Echoes (1971 song)
. Early live recordings of Pink Floyd performing the song "Embryo" in 1970 also feature this noise.
In the second half of the "Echoes" interlude, the screams die down to become background noises under the sound of rooks, which were added to the music from a tape archive recording (as had been done for some of the band's earlier songs, including "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun"). Eventually, the entire ensemble is faded into a sustained Farfisa organ chord underneath a reprise of the sonar-like 'pings' from the introduction. Volume swells on the guitar accompanied by sustained organ chords combine to create a stark contrast to the screams of the previous interlude. This texture strongly suggests the feeling of clearing air and receding winds after a violent storm. Gilmour starts strumming muted notes from B to F# to D to E (rhythmically reminiscent of
Another Brick in the Wall) on a guitar tuned to drop D over a slowly-building organ solo. The drumming becomes a combination of quick ride cymbal work and tom-tom fills.
Eventually, a glissando guitar riff with echo and distortion create a massive buildup of melodic tension, and in an anticlimactic moment, this segues into the soft vocal strains of the third verse. Unlike the previous verses, this is accompanied by intermittent guitar fills. After a final refrain, the song recedes into another wind-like noise: a tape loop of multi-tracked ascending male voice glissandos, similar to the effect of a
Shepard tone. A soft
call-and-response passage between guitar and keyboards retreats into more improvised phrases, before the chaotic 'winds' finally take over to end the song.
The piece had its genesis in a collection of musical experiments written separately by each band member, referred to as "Nothing, Parts 1-24". Subsequent tapes of work in progress were labelled "The Son of Nothing" and "The Return of the Son of Nothing"; the latter title was eventually used to introduce the as-yet unreleased work during its first live performances in early 1971.
During this stage of its development, the song's first verse had yet to be finalized. It originally referred to the meeting of two celestial bodies, but perhaps because of Waters' increasing concerns that Pink Floyd was being pigeonholed as a
space rock band, the lyrics were rewritten to use underwater imagery instead. The title "Echoes" was also subjected to significant revisions before and after the release of
Meddle: Waters, a devoted
football fan, proposed that the band call its new piece "We Won
the Double" in celebration of
Arsenal's 1971 victory, and during a 1972 tour of Germany he jovially introduced it on two consecutive nights as "Looking Through the Knothole in Granny's Wooden Leg" and "The March of
the Dam Busters", respectively.
[http://support.uni-oldenburg.de/~floyd/english/echoes/meddle.html]The song, then entitled "The Return of the Son of Nothing", was first performed in public on April 22, 1971 with the unrevised 'planetary' lyrics. These remained in place until sometime in late July of that year, when they were replaced by the more familiar '
albatross' lyrics. The song was first introduced as "Echoes" on the sixth of August, 1971. It was a staple of Pink Floyd's live performances from then until 1975 and was also played eleven times in 1987, near the beginning of the
A Momentary Lapse of Reason tour. Most recently, David Gilmour has performed the song on his 2006 solo tour.
Unlike the
Atom Heart Mother Suite, it was relatively easy for Pink Floyd to reproduce "Echoes" onstage (as can be seen in the
Live at Pompeii film) without requiring additional musicians, though the swapping of keyboard sounds during the piece sometimes proved problematic in live performances. Originally, Wright would start the song by playing his grand piano through a Leslie speaker, then switch to the Hammond organ just before the first verse, switch again to the
Farfisa organ during the 'seagull' middle section, back to the Hammond again for the last verse, and finally to piano for the outro. This required Roger Waters to provide the piano 'pings' at their re-entry after the middle section. The Farfisa was later dropped from the band's live keyboard setup and all its parts were played on the Hammond instead. The 1987 performances had synthesizers replacing the Farfisa.
Starting in 1974, the musical arrangement was augmented by backing vocals from Venetta Fields and Carlena Williams and saxophone solos by Dick Parry added directly after the second verse and at the song's finale. All three of these additional artists joined Pink Floyd's touring party to take the latter
Dark Side of the Moon performances, and added their own parts to the remainder of the concert (largely because the former artist was reluctant to leave and re-enter the stage throughout the show).
[ Kubrick would later ask the band if he could use portions of the Atom Heart Mother Suite in his film A Clockwork Orange. Pink Floyd turned him down on the grounds that the music would sound silly if excerpted out of context; nevertheless, a copy of the album Atom Heart Mother is displayed behind the counter of a record shop in the film.]
Years later, in an interesting postscript to the Kubrick/Floyd connection, Roger Waters asked the filmmaker's permission to include sound clips from Space Odyssey into his 1992 album Amused to Death. Waters' intention was to sample the dialogue and breathing sounds from the scene immediately prior to "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite", when Dave Bowman deactivates the computer HAL 9000. These were to be mixed in during the instrumental introduction to "Perfect Sense, Part One". After much deliberation, permission was declined in the interest of upholding Kubrick's own precedent of not granting such requests. Instead, Waters inserted his own shouting, whispering and breathing in a backwards message that refers to Kubrick by his Christian name. However, a live recording from his 2000 solo tour uses the original film dialogue as Waters intended.
The 1973 George Greenough film "Crystal Voyager" concludes with a 23 minute segment in which the full length of "Echoes" accompanies a montage of images shot by Greenough from a camera mounted on his surboard.In interviews promoting Amused to Death, Waters asserted that Andrew Lloyd Webber had plagiarized themes from "Echoes" for sections of the musical The Phantom of the Opera; nevertheless, he decided that life was too short to bother filing a lawsuit regarding the matter. [http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/ptr/pfloyd/interview/roger2.html]
*Did Pink Floyd Meddle with 2001?
