Pink Floyd Ummagumma 1975 Harvest Records Dbl Vinyl LP

$

30

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Ummagumma Studio album / Live album by  Pink Floyd Released 7 November 1969 Recorded

• September 1968 – July 1969 (studio)
• 27 April and 2 May 1969 (live)

• Mothers Club, Birmingham
• Manchester College of Commerce, Manchester

• Experimental 
• avant-garde 
• psychedelic rock 
• progressive rock 
• space rock

• Pink Floyd 
• Norman Smith

Ummagumma is a part-studio, part-live album by the English rock band Pink Floyd. It is a double album and was released on 7 November 1969 by Harvest Records. The first disc consists of live recordings from concerts at Mothers Club in Birmingham and the College of Commerce in Manchester that contained part of their normal set list of the time, while the second contains solo compositions by each member of the band recorded at EMI Studios, counting as Pink Floyd's fourth studio album. The artwork was designed by regular Pink Floyd collaborators Hipgnosis and features a number of pictures of the band combined to give a Droste effect.

The album's title supposedly comes from Cambridge slang for sex, commonly used by Pink Floyd friend and occasional roadie Iain "Emo" Moore, who would say, "I'm going back to the house for some ummagumma". According to Moore, he made up the term himself. Drummer Nick Mason later said the album was titled "because it sounded interesting and nice."

Although Ummagumma was well received at the time of release, and was a top-five hit in the UK album charts, it has since been looked upon unfavourably by critics and by the band, who have expressed lukewarm opinions about it in interviews.

Reception and legacy

On release, Ummagumma received favourable reviews. International Times was particularly positive about the live album, with the reviewer describing it as "probably one of the best live recordings I have ever heard". Stylus Magazine was very positive towards the album, saying the live album was "as a visceral document of the early Floyd's proclivity for atmospheric, energetic jamming, there's nothing else like it" and that the studio one "somehow transcends its fractured construction to make a full album-length statement".

However, retrospective reviewers have given it mixed-to-negative ratings. Rolling Stone and MusicHound each awarded the album a score of 2.5 out of 5, while Paste, reviewing the 2011 re-release, described the album as "rock excess of the worst kind", although the writer praised the live version of "Careful with that Axe, Eugene". In his review for the Pink Floyd studio album Atom Heart Mother (1970), Robert Christgau suggested that Ummagumma's "hypnotic melodies" made it "an admirable record to fall asleep to". Paul Stump, in his book The Music's All that Matters: A History of Progressive Rock, approved of the first disc for its "often involvingly spiritual live improvisation", while deriding most of the studio disc, going so far as to liken "Sysyphus" to "an excitable two-year-old let loose on the bass end of a piano keyboard". However, he praised both of Waters's solo contributions and the editing and splicing techniques used on "The Grand Vizier's Tea Party". Bradley Smith's The Billboard Guide to Progressive Music (1997) recognises the studio disc as the more significant half of the record and also as "perhaps one of the most adventurous recordings ever released by a major label group."

The band have since been dismissive and critical of the work. Recalling the album in later years, Waters said: "Ummagumma – what a disaster!" In 1995, Gilmour described the album as "horrible", though he thought the live album might be acceptable musically. In a 1984 interview, Mason said: "I thought it was a very good and interesting little exercise, the whole business of everyone doing a bit. But I still feel really that that's quite a good example of the sum being greater than the parts ..." Later, he described it as "a failed experiment", adding that "the most significant thing is that we didn't do it again".

Track listing

Live album

• Roger Waters 
• Richard Wright 
• Nick Mason 
• David Gilmour

• Waters 
• Wright 
• Mason 
• Gilmour

Studio album