The Flaming Cow: The Making of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother

By Ron Geesin and Nick Mason

‘a fantastic read . . . witty and incredibly detailed’ Brain Damage

By the late 1960s, popular British prog-rock group Pink Floyd were experiencing a creative voltage drop, so they turned to composer Ron Geesin for help in writing their next album. The Flaming Cow offers a rare insight into the brilliant but often fraught collaboration between the band and Geesin, the result of which became known as Atom Heart Mother – the title track from the Floyd’s first UK number-one album. From the time drummer Nick Mason visited Geesin’s damp basement flat in Notting Hill, to the last game of golf between bassist Roger Waters and Geesin, this book is an unflinching account about how one of Pink Floyd’s most celebrated compositions came to life.

Alongside photographs from the Abbey Road recording sessions and the subsequent performances in London and Paris, this new and updated edition of The Flaming Cow describes how the title was chosen, why Geesin was not credited on the record, how he left Hyde Park in tears, and why the group did not much like the work. Yet, more than fifty years on, Atom Heart Mother remains a much-loved record with a burgeoning cult status and an increasing number of requests for the score from around the world. It would appear there’s still life in the Flaming Cow yet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Nov 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780750951807

Ron Geesin

Ron Geesin was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, but escaped to England at the age of just 17 in a jazz band. After four years touring with the band, Ron began his solo career in London. In 1970, he composed music for the features The Body and Sunday Bloody Sunday while co-composing Pink Floyd's first gold album, 'Atom Heart Mother'. Over the years this polymath has been the subject of 'One Man's Week' for BBC Television, formed a one-man record company, written and presented two series for BBC Radio, made music for many documentaries and feature films, and continued to perform live and broadcast across the UK and Europe. In 1996 he became Senior Research Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, focussing on light and sound relationships, which led to his designing several large-scale installations. Now living in Sussex with his wife, Ron has been collecting adjustable spanners for over thirty years, and the results of this passion form the basis for this book.

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

Let us get one hazy impression focussed into hard fact: this book lays out my experience in the composing and making of that twenty-three-minute work retrospectively named Atom Heart Mother on 16 July 1970. Before that, its basic formative structure had been performed live by Pink Floyd as The Amazing Pudding, subsequently modified and assembled from recorded sections to form the framework at EMI Abbey Road Studios for final issue on LP under the working title Untitled Epic. Since the final title, Atom Heart Mother, was also used to name the whole LP record, side two of which I had no part in, there has been further confusion as to what precise work various individuals have addressed their comments, not helped by vague and inaccurate reporting by members of the popular music press or the tangled netting of the World Wide Web. The qualifying word ‘suite’ was added later as partial attempt to distinguish The Work from The Album, but I am staying with the original title here.

Entirely from my point of view, this book is the story of a collaboration in the modern art medium of organised noise. Mixed metaphors abound. There are even some new words not found in any recognised English dictionary. I was never one for accepting what was taught. There is life after school. ‘What have we done?’ was certainly not understood at the time, got distorted through the rippled glass of several participants’ front doors and has now emerged out of the back door into the world’s garden – with no assistance from me, I can tell you, other than to make the score available to deserving enterprises.

I have winkled out every possible memory and used diaries, notepads and available factual documentation for substantiation. Recollections from Pink Floyd and its team were invited. I received none. You are conducted from our damp basement in Notting Hill, London, where drummer Nick Mason came to meet me, to my elevated padded cell in Ladbroke Grove where the dots were sweated on to paper. From there, you stagger into EMI Abbey Road Studios and very nearly stagger out again but for some chance reactions to traumas that found a way to get the job done. Questions arise, and some are answered. Eyebrows are frequently raised, to reveal a cheeky chap careering through doors of disorder into an understanding of life’s workings – maybe!

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Pink Floyd has forever thrived on mystery, sometimes puffing at the smoke machine a bit too hard to shield what is essentially a very simple process, that of building a structure in sound and light for the amusement of others. ‘It’s all an illusion,’ is one of my crypticisms. I am no different: it’s just that my structures are more convoluted and tend towards the miniature as an art form.

The conclusion – and you will get it quite soon – is that this time-shifted collaboration would not be buried by any of Pink Floyd’s attempts but instead hovers above ground in its own mysterious vapour, held up by a magnetic field generated by the conflicts of aims and building materials that might have prematurely destroyed it. I call this process ‘playing with polarisation’. Forward, with all passion.

1

WHO AM I?

What an impertinent question, and one that might take a book to work out! As I swim, stride, shuffle and slide through this one, I am hopeful that you and I will come out with some idea.

I was born Ronald Frederick Geesin to Joyce (née Malcolm) and Kenneth Frederick Geesin in Kilwinning Maternity Hospital, Ayrshire, Scotland. My mother has told me that I was going to be called Roland, but there was another one in the road and, since two in one road would never do in polite middle-class Ayrshire, my parents swapped two letters round to get Ronald. So I was imbued with a healthy uncertainty at a very early age.

There were strands of creativity running through my ancestors: my mother’s grandfather, James Malcolm (1849–1909), was a good amateur scenic painter, and his brother, William Buchan Malcolm (1852–1917), was a fine early amateur photographer. The combination of these, together with my father’s technological involvement in constructional engineering, might have equipped me with some of the tools necessary for survival in this wire-wound and wounded machine age. I believe that all people are creative – it’s human nature – but some get provoked (they call it ‘driven’) into building extraordinary shrines, or little piles of stones by the roadside, to register their temporary tampering with space and time. Others then stand back to admire or fall over them.

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Ron with mouth-organ c. 1957. Photographer: K.F. Geesin

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Ron with first banjo 1959. Photographer: K.F. Geesin

I really do not believe in the many strained attempts to find direct hereditary connections to someone’s talent, typified by the question: ‘So who was the musical one in the family?’ We all love to find patterns in our lives that might reassure us that we are comfortably contained in some kind of identifiable framework, but the links are much less defined, possibly lying in a genetic trait to enquire, investigate, probe and venture alone, rather than to join a seemingly comfortable sheep pack that is herded around by ‘the system’.

So, I was born in Ayrshire and raised in Lanarkshire where my father built our bungalow overlooking a fairly featureless Clyde Valley. The one feature was a giant ‘bing’ (slagheap to you), a monumental by-product of the coal mine. My father’s roots were entirely English and my mother’s were English and Scottish, so that made me a quarter Scottish. This must have been why I never fitted in much socially and used to go on solitary bike rides up the more picturesque part of the Clyde Valley. Two aspects of life seem to have attracted me through my schooling years, unfairness and absurdity. In a music class, we were told things or played things from recordings. After a particularly pedestrian piece of Beethoven rendered from the gramophone I said, ‘Please sir, I didn’t like that!’ ’Geesin, you’re not here to tell me what you like, you’re here to learn!’ How unfair is that? My first instrument was the mouth-organ, more accurately the twelve-hole chromatic by Messrs. Hohner, following after that prodigy who never recovered, Larry Adler. How absurd is that?

As I became increasingly unruly in my awkward adolescent years through the late 1950s, my father introduced me to his business colleagues: ‘This is my scruffy son’. Maybe this was one of his attempts at second-hand dry Scottish humour, but it came out more like a desperate attempt to climb up above the middle of the middle class. Thirty years later I was moved to investigate our family history, principally along the Geesin line, and found that my father had been denying his origins. His great-grandfather died of cirrhosis of the liver, sometimes occupied as a night watchman in Gateshead, a town that was then a very scruffy underling of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland.

As a final breakthrough into bad behaviour I discovered the banjo, got one for my sixteenth birthday and practised it fervently on the toilet, where the acoustics enhanced my efforts. It was the 1950s fashion of ‘trad’ jazz that revealed this tuned drum to me. In fact, I had made a banjo-shaped instrument on my father’s workbench earlier: it had no stretched skin but was entirely of wood with the metal frets made from cut lengths of garden wire sellotaped on. It turned out that this process of improvised instrument to improvise music was what the slaves embraced in North America to eventually evolve jazz in the first place. So I was connected. A glimmer of the future was shown when I earned 15/- (fifteen shillings = 75p) going round some well-chosen doors in the village playing this contraption at Hallowe’en that year, 1958. That paid for three more EP records of sinful jazz music – I still have them.

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