Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (32 page)

There were the inevitable cock-ups. In Marseilles, an elongated version of ‘One of These Days’ meant the dancers had completed their routine some minutes before the song ended, making for a hesitant exit from the stage with the Floyd still pounding away. As a precaution, Floyd ordered one of their hangers-on to sit beneath Richard Wright’s piano and hold up cards with the number of bars written down on them. He was instructed to hold up a new card after every four beats, effectively letting the band know where they were in the piece they were playing. On most nights, though, the assembled rock fans were in no mood to sit through two ballets before the main attraction, and began heckling and shouting for the Floyd during the first act.

‘It was fantastically offensive,’ complained Nick Mason at the time. ‘Roland [Petit] did what is an old Floyd routine - he just went out and harangued the audience, told them to go and have a drink until there was something they did want to see.’ Like
Atom Heart Mother
’s collaboration between group and orchestra, the mutual love-in between hairy, heavy rock and classical ballet made sense for the times, and, as Nick Mason later confessed, ‘appealed to a certain intellectual snobbery among us’.

Roland Petit would try to get the band to commit to similar projects. Plans to take the show to Canada stalled when the government refused to allow the use of Communist red flags in ‘Allumez Les Etoiles’. Later, the ballet star Rudolf Nureyev and film director Roman Polanski both became involved in Petit’s schemes. There was a boozy lunch meeting at Polanski’s house in Richmond with Mason, Waters and Steve O’Rourke. Various themes were mooted - Proust (again), Frankenstein, the Arabian Nights. Roger Waters subsequently recalled Polanski and Nureyev sun-bathing in the garden in their underpants. As Waters later griped, ‘It was a complete joke, because nobody had any idea what they wanted to do.’

‘In the end,’ offered Gilmour, ‘the reality of all these people prancing around in tights in front of us didn’t feel like what we wanted to do in the long term.’

By the second week of January 1973, Floyd were back at Abbey Road for the final push on
Dark Side of the Moon
. One of the first songs they went back to tackle was ‘Travel Sequence’. In concert it had been a formless guitar jam, sometimes lasting up to seven minutes. The band turned to their new toy, the VCS3 synthesisers for inspiration. Peter Zinovieff, who’d previously worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, had built the machine, and kept the first model in his garden shed in South London. ‘I visited his home and he had this machine all around the wall, floor to ceiling, hundreds of components, masses of wires,’ remembered David Gilmour.

The band had bought a scaled-down version of the synthesiser and taken it to France for the
Obscured by Clouds
sessions. By their own admission they couldn’t work out how to get any actual notes out of it or use it properly as a keyboard. ‘No one had told us how to,’ said Gilmour. As such, its presence can be heard on the album, if largely confined to a sequence of gothic-sounding drones.

A few months later, and a compact version of the VCS3, the Synthi A, found its way to Abbey Road. The original VCS3 was used on ‘Breathe’, while the Synthi A found its way into ‘Brain Damage’, ‘Time’, ‘Any Colour You Like’ and, most importantly, ‘Travel Sequence’. Waters and Gilmour programmed an eight-note sequence into the machine, against which the band added a mêlée of backwards-recorded cymbals, slide guitar, a Farfisa organ, and the ghostly sounding footsteps of Alan Parsons’ assistant Peter James. An explosion taken from the Abbey Road library of special effects completed the piece. The maddening synth rhythm became the standout feature of the track, which would now be retitled ‘On the Run’. It was unlike anything Pink Floyd had recorded before.

In the meantime, Adrian Maben had made yet another approach to the group. ‘I had been fly-fishing with Roger Waters,’ said Maben, ‘and we vaguely discussed the idea of doing an extended version of
Live At Pompeii
. The band was about to embark on a new recording. Roger somehow managed to persuade the other members of the group, and, after a few months of telephone calls, hesitations and cancellations, I was invited to film certain parts of the recording of
Dark Side of the Moon
.’

The footage from the January 1973 sessions would become as compelling as the scenes filmed in Pompeii itself. In the space of just over twelve months, Pink Floyd had undergone a significant change. The footage of the band at work in Abbey Road retains a certain time-capsule charm. Spot the countless smouldering cigarettes, a reminder of when smoking was still permitted in the workplace, or Richard Wright’s patterned jumper, straight out of a Christmas 1972 stocking, not to mention the spaghetti junction of cables and leads around the pre-digital studio. Wright plays the haunting piano sequence for ‘Us and Them’, Gilmour is seen tearing off a guitar solo for ‘Brain Damage’ (‘Where would rock ’n’ roll be without feedback?’ he quips to the control room), while Waters is filmed manhandling the Synthi A for ‘On the Run’.

Yet the most enduring scenes were those filmed in the archaic-looking Abbey Road canteen. The four are seen seated at what could conceivably have been a boarding school dining table, preparing for a classic mid-1970s carbohydrate overload. Nick Mason’s order, ‘Can I have egg, sausage, chips and beans . . . and a tea?’ date-stamps the footage as much as his Zapata moustache ever could.

Amid much slurping and gnawing, Roger Waters clambers onto his high horse to challenge the claim - made off camera by a person unknown - that a broad knowledge of music is not an essential qualification for a record producer. Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke is mentioned. Waters’ tone becomes fabulously haughty: ‘Steve knows what rock ’n’ roll’s about, but he’s got no idea what the equipment’s about and he’s got very little idea - in terms of technicalities - what the music’s about.’ At some point, the same unknown voice pipes up, ‘We all know you’re God Almighty, Roger.’

Just as in Paris a year earlier, it is the bass player that dominates proceedings. At the far end of the table, Wright chews away, largely ignoring the argument, Mason asks a minion to fetch him a slice of apple pie (‘no crust’), and Gilmour concentrates on his own meal, offering a knowing, ruminative smile to the camera.

The band, minus Wright, are interviewed individually and are all slightly more forthcoming than they were in Paris, though Gilmour manages to evade a question about drugs. ‘I still think that most people see us as a drug-oriented group . . . Of course, we’re not . . .’ He smirks. ‘You can trust us.’

‘I’m a bit embarrassed by that young chap in
Live At Pompeii
,’ said Gilmour in 2006. ‘I find it excruciating, because he was pretentious and naive.’

For a record that subsequently acquired a reputation as a classic ‘stoner’ album, none of those involved in
Dark Side of the Moon
recall, or admit to, any significant use during its making. Alcohol was officially banned at Abbey Road, but that didn’t stop Pink Floyd having a bar and an ice bucket, and keeping a fridge stocked with Southern Comfort. Cocaine would find its way onto the subsequent tour, but there was, by all accounts, none of it in the studio - only the occasional joint.

‘Some of the interview bits done in the canteen at EMI are really funny,’ said Waters later. ‘You can see we were fucking stoned. Dave and I were completely out of our brains. I was going through a stage where I was giving up nicotine, so I’d roll a joint every morning. I was out of my brain for a couple of years, pretending not to smoke cigarettes.’

Of the three interviews it is the resolutely un-stoned Nick Mason that offers the most honest comment. ‘Unfortunately, we mark a sort of era,’ he admits. ‘We’re in danger of becoming a relic of the past. For some people we represent their childhood: 1967, Underground London, the free concert in Hyde Park . . .’

As the new songs developed, so too did the themes behind them, broadening out from Waters’ initial abstract ponderings on the pressures of modern life. The pressures had now become more specific. The damning lyric of wartime cannon fodder in ‘Us and Them’ seems inextricably linked to the Vietnam War then still occupying the headlines, and infiltrating American politics via the Watergate scandal of 1972. The song also, inevitably, touched on the fate of his father.

‘Time’ was even more explicit in its handwringing, fretting over unfulfilled hopes and dreams, as well as containing another outright reference to Waters’ childhood and not knowing when real life was about to begin. The song’s denunciation of the rat race was also a nod to the human worker ants that Waters and Judy Trim used to watch day after day from their Shepherds Bush flat, and which had so inspired the song ‘Echoes’. Similar inspiration had come from a message spray-painted on a wall near their local tube station in the late sixties.

‘If you got the tube at Goldhawk Road, there was this inspired bit of graffiti,’ recalled Waters. ‘It said: “Get up, go to work, do your job, come home, go to bed, get up, go to work . . .” It was on this wall and seemed to go on for ever, and as the train sped up, it would go by quicker and quicker until - bang! - you suddenly went into a tunnel.’

While Waters couldn’t have made his preoccupations - fear, death, violence - more topical and more removed from the old cosmic flights of fancy, there was still one pressing theme that linked the new music to the past. One day Waters had been seated in the Abbey Road canteen when he suddenly felt himself, in his words, ‘recede’. The sound of the people next to him talking became indistinct, and everything he saw seemed to diminish in size. He was not, he insisted, stoned. Getting up from the table, he went back into the studio and waited for the feelings to subside. He would later claim that he thought he was going mad and had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The parallels with Syd Barrett were unavoidable.

The theme of madness had now become central to the new album, most explicit on its closing ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’. ‘When I say, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon”, what I mean is, “If you feel that you’re the only one . . . that you seem crazy cos you think everything is crazy, you’re not alone,”’ explained Waters. ‘There’s a camaraderie involved in the idea of people who are prepared to walk the dark places alone. A number of us are willing to open ourselves up to all those possibilities. You’re not alone!’

‘Syd’s mother blamed me entirely for his illness,’ said Waters years after the event. ‘I was supposed to have taken him off to the fleshpots of London and destroyed his brain with drugs’ (a suggestion refuted by Libby Gausden: ‘I don’t think Win blamed him for anything. I think Syd would have gone off the rails an awful lot sooner if it hadn’t been for Roger Waters’). While trying to shake off the ghost of Barrett in public, and distance themselves from his era, ‘Brain Damage’ seemed to be about Barrett’s experience, and the ‘Is he or isn’t he mad?’ dilemma that had so frustrated the group. This time, though, Waters had written a happier ending to the story. The exultant gospel vocals of ‘Eclipse’ and the penultimate line of ‘everything under the sun is in tune’ suggested that we may
all
be mad, but there is still hope.

During the final sessions for the album, Waters had another brainwave. While the songs were now almost complete, he suggested recording snippets of speech to be woven into the songs, linking the narrative and tapping into the lyrics. He compiled a series of questions relating to death, violence and insanity, and wrote them down on separate pieces of card. These were turned face down on a music stand in Studio Three. Each would-be speaker would then be invited to turn up a card, answer the question, then turn up the second card and answer the next question which would be linked to the first, for example: ‘When was the last time you were violent?’ followed by ‘Were you in the right?’

Potential interviewees were rounded up at Abbey Road. From the band’s immediate circle of roadies came potato-eating champion Chris Adamson, Peter Watts and his then wife Patricia (nicknamed Puddie), roadie Bobby Richardson, aka ‘Liverpool Bobby’, and another occasional Floyd road crew member, Roger ‘the Hat’ Manifold.

Scouring the building, Waters also collared Gerry O’Driscoll, a middle-aged Irishman employed as a handyman and caretaker, alongside Paul and Linda McCartney and guitarist Henry McCulloch, who, as Wings, were recording the album
Red Rose Speedway
at the same studio. Alan Parsons was also invited to take part, but on being asked, ‘What do you think
Dark Side of the Moon
is all about?’ confessed to not being able to come up with an interesting answer, and found his contribution cut. Strangely, the same fate would befall Paul and Linda. Waters was looking for spontaneity and candid, off-the-cuff remarks. The former Beatle and his wife were both too guarded, too keen to put on an act. As Waters would complain later, ‘He was trying to be
funny
, which wasn’t what we wanted at all.’

Replying to questions such as ‘Are you afraid of dying?’ and ‘Do you ever think you’re going mad?’, the other contributions proved far more revealing and, in the context of the finished album, atmospheric. The opening track, ‘Speak to Me’, collaged sounds lifted from elsewhere on the album - ticking clocks, jangling coins - set against an eerie, booming heartbeat. But its most striking elements were Peter Watts’ deranged laughter, and Chris Adamson and Gerry O’Driscoll’s pronouncements: ‘I’ve been mad for fucking years - absolutely years’ and ‘I’ve always been mad, I know I’ve been mad, like most of us have . . .’

Similar snippets of speech now peppered the rest of the album. Waters had lost the question cards by the time he’d tracked down Roger the Hat, and was forced to bluff it. The roadie’s answers were funny, candid and among the most memorable on the record, as he can be heard recalling a road rage incident with a motorist in North London, in response to the question, ‘When was the last time you were violent?’