The Meddle Sessions' Lost Instrumental 'Nothing Part 1' and Its Mutation Into 'One of These Days'

In the chaos of early 1971, Pink Floyd booked time at EMI’s Studio 2 to jam out ideas for what would become Meddle. One of those jams, recorded on January 8, was a loose instrumental called “Nothing Part 1” – a single chord drone with Nick Mason’s heavy kick drum and a sparse vocal moan from Roger Waters. It wasn’t going anywhere until someone (probably Gilmour) suggested adding that sliding bass pulse and doubling the tempo. The band then layered in the wind-through-the-wires sound effect and Mason’s snarling vocal line, and suddenly the track had a spine. By the time they cut the master in July, the original “Nothing Part 1” had been gutted and rebuilt into the 6-minute freakout “One of These Days,” with only the drum pattern and bass line surviving from the original seed.

The Meddle sessions also produced a handful of other unreleased fragments. “Nothing Part 2” (sometimes called “Boomerang”) was a water-drip echo chamber piece that later got recycled into the “Seamus” howling-dog track. A 20-minute blues jam, “Earl’s Court,” was abandoned because it sounded too much like a free-form trap. Most of the rest of the January sessions – including a tape-laden improvisation called “Moody Blues” – were wiped or recycled by the band, who famously hated hoarding outtakes. The only surviving clues come from the Meddle session reels that leaked in the 1990s, where you can hear the band fumbling for the pulse that would become their most savage instrumental.