Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (39 page)

As an outsider coming into the Floyd’s closed circle, Scarfe observed the band members’ individual roles: ‘Nick was the organiser, the ambassador. He approached me at first, but I remember him saying, “Just wait, once you get started you’ll suddenly find you’re dealing with Roger.” Rick was always off to the side somewhere, in his own world. Dave was always very easy-going, but I had the impression he thought it should just be about the music.’

The planned
pièce de résistance
of the 1975 US tour was an inflatable pyramid designed to float above the stage, anchored by cables, recreating the prism on the sleeve of
Dark Side of the Moon
. Waters sketched out the design, but, at a height of 60ft when inflated, and powered by a considerable amount of helium, the pyramid would prove to be an unwieldy beast.

At the Three Rivers Stadium, Pittsburgh on 20 June, projectionist Pete Revell witnessed the pyramid’s last, ill-fated stand. ‘It used to go up on a pair of hydraulic winches, but at Three Rivers one of them came off, but the other one just kept pumping, so the whole thing flipped upside down. The bottom was like a soft skin, but there was this aluminium framework in the corners, pumped up with helium. All the buoyancy was now pointing at the bottom. This thing shot out into the night sky, like a giant jellyfish.’

The weight of the pyramid sent it over the side of the stadium wall, dragging the ropes behind it. ‘It then started bouncing around the car park,’ says Revell, ‘and as there was this aluminium frame inside, it started busting up cars, lamp-posts. I remember we were trying to get everyone out of the car park, but it was no good. There were about two hundred kids out there with knives and bottles, hacking bits off to keep as souvenirs, inhaling the helium and rabbiting away like Donald Duck. I think what was left of the balloon eventually came down in a river near Pittsburgh.’

While marital and musical angst was rife within the band, the crew were having a rather better time of it. ‘We were very well looked after,’ says Revell. ‘But in the end, we were told we were costing them too much money and were told not to order anything more on room service. In America it was getting silly - you’d phone up at 2 a.m.: “Can I have four gin and tonics and 400 cigarettes, please.” They put a stop to all that.’

Nevertheless, Revell would feel the wrath of his paymasters on the final date of Floyd’s US tour. The band’s increasing use of pyrotechnics had led to run-ins with local fire marshals, and the crew began hiding their flash bombs from the snooping officials, before letting them off at the last possible moment. The decision was taken to mark the end of the North American tour with a gig at the Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario, with, to quote the projectionist, ‘the biggest, loudest, fuck-off explosion ever’ to accompany the Floyd’s ‘crashing plane’. The explosion was suitably dramatic, and, with the gig over, the crew began stripping down the stage. ‘That was when I realised a couple of the bins hadn’t gone off,’ says Pete Revell. ‘We had four sticks of dynamite, flash powder and detonators left over, all out of their tins, that we had to get rid of somehow. I said, “Stand back, I’ll set this lot off.” What we didn’t realise is there was more in these bins than had gone off during the gig.’ The resulting explosion blew out half the stadium’s back wall and windows in some of the nearby houses. ‘One bin went up in the air and we never saw it again. Above us was one of those scoreboards surrounded by light bulbs. The explosion went through the bottom and blew the front out, sending glass and aluminium everywhere. I was in shock for two hours.’

Once he’d sufficiently recovered, Revell was sent for, back at the band’s hotel. ‘They’d pulled a table round and set up four chairs behind it, as if they were a board of directors. I felt like a schoolboy being sent to see the headmaster. They were like, “I think we need to have words.” ’

The band were especially sensitive after a previous mishap with pyrotechnics in France.

‘One of them said, “After Paris, we said this would never happen again.” I replied, “I didn’t do Paris”, to which they said, “No, but you’ve just
done
Canada.” ’

Revell kept his job, but a final show in the UK at Knebworth Park was a dispiriting experience for the band. The 40,000-capacity open-air arena ended up holding nearer to 100,000, when the perimeter fence was removed. Floyd were due to headline over Captain Beefheart, The Steve Miller Band and their old friend Roy Harper, all of whom would be using the band’s PA during the day. The jet-lagged road crew arrived late to set up the equipment, only to discover that the backstage generators were liable to voltage fluctuation. This meant that Richard Wright’s state-of-the-art keyboards kept slipping in and out of tune. A decision to buzz the crowd at the start of the gig with two Second World War Spitfires failed to have quite the desired effect, as the road crew were still feverishly preparing the stage at the time. At one point during the gig, half of the PA failed completely. Backstage, in a fit of pique after having his stage clothes stolen, support act Roy Harper smashed up his trailer. Roger Waters witnessed the incident and filed it away for use in a future Pink Floyd song.

Harper’s connection with Pink Floyd would grow stronger during 1975. At Knebworth, he sang lead vocals on ‘Have a Cigar’, reprising his performance on a recorded version of the song from a few weeks earlier. Midway through the US dates, when the band had returned to the UK for a second burst of activity at Abbey Road, they had found Harper in a neighbouring studio, recording his next album,
HQ
, with producer John Leckie. He had known Pink Floyd since the late sixties, when the two acts had appeared on the same bill at the free festival in Hyde Park. A singular, eccentric talent, Harper also shared some of Roger Waters’ concerns and worldviews.

Waters had been struggling with the lead vocal on ‘Have a Cigar’ for some time. Gilmour had refused to sing it, claiming not to feel sufficient empathy with the lyrics. ‘Roy was in and out of the studio all the time,’ said Waters. ‘I can’t remember who suggested he sing it - maybe I did, probably hoping everyone would go, “Oh no, Rog,
you
do it.” But they didn’t. They all went, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.” ’

‘Roger can write songs but he’s never going to be in the top one hundred as a rock singer,’ said Harper. ‘He tries hard, he’s a good lad. Anyway, neither of them could get up there. I just stood at the back, leaning against a machine and laughing. I said, “I’ll sing it for you”, and someone said, “OK”, and I said, “For a price.” ’

Harper delivered the necessary degree of incredulous sarcasm on lyrics that referenced the music biz hysteria that had greeted the band after
Dark Side of the Moon
- lyrics that referred to riding the gravy train. In years to come, when working with producer Bob Ezrin on
The Wall
, Waters would tell him, ‘You can write anything you want, just don’t expect a credit.’ Harper’s name would appear on the finished album. But that was all.

‘Roger said, “We must make sure you get a payment for this,” ’ says John Leckie, ‘and Roy said, “Just get me a life season ticket to Lord’s [cricket ground].” He kept prompting Roger, but it never came. About ten years later Roy wrote a letter to Roger, and decided that, due to the success of
Wish You Were Here,
£10,000 would be adequate. And heard nothing at all.’

‘I think it was a bad idea now,’ said Waters. ‘Roy did it very well, but it’s just not
us
any more.’

Roy Harper wasn’t the only special guest, or old friend to drop by the sessions. When it was discovered that classical violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Stephane Grappelli were recording a duet at Abbey Road, Gilmour suggested Grappelli come in and play a final violin coda to the song ‘Wish You Were Here’. Grappelli haggled over his fee but finally settled at £300. In the end, his playing is virtually inaudible on the final mix. ‘It was terrific fun, though,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘Avoiding his wandering hands.’

One addition to the final mix was a snippet from a radio programme that linked the end of ‘Shine On . . . Part One’ to the beginning of ‘Wish You Were Here’. The opening lines of the song were mixed in such a way as to sound as if they were coming out of the radio. As Gilmour explained, ‘It’s all meant to sound like the first track getting sucked into the radio with one person sitting in the room playing guitar along to the radio.’ The radio programme and interference was recorded on Gilmour’s own car radio, while someone turned the dial. The tiny sample of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony fitted the beginning of ‘Wish You Were Here’ perfectly.

On 5 June, as the band busied themselves for another day at the coalface, each of them in turn wondered who the bald, overweight man fussing around at the back of the studio was. Most assumed that, as he’d made it past the reception desk into the confines of the studio, he must be, to quote Nick Mason, ‘something to do with one of the engineers’. Hardly ones for confrontation at the best of times, his presence went unchallenged. In the grand tradition of hearsay, nobody present that day can quite agree on the exact circumstances of Syd Barrett’s arrival in the studio.

‘Everyone has a different version of that story,’ says Mason. ‘I talked to at least one person who thought that Syd had been in the studio on at least three or four days, I thought he was only there for an hour, and someone else says he was there for the whole afternoon ...’ The drummer remembers a ‘large, fat bloke with a shaven head, wearing a decrepit old tan mac and carrying a plastic shopping bag’. The only known photograph of Barrett at the sessions shows him shaven-headed and wearing a tight-fitting, white, short-sleeved shirt, with the waistband of his trousers hiked up over his stomach. He is certainly unrecognisable as the Syd Barrett of four years earlier.

For Roger Waters, the physical transformation was shocking. ‘I was in fucking tears,’ he said later. It was Waters that pointed Barrett out to Richard Wright. ‘Roger said, “You don’t know who that guy is, do you? It’s Syd,” ’ recalled Wright. ‘It was a huge shock. He kept standing up and brushing his teeth, then putting his toothbrush away and sitting down.’

According to Mason, Wright and Waters, Barrett’s arrival coincided with a playback of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. Gilmour, whose memory of the event is sketchier than the others, claims not to remember which song they were working on, but claimed in one interview that Syd ‘turned up for two or three days and then didn’t come any more’.

According to Richard Wright, at one point, ‘Syd stood up and said, “Right, when do I put the guitar on?” And, of course, he didn’t have a guitar with him, and we said, “Sorry, Syd, the guitar’s all done.” ’

On 7 July, during a break in the
Wish You Were Here
sessions, Gilmour married girlfriend Ginger at Epping Forest Register Office, and the Syd tale takes on another curious twist. In conversation with
Mojo
magazine in 2006, Gilmour disputed any stories that Syd had attended his wedding. Yet at least three of the guests claim they saw Syd at a post-wedding meal at Abbey Road. Ex-manager Andrew King recalled Barrett looking ‘like the type of bloke who serves you in a hamburger bar in Kansas City’. Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley referred to him as ‘an overweight Hare Krishna-type chap’. But whatever the frequency of his visits, there could be no possible reconciliation. Barrett was clearly very sick. The band moved on, and he moved back to Chelsea, where he would remain on and off for the next six years.

‘He doesn’t want to be bothered,’ Bryan Morrison told one inquisitive reporter. ‘He just sits there on his own, watching television all day and getting fat.’

Towards the end of the
Wish You Were Here
sessions, Hipgnosis presented the band with ideas for the album cover. Aware of the theme of emotional absence running through the music and, in some cases, the personal lives of the band, Storm Thorgerson hit on the idea of an ‘absent’ (read: ‘hidden’) cover. He proposed concealing the cover in a black opaque cellophane wrap. The idea was mooted during a meal in the Abbey Road canteen, with the band, Steve O’Rourke and anyone else that happened to be eating alongside them, listening in. The band agreed, with the only record company proviso being that the cellophane wrap included a sticker identifying the name of the band and the album. The hidden sleeve featured another enduring Floyd image: two business-suited men shaking hands, one of them on fire.

Thorgerson explained his thinking in a radio interview at the time: ‘The handshake was a symbol of the whole notion of how you may get hold of somebody, shake them by the hand, and they’re trying to tell you how much they’re really there when they gripped you, but in fact they’re miles away.’ For most, the burning man was taken as a very literal reference to the notion of ‘getting burnt’ in business. Photographed on an empty Hollywood film lot, the flaming stuntman, Ronnie Rondell, was frequently seen risking life and limb in such TV shows as
Charlie’s Angels
. In what would become a familiar artistic approach of layers within layers for Pink Floyd album covers, Hipgnosis included separate designs along the same theme for the back and inside covers. Of these an image of an upturned diver, the top half of his body concealed beneath motionless water, was the most striking. ‘A dive without a splash? An action without its trace? Is it present or absent?’ offered Thorgerson later. The photograph had been taken at Lake Mono in California. The yoga-trained diver had assumed a handstand position, and held his breath underwater while waiting for the ripples in the lake to subside and the photograph to be taken. Designer George Hardie’s creation for the sticker and the record label itself repeated the theme of the insincere handshake, with two robotic hands clasped together.

Wish You Were Here
was released worldwide in September 1975. But that summer’s appearance at Knebworth would be the last Pink Floyd live show until 1977. In an interview conducted for the
Wish You Were Here Songbook
, published a month after the album’s release, Roger Waters made little attempt to disguise the unrest and dissatisfaction he felt. ‘I’m sorry, I wanted to do this interview, but my mind’s scrambled ...’ he protests at one point. Instead, Waters ran through the difficulties experienced while making the album, refusing to present the kind of united front David Gilmour had worked so hard to maintain during his encounter with
NME
at the beginning of the year.