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50 YEARS OF MUSIC
PINK FLOYD Also Available The deluxe 27-disc boxset The Early Years 1965-1972 featuring seven individual book-style packages, including never before released material. In addition to the deluxe set, a two-CD highlights album The Early Years – CRE/ATION’ will also be available through Pink Floyd Records. Each individual book-style package will be released separately early in 2017, except BONUS CONTINU/ATION which is exclusive to the boxset.
Produced By Global Editor-In-Chief Daniel Griffiths Group Art Director Graham Dalzell Editor Neil Crossley Production Editor Katie Nicholls Art Editor Paul Tysall Other contributors include Mark Blake, Roy Delaney, Jeff Hudson, Glenn Kimpton, Martyn Lester, Neville Martyn, Katie Nicholls, David Mead, Jem Roberts, Will Simpson, Henry Yates Photography Joby Sessions
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#01 Music Milestones 03
PHOTO: GET T Y IMAGES/STORM THORGERSON
04 Legends of Rock #01
PINK FLOYD
…are among the prevailing themes explored by Pink Floyd, the band who brought a strident originality and inventive spirit to rock music that captured the minds of millions of fans and catapulted the band into the commercial stratosphere. The scale of their success is positively daunting. In the course of their five decade career Floyd have sold 250 million records. Their best-selling album The Dark Side Of The Moon spent an absurd 736 weeks in the US Billboard charts, sold 45 million copies worldwide and still sells 250,000 copies a year. It has been estimated that one in every five households contains a copy of the album and that there is not a minute goes by when someone, somewhere on the planet, is not playing it. The most significant British band to emerge from the late-60s British psychedelic boom, Floyd's trajectory has not been without its problems. The tragic breakdown of the mercurial Syd Barrett by the second album was followed a decade later with profound creative tensions and the eventual departure of creative lynchpin Roger Waters. The fact that such losses did not impact in the slightest on Floyd's popularity, suggests that the band – and the ‘brand’ – known as Pink Floyd, is infinitely greater than the sum of its individual parts. But beyond the decades of acrimony and the astronomic sales statistics is the music – 15 studio albums stretched across five decades, that chart the band’s development from psychedelic space rockers to sublimely emotive prog visionaries and purveyors of stately melodicism. In the 50th anniversary year of the recording of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn – as the band releases its lavish The Early Years 1965-72 boxset – Music Milestones re-examines Pink Floyd’s 15 studio albums, assessing their merits and taking an in-depth look at their creation – from first concept through to the critical fallout. Through the words of the band and their inner circle we take a behind-the-scenes look at all aspects of each album – from the songwriting and recording sessions through to the artwork, the gear and the near-legendary tours. What follows is an account of a unique band, who created music that is as timeless and innovative as it is enduring and majestic.
Neil Crossley, Editor
#01 Music Milestones 05
MUSIC MILESTONES The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn 8
Ummagumma REVIEW
30
Space rock, fairy tales and a one-way ticket back to the fears of childhood. 10
FOLLOW THE PIPER
REVIEW
Floyd re-emerge with an experimental album divided into four sections. 32
Riding high on the 60's Zeitgeist, Pink Floyd’s debut album captured the psychedelic spirit of the era with Syd Barrett leading the charge.
BAND OF FOUR
With Syd Barrett now firmly planted in the band’s past, the quartet dip their toe into the world of avant garde.
Atom Heart Mother A Saucerful Of Secrets
37
16
Floyd say goodbye to Syd’s psychedelic excesses with a more spacious sound. 18
REVIEW
Hard-to-place, but an important role in Floyd’s musical journey.
REVIEW 38
HEART OF THE MATTER
Fractious horn players, a Dadaist collaborator and the Workers Revolutionary Party – welcome to one of Floyd’s most impenetrable albums.
A TIME OF TRANSITION
Syd Barrett’s profound problems and the band’s subsequent sense of chaos and unease make for an intriguing, if disjointed, second album.
Meddle More
44
23
With Syd gone, Pink Floyd’s third album was a difficult and confounding affair. 24
THE MAKING OF MORE
Floyd’s first full commission for a soundtrack album and it gave them room to explore their new sound.
Contents 6 Music Milestones #01
REVIEW
Psychedelic blues rock, a hint of jazz, Water’s ‘happy’ moment and a song dedicated to a dog.
REVIEW
46
FINDING FOCUS
Shaking off the hangover of the Syd Barrett era, the band discovered their classic sound and set the controls for the stadium league.
PINK FLOYD Obscured By Clouds
Animals
51
REVIEW
A coherent, underrated album to accompany the film La Vallée. 52
INTO LA VALLÉE
76
100
CALL OF THE WILD
REVIEW
A lighter, more widescreen production… Versus a lack of lyrical cohesion. 102
A savage concept piece that tore strips off the social order of 1970s Britain – and hastened the band’s demise…
The Dark Side Of The Moon
RINGING THE CHANGES
With the litigious wrangles of its predecessor behind them, Pink Floyd employ a raft of former compadres to record their 14th studio album
The Wall REVIEW
81
A perfectly-formed slice of Floyd as the quartet reach their peak. 60
REVIEW
Punk is raging and so is Roger Waters, as Floyd adapt Orwell and get venomous.
A band in the middle of a project that would launch them into the musical stratosphere, and beyond.
58
The Division Bell
74
LET THERE BE DARK
82
Everything changed dramatically with a masterpiece as timeless as it is sublime.
The Endless River
REVIEW
A darker side and the end of an era for the classic quartet.
107
BACK TO THE WALL
Donald Trump is not the first person to think a wall is the answer. Pink Floyd got there first…
REVIEW
A tribute to the late Richard Wright and Floyd's “farewell album”. 108
FOND FAREWELL
The final album. Yet its roots lie in 20-plus year-old recordings.
Wish You Were Here 66
68
The Final Cut
REVIEW
The follow-up to Dark Side more than satisfied their salivating, awaiting fans.
REVIEW
Or the final straw? What emerges when the wall comes tumbling down?
POSTCARD FROM THE EDGE
Floyd’s album about absence still sounds, to this day, very present. A triumph yet it could so easily have been a last hurrah for the band.
10 Essential Tracks
88
90
114
What if you only could only take 10 tracks with you…
END OF AN ERA
Roger Waters’ paean to his father The Final Cut remains the most controversial in the band’s canon.
A Momentary Lapse Of Reason 94
REVIEW
Gilmour’s baby and the late-period release that the rock press loves to hate. 96
AN ACT OF DEFIANCE
History has not been kind to it but the first Floyd album without Waters is not without its merits.
#01 Music Milestones 7
MUSIC MILESTONES
Studio Abbey Road, London Producer Norman Smith Released 1967
The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
Space rock, fairy tales and a one-way ticket back to the fears and anxieties of childhood.
I
nfamously, Floyd’s debut album was recorded at Abbey Road’s Studio Three while The Beatles were piecing together Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band next door in Studio Two. Nearly half a century later the two records are still regarded as British psychedelia’s twin peaks and yet in tone they couldn’t be further apart. With Paul McCartney in the creative driving seat rather than the acid-affected Lennon, Pepper is an inclusive, beatific creation, one embraced instantly by millions of Britons.
Piper, meanwhile, is unsettling, scary and full of trap doors and secret passageways. Even if the listener puts out of their mind the fate of its chief songwriter and listens as it would have been heard in 1967, darkness is wherever you look – from the ominous descending organ on the opener Astronomy Domine to the don’t-listen-with-the-lights off instrumental Pow R. Toc H. If, as it’s often claimed, British psychedelia yearned to return to the prelapsarian idyll of childhood, Piper is crammed with the monsters under its bed. Carefree it is not. As is the way with so many debut albums, Floyd and producer Norman Smith walked into Abbey Road in January 1967 with the intention of capturing their live set at the time. This came with the proviso from EMI that their more out-of-control moments would be rounded down for mass consumption. Indeed, Smith managed to cut Interstellar Overdrive – which live, would often stretch to over 20 minutes – down to a more manageable nine and edited the album itself down to a succinct 42 minutes. Sadly, for the modern listener, standard late 60s protocol meant that the singles Arnold Layne and See Emily Play were omitted. Its opening is as exciting (and foreboding) as any major album up to this point. Manager Peter Jenner reading out planet names through a megaphone and morse code ushers in Astronomy Domine. Come the chorus Rick Wright’s Farfisa organ, Barrett’s spiralling guitar and Nick Mason’s crashing cymbals plunge us down a wormhole that leads… where? We arrive at Matilda Mother, a bedtime fairy tale where Syd (as a child) interjects: ‘Why’d you have to leave me there/hanging in my infant air waiting!’. Flaming’s intro
8 Music Milestones #01
blends horror movie organ with owls hooting and features a stumbling mid section where pianos, clockwork toys and Barrett's guitar trip over each other in the darkness. So far, so creepy. But then the record spins even further off its axis. Roger Waters’ snarling Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk is an early indication of the pointed material he would later provide the group with. And then there is Interstellar Overdrive, which must have frightened the bejesus out of 1967 listeners with its nightmarish effects, Wright’s dissonant keyboards and meandering structure. It resides a galaxy away from the concise mod pop of 1965 or even the band’s own blues-influenced repertoire of 18 months previous. No-one had ever made music like this before. After this storm comes the eerie calm of Barrett’s final four offerings. The acoustic-led The Gnome represents the lightest moment on the album (you can hear the relish with which Syd enunciates ‘Grim-ble Grom-ble’), Chapter 24 is an I Ching-inspired treatise on numerology and the laws of nature, and the album closes with Bike, another charming piece of Barrett juvenalia that collapses into a cacophony of bells, violin, xylophones and seemingly anything else the band had to hand in Abbey Road.
Piper did decent commercial business for a debut release, reaching No 6 in the album charts that August, though many early fans were disappointed that the record had failed to capture the sheer sensory overload of their live set. Pete Townshend – a UFO regular at the time – dismissed it as “fucking awful”. In retrospect, it’s a curio and a snapshot of an inchoate band. Entire careers would later be based on its contents, but even had Barrett stayed, it’s unlikely the band would have still been peddling such whimsy as Bike by, say, 1970. Within weeks of Piper’s release, clouds were gathering above Floyd as their leader’s behaviour became increasingly erratic. The Summer of Love was over. Autumn’s encroaching shadows were already there in plain sight on this haunting, unsettling, deliciously disorientating album. Will Simpson
PHOTO: BARON WOLMAN/GET T Y IMAGES
PINK FLOYD
Pink Floyd at the Casa Madrona Hotel, Sausalito, CA in November 1967. From left: Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and Syd Barrett
#01 Music Milestones 9
THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
MUSIC MILESTONES
By Will Simpson
Riding high on the 60s Zeitgeist, Pink Floyd’s debut album captured the psychedelic spirit of the era with Syd Barrett leading the charge. 10 Music Milestones #01
PHOTO: PINK FLOYD MUSIC
Follow The Piper
PINK FLOYD
“I WASN’T THAT KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT THE SORT OF MUSIC THEY WERE PLAYING, PSYCHEDELIA DIDN’T INTEREST ME” Norman Smith ne remarkable aspect about the late 60s psychedelic explosion was how quickly it all happened. 1966 was a key year when a monochrome music scene almost overnight become flushed with colour. At the centre of this sudden explosion was a group of architecture and art students
O
that had started the year playing blues as the Pink Floyd Sound but would evolve into the toast of underground London, dragging along an entire subculture in their wake. Like punk 10 years later, others would be left playing catch-up to the next big thing.
LEADERS IN SOUND
EMI, as the most prestigious British label, understandably wanted to nab the UK leaders of psychedelia. There was a brief dalliance with Polydor but both band and management chose EMI after their booking agent Bryan Morrison received a letter from the label’s in-house producer Norman Smith intimating that he was looking for bands to sign. The deal was concluded for an advance of £5,000
(not much these days, but in the 60s EMI was not used to giving advances to unknown groups). When Pink Floyd (the ‘Sound’ had been jettisoned at some point during 1966) entered the studio with Smith to start recording their debut album in February 1967, it was as the leaders of an underground movement that needed to be interpreted to mainstream pop consumers. There was a lot at stake. Smith and Floyd made for unlikely bedfellows. Twenty years older than his charges, Smith was an ex-RAF man who had engineered The Beatles records up to Rubber Soul. “I wasn’t that knowledgeable about the sort of music they were playing,” he later confessed. “Psychedelia didn’t interest me.” Smith was a jazz head – one of his
#01 Music Milestones 11
MUSIC MILESTONES
Innocence Lost The tale of the sad demise of Syd Barrett is legendary in rock’s history, as the wonderkid fell from grace into obscurity.
12 Music Milestones #01
his childhood (his father died when he was just 15), we will never know. Floyd did try to help their ailing leader. Roger Waters claims to have attempted to arrange a meeting between his friend and esteemed psychologist RD Laing, but Syd simply refused to get out of the car. In the late 60s the music business was not set up to deal with his sort of psychic disturbance. Rehab was in his infancy and the sort of holistic support structures that would have been thrown up today just didn’t
exist. By all accounts Syd was largely left to cope on his own. Helped by his ex bandmates, two solo albums – The Madcap Laughs and Barrett – were released, but not capitalised upon. There was a brief attempt to form another band, Stars, which soon ran aground. After one final aborted recording session in August 1974 he walked away for good to become that rarest of figures, a true living legend; a symbol of pop’s – and the 60s – lost innocence.
PHOTO: ANDREW WHIT TUCK /GET T Y IMAGES
THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
R
oger Keith Barrett was rock’s quintessential lost boy, the too-fragile-for-this-world star that flies too close to the sun and falls to earth. Unlike the other casualties of the late 60s – the Morrisons, Joneses and Joplins – Syd didn’t burn out, he fell gradually. After departing public life, he spent his remaining 30 years as a living ghost. The pre-stardom Syd was charming and convivial, but also a little bit elusive. His talent though was beyond dispute. His Cambridge friend and later Pink Floyd artist/designer Storm Thorgerson said: “his ability to free associate verbally was of a different order. He wasn’t as verbal or as academic as others, but he had a way with words”. Early on it was clear he was the star of the group. Sometime flatmate Duggie Fields described him as “charismatic, handsome, witty, fun to be around. There would be an incredible number of very attractive women knocking on Syd’s door with great regularity”. What happened next is the matter of much record. Syd’s problems were noticeable by those in and around the group from the time they first tasted commercial success in the summer of 1967. Meltdowns on US TV and gigs where he is virtually catatonic ensue. By the end of the year the group are at a loss at what to do. Various solutions are tried. Dave Gilmour is recruited as a second guitarist to ‘fill in’ for Syd. The idea of Syd as a Brian Wilson-type, non-touring songwriter is mooted. Then in late January 1968 the group simply decide not to pick up Syd on a way to a gig in Southampton. A settlement is negotiated and by April it’s official: Syd Barrett has left Pink Floyd. To what extent Syd’s decline was due to simple over indulgence in LSD, how much an allergic reaction to sudden fame, or linked to psychological trauma lurking in
PINK FLOYD
The cover image used on Piper encapsulated the colourful mood of the psychedelic 1960s.
T
he debut album from the leading lights of the UK psychedelic scene needed a suitably psychedelic sleeve and so it fell to an Anglo-Asian photographer, Vic Singh to provide the memorable kaleidoscopic cover image of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. It was one of the few occasions when a band photograph has graced the cover of a Pink Floyd record. Singh shared studio space with David Bailey before striking out on his own, thanks to a loan from Vidal Sassoon. A well-connected fellow, Singh was also friendly with George Harrison and his wife, the model Patti Boyd. It was they who had given Singh a ‘prism lens’ that splits an image up into three or four segments, softening them against each other. So when Pink Floyd’s management got in touch with Singh in 1967 about the cover of Piper, he knew he had something perfect for the band: “I thought, ‘BANG! that lens is perfect for them’, it signified them, the kind of psychedelic music and trip they were on.” Neither the band nor Jenner and King had any alternative ideas of what they wanted from the cover so it was left to Singh himself to come up with his own. “What I asked them to do was to bring really bright clothes to lift the colour a bit and I shot two or three reels on a white background. It was perfect for that session and for them at that time. They were so abstract and undefined, transparent. They’re very like that lens: there, but not there.”
SYD BARRETT TAKES CONTROL
Syd was firmly at the helm at this point. He wrote all but one of the songs on Piper and it is his guitar that dominates the album. “He really was in control,” Norman Smith said in an interview with Studio Sound magazine in 1998. “He was the only one doing
any writing. He was the only one who, I as a producer, had to convince if I had any ideas, though the trouble with Syd was that he would agree with almost everything I said and then go back in and do exactly the same bloody thing.” Nevertheless, the recording went remarkably smoothly, at least according to Nick Mason in his 2005 autobiography, Inside Out: A Personal History Of Pink Floyd. The album, the drummer explains, was recorded, “in what one might call the old-fashioned way: rather quickly”. At this stage Floyd were still gigging up and down the country and had just released their debut single Arnold Layne. Quite often the band would be in Abbey Road for a 2.30pm – 6.30pm session before going out on the road for a gig. The songs themselves divided neatly into two main piles. There were the ‘band’ songs, developed by the group for the live show – the likes of Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive – and there were Syd’s own compositions, which with their
“[SYD] WOULD AGREE WITH EVERYTHING I SAID THEN GO BACK IN AND DO EXACTLY THE SAME BLOODY THING AGAIN” Norman Smith childlike images and quizzical, elliptical lyrics were unlike anything that had been heard in rock music thus far. Most of these had been written by Barrett during the autumn of 1966 at his room at 2 Earlham St, near Cambridge Circus; a richly creative and, by all accounts, contented period for the young singer.
THE FRUIT OF CREATIVE FREEDOM
Rehearsals for the show, Games For May, that Floyd performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 12 May 1967
Halfway through recording (March 21 according to some) there was an encounter with The Beatles, who were putting Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band together next door in Studio Two. Accounts of this vary. Nick Mason writes of “sitting humbly as they (The Beatles) worked on a mix” of Lovely Rita. Norman Smith though recalled Paul McCartney bursting into Studio Three, introducing himself to the group and cheerily bigging up Smith to them, saying: “You won’t go wrong with this chappie”. What seems undisputed is that Floyd were deeply impressed by the freedom and level of control that The Beatles were given over their recordings. This artistfriendly attitude (still unusual in 1967) seeped into the Piper sessions. Mason
#01 Music Milestones 13
PHOTO: NICK HALE/GET T Y IMAGES
Oh, What A Trip!
earliest encounters with the band at Abbey Road involved an ice-breaking jamming session where he played jazz piano “bashing away while the band joined in”. Nevertheless, an understanding developed between both parties. Smith saw his role as curbing the meandering excesses of the band’s live show; sweetening them for public consumption. It was a tricky balancing act for the 40-something music biz veteran, though Andrew King, the band’s then co-manager recalled that: “He was not all conservative. He’d never said, ‘You can’t do that because that’s not the way we do things’. Norman did it with a very light hand.”
says that in this respect Smith was, “just brilliant, because he let us join in. Some of the studio staff, the engineering department, were extremely disapproving of that”. Like George Martin and The Beatles, a positive atmosphere developed where outside-the-box ideas could be batted back between producer and band. The opening track, Astronomy Domine, is one example of this – a whole four-hour session on 12 April was
A Man Called Smith... Pink Floyd producer Norman Smith discovered a second career when he turned his hand to the rather serious business of being a pop star. 14 Music Milestones #01
devoted to its introductory section. The band convinced co-manager Peter Jenner to read planet names from Syd’s copy of the Observer Book Of Planets through a megaphone whilst morse code recordings were layered on top of a pulse effect from Rick Wright’s Farfisa and Syd’s Telecaster. Elsewhere, the Binson Echorec effects unit was utilised heavily, cropping up on virtually every track. Engineer Peter Bown recalled that Syd was “always
[From left] Nick Mason, Syd Barrett, Rick Wright and Roger Waters pose in the studio control room
N
orman Smith had already been around the block by the time his paths crossed with Pink Floyd in the late 60s. After his work on three of the first four Floyd albums, Smith recorded a demo he intended for John Lennon. However, when producer Mickie Most heard it he convinced Smith to release Don’t Let It Die himself. It was a hit, reaching No 2 in the summer of 1971, and adopting the name Hurricane Smith, the then pushing-50 producer embarked on an unlikely second career, rubbing shoulders on TV shows with fellow performers often half his age. For a year or so Smith was a pop star, known to a younger generation largely oblivious to his work with Floyd and The Beatles.
A portrait of the be-hatted Norman 'Hurricane' Smith PHOTO: GAB ARCHIVE/GET T Y IMAGES
THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
MUSIC MILESTONES
PHOTO: ANDREW WHIT TUCK /GET T Y
PINK FLOYD
“HE USED TO GO AND KICK HIS ECHO BOX EVERY NOW AND THEN, JUST BECAUSE HE [SYD] LIKED IT” Peter Bown fiddling with his sound. He used to go and kick his echo box every now and then, just because he liked the sound”. Of the more experimental pieces, Interstellar Overdrive was the most challenging for the average 1967 listener. But this improvisational number was the highlight of their live show, so a version had to be on there somewhere. Floyd had already made two recordings of Interstellar before, but the finished version is an overdub of the band towards of the end of the sessions in June, playing over a reduction of their second take back in February, creating a ‘delay‘ effect. Also included on the stereo mix is a panning effect, which though still unusual in mid-1967 would quickly become something of a psychedelic cliché. Last to be recorded was Bike, written for Barrett’s then-girlfriend Jenny Spiers and the nearest thing in his oeuvre to a love song. Collapsing in on itself, the track ends with a cacophony of tape effects, speeded-up piano, oscillators, clocks, gongs and harmonium. Finally, the album ends
with what sounds like a flock of geese, but which is actually a recording of the band members laughing, reversed and speeded up. Nobody can remember whose idea this was, although Mason suggests it was “probably between Syd and Norman’s”. In the midst of the sessions was a new song Barrett had written, initially entitled Games For May after the event at Queen Elizabeth Hall that Floyd performed at on 12 May. The lyric evolved into another Barrettian tale of childhood trauma, inspired perhaps by Emily Young, the ‘psychedelic schoolgirl’ that had frequented the UFO club. See Emily Play had clear commercial potential and thus was left off the album and set aside for single release. Helped by three performances on Top Of The Pops, it peaked at No 6 in the charts in late July. Pink Floyd were pop stars and their leader’s problems were just starting.
SYD’S DEFINING MOMENT
Piper was released on August 5 1967 and received broadly positive reviews
– Record Mirror and NME both gave it four stars out of five, the former describing it as “a fine showcase for their talent and recording technique. Plenty of mindblowing sound”. But if their earliest fans felt let down that it didn’t replicate the intensity of their early shows, Piper did its job of condensing this new phenomenon for the mainstream. Its experimental and pop sides are supremely balanced. Yes, Interstellar Overdrive and Pow R. Toc H were unlike anything most people had heard in summer 1967, but tracks like Lucifer Sam, Bike and Chapter 24 all had hooks as naggingly catchy as anything then in the singles charts. The album’s status has grown over time. Piper remains Syd Barrett’s greatest achievement; its release heralded the arrival of a unique new talent at pop’s head table – a writer who was able to delve back and locate both wonder and anxiety from childhood’s deep recesses. But the album’s (and Barrett’s) moment was brief. Within six months the group that made it would be no more.
#01 Music Milestones 15
MUSIC MILESTONES
Studio Abbey Road, London Producer Norman Smith Released 1968
A Saucerful Of Secrets
A
troubled production from the word go, A Saucerful Of Secrets marked a major turning point for Pink Floyd in the handing over of the conceptual baton from the increasingly erratic Syd Barrett to his more solid and staid former schoolmate David Gilmour. Originally only brought in to cover Barrett’s unreliability in the live forum, the span of this album’s creation saw Gilmour get promoted from onstage session man to an integral part of the band’s creative force. The early sessions were solely on Barrett’s watch, when the first versions of staples like Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun were swiftly vetoed by their label. Very little of Syd’s creation remains on this album as by then the whole Floyd organisation were tiring of his complicated lifestyle. Rather, we witness the genesis of Roger Waters as a songwriter and the first suggestions of Gilmour’s increasing influence within the band. It’s perhaps telling that Rick Wright supplied the bulk of the vocals here, as his fragile tones matched better with Syd’s more eccentric middle-class stylings, although this move would be forgotten more with each successive release. This was an album put together by a band trying to find itself among the chaos. But it’s not entirely a bad one, despite its lack of focus and occasional indulgent excesses. The spacey and insistent Let There Be More Light kicks off with meandering keys and trippy gong that breaks down to a vocal psychedelia heavily reliant on Syd’s over-arching influence. (Contrary to popular myth, the opening guitar salvo wasn’t sampled by The Chemical Brothers for their Block Rockin’ Beats single – although it is a pretty close match). This was swiftly followed by the Wright-penned Remember A Day, again harking back to the stylistic feel of Piper, immediately locking into its spacey groove and frequently punctuated with Wright’s whimsical vocal. But it is Set The Controls that draws most people to this troubled album. The only song ever to feature all five members of the band, it’s a swirling trippy exploration of sounds and ideas that was a staple of their live set for many
16 Music Milestones #01
years. Holding guitar performances by both Barrett and Gilmour (although Wright’s assertive keyboards often mop up the contributions by both men), it offered the first real hint of what Roger Waters was capable of as both a composer and a vocalist.
Set The Controls segues neatly into closer Corporal Clegg, a song that gives us the first vapours of the recurring themes of war and loss that Waters returns to in later works. More Oh! What A Lovely War than Platoon, its jerky oompah parodies notions of war as a hero’s game and fits in with the band’s contemporary motifs of arch Englishness. Side two is a more troublesome affair. The title track is the band’s first foray into multi-part composition, borne apparently from a 12-minute gap that just needed filling after many earlier attempts at songwriting just didn’t fit the bill. Split into four segments, it’s often patchy and frequently drifts off into aimlessness. But as an exercise in long form composition it offers useful yardsticks for many of their more subsequent portmanteau adventures. Entering the album’s home straight, See-Saw is a much more gentle construction, reminiscent of Brian Wilson’s ambitious studio work and confounding anyone who dares to listen to it on headphones with its unsettling experiments in stereo. Album closer Jugband Blues, however, is perhaps the most poignant moment in the band’s career. The only Barrett song that made the cut, it marked the end of his time in the band. And while many suggest that the song’s delirious lyric is a reflection of his increasingly schizophrenic state of mind, others assert that it is actually a vicious take-down of his fellow band members who were increasingly alienating him. Syd was long gone before Saucerful’s release, so it was a brave and uncharacteristically generous move by the band to choose this song to close the album. Perhaps it was their way of ushering out the old Pink Floyd and heralding in the new. Whatever the truth, this is an album that shows a band in a serious state of flux, and from here on in, things were going to be very different. Roy Delaney
PHOTO: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GET T Y IMAGES
A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS
Floyd say goodbye to Syd’s psychedelic excesses and welcome in a more spacious sound.
PINK FLOYD Pinked Floyd: August 1968 and the band pose for a portrait. (L-R) Nick Mason, David Gilmour, Rick Wright, Roger Waters
#01 Music Milestones 17
A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS
MUSIC MILESTONES
18 Music Milestones #01
PINK FLOYD
By Roy Delaney
A Time Of Transition
PHOTO: PINK FLOYD MUSIC LTD
Syd Barrett’s profound problems and the band’s subsequent sense of chaos and unease make for an intriguing, if disjointed, second album.
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Cover Concept P
PHOTO: ANDREW WIT TUCK /GET T Y IMAGES
A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS
Strange artwork marks the beginning of an era
Syd Barrett at the mixing desk in the recording studio, January 1968 ink Floyd’s sophomore album appeared less than a year after The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and it’s considered to be their transitional record. Given all that had been happening to the band between and during the creative processes, it is surely the mother of all ‘difficult second albums’. Founding member, guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett, was spiralling downwards and becoming increasingly
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erratic by the time the band went into Abbey Road Studios with The Beatles’ engineer Norman Smith to record the album in the winter of 1967. Barrett had been regularly experimenting with LSD by this point and it was having a damaging effect on him and the band. He was behaving oddly at live shows by refusing to play, playing one drawn out note per set, or simply not arriving for the gig. Waters, Wright and Mason initially patched up the problem by hiring a
“THERE WERE NO PLEASANT MEMORIES AND I ALWAYS LEFT WITH A HEADACHE” Norman Smith second guitarist, who came in the shape of Syd’s college friend and understudy David Gilmour, to stand in for Barrett when needed. Gilmour recalls the arrangement as unfavourable, remarking to Guitar World in 1993 that there was no room for imagination and that he was “elected” to play Barrett’s songs because nobody else wanted to.
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ink Floyd’s second album signified the beginning of a relationship with British art design group and Floyd pals Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell who formed Hipgnosis in 1968 to create the artwork for A Saucerful Of Secrets. Floyd went to Thorgerson and Powell to request their input, specifically to ensure the record company did not design the cover artwork. In an interview with Steven Cerio in 1998, Thorgerson says that the design was “an attempt to represent things that the band was interested in, collectively and individually, presented in a manner that was commensurate with the music”. He also goes on to explain ambiguously that the Dr Strange figure, seen hazily in the background, was “merging into images, a million miles away from certain pharmaceutical experiences”. It’s an interesting answer. The drawing is taken from Marvel comics and shows Dr Strange facing off against Living Tribunal over the future of the Earth. As with most of what Pink Floyd produce, it leads to questions over its inception. Is there a message to Barrett, or some kind of recognition of a clash of personal ideals? It seems likely, especially considering the link between the creation of Dr Strange and certain hallucinogenics. The cover of A Saucerful Of Secrets matches the structure of the album and the many egos that went into its creation. According to some Floyd fans, it has actually dated far better than the music itself. Either way, the planetary theme of the cover, alongside the band in a bubble journeying through the cosmos, couldn’t be a better fit for the album.
PINK FLOYD
NEW BEGINNINGS
Unfortunately, it was not to be. On 26 January 1968, while en route to a gig at Southampton University, the band decided not to pick Barrett up. For a time they floundered; even with Syd’s difficult presence and the increased instability surrounding him, he was still the man with his hand on the creative rudder and without him the band very nearly derailed, albeit temporarily. Barrett had the ideas and the control onstage (for a time) and in the studio. When he was dropped, creative free fall seemed imminent for Pink Floyd and something had to be done quickly, before the whole project was abandoned.
Pink Floyd in 1969. Now a four piece with the departure of Syd Barrett a year previously
PHOTO: ULLSTEIN BILD/GET T Y IMAGES
The first sessions for this fragmented seven-track record were started towards the end of 1967 and were, according to producer Smith, difficult, mainly because of Barrett’s uneasy presence and odd behaviour. Smith maintained his belief from the beginning of his time with Floyd that Barrett experienced no pleasure whatsoever from recording music and that this stance, along with his prolonged drug use, made him a producer’s nightmare. “It was sheer hell,” recalled Smith. “There were no pleasant memories and I always left with a headache.” This hardly paints a picture of recording bliss and Peter Bown, Abbey Road engineer, elaborates: “Syd’s guitar was always a problem because he would not keep still and he was always fiddling with his sound.” However, with all of his personal and social issues, Smith always believed that Barrett was the brains of Floyd and that whatever his problems, he was still “always very creative”. It was an accolade he didn’t extend to Waters, Mason or Wright, who he described (perhaps rather unfairly) as simply “adequate” or “capable”. The studio sessions for Saucerful that involved Barrett did, however, throw up some promising work amid the fuzzy chaos, not least the album’s most well-known and best surviving track, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun. Famous for being the only song to feature all members of the band – with guitar parts from both Barrett and Gilmour (from the second recording sessions) – the resilient five-and-a-half-minute mood piece creates an effective tapestry of keys, with sinister guitar lines skulking underneath. It is a song cherished by the band and one that was played live for many years. It also hints at just how special the album could have been, under different circumstances.
Turning Point The title track on A Saucerful Of Secrets signalled the future direction for Floyd
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hen the time came for the newly-gathered band to head back into Abbey Road Studios and focus on A Saucerful Of Secrets again, they quickly realised that there was something of a void in the second half that had to be filled with songs they were, frankly, struggling to produce. The process of creating the title track for the album marked a turning point for the band. They adopted free-form techniques and architecturally stitched together earlier pieces of material and created strange sketches of weird shapes on paper to build a 12-minute epic. The piece itself and its structure was alien and infuriating to producer Norman Smith, who told them after hearing a version that they had to scrap it and write some three-minute songs. It was, indeed, all a far cry from the earlier crafted miniatures of Syd Barrett’s creation, and with Jugband Blues not long after it on the album, the comparison is all the more startling. Although many have scoffed at the arguable lack of focus and unnecessary length of the instrumental medley (perhaps with a point: is the creation of a song constructed from scraps the epitome of ‘filler’?), Gilmour cites it as a crucial part of the band’s heritage and a
marker for their future. “It was a very important track; it gave us our direction forward,” he told Guitar World, before tracing it directly back from The Dark Side Of The Moon as a logical influence for that style of sound. Aside from that, A Saucerful Of Secrets signalled Gilmour’s influence in the band beginning to take hold, with him experimenting throughout the recording with his guitar lying flat on the floor while he dragged mic stand legs and pieces of nondescript metal along the strings. It marked the sound of a band member finding his feet and confidence. Again, it is all a sea change from Barrett-era songs and is arguably the most important 12 minutes in the band’s history. The song held true for the group and they played it live for four years after the release of A Saucerful Of Secrets, with a live version, comprising of three parts, most commonly known as Something Else, Syncopated Pandemonium and Celestial Voices appearing on side two of the first record of the ill-judged Ummagumma double album.
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A Saucy Little Tale Nick Mason on why Saucerful is still special for him…
A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS
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’m very fond of A Saucerful Of Secrets,” Nick Mason told Rhythm Magazine in 2008, “partly because it’s really a group album, with a lot of co-operation. And Set The Controls is still great to play live. I did it with Roger at Wembley a few years ago. It’s a great drum piece, lots of room for both dynamics and space, to stretch out. “It’s a musical journey round the world! To some extent Pow R. Toc H and Set The Controls were both mallet pieces influenced by Chico Hamilton from the Jazz On A Summer’s Day film (1958). He solos with mallets and I thought that was just the cleverest thing I’d ever seen. “One fortunate thing was that we had almost unlimited studio time," Nick remembered. “On A Saucerful Of Secrets the cymbal things are almost
like drones. We experimented putting mics right on the edge and playing them very lightly, and we might have dipped them into water. “The Beatles transformed the recording process because EMI realised there was good reason to let these bands have free reign. If they were going to sell loads, why begrudge them studio time? We actually renegotiated our contract to get smaller royalties and unlimited studio time! For us it really worked. I always say we probably owe The Beatles our existence. They cleared the way for a totally different business: album-led instead of single-led.”
“BARRETT’S POIGNANTLY BEAUTIFUL SWANSONG IS TAINTED WITH SADNESS.” Enter David Gilmour, freshly promoted from live stand-in to full-time band member and the man who would prove to be the catalyst, who triggers the group’s move from imaginative but fairly whimsical Barrett-era psychedelia to the eventual signature sound of space-progressiverock. Gilmour’s real introduction to Pink Floyd on record comes at the end of A Saucerful Of Secrets’ opening track Let There Be More Light where the guitarist contributes a tremendously judged solo. It lifts the song immeasurably and creates a wonderful contrast to the Rick Wright-penned second track Remember A Day – a cast-off from The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. So, it was certainly not all bad in terms of creative output for the band’s ‘difficult’ second album, although Gilmour admitted that when he did fully ingratiate himself, Floyd was a
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band that had lost its direction somewhat and were unsure of themselves as a unit. It was a tricky situation, especially as by that time Saucerful was looking like a pretty decent first half of an LP, with Let There Be More Light and Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun being the outstanding tracks, giving fairly rudimentary fare such as Waters’ Corporal Clegg a leg-up. Side two had a big hole in it that would eventually be filled by the title track, a sprawling 12-minute epic that divided critics and fans. But before that treat, the listener still had to leapfrog Rick Wright’s See-Saw, an unremarkable number that had the inauspicious working title of The Most Boring Song I’ve Ever Heard Bar Two.
GOODBYE SID
A Saucerful Of Secret’s final track is the quietly devastating Jugband Blues,
Barrett’s final contribution and a poignantly beautiful, Beatles-esque swansong that is heavily tainted with sadness. There’s more than a touch of prescience with its, ‘I’m almost obliged to you for making it clear that I’m not here’ line ringing out two minutes before the end. As the finale to such a difficult set of songs that the band struggled to produce, this denouement is a fitting, as well as an upsetting, postcard from the troubled genius and a clear sign, whether played backwards or forwards, that Floyd were off to pastures new. A Saucerful Of Secrets was first released on 29 June 1968 through EMI Colombia records to not terribly positive reviews and it hit No 9 in the UK album charts, three places below The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn the previous year. Rolling Stone magazine’s Jim Miller compared it to their “fairly impressive” debut unfavourably, considering it “rather mediocre”. He went on to describe Let There Be More Light and Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun as “boring melodically, harmonically, and lyrically” , and seemed to find the whole thing rather Beatles-lite. As for the album’s title track, Jim Miller breezily brushed it off as “psychedelic muzak, hardly electronic, but hardly creative rock either”. More recent reviews, however, have had the benefit of context and hindsight. Since its release and the subsequent knowledge of Syd Barrett’s tragic breakdown, it has become a piece of intrigue and meaning as well as a real transitional album for the band. It is a favourite among fans of early and later Floyd, and even the band members themselves seem to have softened towards the disparity over time, with Nick Mason considering the album his favourite of their efforts and Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun his choice of Floyd songs, lauding it as “fun to play” and as having “interesting dynamics”. It does appear then that A Saucerful Of Secrets as an isolated listen is an important, if sometimes misguided and often unsatisfying, part of the Floyd canon. Of course, the band would go on from this point to carve themselves a nook in the wall of the greats, with classic albums such as The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here. Both of which displayed their true focus, consistency and musical prowess. A Saucerful Of Secrets is more a talking point of a record and a message from a significantly unsettled band, rather than a sonically impressive work in its own right.
PINK FLOYD
Studio Pye Studios, London Producer Pink Floyd Released 1969
More MORE
With Syd gone, Pink Floyd’s third album was a difficult and confounding affair.
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he album commonly known simply as More is the soundtrack to a bleak and little-seen Barbet Schroeder film about a German student taking heroin in Ibiza. One shouldn’t consider it to be a full-blown Floyd release: it’s more of a selection of sparse experimental soundscapes interspersed with some of the band’s most underrated songs. As befits an album with such a split personality, it really is a collection of two halves. The whimsical Victoriana and the pastoral village green couplets of the Barrett era have been consigned to the past. Rather, this has been replaced by David Gilmour’s languid guitar and equally laidback vocal tones alongside sound blends that hint at the more epic compositions yet to come.
Opener Cirrus Minor is a perfect example of this new outlook. Beginning with dense waves of birdsong, its gentle organ fades in and out as Gilmour’s lazy voice weaves around these threads in such a way that we can see the first seeds of Wish You Were Here developing deeply in its grooves. In contrast, the stark proto-metal of The Nile Song is arguably the band’s heaviest concoction in the years between Interstellar Overdrive (1967) and In The Flesh (1979). It sees the reedy whine of Cirrus Minor transformed into a deep guttural growl. The insistent fuzztone guitars and wild drummy wigouts churn out an angry furrow for the rest of the album to follow. The music then notches back to the more mellow side with the gentler, folksy Crying Song, before falling away into the mercurial jazz instrumental Up The Khyber with Rick Wright exorcising his inner keyboard noodler over a skittish carpet of exotic drum patterns. Back to more traditional fare, Green Is The Colour is a fragile, delicate number, channelling shades of Neil Young and Bread. Cymbaline continues the tone, leading us through a filmic waking nightmare with a deft touch, before Side one closer Party Sequence, a 67-second slice of incidental movie music, reminds us that, yes, we are actually listening to a soundtrack album after all.
If Side one was more about the songs, the flipside wrenches us back to the conceptual slabs of cinematic underlay that more readily populate a traditional film score. Main Theme is exactly that: a free-flowing, yet melodic piece offering a melancholic droning motif that would have set the perfect tone for this collection had it kicked off at the beginning. Indeed, from here on in it’s nothing but instrumentals, shy of the more chunky Ibiza Bar – the song that sees Gilmour barking out the vocal riffs on his only sole appearance as lead singer until A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in 1987. More Blues sees Gilmour’s roomy guitar licks suggesting again the wide open spaces his playing would offer across albums yet to come, while Side two’s centrepiece, the meandering Quicksilver, is perhaps most reminiscent of what we have come to expect of a contemporary rock soundtrack, with gentle licks weaving intricately among the many layers of sound. The album’s only true low point comes with A Spanish Piece, a hackneyed crowbarring of every 60s Spanish cliché you could imagine into just over a minute of unwelcome cringe-worthyness. Thankfully, this quickly melts into set closer Dramatic Theme, a sharper, more unsettling examination of the darker topics its attendant movie had to offer. There are few Pink Floyd fans who would pitch More among their personal top favourites, and possibly even fewer who would insist that it’s a must-own album. Despite its limitations and occasional self-indulgent excesses it is still an album of note. Not only for some of the stronger songs on offer in its first act, but also as a document of a band of the cusp of a metamorphosis from a psychedelic curio of its times into one of the most revered acts in the history of rock. The buds we first see here begin blooming into green shoots in Ummagumma later the same year, before getting more deeply fleshed out as the band crossed into the 70s. For that alone this curious offering from Pink Floyd is worth a few moments of your attention. Roy Delaney
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PHOTO: GAB ARCHIVE/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
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PINK FLOYD
By Roy Delaney
The Making Of More Although they’d dabbled in film music before, this was the Floyd’s first full commission for a soundtrack album and it gave them room to explore their new sound.
s one of the most talked about up-and-coming bands of their generation, beloved by both fans and critics alike, Pink Floyd had by 1969 also managed to crossover into the pop charts, despite the slightly complicated nature of their music. Things had been going ridiculously well for the few short years of their existence. But then disaster struck as they had to say farewell to arguably the
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March 1 1971: The band strike a group pose during an Australian tour
most bankable member of the band for his increasingly erratic behaviour. Syd Barrett was the man who for most of their listenership was Pink Floyd. What should be their next move? How should they forge the next creative chapter of their musical journey without alienating existing fans and staying true to their unique creative vision. The answer displayed a shrewdness of mind that few expected from the band: record a soundtrack album. Now while this may have been disappointing for some of their more ardent fans who wanted to hear a few more songs in the vein of Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, it was smart. This way the new line-up would get the space to be creative with their sound, without the pressure that a 60s band
would normally be under for their difficult third album. At least that was the theory and it almost worked.
A LITTLE BIT MORE
That album was More. Or to give it its grander official title, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack From The Film More. Released on 13 June 1969, it came a year after their troubled second album A Saucerful Of Secrets, and getting on for 18 months after they decided not to pick Syd up for that fateful gig in Southampton. With their new-found freedom from Syd Barrett’s unpredictability, the band clearly now had the space to work on developing their sound, and this shows throughout this occasionally disjointed but largely underrated album.
“WITH NEW-FOUND FREEDOM FROM SYD BARRETT’S UNPREDICTABILITY, THE BAND HAD SPACE TO WORK ON DEVELOPING THEIR SOUND” #01 Music Milestons 25
Pink Floyd headlining Hyde Park's now infamous free festival on July 18, 1970
“SCHROEDER FINISHED THE MOVIE AND THE BAND SIMPLY GOT THEIR HEADS DOWN AND RECORDED THE WHOLE THING IN EIGHT DAYS” Not only was this Floyd’s first full recording without Syd, but also without Norman Smith. He had produced their first two full-length albums and most of their early singles. He was also considered to be responsible for honing their psychedelic ramblings into more manageable pop sounds. The band took over the responsibility for the recording at London’s Pye Studios themselves, with help from engineer Brian Humphries. It gave Pink Floyd room to express their creative nature. It also laid them open to accusations of self-indulgence. Indeed, More often comes towards the bottom of popularity polls on their
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most favoured albums (Ummagumma being the only one to rival it at the wrong end of the table). But one should remember that, as a soundtrack, it was never intended to be a regular album full of pop songs and live favourites and, as such, it’s possibly got a raw deal as it harbours some of the band’s most underrated songs. It also showcases the beginnings of the sound that would make them one of the top-selling acts in all history.
HIDDEN GEMS
So how did it even get made? A young filmmaker called Barbet Schroeder had just finished his debut feature film. It
was a bleak drama about heroin addiction on Ibiza, and it was in need of a soundtrack. The exact timeline of what happened has often been debated, but what we do know is that Schroeder showed the finished movie to the band and they simply just got their heads down and recorded the whole thing in eight days – for which they were paid the princely sum of £600 each. But rather than the hurried, ill-planned affair that this could have produced, More holds many hugelyunderrated compositions that offered the first early clues of the way their career would unfold with this new, and
PHOTO: MICHAEL PUTLAND/GET T Y IMAGES
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MUSIC MILESTONES
PINK FLOYD
The Movie, More An obscure piece from the French new wave movement.
PHOTO: GET T Y IMAGES/STORM THORGERSON
W
hen anyone talks about Pink Floyd’s album More, they generally refer to it as, ‘that soundtrack album’. But what is the film actually about? And has anybody aside from the more ardent Floyd fan actually seen it? Well, in reality, very few people know much about this movie beyond the orange and blue image of a windmill on the album cover, however, despite its obscurity, it is a pretty watchable document that captures the spirit of its time. Coming from the tag-end of the French new wave movement, the film was the debut offering of Iranian-born director Barbet Schroeder, a man who would later go on to enjoy significant success in Hollywood. A sparse and existential film with a practically unknown cast, it follows the tale of Stefan, a young and idealistic German lad who’s just finished a maths degree. He wants to get out into the world in the free-and-easy late 60s and learn a bit about life. After bumming a lift to Paris with a trucker, he ends up losing his money in a card game at a dodgy bar and decides to commit a burglary with a new-found friend in order to collect more funds for his journey. Still in Paris, he meets a beautiful but mysterious American girl called Estelle and falls instantly in love with her. Despite many warnings from the locals who are familiar with her, he follows the beautiful Estelle to the Spanish party island of Ibiza, and his life takes a much darker turn. Here, our protagonist’s obsession with the American girl sees him becoming involved with hippy cults, Nazi drug dealers and weird, wild sex, before eventually being drawn into a spiral of drug taking that leads him onto a dangerous path of self-destruction. So, in all a cheery little tale, then, but one that a band like Pink Floyd were perfectly predisposed to write a soundtrack for.
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MUSIC MILESTONES
PHOTO: ANDREW WHIT TUCK /REDFERNS
Work on Syd’s last song, Jugband Blues, begins
SYD
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SETTING THE FOUNDATIONS
As befits a soundtrack album, the bulk of More’s grooves are taken up with instrumentals and incidentals – and these vary more wildly in quality than the songs. Main Theme does exactly what you’d expect, underlaying the film’s opening scenes of sunshine and clouds quite exquisitely, while the album’s centrepiece Quicksilver clocks in at over seven minutes of
“[MORE IS] A COLLECTION OF SONGS THAT DISPLAY THE WORKINGS OF A TRAUMATISED BAND” experimental soundscapes and long, rumbling layers of gentle noise. But for every Quicksilver there’s unfortunately an ill-pitched A Spanish Piece, an incongruously jazzy Up The Khyber or a bongo-fuelled Party Sequence, all which may fit well within the confines of a movie, but sit very strangely when confined to two short sides of vinyl. This is all the more bewildering when you actually see Barbet Schroeder’s intriguing debut film and discover that two rather cracking numbers have, in fact, been left off this disc: the light and poppy Seabirds and the organ-heavy chug down of Hollywood. Ultimately, though, ours is not to question why Pink Floyd chose the pieces that they did for this
26 T he J A N U to b AR gig pick and d Y 196 i n S up S e c i d 8 ou t yd e n ham f o r o t pto a n
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The changing of the guard
longest surviving song from this collection in their live set, it was perhaps more famously covered by Hawkwind on their debut album a year later. Crying Song, on the other hand, is a more amiable plinky plonk, with soft guitar plucking and relaxed vocals, while the gentle Green Is The Colour reads like a blueprint for three quarters of the career of Welsh mountain randomists, Super Furry Animals.
CH Dav R I S T M b a n id G A S d a ilm 1 9 6 s g our 7 u i t a as r c o ked 12 J v e r t o jo A f o r in t Pin NU A S yd he k g i g F lo R Y 1 a y 9 d s 20 a ’s 68 Pin JANU five-p first g i g k F lo A R Y i e c e as yd’ 196 a f i s la 8 ve - s t pi e ce
(at this point) less troubled line-up. Indeed, there are many little heard and even near-to-lost gems that came out of this project, songs that you should take the time in tracking down if you’ve never previously had the pleasure of hearing them. Songs like Cirrus Minor, which despite opening this selection comes from deep within the film that inspired it. A tripped-out swirl of organs and birdsong, it acts as the sunshine comedown to the insistent rush of Set The Controls To The Heart Of The Sun from their previous album. You can see already their DNA shifting from the Barrett years, with David Gilmour’s mumbling burr in stark contrast with Syd’s more precise psychedelic gent persona. This was, of course, the new boy’s first album as the sole vocalist, a feat he’d not achieve again until Roger Waters finally left the band in the 80s, and you How Pink Floyd moved from Barrett can sense him trying out different to Gilmour in just under two years styles and voices throughout. This is most notable with the brace of beefier tunes here: the stomping 7 Ga t e s 6 19 shuffle of The Nile Song and the more S T At T h e s e d U G er l e a beatsy wigout of Ibiza Bar. Both songs U 5 A e Pip n re display a much more stark and rocky T h f Daw edge to the band, but here Gilmour O shows more aptitude at spitting out an angry couplet, and it makes you wonder what very different kind of band Pink Floyd could have become had they chosen to follow this considerably more aggressive proto-metal furrow rather 7 AUGUST 1967 than the more spacious and Work on A Saucerful laid back sound that they became famous for. Of Secrets begins But this album carries a little of something for all flavours of Floyd fans. Cymbaline is perhaps the most traditional song of the album’s collection, exploring the story of the film’s hero as he embarked upon his first pot 19 OCTOBER 1967 smoking experience. The
PHOTO: RALPH GAT TI/GET T Y IMAGES
PINK FLOYD
The Director Meet Iranian-born director Barbet Schroeder – the creative force behind this curious film.
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Measures and the creepy home invasion classic Single White Female. He was also the guest director for the episode of Mad Men that dealt with the Kennedy assassination. And if you still don’t recognise him, one of his many cameos as an actor saw him play the President of France in Mars Attacks!.
Wish You Were Here – or at least not in the form that we know them. And for that More is a much more important and fascinating piece of work than you may first give it credit for and it commands a level of respect beyond its immediate musical impact.
1F Pin EBRUA r e c k F lo R Y ord yd 196 ing beg 9 in
More may not get the plaudits and the gushing reviews of the albums that proceeded and followed it, but it could be argued that without this album, which gave them space to experiment with a new way of working, there would be no Dark Side Of The Moon or
6A S y d P RIL off ’s d 196 ic i a e p 8 lly artu ann r e oun ced
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selection, and just enjoy this difficult third album for what it is: a highly diverse collection of songs and noodlings that display a traumatised band showing us their workings as they decide what they want to be from here on in.
Floyd continued into his second, La Vallée, whose soundtrack is better known as the album Obscured By Clouds. But it was his move to Hollywood that made his name internationally. After making a documentary about the American writer Charles Bukowski, he turned the subject’s life into the award-winning drama Barfly. From here he was responsible for a string of box office hits, including Reversal Of Fortune, Desperate
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13 T h e JUNE 196 alb 9 um r ele s o u ase n d t r d in a c k t he UK
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lthough his name might not be immediately familiar, More’s director, Barbet Schroeder is the man behind a plethora of Hollywood blockbusters that you will be much more familiar with, including Barfly. Born in Tehran to Swiss and German parents, he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at the age of 23 he formed a movie production company. More was his first film as director, in 1969, and his connection with Pink
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20 JULY 1969 Pink Floyd play live TV soundtrack to the Apollo 11 moon landing
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Studio Birmingham Mothers Club, Manchester College of Commerce, Abbey Road Studios Producer Pink Floyd, Norman Smith Released 1969
Ummagumma
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rom our 21st century perspective, we all know how it ends: Roger Waters gets too powerful. He wants to conceive the work, write the words, compose the music and sing all the songs. Eventually, he gets his way. The record comes out, people buy it, it’s a hit but the band implodes. Except that hasn’t happened yet. This isn’t 1981, this is 1969 and this is not The Wall - this is Floyd’s fourth album, Ummagumma. Pink Floyd’s first double album, proved extremely popular at the time, partly because it offered a live and a studio record in one helping. Kicking off with Disc 1 (the concert album) you get what you expect: four tracks from four hippyish prog rockers who never met an eight-minute song they didn’t like. Even Syd Barrett’s Astronomy Domine, a mere four minutes under their erstwhile leader, gets stretched to double its length at Birmingham’s Mothers Club – and boy does it work. Syd Barrett may have had the ideas, but in the hands of Gilmour et al, it comes alive, a Pink Floyd song for the next incarnation of the band.
Careful With That Axe, Eugene is a four-way composition that smacks of a band pulling in the same direction, as does the near 13-minute A Saucerful Of Secrets. Tellingly, Waters’ Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, from Manchester’s College of Commerce, is just as well rendered. The second disc is where things start to get experimental. The concept behind Ummagumma is that each member creates a quarter of an album, an idea that came from Richard Wright. Maybe with old leader Syd Barrett gone, Wright wanted to audition for the vacancy. Fittingly, he starts the process with Sysyphus Parts 1-4. In Sysyphus Part 1 just about every encounter Dr Who’s Patrick Troughton or Jon Pertwee ever had with an alien is soundtracked by the brass stabs and timpani booms that Wright serves up with the first of this four-part offering. Wright has emptied the BBC Radiophonic Workshop using buzzing symbols that give way briefly to the sound of a drunk organist slumped over his keys as monkeys run riot in the orchestra pit. Thankfully, it does settle down to
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something of a whimsical keyboard melody. Part II is the only one of the quartet that starts out as anything other than challenging, but then discordance returns with Part III. Does it stand the test of time? Sadly not. Next cab off the rank is Waters. Ever an acolyte of the say-what-you-see style of songwriting, the first of his two pieces is named after local Cambridge haunt Grantchester Meadows. Despite the looped call of skylarks and the occasional honk of goose, this acoustic Watersaccompanying-Waters song is well, frankly, good. Yes, it’s a pastoral postcard of sorts, but it has depth. And guitars, unlike synth effects, never get old. If you’ve ever wondered what Roger Waters sounds like shorn of ideas then I present his next track, Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict. Percy Edwards-style bird and animal impersonations would not these days, one suspects, a modern band’s serious attempts at longevity make (Radiohead notwithstanding). Listen out around the four-minute mark and you’ll hear Waters say, at half speed, ‘That was pretty avant-garde, wasn’t it?’. Which pretty much says it all. David Gilmour’s moment in the spotlight arrives on The Narrow Way – a dovetailing of three songs stitched together. Part I resembles an acoustic song previously called Baby Blue Shuffle In D Minor, which pretty much sums up its sound. Less instrumental and more unfinished to these ears, it’s crying out for a lyric. The mid section goes electric, vaguely sinister in grizzled tone and motif, while it’s only the finale that introduces a vocal – well several actually with David Gilmour harmonising with himself. Why not? He does everything else. Which leaves Nick Mason – and his wife – to wrap up proceedings with The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party. His drums, her flute, what could go right? Split into three parts it’s less prog rock than am dram. Jeff Hudson
PHOTO: PINK FLOYD MUSIC LTD
UMMAGUMMA
Pink Floyd re-emerge with an experimental album divided into four sections.
PINK FLOYD Album promotional shoot, featuring the band relaxing in Kew Gardens, London
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UMMAGUMMA
MUSIC MILESTONES
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PINK FLOYD
By Will Simpson
Band Of Four With Syd Barrett now firmly planted in the band’s past, the quartet dip their toe into the world of avant garde with each band member composing their own section of the album.
n retrospect, the patience of major record labels in the late 1960s seems astounding. At the beginning of 1969 Pink Floyd had just come off the back of a year in which they had lost their frontman and chief songwriter. Their last album hadn’t done as well as their debut and their last three singles had flopped. Somehow, though, they were not only commissioned to write a film soundtrack, but EMI allowed the band to release a double album. That soundtrack was More, a stop-gap release that at least scratched a creative itch that Roger Waters had to move into movie soundtracks. The double album, Ummagumma, proved to be an important staging post in the band’s career. It’s where the group
PHOTO: ULLSTEIN BILD/GET T Y IMAGES
I
realise that their strength lies in the longer multi-part music that had always been the highlight of their live show. After the failure of Point Me At The Sky in late 1968 there would be no more attempts to write succinct three-minute singles to compete in the pop charts. Instead, Floyd begin to stretch out and, on this album at least, indulge themselves, both individually and as a group. What Ummagumma isn’t is a band album. Rather, its studio half is a collection of solo tracks collected under the Floyd banner. A thoroughly 21st-century concept: the hip-hop outfit Outkast notoriously went one step further and released two solo albums in one package under their band name.
“UMMAGUMMA ISN’T A BAND ALBUM. RATHER, IT’S A COLLECTION OF SOLO TRACKS UNDER THE FLOYD BANNER” #01 Music Milestones 33
MUSIC MILESTONES Dave Gilmour and Nick Mason at the Falkoner Teatret in Copenhagen, November 1970
UMMAGUMMA
“[UMMAGUMMA] WAS THE PRODUCT OF CHAOS... A NOTION OF FORGING NEW FRONTIERS” Peter Mew
PHOTO: JORGEN ANGEL/GET T YIMAGES
NEW FRONTIER
Roger Waters rocks the stage in Copenhagen, 1970
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No-one seems to be able to recall why Ummagumma ended up being made in this manner. EMI engineer Peter Mew remembers the four-way split – with each member contributing half a side each as, “the product of chaos, of not quite knowing what to do. (There was) a sense on one hand of, ‘Oh God’ and on the other of excitement, a notion of forging new frontiers”. Mew recalls the group turning up in the studio at the beginning of recording and Norman Smith asking if they had any new songs. When the group replied in the negative, the solo gambit was agreed upon. Considering that they no longer possessed a chief songwriter, it seemed a reasonable enough modus operandi. Rick Wright was the most enthusiastic about the idea, at least according to Mason in his 2005 memoir and he managed to deliver his contribution Sysyphus before the end of January 1969. The keyboardist later dismissed the four-part piano concerto as “pretentious”. Certainly, its combination of modern classical-style discord and gentle meandering made more sense at a time when rock’s scope for expansion seemed limitless. Similar self indulgence could be detected in Mason’s own track, The
Grand Vizier’s Garden Party. Another multi-part composition, his section is, not surprisingly, percussion and effects-heavy. His wife, Lindy, contributed flute and Norman Smith helped with the woodwind arrangements. Mason remembers that even at this stage Floyd weren’t trusted entirely by EMI – the studio manager reprimanded the drummer for editing his own tapes. Waters ended up completing two tracks. Grantchester Meadows is for many the highlight of the album, a pastoral evocation of the titular area in Cambridge complete with birdsong, buzzing flies and splashing geese. But the baffling Several Species Of Small Furry Animal Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict is a one-note joke that quickly wears thin, even if it did show off purchasers’ stereo systems quite superbly. At the time Waters described it as “a bit of concrete poetry. The sounds on that that I made – the voice and hand slapping – were all human-generated. No musical instruments”. ‘Pretty avant garde’ it may have been in 1969, but its Pythonesque humour, frankly, hasn’t dated well. David Gilmour was the one who had the most difficulty with his section. A full member for less than a year, at this stage he had little or no compositional experience. By the early 80s he had all but disowned his track, The Narrow Way, saying in an 1983 interview: “We’d decided to make the damn album and each of us had to do a piece of music on our own... It was just desperation really, trying to think of something to do. I’d never written anything before, I just went into a studio and started waffling about, tacking bits and pieces together.” When Gilmour phoned up Waters to ask for help writing lyrics, the bassist turned him down, an early sign of the conflict that would ultimately prove ruinous for the pair’s relationship. Nevertheless, the album was delivered by the summer and scheduled for an autumn release. It was only around this time that the idea came about to convert it into a double. Floyd’s management were nervous that fans might feel ripped off by four solo pieces rather a band album proper, which prompted discussion within the group of the possibility of putting together a single track that they could all work on together. In the end the easier option of tacking a live album onto the new studio album was taken. If nothing else, it was a good way of putting out live favourite Careful With That Axe Eugene, a group composition that they hadn’t got around to
PINK FLOYD
Portrait Of A Band Pink Floyd step out of the box with new, portrait-style approach to the album cover.
U
mmagumma was not the first Pink Floyd album Hipgnosis had worked on, but it was the first time they produced the sort of striking image with which they – and the band – would soon become synonymous with. Coincidentally, it also marks the last time a band group shot could be seen on the cover of a Floyd record. Although it’s hardly a conventional portrait. Indeed before his passing in 2013, Storm
Thorgerson considered if as “not really a portrait at all. It’s about infinite regression”. For the designer, the cover “served to illustrate the idea that Floyd music was multi-layered and more intricate than most”. Adding: “I didn’t like this record much”. Storm and his then-girlfriend Libby January were talking about the band’s music and the layers they found in their albums; how they only made sense on their
third, fourth or fifth listen. January then compared this with “infinite regression line drawings that psychologists use”, which set Storm thinking. The idea was formulated to shoot the band several times in similar positions but with the members switched, which when one was hung on the wall would provide a droste effect. The band decided to shoot the cover at January’s father’s country house at
Great Shelford, a suburb of Cambridge. The band already knew it well, having played in the garden shown on the cover at a 21st birthday party thrown for Libby back in 1965. Back when they were still known as The Tea Set and were supported by both David Gilmour’s band Joker’s Wild and an obscure young US folk singer called Paul Simon. A lot had happened to the band in the intervening four years.
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Careful With That Axe, Eugene
Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin pose during filming for Zabriskie Point, circa 1970
The hypnotic track that set the stall for a future sound.
“IT WAS FUN TO MAKE... [BUT] THE PARTS WERE NOT AS GREAT AS THE SUM” Nick Mason recording yet. An eight-minute version of Astronomy Domine was also included – a nod to their first album and a way to keep royalties ticking over for their beleaguered former leader, Syd Barrett. Two shows at Birmingham Mother’s Club and Manchester College of Commerce, were recorded with a view for release. Neither proved wholly satisfactory and so the live half of Ummagumma is a composite of both performances. Even then the vocals for A Saucerful Of Secrets were not deemed of sufficient quality and had to be redone in the studio.
A DISPARATE ALBUM
In retrospect it all sounds like a bit of a fudge, the very opposite of the carefully-crafted, painstakingly thought-out concept albums they would become known for. Indeed Ummagumma has never had a very
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high reputation, not least among the band themselves. “I don’t think we were very taken with it,” wrote Nick Mason. “It was fun to make and a useful exercise, the individuals’ sections proving to my mind that the parts were not as great as the sum.” Roger Waters wasn’t overjoyed by it either and suggested that the group’s decision not to play each other’s contributions until they had all been finished had backfired: “It would have been better if we’d gone away and then done the things, come back together and discussed it. I don’t think it’s good to work in total isolation.” But Floyd were not yet in the privileged position where they could simply junk an entire album and start again. They had to release it, however unhappy they were. As it happened, trends were moving in their direction. The years of patiently building up a following through their live work was beginning
to pay off. Despite EMI’s (and the band’s) reservations about the whole project, Ummagumma sold well on release, reaching No 5 in the UK album charts in November 1969 - four places higher than A Saucerful Of Secrets. An audience was growing for the sort of longer form experimental rock Ummagumma was emblematic of. Reviews were by and large warm. Record Mirror described it as, “a truly great progressive rock album” and as the next decade unfolded, Floyd would go on to become inextricably linked in the public mind with that phrase. Coincidentally, Ummagumma is also the first Floyd album to be released on Harvest, the EMI subsidiary that was founded to provide a home for more experimental album-orientated music covered by that umbrella term ‘progressive’. (Interestingly, one of the figures that helped launch it was Pink Floyd’s ex-manager Peter Jenner). Ummagumma is Floyd’s bestforgotten album. They got away with it, but it had revealed that working in isolation hadn’t really worked for the band. Their next few albums would be all true team efforts, and would be all the better for it.
PHOTO: HULTON ARCHIVE/GET T Y IMAGES
UMMAGUMMA
O
The live version on Ummagumma is probably the best known and is suitably blood-curdling with Roger Waters screaming and Dave Gilmour unleashing the sort of squealing solo his name would one day be synonymous with. It was re-recorded again in 1970 for the soundtrack to Zabriskie Point, for which it was retitled Come In Number 51 Your Time Is Up, a reference to a sketch on Spike Milligan’s Q5 TV programme. In all its incarnations, it’s a deliciously creepy listen, and its inclusion undoubtedly strengthened Ummagumma.
ne of the highlights of the Floyd set in ’68-’69 was this largely instrumental track, which in its hypnotic way set the stall for the music that would become a hallmark of the band’s work in the 1970s. They had first started working on it in early 1968 after Barrett’s departure as Keep Smiling People. By the time they recorded it for a John Peel session it was Murderistic Woman. Eventually, it turned up on the B-side of their 1968 single Point Me At The Sky. When that flopped the studio version attained the status of a rarity.
PINK FLOYD
Studio Abbey Road, London Producer Pink Floyd, Norman Smith Released 1970
Atom Heart Mother ATOM HEART MOTHER
This hard-to-place album played an important role in Floyd’s musical journey.
A
tom Heart Mother is sometimes written off as the Pink Floyd bandwagon swerving into a dead end street. The record can annoy those enamoured with straight-line musical journeys (Rubber Soul begets Revolver begets Sgt Pepper), thinking bands should follow a bendless road, with albums sitting right alongside it like motorway service stations. Based on David Gilmour’s take on some chord sequences from the Magnificent Seven’s soundtrack, what would become AHM’s title track had often been performed in concert. But while it was fine for sating a stoned audience, it hadn’t the melodic meat required for a major recording, and the band couldn’t work out how to progress it. Stressed out by touring and album deadline demands, Floyd handed over the title track to composer-arranger Ron Geesin to beef up, with vague instructions about orchestras. The upshot was the recording of an almost 24-minute track incorporating 10 horns, 20 voices and a solo cello, as well as the Floyd themselves. The work ranges from the sublime to the cacophonous. One suspects that the album’s theoretical producer, Norman ‘Hurricane’ Smith, would have clamped down on this self-indulgence. But the band, in their first real burst of control-freakery, kept him completely sidelined. For hefty chunks of ATM, the rock stars are playing as a backing band for the session musicians, which turns the era’s ‘pomp rock’ signature pose on its head. But surprisingly Geesin’s orchestral and choral segments hang together well. Identifiable themes come and go, and are sometimes rinsed and repeated. And when they’re to the fore, the band as the band (rather than ‘avant garde’ producers) are in good form too. Gilmour caresses his (now legendary) black Strat for the first time on record, while Wright unveils his new Hammond and gets friendly with a Mellotron. Arguably in sore need of a three-minute trim, it’s admittedly flawed, but not fatally so. Many Floyd fans (including this writer) pursue a cautious love affair with it. Opening Side two of the original LP, Roger Waters’ If is very reminiscent, in mood, of his main contribution to
Ummagumma. Folky acoustic guitar, sotto vocals and restrained backing, including some sweet electric almostsolos from Gilmour. Lyrically, it’s another matter – Grantchester Meadows’ rustic idyll images have given way to soul-searching and intimations of feared insanity. Rick Wright’s Summer ’68 continues the mood, at least momentarily; gentle piano and voice giving way to a distorted vocal rant of, ‘How do you feel?’ replete with beat-y pop and Beach Boys harmonies, after which a horn section blasts in like the showdown theme from a spaghetti western. Lyrically, the song’s crass, but musically it’s rather exciting. David Gilmour’s Fat Old Sun resets the mood, distant church bells heralding pastoral lyrics. More understated vocals, acoustic guitar and discreet backing before opening the throttle a half-twist to support a heartier electric solo. The experimental Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast is credited to the whole group, but it was mostly Nick Mason. It stitches together and overlays three instrumental sections with the sound of someone making a fried breakfast, and snatches of speech from roadie Alan Styles. The group were clearly pleased with it though some critics might argue that it’s less a roadie’s breakfast than a dog’s dinner.
AHM would not put Floyd off 20-minute-plus epics: within six months they had written Echoes. The incorporation of ‘found’ and collected elements (especially the sound effects and conversations) would re-emerge on Dark Side and Wish. And the three actual songs on AHM would hold their own on most Floyd albums. Waters continued performing If for decades, as did Gilmour with his favourite, Fat Old Sun. Although given zero stars (zero!) by Rolling Stone, Floyd’s first UK No 1 was certainly not a dead end, even though it may not satisfy those compulsively tidy ‘motorway service station’ catalogue fetishists. Martyn Lester
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MUSIC MILESTONES
By Martyn Lester
ATOM HEART MOTHER
Heart Of The Matter Fractious horn players, a Dadaist collaborator and the Workers Revolutionary Party – just a few of the elements involved in the convoluted creation of one of Floyd’s most impenetrable albums.
ink Floyd were an odd band in many ways. Among their idiosyncrasies was their fairly frequent habit of touring material and putting it on record later. Some groups of the era would, of course, pack their first album with songs they’d been performing in pubs, clubs and rainy fields while waiting to be ‘discovered’. But after that, most would ‘lay down’ an album and then tour to promote it. Floyd liked to try out new material on tour, fiddle with it in studio sessions, take it back on the road, hone it onstage and finally turn it into an album track. This gestation process was visible at its most elephantine in 1974 when the group regularly played two songs that would not appear on disc until Animals, three years later. Ditto, Side one of Atom Heart Mother also began life in this fashion.
P
‘THE EPIC’
Before we move forwards, a caveat. Although AHM is one of five Floyd
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albums to have the same name as one of its components, it’s the only one where they are regularly discussed at cross-purposes. So to avoid such confusion, we’ll be referring to one as ‘the album’ and the other as The Epic – for reasons which will all become clearer. Floyd began performing The Epic at least as early as January 1970 – usually introducing it as The Amazing Pudding. In March of that year, the group took the piece into studio sessions and laid down a rhythm track with the odd organ overdub and a couple of guitar solos. Pretty soon, though, they reached an impasse. While EMI were breathing down their necks to cut an album, they were also booked to tour the US in April, record soundtrack
pieces for the Antonioni movie Zabriskie Point, help Syd Barrett with a solo album… The solution, they decided, was to call in Ron Geesin. Geesin was an eccentric. Raised in Scotland by three-quarters English parents, Geesin never seems to have felt that he fitted in. He learned harmonica, then banjo and then, like the boy who ran away to the circus, he fled south as the hired-on-the-spot new pianist in a travelling jazz band that just happened to be passing through town. After four years with the Original Downtown Syncopators, Geesin had by 1968 transformed into an at least partly Dadaist one-man show, appearing on a number of bills with the Pink Floyd but
“FLOYD BEGAN PERFORMING THE EPIC AS EARLY AS JANUARY 1970, INTRODUCING IT AS THE AMAZING PUDDING”
PHOTO: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GET T Y IMAGES
PINK FLOYD
Pink Floyd in 1970 welcoming in a new decade with a new album, Atom Heart Mother
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Here Is The Moos
ATOM HEART MOTHER
A few interesting tidbits about Atom Heart Mother, from concept to cover and beyond...
WHAT'S IN A NAME? Pink Floyd recorded an ‘inconcert’ version of their new epic for the BBC in advance of the album’s completion. When John Peel asked for a title, Waters looked through Peel’s copy of the London Evening Standard in the hope that a ‘found’ title would emerge. The headline ‘Atom Heart Mother Named’ topped a story about a woman from Barnet who had become the first person in Britain to receive a plutonium-238 pacemaker.
COVER CONCEPT Like the album’s title, its cover was regarded at the time as enigmatic. In reality, there was nothing terribly deep about it. Storm Thorgerson
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of Hipgnosis thought it would be amusing to do a “non-cover”. Of three “dry, meaningless” concepts that he pitched to the band they liked the idea of a picture of a cow the best. They thought it was funny. He drove out of London to the first field that he could find with cows in it, shot two rolls of 120 film, and that was it.
SIX-PIECE SUITE Similarly intriguing for fans were the individually-titled movements of the main ‘suite’. But once again, there was no hidden meaning. Although structured for recording purposes into 16 sections, the piece was never conceived as a suite, just an album side. According to Ron Geesin, the
‘movements’ were a fabrication arrived at to mitigate a contractual loophole. If the piece had simply been named Atom Heart Mother, it would have earned royalties in the US as a single song.
SESSION CREDITS Although ‘John Alldis Choir’ was name-checked as a ‘Special thanks to’ contributor, the only mention of major contributor Ron Geesin on the album packaging or label is in the ‘(Mason, Gilmour, Waters, Wright & Geesin)’ songwriter credit. As was normal, the orchestral session musicians were uncredited, though some would say this is a touch unfair on cellist Haflioi Hallgrímsson. The Icelander worked with several
notable orchestras before turning full-time composer in the early 1980s. He lives in Bath.
ELECTRICONICS WIZARD Peter Bown was the sound engineer on the album. Although almost unknown outside the industry he was something of a legend within it. Bown’s first contact with Pink Floyd was on 27 March 1967 when he was called back in to Abbey Road for a midnight session with an ‘underground group’ that producer Norman Smith was struggling to record. As Bown arrived, the Floyd were running through Interstellar Overdrive. “By Christ, it was loud!” he said. They burned out four microphones during the session.
PINK FLOYD
PHOTO: HANS-JURGEN DIBBERT/GET T Y IMAGES
Wright, Gilmour and Mason being interviewed backstage whilst on tour in Germany
“NICK MASON TURNED UP OUT OF THE BLUE AT GEESIN’S FLAT... SO THAT HE COULD MEET A ‘REAL NUTTER’” never meeting them. In 1968, he was gigging, composing, recording (John Peel plugged his homemade album), working on a TV advertisement and documentary music, and even making location recordings for the BBC. In short, he was doing a lot of things. Many of them unusual. It was also the year that Nick Mason turned up out of the blue at Geesin’s flat, having been given the address by a mutual friend. Geesin remains unsure whether this was because it was supposed they might have something in common, or so that Mason could “meet a real nutter!” Either way, something must have sparked. The Geesins became part of the Masons’ social circle, soon meeting the Wrights and the Waters. Ron and Roger seem to have rubbed along particularly well, regularly playing golf together. Soon,
the two were collaborating on the soundtrack to a documentary about the human body that was, in effect, being made (rather oddly!) by the Workers Revolutionary Party. This, in a nutshell, is how threequarters of Floyd (Gilmour hadn’t met Geesin) came to entrust the progress of half of their next album to a multitalented absurdist. They explained to Geesin what they wanted. If we summarise this brief as: ‘About 25 minutes… something big… with a choir… and some orchestra’ we are probably not missing much in the way of vital details. Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke subsequently tightened the parameters a touch. “Yes, big, but not too big – we’re on a limited budget here!” It was therefore agreed that Geesin would restrict his scores to 10 brass
instruments, a solo cello and a choir of 20. EMI handed over the tapes of the basic work that the band had done on 2, 3, 4 and 24 March, and Geesin was away. At this stage, the work had no name. Abbey Road was logging its progress as “untitled epic” and all that was written on the tape canisters that Geesin received was ‘Epic’ , so that’s what he wrote at the top of his score: ‘Pink Floyd Epic’. His first job was to analyse what was already there, and decide which sections should be moved or repeated further on in the piece. He ended up with seven core sections which, when reprises and re-entries were mapped in, became 16 in total – some orchestral, some choral, some Pink Floyd and some combinations of two or all three. Next, he had to compose the orchestral and
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Road Test In keeping with a number of Pink Floyd albums, the material was first debuted live before a note was even recorded.
ATOM HEART MOTHER
T
he first historical record of a performance of what would eventually become know as Atom Heart Mother was on Saturday 17 January 1970 at Hull University, with further airings on the following two nights in Croydon and Brighton. Before the end of the month, the piece would enjoy its French debut – the beginning of a decades-long national affair with La Vache Atomique. The first audience of French fans to hear the nascent work was at the celebrated Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 23 January 1970. The Royal Albert Hall hosted the next British performance on 7 February. Manchester Opera House followed the next night with at least four more live shows before the band hopped into Abbey Road Studios and started playing with it in the studio over three days at the start of March. Further performances in England, West Germany, Scandinavia and the US followed. By the time Floyd started earnest studio work on the new album on 10 June, they had already performed the
“EMI INSISTED ON USING PLAYERS FROM AN IN-HOUSE ROSTER. FRICTION ENSUED... IT ALMOST CAME DOWN TO A FIST FIGHT”
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(Left): Rick Wright at the Falkoner Teatret, Copenhagen in 1970; (Right) David Gilmour at the Hyde Park Free Concert in July 1970
choral parts, and get copies of the score produced (a scenario even more fraught with problems than one would first imagine). Once it was taken into the studio, life was even less simple. Rather than the horn players Geesin had hoped to work with, EMI insisted on using players from a sort of in-house roster. Friction ensued, which was exacerbated by 1970 style trade union practices. It almost came down to a fist fight, with Geesin having to absent himself from the studio while the choir conductor took charge.
PINK FLOYD group-only version of the new work about 30 times. If anything, the new orchestral and choral elements added by Ron Geesin only increased the band’s appetite for performing it live. They took a brass section and choir to the Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music on 27 June, and again for a concert at the BBC’s Paris Cinema in London on 16 July. It was here that the piece finally received its name. The newly-dubbed Atom Heart Mother – brass, choir and all – was rolled out again for a free concert in Hyde Park two days later, and once more on 12 September in front of a festival crowd of 500,000 in Paris. Half a million! That’s Woodstock plus 25 per cent. During a tour of the US beginning in the same month, Floyd also put on full-blown performances in New York and San Francisco. By this time, the band had embarked on a year-long spell in which recordings for the next album, Meddle, were interspersed with dozens of gigs. Selected performances, which featured choir and orchestra included Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Sheffield, London, Münster,
embarked on their next stint of North American touring in October, the band had decided enough was enough, and settled back into performing as a four piece. This wasn’t the end of the line for the orchestrated AHM, though. If the band were fed up with it, the world hadn’t quite had its fill. Through the 70s, 80s and 90s, Ron Geesin would sporadically receive requests for the score from conductors planning their own performances, and if anything, the turn of the century gave the work a new lease of life. Increasing demand led to Geesin having the score digitised, as he couldn’t keep up with making copies. Performances in Lyon in 2002 featured a choir of 200. Geesin also worked on a revised and extended version for a 2008 Chelsea Festival evening of his work. Surprisingly, David Gilmour (who had gone through a phase of seeming to hate the piece) decided to play the guitar parts for one of the two performances. Astonishingly, the board for the 2012 Baccaleauréat decided to make Atom Heart Mother one of its three set works
There was also a rather drawn-out problem causing some rather significant issues. The brass players (this time through no fault of their own) simply couldn’t come to grips with one section of the score. After much head scratching, it was eventually worked out that, in the original studio takes, Nick Mason had started the section by skipping the first beat of the opening bar and coming in on the second. This meant that Geesin’s transcription was astray, and (in essence) the band and the horns were playing from scores that had their
for study in the music module, alongside Bach’s Mass in B Minor and Dalbavie’s Colors. AHM had finally become academic! In honour of this accolade, Radio France organised and broadcast a special concert performance at the Théâtre du Chatelet. A film was also made for students to access online. Since 2014, the full concert video has also been available in HD on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than a quarter of a million times. It’s well worth watching, too.
bar markings offset by one beat from each other.
For Atom Heart Mother obsessives, Ron Geesin’s comprehensive account of The Epic, from its birth to its celebration in French academic circles more than four decades later, is endlessly fascinating. Though necessarily a one-sided story, it rings pretty true. Nick Mason penned a genial foreword in which, while not actually pleading guilty, he does imply that, well, maybe the band had been a bit difficult to work with. For Ron Geesin’s account of the collaboration, his book The Flaming Cow makes an intriguing read.
BIRTH OF THE MOTHER
By the time the band had added their overdubs and ‘composed’ the vacant experimental section and The Epic was in the can, Geesin was just glad it was all over. He never felt that the recording was anything near as good as he would have liked it to have been. Pink Floyd seemed, however, to be delighted. Over the years, the two would each end up switching to opposite opinions of the suite.
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(INSETS FROM LEFT) JORGEN ANGEL; MICHAEL PUTLAND/GET T Y IMAGES
Sound and vision: Pink Floyd onstage in 1970
Hamburg, Offenbach, Lyon and Villach. Perhaps wisely, they decided to forego the bells and whistles for the Japanese and Australian legs of the tour, bringing them back for a festival in Montreux. There are intrinsic difficulties in staging full performances of Atom Heart Mother on tour. Even within one country, two performances might end up featuring entirely different horn and choir sections of varying quality, and always unfamiliar with the work. By the time Floyd
PHOTO: (MAIN) LARRY HULST/GET T Y IMAGES
“BY THE TIME FLOYD STARTED ON THE NEW ALBUM ON, THEY HAD ALREADY PERFORMED THE GROUP-ONLY VERSION 30 TIMES”
MUSIC MILESTONES
Studio AIR Studios, Abbey Road, Morgan Studios Producer Pink Floyd Released 1971
Meddle
F
or a band blessed with such riches in the vocals department, it’s interesting that Floyd were never afraid to go the instrumental route. And so it is with Meddle’s opener, One Of These Days. Credited to all four members, David Gilmour, has said that he considers it to be one of the band’s greatest collaborative achievements – possibly because it’s not dominated by Roger Waters’ lyrics. Whether this is a statement driven by bitter memories or not, there’s undoubtedly a fluidity and confidence to the track. And it’s packed with ideas. Certainly the song draws on every available resource, and then the band adds in some more. Special effects weather turbulence blends into Roger Waters’ bass, which begets an eager synthesizer rhythm. Sci-fi fans will be encouraged to note that this features more than just a soupçon of the Time Lord with the song’s sample of the Doctor Who theme.
Officially, One Of These Days is an ‘instrumental’ yet listen closely around the 3:40 mark and you’ll hear the distorted tones of Nick Mason exhorting, ‘One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces’. Nice it certainly isn’t, but it remains the only vocal credit this particular drummer has ever received.
Meddle boasts a neat little segue from One Of These Days to A Pillow Of Winds a hint towards the fact that Floyd are gaining confidence in how to construct their albums, rather than just putting a collection of songs out there. Nevertheless, A Pillow Of Winds is baffling, both musically and for those interested in nomenclature. Mason says the title came from on a tour-long infatuation with Chinese board game mahjong. More of a head-scratcher, however, is the discovery of an acoustic love song making an appearance in a Floyd album. What’s the hidden agenda? Forty-five years later we still don’t know. Did this pretty song really come from the tortured minds of Waters and Gilmour? With Fearless, we’re back on familiar territory as the band build their own wall of sound with guitars and vocals providing the scaffolding. But just when you think you’re on
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safe ground, Fearless lurches into a sample of You’ll Never Walk Alone – the anthem sung by the thousands who pack out Liverpool FC’s Kop every home game: fearless indeed. If there’s one thing the world rarely sees, it’s a happy Roger Waters. Based on San Tropez, it’s not a thing we ever need to see – or hear – again. A man known for his close association with emotional turmoil, when Waters is conflicted he produces his best work. Where’s the danger in this breezy slice of summer jazz? Where’s the injustice? The misanthropy? Imagine receiving a postcard from your grumpy uncle at his favourite holiday resort and looking for the hidden sarcasm in the message – and finding none. That is San Tropez. All good bands have rivalries at their heart. Don Henley and Glenn Frey, Mick Jones versus Joe Strummer, Dave versus Ray. With Gilmour and Waters the acrimony could work in their favour. On a good day Gilmour sees Waters achieve something and wants to top it. On a bad day apparently he simply emulates it. Side one of Meddle ends with, literally, a dog of a track. Seamus, named after a collie belonging to The Small Faces’ Steve Marriott, is Gilmour’s take on a bluegrass original. Accompanying yaps from the dog in question permeate the track but Gilmour’s thoughtful slide guitar is all that fixes it in the memory. Side two of this troublesome album is dedicated entirely to the 23:29 long track, Echoes. After the mish-mash of Side one, this has purpose; a journey it wishes to undertake. Despite being partly improvised, nothing about Echoes feels accidental or thrown in for luck, or bombast. From the opening affected piano ‘pings’ to their mirrored refrains nearly 24 minutes later, there is a structure in place, three measured sections, each adding to the whole. Even the accidents – like Gilmour plugging in his wah-wah back to front for the middle solo – produce results that sing. Gilmour’s vocals too take on a new richness as the melody builds, before descending – setting the scene for greater, darker things to come. Jeff Hudson
PHOTO: BERNARD ALLEMANE / INA VIA GET T Y IMAGES
MEDDLE
Psychedelic blues rock, a hint of jazz, Water’s ‘happy’ moment and a song dedicated to a dog.
PINK FLOYD David Gilmour during a concert given by Pink Floyd on June 16th, 1971 at the Royaumont Abbey, France
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Pink Floyd pre-show at Hakone Aphrodite, Kanagawa, August 6th, 1971
By Henry Yates
Finding Focus
Shaking off the hangover of the Syd Barrett era, 1971’s Meddle marked a sea change for Pink Floyd as the band discovered their classic sound and set the controls for the stadium league. “It’s the point, ” says David Gilmour, “at which we found our focus.” 46 Music Milestones #01
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“MEDDLE WOULD FINALLY SHAKE OFF SYD BARRETT’S INFLUENCE, PROPELLING THE BAND TOWARDS THEIR BENCHMARK 70S ALBUMS”
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AIR and Morgan Studios – where the Floyd took full advantage of the prevailing attitude that artists deserved boundless creative freedom. “We had just signed a new contract that gave us a slightly reduced royalty in return for unlimited studio time,” said Mason in Guitar World. “I think only The Beatles had a similar deal.” With EMI suits taking a hands-off approach – aside from artist relations manager Colin Miles, who would periodically visit the studio bearing wine and cannabis – the Floyd were free to tickle their own fancies into the small hours of the morning. One aborted wheeze saw each individual band member track his parts for a song with no knowledge of what the others had already recorded (“Absolutely awful,” declared Gilmour of the results).
NOTHING ONE, AND TWO
By the time the line-up moved to Air – having deemed Abbey Road’s eight-track technology too dated – they had a forest of half-ideas, each given a somewhat dismissive working title (Nothing One, Nothing Two, The
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PHOTO: SHINKO MUSIC/GET T Y IMAGES
y 1970, Pink Floyd looked like a band on the ropes. Two years had passed since Syd Barrett retreated into acid-fried oblivion, but resetting the controls without their fallen talisman was proving a test for the remaining members. On tour across the US, much to Roger Waters’ disgust, the Floyd were hectored by the crowd for more cosmic space-jams. In the studio, they were rudderless,
turning in 1969’s Ummagumma and 1970’s Atom Heart Mother, but subsequently claiming the latter should be “thrown into the dustbin”. With trademark candour, Waters told the press he was “bored with most of the stuff we play” while Dave Gilmour would admit to “scraping the barrel”. Such was the inauspicious backdrop to Meddle, the sixth album that would finally shake off Barrett’s lingering influence, propelling the band towards their benchmark 70s albums and dizzy commercial heights. “We were looking for something,” Gilmour told biographer Mark Blake. “During that whole period, through Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, we were finding ourselves. Echoes was the point we found our focus.” Few Floyd tracks are as significant as Echoes. Sprawled across the entire second side of Meddle, this 23-minute, shape-shifting prog odyssey was the song that both defined the record and saved the band. The similarly twisty story of its creation begins in Studio Two of Abbey Road in January 1971 – and proceeds across London to the
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Son Of Nothing etc) and collated in the so-called ‘rubbish library’. Some of these rough diamonds were worth polishing. The line-up’s touring schedule of 1971 meant they routinely left the studio to gig, naturally dropping that week’s studio material into the set and working out the kinks in front of a crowd. That April, a show in Norwich saw order emerge from the chaos of a number then known as Return Of The Son Of Nothing (soon to be Echoes). “When they came back, they’d got it into shape because they’d been playing it live,” engineer John Leckie told Mark Blake. “It was conceived as one big thing, bits in various sections, so it was recorded that way.” Credited four ways to Waters, Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright, Echoes was a collaborative effort that would be unthinkable in Floyd’s later years. “They weren’t really different from any other band,” recalls Leckie. “It was energetic, everyone had a say. Nick came up with a lot of the crazier ideas. Rick contributed a lot. Roger and Dave were running the show, but everybody was contributing.” Indeed, it was Wright who came up with the ghostly submarine ‘ping’ that opens the track, achieving the effect by putting a grand piano note through a Leslie rotating speaker. Waters’ wistful lyrical references to “strangers passing in the street” , meanwhile, were inspired by the loneliness he felt upon moving from Cambridge to London. “It’s that connection that is central to all my work,” the bassist told CD Now, “not just with other men, women and children, but with whatever you want to call God.” Perhaps the standout contribution came from Gilmour’s guitar work, which slow-burns from the introductory weeping melodies, through the eerie avian shrieks of the middle section (achieved by wiring a Dunlop Cry Baby wah pedal back-tofront), to the mournful outro. “Echoes has a guitar build-up that I love,” the guitarist told interviewer Darrin Fox. “It’s a creation of dozens of different parts. That sort of textural thing often thrills me more than a particular solo I may have played.” Only Mason felt the band had perhaps overcooked this magnum opus, noting AIR’s 16-track technology “there were almost too many options” and that “listening to [Echoes] now, it sounds a bit overlong – something could be chopped out of it, which would make a better piece”.
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Surf’s Up Revisiting the 1973 cult movie soundtracked by Echoes…
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veryone surely knows the old chestnut about The Dark Side Of The Moon matching up to The Wizard Of Oz. Almost as popular amongst stoners is the theory that Echoes synchronises with the finale of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not true, say the band – or at least, it’s not intentional. Meddle’s centrepiece, Echoes, does appear, however, on the soundtrack of a lesser-known movie. Released in 1973, Crystal Voyager was written and narrated by George Greenough, the cult-hero US surfer and filmmaker notable for developing the modern surfboard fin and pioneering the spoon-style wakeboard. Greenough had met Pink Floyd when they toured Australia
in 1971, but director David Elfick still had to travel to the band’s management offices in London to secure the use of Echoes (he was granted permission on the basis that Pink Floyd could screen his surf footage to accompany the song when played in concert). One of the defining movies in the surf genre, Crystal Voyager is a biography of sorts, tracking Greenough’s journey across California in search of the perfect waters. In the iconic final scene, the viewer follows the surfer inside the tube of a wave, courtesy of a waterproof camera strapped to his board, accompanied by the otherworldly strains of the Floyd’s 23-minute symphony. Sound and vision have rarely been in such harmony.
PINK FLOYD Richard Wright plays at the Royaumont Abbey concert, 1971
All Ears Meddle wins the prize as Pink Floyd’s worst ever album sleeve?
Echoes was the track that marked Floyd’s seismic shift from esoteric psychedelia to stadium-ready progressive rock, and debuted the ethereal flavour that would flow into future classics like Breathe, Us And Them and Shine On You Crazy Diamond. As contemporary prog giant Steven Wilson notes, it remains “the quintessential, ultimate epic”.
dog sitting for Steve Marriott). “It was very funny when Dave played the harmonica and that dog started howling,” Leckie told Mark Blake, “but I must admit, I was surprised to hear it on the finished album.” Thankfully, the other three songs were made of stronger stuff. Cowritten by Gilmour and Waters, A Pillow Of Winds was a sweet, simple
“LISTENING TO [ECHOES] NOW... SOMETHING COULD BE CHOPPED OUT OF IT, WHICH WOULD MAKE A BETTER PIECE” Nick Mason Measured against that masterpiece, perhaps it was inevitable that the five tracks that comprises Side one of Meddle sounded a little slight. Waters’ San Tropez was a jazzy, plink-plonk piano doodle, while Seamus was a drowsy two-minute blues workout notable only for the background barks of the titular collie (whom Gilmour was
acoustic piece decorated with swoons of slide guitar, its title referencing the Chinese game of Mahjong (played ardently by the band on tour). The pair also collaborated on Fearless, with its open G tuning, faint country vibe and a climax featuring the Liverpool FC crowd singing club anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone (an inclusion made
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PHOTO: BERNARD ALLEMANE / INA VIA GET T Y IMAGES
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f Atom Heart Mother’s cow had been an unlikely cover star, then Meddle’s sleeve art left prog fans of 1971 in a state of bafflement, offering a mysterious semi-submerged object, bathed in blue light, surrounded by spreading ripples. After much speculation, this was revealed to be a close-up shot of a human ear in shallow water, with the ripples representing soundwaves. Meddle might not be Pink Floyd’s most iconic sleeve, but for band insiders, it was perhaps the most contentious. Storm Thorgerson – the late linchpin of the Hipgnosis design studio – had reportedly pitched a concept featuring a baboon’s anus, but with the band away on tour in Japan, the ear concept was decided over a conference call and photographed by Bob Dowling. The irascible graphic designer hated the result, citing it as his least-favourite Floyd sleeve. “The band always say that Atom Heart Mother was a better cover than it was an album,” he told Mark Blake, “but I think Meddle is a much better album than its cover.” Hipgnosis co-founder Aubrey Powell was even more self-critical: “Meddle was a mess. I hated that cover. I don’t think we did them justice with that at all – it’s half-hearted.”
MUSIC MILESTONES
An Empty Stage An avant garde concept leaves Live At Pompeii limping home with a whimper.
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MEDDLE
ith Meddle complete, Pink Floyd’s next move was to showcase the album with perhaps the most leftfield concert film in rock history. Live At Pompeii was the brainchild of the British-born, Paris-based director Adrian Maben. In the summer of 1971, the filmmaker found himself in Pompeii, and was struck by the atmosphere of the 2,000-year-old amphitheatre. “It was strange,” he noted, “a huge, empty amphitheatre with some echoing insect sounds and disappearing light.” Inspired, Maben approached the band with a pitch: a concert film with no audience. “The main idea was to do a sort of anti-Woodstock film where there would be nobody present... it would mean as much, if not more, than a million crowd,” he told a Russian Pink Floyd fansite. The band were intrigued (“At a time when other rock films were either straight concert footage or attempts to copy A
Hard Day’s Night,” said Mason, “the idea was appealing”). Maben duly negotiated with Naples authorities to secure a six-day shoot in October. On arrival, the lack of electricity left the band kicking their heels. “Adrian had lots of problems with red tape,” Gilmour told Rolling Stone. “I think we lost two or three days.” Matters improved when the playing began with the group airing Meddle material including Echoes (split into two sections that bookend the film) and One Of These Days. The band were forced to fly home with the shoot incomplete, and although more footage was filmed in Paris in 1972, the loss of several cans of film left Maben to deal with gaping holes and continuity errors (notably Wright’s beard, which comes and goes). Accordingly, when Live At Pompeii premiered at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival, it was just 60 minutes long, and garnered lukewarm reviews.
PHOTO: BERNARD ALLEMANE / INA VIA GET T Y IMAGES
Pink Floyd performing Echoes in the appropriately astmospheric surrounds of the Royaumont Abbey
more incongruous by the fact the bassist was an Arsenal fan). Opening the album, meanwhile, One Of These Days was the closest touchstone to the Floyd of old, featuring a tooth-rattling Dr Whostyle bassline played by both Waters and Gilmour, a swirled organ soundscape and a sinister robotic voice that threatened to “cut you into little pieces”. Amusingly, this was supplied by the mild-mannered Mason – nevertheless it still has a somewhat sinister ring to it.
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“Possibly the most interesting thing about One Of These Days” wrote the drummer in retrospect, “is that it actually stars myself as vocalist, for the first time on any of our records that actually got to the public. It’s a rather startling performance involving the use of a high voice and sloweddown tape.”
WINDS OF CHANGE
If Meddle’s content was something of a curate’s egg, then critical reaction to the album on its October 1971 release
blew similarly hot and cold. In Britain, it reached a very respectable UK Number 3 chart placing, but across the Atlantic in the States, the band blamed the “old-fashioned” Capitol label for failing to work the record to its full potential, and saw it stall at a shockingly low US Number 70. The music press were likewise divided, with NME declaring the album “exceptionally good” and Rolling Stone noting that “[Meddle] states forcefully and accurately that the group is well into the growth track again” – while a more lack lustre review from the Melody Maker dismissed it as “muddled” and featuring berated “vocals that verge on the drippy and instrumental workouts that are decidedly old-hat”. Nobody would claim that Meddle was the finished article. Rather, this album was an emphatic line in the sand after Syd Barrett’s tenure, a signpost towards the band’s dazzling future, and the bridge that led to 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. Pink Floyd might have started the decade on the ropes – but they were about to come back swinging.
PINK FLOYD
Studio Strawberry Studios, Château d’Hérouville Producer Pink Floyd Released 1972
Obscured By Clouds OBSCURED BY CLOUDS
A coherent, underrated album to accompany the film La Vallée.
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eddle and Obscured By Clouds hold an interesting place in the Pink Floyd canon. Emerging just about unscathed from their experimental phase (Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma), there are signs in both of the impending greatness just around the corner.
One of the criticisms of Obscured By Clouds is that, unlike its predecessor, it has no ‘stand-out’ tracks. Albums don’t always need stand-out tracks. An album needs to work as a whole, as a complete piece in itself. And in 1972, Pink Floyd were just beginning to realise that. The title song gets us underway. A sonic melange from the heads and hands of Roger Waters and David Gilmour. The mood is dark, the rude fuzz of the band’s beloved EMS VCS3 synth holding each note for five or six seconds before moving on. Gilmour’s slide guitar sounds angry as it pierces the electronic haze. Track 2, When You’re In, grows out of Obscured By Clouds. As brutally as the synth dominated before, so this time Gilmour’s persistent guitar does. Peppered with flute-like Hammond notes from Richard Wright, this second instrumental is heavy, cymbals high in the mix, and mesmeric and threatening. Oddly, considering the now prehistoric keyboard tech on show, it’s largely Mason’s contributions that stand the test of time least well. It’s not how he plays but the way percussion and cymbals were recorded a lifetime ago seems so gauche now. Maybe it’s just because we’re used to saturated effects these days. Burning Bridges is a case in point. Mason’s not entirely helped by the vocal arrangement on this bluesy number. Gilmour and Wright each take turns with Roger Waters’ lyrics in a way that bands just don’t these days. Track 4, The Gold It’s In The… consigns Wright and his electronica to the rehearsal room and ploughs ahead, heavy and mean. The feel of the song, the upbeat tempo, the high and, yes, bouncy melody all sing of Lynyrd Skynyrd at their peak, yet all done with a British glint in the eye.
Then everything slows. Wot’s... Uh The Deal? shows Waters beginning to look outside himself for meaning. Yes, you might have fun now but what are the consequences? It’s not a word often used by rock stars. Sung by Gilmour, self-harmonising, it provides an acoustic and meaningful slide into the side’s closer, Mudmen.
Childhood’s End is a rarity. A Pink Floyd song, with words, entirely composed by Gilmour. Recognising one’s strengths is a talent. So often content to let his bandmate (or later, wife) get the quill out, Gilmour wrote this near classic Floyd after reading Arthur C Clarke’s novel of the same name. Despite a jaunty feel, Free Four is perhaps Waters’ most serious lyric to date, and arguably the earliest nod to where Pink Floyd would find themselves for the next decade. Despair with the music business? Sadness at his father’s death in the Second World War? Both topics – so familiar to Floyd fans in 2016 – are put up for discussion here. You might not notice given Waters’ happy-ish vocal and Gilmour’s piercing solo, but the breadcrumbs are here. Given it’s written by Waters and Wright, penultimate track Stay is very similar to the sound Gilmour would employ in parts of his first solo album a decade later. Another introspective lyric, this time about the moral complexities of casual sex, gives an indication of Waters’ confidence exploring the things that matter to him, even if it seems less important to us. There’s a reason Obscured By Clouds sounds more like a complete ‘album’ than Meddle and that’s because it was initially conceived as the soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder’s film La Vallée. Which, of course, explains the presence of New Guinea’s Mapuga tribe who close proceedings. Recorded for the movie, the tribe’s a cappella chants fade into Absolutely Curtains, a Rick Wright heavy number that unfortunately draws as much on his own Sysyphus Part I from Ummagumma as ancient cultures. Jeff Hudson
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By Roy Delaney
Into La Vallée Three years after Pink Floyd’s soundtrack for More, director Barbet Schroeder approached the band for another. This time he found a band in the middle of a project that would launch them into the musical stratosphere, and beyond.
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PINK FLOYD Pink Floyd on the brink of mega stardom. (From left) Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason, Dave Gilmour
hen French-based film director Barbet Schroeder wanted somebody to compose a soundtrack for his second feature-length movie, his first impulse was to track down the people responsible for the music from his first. But three years after his debut, More, his original scorers had grown from the slightly shell-shocked post-Syd experimentalists into a confident group of men at the height of their creative powers. It showed in the way that the music was produced and the way things turned out in its immediate aftermath. This was 1972 and Pink Floyd were smack in the middle of
PHOTO: REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
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making what would become their masterwork: The Dark Side Of The Moon.
OBSCURED BY CLOUDS
Nick Mason in 1972 at La Salle Vallier, Marseille, France
Schroeder’s film told the story of a middle-class western European innocent on a voyage to an exotic land for self-discovery, but by this point the Floyd had already travelled this path, and knew exactly who they were. They’d found their feet with More (1969) and experimented live with the more out-there sounds of Ummagumma (1969). They’d begun to hone their sound by Atom Heart Mother (1970) and then distilled it further with Meddle (1971). With Dark Side conceptually in the bag, the band were at a creative peak and Schroeder had, quite by chance, hit the mother lode, but he possibly wasn’t prepared for quite how difficult things would become. It is clear after even a cursory listen that Obscured By Clouds is a much more mature piece of work than More. It holds its own as an album much
Tribal Screen Obscured By Clouds aka La Vallée: the soundtrack for an obscure 60s film.
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a Vallée, for which Obscured By Clouds was the soundtrack, explored many of the same themes of director Barbet Schroeder’s earlier work, but expanded into a more existential plane. In La Vallée, we follow an innocent but slightly uptight Western European on a journey of self-discovery. Viviane is the wife of the French consul in Melbourne who has a penchant for exotic feathers. After a chance meeting with some hippy travellers, she decides to follow them to a remote part of Papua New Guinea to track down the
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feathers of an incredibly rare bird that lives deep in the heart of a particular forest. These hippies are on an altogether different quest and they plunge themselves into the very heart of the last unexplored place on the planet to discover paradise by assimilating the ways of the local tribes. And so it is that Viviane’s mundane existence in Australia quickly turns into a whirl of sex and strangeness when the group meet up with the Mapuga tribe, one of the most isolated peoples on the planet.
Things in paradise are never as idyllic as they seem and the more they work their way into the tribe’s lives, the more unsettling things become. Amid the scenes of tribal dancing and mudmasked men, are harrowing depictions of a brutal lifestyle: be sure to turn away if it looks like the locals fancy a bit of pork for dinner. While it’s an often sparse and dated piece of work with only scant suggestions of Floyd’s work on the soundtrack, it’s a period piece and worth a look if you’ve got a strong stomach for gory scenes and stilted dialogue.
PHOTO: JEAN-CLAUDE DEUTSCH/PARIS MATCH VIA GET T Y IMAGES
HITTING THE MOTHER LODE
PINK FLOYD
PHOTO: MICHAEL PUTLAND/GET T Y IMAGES
Roger Waters on vocal duties onstage in 1972
more than their previous soundtrack. Notably, the band had a massive fall out with the film’s producers, which led to them erasing all references to the film’s original title La Vallée and changing it to Obscured By Clouds, a nod to the hidden, mystical valley at the heart of Schroeder’s film. Nick Mason has said that the sessions in France were often much more hurried than they would be for a more formal Floyd album, but don’t let that make you think that this is going to be a patchy affair cut from the same cloth as More. Here, each piece stands on its own, but also folds neatly into the next to create a greater whole, which comes in stark contrast to More’s less frequent gems in a sea of fragments and noodling. The band took a pragmatic approach to composing the score. Watching a rough director’s cut of the film, they noted down the timings of key events and used them as cues for adding musical highs and lows as the film progressed. They also remembered Schroeder’s naturalistic approach to music in his films and how he preferred it to appear only in real world situations, such as clubs, shops or car radios. Observers suspected that a few of Floyd’s pieces for More were placed out of composition order: the track Ibiza Bar, for example, is positioned during a party in Paris long before the protagonist ever gets to the Spanish island. Much of the work on Obscured is more loose and fluid, and possibly ambiguously pitched in order that it could be placed at any point across the movie. Another complication is that the film is based in a remote valley in Papua New Guinea, so that the chances of stumbling across any radios or hippy parties so deep into the jungle would be scarce. Ultimately, what could have been a problematic album for a band in the midst of a massive escalation of fame turned out to be one of their most engaging and underrated works. From the deep, dark throb of the titular opener, this album is disarming. After its slow, rasping build, its nodding metronomic pace is reminiscent of Krautrock masters Can or the motorik sounds of Neu! before Gilmour’s familiar scratchy blues guitar licks come rolling in to wrench you back into the world of Floyd, quickly kicking into the more urgent When You’re In. In contrast to the short excerpts scattered
“A POTENTIALLY PROBLEMATIC ALBUM TURNED OUT TO BE ONE OF PINK FLOYD’S MOST ENGAGING AND UNDERRATED WORKS... THIS ALBUM IS DISARMING” about the More soundtrack release, these are generally more solid pieces, designed for Schroeder to pick and choose from as they faded in and out of specific passages from the film. With barely a weak track on the whole album, it’s the songs that really stand out on Obscured. Burning Bridges offers the laid-back style evident on much of Dark Side but with Gilmour and Wright’s dual vocal to-and-froing offering a strange, unsettling quality (if you like the melody of this song it turns up again in three songs’ time with a different time
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PHOTO: JOHN LYNN KIRK /REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
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Strawberry Studios Home to Pink Floyd during the recording of Obscured.
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many monster albums such as David Bowie’s Pin Ups and Low, Gong’s Camembert Electrique, Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, Rainbow’s Long Live Rock ’n’ Roll and even, somewhat surprisingly, Sham 69’s The Adventures Of The Hersham Boys. Other stellar acts that passed through its doors included T Rex, Jethro Tull, The Bee Gees, MC5, Joan Armatrading, Uriah Heep, Fleetwood Mac, Sweet and many more famous artists and musicians. After Michel Magne’s death in 1984, the studio, as well as the mansion that housed it, fell into terrible disrepair, and it is only in the last few years that work has begun on renovating this fabulous, historic building. A team of dedicated restorers are beavering away on the Château as we speak, hoping to bring it back to its former glory and reopen the studios before the end of 2016.
signature in the instrumental Mudmen). Later, The Gold It’s In The… gives us a more standard bar room rock workout, eschewing Wright’s keyboards for a rollicking guitar and bass stomper, while the prowling Childhood’s End, written after he’d read an Arthur C Clarke novel of the same name, was the last entirely Gilmour-penned song until A Momentary Lapse Of Reason some 15 years later. But it is the album’s principal single, Free Four that gains the most plaudits from this collection. Despite its plinky-plonky fun-time swing, its sarcastic lyric offers us the first glimpses of Waters’ dissatisfaction
The Floyd performing in Kent State University, Ohio in March 1973
with the rock ’n’ roll life, and reprises the motif of his lost father. It has often been posited that this is the sour egg that eventually hatched into The Wall at the decade’s end; indeed, you can see the early themes of Waters’ grand and personal work begin to incubate within the cracked shell of this song.
PHOTO: MICHAEL PUTLAND/GET T Y IMAGES
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or their first sole foray to a foreign recording studio, Pink Floyd decamped to the famous Strawberry Studios at the Château d’Hérouville in France. Located in the tiny village of Hérouville out beyond the edge of the furthest North Western suburbs of Paris, this 30-roomed mansion, built in 1740, was once painted by Van Gough and was for a while the home of the composer Frédéric Chopin. After a fire in 1969 the then-owner – Oscar-nominated composer Michel Magne – converted it into a recording studio that would soon become a must-visit haunt for a whole generation of the world’s most important rock and pop stars. Dubbed the Honky Château by Elton John (who often recorded there and named his 1972 album after it), Strawberry Studios was the source of
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
As with most Pink Floyd records, the track titles in Obscured By Clouds have caused much discussion and debate among fans of the band. While it’s clear that some like Burning Bridges, Mudmen and Stay have clear links to occurrences within the movie, others are perhaps a little more obscure. Many
Dave Gilmour honing the tracks on Obscured as he performs onstage in London in 1972
Fifteen months in the life of a rock ’n’ roll star... Look at Pink Floyd’s hectic 70s schedule and you’ll wonder how they ever found the time to record an obscure soundtrack album. No wonder Waters was getting tired of the rock ’n’ roll life…
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DECEMBER 1971 Begin writing The Dark Side Of The Moon
20 JANUARY 1972 Debut first material from The Dark Side Of The Moon at Brighton Dome
17 FEBRUARY 1972 Preview songs from The Dark Side Of The Moon to the press at The Rainbow Theatre, London
23-29 FEBRUARY 1972 First recording session of Obscured By Clouds at Strawberry Studios France
PINK FLOYD
“WOT’S… UH THE DEAL L IS A JOKE, REFERRING TO PHRASES UTTERED D BY THEIR CRE EW MEMBER CHRIS ADAMSON” D have proposed deep and cosmic explanations, but popular myth suggests that it’s all a little more prosaic and that both When You’re In and Wot’s… Uh The Deal are inscrutable in-band jokes, referring to regular phrases uttered by their larger-than-life crew member Chris
6-13 MARCH 1972 Japanese tour
Adamson. Whatever the real reason, they add just a little bit more mystery to ever-growing tales that make up the Pink Floyd legend. Despite being a hastily put-together collection of songs that was interrupted by a Japanese tour, Obscured By Clouds ended up being a reasonably successful
23 MARCH-6 APRIL 1972 Second recording session of Obscured By Clouds at Strawberry Studios France
14 APRIL-4 MAY 1972 American tour
interim album between the muchliked Meddle and the band’s stratospheric opus, The Dark Side Of The Moon, some nine months later. Despite their set-to with the film’s makers, there were still some early editions released entitled either La Vallée, or anglicised to The Valley. Track these down and you’ll make an avid collector a very happy human. Indeed, so much had Pink Floyd’s stock risen that the film’s production company eventually retitled the movie La Vallée (Obscured By Clouds) to cash in on Floyd’s post Dark Side Of The Moon success. A strange and corporate footnote to one of the band’s often overlooked collections.
MAY-JUNE 1972 First recording sessions of The Dark Side Of The Moon at Abbey Road Studios, London
2 JUNE 1972 The album Obscured By Clouds released
JANUARY 1973 The second recording sessions of The Dark Side Of The Moon at Abbey Road Studios, London
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PHOTO: BINDER/ULLSTEIN BILD; KOH HASEBE/SHINKO MUSIC; JOHN LYNN KIRK /REDFERNS; MICHAEL PUTLAND/ALL GET T Y IMAGES
PHOTO: MICHAEL PUTLAND/GET T Y IMAGES
(L-R) David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Richard Wright, circa 1972
MUSIC MILESTONES
Studio Abbey Road Studios, London Producer Alan Parsons Released 1973
The Dark Side Of The Moon
T
he eighth album by Pink Floyd is the second best-selling album of all time. Even the iconic prism cover is cited as one of the best of all time. Every way you look at it, this is an important album. But the most important fact of all is that nobody saw it coming.
about death, madness and history of violence. The first words heard on Dark Side are: “I’ve been mad for fucking years” , uttered by Floyd roadie, Chris Adamson, setting the tone for what lies ahead.
Buoyed by Meddle, the band entered discussions about their next project with enthusiasm. It was Waters who came up with the notion of writing a ‘concept’ album settling on the idea of things that make people ‘mad’. Time, money, modern life in general. In 1972 Pink Floyd were a proper team. They were writing again, often in the same room, and when the shoots of a new album started to show, they developed them as a unit in a rehearsal room before taking the whole collection, then entitled The Dark Side Of The Moon – A Piece For Assorted Lunatics on tour – months before committing any of it to tape. The band went on to record and release Obscured By Clouds, intended as the soundtrack to a film called La Vallée before Dark Side was even finished.
Gimmickry is nothing without artistry. Fortunately, the songs on Dark Side are more than able to take the weight. The surprisingly melodious medley of ringing alarm clocks (courtesy of producer Alan Parsons) that segues into Mason’s careful drum intro on Time still stands the test of – well – time. Waters’ lyrics speak of not seizing the day until it’s too late. The last song that would ever feature writing credits from all four, it genuinely feels like a collaboration. Gilmour delivers the verse vocal with Wright handling the bridge, backed by Gilmour and female session singers. At 3:30 Dave steps away from the mic for a part-blistering, partlanguorous 90-second solo, second probably only to his offering on Comfortably Numb in feel, range and power. The sound is nigh on epic. When the song drifts seamlessly into a reprise of Breathe, it’s almost a relief.
Dark Side’s idea was that each track would meld into the next to create two long sections. With its pulsing synthesizer riff (created by Gilmour) and taped airport tannoy announcement, On The Run sits boldly between the late-night blues club feel of Breathe and the standout rocker of the album, Time. Any Colour You Like holds the same position on side two, this time easing listeners from the end of the ‘Gilmour’ section of vocals into two songs written and sung by Waters: Brain Damage and Eclipse. It’s a remarkably well-constructed, well-conceived album.
Money is a Waters-only composition and his bass is duly prominent for the opening rhythm but when the song gets going, it’s Gilmour's playing that drives it along. As well as strained lead vocals, he throws in a solo that reaches notes so high it required a four-octave range Lewis guitar to achieve it. But Gilmour isn’t the only soloist on show. Saxophone player Dick Parry lets rip mid song before the swinging blues section takes over, continuing into Us And Them, this time with a more laidback vibe, mirroring Gilmour’s vocal throughout.
Nowhere is the blueprint of Dark Side more evident than in its pioneering use of effects and samples. Speak To Me, the album’s opener, is itself effectively a mini highlights package of the rest of the album condensed into one minute and seven seconds. Beginning with a heartbeat (featured again to close the album on Eclipse), we get a ticking clock (from Time) before manic laughter (Brain Damage), an old-fashioned cash register (Money) and a helicopter (On The Run). And then there are the voices. Waters taped various people, friends and Abbey Road staff, answering questions
With the swirls of Wright’s Hammond prominent throughout the album, this really is a piece of work that highlights every aspect of a band at the height of their powers. And, yes, that includes Waters’ then nascent obsessions with mortality and mental health. From concept to execution it’s Floyd working as the perfect machine while other albums feel disjointed and argue-some. As an album The Dark Side Of The Moon has it all.
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Jeff Hudson
PHOTO: MICHAEL OCHS ARVIVES/GET T Y IMAGES
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
A perfectly-formed slice of Floyd as the quartet reach their peak.
PINK FLOYD From the archives: A Pink Floyd publicity photo circa 1973
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MUSIC MILESTONES
By Jeff Hudson
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
Let There Be Dark
Before 1973, Pink Floyd’s highest album position in the US charts was 55 for Atom m Heart Motherr and they never sold more than 250,000 copies of that album. That all changed dramatically with The Dark Side Of The Moon, a masterpiece as timeless as it is sublime.
adness, loneliness and the passage of time are just a few of the themes dealt with on The Dark Side Of The Moon, a compelling masterpiece that remains as potent and enduring today as the day it was first released. The profound mental problems experienced by the band’s former creative force Syd Barrett fuelled Roger Waters’ idea for an album that dealt with the things that “make people mad” , while focusing on the pressures resulting from the band’s arduous lifestyle. Tellingly, Pink Floyd’s greatest album, was the last record on which the band collaborated on equal terms with each other. “It felt like the whole band were working together,” recalled Rick Wright, “It was a creative time. We were all very… open.” Readers too young to remember the original release of The Dark Side Of The Moon in March 1973 will still be aware of it. Chances are, they’ll probably even own it. It’s that kind of album. Listen to the pulsing heartbeat running from
M
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the intro of Speak To Me through to the fade-out of Eclipse. This is a record with a life of its own. This, after all, is the album that has sold 45 million copies, spent an absurd 741 weeks in the US Billboard charts without a break and was owned by every one-in-five households in the UK. This is the first album to be played in space. This is the biggest-selling album by a British band. Ever. For musicians, their fans, and the industry itself, things would never be the same after 24 March 1973.
CREATION OF A CLASSIC
Despite half the band (Waters, Mason and, for a few terms, Wright) being
architecture students, there was a looseness to the way the Floyd did business in those early days that belies the sluggish, corporate-like moves the band made in subsequent years. In truth, there was no masterplan. As perfect as many people think it is, Dark Side did not mark the apogee of some meticulously plotted career path. Pre-1973, they had never sold more than 250,000 copies of any album or reached higher in the US charts than Atom Heart Mother’s lowly 55, but that never seemed to be a problem, at least not to the band. Dark Side was not a cynical stab at commercial salvation. The reality is that the album’s creation
“IT FELT LIKE THE WHOLE BAND WERE WORKING TOGETHER. IT WAS A CREATIVE TIME. WE WERE ALL VERY… OPEN” Rick Wright
PINK FLOYD
PHOTO: NIK WHEELER/SYGMA VIA GET T Y IMAGES
Roger Waters performs The Dark Side Of The Moon on stage during a concert in France
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Track By Track SPEAK TO ME
BREATHE (IN THE AIR)
ON THE RUN
TIME
The creeping introduction of the pounding heartbeat was lifted from the band’s contribution to the Zabriskie Point soundtrack in 1970. Fading in from a deep, resonant heartbeat it seems to suggest a baby’s first bleary impressions of the brash, cynical world. Credited to Mason, although written by Waters, the title came from the album’s engineer Alan Parson’s oft-repeated control booth instruction. Featuring a vari-speeded clock lifted from Time, a scream from The Great Gig In The Sky and spoken parts. “I’ve been mad for fucking years” from road manager Chris Adamson, and “I’ve always been mad” from doorman Jerry Driscoll.
The languorous chord progression of Breathe finally bursts out of a crescendo of screams and backwards sounds. David Gilmour’s arpeggiated Em-A vamp is an archetypal Pink Floyd moment. Two of Gilmour’s long-term fascinations are here: the Leslie rotating speaker on the rhythm guitar and the gently swooping pedal steel (although Roger Waters has claimed that this is an open-tuned Stratocaster played with a slide). This is a song about trying to be true to yourself, constructed during the Broadhurst Gardens sessions by Waters, Gilmour and Wright. Gilmour’s vocals are double-tracked for fuller effect and he provides his harmonies.
Emerging from one of the album’s many smooth crossfades (achieved manually with two tape machines). On The Run is built largely with sounds from the EMS VCS3 synth. The ‘train’ sound is feedback from David Gilmour, then a number of sound effects were added from both the Abbey Road sound archive and the stack of vox pops that Roger Waters recorded. The Travel Section is a VCS3-based assembly with footsteps added by Parsons, and words from Roger The Hat. Gilmour, backed up by Parsons, says he first managed to get notes from the synth, which Waters then replaced. Waters says that it was he who first elicited meaningful sound from it.
Recorded during the first studio stint, on 8 June 1972. Parsons added the alarm clock sequence, which he had just recorded for a quadrophonic sound demo. The heartbeat is Mason’s bass drum. Gilmour’s guitar tone is biting and spiky, creating a marked contrast between the A section and the smoother B section. The track ends with a smooth reprise into Breathe so smooth, in fact, that you can easily fail to notice the sudden switch to Emin where the B section in Time usually ends on E major. This track was originally the final verse of the main Breathe but was placed after Time during gigs immediately prior to the recording sessions.
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SIDE B
TRACK
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
SIDE A
The inside track to the musical intricacies of a masterpiece….
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2 6
3 7
4 8
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MONEY
US AND THEM
ANY COLOUR YOU LIKE
BRAIN DAMAGE
Waters came up with the unusual 7/8 bassline at Broadhurst Gardens and later added the cash register effects after recording coins and money thrown into his wife’s industrial food mixer. Released as a US single, it reached No 13 and, at gigs, people started screaming for ‘the hit’. The basic track was recorded on 7 June 1972 recording tremelo guitar, bass, drums and a Wurlitzer through a wah-wah. All at various speeds. David Gilmour’s old friend Dick Parry plays sax which Gilmour follows with three distinctly different guitar solos over a more standard 4/4 backing. Thus creating perhaps the prime example of his ability to play screaming blues guitar.
Richard Wright had recorded an earlier, instrumental version in 1970, which was submitted (but ultimately rejected) for the cult film Zabriskie Point. Recorded on 1st June 1972, the band’s first day in the studio, Jerry Driscoll, Mr and Mrs Pete Watts and Roger The Hat add spoken parts, the latter saying: “short, sharp, shock”. Wings guitarist Henry McCullogh memorably admits, “I don’t know, I was drunk at the time,” in response to the question, ”were you in the right to thump that person on New Year’s Eve?” The big star of the track is Dick Parry, whose sax solo is a lesson in subtle melodicism.
This is the only track by Pink Floyd written by Gilmour, Mason and Wright without Waters. Yet again, the VCS3 is dominant, supported this time by Gilmour’s Univibeenhanced guitar parts, one with more overdrive than the other and panned to opposite sides of the stereo spectrum. The final title refers to Henry Ford’s Model T claim: “You can have it any colour you like, so long as it’s black”. Gilmour claims to have lifted his guitar sound from Eric Clapton’s Leslie speaker sound from Badge. Initially sounding like an extended ending to Us And Them, this track marks a return to that two-chord Dorian vamp from Breathe, but this time transposed to D minor.
The Lunatic Song, to give it its early title, was written by Waters about Syd Barrett and Cambridge. The opening lines were taken from a song Waters wrote for Meddle called – appropriately enough – The Dark Side Of The Moon. It was never recorded. The ‘grass’ is the square in between the River Cam and King’s College Chapel. Once again, Gilmour plays Leslie’d guitar over a backing of a VCS3, the recurring heartbeat and full band. Jerry Driscoll talks about being mad, Pete Watts laughs, Waters sings.
PINK FLOYD
“THEY CAME IN AND SAID, ‘WE DON’T LIKE THIS ONE, WE DON’T LIKE THIS – WE’LL HAVE THAT ONE’. THEY WERE ALL TOTALLY UNANIMOUS” Storm Thorgerson Jerry Driscoll and Puddy Watts give their thoughts on dying. The music was mostly laid down on 25 June 1972. Then on 21 January 1973, 25-year-old session vocalist Clare Torry supplied three hours of improvised vocals, replacing Bible readings and a Malcolm Muggeridge speech, which had featured in the live version. Torry was working as a staff songwriter for EMI. Not a particular fan of Pink Floyd she had other commitments for the evening, including, she later admitted, tickets to see Chuck Berry. So a session was scheduled for the following Sunday. “I think they thought, ‘Well maybe we should have a vocal on it and we'll see how it goes’. So I listened to
it and I thought to myself, ‘What the hell do I do?’. I had no idea. Somewhere in the back of my mind it crossed quickly that perhaps I should pretend that I was an instrument. I don't really think they had any more idea than I had, It was just an experiment.” The results were a hugely emotive wail that elevated the track to new heights. Torry recorded three versions and the final version was assembled from those takes. The band members were so reserved in their response that she left under the impression that her vocals would never make the cut. She only became aware they were used when she saw the album at a local record store and spotted her name in the credits.
David Gilmour pictured at a free concert in Hyde Park, London, 31st August 1974
PHOTO: GET T Y IMAGES
THE GREAT GIG IN THE SKY
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ECLIPSE Another Waters vocal (with Gilmour harmonising), he wrote this song specifically to ‘end’ the album. Comprising of his standard ‘list’ lyric formats, it is intended to leave listeners in an upbeat mood. Jerry Driscoll states: “There is no dark side of the moon. As a matter of fact, it’s all dark.” (His further observation that “The thing that makes it look alight is the sun” was not used.) The heartbeat closes the album, just as it introduced it. The previous track, including Gilmour’s steady, even arpeggio playing, segues into Eclipse, but with the repeating chord progression (D, D/C, B b , A) adding a mantra-like quality that perfectly complements
the uplifting lyrics of this album closer. Notice how Gilmour’s double-tracked Leslie guitar doesn’t stick to the same chord shapes throughout, moving instead to higher inversions, so the guitar doesn’t get lost among those huge, swirling organ chords. As the last chord fades to reveal the heartbeat, which started the album, sit back and reflect – you’ve just listened to one of the finest albums in rock history. Now press ‘play’ again…
had less to do with releasing a record than with putting on a better live show. With criticisms from outside and within that their legendary performances were getting stale, the band were conscious of making their 1972 British tour something to remember. And what could be more memorable than new material? At the end of November 1971, having finished a US tour, Pink Floyd descended on Broadhurst Gardens studios in West Hampstead, London, to work through new songs for their first meaningful UK dates in four years starting on 20 January. Wright dusted down a piece he had written (and had rejected) for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point soundtrack, and another chord sequence that had been around for a while. The world would later know each as Us And Them and The Great Gig In The Sky. Waters, meanwhile, knocked into shape an instrumental he had supplied to a documentary called The Body. With words, it became Breathe.
Tunes aside, Waters’ greatest input came in the concept of the album – literally. Rather than a collection of good but disjointed songs, this would become a continuous suite of music, similar to their earlier whole-sided experiments, but this time with a lyrical as well as musical consistency. The theme would be the pressures of modern life: violence, religion, love, death, old age, greed, travel and, above all, insanity. The songs would run into each other, there would be linking effects and for continuity’s sake, Waters would for the first time write all the lyrics. Their first concept album. Having the album virtually written by the start of 1972 and getting it recorded were two very different things. For a start, there was the British tour, which took them to the end of February. Then came the gigs in Japan, Australia, the US, Holland and Germany, all of which took them up to the end of May. There was the small matter of work on their film Live At Pompeii – which features eye-opening
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THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
PHOTO: NIK WHEELER/SYGMA VIA GET T Y IMAGES
MUSIC MILESTONES Pink Floyd on Stage in France in 1973 with Chinese autocrat Mao Tse-tung keeping watch
PHOTO: NIK WHEELER/SYGMA VIA GET T Y IMAGES
“I’VE NEVER HAD FAST FINGERS AND THE CO-ORDINATION BETWEEN LEFT AND RIGHT HAND IS NOT GREAT. I HAVE TO RELY ON EFFECTS, FUZZBOXES… ANYTHING LIKE THAT” David Gilmour
David Gilmour on stage in France avéc his famous ‘black (Fender) strat(ocaster)’
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footage of the band developing Dark Side. Even more pressing, a commitment to record another soundtrack album, Obscured By Clouds in March, and not a note for The Dark Side Of The Moon would be recorded until the band’s first day at Abbey Road studios on 1 June 1972. After 23 days of work on the album it was time to take a break. July and August came and went without a note being played. September was devoted to another US tour. Twelve studio days were squeezed in for October (they turned up for nine), then another European tour was followed by the band’s most bizarre diversion yet. Having agreed to write music for choreographer Roland Petit’s ballet, the Floyd were soon struck by the lack of impetus by the project’s leading lights, Petit, Roman Polanski and Rudolf Nureyev. In the end they played a series of shows backing dancers to arrangements of One Of These Days,
Careful With That Axe, Eugene, Obscured By Clouds, When You’re In and Echoes. A further 11 studio days in January and February 1973, which were fitted around touring, and that was it. Fifteen months after they had first sat in Broadhurst Gardens and eight months after their first studio date in June 1972, The Dark Side Of The Moon was done. Thirty eight days to make one of the most significant albums in history.
INSPIRATION AND EFFECTS
Studio innovation had long been a staple of the Floyd recording process by 1973. From each band member contributing new material to Echoes in secret while the others stayed out of the room, to the musique concrète crockery cacophony of Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast, their early albums were abundant with fresh ideas that grasped whatever new technical mantle the 1970’s studio thrust at them. The new album would be the same, powered very much by the technical know-how of producer/ engineer Alan Parsons. “The Floyd were famous for using every machine in the studio,” he writes. The new VCS3 synth (used previously on The Who’s Baba O’Reily) became a highlight of the album after Gilmour met the machine’s inventor at his home, became a fan of his creation
PINK FLOYD
All That You See Few covers have attained the iconic status as Storm Thorgerson’s gatefold de Of The Moon. for The Dark Sid
A
and insisted on experimenting with it in the studio. Modestly, he puts his curiosity down to his own lack of ability. “I’ve never had fast fingers,” he recalled,” and the co-ordination between left and right hand is not great, so I have to rely on other things – effects, fuzz boxes… Anything like that I can lay my hands on.” Equally unconventionally, it was not uncommon for tape to be strung around the studio, then hand-fed into the Studer recorder to gain various delay or echo effects. A mic’d-up metronome served as a click-track and vibrato effects were occasionally gained by manipulating the speed and depth of an oscillator by hand throughout a recording. Perhaps the most obvious shot of inspiration, however, came again from Waters. Devising a series of 20 questions – including: ‘What does the dark side of moon mean to you?’; ‘When was the last time you were violent?’; and ‘Are you frightened of dying?’ – he recorded the answers of anyone who happened to be around at Abbey Road – from the studio doorman, to the band’s road manager, to Paul McCartney. The results (although not McCartney’s) were then woven very successfully into the final album. “I still glow with pleasure at how well that worked,” Waters was moved to recall.
s a starting point Storm Thorgerson of design team Hipgnosis called Rick Wright. “When I asked him what he thought we ought to be doing he said, ‘Well not one of your pictures.’ He wanted something cool and graphic and iconographic, rather than the pictures we’d used before – which were full-blooded, figurative, full of tonality, even those that were a bit obscure, like Meddle or the cow. Rick was suggesting we had something cleaner.” Fortunately, Storm had one or two ideas. “A bit like a musician might have pieces of works, chord sequences or ideas that they don’t know what to do with, I have various fragments of work lying around,” he said. “The prism was a re occurrence of an idea I had explored previously, although in a different way, for a record label called Clearlight, which was being formed by a company called Charisma. In the end they chose a different image so I was free to use it again.” Not without change, however. “I had seen the prism in a physics text book, I think, and I thought it could be used,” he said. “I saw that the diagram is always on white, so for Pink Floyd I put it against black. In a way it was more about art directing because all I’ve really done is taken what is basically a text book diagram, something that belongs to everybody and applied it to this project. Apart from changing the background to black, which I think was the crucial bit, I bent the light angles a little so they looked better. Also, because the four-colour process under which sleeves were printed at that time might not have been able to distinguish between indigo and violet, we dropped indigo. It didn’t seem to make any difference and no one noticed. No one came up to us and said, ‘Oh, you haven’t got seven colours…’. “We took about seven ideas, including the prism to Abbey Road and showed them to the band in some shabby, downstairs back room. We carefully put up all our presentation boards, then they came in and said, ‘We don’t like this one, we don’t like this – we’ll have that one’. They were all totally unanimous and they walked out. It took about three minutes. I was actually trying to make them come back and look at the others, because we’d worked quite hard on them. But they just said, ‘We’re going upstairs to do our real job’. They argued about most things, so it was good that they all agreed on this.” At Waters’ suggestion, the artwork was adapted to tie in with the heartbeat on the record, which could then be utilised in the stage shows. Two posters, stickers and the light spectrum running throughout the opened gatefold sleeve meant that this was, in all aspect, a package: sound and visuals in harmony. When Dark Side music was remastered for CD 20 years later, so was the artwork. Where once there was a line drawing (by George Hardie), now there was an actual photograph of white light refracting through a glass prism. “It worked a treat,” said Storm. “All I had to do was bend the angles of the incoming and outgoing spectrum a little to match the first album.” Despite the omnipresence of The Dark Side Of The Moon and the multiple ways the sleeve has been broadcast over the decades, Thorgerson said he did not tire of the album. “It’s a really good album,” he said. “One of the best three ever. It’s so nice to have tunes and rock and effects and freaky voices and really strong lyrical content – how often do you get that? In my view, it’s as eminently playable now as it was then.”
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Studio Abbey Road Studios, London Producer Pink Floyd Released 1975
Wish You Were Here WISH YOU WERE HERE
The sophisticated follow-up to Dark Side more than satisfied their salivating, awaiting fans .
W
hile Wish You Were is sometimes unfairly overlooked in relation to its predecessor, it is arguably a more assured and sophisticated work. Certainly, its lyrical concept is more clearly defined, focusing on Waters’ emotive tribute to his friend Sid Barrett, who famously snuck unnoticed into the control room at Abbey Road Studios, while the band were recording Shine On You Crazy Diamond – Waters’ poignant ode to him. Almost half the album’s playing time is taken up by Parts I and II of Shine On and it’s the majestic instrumental introduction to Part I that starts the album and offers one of its most climactic and iconic moments. After almost four minutes of sparse, ethereal instrumentation, David Gilmour’s guitar breaks in with a dynamic and emotive four-note arpeggio of B b , F, G and E and really gets Shine On You Crazy Diamond started. It’s haunting and unsettling, and resonates as much today as it did in 1975.
Shine On You Crazy Diamond works even before you learn it’s a homage to Syd Barrett. The three-and-a-half minutes of synthesiser, Hammond organ and finger-rubbed wine glasses offer scene setting without compare. When David Gilmour’s Black Strat finally arrives to hit that potent refrain – coined ‘Syd’s theme’ by the band – you know you’re in the hands of a master. It’s welcoming, clear and true. And it sends a shiver up the spine. Post Dark Side you’d have put money on Gilmour doing far more than just playing guitar. But Roger Water’s paean to Syd is so heartfelt, it makes complete sense that it’s he who takes the vocal on this track. Does he cut it as well as Gilmour would have? Technically, no. But his delivery is raw and imbued with meaning – and there’s plenty of Gilmour harmonising in the built-up backing sections. Elsewhere, Richard Wright’s Mini-Moog and Dick Parry’s variety of saxophones get lengthy run-outs, via tempos both swinging and funky, but always building. And then it stops. The Hammond dies, Parry fades away, he and Wright fighting to be the last man standing, and there’s a click. A
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door opens. A factory machine humming like a mechanical heartbeat. There’s applause and the heartbeat gets louder. At this point, the album ceases to be about Barrett, but on the problems facing the band as whole – isolation, acrimony between the members and their frustration at feeling part of a music industry production line, a theme explored in Welcome To The Machine. This is not just a rich man’s diatribe at his bosses, it’s a statement from every artist who has ever been told to change to make a profit. Sung by Gilmour, the song melds space-age synth effects with acoustic guitar. The slow, casual pace suggests warmth and friendliness but the rhythm is relentless, evoking a machine-like malevolence.
Welcome To The Machine slides into Have A Cigar, a scathing indictment of the control that record companies can exert on their artists. Every line, every bored observation ever uttered to the band from unnamed and clueless record company executives is trotted out. The theme of isolation is continued on song number four, the album’s title track. Another largely acoustic venture, and eminently memorable in every way, Gilmour sings it like a man who has known suffering. He plays, as ever, like one touched by angels. It couldn’t be more distinct from the layered constructs of Dark Side. After Waters’ inspiring vox pop interview recordings of roadies, doormen and studio staff on their previous album, Floyd here take their samples in a more highbrow direction. Wish You Were Here begins with snatches of a Radio 4 play and a stab of Tchaikovsky as the dial is spun on Gilmour’s car radio. Back to Syd. The album closes, as it opens, with Shine On. New time signatures, new words but the same meaning, same emotive impact. Like Dark Side, the parts – all nine of Shine On – don’t necessarily work on their own. But together? A song that manages one moment to bestride the globe like a colossus then convey such a personal message is a rare thing indeed. Infinitely intimate yet it speaks to us all. Neil Crossley & Jeff Hudson
PINK FLOYD
PHOTO: GIJSBERT HANEKROOT/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
David Gilmour at the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam, May 22 1972
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MUSIC MILESTONES
WISH YOU WERE HERE
By Jeff Hudson
Postcard From The Edge PHOTO BY MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GET T Y IMAGES
Floyd’s album about absence still sounds, to this day, very present. Wish You Were Here was a triumph yet it could so easily have been a last hurrah for the band.
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PINK FLOYD
n 1973 The Dark Side Of The Moon had unexpectedly become not just big, but massive. While each member of Pink Floyd knew in their bones it was the best thing they’d ever done, as Nick Mason recalls: “There’s no way anyone felt it was five times as good as Meddle or eight times as good as Atom Heart Mother – but those were the figures it was selling at.” Two years after its release, the album remained in both the UK and US charts. Two years after its release, the Floyd were still performing it, in its
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entirety, on tour. And two years after its release the world was still waiting for its follow-up.
AFTER GREATNESS COMES...
How do you follow creative perfection? It’s a challenge that even the world’s finest artists need to consider at some point during their careers: Bowie treading the Live Aid boards at Wembley Stadium after Queen had seared 17 of their finest minutes in the band’s history. Dickie Henderson following The Beatles on stage at The Royal Command Performance in 1963.
“[NO-ONE] FELT [WISH] WAS FIVE TIMES AS GOOD AS MEDDLE OR EIGHT TIMES AS GOOD AS ATOM HEART MOTHER BUT THEY WERE THE FIGURES IT WAS SELLING AT” Nick Mason
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MUSIC MILESTONES
WISH YOU WERE HERE
remained resolutely tried and tested. A selection from Obscured By Clouds and Meddle plus a couple of earlier songs fitted around Dark Side performed in its entirety. No experiments, no surprises – just plenty of what an increasingly clamouring public wanted. When 1974’s French mini-tour began in Paris on 18 June, however, there were shoots of inspiration. Gone were all but Echoes, One Of These Days and Dark Side. Installed instead were two new songs: Raving And Drooling and Shine On You Crazy Diamond, a song in nine parts. Come November and the start of six weeks of British venues, a third number, You Gotta Be Crazy, was added to the first half of the show. By the time the band began a North American tour in Vancouver in April 1975, there was a fourth: Have A Cigar. Finally, 25 long months after Dark Side’s release, it looked like Pink Floyd were getting somewhere.
Bands deal with success in different ways. Queen (again) arguably hit their apotheosis with 1975’s A Night At The Opera. They followed it a year later with A Day At The Races – a more or less carbon copy, right down to the cover design (albeit on black rather than white). Radiohead went the other way and challenged the millions of new fans wooed by the commercialism of OK Computer with Kid A, the first in a line of less dip-in-able offerings.
In other words, there’s no perfect template. But, whichever route Pink Floyd decided to go down, there was one thing everyone could agree on: they would need songs. Great ones, to stand any chance of not being swamped by expectation. Unfortunately, a year after Dark Side’s release, there remained a dearth of ideas in the camp. Always willing to trial new material onstage, throughout 1973 Pink Floyd’s live set-lists
A FRIEND REMEMBERED
In the event, of the four new songs only Shine On and Have A Cigar made the cut for what would become Pink Floyd’s ninth studio album. (The other two songs, re-written as Sheep and Dogs respectively, would appear reworked and re-paced on 1977’s Animals instead). But by then a theme – of alienation, absence and abandonment – had emerged. Having skirted around the topic of mental illness on Dark Side, Roger Waters
PHOTO: NICK HALE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GET T Y IMAGES
Hello Old Friend The lyrics of Wish You Were Here speak directly to an absent friend, who actually turned up during the recording....
A Happier days: Rick Wright and Syd Barrett confer during rehearsals at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1967
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t first no-one recognised him. Roger Waters thought he was a friend of Dave Gilmour’s. Gilmour thought the overweight fellow clutching the carrier bag must know Richard Wright or Nick Mason. In the end, they were all correct. The man with the shaved head, no eyebrows and dark, sunken eyes was Syd Barrett. As cover designer Storm Thorgerson who was there recalls, “Roger cried. David cried. I cried. Everyone in the room did the same. It was the only human response.”
Syd was in no condition to pick up a guitar and add a few licks to Shine On or any of the other tracks. He sat at a desk, silently nodding along to the music, occasionally leaping up to brush his teeth or other compulsive behaviours, oblivious to the fact that the lyrics Waters was singing were for – and about – him. Syd had been nudged out of Floyd for a reason, which was clear. But the timing, as Wright recalled, will haunt the band forever. “It’s a bit disturbing. For him to pick the very day we want to start putting vocals on a song about him is very strange.”
PHOTO: MICHAEL PUTLAND/GET T Y IMAGES
Roger Waters at the Knebworth Festival, Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, July 5 1975
PINK FLOYD Dave Gilmour at the Los Angeles Sports Arena in April 1975
Guitar Great Gilmour’s playing on Shine On is sublime says Neville Marten, editor of Guitar Techniques.
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PHOTO: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GET T Y IMAGES
t the start of Shine On, the ambience holds you but very little actually happens until that four-note guitar arpeggio, which really kick-starts the whole track. That it’s also the precursor to some of the most majestic soloing ever on record is the icing on an amazing cake.
decided that the time was right to pay proper homage to former bandmate and team leader, Syd Barrett, whose exit from the band eight years earlier had come as a result of his psychological breakdown. The lyrics of Shine On You Crazy Diamond speak directly about him: ‘Stranger’ , ‘legend’ , ‘martyr’ , ‘raver’ , ‘seer of visions’ , ‘painter’ , ‘prisoner’ and, tellingly, ‘piper’ were all hats he wore. That Syd ‘reached for the secret too
Sped up, slowed down and harmonised into chords, these notes form the core of Part I. Played live in 1974, all parts ran into each other. When the band entered Abbey Road Studios in January 1975 it was the intention to record it the same way. Certainly that’s what Gilmour expected. It was to be, he assumed, another Echoes or Atom Heart Mother, a statement of a song spanning the entire side of an LP. However, Waters
“THE LYRICS OF SHINE ON SPOKE OF SYD: ‘STRANGER’ , ‘LEGEND’ , ‘MARTYR’ , ‘RAVER’ , ‘SEER OF VISIONS’ , ‘PRISONER’...” soon’ like a musical Icarus, is the saddest line of all. While Waters’ strength was undoubtedly his words and ideas, the music for Shine On was very much a joint effort between him, David Gilmour and Richard Wright (who, in fact, takes a solo credit for Part IX of the song), while the first section was a reworking of an unpublished experiment called Household Objects. For this piece of ‘art’ , the band had filled wine glasses to various degrees and recorded the notes created by rubbing a wet finger around each rim.
disagreed. He argued that the 25-minute song would be better received if split in two – in effect bookending the album. ‘Argue’ being the operative word. It wasn’t the first disagreement between the two and nor would it be the last. But, tellingly, it was Waters whose opinion was backed by Wright and Nick Mason. History will show that as a key moment in Roger Waters’ ascendency to becoming de facto band leader. The fact that the second and third songs on what would become Wish You Were Here were Waters’ solo writing efforts
What are Gilmour’s strengths on guitar? David cites his sense of melody. I’d add the ability to select the perfect tone for each moment, and his innate ability to compose great parts. There’s a lot of musical vision in him. Can you hear influences? The Shadows’ Hank Marvin. You can hear it in his melodicism, his love of echo and fearlessness when playing exposed, clean lines. Blues courses through his style: Clapton and Hendrix. Is he a spontaneous and instinctive player as well as being considered? Most definitely! David’s mix of melody and blues means he’s most happy to use the underlying chords over which to create something spontaneous, but that sounds composed. A fantastic skill! ‘Taste’ and ‘melodicism’ are often used to describe David... Can he do visceral? Oh yes. Very often he’ll be playing sweet and tastefully on his Strat’s neck pickup, then flip to the bridge and take your head off with a searing tone, spiteful licks, huge bends and powerful vibrato. How would you define his sound? David has always employed classic guitars and amps, but then deftly manipulated those classic sounds with echo, distortion, various wobbly effects – flange, tremolo, rotary speaker... If he was allowed just one guitar and amp, which do you think it would be? I’d say his famous ‘bitser’ Black Strat and an old tweed Fender Twin for the road, and a Deluxe or Champ for the studio.
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MUSIC MILESTONES Waters performing Wish You Were Here at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island, New York, 1975
PHOTO: (FROM TOP, CLOCKWISE): MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES; RICHARD E. AARON/REDFERNS; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES – ALL GET T Y IMAGES
WISH YOU WERE HERE
Rick Wright at the Sports Arena in April 1975, Los Angeles, California
(L-R) David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Rick Wright at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena in April 1975
added further grist to this particular mill. Both Welcome To The Machine and Have A Cigar share the second theme of the record: namely disenchantment with the record business. In the former, Waters vents his anger at being made to feel just another cog in the corporate wheel. In the latter, he derides the myriad unnamed strangers and hangers-on who fill each backstage area with their inane commentaries and opinions. Gilmour sings Welcome To The Machine with a soulful detachment. When it came to recording Cigar, however, he declined Waters’ plea to step in when a hoarse Roger couldn’t make it work. Recording elsewhere in Abbey Road was Roy Harper. Called upon, he took up lead vocals instead, a decision that still burns Waters today.
SAX AND VIOLINS
With old Cambridge cohort Dick Parry invited back from his Dark Side sessions to play saxophone on Shine On, for the title track of the album certain other guests were invited to audition. As with Harper, the fact that violin virtuosos Stephane Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin were recording in
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Abbey Road was a good enough reason to get them involved. Ultimately, Grappelli’s efforts were used but so low in the mix as to not warrant a credit. (Recent CD reissues include his version as a bonus track along with live versions of Raving And Drooling and You Gotta Be Crazy). Classical music does feature on the song, however. Wish You Were Here begins with the recorded sweep of Gilmour’s car radio, as the dial turns through various stations. A snatch of a Radio 4 play, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4, it ends with Gilmour’s 12-string guitar effected to sound like part of the AM broadcast, before snapping into clarity. Gimmicks aside, the song showed the harmonious partnership of Gilmour and Waters once again restored and the more melodic results are noticeable. Waters is a great writer but Have A Cigar and Welcome To The Machine follow the same structural groove as Brain Damage and Eclipse from Dark Side. They introduce a musical idea and pursue it through verse and, at best, extended bridge. Gilmour, however, knows how to write choruses. Accompanied by his own acoustic guitar, his emotive vocal is
“WISH YOU WERE HERE WAS AN INSTANT SUCCESS... CEMENTING PINK FLOYD’S PLACE AT THE TOP OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY TREE” every inch the equal of Waters’ lyrical paean to Syd.
A BAND PULLING TOGETHER
Wish You Were Here was an instant success. So much so that UK labelEMI Harvest failed to press enough copies to meet initial demand. It hit No 1 all over the world and cemented Pink Floyd’s place at the top of the music industry tree. And it had done so whilst being different to its predecessor and similar at the same time: ‘Different’ because it sounded so fresh. Yet ‘similar’ because it’s an album following a concept rather than a collection of songs. And the band is pulling in the same direction throughout. It would be the last time.
PINK FLOYD By Jem Roberts
PHOTO: COLIN DAVEY/EVENING STANDARD/GET T Y IMAGES
A Special Relationship Author, satirist and Floyd fan Douglas Adams became a good friend of the band’s, which led to him naming one of their albums and even being invited onstage to play rhythm guitar.
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ink Floyd have amassed an army of famous fans over the decades, from musical icons like Paul McCartney, Kate Bush and Brian May to Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, and scores more devoted admirers. But their biggest famous fan has sadly not been with us to witness the band’s 20th century output. Douglas Adams, sci-fi comedy legend and creator of Dirk Gently and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, was so much more than just another ‘fan’. Like many comedians, Adams was always a frustrated musician at heart, learning guitar with the same painstaking precision that he put into his prose. At Brentwood School in Essex, The Beatles were the first band to light his muso flame. A school performance by Paul Simon on his early UK tour also gave the 6' 5" writer a lifelong adoration of the significantly shorter balladeer (they nearly arranged to meet up in later life, until Simon was told about Adams’ height and swiftly cancelled). But Pink Floyd always had a prized place in Adams’ heart, and no other band quite seemed to fuel his imagination in the same cosmic way. He was also inspired by the likes of Procol Harum (The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe was directly based on their track Grand Hotel), but it’s a moot question whether we would have Hitchhiker at all had it not been for the inspiration of Waters’ Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE Adams was of the schoolboy generation who fought to allow their hair to sprout over their shirt collars, and listened intently to The Dark Side Of The Moon in their dorm rooms, imagining what life on other planets may be like. When, after a long, hungry period of failure, Douglas finally managed to get his own sci-fi comedy onto BBC Radio, it was no surprise that he made sure to squeeze a Floyd reference in there,
Marvin the Paranoid Android reveals an uncanny skill for mimicry, humming Shine On You Crazy Diamond to add atmosphere when the spaceship, the Heart of Gold, first arrives on the planet of Magrathea (although the section had to be cut for official release for rights issues, along with Marvin’s version of The Beatles’ Rock & Roll Music). Adams openly admitted the influence of Floyd’s recordings on The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy sound: “I felt you could do a great deal more with sound than I had heard being done of late. The people who were exploring and exploiting where you could go with sound were people in the rock world – The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and so on... I had the idea of scenes of sound. That there would never be a moment at which the alien world would let up, that you would be in it for half an hour. I’m not saying we necessarily achieved that, but I think that what we achieved came about as a result of striving after that.” The connections continued when Floyd album designers Hipgnosis came up with the cover for the first Hitchhiker novel, and album. As Hitchhiker turned the starving comedy writer into a millionaire novelist, the JK Rowling of the 1980s, Adams found himself rubbing shoulders with many of his heroes, and chief among them was David Gilmour. The parties that Douglas and his wife threw in their Islington home were famous for their musical entertainment, and Gilmour was a regular unpaid guitarist at these gatherings, and he became one of Adams’ most prized peers.
TAKING TO THE STAGE Gilmour was the man to thank for the best present that Adams ever had, for his 42nd birthday – an exclusive voucher permitting the owner to join Pink Floyd on stage for the duration of at least two songs at the Earl’s Court gig in October 1994. The months of anticipation
did not lead to disappointment for Adams, who was higher than any substance could achieve when he stepped up on stage to play rhythm on Eclipse and Braindead. Footage from the event was long believed lost, but Douglas’ brother James Thrift uncovered it in 2015 and uploaded it to YouTube, for all to enjoy. Oddly, however, this wasn’t even the first time that Adams had shared a stage with Pink Floyd, but the first time perhaps wasn’t worth remembering – in the mid-1970s, Douglas was the protégé of Monty Python Graham Chapman, and when Floyd played Knebworth in July 1975, Chapman was hired to act as a sort of anti-compere in his silly Colonel guise. Adams went along with him, dressed as one of the show’s Gumby characters, and the idea was that they would entertain the crowd between rock bands… but their brand of facetious silliness was so badly received, they were all-but bottled off by the time Pink Floyd took to the stage. Sadly, we lost Douglas Adams very suddenly at the outrageously early age of 49 over 15 years ago, but he did have one final momentous link with his favourite band worth celebrating. Around the time of his 42nd birthday, the band had a new album ready for release, but nobody involved could decide on what to call it. Douglas was ecstatic to be one of the first to get an exclusive listen of the CD, and told his friend Gilmour that he knew just what the album had to be called, and he would tell him in return for a hefty donation of around £5,000 to a Silverback Gorilla charity. Gilmour and co may have presumed the donation would yield some incredible unexpected title from the inventive writer, but when he suggested making The Division Bell the title track, they knew that he was right – why else would he still be remembered, so long after his death, as one of the greatest word perfectionists in the history of English literature?
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Studio Britannia Row, London Producer Pink Floyd Released 1977
Animals ANIMALS
Punk is raging and so is Roger Waters as Floyd adapt Orwell and get venomous.
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f Wish You Were Here represented the end of something – the band that was shaped by, then coped without and mourned Syd Barrett – then Animals is the start of Floyd’s next phase, one dominated by the vision of Roger Waters. It’s the point when the band’s native melancholy is turned outwards into an anger that would initially sustain them, before ultimately breaking them apart. Suitably, the clouds above Battersea Power Station on the iconic sleeve are soot black.
Side two (as it was back then) opens with honking effects as Pigs (Three Different Ones) settles into what could be almost described as a funk groove, Mason’s cowbell prominent in the mix. Waters pours his vitriol on the self-righteous authority figures at the top table with then-scourge of TV schedulers and the so-called permissive society, Mary Whitehouse denounced as a “bus stop rat bag/ fucked-up old hag”. No beating about the bush there. The identity of the other two pigs has never been revealed.
It’s also the first Floyd album to acknowledge the challenge of punk. Even as they recorded it during the summer and autumn of 1976, in their newly-built studio at Britannia Row, Islington, Waters and the band were only too aware of their growing status as ‘dinosaurs’ about to be wiped out by punk’s asteroid. According to Mason the group “subconsciously” adapted and toughened up their sound. Certainly Waters, whether through chance or design, succeeded in channelling some of the disgust associated with that movement, on one of rock’s most acidic appraisals of British society.
Finally birdsong and bleating usher us into Sheep, which interpolates Psalm 23, as intoned by Mason and modified to include a reference to lamb cutlets. However the sheep “through quiet reflection, and great dedication/ master the art of karate” and rise up - Gilmour’s heavy riffing is particularly effective in symbolising the final battle before the bleating returns and fades into the second part of Pigs On The Wing, written apparently for Waters’ new girlfriend, which closes the album on an upbeat note.
Early on it was clear that it was going to be another conceptual set. Waters identified a theme loosely based around George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He sketched out an idea of a future society where humanity had been reduced to three subspecies – scheming despotic pigs, ferocious fighting dogs and the mindless sheep, ie us, the huddled masses. Where Waters deviates from Orwell is in Animals the sheep overthrow their porcine oppressors, though it’s hard to ascertain this from the music alone. While the lyrics preached insurrection, musically Floyd made no concessions to current trends: Animals contained three extended tracks, bookended by Waters’ plaintive acoustic Pigs On The Wing. Dogs, a multi-sectioned leftover from the Wish You Were Here sessions stretched to over 17 minutes. It had been played live as far back as 1974 as You Gotta Be Crazy. While Waters added new lyrics comparing businessmen to dogs, Gilmour’s sang lead and contributed three piercing solos, two of which sandwich a synthesised section where dogs can be heard barking through vocoders.
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It’s a challenging and brave album, which drew grudging respect from reviewers at the time (NME praised it at the time as being “extreme, relentless, harrowing and downright iconoclastic”.) If there is a fault it’s there is no easy route in; no Money or Another Brick In The Wall to lure the passing, more casual punter. And the concept just isn’t fleshed out enough compared to the tireless work Waters would later put into The Wall. For all these reasons Animals remains the connoisseur’s Floyd album and unlike its two immediate predecessors it’s not one that you often see on those ‘all time’ lists. At least, even with its clumsy metaphors, it attempted to depict life as it was lived in Britain in 1977 and while musically it exists in a different universe to, say, The Clash’s debut album, its concerns - the way capitalism subjugates the ordinary people – and invective are broadly similar. Dinosaurs they might have been, but Animals saw Pink Floyd getting their hands muddy, grappling in the mire, with the rest of us sheep. Will Simpson
PINK FLOYD
PHOTO: DAVID TAN/SHINKO MUSIC/GET T Y IMAGES
David Gilmour on the Animals tour in New York City July 1977
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MUSIC MILESTONES
By Henry Yates
Call Of The Wild
ANIMALS
Pink Floyd’s Animals was a savage concept piece that tore strips off the social order of 1970s Britain – and hastened the band’s demise. “Let it be said” notes Roger Waters, “that it’s a very violent album…”
t was 1976 and Pink Floyd were a band on the brink of cultural obsolescence. In the wake of Wish You Were Here, the tills had kept ringing, but when John Lydon – soon to be rechristened Johnny Rotten – skulked across London that year in his mythologised ‘I hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt, it caught the sentiment of British youth for whom the quartet were millionaire windbags, cosseted from life at the sharp end and representing all that punk had come to tear down. Ironic, then, that even as the new guard bayed for their blood, Pink Floyd were busy recording an album of such anti-establishment malice that it would make the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen sound like a squeak of dissent by comparison. “Let it be said,” noted Roger Waters in one radio interview at the time, “that although the violence is tempered with sadness – and even a smidgeon of compassion here and there – Animals is a very violent album.”
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Animals was not directly inspired by punk, the band insist. Waters has reflected since that he “didn’t notice” the nascent punk scene as it raged around him, while David Gilmour, “didn’t feel like it was particularly relevant to us”. But given the cultural sea change of the era, it’s surely no coincidence that a similar white-hot anthropological rage boils through this 10th album, albeit shrouded in Waters’ conceit of an Orwellian future-world where social classes are represented by pigs, dogs and sheep. “I’ve had the idea of Animals in the back of my mind for many years,” the bassist told one interviewer. “It’s an old chestnut, really, isn’t it?”
These were indeed songs of a certain vintage. Of the five tracks that make up Animals, both Sheep and Dogs had appeared in concert two years prior (then known as Raving And Drooling and You Gotta To Be Crazy). “We used those two tracks, which went back to 1974,” explains Gilmour, “and changed the names, doctored them around and stuck them on the album.”
THE GREAT MELTDOWN
In April 1976, when the band convened at their new North London recording facility on Britannia Row, Waters completed the tracklisting with Pigs (Three Different Ones) and the two-part Pigs On The Wing. A
“A POLICE HELICOPTER DID GIVE CHASE FOR A WHILE BUT THE PIG WAS CLIMBING LIKE AN F-14. SOME TIME LATER IT LANDED IN A FIELD IN KENT” Nick Mason
PINK FLOYD
PHOTO: DAVID TAN/SHINKO MUSIC/GET T Y IMAGES
“ALTHOUGH THE VIOLENCE IS TEMPERED WITH SADNESS AND EVEN A SMIDGEON OF COMPASSION HERE AND THERE, ANIMALS IS VERY VIOLENT ALBUM” Roger Waters
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Pigs Might Fly The story behind the iconic Animals sleeve art.
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ANIMALS
f the Animals sessions were a “slog”, the sleeve art didn’t come easily either. In December 1976, with the music completed, the Floyd invited their go-to design group Hipgnosis to present cover concepts, and were appalled at the original pitch of a small boy interrupting his parents mid-coitus. In search of an alternative, Waters cycled around south London with a camera, stopping outside the imposing form of Battersea Power Station, its four steaming chimneys evoking a fitting sense of dystopia. Yet the bassist had a twist in mind. “The band had just had an inflatable pig built for a tour,” recalls Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis in Time Out.
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“Roger and I both looked up at the power station and said, ‘Let’s fly the pig between the chimneys’. Just like that.” If only it were that simple. Having commissioned the 40-foot high porker – now christened Algie – from German airship manufacturer Ballonfabrik, the Floyd’s creative team arrived at Battersea en masse. “There was a crew of riggers, inflaters and everything else,” Nick Mason told In The Studio. “And also a highly-paid marksman whose job was to deflate the pig with a well-placed shot in the event of it escaping.” Despite the eye-catching skies over Battersea, that first day of
shooting proved an abject failure, the pig failing to fully inflate with helium and remaining thoroughly earth-bound. “We didn’t get the shot,” remembers Mason, “so the next morning everybody reported for work to try again – with the exception of the marksman.” This time, Algie inflated, only to promptly break its moorings and take flight across London. “All flights from Heathrow were cancelled,” recalls Powell, “and I was arrested. We put out an announcement on the radio telling people to look out for 40 foot-long, pink, inflatable pig.” “There were even stories that airliners did spot the pig,” picks up Mason, “although I think that’s
unlikely. A police helicopter did give chase for a while, but the pig was climbing like an F-14 at the time. Some time later, the safety valves opened and it began a gentle descent and landed in a field in Kent.” That evening, Powell found himself in the surreal position of being berated by a local farmer. Roadies were dispatched to retrieve the pig, and a third day of photography (with two marksmen) passed without incident. “The day when we finally shot it,” says Powell, “the sky wasn’t as impressive as it had been, so I added the pig to the photo from the first day. It’s actually a completely faked photograph.”
PINK FLOYD
PHOTO: ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park's menacing porcine inflatable set sail nightly as part of the Animals tour
“PIGS IS A FAIRLY COMPASSIONATE SCREAM OF ABUSE. IF YOU CAN SCREAM ABUSE IN A COMPASSIONATE WAY” Roger Waters troubling pattern was emerging. While Gilmour was co-credited and contributes joint vocals for Dogs – and maintains that he “didn’t feel remotely squeezed out on that album” – Nick Mason argues that Waters held the sessions in a creative stranglehold, “really keeping Dave down and frustrating him deliberately”. Richard Wright, for his part, saw Animals as the start of the great Floyd meltdown. “It was difficult,” the keys man told Floyd biographer Mark Blake. “That was when Roger really began to start believing that he was the sole writer of the band. With regards to that album, it was partly my fault, because I didn’t have much to offer. Dave, who did have something to offer, only managed to get a couple of things on there. Compared to, say, Wish You Were Here, Animals was a slog.”
Revisit the album and the venom isn’t immediately apparent. On the contrary, never has a record started so deceptively as Animals, which opens with a cloud of strummed acoustic guitar, accompanied by the most heartfelt vocal of Waters’ career, devoted to his new girlfriend Carolyne Anne Christie. “There was a certain amount of doubt as to whether that song was going to find its way onto the album,” noted Waters of Pigs On The Wing (Part One). “But otherwise the album would just have been a sort of scream of rage.”
RELEASE THE DOGS
True enough, anyone lulled by that lovestruck opening gambit was quickly jolted headlong into dystopia by Dogs. A 17-minute polemic whose genreslipping music gave a bed for lyrics of
abject alienation and savagery, it portrayed a Machiavellian businessman whose club tie and handshake mean he’s “trusted by the people that you lie to, so that when they turn their backs on you, you’ll get the chance to put the knife in”. Nonetheless, in a chilling couplet delivered by Gilmour, the washed-up protagonist ends the song with his just deserts, as “just another sad old man, all alone and dying of cancer”. Decorated by porcine grunts and blues-rock guitar evocative of 1975’s Have A Cigar, Pigs (Three Different Ones) was shorter – at 11 minutes – but even more vicious, taking pot-shots at the pampered blue-bloods with their snouts in the trough: “Pigs is a fairly compassionate scream of abuse,” explained Waters, “if you can scream abuse in a compassionate way.” While most of his targets are painted in vague terms, the final section saw Waters single out the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, infamous for her Clean Up TV campaign of the 1960s. The bassist had deliberated over the verse and repeatedly thrown it out, but says he never managed to write anything better. “I was incensed by [her],” he told MOJO, “as I am by all book-burners and Bible-pushers; people who foster sexual guilt and shame, who try and deny people any opportunity to fulfil their sexual destiny.” After Pigs had burnt out with Gilmour’s blistering outro solo, a lowing of livestock bled into the bass-driven space-rock of Sheep, which offered a redemptive vision of the oppressed masses rising up against the dog class (‘Bleating and babbling, we fell on his neck with a scream/Wave upon wave of demented avengers/ March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream’). “The lyrics are not a direct expression of my feelings as on Wish You Were Here”, stressed Waters, who also played rhythm guitar on the song (while Gilmour handled bass). “More of them are put into a third person, about more distant events. Especially something like Sheep, which is nothing to do with me at all, really. It’s a kind of weird tract, a kind of weird, slightly jumbled tract. It’s kind of admonishing and a warning, but it’s not really, because it’s so confused.” And finally, by way of much-needed light relief after the bombast and savagery, there was Pigs On The Wing
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MUSIC MILESTONES Nick Mason on the Animals tour – soon to be rechristened In The Flesh – New Bingley Hall, Stafford, 1977.
Hell On Wheels Revisiting the living nightmare of the Animals tour.
ANIMALS
PHOTO: DAVID REDFERN/REDFERNS
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“IT’S EXCITING AND NOISY AND IT’S GOT REALLY GOOD BITS OF EFFECTS ON IT BUT IT’S NOT ONE OF OUR HIGH POINTS” Rick Wright (Part Two). But even the opening love song’s reprise reportedly caused further friction in the line-up, as it would garner Waters a second slice of the album’s royalties. Nor, by all accounts, did it help band relations that session man Terrence ‘Snowy’ White was invited into the studio to contribute a guitar solo linking the finale back to Part One (only heard on the album’s eight-track format). So it was finished. Despite the decidedly radio-unfriendly material – and the supposed dominance of punk rendering everything else as irrelevant – Animals proved another commercial success, reaching UK No 2 and US No 3 upon its release on January 23 1977 (albeit never matching the sales figures of the Floyd’s other big-hitter releases from that decade). Curious, then, that its status has palpably receded over the years, to the point that in modern times, it’s often dismissed as the gear shift between the better-loved Wish You Were Here and the masterpiece that took Waters’ acerbic worldview to its logical conclusion, 1979’s The Wall.
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As for the band members themselves, they never did much to fight Animals corner. “I didn’t really like a lot of the music on the album,” sniffed Wright in a BBC Omnibus special, while Gilmour was decidedly ambivalent while passing comment in 1992: “It’s exciting and noisy and fun, and it’s got really good bits of effects and stuff on it, but it’s not one of our creative high points, really.” Doomy and nihilistic, Animals is not an easy album to fall in love with, and perhaps there are other releases from Pink Floyd around the period that you’d take off the shelf more readily. And yet, at a stroke, it proved that the band were still angry, eloquent, relevant and attuned to the thoughts of the man in the dole queue. No wonder it won them the grudging respect of the punk scene. “I’m always amazed,” mused Gilmour in NME, “when I meet young English musicians who were big in the punk era, and they say they loved everything we did – and that includes one of the Sex Pistols. No, I’m not going to tell you which one…”
ebuting in Dortmund, West Germany on the 23rd of January 1977, Floyd’s biggest tour yet unveiled staging and lighting unprecedented for a rock show, alongside a fleet of inflatables… A reproduction of the pig from the Animals sleeve was detonated nightly as it sailed over the fans. To accompany Dogs, there was also the so-called ‘nuclear family’: grotesque blow-ups created by Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park. “I think the boys thought I’d gone the way of Syd [Barrett] when I said that we needed a giant inflatable family and a load of animals,” reflected Waters in 1987. Howwever, faced with the band playing to a click track in headphones, surrounded by airborne latex, NME’s Mick Farren wrote of a “depressingly hopeless journey through a menacingly sterile cosmos”. In Frankfurt, a dry-ice hitch prompted fans to bottle the stage. Things got worse when the tour (now dubbed In The Flesh) moved to North America. “The shows varied in quality,” noted Nick Mason. “We were not spending enough time on key aspects like segueing from one number to the next. My memory is that some of the staging was as erratic as the music.” Now more interested in golf than socialising, Waters was travelling separately from his bandmates, and growing increasingly agitated at playing to drunken hordes calling out for Money. When a firework went off in New York during Pigs On The Wing, Waters chastised the perpetrator as “a stupid motherfucker”. When the tour concluded at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, he snapped. “There was some kid trying to climb the chain-link fence. I finally got so angry with this kid – who was screaming all the way through one of the quieter songs – that I spat at him. And when I came offstage afterwards, I thought, ‘What have I been reduced to here, and what has happened to the relationship between the band and the audience?’” So began Waters’ concept for The Wall. But that’s a whole different animal…
PINK FLOYD
Studio Super Bear Studios & Studio Miraval, France / Britannia Row Studios, London / CBS Studios, New York / Cherokee Studios, Producers Workshop & The Village Recorder, Los Angeles Producer Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, James Guthrie, Roger Waters Released 1979
The Wall THE WALL
A darker side and the end of an era for the classic quartet.
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y the late 1970s the triple assault of Pink Floyd albums The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals had sent the band into the stratosphere, making them a bona fide stadium outfit living out the full excesses of rock stardom. Pink Floyd were being swept along by the juggernaut of the music industry that was demanding they play a relentless touring schedule in stadium-sized venues. Famously, the seed of the idea behind The Wall came in 1977 when Roger Waters spat at a fan in the crowd. He later confessed his sense of alienation from the Floyd fanbase during that time and a desire to build a wall behind the band and the audience during live shows.
Of course, such a cursory event in a rock star’s life does not a 26-track concept album make. And, in truth, the unfortunate incident with what Rogers claims was an inattentive fan merely provided the light to the touchpaper of Water’s burgeoning angst. Written in 1978 entirely by Waters, The Wall is to a great extent his autobiography (dovetailed with a portrayal of their troubled former member Syd Barrett) and is based around the fictional character Pink. Starting with the death of his father at the hands of Hitler, Pink leads a dark and oppressive existence occupied by an over-bearing mother (Mother) and vindictive teachers (Another Brick In The Wall Pt II). His ascent as a rock star compounds his already fragile psyche and the wall continues to be built as he suffers from loneliness, drug addition, divorce and a descent into fascism, before finally breaking the wall down. During the recording of this, their 11th studio album. Waters was firmly at the helm and the recording process was famously fraught with financial difficulties, multiple producers and inter-band bickering that would culminate with Waters sacking Wright and then re-employing him as a touring musician. The incarnation of Floyd as Waters, Wright, Mason and Gilmour would never record together again after the release of The Wall. The themes behind the album are brooding: war, violence, isolation, corruption and addiction, amongst them. These
are, of course, universal themes of the human experience and they resonate as much now as they did on its release in 1979. However, the album remains a period piece in its portrayal of Britain as a nation struggling to find its post-war identity and the resulting class, race and generational conflict that fuelled such personal angst. It’s a traumatised view of Britain during the 1970s – which, in retrospect holds weight in the light of the music business corruption and widespread showbiz paedophilia that prevailed during that era. Musically, The Wall is not generally considered to be the band’s zenith: that position, arguably, falls to The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here. On The Wall, Waters’ ego overrides the musical whole that was Pink Floyd on its two predecessors. And to some extent, the narrative driving the album dominates the music. This is a rock opera and it’s bursting with big, bombastic, theatrical rock songs with insistent rhythms and soaring guitar solos. Special effects weave in and out while Gilmour and Waters share vocal duties. There are beautiful moments too amidst the brooding atmosphere and the desolation of the lyrics: Goodbye Blue Sky and Comfortably Numb revealing a more sophisticated interplay between Gilmour and Waters in particular.
The Wall is undoubtedly a masterpiece – albeit a sprawling one – and one of the best-selling albums of all time. Yet, it remains a demanding listen with 26 thematically and lyrically uncomfortable tracks that conclude with only partial resolution as Pink breaks the wall down but doesn’t seem to find peace. The Wall is also the ultimate concept album that demands a chronological listen. How this translates to a generation of streamers is a moot point. How, for example, would In The Flesh fit into a Spotify playlist? Nevertheless, The Wall stands strong as an example of the concept album and an important marker in the history of one of the greatest rock bands in the history of music. Katie Nicholls
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THE WALL
MUSIC MILESTONES
By Jeff Hudson
Back To The Wall
Donald Trump is not the first person to think a wall is the answer. Pink Floyd got there first – and they paid for it themselves.
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PINK FLOYD The original The Wall live show. Pink Floyd perform on stage at Earl’s Court in London, 6th August 1980
he momentum created by The Dark Side Of The Moon and carried through Wish You Were Here and Animals meant that by 1977, arenas were no longer large enough to cope with ticket demand for Floyd gigs. Four shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden apart, the majority of the venues for their In The Flesh tour were open-air stadiums. It should have been the band’s finest moment. In truth, a
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few of them had never been so unhappy. Nor so inspired. Everything that happened to the band from that point on – good, very good, and bad – can be traced back to that tour.
BLAME CANADA
The Wall was born in Montreal, although nobody realised at the time. It was at the city’s Olympic Stadium on 6 July 1977, the last night of the tour, that Roger Waters, already aggravated by the distance – both physically and culturally – separating the vast football-style crowds and the band, allegedly lost his temper and spat at certain boisterous individuals. It didn’t come from nowhere. For weeks he’d endured chanting and yelling, noticeably during the quieter songs,
and had recently begun to yell at fans, screaming “shut up” and other choice instructions. But the spitting was a new low, or high, depending on your point of view. David Gilmour had his own concerns that night. The sound and the band’s performance, he felt, were sub par. In protest he refused to step out for the scripted encore, leaving Snowy White to fill his shoes as best he could. The band, in the end, improvised a blues jam rather than Money and Us And Them. For the 60,000+ fans it would be a memorable, unique encounter. But for Waters it was so much more. It never rains but it pours, of course, and later that night Waters injured his foot during a good-natured backstage tussle with manager Steve O’Rourke.
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PHOTO: ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
“GILMOUR HAD HIS OWN CONCERNS. THE SOUND AND THE BAND’S PERFORMANCE WERE SUB PAR. IN PROTEST HE REFUSED TO STEP OUT FOR THE SCRIPTED ENCORE”
LEGENDS of ROCK bullying, of stardom and destructive relationships are all designated as ‘bricks’ in Waters’ metaphorical wall. But there is one aspect that is purely Waters’ own. And that is his father’s experiences in War. Eric Waters died during the Second World War. His young son never knew him, a fact that torments Waters to this day (see the documentary parts of his film Roger Waters’ The Wall Live for visits to his father’s battle sites and grave). Pink, to be rounded and grounded in reality, was to have experienced death, missiles and mortar bombs. Quite a challenge for a band aiming for chart and sales success.
Roger Waters performs The Wall on February 27 1980 at Nassau Coliseum in Long Island, NY
HANDS OFF OF MY STACK
THE WALL
The ‘bricks’ in the wall are all obstacles that befell Waters at some point. During recording of the album, several others became apparent. The keystone was money. Virtually all other problems can be traced back to the On the journey back from hospital he began to muse on what had made the tour such a disaster for him. Number one, the audiences were too big, almost too uneducated. Number two, he was a musician, not a performer. The disparity between him and the public was too great to surmount. He would, he decided, have been happier if Pink Floyd played behind a giant wall…
BRICKS AND MORTARS
Floyd revisionists say that Waters began to dominate the group as part of a cunningly-devised plan, The Wall being his masterstroke. The truth is somewhat more haphazard. Yes, he had taken the lion’s share of credits on Animals – Gilmour co-wrote You Gotta Be Crazy/Dogs and it is the only song he takes a (shared) lead vocal on – but according to the guitarist, the production was a proper collaboration. A year later, in 1978, with Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright absenting themselves from band duties to work on solo projects, Waters began to do what he does best – write. And write. And write. Yes, one batch of his private demos was entitled Bricks In The Wall and focused on the alienation he’d experienced touring the world to faceless audiences. But there was another project he felt equally passionate about, a more intimate concept of sex, family and modern living. When the band convened in July at Britannia Row Studios to discuss album number 11, he presented both. In the past, Pink Floyd had workshopped and collaborated and often jammed ideas into songs and then albums. On this occasion with the
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“VIRTUALLY ALL OTHER PROBLEMS CAN BE TRACED BACK TO MONEY. OR THE BAND’S SUDDEN LACK OF IT. THE FLOYD FOUND THEMSELVES WITH LITTLE IN THE BANK AND AN 83% TAX RATE ON THAT” other members being artistically ‘spent’ , it came down to a choice between Waters’ brace of projects or… nothing. There was a vote and they all went for Bricks In The Wall. The other idea was back-burnered, later to appear as Waters’ first solo album The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-hiking. That’s not to say it was a 100 per cent positive vote. There wasn’t so much to separate the two. Given such little input at the writing stage from the rest of the group it is no surprise the project read and sounded autobiographical; too autobiographical, the rest of the band feared. Centred around Waters’ personal angst about audiences, touring, alienation, sex and relationships, there was no other conclusion. New co-producer Bob Ezrin, however, persuaded Waters that a rewrite to include a new central character, ‘Pink’ , would soften the blow. It was just what was needed. Pink, it transpired, shared the similar resentments about school as Waters. He had ‘mummy issues’ that may or may not have been the author’s own. But there were also elements of Syd Barrett in the character as well. The notions of alienation, of feeling apart from others, of violence, of
band’s sudden lack of it. Relying on a company that made ultimately bad investments, the Floyd found themselves with little in the bank and an 83 per cent tax rate on that. In short, they needed to make and sell an album to stay afloat. Typical then, that it was to be their most complicated – and longest – production to date. To beat the tax rap, the band were advised in April 1979 to take temporary residence abroad. The problem was that they didn’t all exile to the same place. Gilmour and Wright headed for the Greek islands, Waters to Switzerland and Mason to France. For the purposes of recording they came together after initial sessions at Britannia Row, to work at France’s SuperBear Studios. Which is where the cracks first began to show. With Wright absent from writing credits on Animals he was conscious of having little space to contribute on its successor with his musicianship squeezed out. In particular, he resented the influence – and royalty points – of the album’s co-producer Ezrin. Eventually he persuaded Waters to let him produce, a decision which in turn led to conflict with Ezrin and Wright, as a result, working at nights alone.
PINK FLOYD
You can’t have any pudding… Truly the stuff of nightmares, The Wall’s imagery lingers on...
PHOTO: IMAGE USE BY KIND PERMISSION OF GERALD SCARFE
PHOTO: GET T Y IMAGES/STORM THORGERSON
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umour has it that Roger Waters was displeased when Storm Thorgerson included artwork from the Animals album in his book Walk Away Rene and took his revenge during The Wall by insisting the band look elsewhere for visuals for the project. Luckily, there was a replacement waiting in the wings. Gerald Scarfe, cartoonist for broadsheet newspapers and tabloids alike, had been commissioned to supply images used during the In The Flesh tour. Waters in particular liked the cut of his nib and pushed for him to oversee the packaging for The Wall. It is Scarfe’s unmistakable handwriting that scrawls the album title on the background of white bricks. And it is his images inside the cover denoting demonic headmasters and other characters from the album – many of whom would later be turned into giant dirigibles on the subsequent tours. The 80ft teacher, lording it over a frightened crowd, screaming, “How can you have any pudding when you don’t eat your meat?” is never to be forgotten. It was Bob Ezrin’s instinct to pursue Another Brick In The Wall Pt II as a potential hit single – a Trojan Horse designed to slip an angry, head-fuck concept album into the shopping of unsuspecting audience. He persuaded Waters to extend it to more than one verse and one chorus, sourced the kids choir from Islington Green School and manoeuvred Gilmour into accepting a ‘disco’ beat. But it was Scarfe’s vision in the controversial accompanying video that stays with us the longest. It is he, after all, we have to thank for the grotesque sight of children being poured into a mincer and ground out as worms – all the backdrop of pre-teens singing about ‘ed-u-cay-shun’. Thirty-five years later it remains as shocking as ever. Just what Waters wanted.
Gerald Scarfe and Roger Waters discuss Gerald’s unique contribution
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Ed-u-cay-shun A brief history of The Wall ’s multiple live shows and tours…
THE WALL
PHOTO: WARING ABBOT T/GET T Y IMAGES
David Gilmour, February 27 1980 at Nassau Coliseum in Long Island, NY
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he Wall is a landmark album for Pink Floyd and a personal milestone for Roger Waters – but it is also so much more. Cultural phenomenon, record breaker and modern icon – is there another album that reaches so far beyond its original remit? In 2010 Roger Waters embarked on what would become a three-year tour of record breaking proportions. Playing to 4.2 million people, grossing $458 million along the way, his 219 shows eclipsed Madonna’s record for most lucrative solo tour ever.
Ever watchful of the pennies, Waters took a decision in summer that proved the final straw for Wright. When US record company Columbia offered the band a cash incentive to get the album out by Christmas, Waters agreed. Gilmour, Mason and Ezrin fell into line. Wright, however, refused to cut short a rare family holiday. Incensed, Waters allegedly called on O’Rourke to eject the keyboard player post haste. Gilmour’s attempts to placate matters lasted only until Waters said he wouldn’t continue with the album unless Wright went. When The Wall as it became known, finally appeared in November 1979, Richard Wright’s name did not appear
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No matter the width or breadth of the stage, his ‘wall’ filled an entire end. Used as a projection screen for myriad political messages – including photographs, many sent in by fans, of hundreds of people killed by the actions of war – it rose to the occasion in every venue. The highlight was often the lone guitarist appearing atop the construct for the co-singing parts of Comfortably Numb. On 12 May 2011 that guitarist was David Gilmour repaying a debt to Waters, owed since his erstwhile colleague agreed to appear at a charity event.
The show featured a drone-powered pig, daubed in political slogans, hovering over the crowds, a mammoth towering schoolmaster lecturing all and sundry on eating practices, and a Stuka bomber zipping down a wire and ‘exploding’ into the wall. When the resulting concert film was ready it was only fitting that it get a worldwide cinema release.
LIVE IN NO MAN'S LAND The origins of the new tour were born 22 years earlier, on the 21st of July 1990 when Roger Waters mounted a one-off
on it. In fact, when he appeared on the accompanying tour it was as a paid session musician.
WALL COMES TUMBLING DOWN
Waters and Wright’s was not the only relationship tested during recording of The Wall. The final result, including unexpected No 1 single Another Brick In The Wall Pt II, eventually filled four sides of vinyl, totalling 26 songs of which 16 were sung outright by Waters. Gilmour sang three and the two men shared the remainder. The guitarist managed to co-write only Comfortably Numb and Run Like Hell – both songs he still performs as encores today – plus Young Lust, all of them far more
commercially tuneful for his input. Getting even these ideas over to Waters, however, proved no small task. The bassist’s way of coping with the various external pressures on the band was to bunker down, not letting his bandmates in. And Comfortably Numb nearly didn’t happen. Even on the tracks where David Gilmour is billed as collaborator, it often needed Bob Ezrin to play a role to make them see the light of day. The original concept for Comfortably Numb, for example, – or at that time a Waters tune titled The Doctor – had Roger rhyming ‘listen’ with ‘physician’ , ‘condition’ and ‘magician’ , like an uninspired O-Level
PINK FLOYD Roger Waters onstage at Bankers Life Fieldhouse on June 11 2012 in Indianapolis as part of his mammoth Wall tour
“THEY WERE NEVER HUNGRIER… NOR WERE THEY EVER AS UNHAPPY…” Storm Thorgerson
PHOTO: GET T Y IMAGES/STORM THORGERSON
spectacular of The Wall in Berlin. 350,000 paying customers plus 100,000 crowded into the former ‘no-man’s land’ between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall some eight months earlier. A cast of luminaries including Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Bryan Adams, Albert Finney and Cyndi Lauper took to the stage to fill the various roles. That The Wall has a life beyond the record is evidenced in the fact Alan Parker wanted to make a film based on it. Originally slated to star Roger Waters as
his own creation, ‘Pink’, screen tests proved not favourable and rising punk star Bob Geldof was persuaded instead (despite huge reservations, hilariously overheard by Waters’ taxi driver brother while dropping Geldof off at the airport). A plot, the album music, and added graphics from Gerald Scarfe produced a cinema cult classic. And then there's the original groundbreaking Wall shows… Pink Floyd’s own 31-date tour in the early 1980s was filmed with the intention of broadcast in the movie. Sadly, the footage was not
student. Producer Ezrin persuaded him to not make it so personal and to work with Gilmour instead. The result is arguably one of the best songs Pink Floyd ever made. Certainly, it features one of the best guitar solos and garners the biggest reception during concerts 30 plus years later.
compelling”. Fans were less ambiguous. The Wall hit the No 1 spot in the US and stayed there for 15 weeks, selling more than 19 million copies within the decade. If it weren’t for The Dark Side Of The Moon outselling everything, it would be renowned as Pink Floyd’s commercial masterpiece. As magnificent in scope, ambition and production as The Wall is, for a band renowned as a live entity it would prove a headache. A migraine, in fact. Waters had conceived of the album as the journey of a man who builds a wall between himself and reality – entertaining vile dictatorish delusions along the way (notably Run Like Hell and its controversial introduction). To
IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?
Critical reception to The Wall was mixed. Columbia Records – Floyd’s label in the US – were not instantly sure of the hit on their hands. Some journalists were equally nonplussed. Melody Maker in the UK is a case in point: “I’m not sure whether it’s brilliant or terrible, but I find it utterly
technically resolute enough although on his record-breaking tour Waters duetted each night on Mother with the 1980 version of himself singing at Earls Court. On 27 March 2000 Pink Floyd themselves released a live double CD of the tour, taken from various nights. The cover of Is There Anybody Out There?, once again by Storm Thorgerson, shows the four masks of Waters, Wright, Gilmour and Mason, worn onstage by the surrogate band. “They were never hungrier,” Thorgerson said. “Nor were they ever as unhappy.”
perform it live he wanted this enacted. And so, for 31 glorious nights between February 1980 and June 1981, it happened. On those rare nights in the US, Germany and London, Pink Floyd played the album in its entirety and gradually stage-hands assembled large white blocks which eventually obscured the band from the audience and, crucially, vice versa. Then the wall was destroyed and the band played out in full technicolour glory. It remains a landmark in rock production and the last tour where Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason all took part. Together. As a band. The next chapter in their story would be very different indeed…
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Studio Gilmour’s Hookend Manor, Waters’ Billiard Room Studios, Mayfair Studios, RAK Studios, Eel Pie Studios, Olympic Studios, Abbey Road Studios, Audio International Studios Producer Roger Waters, James Guthrie, Michael Kamen Released 1983
The Final Cut THE FINAL CUT
Or the final straw? The album that emerged when the wall came tumbling down…
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y 1982 Pink Floyd were less a band than a man on a mission plus a couple of disenfranchised backing musicians. Following a dispute with Roger Waters about not pulling his weight during the recording of the previous year’s The Wall, Richard Wright had ceased to be an official band member. He took part in the subsequent tour as a salaried musician.
Letting down Waters on The Wall was never going to end well. The album was received as the bassist’s pet project. He’d conceived the whole enterprise, written most of the songs and sung the majority as well. When ownership of the ‘Pink Floyd’ name hit the courts following Waters’ own departure in 1985, it’s notable that he ‘won’ the rights to the album (along with the ‘pig’ from the cover of Animals). Three decades later his globe-spanning Roger Waters’ The Wall tour played to more than four million people over three years, grossing nearly $460 million. When Alan Parker began work on a movie based on the story in the songs, Waters decided that Pink Floyd would write a soundtrack of new songs. In the event just one of the songs, When The Tigers Broke Free, made the cut. Originally written for inclusion on The Wall, it was vetoed by the rest of the band as ‘too personal’ – an achievement considering the semi-autobiographical nature of the rest of the album. Never one to let a good idea go unrepeated, Waters decided to turn his plans for the disused soundtrack into the next Pink Floyd album, 1983’s The Final Cut. As a result it ploughs familiar furrows, with abandonment, the futility of war and declining social mores at its core. Each track is credited in its entirety to Waters and he sings all but one song. Like its predecessor, the album plays more like a single theatrical piece than a collection of songs. The individual parts all follow roughly the same structure. First a sound effect (a missile on Not Now John; a ticking clock on One Of The Few; whistling wind on The Gunner’s Dream and a radio station sweep – reminiscent of that on Wish You Were Here – on The Post War Dream). Next, Waters sings first mournfully, over occasional piano, guitar or effect. Finally,
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he leaps into shouty mode. Cue drum crashes, bomb blasts, six-string stabs and the inevitable solo (guitar or sax). On paper it sounds formulaic. But, oh, the emotions… What really bothers Roger Waters, of course, is war. He never knew his father Eric Waters, because he was killed at the Battle of Anzio in 1944, and here his son’s anger at war resonates on just about every track. When The Tigers Broke Free, added to all reissues of The Final Cut post-2004, is essentially a list of Eric Waters’ movements during the campaign. But in 1983, Waters can’t scream at Winston Churchill so it’s Margaret Thatcher – revelling in her ‘success’ during the Falklands War – who is the subject of his wrath on The Post War Dream. Being too emotional is never an accusation one could level at David Gilmour. Yet emotion doesn’t just come from the voice. Despite rumours of working separately to Waters for the majority of the album, Gilmour puts in some guitar work as passionate as his bandmate’s libretto. The solo on The Fletcher Memorial Home is every inch as personal as Waters’ lyric. It swoops, soars and penetrates over 60 unhurried seconds. So few notes, so measured, so full of space.
Your Possible Pasts is another that circles Comfortably Numb level artistry. But what would really make it Pink Floyd is Gilmour singing. By 1983 Roger Waters had learned to write songs that suited his voice. But for one song, Not Now John, he required a proper singer. Not Now John begins with an incendiary exploding and just gets louder from there. It is epic, anthemic and Gilmour, completely in his element, lets rip in his trademark faux strained style, the gospel backing singers beautifully parrot ‘Fuck all that’ throughout. Now that is a lyric the guitarist can identify with. Ultimately, like The Wall but more so, The Final Cut is one to be filed under ‘experience’ as much as ‘album’. Luckily for everyone, it succeeds at both. Jeff Hudson
PINK FLOYD
PHOTO: L. BUSACCA /WIREIMAGE/GET T Y IMAGES
David Gilmour live onstage in New York, circa 1984
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MUSIC MILESTONES By Jeff Hudson
THE FINAL CUT
End Of An Era Roger Waters’ paean to his father – and very nearly the final album from Pink Floyd – The Final Cut remains the most controversial in the band’s canon.
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y 1982 Pink Floyd was no longer a single entity but rather one man in charge with a raggle taggle band of disenchanted musicians. On paper, David Gilmour and Nick Mason were every bit Roger Waters’ equal. It just didn’t feel like it. The Wall was widely received as Waters’ masterpiece. When talk of a new Floyd album began in 1982, the band met to discuss ideas. Gilmour saw it as an opportunity to discuss what the band wanted to do next, planning to work with Waters on writing new songs together. Waters had other ideas. Tons
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PINK FLOYD
of them, in fact. Just as he’d done with The Wall, he presented Gilmour and Mason with a demo tape of an album already largely conceived and written. Perhaps lazily, Gilmour has since admitted, he and Mason decided to go with Waters’ songs because they were there. The only problem was, hadn’t they heard a lot of them before?
MORE BRICKS?
Roger Waters might have taken the majority of writing credits on The Wall, but that didn’t mean he always got his own way. The band was, at least on paper, still a democracy. As such, If
Wright, Mason and Gilmour voted against doing something then Waters had little option but to agree. And that rankled. As the driving force behind the entire project Waters felt his vision should have been left untempered, especially by three men whose only contributions were, he felt, to every so often say ‘no’. But say ‘no’ they did, several times. When The Tigers Broke Free is a case in point. Originally written for inclusion on The Wall, it was vetoed by the rest of the band as ‘too personal’. The Hero’s Return, One Of The Few, Your Possible Pasts and The Final Cut
were all passed on as well. In response Waters decided that Alan Parker’s planned motion picture of The Wall should have a soundtrack of new songs – called Spare Bricks – including those excluded from the original album. After More and Zabriskie Point, it certainly wouldn’t be their weirdest film gig. In the event this didn’t materialise with just one of the songs, When The Tigers Broke Free, making the transition. A soundtrack is one thing. A proper Pink Floyd album is quite another. Gilmour, for one, could not see the value in rehashing old material on a
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PHOTO: ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
“PINK FLOYD WAS NOT A SINGLE ENTITY BUT ONE MAN IN CHARGE WITH A RAGGLE-TAGGLE BAND OF DISENCHANTED MUSICIANS”
MUSIC MILESTONES new record. “If the songs weren’t good enough before, why are they good enough now?” he demanded. Buoyed by the ongoing success of The Wall – success he was beginning to take very personally – Waters was in no mood to kowtow. “Have you got anything better?” The answer, in 1982, was “no”.
Dave Gilmour live in Utrecht, playing a Fender Stratocaster (not Black Strat)
THE FINAL CUT
Never really more than close colleagues rather than intimate friends, the relationship between David Gilmour and Roger Waters, for so long the joint hearts of Pink Floyd, was tested like never before during recording of The Final Cut. Things began well. Studio downtime was shared together, with Mason, discussing the issues of the day, watching movies and playing video games, Donkey Kong, being a particular favourite. There were certainly moments of agreement. Having enjoyed working with two co-producers on The Wall (Bob Ezrin and James Guthrie), Waters wanted to go down the same route again, this time bringing in Michael Kamen, noted for his keyboard skills and talent to write orchestration. Gilmour and Mason agreed, with the caveat that Gilmour also join Waters to co-produce the record, as he’d done on The Wall. Waters said, ‘Yes’. So far, so good. Now they just had to agree on the subject matter.
MAGGIE, WHAT HAVE WE DONE?
Despite a sticker on the single of When The Tigers Broke Free saying, ‘Taken from the album The Final Cut’ the song never made it onto the album (until the 2004 reissue, that is). But it certainly would not have sounded out of place given that it is essentially a diary of events leading up to death of Waters’ father. Eric Fletcher Waters, a second lieutenant of the 8th Royal Fusiliers, was killed, we now know, during WWII at Anzio in Italy on 18 February 1944. But the young wife he left behind and her baby son barely five months old were only told he was missing in action, presumed dead. Not only did the boy, young Roger, grow up without a father but part of him always expected Eric to one day still come home. That Roger would never know his father remains the greatest curse of his life, but arguably an unparalleled creative motivator. The Wall might be his most famous platform on the subject but for The Final Cut he wanted to go further – especially given what was happening in the UK at the time. In 1982, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, responding to Argentine
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PHOTO: ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
BAND OF GOLD
Hits And Misses When EMI stared at years ahead with no Floyd releases, they engaged in some lateral thinking.
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n 1971, worried that there’d be no new Pink Floyd product for at least a year, EMI decided to release a ‘best of’ compilation. Relics is a typically Floyd title, poking fun at a band considered all too serious by fans and media alike. But its subtitle, A Bizarre Collection Of Antiques And Curios, is even more apt given that the album assembles most of the band’s singles to date (not Apples And Oranges, Point Me At The Sky or It Would Be So Nice) and just one B-side (Candy And A Currant Bun). What it did offer of note, however, was a new track, the previously ‘live only’ Biding My Time, by Roger Waters. Ten years later EMI decided to pull the same trick again. Faced with the prospect of three or maybe even four years without a new Pink Floyd album, they released another retrospective, this time taking audiences from where Relics left off to the present day. Like its forerunner, the title of A Collection Of Great Dance Songs is wilfully tongue in cheek. And, also like its predecessor, the running order is a matter of taste rather than logic. Six songs – One Of These Days, Money, Sheep, Shine On You Crazy Diamond,
Wish You Were Here and, of course, the only thing with even a vague danceability, Another Brick In The Wall Pt II – are intended to give new listeners as broad an introduction to the band as possible. Unlike its predecessor, however, there are no new tracks.
OR ARE THERE? In order to include a song from The Dark Side Of The Moon, former US record company and American licence holder of the album Capitol needed to agree. They didn’t. Undaunted, David Gilmour entered the studio with The Wall engineer (and soon to be The Final Cut co-producer) James Guthrie and started re-recording the track himself. He played drums, he played bass, synths and keys, guitar and he sang, both lead and harmonies. The only instrument he didn’t pick up, in fact, was sax – original player Dick Parry was drafted in to reprise his role. The result is impressive – and not entirely detectable from the original. Remember that the next time Roger Waters gets tarred with the ‘write the theme tune, sing the theme tune’ brush.
PINK FLOYD perceived provocation by despatching warships to protect the Falkland Islands. As daily reports of casualties on both sides came in, Waters could not understand why Thatcher had been so quick to go down the military route when negotiation was still an option. But then it wasn’t her son she was
sending to battle. As he says in The Final Cut’s closing song, Two Suns In The Sunset (and on a plaque unveiled at the site of his father’s death), ‘Ashes and diamonds/Foe and friend/We were all equal in the end’ – in other words, it is not the opposing soldiers who are the enemy, it is the monsters who send
“THE FINAL CUT IS AN ANGRY RECORD – AN EMOTION THAT INEVITABLY SEEPED INTO THE LIVES OF THOSE MAKING IT.”
How The Tigers Broke Free The story of Eric Waters’ death during WWII is a tale of bravery and abandonment.
PHOTO: ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
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t the outbreak of WWII, Eric Fletcher Waters, name-checked in The Fletcher Memorial Home, was a conscientious objector who refused to fight. As the news continued to flood in of his fellow countrymen falling on the front line to protect their nation, so they believed, he had a change of heart and signed up for active service. It was as part of the Royal Fusiliers’ 8th Battalion, Z Company, that he left British shores in 1944. Operation Shingle was go. When Z Company arrived on the beaches of Anzio, Italy they were not alone. Troops from the 9th Royal Fusiliers and the 7th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, under the command of the 167th (London) Infantry Brigade, as well as the US VI Corps were alongside them.
The mission goal was to liberate Rome from German control. On 17 February 1944, en route to the capital, the Allies encountered a massive German force, fronted by a phalanx of Tiger tanks. The odds of survival let alone victory were slim and initial casualties were high. The frontline commanders asked for permission to withdraw and regroup. The generals, miles away in safety, declined. Z Company and its companions set up a perimeter and throughout the 17th they defended the line with everything they had. It was only a matter of time, however, and in the early hours of 18 February 1944, the Tigers broke through. The body of Eric Waters, like those of so many of his fellow comrades, was never found.
them to die. As he puts it in When The Tigers Broke Free, ‘That’s how the High Command took my daddy from me.’ But The Final Cut is not simply an anti-war rant. It’s an exposé of the hypocrisy at the heart of a government that on the one hand is prepared to see innocent men and women die in the name of their country but, when it comes to commissioning new ships to replace those destroyed in the process, would prefer to save money buying from Japan rather than investing in jobs back home. The Final Cut, then, is an angry record – an emotion that inevitably seeped into the lives of those making it. David Gilmour was very uncomfortable producing such a political statement. Waters’ response, as ever, was to challenge him to come up with something better. On the one hand Waters resented doing, as he saw it, all the work. On the other hand, the less interference from anyone else the better. Increasingly dismissive of Gilmour’s input, the two men ended up working separately, either at different studios (eight were used in total) or in the same studio at different ends of the day. Ultimately, Gilmour was stripped of his co-producer credit, although not the financial rewards. Waters’ micromanagement of every detail – he would even design the cover – didn’t end with the guitarist. With Richard Wright already ejected and Gilmour banished to nocturnal hours, now it was the turn of Nick Mason to be sidelined. With a second – then third – drummer brought in to play his parts, Mason’s only real lasting contribution to the album was recording some of the innovative ‘holophonic’ effects. It was a new low in the life of a once equal band.
AND FINALLY...
The Final Cut achieved something both its immediate predecessor and Dark Side had failed to: reach No 1 in the UK. In the US it peaked at No 6. If Waters felt vindicated by the positions it was Gilmour who had the last laugh, quietly blaming the album’s weak songs for the fact it would become the band’s worst-selling album since Meddle in 1971. Critical response was largely negative. Reviewers compared it unfavourably with The Wall with many mocking Waters’ paranoid obsessions. Only in later years did writers begin to recognise, rightly, its artistic merits. Either way, it would be the last Pink Floyd record with Roger Waters and, if he had had his way, the last ever.
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Studio Astoria Studio Houseboat Producer Bob Ezrin & David Gilmour Released 1987
A Momentary Lapse Of Reason A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON
Gilmour’s baby and the late-period release that the rock press loves to hate.
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t’s hard not to wince while flipping through the cuttings file for A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. Since its original release back in September 1987, Pink Floyd’s 13th studio album has become something of a critical whipping boy, variously dismissed as “fluffy tour merch” (Rolling Stone), “made to keep the Floyd brand going” (The Telegraph), “essentially a David Gilmour solo album” (Q) and “very facile, very third-rate, poor in general… but a quite clever forgery” (that’s Roger Waters, sniping from the sidelines). Does Reason really deserve such flagellation? Yes and no. Revisit the album three decades later and you’ll find brilliance here in flashes – yet it would plainly be absurd to pretend that these 10 tracks don’t suffer from momentary lapses of quality. Waters’ assessment is viperous, but he has a point: at its lowest ebbs, this album does indeed feel like a facsimile of the Floyd’s prime-time 70s peak, offering up all the sonic calling-cards – not to mention the Storm Thorgerson sleeve art – but sorely missing the trenchant snarl of its ousted bassist and agent provocateur. Consider The Dogs Of War: a track whose sinister stabs of organ and polemical lyric could almost have fallen off The Wall, but which leaves you wondering how much deeper it might have bitten had Waters been there to douse it in vitriol.
There’s also some weight to the argument that Gilmour is a little too dominant in proceedings (as well he might be, after a decade in the passenger seat). With Waters gone, Richard Wright relegated to waged musician and Nick Mason keeping his head down, Reason finds the guitarist presiding over a cohort of studio yes-men who sound keen not to rock the (house) boat. In the absence of a coherent concept, he delivers too many dreamy offcuts from a proposed third solo album, many of which seem to exist purely as a canvas for his (admittedly astonishing) Stratocaster work. At points – as in the meandering six-minute instrumental Terminal Frost – you wish there was a creative rival to drag his safer material into choppier waters. For all that, the forest of one-star hatchet jobs doled out to Reason over the decades are wide of the mark. The best
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tracks here conjure an atmosphere as rich and immersive as the band’s halcyon era, vindicate the oft-maligned Gilmour era and justify the album’s restorative sales. Out of the blocks, Signs Of Life is a magical opening salvo, with the dip of oars and an eerie organ line evoking a journey across the River Styx. When Gilmour enters the fray at the three-minute mark, stroking gorgeously spacey licks atop glistening synth, you’d struggle to describe it as Floyd lite. Another highlight follows on its heels in Learning To Fly. With its clattering beat and cascade of processed vocals – and elevated by another vintage Gilmour solo – it’s an anthem of spring-heeled, skyscaping brilliance. One Slip might almost have scaled the same heights, were its driving beat and WOMAD wind-chimes not maddeningly dated by both the production and a dubious mid-point bass solo that sounds like the sort of horror that Alan Partridge would mime in a full-length mirror. A missed opportunity. Much is forgiven, though, thanks to On The Turning Away: the undisputed album standout that closed the original first side. Gilmour has perhaps never sung quite so tenderly as on the almost-a capella intro, and as a sadly strummed acoustic guitar prepares the ground for a soul-in-fingers solo, only the most cloth-eared of Waters diehards would argue this was a backward step from 1983’s wretched The Final Cut.
A New Machine (Parts 1 & 2) remain claustrophobic minimasterpieces, catching the listener with cri de coeur vocals that burst from the gloaming, while Yet Another Movie is notable for a white-hot Gilmour solo. Sorrow, too, starts strongly with scything guitar lines, but can’t maintain the momentum, its eight-minutes exposing lack of ideas. It would be ridiculous to cast A Momentary Lack Of Reason as the essential first purchase for a Floyd newcomer: there are other albums in the canon that explore the same ground and mine the same musical motifs, but do so far more effectively. But neither is this the avoid-like-the-plague disaster of pub and chat-room repute. Henry Yates
PINK FLOYD
PHOTO: LORNE RESNICK /REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
On tour in the States: (L-R) Dave Gilmour, Guy Pratt, Rick Wright, 1987
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History has not been kind to the critically-panned A Momentary Lapse Of Reason but, as Mark Blake explains, beneath the technology and 80s bombast, the first Floyd album without Waters is not without its merits. ripping track” , but which sadly remains unreleased. Only Phil Manzanera’s co-write One Slip would make it to the final album. Within a few months, Gilmour had amassed enough ideas to approach former Floyd collaborator Bob Ezrin. With Ezrin hired as co-producer, the sessions (conducted on the guitarist’s houseboat/studio Astoria near Hampton Court) took on greater urgency; if not quite the same level as if Waters had been there.
n December 1985, Roger Waters, a man billed on a later solo tour as “the creative genius behind Pink Floyd” , formally announced that he was leaving the group. As a parting shot, Roger Waters issued a high court injunction to try and prevent the name ‘Pink Floyd’ ever being used again.
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It was the first act of aggression in a war of words that would dog the creation of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, the first Floyd album recorded without Roger Waters. And one now languishing, overlooked and rather unloved in the Floyd catalogue. More’s the pity. A Momentary Lapse Of Reason was partly made to prove a point. “Roger said, ‘You’ll never fucking get it together to make a record’ ”, recalled David Gilmour; a statement Nick Mason later compared to “a red rag to a bull”. Gilmour and Mason ignored the attempted injunction, resurrected the name and informed EMI they were making a new Pink Floyd record. But it would prove to be a long and arduous process. In early 1986, Gilmour began casting around for collaborators. His first recruit was former Bryan Ferry
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keyboard player Jon Carin. At just 21 he was much younger than Gilmour but a committed Pink Floyd fan, also capable of creating a fair facsimile of the sound Rick Wright brought to the band. During these early months, Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, 10cc’s Eric Stewart, poet Roger McGough and session drummer Simon Phillips also spent time writing or jamming with Gilmour. Phillips apparently played on what Gilmour later described as “a
The Reason tour 1987: Gilmour (centre left) on acoustic guitar
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Sampling, sequencing and music technology had advanced immeasurably since 1983’s The Final Cut, enabling Gilmour and Ezrin to work alone if necessary. Before long, they’d pieced together the bones of Learning To Fly, Terminal Frost and The Dogs Of War. But the pace of the sessions was still rather leisurely and Gilmour had yet to write any lyrics. With Waters gone, Pink Floyd were missing a lyricist. Ezrin invited the
“ROGER WATERS SAID, ‘YOU’LL NEVER GET IT TOGETHER TO MAKE A RECORD’... IT WAS A ‘RED RAG TO A BULL’”
PHOTO: EBET ROBERTS/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON
An Act Of Defiance
PINK FLOYD By Mark Blake
London Arena, in July 1989 on Another Lapse Of Reason, tour
The Tour Proving a point via a pig with testicles Diamond, Wish You Were Here and Comfortably Numb. The tour came with a full production. Floyd’s stage set was housed within a 80-ft high steel framework containing a huge circular projection screen. The show’s piece de resistance was the reappearance of their famous mascot, the flying pig, which, to circumvent Waters’ claim of legal ownership, was customised with a pair of huge testicles. The first leg opened in Ottawa and crossed America before winding up in Vancouver just before Christmas 1987. After two years of legal sparring, Waters and Gilmour met on the Astoria soon after and came to an arrangement. It was agreed Gilmour and Mason could use the Floyd name in perpetuity, but that Waters would retain the rights to certain items in the back catalogue, including The Wall. Finally free of possible legal action, Pink Floyd went back on the road in January 1988 – and stayed there for the rest of the year. By the time the tour ended in summer 1990, it had played to 5.5 million people and grossed $135 million. As a parting shot, a cassette copy of the subsequent live album Delicate Sound Of Thunder was taken into space by cosmonauts on the Soyuz TM-7 rocket; proof that the ‘new’ Pink Floyd could take their music anywhere. “We wanted to be world-conquering,” said David Gilmour. “We wanted to leave no-one in any doubt that we really meant business.”
LAWS AND LIES
PHOTO: TIM HALL/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
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he A Momentary Lapse Of Reason tour was a marathon trek, beginning in September 1987 and finally ending in June 1990. In between, Pink Floyd played 197 shows, including dates in Australia, Japan, the former Soviet Union and the Grand Canal in Venice. However, like the album the tour was blighted by the fall-out between Waters and the band. Waters wrote to every promoter in the US threatening to sue if they staged a Pink Floyd show. Canadian promoter Michael Cohl ignored the threat and agreed to promote a date in Toronto’s Exhibition Centre. When all 60,000 tickets sold out in just a few hours, he added further shows, and other promoters soon followed. Producer Bob Ezrin was hired to, as he put it, “knock the band into shape” with a series of pre-tour rehearsals in Toronto: “The problem was, there was no producer or director and David was busy working out which guitar to play.” Ezrin helped Gilmour choose the setlist and corral the group’s extended family of additional musicians. Pink Floyd’s touring party now included new bassist Guy Pratt, a second drummer (Gary Wallis), an additional keyboard player (Jon Carin), second guitarist (Tim Renwick), saxophonist (Scott Page) and four backing singers. A setlist was chosen that accommodated songs from the new album but didn’t skimp on the ‘hits’, including Shine On You Crazy
Canadian poet Carole Pope to England. Pope worked with Gilmour on an as-yet unreleased song, Peace Be With You. But their collaboration never went any further. In the end, Gilmour chose to work with singer-songwriter Anthony Moore, previously a member of the 70s art rock groups Slapp Happy and Henry Cow. Moore contributed lyrics to The Dogs Of War, Learning To Fly and On The Turning Away. In the meantime, sessions were interrupted by frequent phone calls from Pink Floyd’s lawyers. Realising no judge in the land would rule in his favour regarding use of the band name, Waters began sniping from the sidelines. Still a director of Pink Floyd Music, he was soon blocking any decisions made by his estranged bandmates, and slowing them down even further. By now, Gilmour and Mason had also re-recruited Rick Wright, who’d been living in Greece since quitting the band. “I just woke up one day and thought, ‘God! what have I been doing?’” he said. “So I phoned Dave up and he said he was planning another album. I told him that if he needed anyone to play keyboards, that I’d love to do it.”
However, a clause in his leaving agreement meant Wright was prohibited from re-joining as a full member. Instead, he was hired as a session musician, and was absent from the group photograph on the final album, and from most of the music inside. According to Waters, the music itself had also become an issue for some. Talking to Billboard in 1987, Waters claimed a representative of Floyd’s US record label, Columbia, heard their new songs and suggested they start again. However, talking to the author in 2013, Gilmour insisted this was never the case: “A tissue of lies. I never stopped and started again”. In February 1987, Floyd escaped the lawyers’ phone calls and Waters’s sniping and moved the sessions to A&M Studios in Los Angeles. It was a positive change of scene. But both Wright and Mason struggled to play to the standard required. Neither was match fit. “I hadn’t played seriously for four years and didn’t even like the sound and feel of my playing,” said Mason. “I ended up struggling to play some parts satisfactorily.”
LEARNING TO FLY
In LA, Ezrin and Gilmour drew on an extensive cast of session musicians, including former John Lennon
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Ezrin On The Album The Wall producer returns to the fold for Reason...
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roducer Bob Ezrin began his working relationship with Pink Floyd on 1979’s The Wall. But Ezrin fell out with Roger Waters soon after when he revealed details of the Floyd’s upcoming shows to a Billboard journalist. Declared persona non grata at the time, come the mid-80s Ezrin was in demand again, and co-produced David Gilmour’s solo album, About Face. In summer 1986, Ezrin arrived in England to co-produce A Momentary Lapse Of Reason; a move that went down badly with Waters, who’d asked him to do the same on his new solo record, Radio K.A.O.S. “I was surprised to get David’s call,” Ezrin told the author. “Roger had told me he’d left the band and there was no Pink Floyd, and that the ‘muffins’ – as he called them – would never dare carry on without him.” Ezrin chose Pink Floyd over Waters, partly because Gilmour agreed to record half the album in the UK and half in Los
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Angeles. Waters had insisted he make the whole album in England; something Ezrin’s wife couldn’t agree to. “Those early sessions for Reason on the houseboat were just magical,” Ezrin recalled. “There was a lot of laughter and a sense of adventure… here we were on the river, like a boys’ camp.” However, Ezrin also acknowledged the size of the hole left by Waters, and the problems caused by Mason and Wright’s long time away from a studio. “David was ready to go make a record; I’m not sure the others were. And we’d lost our main lyricist. There was no getting around that.” “Working with Pink Floyd was a familiar ground for me,” said Ezrin, who later returned to work with the band on The Division Bell. “It felt right. Listening to A Momentary Lapse Of Reason again, there are things I’d certainly do differently now, but I think a lot of it is still surprisingly good.”
oars gently sculling through the water set the tone for everything that came thereafter. The album’s standout tracks, Learning To Fly and Sorrow, leaned heavily on Gilmour’s hushed vocals and measured guitar solos. The former (a collaboration between Gilmour, Ezrin, Anthony Moore and Jon Carin) had that same pacy, slow-building drama as Shine On You Crazy Diamond – and a similar choir of female backing vocalists. Interviewed later, Ezrin claimed the title and lyrics were a metaphor for the ‘new’ band’s feeling of freedom and escape. But the song’s roots were more literal than that. Learning To Fly contained a sample of Nick Mason’s voice during a flying lesson. Both he and Gilmour were keen pilots and owned a Cessna 421 Golden Eagle between them. Sorrow continued in a similar vein and contained Gilmour’s most climactic finale since Comfortably Numb. The instrumental, Terminal Frost, reproduced Pink Floyd’s very familiar melodrama with an orchestra of synths and drum machines and saxophones played by Supertramp’s John Anthony Helliwell and jazz musician Tom Scott.
PHOTOS: (FROM TOP CLOCKWISE) TIM HALL/REDFERNS; LORNE RESNICK /REDFERNS; KRISTOF VAN ACCOM/AFP; CHRIS SO/ TORONTO STAR – ALL GET T Y IMAGES
A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON
Let there be light! Another Lapse of Reason tour, London, 4th-9th July 1989
drummer Jim Keltner and Little Feat’s keyboard player Bill Payne, to complete the album. It was a good short-term strategy but presented Mason and Wright with the challenge of having to learn the parts anyway before Floyd’s planned tour. After a long and troubled birth, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason finally arrived on 7 September 1987. Gilmour, who later admitted he’d been nervous about the public’s reaction to the record, insisted it was the musical successor to Wish You Were Here. “There was a better balance [Reason] between the music and the lyrics than on those later albums,” he said, referring to The Wall and The Final Cut. Meanwhile, Nick Mason tactfully described Reason as: “a careful album, with very few risks taken”. In hindsight, both were right. The ‘new’ Pink Floyd’s album began with the instrumental scene setter Signs Of Life: all purring synthesisers, Gilmour’s textbook string bending and the sound of the Astoria’s caretaker/ boatman Langley Iddins rowing up the river Thames. Wisely, they hadn’t tried to make a concept album without a concept, but had created pieces of music that shared a similar mood. The sound of Iddens’
PINK FLOYD Gilmour in the spotlight on the US tour, 1987
“ROGER WATERS WASTED LITTLE TIME IN DAMNING IT AS ‘A CLEVER FORGERY’; A STATEMENT BACKED UP BY WRIGHT” This was Pink Floyd re-connecting with the sound of what their audience and many critics considered their classic era.
TECHNOLOGY RULES
Elsewhere, The Dogs Of War aspired to the cold brutality of Wish You Were Here’s Welcome To The Machine, but missed Waters’s natural vitriol. While One Slip (featuring session man Tony Levin’s ubiquitous Chapman Stick), the AOR anthem On The Turning Away and Yet Another Movie (a collaboration with
Madonna’s producer Pat Leonard) wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Gilmour’s 1984 solo album, About Face. This was Pink Floyd without the venom and idiosyncrasy Waters bought to the music. At times, especially on the effectsheavy A New Machine (Parts 1 and 2), technology overpowered the music. You could hear every pound and dollar spent, and the inside sleeve credits told their own story; listing the 17 additional musicians used to complete the record.
Nevertheless, any doubts that David Gilmour and Nick Mason had about the veracity of a Roger Waters-less Pink Floyd were soon quashed. A Momentary Lapse Of Reason went into the Top 5 in the UK and the US, proving the brand was still strong. Roger Waters, somewhat predictably, wasted little time in damning it “as a clever forgery”; a statement later backed up by none other than Rick Wright. Largely sidelined from the finished record, Wright told the author “it’s not a band album at all”.
A PRODUCT OF ITS TIME
The Sleep Under The Stars arts project in Oostende depicting the cover of A Momentary Lapse of Reason
Reflecting on A Momentary Lapse Of Reason many years later, David Gilmour insisted that the record was the best possible Pink Floyd album they could make at the time. That it was kept off the top spot in the US by Michael Jackson’s Bad and Whitesnake’s 1987 speaks volumes. Like those albums, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason is the 80s incarnate: an album made to do battle in the new digital age. But beneath the drum machines, sequencers and sometimes overpowering din of technology, its songs are far better than history would have us believe. Mark Blake is the author of Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd (Aurum Press, 2007 & 2013)
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Studio Britannia Row Studios, London / Astoria Houseboat Studio Producer Bob Ezrin Released 1994
The Division Bell
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y the time that The Division Bell emerged from hiding in March 1994, Pink Floyd had been virtually silent, in terms of new material, for nearly seven years. Album designer Storm Thorgerson refers to this intervening period as the band being “in the doldrums” , and apparently unsure of what to do next. The previous release, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, had done well, having outsold The Final Cut, but had enjoyed only a mixed reaction from fans and critics. The 1987 tour and resulting live album The Delicate Sound Of Thunder seemed to many that the band was merely treading water, seemingly deciding on its next move at the start of this post-Waters era. There’s little doubt that, with Waters’ departure from the band, it was as if the dark heart had been ripped from the band. Gone was the bite and bile and much of the direct political commentary that had surfaced on the albums drawn from the acknowledged classic period, from Atom Heart Mother to The Wall. But they had survived the fall of Syd Barrett years earlier, surely they could rise again and overcome this near fatal blow? If they had anything to prove at all, it would be with the next studio release; a new era for the band, but it desperately needed consolidating and it all hung on The Division Bell to launch the new manifesto. In hindsight, of course, it was to be the final album of new material, the death of Rick Wright in 2008 sealing the band’s fate for good. After the release of The Endless River in 2014, Gilmour went on record as saying that it was all over and that from now on he intended to concentrate solely on his own solo career. So what can we make of The Division Bell now that the dust has well and truly settled? From a fan’s point of view, the no-expenses-spared packaging, with iconography based around a theme of communication – the CD jewel case even had ‘Pink Floyd’ inscribed in Braille on its spine – everything was looking like it was business as usual for a band known for its attention to detail. The music, too, was a lighter, more widescreen production than its predecessor, with Gilmour’s trademark liquid guitar lines taking centre
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stage from the outset, seemingly in conversation with Rick Wright’s piano lines on the album opener, Cluster One. But the following track What Do You Want From Me seemed to be asking a question of the band’s fanbase in the most direct terms. What did they expect from Pink Floyd and this new direction, with Waters now in exile? Certainly many of the band’s trademarks were present on the album in the use of real world sound effects, segued tracks with the odd crafty reference to their heritage, most notably the return of the Dark Side heartbeat at the end of the Rick Wright penned track Wearing The Inside Out. This particular track featured Wright’s first vocal with the band for 20 years, a celebration of sorts as he was now contractually a full member once again since his dismissal during the infamous in-fighting around The Wall era, enjoying only session man status on subsequent ventures. Are there any classic songs here? A good guess as to the material that Floyd as a collective thought to be the strongest must be drawn from the two singles taken from The Division Bell. The first, Take It Back (May 1994) was a Gilmour rocker that bore a distinct stylistic resemblance to some of the material from his solo album About Face (1984). The second single was a double-header comprising High Hopes coupled with Keep Talking (October 1994). Of these two tracks, the former was a yearning for the past and its connection to the future, the latter imploring everyone – from couples to governments and so on – to communicate. It even had Stephen Hawking’s voice lifted from a BT advert to ram home the message. Out of the three, it’s probably High Hopes that has any enduring quality, but, to many, it falls far short of Comfortably Numb, Money or Wish You Were Here to name but three concert staples.
The Division Bell is far from being the worst Pink Floyd album, but far from being the best. Production values are on a par with anything they’ve done in the past, but the ghost of what could have been had Waters been there will haunt the album forever. David Mead
PHOTO: MICK HUTSON/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
THE DIVISION BELL
A lighter, more widescreen production… Versus a lack of lyrical cohesion.
PINK FLOYD
Dave Gilmour performs The Division Bell on tour
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MUSIC MILESTONES By David Mead
Ringing The Changes THE DIVISION BELL
With the litigious wrangles of its predecessor behind them, Pink Floyd employ a raft of former compadres to record their 14th studio album.
Live at Earl’s Court, London, the band show off the amazing stage set of The Division Bell tour
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PINK FLOYD ree at last from the legal entanglements that had been reverberating during the recording and release of 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, Gilmour, Mason and Wright decided to go ‘old school’ for their 14th release and merely meet together in the studio and jam, and see what came from it. These first tentative sessions began in the early part of 1993 at Britannia Row Studios, featuring the trio feeling their way through some instrumental ideas, extending and modelling them as they had done in the past. Still shell-shocked from Roger Waters’ departure and aware of the acrimony that existed in that quarter, observers relate that these initial sessions left the band unsure that they actually had anything to say musically. With the bass chair empty, it was decided to call upon the services of touring stalwart – and boyfriend to Wright’s daughter Gala – Guy Pratt to fill this most obvious void. The sessions continued and gradually songs began to form and it is from this period
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that a lot of the band’s swansong album The Endless River is drawn.
BACK IN THE STUDIO
The recording sessions were split between Gilmour’s riverboat Astoria, Britannia Row, Abbey Road, Metropolis and the Creek Recording Studio. As the music solidified, other players were called in along the way. Some were chosen from the ranks of the previous tour, including Tim Renwick on guitar and Dick Parry on saxophone (a long-serving Floyd auxiliary having played on Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here, and a former bandmate of Gilmour’s during his Jokers Wild days). Extra hands were also summoned to the sessions in the form of Jon Carin and (producer) Bob Ezrin on keyboards, Gary Wallis on percussion and a host of backing vocalists, including Sam Brown, daughter of British rock’n’roller Joe. One problem remained: that of lyrics. None of the surviving members of Floyd felt they could fill the vacuum left by Waters, whose snarling and
sometimes cynical lyricism had adorned much of their previous and, there’s no doubt, finest work. After much consideration, lyrical content was to be provided largely by Gilmour’s soon-to-be wife, journalist Polly Samson and a theme began to emerge. Themes had always played an important part of Floyd’s back catalogue and here it was communication with songs like What Do You Want From Me, Poles Apart and A Great Day For Freedom, a nod towards the felling of The Berlin Wall in 1989. For the track Keep Talking the voice of Professor Stephen Hawking can be heard extolling the virtues of communication. This sample was taken from a TV advert for BT, Gilmour having thought that it framed the sentiments of both the song and the new album’s general theme perfectly. Another sound sampled by the band includes that which is heard at the beginning of The Division Bell’s opening track, Cluster One. What sounds a little like radio static is, in fact, a recording of the solar wind
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PHOTO: MICK HUTSON/REDFERNS
“THREE STAGES WERE BUILT AT A COST OF £3M TO LEAPFROG EACH OTHER AS THE BAND PLOUGHED ITS WAY ACROSS AMERICA AND EUROPE”
MUSIC MILESTONES
Marmite, Branston and Fireworks Inside the $100 million 1994 Division Bell tour he release of The Division Bell was perfectly timed with a world tour. Indeed, the first US date took place two days after the album was released in the UK and five days prior to its US debut. Production rehearsals began in a hanger at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino on the 3rd March 1994 before moving to Universal Studios in Orlando on the 23rd. The stage for the tour was purpose built after the band remarked that the onstage acoustics at The Hollywood Bowl were so good they wished they could pack it up and take it with them. Of course, when you’re Pink Floyd, anything is possible and so their wish was granted – in fact, it was granted three times over as three stages, designed by Marc Brickman and Mark Fisher at a cost of $3M, were built to leapfrog each other as the band ploughed its way across America and Europe. It took 200 crew members, 49 trucks – 33 of which carried the staging alone – to move the gear around between dates. Each stage took three days to assemble the steel components and 18 hours to complete, with breakdown taking seven hours and a further two days to disassemble the steel components. At the time it was the biggest tour by any rock band ever. Figures from EMI suggest that, during the North American tour alone, Floyd played 59 sold-out dates in 48 cities in front of almost three million people, grossing in excess of $100 million. During the US dates, Floyd’s rider included the provision of Marmite, Branston Pickle, English marmalade and Weetabix to be added to the day-to-day catering requirements. When the tour moved to Europe in July 1994 it took three 747’s to fly the gear and staging from the USA, with a
PHOTO: MICK HUTSON/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
THE DIVISION BELL
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further 747 for the band and crew. Sat in privileged VIP seats above the mixer special guests witnessed a spectacle beyond words. The light show alone was phenomenal with 270 Vari*Lites and powerful Oxford ACL45 lasers that had never been used for entertainment purposes before. They were so powerful that spotters had to be dispatched on the higher reaches of each open-air stadium to watch for aircraft, the fear being that this
feature of Floyd’s performance might interfere with navigation and lure one for landing. One unexpected pleasure for fans during the tour was the inclusion of Dark Side Of The Moon played in its entirety for the first time since the 1970s. David Gilmour explains how this came about: “I don't know if we ever played the whole thing through before we did it,” he said in 1995. “It was quite frightening, the first time we did it in Detroit – we
weren’t at all certain how it would go.” Initially, it was met by stunned silence, but the internet, still in its infancy back then, started to spread the word and the famous heartbeat intro was greeted eagerly from then on. The resulting live album and video/DVD from the tour – both titled Pulse – while impressive, clearly fail to transmit the power and intensity of the actual concert experience and at the time nobody guessed that this would be Floyd’s final tour. In the video, Gilmour plays a line or two from the wartime classic We’ll Meet Again during his intro to the final encore, Run Like Hell from The Wall, in anticipation perhaps of the band’s future outings – and, right at the end of the song, as the band plays an extended final crescendo, the end of the proceedings is punctuated by the whole stage seeming to explode in a spectacular – and noisy – pyro apocalypse. When Gilmour was asked how he thought they would follow that: “That’s something for you to worry about, not for me,” he laughed.
PINK FLOYD
The band, as a three piece cutting a dash in one of very few official photographs from the time
“WITHOUT A TITLE GILMOUR TURNED TO DOUGLAS ADAMS FOR A SUGGESTION. ADAMS SAID THAT THE ANSWER WAS RIGHT UNDER HIS NOSE…” interacting with planet Earth’s magnetosphere, a phenomenon also known as the ‘electromagnetic dawn chorus’. Space rock indeed.
WHAT’S IN A NAME
With recording complete the new album still lacked a title and Gilmour turned to his friend and author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams for suggestions. On hearing the album, Adams is reputed to have told Gilmour that the answer was right under his nose and hiding within the lyrics. The line, ‘The ringing of the division bell had begun…’ turns up in the first verse of High Hopes, a song that seems to be Gilmour reminiscing on his past. Once revealed, it did indeed seem to be the obvious choice and Adams was rewarded by appearing onstage with the band at Earl’s Court on the 28th October, Adams’ 42nd birthday. Let’s not forget
the significance of the figure ‘42’ in Adams’ great work as being the answer to life, the universe and everything.
VISUAL IMPACT
For any Pink Floyd release, the album’s artwork is an integral part of the proceedings – reference the iconic covers of The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here, for instance. Once again the services of another member of the Floyd ‘Old Contemptibles’ was called upon in the form of Storm Thorgerson who was briefed as to the ‘commun– ication – or lack thereof’ leitmotif
The famous CD sleeve featured a blinking red LED in its spine making the large in-store displays for the record's release sparkle enticingly
running throughout the new album. Storm set to work, settling on the idea of massive sculptures of Easter Island style heads, at once facing each other and seeming to look the viewer in the eye. The figures were drawn from sketches by Keith Breeden. One pair made from metal, riveted together in the style of old aircraft and the other from polystyrene and fiberglass. Each one as tall as a double-decker bus – and commissioned from John Robertson and Aden Hynes respectively. Whereas much of the progress of the album had been cloaked in secrecy – although rumours abounded among the Floyd fanbase – perhaps the first physical evidence of the new release came about in a
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MUSIC MILESTONES
Waiting For The Waves To Break Backstage With Pink Floyd in 1994
PHOTO: PETER STILL/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
THE DIVISION BELL
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here are many tales from Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell US and European tour, some printable, others perhaps not. One endearing one features saxophonist Dick Parry who mentioned that he had a lot of time to spend waiting around backstage between his appearances and that there was nowhere for him to sit. So David Gilmour sent out a minion to purchase a leather sofa and pot plant especially so that Dick could be more comfortable. Phil Taylor, Floyd’s Head Of Backline is the man with the plan and explained Gilmour’s onstage set-up at the time: “I always set his gear up so that it sounds good to me and the levels seem right, however, the reason why he likes to have his rack onstage with him every night and the reason why his pedals are mounted on the top is so that he can wander over and give them a tweak as he feels necessary. “Between projects there are often quite long periods where David doesn’t play much guitar, but when there is something – a tour or an album – about to happen then I keep my eyes open as to what’s around and take him stuff to try,” he confirmed. Being located just behind Gilmour during a show, things must have become pretty loud in his area. “Pretty loud, yeah, but not horrendously so; you can stand by each other and talk. Basically, I’m here listening to Dave’s system and tuning. I get called up onstage for
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different reasons, but generally I’m just listening for any of the equipment going wrong. I’m always on red alert! “On this tour we’ve had to deal with a lot of temperature changes and we’ve had to set up in the rain a lot because of the number of outdoor venues we’ve been doing,” Phil acknowledged. “You set up in the morning and it may be cold and raining and then, by afternoon, the sun’s come out and it’s got really hot so you have to put space blankets on the equipment to keep the sun off.” One of the elements of The Division Bell show was the amount of pyro – explosions, leaping flame and so on – that occurred every night. “The pyro onstage contributes a lot of dust and filth every night, which gets into everything. I’ve had a few failures; nothing went wrong on the first part of the tour but gradually some of the pedals started not working properly and I had two or three of those go down and some transmitters fail.”
Single sleeves show Thorgerson's relentless cavalcade of imagery and packaging; (below) tickets for the accompanying huge stadium tour
farmer’s field just outside the Cambridgeshire city of Ely in January 1994. Motorists on the nearby A10 were surprised to find the somewhat surreal sight of the sculptures at large, often surrounded by ant-like flurries of activity as Storm and his crew waited for the winter sky to provide a suitable backdrop for their photograph. Ever the perfectionist, the heads remained in situ for two weeks before Storm was satisfied that he had the right shot. At one point – and make what you will of the irony here – a winter storm blew the metal heads down, but they were soon reinstated and the weather vigil continued. In the end, the metal heads appeared on the CD cover with the ‘stone’ versions saved for the cassette and LP versions.
THE WHOLE PACKAGE
This wasn’t the only photography or artwork to adorn The Division Bell’s cover as it was decided that the CD booklet should contain a photograph or artwork representing each track. As such, the booklet gave Storm an opportunity to flex his muscles to serve the album’s thematic concept still further. Videos were filmed around Ely each underlining the band’s association with the area and, in one scene, a bust of Syd Barrett is held aloft, a further nod to Floyd’s origins. The album was released in the UK on the 28th March 1994 to mixed acclaim from critics and fans alike. Rolling Stone awarded the album a meagre two and a half stars, Uncut a more enthusiastic four and other reviews continued this polarised hot and cold theme. The most scathing review, however, came from Roger Waters, who dismissed it simply as being, “Just rubbish…”.
PINK FLOYD
Studio Astoria Houseboat Studio & Medina Studios, UK Producer David Gilmour, Youth, Andy Jackson, Phil Manzanera Released 2014
The Endless River THE ENDLESS RIVER
A tribute to the late Richard Wright and Floyd's “farewell album”.
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loyd fans were kept waiting 20 years for the follow-up to 1994’s The Division Bell. A painfully long period during which time Floydians could contemplate at leisure the turbulent and acrimonious history that had plagued the band throughout its then 49-year history. It’s somewhat appropriate then that this, their 15th studio album plays out some of those troubles. Setting the mood is intro track Things Left Unsaid, which kicks off proceedings with half-whispered ruminations about arguing and fighting. It’s notable too that The Endless River is a tribute to keyboardist Rick Wright, who was famously sacked in 1978 by Roger Waters and then re-employed as a touring session musician. Wright died in 2008 and with much of the material on The Endless River taken from old recordings, this is a fitting swansong. “The Endless River is a tribute to Rick,” drummer Nick Mason told The Wall Street Journal. “I think this record is a good way of recognising a lot of what he does and how his playing was at the heart of the Pink Floyd sound. Listening back to the sessions, it really brought home to me what a special player he was.” The glaring omission of Roger Waters, who was not asked to contribute to The Endless River, speaks for itself.
The Endless River is steeped in Floyd history - not just thematically and musically but literally as much of the album is constructed largely from old takes, jams and recordings from the cutting room floor of its predecessor The Division Bell. Its story begins in 1993 when producer Andy Jackson fashioned an hour’s worth of outtakes and improvisations from The Division Bell into a mix entitled The Big Spliff, which was never released. When Gilmour told Phil Manzanera about The Big Spliff revealing there were an additional 20 hours of mixes, the curiosity of the former Roxy Music guitarist was piqued and he spent the next six weeks arranging the material into four suites. The fledging album was then passed into the hands of Youth (former member of The Orb, producer and Floyd obsessive) who agreed to co-produce it. The life cycle of the album finally came to fruition when in 2014, 20 years on from The Division Bell, Gilmour and Mason decided to record new guitar and drum parts for the album, maximising on modern studio technology to seamlessly blend the new with the old and The
Endless River finally hit the shelves in November 2014. Instrumental except for a single track (Louder Than Words) The Endless River is an ambient affair that glides its way through 53 minutes with Rick Wright’s keyboards taking centre stage on many of the tracks, with Gilmour and Mason the supporting cast. Manzanera says he wanted to capture the Floyd sound throughout all its incarnations – from Syd Barrett to post Waters and this album undoubtedly has a nostalgic feel – not least as an exploration of the quintessential Pink Floyd sound and the position they hold in the canon of British music. There’s also a sense of closure. This is not Floyd forging new paths but rather a tip of the hat to their own legacy and an acceptance of their history as a band. If the prospect of a band contemplating their past rings alarm bells, fear not! The band almost hop and skip through the tracks with some only lasting just over a minute – so there’s no self indulgence or over-egged solos here. Highlights of the album include Skins, on which Nick Mason takes the reigns on rotodrums and Autumn 68, featuring Rick Wright performing in the Royal Albert Hall on pipe organ. Undoubtedly, Louder Than Words is the moment on this album that feels like unalloyed Floyd. With lyrics written by Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson, Gilmour opens with “we bitch and we fight” and while it’s undoubtedly an acknowledgment of the band’s bickering it’s ultimately a tribute to Rick and how love and respect ultimately wins over acrimony. Gilmour’s rich, warm vocals embrace the ears and the track acts as the album’s anchor amidst the cinematic swirls of the ambient instrumental tracks. Gilmour has said that The Endless River is Floyd’s farewell – although, tantalisingly, Nick Mason told Rolling Stone in 2014, “I’m not entirely sure Pink Floyd is over.” While The Endless River doesn’t carve any new direction for the band, this is not a band aching for its past and the addition of new material from Gilmour and Mason keep it fresh and vibrant. A solid goodbye from one of rock’s biggest acts… or is it? Katie Nicholls
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THE ENDLESS RIVER
MUSIC MILESTONES
Fond Farewell By Michael Leonard
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PHOTO: EAMONN MCCABE/REDFERNS
The Endless River has been described by David Gilmour as the final Pink Floyd album. Yet its roots lie in 20-plus year-old recordings. Back in 2014, the album’s co-producer Phil Manzanera spoke of its source and meandering soundscapes…
PINK FLOYD
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PHOTO: JOBY SESSIONS
ike seemingly every Pink Floyd album, The Endless River has somewhat convoluted origins. After cutting The Division Bell (recorded 1993, released 1994), Floyd – Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Rick Wright – had hours of left-over jams and improvisational pieces of music, composed mostly by Gilmour and Wright. Album engineer Andy Jackson later mixed an ambient ‘album’ of this music, notionally called The Big Spliff, and Floyd did consider releasing it. Eventually they decided not to. But when Gilmour asked long-time friend Phil Manzanera to “listen to some stuff” from those days, it soon went beyond The Big Spliff mix. “There was no great plan,” says Manzanera. “But soon I was on (Gilmour’s boat studio) Astoria, having a listen, and him asking me what I thought. Andy Jackson was there, and he talked about The Big Spliff mix. I immediately said, ‘Stop there. I want to hear every single bit that was recorded’. It was 20 hours of music in total. Andy
Phil Manzanera relaxing after painstakingly building The Endless River for close friend David Glimour
“STOP THERE. I WANT TO HEAR EVERY SINGLE BIT THAT WAS RECORDED. IT WAS 20 HOURS OF MUSIC IN TOTAL. ANDY THOUGHT I WAS JOKING” Phil Manzanera thought I was joking. I said: ‘No, I’m not!’ At first I thought, ‘What the hell am I going to do with this?’ But I just pulled out any bit that I thought was good, and hadn’t been used before, and made my own notes. It was six weeks of just listening, again and again.”
FRIEND AND FAN
Apart from one track, it’s instrumental. The late Rick Wright’s keyboards loom large on The Endless River, punctuated by the gliding guitar solos of Gilmour. “In my head was: what would a Pink Floyd fan like to listen to?” says Manzanera. “I’m a Pink Floyd fan, of all different eras, so I tried to get an idea of all those different eras with the music we had. And I found that, with Rick especially, there were bits I just loved. For example, he hadn’t used the Farfisa Duo Compact keyboard since Wish You Were Here… until these 1993 jams. Rick hadn’t revisited his famous ‘French horn’ sound, and that was also really good.” Manzanera stresses that the
recordings sounded like classical music, which prompted him to create four movements. Modern technology created new editing possibilities, he says. “If the key isn’t right, you can change it. You can change the tempo. It was great, but at the time I was only working with what was available. And I took some diabolical liberties. Something might have sounded like Echoes but with no rhythm. Okay, let’s put on a beat. I found a recording of Nick (Mason, drums) warming up in Olympic Studio and took a loop. I had tapes of Rick Wright playing the organ at the Royal Albert Hall from 1968. After six weeks, I had something.” Gilmour eventually put the proto-project in others’ hands, also. Alongside Manzanera and engineer Andy Jackson, Youth (Martin Glover) was involved. Youth (ex-member of Killing Joke and The Orb, producer of The Verve) had also produced Us And Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd in the 90s: based on Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman’s reworking of classic Floyd songs. It also helped that Youth was
behind 90s techno/house music duo Blue Pearl with singer Durga McBroom, who had also contributed vocals to Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. “It was Polly (Samson, author and Gilmour’s wife) who suggested: ‘Why don’t you play this to Youth?’ ”, says Manzanera. “Youth heard a couple of parts, and he just loved it. That got them excited.” Gilmour thought it had “possibilities”. Then, Manzanera also invited Nick Mason to his Gallery studio in London and played him some of this old 'stuff'. “Nick thought there were possibilities for this, too. We left it for nine months. Eventually, Nick and David decided it could be a Pink Floyd album.” Gilmour and Mason then agreed to add new guitar and drum parts to complete The Endless River.
Part of Gilmour's carefully maintained studio kit
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THE ENDLESS RIVER
Pink Floyd launched The Endless River With a live lightshow by the band's original 1967 UFO Club lighting designer Peter Wynne Willson. Porchester Hall, London.
“YOU COULDN'T HAVE DONE THIS IN 1993. BUT NOW WE USE THE STUDIO AS A PALETTE, AN INSTRUMENT. IT ENEABLED US TO WEAVE THE WHOLE THING TOGETHER” Phil Manzanera “You couldn’t have done this in 1993,” continues Manzanera. 'It was all analogue, but now we use the studio as a palette, an instrument. It enabled us to weave the whole thing together. All the links between tracks are made of hundreds of little sounds we found on those jams. It’s a real tapestry.” Apart from closing track Louder Than Words, the album is instrumental. Much of it highlights the contributions of late Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright. As Manzanera notes, “I guess this album shines a light on Rick. David’s guitar playing, singing, and Roger Waters’ writing, were always talked about. But no-one ever really talked about Rick. And there were only four of Pink Floyd at any one time. “But I do think Rick’s choice of chords and sound provided a wonderful context for a singer or a guitarist to play. You can play simple notes, as a guitarist, if there’s this wonderful ever-changing sound beneath you. I think that has highlighted David’s
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PHOTO: ANDREW WHIT TUCK /REDFERNS
PHOTO: BRIAN RASIC/GET T Y IMAGES
Manzanera himself, however, surprisingly doesn’t play on The Endless River. “I never try and play on Pink Floyd or David’s songs. I’ll play bass, keyboards, demos, I produce. I think my role was showing there was a structure that could be achieved. And that could result in a 21st century Pink Floyd album.
playing and tone. His sound needs to have that context.” And listening to the evolving texture of The Endless River, it certainly serves up some classic ‘Floydian’ guitar. It’s What We Do and Surfacing boast rich archetypal Gilmour-isms. The Lost Art Of Conversation even exhibiting shades of Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Manzanera: “In the back of my mind, I was always thinking: ‘legacy’. It couldn’t be opportunistic, it had to have thought, musicality and construction. It was like having a documentary point of view, the context of the music that these three people provided. And David worked a lot on constructing his solos to reflect that. To me, it bookends Pink Floyd’s career. It’s not all guns blazing. It’s a chill-out farewell, maybe. It’s a different, immersive listen. But if you put in the time, you will drift off and have a fantastic listening experience.”
The Wright Man Around 20 hours of instrumental music was unearthed from 1993's The Division Bell sessions for use on The Endless River. For David Gilmour and Nick Mason, it was a poignant reminder of Richard Wright's immense musical contribution...
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s we went through this process, our minds focused on the fact that Rick isn't coming back," David Gilmour told Rolling Stone magazine in 2014. "We'll never get another chance to play with him. This is his last recorded moment with Pink Floyd. It's so sad.” A gentle, unassuming and private man, Richard Wright's contribution to Pink Floyd was significant, as Gilmour stated on his website following Wright's death from cancer in 2008. “His soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognisable Pink Floyd sound.” said Gilmour. “In my view the greatest PF moments are the ones where he is in full flow.” Wright's vocals were also pivotal to the distinctive Floyd sound. “The blend of his and my voices and our musical telepathy reached their first major flowering in 1971 on Echoes,” said Gilmour in his eulogy. It was on Dark Side that Wright contributed what are arguably his most memorable compositions – The Great Gig In The Sky, featuring the rousing, iconic vocal of Claire Torry – and Us And Them, which is now regarded as one of Floyd's most defining melodies. "He was such a lovely, gentle, genuine man.” reflected Gilmour, “and he will be missed terribly by so many who loved him."
PINK FLOYD
Welcome To The Machines David Gilmour’s long-serving tech Phil Taylor discusses the instruments, amps and effects that the Pink Floyd legend used to summon up the rich soundscapes of The Endless River.
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Personalised picks are one of surprisingly few nods to rock 'n' roll indulgence
avid Gilmour clearly likes water. His famed houseboat studio, Astoria, is moored on the Thames near Hampton. His other studio, Medina, near Brighton, overlooks the Channel. Aptly enough, it was these two watery venues that were employed to record the bulk of the final Pink Floyd studio album, The Endless River. Medina is smaller than you may expect for a musician of Gilmour’s legendary status, but size isn’t everything: Medina is bespoke to Gilmour’s needs. “It was a derelict storage unit when David bought it three years ago,” Phil Taylor explains. Once the building’s ‘shell’ had been renovated, Taylor got to work on bespoke appointments. The control room’s mixing desk is hand-built and on wheels so Taylor can access its rear for servicing.
Gilmour has his own custom control room rack, with switching that allows him to turn on any combination of amps in the live room – if he fancies recording in the control room. Even the wiring of Medina is custom-designed by Taylor. Taylor explains: “Because David records with single-coil guitars – his Strats, his Teles – particular attention was paid to the electrical installation to avoid creating mains power ‘radiating’ and interference. The entire building was wired in shielded mains cable. All earthing is connected to the regular main ‘company’ earth – except the audio-technical earth, which has two 60-foot copper rods sunk into the ground. All lighting systems are run in 12 volts DC, and the technical studio power is derived from a balancing transformer.”
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PHOTO: JOBY SESSIONS
Charged with keeping Gilmour's collection primed and ready at a moments notice, Phil Taylor inside the Medina studio
THE ENDLESS RIVER
MUSIC MILESTONES
THE BLACK STRAT
MOD SQUAD
SEEING RED
David Gilmour’s most celebrated guitar is something of a ‘mongrel’. He bought the Fender Black Strat from Manny’s Music store in New York in May 1970 during Pink Floyd’s US tour. Gilmour had, just weeks earlier, bought his first black Fender Strat at Manny’s, but it was soon stolen, along with much of Floyd’s rig. Floyd cancelled their remaining US dates, but David again visited Manny’s and bought this before returning to the UK. The Black Strat was first played by Gilmour at the Bath Festival in June 1970.
As a close-up examination of the original Black Strat attests, it is a much-modded guitar. It was originally a Fender 1968 to ’69 alder body with black painted over the original Sunburst. It had a Fender late ’60s maple neck (large headstock) and 21 frets, but a rosewoodnecked version features on The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here. To muddy the waters still further, it later had a Charvel neck fitted! When it came back from Hard Rock Cafe, it was damaged and with knobs missing, so the mods have continued.
Like the Black Strat, the Red Strat has been extensively modded. Gilmour eventually replaced the single coils on his main Red with active EMG pickups – 1979-made forerunners of what became the signature DG20s (DG still employs the originals). The EMGs feature an EXP control boosting treble and bass and an SPC control, boosting the midrange for a humbucker-esque tone. Gilmour also added his ‘custom’ 4.25-inch vibrato arm. As well as being used on The Endless River it also featured on A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.
FENDER CUSTOM-MADE BARITONE TELE
ROGER WATERS’ FENDER PRECISION BASS
1956 GIBSON LES PAUL GOLDTOP
“David has a 1963 Fender Bass VI,” says Phil Taylor. “It’s strung relatively light for a baritone. But it’s still a 30-inch scale, so I thought I’d get him a new one made. I wanted it to be more like a guitar, shorter scale, but it also had to have a vibrato on it. I talked to Fender, and they made two. They have a 27-inch scale, so between a guitar and a bass. You can put lighter strings on these, it feels very nice. But I had to change a few things – I put a Vibramate String Spoiler on the back-end of the Bigsby.”
When Roger Waters exited Pink Floyd, there were several ‘band-owned’ instruments. One of them was this 1970s Fender Precision played by Waters. David Gilmour kept it. “This was the bass Roger had from 1974 to ’78,” says Phil Taylor. “It was his main bass. It was played on Wish You Were Here and Animals, mostly. I replaced the pickguard to be black just before the Animals tour, 1976. Roger had three black basses – one with a rosewood neck, two with maple. But this was his main one.”
“We got this because it had an original Gibson factory Bigsby on it,” explains Phil Taylor. “He has his ’55 (hardtail) Goldtop – that’s the one on Another Brick In The Wall Pt II. But David wanted a Bigsby one. And he didn’t want a modified one, with a later-added Bigsby. “It’s got P-90s. The only humbuckers David uses are on the Gretsch Duo-Jet – and although they are humbuckers, they sound more like single coil pickups. He also has a reissue Gibson Les Paul from about 2009.”
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PINK FLOYD Though they might be vintage, they're all in perfect working order and tirelessly kept that way
“These were David’s main amps on The Endless River,” comments Phil Taylor on the beautiful array of vintage and modern amps that can be found in the studio’s live room. “He also used the Leslie Studio 12 cab with the Allesandro Redbone Special 55-watt model.” The set-up is made more flexible by the addition of a rig that allows the amps to be operated from the control room. Note the Fender Tremolux and Champ amps. “If David wants to record in the control room he can, without being in the live room,” says Phil Taylor. “This [effects] rack is not a mirror of his main rack, it’s a system in its own right. But you can select the studio amps in the live space or from here. He can use the effects in here, or play in here and send the signal to the effects in the live room. It all means he can monitor what he’s recording in the control room. He can alter the speed of his Leslie cabinet, or the speed of the Yamaha RA200, all from here. “The Tim de Paravacini board (wallmounted) is custom-made: 24 tracks into 12. Once David’s selected his amps, he can then control the amp mics, too, plus a couple of ambient mics as well. And he can send all this direct to Pro Tools. Is it complicated? Not really. It’s actually very user-friendly. David can come in, hit four switches and the whole place powers up. Ready to go.”
PHOTO: JOBY SESSIONS
WIRED FOR SOUND
The Tim de Paravacini custom mixing board overlooks a rack of pedals arranged just how Gilmour likes them
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By Neil Crossley
ALBUM: Wish You Were Here TRACK TIME: 13:19
Arguably one of the oddest, boldest and most exhilarating tracks to kickstart any band. A sublime piece of space rock freak out, Astronomy boasts ominous Farfisa organ from Wright, spiralling guitar from creative commander-inchief Barrett and crashing cymbals from Mason. To set the scene, the track is ushered in by then-band manager Peter Jenner reading out planet names.
At 26-minutes long, and in nine parts, the track is credited to Waters, Gilmour and Wright, but it’s Waters' lyrics that define this as a deeply personal and heartfelt tribute to Syd Barrett. It’s entirely fitting that Waters’ takes the lead vocal on this one. His delivery is raw and imbued with feeling. A peerless Floyd moment – heartfelt, timeless and true.
WISH YOU WERE HERE
ALBUM: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn TRACK TIME: 09:41
ALBUM: Wish You Were Here TRACK TIME: 05:40
Allegedly this came into being when Syd Barrett heard Peter Jenner singing a song and then attempted to interpret it on the guitar. Its raw, visceral quality – largely enhanced by the spiky, angular tones of Barrett's Telecaster – gives the track an almost timeless quality. Discordant tones and shifting tempos only add to its ambience.
Featuring a down-home, rootsier instrumentation of acoustic guitars and acoustic piano. Snippets of Tchaikovsky and a Radio 4 play feature within the static from a car radio at the start of the track. “We're just two lost souls, swimming in a fish bowl, year after year...” Sparse and heartfelt, one of the most potent songs of Floyd's career.
ECHOES
2
DOGS
ALBUM: Meddle TRACK TIME: 23:32
ALBUM: Animals TRACK TIME: 17:08
If one track marks the moment at which Floyd discovered the classic sound that catapulted them into the stadium league, then this is it. A classic from the opening effected submarine bleeps (a high A note played on a grand piano and the signal then sent through a Leslie speaker) to their echoed refrains almost 24 minutes later.
Stretching to over 17 minutes it's a savage conceptual piece. While Waters' lyrics compare businessmen to dogs (canines can even be heard barking through vocoders in one section), Gilmour's twin guitar harmonies dominate, providing the soaring progression before the synth-driven passage kicks in.
BRAIN DAMAGE / ECLIPSE
19
COMFORTABLY NUMB
ALBUM: The Dark Side of the Moon TRACK TIME: 03:47 + 02:01
ALBUM: The Wall TRACK TIME: 06:25 While The Wall is very much Waters'
Two tracks that meld seamlessly into one. Brain Damage is inspired by the breakdown of Barrett and emerging from the album's prevailing themes of madness, greed and isolation, the hugely emotive and rousing Eclipse offers a sense of hope and resolution – a life-affirming postscript to one of the finest albums ever made.
album, the music for arguably its strongest track is written by Gilmour. Waters lyrics concern playing a gig in Philadelphia while under the influence of doctor-prescribed tranquillisers. Anthemic and rousing, the track features two of the most blistering guitar solos ever from Gilmour.
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114 Music Milestones #01
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INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE
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If you only could only take 10 tracks with you… From the space rock psychedelia of the Barrett era to their monumental progressive anthems and beyond, here are 10 outstanding tracks across five decades that define the very best of Pink Floyd…
SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND
ALBUM: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn TRACK TIME: 04:15
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ESSENTIAL TRACKS
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ASTRONOMY DOMINE
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MUSIC MILESTONES
HIGH HOPES
ALBUM: The Dark Side of the Moon TRACK TIME: 07:05
ALBUM: The Division Bell TRACK TIME: 08:32
The passage of the years and the fear of unrealised aspirations is the focus here. The song settles into a strident, steady groove, the bedrock for Gilmour and Waters’ shared vocals. But the real highlight is Gilmour’s guitar solo that stretches from 3:15 to 4:40. Soaring, searing, majestic… Transporting the listener to a higher emotional plane.
A new chapter, with Gilmour now firmly at the helm. Church bells usher in the result of a cathartic and feverish burst of writing from Gilmour, with lyrics co-written by his wife Polly Samson. The song finds Gilmour reminiscing about his past, leaving his hometown of Cambridge and the seeds of division sewn in Floyd's early years.
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