The house used as the location for the front cover of the album is located in Great Shelford, near Cambridge. On the Australian edition, the Gigi cover is completely airbrushed, not even leaving a white square behind. On most copies of American and Canadian editions, the Gigi cover is airbrushed to a plain white sleeve, apparently because of copyright concerns however the earliest American copies do show the Gigi cover, and it was restored for the American CD edition. At a talk given at Borders bookstore in Cambridge on 1 November 2008, as part of the "City Wakes" project, Storm Thorgerson explained that the album was introduced as a red herring to provoke debate, and that it has no intended meaning. The British version has the album Gigi leaning against the wall immediately above the "Pink Floyd" letters. The cover of the original LP varies between the British, American/Canadian, and Australian releases. The latter, however, is absent from the CD release instead, the recursion effect is seemingly ad infinitum. After 4 variations of the scene, the final picture within picture is the cover of the previous Pink Floyd album, A Saucerful of Secrets. The picture on the wall also includes the picture on the wall, creating a recursion effect, with each recursion showing band members exchanging positions. The cover shows the members of the band, with a picture hanging on the wall showing the same scene, except the band members have switched positions. (It would have been one of only two songs on the record to include Syd Barrett as a writer.) Other sources have claimed that the song was dropped because of a conflict over the music publishing rights. The track was dropped at the last minute, some say to maintain the sound fidelity of the record, but numerous test pressings with the original track list were given to friends of the band, including John Peel. The band had also recorded a live version of "Interstellar Overdrive" (from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn), intended for placement on side one of the live album. In footage of the band rehearsing for a Royal Albert Hall appearance in 1969, one of the band members can be heard, off camera, quietly chanting the word "ummagumma".Īlthough the sleeve notes say that the live material was recorded in June 1969, the first disc of Ummagumma was recorded live at Mothers Club, Birmingham, on 27 April 1969 and the following week at Manchester College of Commerce, on the second disc included four solo segments, one half-side of vinyl each by, in order: Richard Wright, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason. However, some band members have since stated that the word was "totally made up and means nothing at all". The album's title supposedly comes from a Cambridge slang word for sex, commonly used by one of Pink Floyd's friends and occasional roadie, Ian "Emo" Moore, who would say 'I'm going back to the house for some Ummagumma'. Side A is a live album of their normal set list of the time, while side B contains individual compositions by each member of the band recorded as a studio album. Ummagumma is a double album by Pink Floyd, released in 1969 by Harvest and EMI in the United Kingdom and Harvest and Capitol in the United States.