Pink Floyd followed up Meddle by taking time off from sessions for Dark Side Of The Moon to record the soundtrack for a film called Obscured By Clouds. It’s by far my favourite Floyd album.
I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Pink Floyd, whose music can tend towards the over-indulgent for my tastes (and I have no time for the wildly overrated Syd Barrett era so beloved of cultists), but I’ve always loved the sound of Dave Gilmour’s guitar.
Never more so than on this track Mudmen, where the listener is bathed in its warm, almost liquid tone.
It comes from one of the band’s lesser-known albums, Obscured By Clouds, which came out in 1972 and has always been my favourite of theirs, as well as the most eclectic.
It’s also one of the most overlooked: it is sometimes discounted from their ‘proper’ discography on the grounds that it was recorded as a soundtrack for French director Barbet Schroder’s film La Vallée, in between the completion of Meddle and the release of Dark Side Of The Moon.
I remember seeing the film years after the album came out: a strange arthouse affair involving Bulle Ogier going to New Guinea to search for a hidden valley where she hopes to find the feathers of a rare bird, but becomes lost on a mountain where she encounters one of the most remote tribes on Earth.
What follows is one of those “voyages of self-discovery” for which French films of the era were notorious, and which invariably involved sophisticated French people interacting with some “native” people performing exotic rituals – something that usually involved people taking off their clothes – and discovering some truths about “civilisation” in the process.
It’s not a great film but it is worth digging out the album.
Most of it has a pastoral mood but there are a couple of oddities: the jaunty singalong Free Four and a heavy rocker called The Gold It’s In The…, which must rank (along with The Nile Song) as the least representative tunes in the lengthy Floyd repertoire.
Richard Wright’s closing synth suite Absolutely Curtains, featuring his new VCS3 bought from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, brings it to a close with a chorus of hypnotic native chants.
Footnote: One of the actresses in the film, Miquette Giraudy, would go on to join the band Gong as vocalist and synth player, and form the ambient System 7 with her partner Steve Hillage.