How 'Meddle' and the 23-Minute 'Echoes' Launched Pink Floyd Into Their Golden Era

Before The Dark Side of the Moon there was Meddle — the album where the band finally gelled as a four-piece after Syd Barrett’s departure. Recorded in scattered sessions across 1971, it’s the moment they stopped sounding like a psychedelic relic and started chasing atmosphere. The entire B-side is taken up by “Echoes,” a 23-minute piece that didn’t just signal a direction — it became the blueprint.

“Echoes” works like a dry run for everything that followed: the slow-build structures, the use of tape loops and studio effects as instruments, the seamless marriage of instrumental passages with lyrics about connection and isolation. Richard Wright’s haunting piano riff and David Gilmour’s slide guitar (actually a wah-wah pedal through a Leslie cabinet) create a submarine-like texture that they’d refine into the cleaner sound of Dark Side. Even the famous “ping” at the start was a happy accident — a single piano note run through a Binson echo unit.

The album’s other tracks show the band still figuring things out — “Seamus” is a novelty blues with a dog howling, and “Pillow of Winds” is an acoustic ballad — but “Echoes” proved they could hold a listener’s attention for side-long durations without gimmicks. It directly led to the confidence to attempt “Us and Them” and “Any Colour You Like” later. Without Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon might have been a very different, shorter record.