When The Dark Side Of The Moon became an international hit in 1973, Pink Floyd’s career path changed for ever. They shut the door on their early experimental era, and locked behind it was an intriguing concept album they’d been working on since 1970. Only a few minute of Household Objects survive to hint at what could have been, as Prog reported in 2016.
Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here is filled with sounds easily missed by even the most dedicated listener. Jazz virtuoso Stéphane Grappelli plays faint violin on the title track, and the refrain from Floyd’s 1967 hit See Emily Play is heard on Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part IX. And The first sound to be heard on the record is an eerie drone created by fingers running around the rims of wine glasses, each filled with different amounts of liquid to create different notes.
For more than 30 years the tuned glasses were all that remained of Household Objects, the working title for an album started in 1970 and abandoned for good in ’74. A year earlier, The Dark Side Of The Moon turned Floyd into a top-five band in Britain, Europe and, crucially, America. Before that, they’d been a very different proposition.
The Household Objects concept had begun in 1969 via a composition called Work, which involved sawing wood and boiling kettles on stage. A year later Atom Heart Mother included the track Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast, featuring the sound of roadie Alan Styles frying eggs and bacon before ending with the hypnotic sound of a dripping tap. Atom Heart Mother was a UK No.1 hit – but as drummer Nick Mason admitted, “We were still looking for a coherent direction.”
When Floyd reconvened at Abbey Road Studios in January 1971 they were still searching. Their immediate solution was to dispense with conventional instruments and bring the found sounds of Work and Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast to the fore. At the time, future Muse producer John Leckie was a 22-year-old tape operator assigned to work with Floyd. “They spent days working on what people now call Household Objects,” he told this writer in 2006. “They were making chords up from the tapping of beer bottles, tearing newspapers to get a rhythm, and letting off aerosol cans to get a hi-hat sound.”
The ideas were catalogued before the group decamped to George Martin’s Air Studios. But they had a change of heart and returned to conventional instruments, as heard in 1971 album Meddle – which, although it utilised some sound effects, didn’t contain the torn newspapers and tapped bottles.
Two years on The Dark Side Of The Moon topped the UK and US charts. But when Floyd reassembled to start work on a follow-up in late 1973 they were in trouble. “We didn’t have an idea between us,” said Mason. After making the most accessible album of their career, their solution was to reprise Household Objects. Weeks were spent with engineer Alan Parsons at Abbey Road, creating a percussive rhythm by scraping a broomstick on a floor, hitting a piece of wood with an axe and twanging elastic bands stretched between matchsticks.
“I’ve always felt that the differentiation between a sound effect and music is all a load of shit,” Roger Waters told Zigzag magazine at the time. “Whether you make a sound on a guitar or a water tap is irrelevant.” He insisted that Floyd’s new music, using “bottles, knives and felling axes,” was “turning into a really nice piece.”
By the end of the year, though, he’d changed his mind. Mason has since suggested that Household Objects was a “delaying tactic” in the absence of any new songs.
Certainly once Waters had conceived the idea of making an album about absence – is soon-to-be ex-wife, of Syd Barrett and his bandmates’ support – Wish You Were Here fell into place, and Household Objects was forgotten. Although not everyone was happy with this decision. “I was rather disappointed it never came to anything,” said Parsons.
In 2011 Floyd released extended versions of Dark Side and Wish You Were Here. The latter contained the tuned glasses track, while the former featured The Hard Way – three minutes of what may or may not have been torn newspapers in place of drums, and what sounds like elastic bands in place of a bass. But the melodic refrain that appears several seconds in is pure melancholy Floyd.
Fans had waited decades to hear this stuff. The band themselves quickly pointed out that nowadays you could make these sounds in an afternoon on a synthesiser.
Their reluctance to attach much importance to Household Objects is understandable. After all, The Dark Side Of The Moon turned twentysomething ennui and navel-gazing into big business. But those found sounds are the last hurrah for the old Pink Floyd; the one that was young, silly and experimental.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” said Waters. It was, and it still is.
(LouderSound)
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