Pink Floyd Atom Heart Mother (EMI)
First, seven seconds of silence. Then, slowly, a deep buzz emerges, dragging with it an organ, a cymbal rattle and finally a brass parp. The parp blossoms into a fanfare, and Pink Floyd declare themselves - Roger Waters' insistent bass; Dave Gilmour's clanging guitars; Richard Wright's understated keyboards; and Nick Mason's pounding tom-toms. Oh, and fairly soon there is a motorbike revving its engine.
So begins Atom Heart Mother, Pink Floyd's fifth album, the one that saw them begin to sweep their avant-garde origins under the carpet and clear a path for the avant-gardish mega-albums Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. Turning 40 this year, Atom Heart Mother is the record that almost everyone in the band grew to hate, but which inflated pop music every bit as imaginatively and self-importantly as Sgt Pepper and Pet Sounds.
Released in 1970, Atom Heart Mother bridged a schism between two Pink Floyds: that of Syd Barrett, who inspired their early singles and debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and the superstar band driven by Gilmour and Waters to the top of the charts.
Drummer Mason has compared this incarnation of the band to four drunks wrestling for control of the car wheel.
Having tested the world's patience with the fractured and sprawling Ummagumma, this interim Pink Floyd picked up where they left off with Atom Heart Mother: its eponymous 23-minute opening 'suite' not only features interludes of band, brass and bike, there is a lengthy section with a Gregorian chant, and another which sounds like a drunken crow singing in a vast cave.