Prog “Ah, Friesians.” It was summer 1970 and LG Wood, managing director of EMI’s Record Division, was peering at the cover of Pink Floyd’s It was EMI policy for Wood to sign off on all EMI album sleeves, but here was a cover missing a title and the group’s name. Instead, there was just a cow in a field.
Presuming there were words , Wood turned the sleeve over, only to find more cows. According to one eyewitness, “Ah, Friesians” was all the baffled MD could muster. Three months later, became Floyd’s first No.
1 album. EMI’s powers that be already knew that strange-sounding hairy rock groups sold lots of records. Now, it seemed, they could do so without including their name or the album title on the cover.
Just a cow in a field. The band’s gargantuan seven-volume box set, , dedicates an entire volume, , to and the soundtrack that inspired its title track. Here you’ll find the earliest known recording of the suite, plus filmed performances from Hyde Park and St Tropez, and much more besides.
But is probably better known for the cow than the music. Revisiting the album now is like entering a parallel universe inhabited by epic orchestral suites and songs created from the sounds of boiling kettles and frying bacon. Floyd would make better albums, but it remains – or as guitarist later described it, “Our weird shit.
” An album that ended with a cow in a field in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, began over a year before in Rome. Italian director Michelangelo Ant.
