One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

21/11/71 : Meddle - Pink Floyd

This is our seventh visit with the Floyd and I believe it's an album that divides the fans, so my expectation is that I'm not going to like it...

Lordy, it starts quietly. I spent about forty seconds trying to work out why Amazon Music wasn't playing anything before I realised it was - but then the track went absolutely nowhere. And the going nowhere theme continues across the album, but I'd say it does so quite effectively (although I wasn't convinced by the dogs on "Seamus") - it's kinda pleasingly understated (even the 23:33 of "Echoes"), which isn't something I was expecting from the lads. All in all, I found this to be surprisingly enjoyable and it's another one that would benefit from multiple listens.

We're at #3 in the charts this week on their second week of a twenty week run, with this being as high as it got. Over the years, it's had another 26 runs adding up to 85 weeks in total - many of these lasted only one week, but it did manage an 18 week run in '74. The rest of the top five this week were Top Of The Pops Vol 20 (one of two to make it to the top before they were banned from the chart because they were budget releases), Rod Stewart, Motown Chartbusters Vol 6 (featuring some top tracks by top artists) and John Lennon, with the highest new entry being Led Zeppelin (#10).

Wikipedia tells us this is their sixth album and there's a whole load of text there which basically just says the band were somewhat lacking in focus during the recording and spent a whole load of time doing stuff which didn't come off. The cover art is a Hipgnosis effort and is apparently an ear underwater - Storm Thorgerson wasn't very happy with the results, but I think he was just grumpy the band overruled his initial suggestion of a baboon's anus. Critically, it was well received with quite a few people agreeing it was their best yet - which, from what I've heard of their earlier material, isn't something I'd argue with. Commercially, it did well in Europe, including getting to #2 in the Netherlands, but only got to #70 in the US - mostly because the record label forgot to promote it there. Oops.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for a fiver, but if you want a mint copy with the A1-U/B1-U runouts (no, I've got absolutely no idea) then it's going to set you back £699.95, which I'm going to declare to be the most expensive album of the year so far because some of the other ones have just felt too dodgy (if you want to get dodgier here, you can look to Europe and go for an ultra-rare Japanese first pressing for 5000 Euros!). I won't be spending any money on it but I enjoyed this album way more than I was expecting - I'm almost tempted to listen to it again!

28/11/71 - Nicely of its time

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