As with most of the rest of Floyd’s work, you are invited to make of it what you can.Īlternatively you may listen to the fifty-two minutes of Atom Heart Mother – or forever, if you have the vinyl edition and listen to Alan’s tap dripping for eternity in its locked groove – and wonder exactly from what, or whom, Pink Floyd were hiding, or running away. The members’ attitude to the record over the years has been ambivalent sometimes they laughingly dismiss it, at other times they solemnly praise it. Of Pink Floyd themselves there is as little as possible on Atom Heart Mother – that title, pointing back to their blues roots or preparing to breathe their natural last? – but then they wanted the freedom from being “Pink Floyd,” to employ and address as many musical styles as they felt able and willing to do.
There are vaguely sinister in-jokes in the Hipgnosis design – the cows veering menacingly towards us on the rear may be a simple pun on “group shot,” but the 1994 CD remastering and repackaging of the record joins a few more vowels to their attendant consonants now there are pictures of pig stools, resembling a concentration camp, a snorkelling diver (that aqueous release/return to womb scenario again), a hard-hatted man climbing up to the top of nobody’s idea of a fat old sun (an atomic plant which could erase everything else seen and heard on the record), a psychedelic breakfast sculpture reminiscent of the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss (they too are to be seen at Tate Modern), and a pair of apparently genuine recipes as “Breakfast Tips” for Alan, one of which describes a “Traditional Bedouin Wedding Feast” involving the successive stuffings of chicken into lamb into goat into camel, and the other of which, in German, gives a recipe for a cow brain delicacy as an alternative to scrambled eggs. Being Pink Floyd, however, it could not have helped but be the most psychedelic album cover ever created, and the existence of a three-piece suite with the word “Psychedelic” in its title at album’s end did not dispel this possible double irony. The notion of cover star Lulubelle III, and the complete lack of artist or other information without venturing into the gatefold sleeve, may have been inspired as a kind of antitode to Warhol’s cow wallpaper – also, coincidentally, on show at Tate Modern – but its apparent intent was to create the blankest yet brightest of empty spaces, ready to be filled in, the least psychedelic album cover ever created. Is one of hard-won peace, although it displays its tightrope tentacles of impermanence more soundly than Nogueira. Similarly, the overwhelming impression gleaned by Atom Heart Mother There is monochrome greenness, and an uncommonly lucid sense of contentment, about these rovings. Nothing much happens but we are invited to contemplate the near-stillness, wonder how closely this overlaps with stasis or simply peace, and question the relevance or irrelevance of the kites and other subtly awkward paraphernalia which appear to exist both in and of themselves and beyond the earthly needs of the east Scottish-English border.
Primarily a sculptor, she nevertheless worked across a range of fields, and her main work on show is a multiple TV diary of quiet, blowsy days in the fields and on the coast of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Track listing: Atom Heart Mother: a) Father’s Shout b) Breast Milky c) Mother Fore d) Funky Dung e) Mind Your Throats Please f) Remergence/If/Summer ‘68/Fat Old Sun/Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast: a) Rise and Shine b) Sunny Side Up c) Morning GloryĪt Tate Modern there is currently on display a group of audiovisual works by the late Brazilian artist Lucia Nogueira.