Pink Floyd

The creative bond between David Gilmour and Roger Waters was for a long time the driving force behind Pink Floyd, before wearing thin over time. By the end of the sessions for “The Wall”, it was already clear that the relationship between the two had reached a point of no return. Their visions of what the band should be had become irreconcilable, and Waters' increasingly authoritarian attitude made it inevitable that the group would carry on without him after “The Final Cut”. And yet, there remain moments in which the two managed to draw out the best in each other. A creative synergy summed up by the track both of them called “a masterpiece”.

This isn't a track from the bestselling “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, nor from the equally celebrated follow-up “Wish You Were Here“, but rather a suite featured on “Meddle”, the 1971 album that arrived after the highly ambitious undertaking of “Atom Heart Mother“, a record that had split critics and, in the end, hadn't fully convinced even Gilmour and Waters themselves, despite actually being one of their artistic high points.

In 1969 the Floyd camp tried to regroup after the departure of Syd Barrett. Having lost their original leader, the English band found itself essentially without a compass. Gilmour initially came in as a makeshift replacement, brought in to fill the void left by his friend with his more blues-based guitar style, while Waters, though already displaying considerable songwriting potential, seemed to be straining too hard in his attempt to recapture the visionary lightness that had defined the band's debut.

Album after album, however, Pink Floyd gradually began to move toward a more defined shape. “More” hinted at several possible directions, and even tracks from “Atom Heart Mother” such as “If” and “Fat Old Sun” showed two creative souls learning to converse with one another.

The real turning point, though, came with “Meddle”. Before that record the band still seemed to be searching for a clear direction; and while the album's first side is hardly among the most immediate listens of their career, it was the monumental suite “Echoes” that marked a decisive change of pace. From the moment Richard Wright strikes that first, unmistakable note, it's clear the English band had by then set out on the path of building new sonic landscapes, less eccentric than in their early days but just as complex. After the intro – composed by Wright himself and created by running the sound of an amplified grand piano through a Leslie speaker, together with a high note produced by Gilmour's slide guitar – the entrance of the drums heralds the verse, sung by the guitarist, after which the long electric guitar solo paves the way for a disorienting foray into funk – with Gilmour's distorted guitar and Waters' slide bass front and centre – until Wright's Farfisa organ bursts in, leading into another psych–prog crescendo, closed out by the final coda, with Gilmour's solo trading lines with Wright's piano as it fades away. An absolute feat born out of a set of 36 different musical ideas, from which emerged the embryonic version (“Return Of The Son Of Nothing”), later renamed “Echoes”.

It's also the track that would go on to title the 2001 compilation “Echoes: The Best Of Pink Floyd”, where it's included in a shortened 16-minute-30 version.

Gilmour has never hesitated to call “Echoes” one of the absolute high points of Pink Floyd: “It's the masterpiece of the album, the track where we were all discovering what the band really was. 'One Of These Days' is almost an offshoot, born while we were working on 'Echoes'”. And even Waters, notoriously harsh on much of the band's later output, has always reserved a special place for this track. While acknowledging that “The Wall” is a monumental work and that “The Dark Side Of The Moon” remains the most celebrated record, Waters has repeatedly pointed out that the message of “Echoes” still stands as a cornerstone of his thinking today: “I've always had just one message: 'Two strangers passing in the street, by chance, two person's glances meet, and I am you, and what I see is me'. It's right there, on 'Meddle', and it has never changed”.

Ambitious, then, is also the track's theme: a reflection on the genesis of the world and the cyclical nature of life. But “Echoes” isn't just that message. Across its 23 minutes, the track documents a band experimenting, dismantling and rebuilding its own language until it finds a new equilibrium, with the long central section where Gilmour is free to stretch out his phrasing, a piece of sound design that was startling for its time, and that descending riff so memorable it almost feels like an archetype, one of those that many musicians would have loved to call their own. “Music history is not short of bolder concept works or even more eccentric detours – writes Tim Coffman on Far Out Magazine – And yet 'Echoes' still resonates because it's charged with a deep empathy, palpable in every passage. It's the moment when Pink Floyd learn again how to play like human beings. And, just as its title suggests, this 23-minute colossus is destined to keep echoing long after its authors are gone”. “Echoes” remains perhaps the definitive suite of British psychedelia, a magnificent distillation of the bond between the members of Pink Floyd throughout the 1970s.

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14/03/2026