None of the Pink Floyd members could claim that every part of their career was easy to work through. From working with the dissolution of Syd Barrett to channelling their grief into their finest works, there was always a certain amount of pain that came at the expense of everyone trying to have their creative voices heard. Although the band may have suffered for their art more than a few times, David Gilmour singled out one song as the peak of the band working as a team.
While the original incarnation of the band saw Barrett leading the charge with one hit after another, his expulsion due to his severe mental problems led to Roger Waters picking up where he left off. Despite staying within the confines of space rock at the time, Waters would quickly turn into the group’s leader, often dictating how he thought the song should be played every time the band walked into the studio.
When the group first figured out how to make their sound work, though, much of their attempts to find the right sound came from trial and error. Working on the album Ummagumma as a half studio/half live disc, much of the studio sessions involved the band making various avant-garde experiments that never quite gelled into full songs.
Even when the band started to create lavish pieces on the album Atom Heart Mother, the group was still unsatisfied with what they were creating, thinking that most of the material didn’t have a purpose. While Gilmour and Waters have been known to wash their hands of Atom Heart Mother, the following album marked when everything began to gel.
In terms of Pink Floyd’s classics, much has been made of the song ‘Echoes’ from Meddle, a sprawling epic spread across 23 minutes that takes the listener on a sonic journey into the ocean’s depths. While the song was a watershed moment for the group, Gilmour maintained that one of the finest collaborations the band ever had came a few tracks before.
When talking about the rest of the album, Gilmour felt that ‘One Of These Days’ was a fine example of the band working off each other in precisely the right way, calling it “the most collaborative effort of anything we ever did”. Looking at the way the song builds, though, it’s easy to understand why Gilmour took a liking to the band’s collaborative spirit.
As the group approached recording the song, Gilmour would say that the tune started with different delay effects before Waters came in to flesh out the rest of the track. After Richard Wright and Nick Mason left their signature stamps on it, the track became a perfect mix of rock and roll and experimental music, down to a guitar riff that could have been used in a long-lost Rolling Stones song.
From there, the band would innovate further on their next artistic venture, Dark Side of the Moon, creating a continuous piece of music across its runtime centred around the various aspects of life and how to maintain one’s humanity. Although Gilmour and Waters would write brilliant songs separately for the band, ‘One Of These Days’ exemplifies their camaraderie working at its finest.
