Pink Floyd

There's a Pink Floyd track in front of which even the most die-hard fans are forced to wave the white flag. A song conceived as a divertissement that, more than half a century on, still regularly turns up in rankings of the worst songs ever recorded by the British band. It's called "Seamus", runs just over two minutes, and appears on "Meddle", the 1971 album that, paradoxically, also contains one of the most celebrated compositions of the group's entire career: the monumental suite "Echoes".

Released in October 1971, "Meddle" marks a pivotal turning point in the evolution of Pink Floyd. After Syd Barrett left the group in 1968, David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason had gone through a long phase of exploration, experimenting with new sonic approaches somewhere between psychedelia, improvisation and flirtations with progressive rock. Albums like "A Saucerful Of Secrets", "Ummagumma" and "Atom Heart Mother" had documented this transition, but it was with "Meddle" that the band truly began to find its own musical identity, foreshadowing the atmospheres and sonic architecture that would come together in the 1973 masterpiece "The Dark Side Of The Moon".
The album opens with the menacing instrumental charge of "One Of These Days" and closes with the more than 23 minutes of "Echoes", an extraordinary sonic exploration built around a single piano note from Richard Wright, run through a Leslie amplifier. In between sit equally significant pieces, such as the delicate "A Pillow Of Winds", the epic "Fearless" and the breezier "San Tropez".
But the tracklist also includes the infamous "Seamus"...

Genesis of a divertissement

The song is essentially a twelve-bar country–blues number, backed by slide acoustic guitar, piano and Gilmour's vocals. What makes it unusual is that, alongside the singer, there's another decidedly odd performer: a dog that howls for almost the entire length of the track. The quadruped in question was actually named Seamus, a Border Collie belonging to Steve Marriott, former frontman of the Small Faces and, at the time, frontman of Humble Pie. In the summer of 1971, Marriott had temporarily left the dog in Gilmour's care during an American tour. The guitarist noticed that Seamus had the curious habit of howling whenever he heard music playing, and Pink Floyd decided to make use of this trait to record a thoroughly surreal blues number, turning the animal into a kind of additional vocalist.

What was, for the four musicians, mostly a joke, however, didn't go down quite as well with audiences. Over the years, "Seamus" has become a recurring presence in rankings devoted to the least successful entries in the Floyd's catalogue. The site Classic Rock Review called it a largely forgettable track, conceived as comic filler and weighed down by the dog's constant howling. Even in a roundup of the worst songs by major rock artists, the track was singled out as one of the most credible candidates for the title of "worst Pink Floyd song ever".

The new version for "Live At Pompeii"

Not everyone agreed, though. In the original review of "Meddle" published by Rolling Stone, critic Jean-Charles Costa actually praised its parodic nature, describing it as a successful blues gag. Gilmour himself, looking back on the episode, would later admit with a touch of self-deprecating humour: "I guess it wasn't as much fun for everyone else as it was for us".
The story of "Seamus", incidentally, didn't end with the album's release. The track resurfaced in a drastically reworked version in Adrian Maben's concert film "Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii", retitled "Mademoiselle Nobs". On that occasion, Gilmour's vocal part was replaced by harmonica, while Waters picked up a Stratocaster. Above all, though, the four-legged star changed: in place of Seamus came Nobs, a female Russian Borzoi belonging to Madonna Bouglione, daughter of circus director Joseph Bouglione, brought in to reproduce the howls from the original recording.

It remains one of the strangest paradoxes in Pink Floyd's history: on the same album sit the visionary ambition of "Echoes", a genuine manifesto of their artistic maturity, and the almost nonsensical extravagance of "Seamus". Two seemingly irreconcilable sides of a band that, before becoming one of the greatest institutions in world rock, could still afford the luxury of playing around with music — even if it meant handing the microphone to a dog.

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12/10/2026