Udderly Ordinary: the new meaning of Pink Floyd’s ‘Atom Heart Mother’ cow 50 years later
It was meant to be a ‘non-cover’ for a ‘non-concept’ album, a part of Pink Floyd’s adjustment period after losing their principle songwriter Syd Barrett. But can we now bestow meaning to this meaningless photo of a cow in the midst of the climate change panic?
In the pleasant British countryside, a rising art and design group were on a mission for rock music. Hipgnosis specialised in album cover art and already had commissions under their belt, their first being ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ by Pink Floyd. Now the band had tasked them to create a cover for their 1970 release: ‘Atom Heart Mother’. Their instructions were unconventional, but fairly simple. Pink Floyd wanted something painfully dull on the cover to move away from the psychedelic image they had become associated with. No swirling motifs, no Fauvist colouring, no cryptic Droste effect photos. It had to be so tedious it might as well be nothing. Hipgnosis member Storm Thorgerson discovered the answer grazing in a field on a bright sunny day in his home town of Potters Bar. A common sight in the British countryside, they had found their mundane muse: a Holstein Friesian cow.
You would never guess just by looking at this tranquil photo that the British countryside had very recently been a war zone between its farmers and disease. In 1967, infected cows were slaughtered and burned and farmers had to watch the flames blacken and engulf their livelihoods. This outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease, an affliction affecting cloven-hoofed animals, lasted eight gruelling months and led to the slaughter of over 400,000 livestock. Through diligent reporting, quarantine, slaughter and disinfection, the epidemic was halted the following year. But some farmers’ precious cow herds were devastated. To rebuild, some looked to Canada where the Holstein Friesian breed had been embraced as a dairy cow.
If you were ever asked to draw a cow, the result, no matter how crude, would probably look like the Holstein. This black and white breed is a popular bovine for dairy production because, on average, one cow can yield over 7,000 litres of milk per year. They originated from the province of Friesland in the Netherlands, where their native white cows were bred with the black cows of Batavia and resulted in the piebald breed. They arrived in North America in the 1850s and soon after became a hit on the continent. Over a hundred years later, British farmers were putting their faith in the Holstein too. According to one Chester farmer, the Holsteins he bought in 1968 produced 400 gallons more milk in their third lactation than his previous herd. These incredible animals were part of the healing period for the British farming community. Fast forward a couple of years later and a member of this breed, named Lulubelle III, was about to become part of rock history.
Nowhere on the front or back cover of ‘Atom Heart Mother’ is the band name or title of the album featured (unless you owned certain international versions). This was in fact the first rock album to ever do this. It has even less information on the front cover than The Beatles’ ‘White Album’. Hipgnosis reportedly presented Pink Floyd with three options for the cover: the cow, a diver and a woman entering a doorway. The cow was apparently the funniest of the three. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s ‘Cow Wallpaper’ (1966), Hipgnosis took a rear-facing view of Lulubelle III standing in a green field and looking back at the viewer. The entire LP visuals are cow-themed. On the back are three more bovines looking at the camera inquisitively. Inside the sleeve is a black and white landscape photo of a field full of cows lounging in the sun.
Let’s put the cover design in context. In 1970, one would be flipping through the new releases in a record shop and come across a delightful assortment of eye-catching vinyl sleeves. Around the same time as ‘Atom Heart Mother’’s release you would have found Led Zeppelin’s eponymous third album, which featured Zacron’s rotating volvelle covered in a photo collage of the band. The jazz lovers would find German painter Mati Klarwein’s cover for ‘Bitches Brew’ by Miles Davis. There was also ‘Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs’ by Derek and the Dominos, which featured Émile Théodore Frandsen’s seductive and abstract blonde. Roger Dean, whose fantastical landscapes would later become famous on Yes and Asia album covers, was emerging at this time with brightly coloured visuals like Dr Strangely Strange’s ‘Heavy Petting’. In a year of innovative and exciting album cover art, the genius of Lulubelle III was how she stood out in a record shop just by being utterly ordinary.
When asked to comment on the album cover, Thorgerson has said that it was meant to be a “non-cover” for a “non-title” and “non-concept” album. The title came from a random story found in the Evening Standard with the headline ‘Atom Heart Mother Named’, about a woman who had been given a plutonium pacemaker. It seems, as far as the band and Hipgnosis are concerned, the cover symbolises nothing and that’s the end of the matter. Yet links can be made between the album’s songs and its visuals. The 23-minute instrumental first track ‘Atom Heart Mother Suite’, composed by Ron Geesin, is broken up into different sections with cow-themed titles like ‘Breast Milky’, ‘Mother Fore’, and ‘Funky Dung’.
The rest of the album makes references to a bright sunny day, not unlike the one featured on the cover. In the third track ‘Summer ‘68’, a song about the fleeting experience of sleeping with a groupie, a man wishes to be with his friends ‘lying in the sun’ instead of dealing with this emotional drama. ‘Fat Old Sun’ is David Gilmour’s love letter to the countryside of Cambridge where he grew up. The lyrics mention ‘summer evening birds’ and ‘new mown grass smells’ under a sun quietly sinking into the horizon. The last track, ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’, is a 12-minute song broken down into three movements: ‘Rise and Shine’, ‘Sunny Side Up’ and ‘Morning Glory’. We hear recordings of the band’s roadie Alan Styles making his breakfast and talking about what he eats, from cereal to ‘macrobiotic stuff’. The thought of breakfast usually, as a result of advertising, induces the image of a sunny bright day outside. Let’s face it, have you ever seen someone in an advert eating cereal while it’s raining?
‘Atom Heart Mother’ was Pink Floyd’s first number one album. Stanley Kubrick even wanted the opening track to feature in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, but instead the cover was used as a film prop. Yet David Gilmour has said that the album isn’t his favourite, stating that the band were “scraping the barrel a bit at that period”. It was released two years after their guitarist and lead singer Syd Barrett’s addictions and erratic behaviour caused him to part ways with the band he helped start. In fact, the album’s second track ‘If’ could be a lament about his departure. As you can imagine, losing their principle songwriter left the band in an identity crisis. ‘Atom Heart Mother’ has been referred to as a turning point of Pink Floyd’s experimental era and their period of adjustment after Barrett.
Nick Mason described ‘Atom Heart Mother’ as a tangent from their other experimental era albums. According to the drummer, it was their next album ‘Meddle’ that illuminated the path to their masterpiece ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’. In this light, the album cover takes on a humorous tone. A band, destined to create one of the greatest rock albums of all time, makes their way down yet another creative path only to find a metaphorical dead end in the form of a cow. Lulubelle III lazily raises her head from eating grass and looks back at the band who have entered her green field. Her expression is blank, but says it all: “Wrong way guys, go back and try again.”
The band have stated in the past that this was the most thrown together album they had ever created. But it seems some fans aren’t so confident to dismiss it. When asked about their opinion on ‘Atom Heart Mother’, one fan on Reddit thought that the cover is not as anti-psychedelic as Hipgnosis may have intended. The vivid green of the grass field and bright blue sky behind the cow depicts a hyper-pigmented idyllic countryside. Even other bands have emulated the cover as a tribute. The German band M.Walking On The Water’s 1993 album ‘Pictures of an Exhibitionist’ shows a naked man painted like a cow and hunched over in a green field just like Lulubelle III. The KLF credited ‘Atom Heart Mother’ as the inspiration for the cover to their album ‘Chill Out’, which depicts white sheep lounging on a green field.
One constant throughout Pink Floyd’s post-Barrett period and beyond was their cover artists Hipgnosis, consisting of Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell and later Peter Christopherson. The group was defined by their style of surreal photographic visuals and stepping away from the traditional band portrait album cover. Their history and Pink Floyd’s are intertwined, being the geniuses behind ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ spectrum pyramid, the man on fire on ‘Wish You Were Here’ and the pink pig balloon on ‘Animals’. For the 40th anniversary of ‘Atom Heart Mother’, the cover was re-released by Thorgerson’s studio. This time, instead of a Holstein, a three-dimensional sculpture of a cow made out of wire stands on a grass field looking back at the viewer with the same blank expression. Perhaps this outline of a cow is a reminder of its intention to mean nothing. This vessel of wire devoid of meat, bones, hooves and hair might as well not be there. Or maybe, in the late Thorgerson’s wisdom, it could be a premonition of the fate of the cow. It’s a common sight now, but in the future could it become a rarity in our countryside?
In the 50 years since the album’s release, Holstein Friesian’s have become the dominant dairy cow in the United Kingdom. In fact, they make up nearly 90 per cent of Britain’s dairy cow population. Now, even more than in 1970, the cover to ‘Atom Heart Mother’ is an accurate reflection of the British countryside aesthetic. But cows are becoming a vilified animal while humankind contemplates its responsibility to the environment. We now know that one cow can produce up to 200 kilograms of methane a year and are responsible for 65 per cent of livestock emissions. Although Lulubelle III was a dairy cow, beef is regarded as one of the worst offenders in the meat industry. According to one report, producing beef requires more resources than pork or chicken. It needs more land, more fertiliser and more water.
Change is happening as a result. A recent report from the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) recommended that we cut the amount of beef, lamb and dairy we eat by a fifth. They have even suggested a tax on meat and dairy products. But other figures suggest that might not be necessary. The Food Standards Agency say that red and processed meat consumption has declined by 30 per cent in a decade. A food and drink report from Waitrose states that one in eight Britons are vegetarian or vegan. At the time of publishing, we are coming to the end of the Veganuary challenge. But it’s not just meat. The research firm Mintel stated that a quarter of British people are consuming non-dairy milk.
What kind of future does the cow have in a world anxious about climate change and views them as oblivious culprits? What will become of them if enough people switch to plant-based milk? Could we be so bleak as to imagine a future where cows just don’t fit into our society anymore?
The ‘Atom Heart Mother’ album cover was never meant to be a political statement or a symbol of green activism, that much is clear. It is unknown whether Hipgnosis were subconsciously referencing the Foot and Mouth outbreak of 1967 (and unlikely). Despite intriguing fan theories and lyrical analysis, the evidence suggests that this isn’t a ‘Dark Side of the Rainbow’ situation. It’s just a cow. Lulubelle III could have been anything, a stray cat, a parked car, or a dustbin. It had to be something for the purpose of being nothing.
And yet, through the natural passage of time, we can attach new meaning to the meaningless cover. 50 years after its release, humankind is apprehensively looking ten years ahead when we’re told the environment will reach a breaking point. Therefore, we’re pointing at these abundant and mundane things like the cow and asking ‘can we do better?’ Or there’s the more sinister question: ‘do we still need this?’ The weight of Pink Floyd’s cow can be felt more than 50 years ago as we start asking awkward questions about this animal’s place in our environmental strategy. It seems despite Hipgnosis’ best efforts, their nothing cover collected something over time like a pair of boots left out in the rain.
Perhaps this line of thought is not meant for now but in the next 50 years, when all the scientists’ current deadlines have passed and things will have been sacrificed along the way. Assuming ’70s British rock is not one of them, a 100th anniversary edition of ‘Atom Heart Mother’ may be released. Lulubelle III’s same blank expression will be looking at a new world. But will this new world look back at her and say: ‘you don’t see cows very often now, do you?’
Isa Hemphrey is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written for Discover Benelux and Timeless Travels magazine. Her blog, The Wild Abstract, is a project exploring how animals are used in art and culture.
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