Released
on June 2nd, 1972, Pink Floyd’s seventh studio album, Obscured by
Clouds, is celebrating a half century on the shelves today. It was
recorded over the course of a couple of rushed sessions at Château
d'Hérouville, France, between February 23rd and April 6th while the band
were on break from touring. It was commissioned as the soundtrack for
the film, La Vallée, by Barbet Schroeder and continues their work in
that arena along with prior soundtracks for the films, The Committee
(1968), More (1969) and Zabriskie Point (1970). Production of the album
pushed back work on Dark Side of the Moon briefly as they had already
begun to record sections for that album prior to beginning work on
Obscured by Clouds.
Musically, the album focuses a lot on short
acoustic guitar heavy songs rather than the longer, more expansive
compositions the group were known for. The film’s themes of love and
romance became central to the lyrical direction of the album and, while
the group originally set out with little concern for creating concise
“songs”, aiming more for loose motifs which could be cross faded across
the film’s various scenes, the resulting material is surprisingly
coherent. The cover image was inspired after seeing rushes of the film
where, in one instance, the film became jammed on an out of focus image.
Thus the shot of a man in a tree, blurred to the point of being
unrecognizable, was created by Hipgnosis for the album.
The album
was reasonably successful, but is seen mostly as a stopgap project
prior to the release of Dark Side of the Moon, which would solidify the
group’s position as megastars in the world of rock music.
