How Ron Geesin and a choir saved 'Atom Heart Mother' from being a disjointed mess — and why Pink Floyd later called it 'rubbish'

In early 1970, Pink Floyd wanted a longer piece to fill the B-side of their upcoming album, but they had no idea how to stitch together the separate instrumental ideas they’d been toying with. Keyboardist Richard Wright had a riff that became the central theme, and guitarist David Gilmour had a pastoral melody, but the band couldn’t figure out how to make them cohere into one continuous suite. Enter Ron Geesin, a Scottish avant-garde composer and friend who had previously worked with Roger Waters on the soundtrack to The Body. Geesin suggested adding a full choir and brass section to create a unifying orchestral passage — a radical move for a rock band still shaking off their psychedelic past. He wrote a choral part that borrowed from a medieval hymn form, and recorded the John Alldis Choir at Abbey Road, layering vocals that sounded both sacred and sinister. The result was the 23-minute “Atom Heart Mother” suite, a sprawling, often jarring mix of Mellotron, slide guitar, orchestral swells, and a cow mooing, all arranged by Geesin.

Despite hitting No. 1 in the UK — their first chart-topper — the band quickly soured on the album. David Gilmour later called it “a load of rubbish,” and Roger Waters dismissed it as “a clumsy, inept piece of music.” The title itself was an inside joke: a newspaper headline about a woman who had given birth while her pacemaker malfunctioned. What bugged them most was the gulf between ambition and execution. They felt the orchestral parts were pasted on rather than integrated, and the whole thing lacked the tight cohesion of their later work. Geesin, who wasn’t credited as a co-writer and felt underpaid, grumbled that the band never really understood what he’d done. The album’s cover — a simple field with a cow — became a symbol of their embarrassment: they’d wanted to make a serious progressive statement but ended up with a musical mess that they couldn’t even stand to hear in concert. By 1972, they dropped the suite from their setlist entirely, and it wasn’t played live again for over 40 years.