The Epic Pink Floyd Song David Gilmour and Roger Waters Hated
David Gilmour and Roger Waters helped guide Pink Floyd to classic rock superstardom, but they rarely agreed on anything. They settled their conflict over “Comfortably Numb” by combining their ideas, which might have been their last compromise as the group began splintering around that time. Years before making that song, though, Waters and Gilmour hated the results of the epic Pink Floyd song “Atom Heart Mother.”
David Gilmour and Roger Waters hated the Pink Floyd song ‘Atom Heart Mother’
When Pink Floyd lost the creative genius of Syd Barrett (possibly to a combination of an existing mental condition and heavy use of psychoactive drugs), the band struggled to find its way.
They stayed on the psychedelic path (A Saucerful of Secrets). They cranked out a smorgasbord of a film soundtrack (More). And Floyd released a double album that included an LP’s worth of songs the four members played and wrote independently (Ummagumma).
Pink Floyd pulled out all the stops for 1970’s Atom Heart Mother. That included the title song, an operatic, multi-part suite that stretched nearly 24 minutes on Side 1. The entire band — Waters, Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, and keyboard player Rick Wright — wrote it with some help from composer and arranger Ron Geesin.
Pink Floyd put a lot of effort into piecing “Atom Heart Mother” together (per the band biography Saucerful of Secrets). Despite the hard work, Waters and Gilmour hated the song.
“[It was] a load of rubbish, to be honest with you. We were at a real down point. We didn’t know what on earth we were doing or trying to do at that time, none of us. We were really out there. I think we were scraping the barrel a bit at that period.”
David Gilmour
Waters sided with Gilmour over his distaste for “Atom Heart Mother,” saying it wouldn’t be terrible if it were “thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again.”
Listeners coming to the work decades later can appreciate “Atom Heart Mother” as an experimental stepping stone. But that’s because we can’t ignore the heights Pink Floyd reached just a few years later. In a vacuum, it’s clear the song is what Gilmour said it was — a band with few viable ideas reaching for something, anything, just to get a record out and remain relevant.
Gilmour and Waters both hated “Atom Heart Mother.” The album, supplanted with ballads written by Waters, Wright, and Gilmour and the sound collage of “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,” was far from Pink Floyd’s finest work. So it must have been shocking to see how well it performed with fans.
Pink Floyd had its first No. 1 album with ‘Atom Heart Mother’
We already know Waters and Gilmour hated the song “Atom Heart Mother.” So they were probably shocked when the album became Pink Floyd’s first big success.
Despite housing a song they despised on Side 1, incongruous but memorable cover art that featured the hindquarters of a cow front and center, and an album title that had nothing to do with the music of lyrical content, Atom Heart Mother debuted at No. 1 on the charts in England (per the Official Charts Company). It spent five straight weeks in the top 10.
Pink Floyd’s fifth album provided a breakthrough in the United States. It peaked at No. 55 on the Billboard charts in December 1970, but that represented a massive improvement for a band that barely cracked the top 75 before then.
The band’s members often criticized their work
Gilmour and Waters weren’t fans of Pink Floyd’s first epic song (“Echoes” and “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” stretched more than 20 minutes, too). Mason and Wright also threw the band’s work under the bus.
Wright said “Remember a Day” and “See-Saw,” the tunes he wrote for A Saucerful of Secrets, were embarrassing songs he didn’t listen to after the band recorded them.
Pink Floyd built their reputation with memorable live performances. Their light show and sonic experimentation produced explosive results even in small clubs and theaters. Yet Mason said most of their early shows were mostly rubbish, with some solid ideas emerging along the way.
Pink Floyd’s members never shied away from criticizing their own work. For Waters and Gilmour, that meant a shared hatred for the epic Pink Floyd song “Atom Heart Mother.”
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