MEDDLE

Easily the Floyd's best studio album since A Saucerful of Secrets, Meddle sees the band both lay their old sound to rest and stumble upon their new approach with the epic Echoes. It is not, however, a wall-to-wall masterpiece.

It's well-known that the group entered the studio this time around with more or less no new material to work with, and had to create the entire thing from scratch. Various experiments - an attempt to make an album using only household items rather than actual instruments, an experiment in which each band member improvised individually without being able to hear the others, with only guidance for what sort of mood to play in and how long to play each mood for offered - yielded nothing particularly special.

Eventually, from this long period of frustration was born the album we have today - on which Roger Waters has a writing credit on all the songs, three numbers being whole-group compositions, two songs being Waters-Gilmour collaborations and one being composed by Roger entirely. This, of course, is the birth of the Waters-led songwriting process which would lend vital focus both to this album and to its followups - but would also lead to Waters personality dominating the group by the era of The Wall and The Final Cut, leading to the infamously acrimonious split.

Here, the results of Waters taking the lead are, I have to say, mixed. Opening track One of These Days is a real scorcher, and I have no quibbles with it. Echoes is, of course, wonderful - though I have to be really in the mood for it to appreciate the three minutes of synthesised wilderness noises in the middle. As for the middle tracks, San Tropez and Seamus are both novelty tracks - not a field the Floyd has ever been especially strong in - whilst A Pillow of Winds and Fearless are psychedelia retreads along the lines of Fat Old Sun or If from Atom Heart Mother.

Meddle is overall a good album. It's got a great opener and a landmark second side, but the remainder of the first side once One of These Days fades out is a bit patchy - on a level of "good but not great" and sometimes slipping below that. Still, at long last the light at the end of the tunnel is visible; this album marks the end of the post-Syd period of struggles over direction as the band tried to chart a "democratic" course only to find that this didn't really match their temperaments, and that (to put it charitably) some group members had better songwriting chops at this point than others. Waters taking the lead may, in the long run, have ended in disaster as far as maintaining friendships went, but at this point in time it was vital to prevent the band from simply dissolving due to a lack of ideas and direction. And the heights which would be attained with the next run of albums were surely worth it.

But as for Meddle itself? It's a transitional work, not a masterpiece. But it's tantalisingly close to being one.