Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (31 page)

‘Us and Them’ had already been knocked into shape on the road, but it would be another few months before the band included its now distinctive saxophone solo. This time, the song’s dream-like quality and snail’s pace was heightened by the slow delay running through the piece and feeding back and forth through the sound. Without modern-day flangers or samplers to do the job for them, the band and Parsons relied on their own sense of timing and expertise. When played live, ‘Time’ had previously sounded unfinished and too slow. In the studio, Gilmour weighed in with a far more assertive vocal and what would prove to be one of the most exciting guitar solos on the album.

‘Money’ also presented a challenge. In the live show, the song had been accompanied by a tape loop, created by Waters in his garden shed/studio. Roger had commandeered one of wife Judy’s potter’s bowls and, with a hand-held tape recorder, captured the sound of coins thrown into the bowl. To produce the same sound on record, the loop had to be re-recorded. The band had now decided that the album should be released in quadraphonic, as well as stereo; an added complication which would backfire when the album was released, as few record buyers owned quadraphonic sound systems on which to play it. The aim, then, was for the sound effects to essentially ‘circle’ the room. This meant that each of the sounds they wanted to include - the coins, the ringing cash register, the sound of money (in reality, just paper) being torn up - all had to be recorded on different tracks.

Five individual lengths of tape ended up circling the studio, held tight by carefully positioned microphone stands to prevent them becoming chewed up in the machines. ‘It was,’ as Nick Mason later recalled, ‘all
very
Heath Robinson.’ It was also something that can now be achieved in a studio in a matter of a few seconds with the press of a button.

Musically, ‘Money’ was an even greater break from the Floyd tradition. The tricksy, 7/4 riff proved a challenge for Nick Mason (‘It was incredibly difficult to play along with’), and the tempo varies even on the finished album. The unusually funky feel also made it the ‘blackest’ Pink Floyd song to date. ‘Nice white English architecture students getting funky,’ was Gilmour’s description of the song later. As well as delivering a fiery guitar solo, Gilmour was also free to squeeze in some of his R&B and soul influences from the Jokers Wild days, notably Booker T & The MGs.

Like his predecessor John Leckie, who’d engineered the
Meddle
album, Parsons quickly discovered that the band were rarely given to expressions of outright enthusiasm, even when things were going well. ‘It was always very low-key, very calm. After an amazing guitar solo, Roger would turn around and say something like, “Oh, I think we might be able to get away with that one.” ’

With yet another American tour pending, the group took most of the summer off, but decided to spend it together. A vacationing party of Gilmour, Waters, Wright (Nick Mason stayed behind, as Lindy was now pregnant with the couple’s first child), Steve O’Rourke, girlfriends, wives, drug buddies and sparring partners decamped to Lindos. Here, they hired a boat, rented a villa, sunbathed, drank, smoked, played endless games of backgammon and locked conversational swords with fellow guests Germaine Greer, author of the recent feminist tome,
The Female Eunuch
, and the artist Caroline Coon, a contemporary from the UFO club days, who had set up the drugs charity Release in the early sixties.

‘I was in ecstasy about finally having a few weeks off that summer,’ says Caroline. ‘But I found myself in the Pink Floyd stronghold of Lindos. I’d come from a very upper-class background but had been thrown out of home when I was eighteen and was now absolutely poor. I got into this terrible argument with Roger Waters. I was talking about how there was a need for the wealthy to give money to the poor and for rock groups to do more free gigs. Roger said something terribly cutting, about how the reason the country was falling apart - with the unions on strike - was due to the slackness of the working classes. I contradicted him, and he came back with some suitably smug comment.’

Unknown at the time, Roger Waters’ personal wealth was about to increase immeasurably. Despite the balmy surroundings of Lindos, there was business to attend to. Floyd’s lack of progress in the US had long been a source of discontent. The band were signed to EMI’s partner and subsidiary Capitol in America, but were languishing on Tower Records, an offshoot that dealt mostly with jazz and folk acts, but had none of the cachet of Harvest Records in the UK. Floyd had one more album,
Dark Side of the Moon
, left on their Capitol contract, and, by the summer of 1972, were in the market for a new deal.

Jeff Dexter, the former Middle Earth DJ, was now managing the folk-rock duo America and sharing an office with Steve O’Rourke. He had also joined the Floyd and friends in Lindos. America’s debut album had been released that year on Warners, and Jeff Dexter’s closeness to Pink Floyd’s management was such that he helped bring the company’s new president, Joe Smith, into the running. Atlantic Records’ head honcho Ahmet Ertegün, who’d previously signed Led Zeppelin to the label, was also circling. Both parties were aware of the band’s success outside of America, and, with Atlantic and Warners merging to become the WEA group, believed they could break them properly in the States. Meanwhile, Capitol had appointed a new president, former Delhi and Oxford Universities graduate Bhaskar Menon, who was determined to halt the company’s poor track record with the Floyd.

‘Steve O’Rourke was playing the game,’ says Dexter now. ‘He wanted to let everyone know that things were up for sale. So between Joe and Ahmet and Bhaskar Menon, he had a sort of auction going over a period of a few months . . . There was one telephone in the whole village, and it was half a mile from the beach. We had a nickname for the guy that ran the phone office. We called him Yani Ring Ring. Every time we had a call, Yani would stand at the top of the square and call out over the village to where we were all lying around on the beach . . . Of course, I was running back and forth all day taking their phone calls as well as my own. One day we were on the beach, and a call came in for Steve from Ertegün. Steve said, “Look Jeff, you’ve got to talk to them for me. Talk to Ahmet and tell him to fuck off.” Ahmet and Joe Smith both thought they were going to get the Floyd.’

It was a prime example of the bombastic O’Rourke’s unstinting defence of the band. But his attitude did have its drawbacks.

‘I sometimes wondered what made the Floyd keep Steve,’ offers Storm Thorgerson. ‘Roger later denounced him. But he was very useful to the band. Unfortunately, the bullishness that was useful against record companies, or anyone else that might abuse the Floyd, was not that useful when turned on those nearest and dearest. He didn’t need to bully me, but he did. Steve had his qualities otherwise they wouldn’t have kept him, but those qualities didn’t always need to be utilised among the inner circle.’

In the end, neither Ahmet Ertegün nor Joe Smith would sign Pink Floyd.

With fourteen dates booked in North America, there was further opportunity to hone the new album in front of the public. Alan Parsons had now been recruited to look after the front-of-house sound, beginning a trend for Floyd’s studio engineers joining them on the road. Buoyed by the success of
Obscured by Clouds
, the band’s popularity as a live act in America was starting to grow. In September they booked into the open-air Hollywood Bowl. Far bigger than the 12,000-seater venues they usually played, the gig failed to sell out, but was a spectacular showcase for both their new work and their most striking light show to date.

‘We hired four of those searchlights that they use at film premieres,’ said Gilmour. ‘We fanned them out backstage and pointed them at the sky, creating a pyramid over the stage.’ Within two years, the band would take the pyramid of light idea to another level completely.

Back in the UK in October, they sold out the Wembley Empire Pool at a benefit gig for the charities War on Want and Save the Children, filling the stage with dry ice, letting off flash bombs and setting Roger Waters’ beloved gong on fire for a grand finale of ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’. Reviewing the show,
Sounds
praised ‘a faultless demonstration of what psychedelic music is all about’.

The Wembley show interrupted another burst of activity at Abbey Road, as the band made progress on the songs they hadn’t tackled in the summer. Two instrumental pieces, ‘The Travel Section’ (originally called ‘The Travel Sequence’ and later titled ‘On the Run’) and ‘Any Colour You Like’, were recorded. The first was still a conventional jam, and would undergo a further radical transformation before the album was finished. ‘Any Colour You Like’ provided a necessary bridge between ‘Us and Them’ and the penultimate ‘Brain Damage’, but was not crucial to the narrative of the album. ‘We used to do very long, extended jamming on stage,’ said Gilmour. ‘Interminable, many people would say, and probably rightly . . . and that’s what that one came out of.’ A two-chord jam dominated by Gilmour and Wright, the guitarist played through a pair of Leslie speakers with the express purpose of capturing the same sound Eric Clapton had achieved on Cream’s ‘Badge’.

On ‘Brain Damage’, Waters took his first lead vocal of the album (‘He was very shy about singing,’ said Gilmour, ‘so I tried to encourage him’). If Waters’ voice wasn’t as strong as his bandmate’s, he had the benefit of being joined by four female backing vocalists hired for the sessions. English singer-songwriter Lesley Duncan had previously sung for the Dave Clark Five and Donovan, and had seen her own songs covered by Elton John and Olivia Newton-John. Liza Strike was another prolific English session singer who’d appeared on Elton John’s 1971 album
Madman Across the Water
. Barry St John was another of Elton’s backing singers. An American, then living in London, she’d also sung on the first solo album of Daevid Allen, founder member of Soft Machine. Completing the quartet was Doris Troy, a New York-born soul singer, who’d been recording since the early sixties after being discovered by James Brown. She’d released a solo album on The Beatles’ Apple label in 1970, and had sung back-up on The Rolling Stones’
Let It Bleed
. A formidable talent with the presence to match, Doris was an Abbey Road regular, and was given to disguising her inability to sight-read by tossing aside any sheet music put in front of her during a session, declaring, ‘Get that outta here. I don’t need that!’

As well as ‘Brain Damage’, the quartet made their presence felt on ‘Us And Them’, ‘Time’ and the album’s dramatic closing moment, ‘Eclipse’, which contained a compelling gospel-style ad-lib from Strike and Troy. ‘Dave Gilmour was running the session,’ Liza Strike told writer John Harris. ‘He knew exactly what he wanted. Even when we were ad-libbing, he told me what to sing.’

Gilmour was also instrumental in hiring saxophonist Dick Parry for the June sessions. Dick was a jazz musician and mainstay of the Cambridge club circuit (‘Part of the Cambridge Mafia’, according to Nick Mason). He and Gilmour had often played together during Sunday night sessions at the Dorothy Ballroom in the sixties. Yet Parry’s recruitment was based on something else besides his musical talent. ‘We didn’t know anyone,’ admitted Gilmour. ‘We were so insular in some ways. We really didn’t know how to get hold of a sax player. And it can be tedious bringing in these brisk, professional session men. A bit intimidating.’

Parry delivered a gentle solo on ‘Us and Them’, punctuating the verses and choruses while never intruding on the rest of the instrumentation. On ‘Money’ he came in harder, matching Gilmour’s raucous solo with a brassy outburst that fulfilled his loose instruction from the band to play something like the cartoon saxophonist that appeared alongside the theme music for the Pearl and Dean ads screened in cinemas at the time.

Undeterred by his rejected idea for the early version of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, Alan Parsons found his next brainwave met with a more positive response. Shortly before starting work on
Dark Side of the Moon
, Parsons had made a recording designed to demonstrate the effects of quadraphonic sound, comprising various clock sounds. ‘I made the recordings in an antique clock shop not far from the studio,’ said Parsons. ‘I went out with a portable tape machine and got the owner to stop all the other clocks in the shop, and record each one at a time. I then comped them together at Abbey Road.’

The assembled ticks, chimes and alarm bells would then be spliced onto the beginning of ‘Time’. Following the explosive din, guaranteed to shake any stoned listener out of their torpor, came another new sound. Just as the band had featured instruments left in the studio at Abbey Road on
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
, a set of rototoms discovered in the studio found their way onto the intro to ‘Time’. These were single drumheads stretched over a frame, which could be tuned to a specific pitch. Against Gilmour’s guitar and Wright’s piano, Mason delivered measured beats on the tuned drums, ramping up the tension for over two minutes before the first verse began.

By the end of the month, with more work on the album still to be done, the band were back on tour. There was, after all, a ballet to be performed.

Pink Floyd’s collaboration with Ballet de Marseille had finally come to fruition, after twelve months of toing and froing. Floyd performed five shows at Salle Valliers in Marseilles in November 1972, before taking the show to the Palais de Sports in Paris in January the following year.

The programme included three pieces: ‘Allumez Les Etoiles’ (Light the Stars), a ballet based around the Russian Revolution, with music by Mussorgsky and Prokofiev; ‘La Rose Malade’ (The Sick Rose), based on the William Blake poem of the same name; and, finally, the prosaically titled ‘The Pink Floyd Ballet’, during which the band performed ‘Echoes’, ‘One of These Days’, ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, ‘Obscured by Clouds’ and ‘When You’re In’. Roland Petit’s choreographed routines included performances from Ballet de Marseille stars Rudy Bryans and Danièle Jossi; the latter apparently dragged across the stage in the full splits position, much to the dismay of the assembled rock press, unused to such athleticism.