‘The Nile Song’: the odd birth of prog metal
Progressive rock and metal have always earned their keep in being outsider genres. Sure, they both have their respective fanbases and have become legendary styles of music that have filled stadiums, but it was a much tougher sell to get them to people’s living rooms when the genre was just being born. They could both play nice together, and the first instance of both of them actually managing to combine came years before the titans of metal even began with ‘The Nile Song’ by Pink Floyd.
Granted, any Pink Floyd released directly after the loss of Syd Barrett was always going to be a scattershot. Outside of losing their mentor, A Saucerful of Secrets, for all its great moments, showed that Roger Waters was a little bit shaky taking the reins of the band just yet.
Any separation like that is bound to do a number on some people, but Waters figured the next best thing was for them to create something for the film More. It wasn’t out of the question for a prog band to make a movie soundtrack (George Harrison had been well-versed in the concept), but the soundtrack is far more interesting than the actual movie.
Despite having a few connections between the drug-addled protagonists, most of the album is made up of a musical score from Richard Wright and the odd ditty by the band. Although everyone might have expected something fairly mellow, there was no preparation for what happened on ‘The Nile Song’.
Compared to their psychedelic beginnings, this is the noisiest record the band had ever released, with David Gilmour shouting his brains out throughout the entire piece. While they may have been going for something that could rival the likes of Led Zeppelin, this sounds far more caustic, as if Gilmour is channelling his anger and frustration about Barrett’s departure into the track.
And the crazy part? This was released a full year before Black Sabbath emerged on the scene, meaning that Floyd actually made a metal track that predated the godfathers of the genre. Even though King Crimson was mixing harsher sounds on In the Court of the Crimson King, ‘The Nile Song’s reliance on blues tropes actually puts it more in line with what metal was going to sound like years later.
Although progressive metal was not yet a calling card, the seeds of this composition can still be felt in the different bands that came after. Since Pink Floyd made their name as a prog band first, their love of all things metallic feels like a precursor to what Dream Theater would be doing in the 1990s, albeit with a lot more finesse and arrangements that were a bit too complicated for prog heads. There are even some hints of what Porcupine Tree would be doing, given how the riff is structured.
This wasn’t just a random accident, either. Since it worked so well the first time, ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ feels like Waters’s answer to what Gilmour had come up with. Outside of being a musique concrete piece rather than a fully-fleshed out song, hearing Waters scream halfway through the piece is miles ahead of the different screamers that would come later.
Even with all their credentials as rock and roll eccentrics, ‘The Nile Song’ proved what could happen if you took that progressive foundation and put a mountain of attitude behind it. Mixing genres like this might make for a bit of an odd fit, but with ‘The Nile Song’, Pink Floyd created that musical equivalent of a chocolate and peanut butter combination that is still being felt to this day.