Echoes Beneath the Surface: Listening to Meddle Fifty-Five Years On

When Meddle arrived in November 1971, it wasn’t heralded as a revelation but as a reprieve. Pink Floyd had spent the year touring through England, America, and Europe, their identity thinning across endless shows and half-finished ideas. They were adrift between worlds: the psychedelic troupe Syd Barrett once guided had dissolved, and the meticulously conceptual Pink Floyd of the mid-’70s had not yet been born. Out of that uncertainty, long nights at Abbey Road and Morgan Studios, too many cables and too little direction, emerged something unexpectedly whole.

The band began with nothing. No theme, no lyrics, just experiments: each member recording separately, unaware of what the others were playing, hoping accidents might reveal purpose. Hours of “Nothings,” “Son of Nothings,” and finally “Return of the Son of Nothings” filled the tape reels. Out of those fragments came a sound that felt alive in a way their conceptual ambitions never could. When Meddle opens with “One of These Days,” that heartbeat of twin basslines, Roger Waters and David Gilmour playing in unison through a Binson Echorec, feels like the moment electricity becomes consciousness. The line “One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces,” spoken by drummer Nick Mason and slowed to menace, is the industrial ghost of England whispering to itself. The nation was entering an age of strikes and stagflation, the post-’60s hangover thick in the air. The song turns that anxiety into motion.

Then, as if remembering to breathe, comes “A Pillow of Winds,” one of the few genuine love songs in the band’s catalogue, its calm inspired by late-night Mahjong games in the south of France. It’s all gentle chords and drifting air, a quiet room after machinery. “Fearless” follows, carrying a riff that seems to climb forever without ever arriving. Gilmour’s voice, unguarded, human, anchors the song’s hesitant optimism, while the distant roar of Liverpool F.C. supporters singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” bleeds into the fade. That chant, recorded at Anfield and folded into the mix, turned a working-class anthem into the emotional chorus of an art-rock record. It’s a small miracle: public solidarity sewn into private reverie.

“San Tropez” and “Seamus” break the spell with wry detours, one a jazz shuffle written by Waters, the other a blues joke featuring Steve Marriott’s dog howling on cue. Critics still mock them, but they remind us that the band was not yet burdened by self-mythology. In 1971, they could still be playful, even absurd, before fame calcified their sound into ideology.

And then there is “Echoes.” Twenty-three minutes recorded across three London studios, beginning with Richard Wright’s accidental discovery of a submarine-like ping when he fed a single piano note through a Leslie speaker. The piece unfolds like evolution itself: sonar, storm, silence, sunrise. You can hear the band learning to listen to one another, turning chaos into architecture. Halfway through, the song dissolves into a wordless landscape, guitars reversed through wah-wah pedals, drums receding into pulse, and when the melody returns, it feels earned, as though the world has reassembled itself. For all its length, “Echoes” never drifts. It expands. It proves that sound alone can tell a story.

The album’s artwork, designed by Hipgnosis, captures that same idea of sound made visible. Storm Thorgerson originally proposed a close-up of a baboon’s anatomy before the band, phoning from Japan, vetoed him in favor of an “ear underwater.” Photographer Bob Dowling turned the concept literal: ripples as soundwaves, water as atmosphere. Thorgerson later dismissed it as half-hearted, but the image endures precisely because it’s accidental, an unintended metaphor for an album that listens more than it declares.

When Meddle was released by Harvest Records, it reached number three in the UK but stalled in America, partly due to Capitol’s indifference. In time, it went gold, then double-platinum, resurrected by the fame of later triumphs. Yet its legacy has never depended on sales. It’s the record where Pink Floyd discovered patience, the art of building not with riffs but with resonance. “Echoes” prefigures everything to come: the seamless transitions of Dark Side of the Moon, the melancholic clarity of Wish You Were Here, even the sharpened cynicism of Animals. But unlike those later albums, Meddle still breathes. It hasn’t been hermetically sealed by concept or narrative; it lives in the space between thought and execution.

Listening now, half a century later, you can sense how accidental genius often is. Meddle feels warm, analog, imperfect. You can hear the room, the hum of tape, the exhalations between notes. Before the band became philosophers of isolation, they were explorers of sound, four people improvising toward coherence. The record ends with the word “Echoes,” but what lingers is the silence after it fades, the realization that every masterpiece begins as noise someone refused to abandon.

Image: Pink Floyd – Meddle (Harvest Records, 1971). Cover design by Hipgnosis; photography by Bob Dowling. The image depicts an ear beneath the surface of water, symbolically “listening” to sound waves. Used under fair use for critical commentary and historical context.