It was a single note, flickering out like a beacon to lead a wayward ship through the night. Pink Floyd had no new songs prepared when they started recording in early 1971, but they did have access to the legendary Abbey Road Studios, and free rein from their label to mess around until they found their way. They spent weeks improvising with each member isolated from what the others were playing—a harebrained search for the sort of strange and spontaneous inspiration that their old leader, guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett, conjured freely.
They called the results “Nothings 1-24”: Predictably, they were almost entirely unusable—except for this one note: a high B, played on a piano near the top of its range, warped by the undulations of a rotating Leslie speaker. It was piercing, but slightly obscured, as if it had traveled a great distance to reach your awareness. “We could never recreate the feeling of this note in the studio, especially the particular resonance between the piano and the Leslie,” drummer Nick Mason wrote later. So they used the demo tape, and began composing around it. “Echoes” grew from that note into something awesome: a 23-minute psych-prog voyage from tranquility to triumph to desolation and back, with a riff like a lightning bolt striking open sea, and a pillowy lead vocal keeping you cozy and safe below deck. It was the first song Pink Floyd completed for Meddle, their conflicted and brilliant sixth album.
After a period of flailing for direction, “Echoes” offered a path toward the populist art-rock epics that would make Pink Floyd one of the most successful bands in history. But it was also a kind of ending. During the late ’60s, under Barrett’s mad reign, Pink Floyd was turbulent and intuitive, balancing his fairytale songs with the sort of chaotic and noisy improvisations that presumably inspired Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon to name her dog after him. As their fame rose and bassist Roger Waters seized ever-tighter creative control across the ‘70s, the music increasingly favored solemnity over whimsy, formalism over exploration. “Echoes”—and Meddle as a whole—sit at the intersection of these two approaches, offering a hazy preview of Pink Floyd’s future as international stars without yet abandoning their past as visionary young ruffians.
From Pink Floyd’s founding in 1965 to Barrett’s ouster in 1968, they were the de facto house band of London’s nascent psychedelic scene. The members, a group of brainy misfits who’d assembled while attending university for art and architecture, mostly kept a professional distance from actual psychedelics—with the exception of Barrett, who indulged heartily. Soon after the release of Pink Floyd’s debut album, 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, he became withdrawn and erratic: He refused to participate in performances, sat unresponsive as people tried to talk to him, sabotaged a TV appearance by standing still when he was supposed to mime along to a backing track. His bandmates grew frustrated by these impediments to their success. One day in February 1968, they decided they simply wouldn’t pick him up on the way to their show that night. That was the end of his time in Pink Floyd. Barrett recorded two solo albums, then withdrew from public life until his death in 2006. “I’m disappearing, avoiding most things” he told a Rolling Stone interviewer in 1971, the year Pink Floyd released Meddle without him. Two of the last songs he recorded with them were deemed too dark and unsettling for release until several decades later. “I’ve been looking all over the place for a place for me,” he speak-sings in one of them, his voice taking on a theatrical Mad Hatter edge. “But it ain’t anywhere.”