"One of These Days" is the opening track from Pink Floyd's 1971 album Meddle. The song is instrumental (despite its distorted death growl "One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces") and features double-tracked bass guitars played by David Gilmour and Roger Waters. One of the two bass guitars sounds quite muted and dull compared to the other. According to Gilmour, this is because that particular instrument had old strings on it, and the roadie they had sent to get new strings for it wandered off to see his girlfriend instead.
The track opens with a "wind sound" emulated by means of a delayed wind drum slowed down to half speed. The ending solo on the left speaker is David Gilmour playing a regular guitar solo dueling with himself, via multi-tracking, playing slide on right speaker.
The threat, a rare vocal contribution by Nick Mason, was recorded through a ring modulator and slowed down to create an eerie effect. It was aimed at Sir Jimmy Young, the then BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2 DJ whom the band supposedly disliked because of his tendency to babble. During early 1970s concerts, they sometimes played a sound collage of clips from Young's radio show that was edited to sound completely nonsensical, thus figuratively "cutting him into little pieces". The bootleg compilation A Treeful of Secrets contains a demo version of "One of These Days" in which the Jimmy Young collage loops in the background during the song. However, the authenticity of this demo has not been confirmed.
According to John Peel, Waters has described "One of These Days" as a "poignant appraisal of the contemporary social situation". Gilmour has stated that he considers the song the most collaborative piece ever produced by the group.
When the song was played on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test, a piece of film was produced by the programme makers, featuring rotoscoped pierrots and gibbons dancing against various backgrounds.
The Japanese release of this song was titled 吹けよ風、呼べよ嵐 (fuke yo kaze, yobe yo arashi?), which loosely translates to "Blow, Wind! Call Forth, Storm!" This is the only song on the Japanese release of Meddle to receive an alternate titling.
Lyrics:
One of these days
I'm going to cut you into little pieces
