour had been trying ideas on a Binson Echorec, the Italian delay unit, the same box that fed Echoes. Roger Waters took the trick onto bass. Two basses are on the record, Gilmour and Waters, double-tracked, the delay set so that straight quarter notes throw back a triplet pattern. For the middle section Gilmour ran a bass through an H&H amp with the vibrato set near the tempo of the delay, then the band edited that piece of tape in and hid the splice under a cymbal.
The only voice is Nick Mason. He speaks one sentence, “One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces,” in a high voice through a ring modulator. The tape was then slowed down. The line was aimed at Jimmy Young, the BBC disc jockey the band disliked for talking too much. At some early 1970s shows they played a collage of his broadcasts cut into nonsense, which was the same joke in public.
Possibly the most interesting thing about One of These Days is that it actually stars myself as vocalist, for the first time on any of our records that actually got to the public. It’s a rather startling performance involving the use of a high voice and slowed down tape.
(Nick Mason to Charlie Kendall, 1984)
All four wrote it: Gilmour, Waters, Richard Wright and Mason. Wright plays Hammond organ and piano. Gilmour adds electric and slide guitar. In October 1971, a month before Meddle reached the shops, Adrian Maben filmed the band playing the song in the empty amphitheatre at Pompeii, with no audience and a cable run into the town for power. Some of the film of Gilmour and Waters during that performance was lost, which is why the cut that survives is mostly Mason at the kit.
The song stayed in the live set for years. It is the moment on Meddle where the band stops drifting and just drives: two basses, a delay, a slowed threat, and then the guitars. Mason told an interviewer in 1984 that it was the first vocal of his to reach the public. It is one sentence, and it is still the whole point of the intro. Meddle reached number 3 in Britain. Gilmour later told Guitar World that Waters had taken the Binson ideas onto bass and come up with the riff they all then worked on. The 1971 tape is the one that counts: Abbey Road, AIR and Morgan, not a later remaster. Pompeii, shot that October and released as a film in 1972, simply showed the same piece with the lights on and nobody in the seats.
