This concert is an easy favorite due to an excellent performance, the first recording that makes up the majority of the concert is excellent yet suffered from wow and flutter issues with Atom Heart Mother having worse issues. Later both Copenhagen 1970 Complete (Ayanami-226) and Blindness(Sigma 5) would feature the complete concert using two different tape sources. The concert from Copenhagen is one that has been released a few times before, early on as Copenhagen Sequence (Highland HL291/292) featuring an incomplete version of the concert. This hardcore base would also actively record the band and recordings exist for many of the concerts on the month long tour. November 1970 would find The Pink Floyd playing yet another European tour, their fan base had grown dramatically in these countries, the audiences made up of people who would come to the shows to intently listen and allow the band the freedom to expand on the songs musical themes.
The thirteen minute "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" consists largely of aimless musique concrète, but concludes with an uplifting, melodic coda of disarming warmth, innocence and charm (terms which would not often be applicable to the band's darkening musical vision).
Roger Waters' "If" and Gilmore's "Fat Old Sun" were only to be effectively realized live (as documented on the 3/10/71 bootleg, Atom Heart Mother Goes on the Road), while Rick Wright's "Summer '68" portends the bitter, cynical tone of later Pink Floyd. The three enervated ballads that ensue underscore the still-unhealed loss of Syd Barrett's songwriting skills.
Floyd sidekick Ron Geesin's uncredited brass and choral arrangements lend form and momentum to the alternately dissonant and lyrical piece, but it's David Gilmore's liquid glissando guitar that sustains Atom Heart's hypnotic plateaus. Pink Floyd - Atom Heart Mother ( Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab UDCD595, 1970/1993, CD)īack in the heyday of symphonic rock, it was natural for Pink Floyd to take an occasional stab at "serious" composition, their most assiduous attempt being this 1970 album's daringly abstract, twenty-three minute title track.