Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (47 page)

Not everyone was impressed by
The Wall
.

The first official playback took place at Columbia’s headquarters in Century City, California. According to the band, more than one of the executives in attendance balked at what they heard. Those hoping for
Dark Side of the Moon Part Two
, or even another instalment of
Wish You Were Here
, were instead bombarded with some ninety minutes of Kurt Weillstyle opera, military marching bands, dissonant heavy metal, disco, divebombing aeroplanes . . . all washed down with lyrics that suggested an existential cry for help. Waters had also engaged in another battle of wills with the company. After being told that, as
The Wall
was a double album, he would receive a reduced percentage per track, he threatened to withhold the record. Columbia backed down. It was not an auspicious start.

Then the unthinkable happened. On 16 November 1979, with the album still two weeks away from being issued in the UK, ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’ was released as a single. Gerald Scarfe was badgered into producing a promotional video in time for an airing on the BBC’s
Top of the Pops
. ‘I said to Roger, “How on earth can I do a video in time for next Tuesday? Today is Wednesday!” He said, “Just find some kids!”’ Scarfe hastily assembled a group of stage school children to be filmed singing, intercut with footage already produced for the upcoming stage show. The video brought to life the images record buyers would first encounter on the artwork for the album.

Three weeks later, Pink Floyd, a band who hadn’t released a single in the UK since 1968, had a number 1 hit, usurping ‘Walking on the Moon’ by The Police; one of the new wave groups that had emerged as an antidote to Pink Floyd and their ilk. ‘We were astonished,’ admits Nick Mason.

‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’ reached number 1 in the US, Norway, Portugal, Israel, West Germany and South Africa, where it was later banned after being adopted as a protest song by black schoolchildren against apartheid. Who knows how widespread the so-called public outcry about the song really was, but it was sufficient for the
Daily Mail
, one of Britain’s most staunchly right-wing newspapers, to pounce on the story. It reported that Patricia Kirwan, a member of the Inner London Education Authority, had voiced her disapproval: ‘It seems very ironical that these words should be sung by children from a school with such a bad academic record . . . the grammar is appalling, too.’ Islington Green was an easy target. Headmistress Margaret Maden defended her position by claiming that music teacher Alun Renshaw ‘wasn’t clear about the lyrics, but we decided it wasn’t as bad as all that’. As damage limitation, she banned the children from appearing on television or having their photographs taken in connection with the record. ‘I remember being cross that there were different kids singing it in the video,’ says Caroline Greeves. ‘But we were told we couldn’t do it as we didn’t have Equity cards. Some of the kids at our school were in [the children’s school drama]
Grange Hill
, so we knew about Equity cards and thought that was a good explanation. Really the school didn’t want any more adverse publicity.’

‘The parents didn’t have a problem with it,’ insists Alun Renshaw. ‘They couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.’ Within a month, with the uproar still going on around him, Renshaw emigrated to Australia, where he still lives today. ‘The forces of Conservatism had come in by then,’ he laughs. ‘I never saw the song as a big political statement, but Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister, and I expect she did . . . Although who gives a shit about her?’

With the band still in Los Angeles when the scandal broke, Britannia Row engineer Nick Griffiths found himself doorstepped by news reporters and, on one occasion, forced to escape the studio via a window. The press were also quick to point out that the children hadn’t been paid for their performances on the record and had therefore been ripped off by an unscrupulous multi-millionaire rock band. In the end, each child was given a free copy of
The Wall
, while the school received a £1,000 donation. In 1996, a music business lawyer traced a number of the pupils that had sung on the record and began pursuing a claim for additional royalties on their behalf. By 2007 four of the pupils had been paid.

Released on 30 November in the UK and a week later in the US, Floyd’s new work prompted both confusion and vitriol among the music press.
New Musical Express
had embraced punk rock and was now a tough nut to crack for bands of Pink Floyd’s vintage, especially with an album the magazine viewed as a ‘monument of self-centred pessimism’.
Melody Maker
was more sympathetic: ‘I’m not sure whether it’s brilliant or terrible but I find it utterly compelling.’ In America, the band’s old nemesis
Rolling Stone
magazine offered cautious praise, with writer Kurt Loder applauding the grandeur of the exercise but warning that Roger Waters’ worldview was ‘so unremittingly dismal and acidulous that it makes contemporary gloom-mongers such as Randy Newman or, say, Nico seem like Peter Pan and Tinker Bell’.

Behind the scenes, the suspicion that some members of Pink Floyd might agree with such criticisms is borne out by their comments about
The Wall
since. Wright, understandably perhaps, is said not to like all of the music on the album, while Gilmour has admitted to not quite sharing Waters’ views about the music industry and their audience, particularly the bassist’s desire to build a wall between themselves and their fans.
The Wall
was also, said Gilmour, ‘a year of very hard work by Roger and all of us, turning a good idea that can only be described as a pig’s ear into a silk purse.’

There was also the small matter of credits to dampen the enthusiasm. With Mason and Wright not named anywhere on the record, Gilmour eked out just three co-writer credits for ‘Run Like Hell’, ‘Young Lust’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’. ‘If anyone was not given sufficient credit it was Dave,’ said Mason.

‘I think
The Wall
is stupefyingly good,’ claims Waters. ‘Christ! What a brilliant idea that was. It holds together so well.’

The album now seems to encapsulate everything that both repels some and attracts others: its bombast, pretension and unstinting melodrama. While the narrative was inspired by Waters’ disgust at playing stadiums, perversely, much of
The Wall
’s music was perfect for being played in such large amphitheatres. The opening fanfare, ‘In the Flesh’, with its dive-bombing sound effects and grinding riff, was a pastiche of the heavy metal bands then filling stadiums across America. But for fans of the genre, Floyd had simply written a sterling heavy rock song to match similar efforts by Black Sabbath or megalomaniac guitar hero Ted Nugent. Any intended parody was likely to go over the heads of many of those listening.

Meanwhile, ‘Comfortably Numb’, ‘Run Like Hell’ and ‘Hey You’ were a gift to FM radio DJs. This was grown-up rock with a message, but the message would never encroach on David Gilmour’s next guitar solo. Listening over twenty-five years later,
The Wall
’s hidden treasures include those often overlooked moments bridging the gaps in the story: Waters’ painful vocals on ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ where he sounds as if he might be drawing his last breath; the ugly, amateurish-sounding synthesiser at the start of ‘One of My Turns’, both of which go against the musical grain but are perfect for the songs. These snippets give you a glimpse of how
The Wall
might have sounded had it been a Roger Waters solo album. Graceless and uncompromising on their own, they make perfect sense alongside Gilmour’s warmer, welcoming contributions. To paraphrase Waters, what a great team they made.

To coincide with the album’s release, Roger granted BBC Radio 1 DJ Tommy Vance an interview. Vance played the whole of
The Wall
, intercut with Waters’ comments about each track, while Floyd fans sat by their radios taping the programme. Not that it made a jot of difference to the sales.
The Wall
cleared a million copies in its first two months, and is now believed to have sold somewhere in the region of 23 million copies worldwide.

Gerald Scarfe’s marching hammers, bug-eyed schoolmaster and thunder-thighed mother were among the cartoon images splashed across the inside cover. The outside of the album stuck to the usual Floyd pack drill of ‘no band name, no album title’, but was their most minimal design ever: a simple, white brick wall. It was also the first Pink Floyd album design since
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
not created by Hipgnosis.

‘Roger didn’t want to use me on
The Wall
, which is understandable, as he was already using Gerry Scarfe,’ said Thorgerson. ‘But he was also supposedly cross with me for a credit I’d given him in a book I’d done.’

The book,
Walk Away Rene
, featuring Hipgnosis’ artwork, had been published a couple of years earlier, and had included the sleeve for
Animals
. ‘I rather fell out with Storm when he included that sleeve in a book, because it had nothing to do with them,’ protested Waters. The disagreement would mark the end of Waters and Thorgerson’s working relationship, despite a friendship that had stretched back to their teenage years.

‘We didn’t speak for twenty-five years,’ says Thorgerson. ‘That’s a long time for someone I’d known since I was fourteen and used to pass the ball to on our rugby team. I was upset about it for the first three or four years, and then I had to get on.’

It would be the first in a series of estrangements that would find the Floyd songwriter backing away from many of his oldest friends and collaborators.

For newcomer Gerald Scarfe, any feuding between the band and their other collaborators was of little concern. ‘I think Roger realised the benefits of having something fresh. But I came in very naive to this whole set-up, so I wasn’t really aware of Storm. I remember someone saying to me, “Oh, the thing about you, Gerald, is you’re like Walter Raleigh to the court of Queen Elizabeth I. You’re this social being that can just walk in and out of the court.” I must admit, I rather liked the idea of that.’

‘I do recall Roger once saying that he wanted the flying pig to defecate on the audience.’ Cambridge contemporary and guitarist Tim Renwick remembers the genesis of
The Wall
stage show. Renwick had previously seen Pink Floyd sawing pieces of wood on stage, and inflating a sea monster in the lake at Crystal Palace as part of their mission to dazzle the audience. By the end of the seventies, Waters’ ideas were becoming increasingly extreme. ‘I think by then Roger was looking for ways to intimidate the audience.
The Wall
was all about giving the audience a hard time.’

The notion of constructing a barrier between Pink Floyd and their audience had been in Waters’ mind for some ten years. Appalled by the impersonal atmosphere at the 60,000-seater venues they had played on the 1977 US tour, and by audiences ‘screaming and shouting and throwing things and hitting each other’, Waters declared that
The Wall
would be staged in smaller, 16,000-seater venues, despite a financial loss to the band. Initial plans to transport their own mobile tent-like venue, nicknamed ‘The Slug’, were nixed when they realised they would never be granted a licence for it by any local authority.

The problem was that, while attempting to convey
The Wall
’s important message to the audience, Waters still had an obligation to entertain that audience. Though, at first, that seemed not to be the case.

‘Roger’s very purist idea at the beginning was there should be no let-up, ’ recalls Gerald Scarfe. ‘He wanted a wall between the band and the audience, and everything would be sung from inside the wall. I think David vetoed that. After which they agreed to open holes in the wall, through which they would be seen performing.’

Pink Floyd’s 40ft-high wall would be constructed from around four hundred heavy-duty cardboard bricks, spanning the width of the auditorium and completely obscuring the stage. Designers Jonathan Park and Mark Fisher originally wanted to use plywood panels for the wall. When they realised how heavy they were and difficult to transport, they came up with the idea of flat-packed cardboard boxes that could then be opened and turned into ‘bricks’. ‘The solution came to us in a pub,’ said Park.

As the show progressed, individual bricks would be removed to reveal the band and scenes from the story, most memorably Waters as Pink (or Syd Barrett?), sitting in front of a TV in a motel room scene for ‘Nobody Home’, audibly flicking the channels on his remote control. Extra speaker cabinets were also installed under the tiered seating in the venues, to be fired up during the wall’s eventual collapse.

A circular screen above the stage and the wall itself would act as a backdrop for Gerald Scarfe’s animations. These would include the corpulent judge during ‘The Trial’, in which Pink imagines himself ‘in the dock’ for past misdemeanours, and the infamous ‘marching hammers’ for ‘Waiting for the Worms’, where Pink transforms from rock star to fascist dictator. ‘Roger talked a lot about the forces of oppression,’ says Scarfe, ‘and I thought of the most unforgiving instrument of oppression I could, and it was a hammer.’ One of Scarfe’s personal favourites was the animation for ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’. A song inspired by the fear of war, it featured the ‘frightened ones’, tiny child-like creatures with heads shaped like gas masks, an image triggered by Scarfe’s own memories of growing up in the Second World War.

A new pig was also designed. Tattooed with Scarfe’s crossed hammers insignia, it made its appearance on stage during the opening song ‘In the Flesh’, reappearing above the audience for ‘Run Like Hell’. Fisher and Park also rendered four of Scarfe’s characters as puppets. The 49ft-high schoolmaster would make his debut during ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’; the pinch-faced mother appeared as a 500lb, 35ft-high monstrosity during the song ‘Mother’, while a snake and a praying mantis inspired Pink’s estranged wife. ‘I had no idea what Roger’s ex-wife looked like,’ said Scarfe. ‘So it wasn’t based on her.’ The character of Pink was also created as a human-sized puppet: toothless, distressed and very, very pink, it would be propped up on stage or on top of the Wall at key moments during the show.