It’s now generally agreed by Pink Floyd aficionados that 1971 album Meddle was the point where the band as we know them really came to life. There’s no better example of this than in the fizzing, energetic opener One Of These Days. A song which became the blueprint for half of the songs on Dark Side Of The Moon, One Of These Days was the sound of Pink Floyd 2.0.
Brilliant as Meddle and its opener were, they couldn't help but be subsumed by the mammoth popularity of Dark Side Of The Moon two years later. Still, while it may not be filled with obvious greatest hits fodder – side two comprises just one sprawling, contemplative track – Meddle embedded itself in a whole new generation of Pink Floyd fans.
One of those kids brought to the dark side by One Of These Days was late Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison. "It was one of the first songs I’d heard as a kid that freaked the fuck out of me," Jordison told Classic Rock magazine in 2009, when quizzed about the Pink Floyd songs he loved the most.
"The distorted vocals and the growl, and just the overall drive of it, it was like pre-industrial. That shit was fuckin’ heavy.
"It was just a very, very odd song, and it really intrigued me as a kid."
You can listen to the track below.
Jordison died in July 2021, aged just 46. He drummed with Slipknot from their formation in 1995 until he was fired from the band in 2013, in a move he dubbed "cowardly".
Jordison wasn't the only Floyd fan within Slipknot, however. In 2019, guitarist Jim Root stated that We Are Not Your Kind track Unsainted was inspired by The Wall, telling Kerrang! magazine: "Before we even started writing this record, Clown had been like,
‘I want to get a choir.’ He was thinking in terms of a children’s choir, like a Pink Floyd The Wall kind of thing, but we ended up getting a regular choir."
Corey Taylor has also performed versions of Pink Floyd tracks Breathe, Have A Cigar and Time live, telling fans: "One of my favourite fucking bands. Always has been, always will be: Pink Floyd".
Slipknot might not be the most obvious examples of Pink Floyd's influence, but it shows just how far the shadow of the prog legends looms.
