Meddle

Engineered by John Leckie and Peter Bown, the album was produced by the band themselves. It reached number 3 in Britain and number 70 in the United States, and went two times Platinum there. Melody Maker described it as a soundtrack to a non-existent movie. Echoes takes up the whole of the second side. The Echoes basic tracks were recorded at Abbey Road in March 1971, with overdubs at AIR from late March to May.

Pitchfork's Andy Cush wrote in 2020 that the band had no finished songs when recording began in early 1971. For weeks they improvised with each member isolated from the others, calling the results Nothings 1 to 24, and almost all of it was unusable. The exception was a single high B on a piano played through a rotating Leslie speaker, which became the opening note of Echoes. Mason said they could never recreate the resonance between the piano and the Leslie, so the demo tape was used. The band also tried recording vocals backwards, and a dog trained to howl along was brought in. They convinced EMI that Abbey Road lacked the technical sophistication they wanted and moved the work to George Martin's AIR Studio, which had 16-track machines. Mason writes that Meddle was the first album the four had worked on together in the studio since A Saucerful of Secrets, and Cush called it conflicted and brilliant.