Pink Floyd: "Meddle" reissued for its 55th anniversary

55 years after its release, “Meddle”, one of the crucial albums in the evolution of Pink Floyd, is coming back in a new vinyl edition. The reissue will be released on October 17th on “San Tropez” orange marbled vinyl and will keep the original tracklist of the 1971 record. The same day will also see the release of a restored, high-resolution version of the famous closing sequence of “Crystal Voyager”, the 1973 surf film scored by “Echoes“.
Pink Floyd's sixth studio album, “Meddle” marked a fundamental step towards defining the language that would find full expression in the band's later work. Recorded amid live commitments and through a long series of studio experiments, the album set the five tracks of side one against the monumental “Echoes”, a roughly 23-minute suite that took up the whole of side two and would go on to become one of the band's signature compositions.

The closing sequence of “Crystal Voyager”

It's precisely “Echoes” that lies at the heart of the other initiative planned for October 17th. After a new restoration, the closing sequence of “Crystal Voyager” will be presented again – the documentary directed by David Elfick and written and narrated by surfer, photographer and filmmaker George Greenough. To capture those spectacular shots from inside the waves, Greenough had built a special camera rig to use directly in the water. The pairing of the footage with Pink Floyd's music came about almost by chance. Greenough discovered “Echoes” through a copy of “Meddle” his mother had bought him, and realised that the length of the composition matched almost perfectly the sequence he was editing. Elfick then travelled to London to ask Pink Floyd for permission to use the track, but the production didn't have the money needed to buy the rights.
So a special deal was struck: “Echoes” would be granted to “Crystal Voyager”, and in exchange, Pink Floyd would be able to use Greenough's footage as visual accompaniment during their concerts.

“I'd never heard ‘Echoes’ before my mother gave me the record”, Greenough recalled. “When I listened to it, I thought it had to be the soundtrack. We asked to use it and struck a deal with Pink Floyd”. More than half a century later, Greenough once again worked with the band to restore that historic sequence.
It was precisely the mammoth “Echoes” suite that marked a decisive shift in direction. From the moment Richard Wright strikes that first, unmistakable note, it's clear the English band has now set out on the path of building new sonic landscapes, less eccentric than in their early days but every bit as complex. After the prelude – composed by Wright himself and created by extending the sound of a grand piano amplified through a Leslie speaker, plus a high note produced by Gilmour's slide guitar – the entrance of the drums announces the verse, sung by the guitarist, then the long electric guitar solo paves the way for a disorienting foray into funk – with Gilmour's distorted guitar and Waters's slide bass to the fore – until Wright's Farfisa organ bursts in, flowing into another psych–prog crescendo, closed by the final coda, with Gilmour's solo in dialogue with Wright's piano, fading out. An absolute feat born out of a series of 36 different musical ideas, from which came the embryonic version (“Return Of The Son Of Nothing”), later renamed “Echoes”.

The magic of “Echoes”

Gilmour has never had any doubts about considering “Echoes” one of the absolute peaks 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 a spin-off piece, born while we were working on 'Echoes'”. And Waters too, notoriously harsh on much of the band's later output, has always reserved a special place for that track. While acknowledging that “The Wall” is a monumental work and that “The Dark Side Of The Moon” remains the most celebrated album, Waters has repeatedly stressed how the message of “Echoes” still stands today as a cornerstone of his thinking: “I've always had just one message: ⟦Q1⟧. It's there, on 'Meddle', and it's never changed”. The track's theme is ambitious too, then: a reflection on the genesis of the world and on the cyclical nature of life. But “Echoes” isn't just that message. Across its 23 minutes, the track documents a band experimenting, taking apart and rebuilding its own language until it finds a new equilibrium, with the long central section where Gilmour can stretch out his phrasing, sound design work that was astonishing for its time, and that descending riff so memorable it feels almost archetypal, the kind many other musicians would have loved to call their own.

“Echoes” remained a fixture of Pink Floyd's live repertoire between 1971 and 1975 and also became one of the central moments of “Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii“, where it appears split into two parts, opening and closing the film. The band briefly revived it in 1987, at the start of the “A Momentary Lapse Of Reason” tour, while David Gilmour brought it back to the stage in 2006 during the “On An Island“ tour. It's also the track that gives its name to the 2001 anthology “Echoes: The Best Of Pink Floyd”, where it's included in a shortened 16-minute-30 version. In more recent years, Nick Mason's Saucerful Of Secrets have also added it to their own repertoire.

The tracklist of the “Meddle” reissue

The new edition of "Meddle" will retain the six tracks from the original album:

1. One Of These Days
2. A Pillow Of Winds
3. Fearless
4. San Tropez
5. Seamus
6. Echoes

The reissue adds to the many initiatives dedicated in recent years to the Pink Floyd catalogue, including the “8-Tracks“ project, the edition for the 50th anniversary of “Wish You Were Here”, and the new release of “Pink Floyd At Pompeii – MCMLXXII“.

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