Thursday 6 January 2011

Atom Heart Mother


PINK FLOYD'S ATOM HEART MOTHER

On march 3rd, 2003, a collection of very talented French students performed Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother in its entirety at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP).

That's all I know  about this video.
Pink Floyd themselves never had a full performance filmed. Some of this sounds uncannily like the original.

Atom Heart Mother isn't the most approachable Floyd opus, it marked the transition from the  very chaotic Pink Floyd of Syd Barrett's day to the later band dominated by Roger Waters. It's hard to imagine bands of today venturing into such ambitious, and risky,  territory, yet this album, in 1971 went to number one in the u.k. charts. In America, well, no surprise, it only made number 55, took it until '95 to go gold in the u.s.

All the band, at various times have disowned it or labelled it as a low point in their creative career.
I disagree. The low point to me is their probably best selling album ever, best known... The Wall. Now that's a heap of worthless, badly thought out dross if ever I saw one.
I've never yet figured out to what extent they stand behind the stuff they spout in The Wall, and to what extent it's parody.
A marching cohort of schoolchildren chanting "We don't need no education" rather undermines its own premise.