"Echoes" is 23-minutes long and takes up the entire second side of the Meddle album. The song evolved out of Pink Floyd's live shows. According to Shiloh Noone's Seekers Guide To The Rhythm Of Yesteryear, Pink Floyd introduced a new piece of music at the Crystal Palace Garden party entitled "Return of the Sun of Nothing," said by the band to be a joke about comic books and Godzilla-type movie sequels, which developed into "Echoes" about six months later. The song was a homage to the minimalist composer Terry Riley.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Pink Floyd leader Roger Waters said that with this song, he was attempting to describe "The potential that human beings have for recognizing each other's humanity and responding to it, with empathy rather than antipathy."
When Pink Floyd started recording the Meddle album, they put down 24 pieces of music with no idea how it would develop, using the working title "Nothing, Parts 1-24." "Echoes" developed out of those pieces.
Rick Wright chanced upon his keyboard pings when routing his piano through a revolving Leslie speaker and the Binson Echorec delay so beloved of the Syd Barrett-era Floyd.
At this stage of their career, Pink Floyd wrote most of their songs separately. This was the first one in a while that they wrote together.
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If you noticed something eerily familiar while watching
Phantom of the Opera, you may have picked up the vibe of this song. Roger Waters sure did. "The beginning of that bloody
Phantom song is from 'Echoes,'" he told
Q magazine. "It's the same time signature - it's 12/8 - and it's the same structure and it's the same notes and it's the same everything."
Rick Wright told Mojo magazine December 2008 that he wrote the music for this song. He explained: "The whole piano thing at the beginning and the chord structure is mine, so I had a large part in writing that. But it's credited to other people of course. Roger obviously wrote the lyrics."
Pink Floyd allowed filmmaker George Grenough to use "Echoes" in his 1973 surfing movie Crystal Voyager. The band used scenes from the movie when they played the song on their 1987 tour.
A year or two after the release of
2001: A Space Odyssey, Pink Floyd was working on
Meddle. The ending part of the movie is 23 minutes long, just like the song. Play the song while watching the end sequence of the movie and enjoy.
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Suggestion credit:
Tim - red hook, NY
On August 24, 79 A.D., the Mt. Vesuvius volcano erupted and destroyed the city of Pompeii. In 1971, 1892 years later, Pink Floyd played "Echoes" parts I and II in the city's ancient amphitheater. No crowd was present, but the concert was recorded on film and released as
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.
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Suggestion credit:
Joe - Piscataway, NJ
The piano on "Echoes" happened spontaneously. "Most of the time with the Floyd, you'd spend getting a sound," Abbey Road staff engineer John Leckie told Mojo magazine. "Even if it was an acoustic guitar or a piano. Rick Wright said, 'Oh, can we put the piano through the Leslie?' So we miked the piano, but maybe it was too close to that one piano string, because every time he hit that note, it would go into the point of feedback. Everyone went, 'Ooh wow, listen to that.'"
Wright revealed to Mojo that the wind section after the song's intro was Roger Waters with a slide on his bass. Also David Gilmour's seagull sound was a mistake. He explained about the latter: "One of the roadies had plugged his wah wah pedal in back to front, which created this huge wall of feedback. He played around with that and created this beautiful sound."
The underwater oceanologist Jacques Cousteau was known to play this song during his Caribbean escapades.
"Echoes" is the title of Pink Floyd's 2001 "best of" collection.
Pink Floyd first performed "Echoes" at Norwich Lads Club on 22 April 1971. They listed it under its working title of "Return of the Son of Nothing" on the setlist.