Before Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd tried to build music from ordinary objects rather than their usual instruments. Household Objects was never completed, but its methods left a trace on the album that followed.
Pink Floyd’s Household Objects was an unfinished recording experiment rather than a lost album awaiting a neat, vault-raiding release. Across sessions in the early 1970s, the band attempted to make music without their familiar instruments, using bottles, newspaper, aerosol cans, elastic bands, wood and wine glasses instead. They eventually left the project behind for more conventional recording, but a little of its strange logic can still be heard at the opening of 1975’s Wish You Were Here.
Household Objects did not appear suddenly after The Dark Side Of The Moon became an enormous success. Pink Floyd had already treated everyday noise as musical material. Their 1969 composition Work involved sawing wood and boiling kettles onstage, while Atom Heart Mother’s Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast included roadie Alan Styles frying eggs and bacon, eating, and a dripping tap. Those sounds sat within a record made with conventional instruments, but they showed the band’s interest in rhythm, texture and atmosphere beyond the usual rock toolkit.
When Pink Floyd reconvened at Abbey Road in January 1971, they pushed that curiosity further. Future Muse producer John Leckie, then a 22-year-old tape operator, recalled that they spent days making chords from tapped beer bottles, tearing newspapers for rhythm and using aerosol cans for a hi-hat-like sound. As Louder reported, the point was not simply to collect odd noises: the band were trying to give each one a recognisable musical job.
The practical challenge was considerable. Bottles could be tapped to create pitches; paper could become percussion; elastic bands could be stretched and twanged; a broomstick could be scraped across a floor for a repeated pulse. In the later sessions of 1973, Pink Floyd and engineer Alan Parsons also worked with a piece of wood struck by an axe and elastic bands stretched between matchsticks.
In the Zigzag interview quoted by Louder, Roger Waters explained the principle: “Whether you make a sound on a guitar or a water tap is irrelevant.” Household Objects was an attempt to collapse the distinction between an instrument and a sound effect. That did not mean every sound automatically became music. A guitar comes with centuries of familiar technique; getting bottles, paper and household hardware to produce parts that could sit together on tape required long stretches of experimentation.
The first attempt receded as Pink Floyd moved towards Meddle, which retained sound effects and atmosphere but returned to conventional instruments. The idea resurfaced in late 1973, after The Dark Side Of The Moon had topped the charts in Britain and the US. The band had no clear follow-up ready, and Nick Mason later suggested that the project had become a “delaying tactic”. That is Mason’s retrospective explanation, rather than a complete account of why the sessions happened, but it captures the awkwardness of trying to turn a painstaking method into finished songs.
The recording process also had a basic creative limit. Mason later wrote that the group had not produced “any actual music”, only a small number of tentative rhythm tracks. The experiment could yield arresting sounds, yet an album still needed structure, melody and a reason to move from one piece to the next. Once Waters developed the idea of an album about absence, including Syd Barrett and the end of his marriage, Wish You Were Here gave the group a clearer direction.
The most prominent surviving result opens Wish You Were Here itself. Before Shine On You Crazy Diamond begins, fingers circle the rims of wine glasses filled to different levels, producing different notes and an uneasy, hovering drone. The recording later appeared as Wine Glasses on an expanded Wish You Were Here release. It is not merely a leftover effect: it establishes the suspended atmosphere before the song’s instruments arrive.
The other official glimpse is The Hard Way, released on an expanded edition of The Dark Side Of The Moon. It is a brief piece of unusual percussion and melody, not evidence of a completed record whose intended sequence can now be confidently reconstructed. The remnants are more revealing as process than as a missing Pink Floyd masterpiece.
Household Objects remains worth returning to for precisely that reason. It was not a completed album with an obscured tracklist or a single settled motive behind it. It was a demanding attempt to make familiar objects perform unfamiliar roles. Wish You Were Here ultimately supplied the emotional architecture that Household Objects lacked, while preserving its wine glasses at the door.
’s Before Doors sessionsIntimate, stripped-back live sessions filmed moments before the doors open. Raw sound, real rooms, no second takes. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss a new one.
