Ummagumma is the strangest album Pink Floyd ever released, and the one they liked least. A double set from 1969, it is really two records in one: a live disc that captures the young band at their thrilling, improvisational best, and a studio disc on which each of the four members was handed half a side of vinyl and left to do whatever he liked, alone. The results range from the beautiful to the baffling. It is a fascinating, wildly uneven curiosity — and the live half is genuinely superb.

The short version

Ummagumma (1969) is Pink Floyd’s fourth album, a double release split cleanly in two. The first disc is their first-ever live album, recorded at two small venues — a club in Birmingham and a college hall in Manchester — and featuring long, expanded versions of four early favourites. The second disc is an experiment: each member was given half a side of vinyl to fill with a solo composition, with no input from the others. Richard Wright, Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason each went their own way, producing everything from a lovely pastoral folk song to abstract tape collages. It reached number five in the UK and gave the band their first American Top 100 placing. The band themselves have spent decades disowning it.

Four members, four half-sides

By 1969, Pink Floyd had rebuilt themselves around David Gilmour and were touring constantly, playing music that had grown far beyond the studio versions on record. Capturing that live was one half of the plan. The other was more unusual: rather than write together, the four members agreed to split a whole disc between them, half a side each, each man working alone with no interference from the rest. It was a bold way to see what they could each do outside the confines of a rock band — and, with hindsight, a revealing one. Wright and Mason found the experience harder than expected; Gilmour later admitted he was apprehensive and largely improvised his way through it, and even asked Waters to supply him with words, which Waters declined to do. Only Waters seemed entirely at ease alone. The whole thing was wrapped in one of Hipgnosis’s cleverest sleeves: a photograph of the band in a room, containing a picture of the same room, containing the same picture again, receding endlessly. It would be the last Pink Floyd cover to show the band at all.

The sound

The two discs could hardly be less alike. The live half is Pink Floyd at full stretch: four early pieces stretched out, deepened and made vastly more powerful than their studio counterparts, all hypnotic build, dynamic light and shade and fearless improvisation. Many listeners rate it the finest surviving document of the band’s early years. The studio half is another matter entirely — a scattered, often difficult collection of solo experiments, taking in avant-garde keyboard suites, gentle acoustic folk, multi-tracked guitar workouts and pure sound-collage. Some of it is genuinely lovely; some of it is hard going; almost none of it sounds like a band. Taken together, the two discs make for one of the most lopsided albums in rock.

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The songs

The live disc holds four pieces: Astronomy Domine, from the Syd Barrett era, opens it in a blaze of cosmic drama; Careful with That Axe, Eugene builds patiently from an eerie hush to an explosive peak; Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun drifts along on Nick Mason’s slow, tribal drums; and a huge, sprawling A Saucerful of Secrets closes it in triumph. All four are transformed — longer, heavier and far more gripping than on record. The studio disc is a lottery. Wright’s Sysyphus is a four-part keyboard suite, ambitious and eerie, that he himself later dismissed as pretentious. Waters offers the best and the oddest of the bunch: Grantchester Meadows, a gorgeous, sunlit acoustic song about the countryside of his Cambridge youth, and then a bizarre tape experiment made from his own voice sped up into animal chatter. Gilmour’s three-part The Narrow Way, on which he plays everything himself, holds some fine guitar and a lovely closing section. And Mason’s The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party, built from percussion and tape effects, opens and closes with flute played by his wife, Lindy — the only woman to play on a Pink Floyd album until 1994.

Reception and legacy

Ummagumma sold well — number five in Britain, and the band’s first appearance in the American Top 100 — and reviews at the time were largely positive. Since then, opinion has hardened, and nobody has been harder on it than Pink Floyd themselves, who have called it everything from a disaster to horrible over the years, with only Mason offering a kind word. Critics have mostly split it down the middle: the live disc is widely admired, the studio disc widely dismissed as self-indulgent. The consensus today is that both verdicts are fair. Yet the album remains an essential document of a band in transition, testing the edges of what four musicians could do — and one small footnote endures: the sleeve is so beloved that Nick Mason later borrowed its title for the name of his own touring band.

The verdict

Ummagumma is not a Pink Floyd album to start with, and it is not one to love uncritically — the band would be the first to tell you so. The studio disc is a genuine oddity: a fascinating experiment, a couple of small gems, and a fair amount that only the devoted will return to. But the live disc is a different story altogether, and reason enough on its own to hear this record: it is the best evidence we have of how extraordinary Pink Floyd were on stage before the fame arrived, and it is thrilling. Come for that, treat the studio half as a curiosity, and Ummagumma reveals itself as one of the most interesting failures in a catalogue full of triumphs.

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