Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (26 page)

‘I wish I had a recording of my meeting with the managing director of EMI,’ recalls Storm. ‘He went absolutely apoplectic when he saw that cover.’

EMI may have balked, but on the morning of the album’s release, they coaxed a herd of cows through the Mall for the benefit of the assembled press photographers.

Atom Heart Mother
would be Ron Geesin’s only collaboration with Pink Floyd. He shared a writing credit on its title track, but, to the surprise of some, wasn’t given a co-credit on the album itself. ‘It was never discussed with the group,’ he insists now. ‘Later, I considered the missing credit to be a typical example of the Great Mincing Machine and the little piece of meat.’

As one of the few outsiders to be invited to collaborate with Pink Floyd, Geesin was quick to spot the pressure the four bigger pieces of meat were under, and the emergent power struggles between them. ‘By the time I worked with them, they were being pushed
all
the time by EMI and Steve O’Rourke. Steve was a heavy man. I knew him from before the Floyd because he handled a lot of jazz bands at the agency where he worked. My impression is that the Floyd were getting burnt out, which is probably why Roger wanted to work with someone else from the outside.

‘Nick and Rick were very easy-going,’ he continues. ‘Rick wouldn’t push anything and you could see how that might become a problem for him later on. Dave was a quiet fellow. I think he was a bit suspicious of me because he knew the least about me, so he could be cagey. I was closest to Roger, whom I liked a great deal, but he could still be very abrasive to those around him. But most artists of any worth create abrasion around them in some way or other. It’s the abrasion necessary to create the heat for creativity. It’s necessary but someone will always get damaged - wives, lovers, children, or the other people on the stage. I was close friends with Roger until he turned and bit just about everybody.’

In one interview that year, Waters was unusually candid about his threatening image. ‘I’m frightened of other people,’ he admitted. ‘If you lower your defence, someone jumps on you. I find myself jumping on people all the time and regretting it afterwards.’

By now, the group were adapting to the fact that, as Nick Mason put it, ‘Roger could be so frightening.’ They followed Steve O’Rourke’s suggestion of remaining slightly isolated from their record company, but ended up appearing even more standoffish in the process. By 1970, Malcolm Jones had relinquished his position at Harvest and been succeeded by Dave Croker, who soon realised that working with Pink Floyd meant waiting to be told what to do only when the group had decided. ‘Steve and the Floyd planned everything in detail long before the event,’ said Croker. ‘Any conflicts they had were well over by the time the group got in touch with the outside world. They did all their arguing and sorting out in private.’

Yet Nick Mason seemed less convinced that the band’s bickering was done behind closed doors. ‘We frequently behaved appallingly,’ he wrote in 2004. Attending dinners with record company staff and promoters, the band would commandeer the middle of the table and ‘banish anyone we didn’t know to the far ends. Group dinners were the focal point for all band fights, policy decisions and general jockeying for position.’

Years earlier, Mason had admitted to the press that relations within the band were akin to ‘being in a small army unit or a prep school because you can oscillate so easily between love and hate’.

‘It’s never two against two, either. It’s always three against one,’ he told
Sounds
magazine’s Steve Peacock. ‘It really is amazing to watch sometimes. Jokes, and the way they become teasing and bullying. We can be incredibly spiteful.’

For Mason, though, there was less jockeying to be done. Aside from being Waters’ closest friend in the band, he wrote very few songs on his own and therefore never had to fight Roger or the others to get his material on a Floyd album. For Gilmour and Wright, Waters presented more of a problem. Wright, who’d once been seen by Floyd’s management as the strongest songwriter after Syd Barrett, was now completely overshadowed by the prolific bass player. Adding to the problem was the fact that the two had never got on in the first place. ‘I had a personality clash with Roger even at Regent Street Poly,’ says Wright. ‘We would not have chosen to be friends, even at that time. Being the kind of person he is, Roger would try and rile you, try to make you crack.’

Gilmour could appear reserved, but he was also incredibly stubborn, a trait that would manifest itself fully when Waters strove to break up the band in the 1980s. In 1970, though, the guitarist was still shrugging off his ‘new boy’ status and struggling to establish himself as a songwriter. ‘Roger doesn’t do any more in the musical direction than the rest of us,’ he insisted in an interview to accompany
Atom Heart Mother
. But years later Gilmour would concede that ‘Roger was the ideas man and the motivator, and helped to push things forward.’

For Waters, himself, it was the others that were the problem. ‘There was always a great battle between the musicians and the architects,’ he admitted. ‘Nick and I were relegated to this inferior position of being the architects who were looked down upon by Rick and Dave who were the musicians.’

Ron Geesin vividly recalls his old friend’s struggles: ‘Roger was grumbling most of the time I knew him. He frequently expressed dissatisfaction at the group’s suitability as a mouthpiece for his ideas. I just said, “Leave!” but, of course, he was trapped. He knew where his bread was buttered. That’s why Roger only left Pink Floyd when he could afford to.’

In August, during the recording of
Atom Heart Mother
, the band flew to the South of France to play some festival dates. They set up camp in a large rented villa near St Tropez, joined by Steve O’Rourke, Pete Watts, Alan Styles and everybody’s respective wives and children. Living in such close proximity to each other, though, meant that tensions soon ran high.

‘The Floyd all had strong wives,’ recalls Peter Jenner. ‘Juliette Wright was a tough cookie, extremely sensible and grounded. Nick and Lindy Mason were probably the most straightforward couple. They’d almost been childhood sweethearts. She was musical herself, and, like Nick, she came from an impeccable middle-class background. Judy Trim was very nice but she was a screaming Trot. I always thought Roger was very influenced by his women, and Judy kept him left-wing and committed. She’d known him since before the Floyd, and she had her own life and her own career as a potter, which was good, because she didn’t put up with any of his shit.’

There was another aspect to Roger and Judy’s relationship that the bassist would later discuss in interviews, namely his mother’s attitude. ‘She thought it would be really bad for me to find a nice clean girl and get married when I was too young,’ he revealed in 1980. ‘I can remember her specifically encouraging me to go out and look for dirty girls.’ Roger had instead married his childhood sweetheart.

It was in St Tropez that Mason and Waters clashed, when Lindy and Judy harangued the bassist after he admitted to being unfaithful a couple of years earlier after a gig in Texas. When Mason joined in, Waters took particular exception, largely on the grounds that the drummer was similarly guilty, but hadn’t confessed to his own indiscretion.

Aside from the gigs and an ill-fated stab at communal living, there was another reason for the trip. Earlier that year Floyd had been approached by choreographer Roland Petit to write a piece for his dance company, Ballet de Marseille. Petit wanted to stage a production based around Marcel Proust’s epic novel,
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
. Lindy Mason was a ballet dancer, so Nick, for one, was well aware of Petit’s credentials. The idea immediately appealed. ‘The French have a more emotional, more intellectual edge to the arts,’ he enthused in the press that year. After an initial meeting in Paris, Roger bought the entire twelve volumes of Proust and suggested the band start reading, before giving up himself after just one volume, with David Gilmour supposedly bailing out after just eighteen pages. The outcome would eventually be five performances in Marseilles in November 1972, and a further run in Paris a few months later.

In France, tensions also ran high outside the band’s shared villa. Several of the proposed festival dates were cancelled due to run-ins with the local authorities over safety, or abandoned after rioters clashed with the police. When promoters pulled the plug on a planned open-air festival in Heidelberg, West Germany, at the end of August, Pink Floyd flew back home.

Gilmour took a detour via the Isle of Wight Festival, where Jimi Hendrix was due to play what would turn out to be his final UK gig. Floyd’s principal roadie and sound engineer Pete Watts had been hired to take care of the sound. But with Watts nervous and, arguably, too stoned to do the job properly, Gilmour took over instead, unknown to Hendrix as the young English guitar player from two years earlier that had squired him around Paris. Less than a month later Hendrix would be dead.

Pink Floyd’s collaboration with Roland Petit would be just one of several non-album projects begun during the first year of the new decade. A proposed soundtrack for a new cartoon series,
Rollo
(by The Beatles’
Yellow Submarine
illustrator Alan Aldridge), was much talked about in the press, but floundered after a pilot was made and the money dried up. The group’s next encounter with a film-maker would prove more rewarding than their earlier butting of heads with Michelangelo Antonioni on
Zabriskie Point
.

On tour in Australia in 1971, the band met film director and ardent surfer George Greenough.
Crystal Voyager
, his documentary film celebrating the national pastime, was crying out for a suitable soundtrack. The film’s grand finale would feature footage of a surfer taken from a camera strapped to his body, and accompanied by a new piece of Floyd music: a 23-minute piece entitled ‘Echoes’. These scenes would later be used by the band to provide a backdrop during parts of Floyd’s live shows, but ‘Echoes’ itself would prove a landmark in the band’s musical development.

‘We were looking for something,’ said Gilmour. ‘During that whole period through
Ummagumma
and
Atom Heart Mother
, we were finding ourselves. “Echoes” was the point at which we found our focus.’

Yet the song’s arrival was less a moment of epiphany than a series of moments, in which the band eventually managed to create something worthwhile from what Gilmour called ‘the rubbish library’. Recording of the next Pink Floyd album, later christened
Meddle
, began at Abbey Road’s Studio Two in January 1971. When they discovered that Beatles producer George Martin had installed sixteen-track machines at his own Air Studios, the Floyd took their eight-track tapes there. Tape operator John Leckie, who’d worked on some of the Barrett album sessions, was brought in alongside Pete Bown to engineer before the final mix at Morgan Studios in Hampstead. The Floyd’s initial ideas were far more avant-garde than the finished album might suggest.

‘They spent days and days and days working on what people now call the
Household Objects
album,’ recalls Leckie.
Household Objects
would never be released, but the group are said to have recorded around twenty minutes of music, utilising the sound of everyday objects: elastic bands, wine glasses, cigarette lighters. ‘They were making chords up from the tapping of beer bottles, tearing newspaper to get a rhythm and letting off an aerosol can to get a hi-hat sound. It was very much Nick Mason’s idea, but everyone was involved. The trouble was it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.’ The idea was abandoned after a week, and consigned to ‘the rubbish library’ from where it would, nevertheless, be retrieved three years later.

Household Objects
wasn’t the band’s only indulgence. One idea from the time involved each of the four band members being invited to play whatever they liked as long as it was in the same key. The results were committed to tape, without any of the group hearing what their bandmates had previously recorded. ‘Awful, absolutely awful,’ said Gilmour. At least one Abbey Road engineer from the early seventies recalls how Pink Floyd sessions had a ‘reputation for being rather long-winded. They could take for ever to do anything.’ Allowed carte blanche by EMI, the group capitalised on the company’s patience, deep pockets and the prevailing mood that rock ’n’ roll bands should be taken as seriously as classical composers.

‘Basically, we’re the laziest group ever,’ admitted Gilmour. ‘Other groups would be quite horrified if they saw how we waste our recording time.’

Yet despite these inauspicious beginnings, there was some order being created out of the chaos.

‘The tapes we took to Air were filled up with lots of little ideas - a bit of guitar jiggery-pokery, a bit of piano, some sound effects,’ recalls Leckie. ‘They were all called “Nothing” - “Nothing One”, “Nothing Two” and so on. So the first couple of weeks was just putting down all these little bits. But they were often going off to play gigs, so you’d have to strip down the studio, they’d load the van and go off and play a gig, then come back and set it all up again.’

The only upside of this fractured process was that it gave the group a chance to test ideas on stage. ‘Echoes’, then still called ‘Return of the Son of Nothing’, was given a public airing.

‘When they came back they’d got it into shape because they’d been playing it live,’ recalls Leckie. ‘It was conceived as one big thing, bits in various sections, so it was recorded that way.’

Salvaged from the various ‘Nothings’ was an idea from Richard Wright. A single note was played on a piano and then put through a Leslie cabinet, a gizmo normally used with a Hammond organ and containing a revolving horn that boosts the sound. The note - like the eerie ping of a sonar - would announce the beginning of ‘Echoes’. From here on, the other ‘Nothings’ slotted together - a melancholy guitar figure, the eerie shriek of an incorrectly wired effects pedal, the final moody denouement - to arrive at the finished piece.