Studio 3, one piano note on the edge of feedback
Echoes takes the whole second side of Meddle. Pink Floyd released the album on Harvest in Britain on 5 November 1971. The piece runs 23 minutes and 30 seconds. Through 1971 they had been playing it live as The Return of the Son of Nothing, after a stack of studio sketches they simply called Nothing. All four wrote it. David Gilmour and Richard Wright sing.
The ping at the start is one piano note. In Abbey Road’s Studio 3, Wright sent a grand piano through a Leslie rotating speaker. The note sat on the edge of feedback, and that was the figure they kept, at the open and again at the close. Abbey Road was still on eight-track. When the tape filled, they moved the work to AIR, George Martin’s studio, for sixteen tracks, and did more at Morgan in Willesden. Peter Bown and John Leckie engineered the Abbey Road and AIR sessions. The band produced the record. The sessions ran from January to August 1971, in the gaps between tours.
The middle section is the other accident. Gilmour had a wah-wah, the Cry Baby kind. Plugged in backwards it did not sweep the guitar. It howled, an oscillation he then tamed with a volume pedal and a delay. They dropped that sound into the centre of the piece, the gull-like cries over the slow drift. Roger Waters wrote the lyric, the one about two strangers passing in the street and not quite meeting.
John Leckie started the dates as a tape operator. Abbey Road’s eight-track filled on the early pieces, and the band wanted sixteen. AIR and Trident were the London rooms that had it. They chose AIR. Peter Bown, used to the Abbey Road desk, went back, and Leckie stayed to engineer the overdubs. The sketches called Nothing ran into the twenties. Most of them were dropped. Fearless and San Tropez came out of the same months. Echoes was the one they had already rehearsed as a single piece, played through rather than built from leftovers. Once the ping gives way, Wright’s organ sits under Gilmour’s guitar and the two of them trade the vocal.
A roadie had plugged the wah in the wrong way, and I stomped into it and got this incredible screaming noise. But, you know what they say, waste not, want not.
(David Gilmour, Guitar Player, 2009)
In October 1971, a month before Meddle reached the shops, Adrian Maben filmed the band playing Echoes in the empty amphitheatre at Pompeii, with no audience and a power cable run in from the town. The film came out in 1972. Meddle reached number 3 in Britain. The suite stayed in the live set through the early 1970s, the long piece they had on stage before The Dark Side of the Moon was finished.
What you hear on the 1971 tape is a Leslie piano, a wah plugged in backwards, and four people editing a 23-minute side in London. The later remaster is not the point. The point is Studio 3, then AIR, then an empty Roman bowl in October, with the same ping at both ends.
