The Pink Floyd album that never saw the light of day in the 70s

The album that in the discography of Pink Floyd should have followed “The Dark Side of the Moon” (read the review here) never saw the light of day. This was supposed to be a record completely devoid of conventional musical instruments.

The idea for an album of this kind dates back to 1969, and had a provisional title “Household objects”. Of course compared to “The Dark Side of the Moon” would have had less commercial appeal. It was supposed to be a record whose sounds came from objects such as bottles, saws, crumpled newspapers, pieces of metal pipes and so on. As the then sound engineer remembered John Leckie in an interview with Prog Magazine in 2006: “They created chords by banging beer bottles, tearing up newspapers to get a beat, and spraying spray cans to get the sound of a hi-hat.”

The first attempt to realize “Household objects” took place before “The Dark Side of the Moon”. The first experiments preceded the recording of the band’s sixth studio album, “Meddle” (read the review here), released in 1971. During a week at Abbey Road studios. Second John Leckie – who was working at Abbey Road studios as a junior engineer at the time – in an interview with Tape Op, these initial, piecemeal sessions lasted just over a week before the band realized they had some serious work to do. The recordings were cataloged and the band decided that the next album itself, “Meddle”should have had a more conventional approach.

Two years after this first attempt to achieve “Household objects”with “The Dark Side of the Moon” the fortunes of the Pink Floyd they had changed a lot. For the English band to work on a record like “Household objects” it seemed like a way to escape the pressures of the recording industry. It was during the period after ‘Dark Side’ that the most intensive work was undertaken on “Household objects” with the sound engineer Alan Parsons to supervise those oddities. Axes hitting wood, hammers hitting metal, broomsticks scraping across the floor and bass lines played with rubber bands. Unlike what happens nowadays, it was a meticulous, slow and manual process.

The drummer Nick Mason he recalled in his autobiography ‘Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd’ that, in reality, the sessions of “Household objects” they were largely a way to avoid the reality of having to make the sequel to “The Dark Side of the Moon”. “The whole idea seems absurdly elaborate today, when any sound can be sampled and then distributed across a keyboard, allowing a musician to play anything from barking dogs to nuclear explosions. In 1973 it took two months to assemble – slowly and laboriously – what now probably could be accomplished in an afternoon. However, the time it took was no problem for us. In fact, it was a blessing. We found that the project was an ingenious device for postponing creation. of something concrete, since we could deal with the mechanics of sounds rather than the creation of music.”

The keyboard player Richard Wright in the documentary ‘Which One’s Pink?’ he recalled that the sessions became too long and eventually led him to unleash his anger at the band’s then creative head, Roger Waters. “We spent days getting a pencil and a rubber band until it sounded like a bass. We spent weeks and weeks doing that. Nick would find old pots and stuff, and then he’d mute them to try to make them sound exactly like a snare drum. I remember sitting with Roger and saying, ‘Roger, this is crazy!'”

As Mason recalled in his book, “After several weeks, musical progress on ‘Household Objects’ was negligible. We could no longer sustain the pretense and the entire project was gently put to rest.” So, the sessions were finally shelved and the group got to work on what would be “Wish You Were Here” (read the review here).

Although what was recorded during the sessions of “Household objects” remained largely unreleased, as MusicRadar reports, a ghost of the project appeared fleetingly at the beginning of “Wish You Were Here”. The very first sound you hear on the record, the opening of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part IV)”is the vibration of wine glasses, filled to different doses for different shades, with fingers moving along the edge.

David Gilmour
in 2003 he recalled: “There are a lot of fragments of “Household objects”, but nothing complete. We saved something. The drone at the beginning of “Wish You Were Here” was made with wine glasses that we recorded on a 16-track, with a glass on each track at semitone intervals, so we could make chords and play it like a keyboard. It was an extremely difficult sampling system. We recovered other fragments too. I remember spending an infinitely long time pulling rubber bands on boxes of matches to get a bass sound that ultimately sounded like a bass!”.

About
“Household objects”,
Roger Waters
he told Rolling Stone magazine: “It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it didn’t work. Probably because we needed to stop for a while. We were just tired and bored. I think the fact that “The Dark Side of the Moon” was so successful was the end. The end of the road. We had reached the point that we had all aspired to since we were teenagers and there was really nothing left to do in terms of rock ‘n’ roll.”