Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (49 page)

‘Alvin never opened the curtains in his playroom. He was like a vampire,’ recalls Emo, who moved in with the Gilmours. ‘We found a secret hiding place in one of the floorboards. We unscrewed it, and there was somebody’s hash and grass. No cocaine, unfortunately.’

Meanwhile, Nick Mason and James Guthrie applied the finishing touches to the drummer’s first solo album,
Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports
, which had been recorded at the end of
The Wall
sessions, but would not be released until May 1981. The album was a collection of songs written by Mason’s recent discovery, jazz vocalist Carla Bley, with contributions from her husband, the trumpeter Michael Mantler, and old pal Robert Wyatt. The album’s most intriguing song was ‘Hot River’, which, promised Mason, ‘contains all my favourite Pink Floyd clichés of the last fourteen years’. To nobody’s great surprise, though, the album failed to chart. In November, EMI put out
A Collection of Great Dance Songs
, the first Pink Floyd compilation since 1971’s
Relics
, which tapped into material from
Meddle
onwards. Roger Waters was sufficiently disinterested in the project to permit Storm Thorgerson to design the cover.

Waters was preoccupied with other matters. The third stage of
The Wall
campaign was the movie. Plans for it were already afoot when Floyd returned to play the final
Wall
shows in the New Year: eight nights at Westfalenhalle in Dortmund, Germany, and a further six at Earls Court.

‘When I watched that show in LA, I kept thinking how you could turn this into a film,’ says Barbet Schroeder, ‘and I eventually realised that there was no way you could.’ Not everyone felt the same way, though. Alan Parker was a 36-year-old English film-maker, whose CV had included
Bugsy Malone
,
Fame
and his 1978 breakthrough,
Midnight Express
, a savage drama set in a Turkish prison, which received several Oscar nominations. Parker approached EMI about the possibility of making a movie of
The Wall
. He and his director of photography, Michael Seresin, flew to Dortmund to watch one of the live shows. Parker was astounded by what he saw: ‘Coming from the slow, archaic film process, to see
everything
- every hoist, every light, every cue - hit on time, was wonderfully impressive.’

Waters had intended
The Wall
movie to be a combination of live concert footage and additional animated scenes. EMI were reluctant to commit, however, and MGM eventually agreed to fund the project, to the relief of the band, who had put up some of the initial start-up costs. Parker was tied up completing his latest film,
Shoot the Moon
, and suggested Michael Seresin should co-direct along with Gerald Scarfe. The pair arranged to shoot five of the six final nights at Earls Court, but it proved a disaster. The band was unable to compromise any aspect of the meticulously precise stage show to suit the filming. Instead, as Gerald Scarfe recalls, ‘Every time I put my lights on, fans would start shouting that I was spoiling the show.’ None of the footage would make it into the final film, and, to date, none has been made available to the public.

With Waters’ original plan scrapped, Parker agreed to commit as director and began taking a radically different approach to the project: no live footage, no actual dialogue, the story portrayed by actors and animated sequences, with the Floyd’s music from
The Wall
moving the narrative on.

Tellingly, in Gerald Scarfe’s original storybook for the film, the animated version of the main character was known as Pink, whereas the human version was called Roger. However, as Parker quickly discovered, after a couple of screen tests, Waters was not cut out for acting. Parker recalled being impressed by videos he had seen of Bob Geldof, the outspoken lead singer with the Irish rock band Boomtown Rats. Despite a run of hits, it had been some six months since the band had troubled the Top 10, and their lead guitarist had just walked out. At least a decade younger than anyone in Pink Floyd and a product of the punk revolution, Geldof was disdainful of anything Floyd had done since the Syd Barrett days. Having condemned
The Wall
storyline as ‘bollocks’, he was enticed by the prospect of acting in a major film, and receiving a hefty pay cheque.

With Michael Seresin replaced by producer Alan Marshall, and with Alan Parker now on board as director, Gerald Scarfe found himself moved sideways. His title would now be ‘designer’.

‘Alan could get the money from Hollywood as he had the clout,’ says Scarfe. ‘If he directed it, they would put the money in; they wouldn’t if I was directing it. I was an unknown. I stepped aside, and I was relieved, as I had enough to do with the animation sequences.’

Recalling the process of making the film would elicit some dramatic reactions from all parties involved. Roger Waters would tell
Rolling Stone
that it was ‘the most unnerving, neurotic period of my life with the possible exception of my divorce’. (Coincidentally, Waters would begin his first course of psychotherapy sessions in the same year.) Alan Parker would liken the experience to ‘going over Victoria Falls in a barrel’. Gerald Scarfe recalls driving to Pinewood film studios at 9 a.m. with a bottle of Jack Daniels on the passenger seat beside him. ‘I’m not a heavy drinker,’ he insists, ‘but I had to have a quick slug before I went in.’ As he explains, ‘Someone said to me, “Well, what do you expect if you put three megalomaniacs in a room together?” ’

Showing considerable foresight, Parker persuaded Waters to take a six-week holiday during the actual filming. With one of the megalomaniacs out of the picture, he began a frantic, sixty-day shoot. British character actors including Bob Hoskins (Pink’s manager) and Joanne Whalley (playing a groupie) joined Bob Geldof as the adult Pink and thirteen-year-old Kevin McKeon as the young Pink. Familiar vignettes from the album and stage show were recreated. While initially sceptical, Geldof seemed drawn to the role of the damaged rock star, recognising parallels with his own misadventures in the music business.

‘I’m not going to waste my time on Geldof, trying to explain
The Wall
to him,’ said Waters. ‘But he
understands
. He just doesn’t realise that he understands.’

Geldof’s bravado compensated for his lack of acting experience. He refused to stop filming after cutting his hand during the hotel-wrecking scene; overcame his inability to swim to float in a swimming pool of fake blood; and achieved the right haunted stare for a scene in which Pink shaves off his body hair (something Syd Barrett had done to himself in 1967).

By the time Pink mutated into a political tyrant, Geldof was afraid he was turning the same way himself. Decked out in a military uniform, complete with the crossed hammers motif, he presided over a scene filmed at London’s New Horticultural Hall, featuring a rally of real-life skinheads, recruited from the East End of London. Subsequent scenes of a riot between the skins and the police found the action continuing with great gusto after the cameras had stopped rolling. In between the human action scenes, Gerald Scarfe had organised a team of up to fifty artists to produce nearly fifteen thousand hand-coloured drawings, bringing back to life the characters that had graced the album and the stage show.

When Waters returned from his vacation he was incensed by the artistic licence Parker had taken with what he perceived as his film. ‘I think he was fearful I wouldn’t let him back in,’ Parker told writer Karl Dallas, ‘and I was just as paranoid about the cut being tampered with.’

‘The trouble is Roger and I had lived this thing together for about three years,’ says Gerald Scarfe. ‘So when it came to the film, Roger didn’t want to relinquish control. So there was me and Roger on one side and Parker on the other - and that’s when the war started.’

After one row, Parker threatened to walk out. ‘That’s when Roger’s and my relationship became unworkable,’ said Gilmour. ‘We had to persuade Alan Parker to come back to it, because there was very big money invested, and the entire film company at Pinewood were going to remain loyal to Alan, because he’s a film-maker, not Roger Waters. So I had to go to Roger and say to him, “Give him what it says in his contract . . . I’m sorry, otherwise we’ll have to have a meeting of the shareholders and directors” - which is me, Nick and Roger - “and we’ll out-vote you.” There was nothing he could do.’

Waters could at least distract himself with the film soundtrack. Holed up with James Guthrie, he oversaw the transfer of the music from the original
Wall
master tapes. New versions of ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’, ‘Mother’ and ‘Outside the Wall’, among others, would be recorded. Tim Renwick stepped in for one track, as ‘David couldn’t be bothered to redo it’. Bob Geldof also recorded his own vocals for a version of ‘In the Flesh’ under Gilmour’s guidance. One new song was recorded. In the movie, ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’ soundtracked a flashback to Pink’s father in the Second World War and the young Pink discovering some of his dead father’s personal effects, including a letter of condolence to Pink’s mother, rubber-stamped by King George VI. The song had not been included on
The Wall
, as it was felt to be too autobiographical. It was released as a single in July 1982 to coincide with the film’s release. With Waters offering more of a spoken-word soliloquy about his father’s death than a conventional vocal, and with the notable absence of any guitar solos, the song scraped into the Top 40 in the UK, but disappeared completely in America.

The Wall
opened at London’s Leicester Square in May, and cleared nearly £50,000 at the box office in its first week. David Gilmour would subsequently consider the film to be ‘the least successful of the three ways of telling that particular story’. Alan Parker would protest that it was a struggle between his own interest in delivering cinematic action and Waters’ desire to ‘delve into his psyche to find personal truths’.

‘I once had a very heated conversation with Alan Parker where he said to me that the perfect film is made up of one hundred perfect minutes,’ said Waters. ‘That, to me, seems to be wrong. There’s got to be lots and lots of imperfect minutes to make a perfect hundred. And that’s the feeling I got from watching the movie - that every minute was trying to be full of action. I found it a bit difficult to watch in a sitting. I’ve become kind of numbed by it.’

With the absence of conventional dialogue,
The Wall
asked a lot of its creators, actors and, ultimately, its audience. Bob Geldof acquits himself well, having sufficient charisma (not to mention an endless supply of haunted stares) to compensate for his lack of proper lines. In Alan Parker’s quest for cinematic action, there are also some powerful set pieces. The opening scenes, in which soldiers under fire are spliced with footage of rock fans stampeding into an arena, is a literal interpretation of Waters’ hatred of playing what he saw to be violent stadium gigs. The scenes outside the arena, in which the fans are roughed up by the police, were directly inspired by events at one of Pink Floyd’s Los Angeles concerts in 1975. Similarly, the film contains poignant moments from Roger Waters’ own childhood. In an early scene, the young, fatherless Pink is seen tagging along behind another child’s father at a children’s playground, and being brushed aside.

‘As soon as I could talk, I was asking where my daddy was,’ said Waters in 2004. ‘In 1946 everybody got demobbed, and, suddenly, all these men appeared. Now they were picking their kids up from nursery school, and I became extremely agitated.’

Like the album and stage show before it, Gerald Scarfe’s animations are now so crucial to
The Wall
movie that it is impossible to imagine it without them. There are only fifteen minutes of animated sequences in the whole film, but Scarfe’s garish parade of malevolent worms, blood, guts and copulating flowers seem to dominate. Ostensibly, the same nagging doubt remains about the movie as it does about the album: that, at times, it’s hard to care or sympathise with the central character of Pink, with his self-pity, his pretensions, his narcissism . . .

It’s tempting to think that at least some of the band felt the same way. When the film opened in New York, Nick Mason excused himself from attending, as he simply couldn’t face watching it again. Richard Wright’s non-appearance was excused with the party line ‘Rick is on holiday’. But by the summer, they could hardly keep up the pretence any longer, and the band made public the news of his departure. Yet these days, even
The Wall
’s creator has little empathy with the monster he created. ‘The one disappointment I had - and it’s my fault - is that it gave me the chance to introduce my sense of humour to the piece,’ said Waters. ‘And I signally failed to do that. It’s extremely dour.’

Back then, life in Pink Floyd was about to become even more dour.

CHAPTER NINE

INCURABLE TYRANTS AND KINGS

‘When you’ve been in a pop group for fifteen years, things that made you laugh about someone when you started can irritate the shit out of you later.’

David Gilmour

O
n 2 May 1982, the British submarine HMS
Conqueror
torpedoed the Argentine cruiser,
General Belgrano,
killing 368 men on board. The sinking was the latest act of aggression in the Falklands War, a conflict that had begun a month before when Argentine forces attempted to claim the islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. Argentina and the United Kingdom both believed the islands to be their territory, but it was the UK that had claimed sovereignty since the nineteenth century.

For a generation that had grown up in Britain after World War II and the Korean War, the Falklands conflict would be the first taste of military action. Confusion over the precise whereabouts and the intention of the cruiser, and political misinformation between the British military and cabinet ministers would spark controversy. But to the then serving Conservative government, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, there was political capital to be made: a marauding foreign force had invaded a British dependency; retribution had been swift and decisive.