The Pink Floyd project that Wright called "madness"

After the staggering success of "The Dark Side Of The Moon", Pink Floyd had to decide which direction to take in order to avoid resting on their laurels and to keep surprising their audience. In that phase of exploration, the English band returned to an idea they had nurtured in previous years: making an entire album without musical instruments, using only ordinary objects found around the house. The project, called "Household Objects", took shape in the studio, required several weeks of work, and produced a handful of recordings.

The roots of the project date back to the late Sixties. In 1969 the British band had already experimented with "Work", a piece performed live by sawing wood and boiling water on stage. The following year, in "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" on "Atom Heart Mother", the sizzle of eggs frying in a pan and the steady flow of a dripping tap made an appearance. Roger Waters had just explored similar solutions with "Music From 'The Body'", built on sounds of the human body, arriving at the conclusion that the distinction between noise and music was irrelevant: "I've always thought the difference between a sound effect and music is a load of nonsense. Whether you make a sound with a guitar or with a water tap, it makes no difference."

In January 1971 the idea resurfaced at Abbey Road Studios: together with engineer John Leckie, Pink Floyd recorded beer bottles, torn newspapers, spray cans. That material was archived, then set aside when the band chose to move forward with traditional instruments to make "Meddle".

The sessions devoted to household objects resumed in earnest after "The Dark Side Of The Moon", in the autumn of 1973, with Alan Parsons at the controls. The band experimented with broom handles, rubber bands stretched between matchsticks, an axe striking a wooden board. The goal was to create an alternative sonic language, building rhythmic and melodic structures without using any conventional instruments.

Over time, however, the project's limitations became clear. Keyboardist Richard Wright recalled that phase as a moment when experimentation risked overriding common sense: "We'd spend days with a pencil and a rubber band until it sounded like a bass. I remember sitting down with Roger and telling him: 'This is madness.'" Despite the bassist's persistence, the recordings proceeded slowly, broken up into short sessions between October and December 1973. In the end, only two tracks were completed: "The Hard Way" and "Wine Glasses". Neither was deemed solid enough to carry an entire album.

The English band, which had been born on those daring experimental trajectories – with the early Barrett-led phase and the debut LP “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” – chose at that point to shift its focus elsewhere. Waters proposed a concept built around the theme of absence, which would eventually give rise to “Wish You Were Here”, and so “Household Objects” was shelved. Years later, Nick Mason would call the decision a “stalling tactic”, a way of buying time when there was no clear direction in sight.

Not everything, however, was lost. “Wine Glasses”, built by rubbing wet fingers on glass goblets, became the embryo of the opening of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”. David Gilmour has repeatedly recalled the method used: “If you pop open a bottle of wine through the mouth of the neck you get a high sound, like tablas, other objects produce different sounds, and so on. We fiddled about with it for a while. At the time we made those noises and recorded them. We spent a lot of time working with rubber bands stretched across matchboxes. All we ended up with was a sixteen-track tape of melodic wine glasses. Wet fingers, a wine glass, all in tune. We used it for the opening of the album 'Wish You Were Here'. It's a pleasant sound. So it served some purpose.”

Other material ended up elsewhere: some sounds found their way into “Welcome To The Machine”. And when, in 2011, the reissues of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” and “Wish You Were Here” came out, the only two completed tracks were finally released: “The Hard Way” on the former, “Wine Glasses” on the latter.

Looking back on that period, Waters has admitted that the project, however fascinating, was hardly sustainable: “The idea of making an album without musical instruments seemed good at the time; but it didn't work. Probably because what we mainly needed was a bit of a rest…”. Wright, for his part, had sensed early on that the project was unworkable. And yet those weeks spent on wood, rubber bands, glass and paper remain a telling example of Pink Floyd's radical approach to creativity at a crucial moment in their history: an extreme gamble, born of the urgent need to find a new direction, and abandoned before it led into a dead end.

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06/03/2026