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The third coming
And it came to pass that the Syd Barrett Group
became the Roger Waters Quartet, who became the David Gilmour Trio. And
many various were the evils that befell them upon the highway.
Pink Floyd
Robert Sandall
Three decades and 140 million albums later,
the sheer familiarity of the Pink Floyd phenomenon obscures the
strangeness of it all. Unlike any of their contemporaries, for whom
drastic changes in line-up have normally spelled disaster, The Floyd are
well into their third coming. They opened their account as the Syd
Barrett band, hoisted themselves into the international superleague as
the Roger Waters quartet, and having survived the successive departures
of two inspirational leaders and principal songwriters, are now
continuing to hold their own as the David Gilmour trio. Small wonder the
accepted wisdom holds that with Pink Floyd it is the sights and the
sounds that matter; that for them, personnel are little more than
technicians servicing a vast, high-tech _son et lumiere_ spectacle, or
perpetuating a brand name. The band endorse and encourage this view of
themselves as a personality-free zone, to the point of giving only one
interview to mark the release of their new album, The Division Bell.
"We don't have to promote a Bono or a Mick Jagger," drummer
Nick Mason tells me. "The thing you have to remember is, we're so
wonderfully boring."
What this thoroghly English remark conceals
though is an equally English history of childhood friendships and
teenage alliances, casting long shadows over the lives and careers of a
group of young, now middle-aged, men. Most accounts of the origins of
Pink Floyd begin at Regent Street Polytechnic, London in 1964, where
three architectural students, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright,
formed a college R&B band, later recruiting a student from
Camberwell Art school, "Syd" -- real name, Roger -- Barrett.
The true foundations of Pink Floyd though had been laid much earlier.
It is no coincidence that the band's three
leaders, Barrett, Waters and David Gilmour grew up together in
Cambridge, in fairly comfortable middle- class circumstances. Their
mothers, according to Gilmour, all had connections with Homerton, the
nearby teacher's training college. But the key to their knowing each
other was the man whose ghost still hovers above the band: Syd Barrett.
Waters and Barrett shared the same primary and grammar schools, and were
drawn to each other, despite the age difference, partly because each had
lost his father. Gilmour and Barrett, both a couple of years younger
than Waters, became friendly aged 14, and ended up at Cambridge Tech
together, studing 'A' levels. "We would hang around the Art
Department, playing guitars every lunchtime. Teaching each other
basically," Gilmour recalls.
In the summer of 1964 the pair went busking in
San Tropez, playing Beatles songs from the Help album on the streets of
the fashionable resort, before getting thrown in gaol by the French
police. "The thing with Syd was that his guitar playing wasn't his
strongest feature. His style was very stiff. I always thought I was the
better guitar player. But he was very clever, very intelligent, an
artist in every way. And he was a _frightening_ talent when it came to
the words, and lyrics. They just used to pour out."
There was never any doubt that Syd Barrett
constituted the guiding spirit of the early Pink Floyd. The year after
St. Tropez trip, he was down in London painting and studying fine art
when Waters asked him to join a blues band called, rather unpromisingly,
The Tea Set. At the time, Waters was an all purpose strummer, more
interested in the idea of the group than in mastering any specific
instrument, let alone the bass guitar. Mason, the drummer, was his best
mate at college. Wright supplied what little musical expertise they had.
One of Barrett's first contributions was a proper name, decided at half
time during a gig at RAF Uxbridge, there being two Tea Sets on the bill
that night. With a typically swift and esoteric flourish, Barrett
combined the Christian names of a couple of is favourite bluesman, Pink
Anderson and Floyd Counsel.
Particularly delighted to have Barrett aboard
was Rick Wright, the group's keyboard player, who had dumped
architecture and was now moonlighting at the London College Of Music.
"It was great when Syd joined. Before him we'd play the R&B
classics, because that's what all groups were supposed to do then. But I
never liked R&B very much. I was actually more of a jazz fan. With
Syd the direction changed, it became more improvised around the guitar
and keyboards. Roger started playing the bass as a lead instrument, and
I started to introduce more of my classical feel."
Together, they led Pink Floyd into the
swirling psychedelic dawn of 1966, where the band's reputation for
uncompromising weirdness soon turned them into the darlings of the
English underground, then centered on clubs like Joe Boyd's UFO, located
in the basement of an Irish pub on Tottenham Court Road. The idea of
incorporating a light show Mason attributes to a lecturer from Regent
Street Poly, Mike Leonard, whose house in Highgate they all lived in.
"Mike thought of himself as one of the band. But we didn't, because
he was too old basically. We used to leave the house to play gigs
secretly without telling him."
Syd permed his hair and they all took to
wearing patterned satin-y shirts. By the summer of 1966, Pink Floyd had
acquired a couple of young managers, Peter Jenner and Andrew King, and a
strong London-based following. "You must never underestimate hown
unpopular we were around the rest of England," Mason insists.
"They hated it. They would throw things, pour beer over us. And we
were terrible, though we didn't quite know it. Promoters were always
coming up to us and saying, I don't know why you boys won't do proper
songs. Looking back on it, I can't think why we persevered."
Syd was much of the reason. Encouraged by
Jenner, he was beginning to write songs which adapted the melodic
approach of The Beatles to the harsher sounds and spacey electronic
atmospheres that dominated Pink Floyd's rambling live shows. Early in
1967 EMI signed the band for an advance of 5,000 [pounds], a princely
sum by the standards of the day, but less significant than a contract
which, for the first time, required the artistes to deliver albums
rather than just singles. And whatever they did, Pink Floyd could, for a
while, do no wrong. Their Games For May concert at the Festival Hall
introduced the world's first quadrophonic sound system, built for the
group by the boffins at EMI. Arnold Layne, See Emily Play, and the first
album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn were all rapturously received.
Six months later, the brightest hopes of the
British psychedelic movement were in trouble. Barrett's fondness for LSD
had always been a little worrying, since he wasn't the most stable
character to start with. "You could see the occasional girlfriend
with bruises," one old friend recalls. By the end of 1967 he had
been made virtually catatonic through a regime of daily tripping. The
Floyd had had to field substitutes before, notably when Dave O'List, the
guitarist of The Nice, stepped in to cover for Barrett on a couple of
dates during their British tour with Jimi Hendrix. As 1968 came around,
the were looking for a full-time replacement. Jeff Beck was considered,
but rejected on the grounds that he would be too expensive and couldn't
sing. The only other serious candidate was Dave Gilmour, whose
Cambridge-based band Jokers Wild had previously supported the Floyd, at
Syd's request.
The original plan was for the Floyd to
continue as a five-piece, on the model of the Beach Boys, with Barrett
cast in the roll of Brian Wilson, mainly staying home to write songs.
Syd, in his more lucid moments, had other ideas, urging his partners to
hire two sax players and a girl singer. [ouch!] By the spring, and after
a number of chaotic appearances as a quintet, it became clear that Pink
Floyd had a new line up, and that Syd Barrett wasn't part of it.
"I loved the first album, but I thought
the gigs were pretty interminable," Gilmour recalls. "It was
too anarchic. I was all for musicking things up a bit. I definately
considered myself a superior musician and I remember thinking that I
could knock them into some sort of shape." The problem was Roger
Waters. The pattern of the next 12 years, according to Mason, the band's
resident diplomat, boiled down to "Dave's desire to make music,
versus Roger's desire to make a show". In the early stages thought,
the relationship was even simpler; it was pure Cambridge: "I was
the new boy. Not only that, I was two years younger than the rest of
them, and you know how those playground hierarchies carry over. You
never catch up. Roger is not a generous spirited person. I was
constantly dumped on. And to get my point across I had to make
increasingly histrionic, stubborn gestures."
Wright, who was to become progressively
isolated from the other members of Pink Floyd during the 1970s, felt
Barrett's departure more keenly than was ever recognized. As well as
losing a musical foil, he lost his only ally in a band which, as Gilmour
robustly points out -- and he should know -- "was never a jolly
bunch of friends. Things between the four of us were always pretty
rocky". Long before Waters called for Wright's resignation in 1979,
the two were at loggerheads. They began arguing at college. "We
would never have been friends if it weren't for the band." As
personalities, the two were clearly ill matched. Waters, abrasive and
assertive; Wright, sensitive and slightly dithery. In addition, as Peter
Jenner points out, "Rick was Roger's real rival. He was better
looking and he had the better voice." The other non-Cambridge
Floyder, Mason, stuck close to Waters, the college friend whose bolshy
spirit of independence he, initially anyway, admired.
That left Gilmour, considerably more
reasonable than Waters but equally hardheaded. All in all, the discovery
that Wright nearly left the band when invited to do so in the spring of
1968 seems hardly surprising. "Peter and Andrew (Jenner and King,
Floyd's managers) thought Syd and I were the musical brains of the
group, and that we should form a break-away band, to try to hold Syd
together. He and I were living together in a flat in Richmond at the
time. And believe me, I would have left with him like a shot if I
thought Syd could do it."
The most telling evidence of the enduring
power of Barrett's charsimatic talent and personality lies in the
intense respect he still inspires in his childhood friend, Roger Waters.
"Syd was the only person I know who Roger has ever really liked and
looked up to," says Peter Jenner. Long after Waters had stopped
talking to the others, and was attempting to claim the credit for most
of what Pink Floyd accomplished in the '70s, he was unstinting in his
praise for Barrett. "I could never aspire to Syd's crazed insights
and perceptions," he told Q in 1987. "In fact for a long time
I wouldn't have dreamt of claiming any insights whatsoever. I'll always
credit Syd with the connection he made between his personal unconscious
and the collective group unconscious. It's taken me fifteen years to get
anywhere near there. Even thought he was clearly out of control when
making his two solo albums, some of the work is staggeringly evocative.
It's the humanity of it all that's so impressive. It's about deeply felt
values and beliefs. Maybe that's what Dark Side Of The Moon was aspiring
to. A similar feeling."
Fables
of the reconstruction
Robert Sandall
Outside, an audience _in extremis_. Inside,
strange things are happening. David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright
relive the creative ferment of the 12 floyd studio albums.
The Piper at the Gates
of Dawn
Along with Sgt Papper, the Floyd's debut album
was Britain's enduring contribution to the Summer Of Love. In early 1967
Pink Floyd went into EMI's Abbey Road studios with a stack of whimsical
tunes about gnomes, scarecrows and bikes, psychedelic ditties that bore
only a passing resemblance to the protracted spacey jams they were then
famous for. Norman Smith, who had engineered for The Beatles, was the
producer.
NM (Nick Mason): We were given Norman Smith by
EMI, no arguments. So Joe Boyd, our original producer, got written out
of the thing. Norman was more interested in making us sound like a
classical rock band. It was a bit like the George Martin thing, a useful
influence to have. But I think Joe would have given Syd his head, let
him run in a freer way. We spent three months recording it, which was
quite a long time in those days. Bands used to have to finish albums in
a week, with session players brought in to play the difficult bits. But
because The Beatles were taking their time recording Sgt Pepper in the
studio next door, EMI thought this was the way people now made records.
We were taken in to meet them once, while they were recording Lovely
Rita. It was a bit like meeting the Royal family.
PJ (former manager Peter Jenner): Norman was
being the perfect A&R man. He realised Syd could write great pop
songs. If we'd put out what we were playing live, it wouldn't have sold
fuck at all. The one song here that was like the live shows was
Interstellar Overdrive. They played it twice, one version recorded
straight on top of the other. They doubletracked the whole track. Why?
Well it sounds pretty fucking weird doesn't it? That big sound and all
those hammering drums.
A Saucerful of Secrets
Pink Floyd Mark 1 was already on the skids by
early 1968 when work began on their second album. During the course of
the recording Syd Barrett was eased aside in favour of the new boy, Dave
Gilmour. Incorrectly sensing the end, managers Peter Jenner and Andrew
King jumped ship.
PJ: It was really stressful waiting for Syd to
come up with the songs for the second album. Everybody was looking at
him, and he couldn't do it. Jugband Blues is a really sad song, the
portrait of a nervous breakdown. The last Floyd song Syd wrote,
Vegetable Man, was done for those sessions, though it never came out. He
wrote it round at my house; it's just a description of what he's
wearing. It's very disturbing. Roger took it off the album because it
was too dark, and it is. It's like psychological flashing.
RW (Rick Wright): I did the title track and I
remember Norman saying, You just can't do this, it's too long. You have
to write three-minute songs. We were pretty cocky by now and told him,
If you don't wanna produce it, just go away. A good attitude I think.
The same reason why we'd never play See Emily Play in concert.
DG (David Gilmour): I remember Nick and Roger
drawing out A Saucerful of Secrets as an architectural diagram, in
dynamic forms rather than in any sort of musical form, with peaks and
troughs. That's what is was about. It wasn't music for beauty's sake, or
for emotion's sake. It never had a story line. Though for years
afterwards we used to get letters from people saying what they thought
it meant. Scripts for movies sometimes, too.
Ummagumma
A 1969 double album of transitional character,
Ummagumma was half live recordings, half individual solo pieces. The
Hypgnosis-designed cover was more striking than much of the music, which
mainly noodles inconsequentially along, coming to life only on the
spooky, lights-out classic Careful With That Axe, Eugene, the first of
many Floyd tracks about insanity.
NM (Nick Mason): This was absolutely not a
band album. The live stuff sounds incredibly antiquated now, although
the fact of Pink Floyd playing at Mothers in Birmingham was considered a
bit of an event at the time. We were looking for new ways of
constructing an album, although I think what this demonstrates is that
our sum is always better than the parts. EMI was very hidebound in those
days. It was still run by guys in white coats. I was prevented from
editing my own tapes by a studio manager who told me I wasn't a union
member.
DG: I'd never written anything before. I just
went into the studio and started waffling about, tacking bits and pieces
together. I rang up Roger at one point to ask him to write me some
lyrics. He just said, No.
Atom Heart Mother
Up to their ears in avant-garde experimental
ideas, the Floyd teamed up with the electronic composer Ron Geesin to
create the 23-minute title piece which fills all of Side 1. The album's
title was randomly taken from a newspaper headline. By now the group
were producing themselves.
NM: It's an averagely recorded album but a
very interesting idea, working with Ron Geesin, an orchestra and the
Roger Aldiss choir. Roger and I were quite friendly with Ron. I think I
met him through Robert Wyatt. The thing that Ron taught us most about
was recording techniques, and tricks done on the cheap. We learned how
to get round the men-in-white-coats and do things at home, like editing.
Ron taught us how to use two tape recorders to create an endless build
up of echo. It was all very relevant to things we did later. Now I
listen to it with acute embarrassment because the backing track was put
down by Roger and me, beginning to end, in one pass. Consequently the
tempo goes up and down. It was a 20-minute piece and we just staggered
through it.
On the other side, Alan's Psychedelic
Breakfast was another great idea -- gas fires popping, kettles boiling,
that didn't really work on record but was great fun live. I've never
heard Roger lay claim to it, which makes me think it must have been a
group idea.
DG: At the time we felt Atom Heart Mother,
like Ummagumma, was step towards something or other. Now I think they
were both just a blundering about in the dark.
Meddle
This was the album which streamlined and
established the hallmark of the Floyd's mature style: a dense and
colourful weave of actuality sounds (notably the football chant on
Fearless) original electronic textures, and more conventional rock
instrumentation. It was recorded at Abbey Road and at Air London in
1971.
DG: We did loads of bits of demos which we
then pieced together, and for the first time, it worked. This album was
a clear forerunner for Dark Side Of The Moon, the point when we first
got our focus.
NM: We spent a long time starting the record.
We'd worked through the Sounds Of Household Objects project, which we
never finished. The idea was always to create a continuous piece of
music that went through various moods and this was the album that
established that. Rick was the guy who got it off the ground with that
one note at the beginning.
RW: I was playing around on the piano in the
studio but it was actually Roger who said, Would it be possible to put
that note through a microphone and then through the Leslie? That's what
started it. That's how all the best Floyd tracks start, I believe.
Dark Side of The Moon
The future began here. Recorded at Abbey Road
on the new 16-track desk, seamlessly constructed and employing a
thematic 'concept' to link the songs, Dark Side was the album which
swiftly projected the Floyd from cult band to cornerstones of rock
culture. A Quadrophonic mix by Alan Parsons, authorised by EMI and
launched at the London Planetarium, caused a rumpus, with the band
refusing to attend. This aside, the album was a huge success, and is
still their biggest in commercial terms, with 28m copies sold worldwide.
NM: Dark Side started as a sequence called
Eclipse. Most of it was developed in rehearsals for live shows, and we
played it live at the Rainbow in London and opened shows with it in
America in 1972. The concept grew out of group discussions about the
pressures of real life, like travel or money, but then Roger broadened
it into a meditation on the causes of insanity. The linkinhg of all the
sounds and the voices was very well done, I think, and we introduced an
early synthesizer, the DCS3 [VCS3???], right at the end. The recording
was lengthly but not fraught, not agonised over at all. We were working
really well as a band, But it wasn't only the music that made it such a
success. EMI/Capitol had cleaned up their act in America. They put money
behind promoting us for the first time. And that changed everything.
DG: The big difference for me with this album
was the fact that we'd played it live before we recorded it. You could't
do that now of course, you'd be bootlegged out of existence. But when we
went into the studio we all knew the material. The playing was very
good. It had a natural feel. And it was a bloody good package. The
music, the concept, the cover, all came together. For me it was the
first time we'd had great lyrics. The others were satisfactory, or
perfunctory or just plain bad. On Dark Side, Roger decided he didn't
want anyone else writing lyrics. |
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Wish You Were Here
The starkly elegiac mood of this album is in
striking contrast to the more dispassionate brooding of its predecessor.
By 1975, Roger was missing Syd; the busines was getting to him
("And by the way, which one's Pink?" from Welcome To The
Machine [NOT! from Have a Cigar!] was an actual quote by an American
record exec). The album also shows Gilmour making his strongest
individual contribution yet, with several fine extended guitar solos and
some of the most heartfelt vocals the Floyd have ever committed to disc.
DG: After Dark Side we were really floundering
around. I wanted to make the next album more musical, because I felt
some of thse tracks had been just vehicles for the words. We were
working in 1974 in this horrible little rehearsal room in Kings Cross
without windows, putting together what became the next two albums. There
were three long tracks, including Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which I
wanted to record, and Roger said, No, let's take Shine On, divide it
into two, and put in other material around the same theme. And he was
right, I was wrong.
RW: The whole album sprang from that one
four-note guitar phrase of Dave's in Shine On. We heard it went, That's
a really nice phrase. The wine came out, and that led to what I think is
our best album, the most colourful, the most feelingful. Shine On was in
the process of being recorded, the lyrics about Syd were written. I
walked into the studio at Abbey Road, Roger was sitting, mixing at the
desk, and I saw this big bald guy sitting on the couch behind. About 16
stone. And I didn't think anything of it. In those days it was quite
normal for strangers to wander into our sessions. Then Roger said, You
don't know who that guy is, do you? It's Syd. It was a huge shock,
because I hadn't seen him for about six years. He kept standing up and
brushing his teeth, putting his toothbrush away and sitting down. Then
at one point he 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."
NM: This was much a more difficult record to
make. Roger was getting crosser. We were all getting older. We had
children. There was much more drama between us, people turning up to the
studio late, which we generally hate. There was more pressure on me to
make the drumming more accurate and less flowery. But I think as an
album it flows really well. It's like a descedant of Meddle in terms of
the use of repeating themes, and the pacing.
Animals
The concept belonged to Waters, but two of the
four beasts here had been heard before under different names: Sheep was
a re-working of Raving And Drooling. Dogs was a makeover of You Gotta Be
Crazy. Waters and Gilmour were beginning to tussle for control, sharing
production credits and engaging in a lengthy wrangle over the album's
publishing royalties which wasn't settled for 10 years.
NM: This was a bit of a return to the group
feel, quite a cheerful session as I remember. We did it in our own
studio, which we'd just built. By now Roger was in full flow with the
ideas, but he was also really kepping Dave down, and frustrating him
deliberately.
RW: I didn't like a lot of the writing on
Animals, but unfortunately I didn't have anything to offer. I think I
played well but I remember feeling not very happy or creative, partly
because of problems with my marriage. This was the beginning of my
writer's block.
DG: On Animals I was the prime musical force.
Roger was the motivator and lyric writer.
The Wall
The loss of 2m [pounds] in investments led the
band into tax exile in the South Of France in 1978, to record a double
concept album whih proved to be their Rogerest project yet. While there,
the Pink Floyd Mark 2 partnership finally started to dissolve.
DG: I still think some of the music is
incredibly naff, but The Wall is conceptually brilliant. At the time I
thought it was Roger listing all the things that can turn a person into
an isolated human being. I came to see it as as one of the luckiest
people in the world issuing a catalogue of abuse and bile against people
who'd never done anything to him. Roger was taking more and more of the
credits. In the songbook for this album against Comfortably Numb it says
Music by Gilmour and Waters. It shouldn't. He did the lyrics. I did the
music. I kept finding hundreds of little things like that. Shouldn't
bitch, but one does feel unjustly done.
NM: The recording was very tense, mainly
because Roger was starting to go a bit mad. This was the record when he
fell out badly with Rick. Rick has a natural style, a very specific
piano style, but he doesn't come up with pieces easily, or to order.
Which is a problem when other people are worrying about who did what and
who should get the credit. There was even talk of Roger and Dave
elbowing me out and carrying on as a duo. There were points during The
Wall when Roger and Dave were really carrying the thing. Rick was
useless, and I wasn't very much help to anyone either.
DG: Generally Nick worked hard and played well
on The Wall. He even worked out a way of reading music for the drums.
But there was one track called Mother which he really didn't get. So I
hired Jeff Porcaro to do it. And Roger latched on to this idea, the way
he always did with my ideas, and began to think, is Nick really
necessary?
RW: Roger came up with the whole album on a
demo, which everyone felt was potentially very good but musically very
weak. Very weak indeed. Bob [Ezrin], Dave and myself worked on it to
make it more interesting. But Roger was going through a big ego thing at
the time, saying that I wasn't putting enough in, although he was making
it impossible for me to do anything. The crunch came when we all went
off on holiday towards the end of the recording. A week before the
holiday was up I got a call from Roger in America, saying come over
immediately. Then there was this band meeting in which Roger told me he
wanted me to leave the band. At first I refused. So Roger stood up and
said that if I didn't agree to leave after the album was finished, he
would walk out then and there and take the tapes with him. There would
be no album, and no money to pay off our huge debts. So I agreed to go.
I had two young kids to support. I was terrified. Now I think I made a
mistake. It was Roger's bluff. But I really didn't want to work with
this guy anymore.
DG: We had a studio in the south of France
where Rick was staying. There rest of us had rented houses 20 miles
away. We'd all go home at night, and we'd say to Rick, Do what you like,
here all these tracks, write something, play a solo, put some stuff
down. You've got all evening every evening to do it. All the time we
were there, which was several months, he did nothing. He just wasn't
capable of playing anything.
The Final Cut
The closest thing to a Roger Waters solo album
that ever went out under the name of Pink Floyd. The material had been
written for The Wall and rejected at the time by the rest of the group.
Now effectively reduced to a duo of Waters and Gilmour, the sessions
featured long arguments between the two which resulted in Gilmour
removing his name from the production credits.
DG: I said to Roger, If these songs weren't
good enough for The Wall, why are they good enough for now? We had the
most awful time of my life. Roger had got Rick out, Nick wasn't around
much and now he was starting on me. A most unpleasant and humiliating
experience.
A Momentary Lapse of
Reason
After the departure of Waters in 1985 and a
tense period of well-published wrangling over rights to the group name,
Gilmour began to put together a new Pink Floyd album in 1987 using the
American producer of The Wall, Bob Ezrin, and working on songs with a
squad of assistants, including Phil Manzanera. Like its predecessor, A
Momentary Lapse Of Reason eventually turned out to be a solo album in
all but name.
DG: Both Nick and Rick were catatonic in terms
of their playing ability at the beginning. Neither of them played on
this at all really. In my view, they'd been destroyed by Roger. Nick
played a few tom-toms on one track, but for the rest I had to get in
other drummers. Rick played some tiny little parts. For a lot of it, I
played the keyboards and pretended it was him. The record was basically
made by me, and other people and God knows what. I didn't think it was
the best Pink Floyd album ever made, but I gave it the best damn shot I
could.
NM: Dave was under a lot of pressure to come
up with songs and he looked for help where he could find it. It was fun
recording on the boat (Gilmour's floating studio at Hampton-on-Thames)
but then we went to America and hired all these sessions musicians who
could knock things off quickly. At the time it seemed like a reasonable
route to go but that was quite alarming for me.
RW: I wasn't a member of the band. By now they
didn't know me. We hadn't played together for years. I was paid a wage
on the sessions. I did get royalties on the album. Not as many as Dave
and Nick though.
Delicate Sound of
Thunder
Only the second live album of their career,
and one that features eight musicians in addition to the three Floydian
principals, this document of the Floyd's longest ever tour was recorded
in various European stadia in August 1988.
DG: At the beginning of the Momentary Lapse Of
Reason tour Gary Wallis was playing all the drums, because Nick
couldn't, and I got Jon Carin to play the keyboards, because he can do
Rick Wright better than Rick Wright can. But then I encouraged them
both, and by the end of the first three-month leg Nick and Rick were
playing great. Their confidence was restored. That tour brought them
back to being functioning musicians. Or you could say I did.
The Division Bell
The brand new back-to-basics album, which took
a year to record on and off Gilmour's boat, painstakingly attempts to
re-constitute the group as something more than a one-man brand name with
a famous repertoire. While not breaking any significant new ground
musically, the sound here is more cohesive and delicately textured than
anything the Floyd have recorded since the glory days of the 1970s. The
tone is quieter, the guitar playing features Gilmour in lyrical, rather
than screaming, mode. Wright, now a junior partner rather than paid
employee, is heard more clearly here than he has been for the last 15
years. Gilmour's search for a lyricist has ended for the time being,
with many tracks co-written by his new-ish girlfriend, journalist Polly
Samson. Bob Ezrin has again helped out with the production.
NM: There's more of the feel of Meddle here
than anything else. This started as a group album, with the three of us
spending a fortnight together just jamming. We put down over 40 sketches
in two weeks, then things moved on. Some of those initial ideas might
actually end up on a satellite album. [Yes! Yes!]
RW: I've written on it. I'm singing on it. I
think it's a much better album than the last one. it's got more of the
old Floydian feel. I think we could have gone further, but we are now
operating as a band. Only Nick has played the drums, and my Hammond
organ is back on most tracks.
DG: On this album both Nick and Rick are
playing all the stuff that they should be playing. Which is why it
sounds much more like a genuine Pink Floyd record to me than anything
since Wish You Were Here. It has a sort of theme about
non-communication, but we're not trying to bash anybody over the head
with it. We went out last time with the intention of showing the world,
Look we're still here, which is why we were so loud and crash bang-y.
This is a much more reflective album.
No
man's land
Robert Sandall
The Pink Floyd were on course for psychedelic
pop stardom until their frail visionary fell in with "some heavy,
loony, messianic, acid missionaries." After that he was being
locked in the linen cupboard.
DG: I noticed it around the time the Floyd
were recording See Emily Play. Syd was still functioning OK then, but he
definately wasn't the person I knew. He looked through you. He wasn't
quite there.
RW: We were supposed to do a session for the
BBC one Friday, and Syd didn't turn up. Nobody could find him. He went
missing for the whole weekend and when he reappeared again on the
Monday, he was a totally different person.
JB (June Bolan): [Blackhill Ents' secretary,
later Mrs Marc Bolan] I went through all Syd's acid breakdowns. He used
to come round to my house at five in the morning covered in mud from
Holland Park when he'd freaked out and the police chased him. He used to
go to the youth hostel in Holland Park, get wrecked and spaced and walk
to Shepherd's Bush where I was living.
JM (John Marsh) [Floyd lighting man]: He lived
for a time in a flat in the Cromwell Road with various characters,
acid-in-the-reservoir, change-the-face- of-the-world acid missionaries.
Everyone knew that if you went round to see Syd, never have a cup of
tea, never take a glass of water unless you got it yourself from the
tap, because everything in that flat was spiked.
PJ: 101 Cromwell Road was the catastrophic
flat where Syd got acided out. He had one of our cats and they even gave
the cats acid. I don't think they were evil geniuses deliberately trying
to fuck with Syd's mind, they were just heavy, loony messianic acid
freaks. As soon as we realised what was going on we moved him out of
Cromwell Road into a flat in South Ken, where he lived with Storm and Po
(Thorgerson and Powell, Hypgnosis), but by then it was too late.
JB: One of the last British gigs Syd played
with Floyd was the Technicolor Dream at Ally Pally. First of all we
couldn't find Syd, then I found him in the dressing room and we was so
gone. I kept saying, Syd, It's June. Look at me. Roger Waters and I got
him on his feet, got him out to the stage. We put the white Stratocaster
round his neck and he walked on stage and of course the audience went
spare because they loved him. The band started to play and Syd stood
there, he just stood there, tripping out of his mind. They did three,
maybe four numbers and we got him off. He couldn't stand up for a set,
let alone do anything else.
NM: Syd went mad on the first American tour in
the Autumn of '67. He didn't know where he was most of the time. I
remember he de-tuned his guitar on stage at Venice, LA, and just stood
there rattling the strings, which was a bit weird, even for us. Another
time he emptied a can of Brylcream on his head because he said he didn't
like his curly hair.
JM: Some A&R man was taking them around
Hollywood for the classic tour of stars' homes, and Syd's wandering
around the place, wide-eyed, and reckless. Gee, he says. It's great to
be in Las Vegas.
JMe (Jonathan Meades) [then a RADA student,
now author and restaurant critic]: In late '67 Syd Barrett and some
other people, one of whom I knew, lived in Egerton Court, a mansion
block opposite South Ken tube station. I went there at the time when Syd
had either just left the band or was ready for the final heave-ho. Syd
was certainly the crazy of the party and one got the impression that he
was also rather disliked. There was this terrible noise. It sounded like
heating pipes shaking. I said, What's that? and my friend sort of
giggled and said, That's Syd having a bad trip. We put him in the linen
cupboard.
RW: We ended up living together in a flat in
Richmond in early '68. The five- man band idea really wasn't working
out, but we couldn't bring ourselves to tell him. So when I went off to
play gigs, I'd tell Syd I was going out to get cigarettes. It was awful.
JF (Jenny Fabian) [starfucker author of
Groupie]: Syd was so beautiful, though I only ever lay beside him,
nothing more could be accomplished. I only hung around him for two or
three weeks just before he flipped. Years later I found him again,
living in a room in a flat in Earls Court. He was sitting in a corner on
a mattress and he'd painted every other floodboard alternate colours,
red and green. [Cover of Madcap??] He boiled an egg in a kettle and ate
it. And he listened over and over again to Beach Boys tapes, which I
found a bit distressing. He was still exactly the same, only now he was
Syd Barrett the has-been rather than Syd Barrett the star.
NM: Whether it was attributable to bad acid,
bad trips, I don't know. I actually think there was some sort of damage
there to start with.
PJ: It was his latent madness which gave him
his creativity. The acid brought out the creativity, but more important,
it brought out the madness, and the darkness in his personality. The
creativity was there, smoking dope was enough to get it going. What
happened was catastrophic. All his talent came out in this great flood;
then it burnt out.
The
manager's tale
Robert Sandall
The first edition of Pink Floyd was a six-way
partnership, a vital piece of which was Peter Jenner. But when Syd left,
he jumped ship.
I remember seeing them for the first time at
the Marquee in 1966 and being fascinated because I couldn't work out
where the music was coming from. It was basically blues, like Louie
Louie or Bo Didley numbers, with weird breaks. They weren't blues solos.
Some were on the guitar, some on the organ, some on both, but you didn't
really know what they were. Sort of psychedelic waffle. At the time I
wanted to do this hippy label with Joe Boyd, who was then with Elektra
UK, the idea being to put out avant-garde anything. And I realised that
to make the label work we needed a pop band, because they could sell
records.
They were the sort of chaps I could relate to,
being another middle- class boy. I'd spent some time with Eric Clapton
before them, and that wasn't so easy. The Floyd all came from
comfortable backgrounds. I remember being amazingly impressed that Nick
Mason's parents had a swimming pool. He didn't care about money, none of
them did really; and it's always to deal with people who aren't bothered
about money.
And like all middle-class boys, they were all
run by their women. Especially Roger. Under the influence of Jude, who
was 'Trot', he began giving his money away. With Carolyn [his wife], it
got into a very American rock story thing, with helicoptors, nannies and
the south of France.
My main contribution at the time was to tell
them to do more of their own material. Also Andrew [King] and I built
their first light show. It was very crude, with domestic light switches.
None of them did drugs when I met them, except
Syd, and he would only smoke dope. Then with the Summer Of Love and all
that bollocks, Syd got very enthusiastic about acid, and got into the
religious aspect of it, which I never did. The others were very
straight. They were much more into half-a-pint of bitter than they were
into drugs. One of the reasons I got on with Syd was because he and I
used to smoke a lot of pot together. Rick would take a puff now and
again, but Roger and Nick would never go near it. Syd was very much the
artist, while the other two were the architects, and I think that's an
important way of looking at what happened. Syd did this wild, impossible
drawing, and they turned it into the Pink Floyd.
The strongest image I always have of Syd is of
him sitting in his flat in Earlham Street with his guitar and his book
of songs, which he represented by paintings with different coloured
circles. I was an immense Syd fan. You'd go round to Syd and you'd see
him write a song. It just poured out. He wrote all those songs in a
two-year period.
You could talk to Roger about all kinds of
things. Roger was argumentative, the one in the group I was least
friendly with, but had most respect for as a businessman. He was this
giant ego striding across the landscape. He was the one who had the
courage to drive Syd out, because he realised that as long as Syd was in
the band they couldn't keep it together. The chaos factor was too great.
Roger looked up to Syd and he always felt very guilty about the fact
that he'd blown out his mate.
Rick was the strongest musician, he would tell
the others which harmonies to sing but he didn't have the force of
character, he was quite fragile, a very shy, private person. Fame was
very hard for him to deal with. They were overnight successes. We
started in the Summer of 1966 and by Christmas they'd had a double-page
spread in the Melody Maker and a big feature in Queen by Nik Colin
without even having a record out. All the records were hits. In business
terms, it was incredibly easy. I knew the band were breaking when I came
up to the UFO Club and seeing all these kids flooding round the corner
with their gear and their bells jingling.
The gig I most remember was the 24-hour
Technicolour Dream concert at Alexandra Palace. We'd got back from
Holland the same night, I was driving the van, and Syd and I were both
doing acid. The band played at dawn with all the light coming through
the glass at the Palace, the high point of the psychedelic era for me.
When the rest of the band said, You don't
think we can do it without Syd do you?, well I didn't. I couldn't see
them doing it with Roger, and I didn't really know Dave. I just knew him
as really good guitar player who could do Jimi Hendrix. The idea that
Roger was going to write the songs and sing them would have made me
collapse with laughter, though I might have put money on Rick as the
leader. And I'm happy to admit I was absolutely wrong.
Andrew and I have always been very well taken
care of by the Floyd ever since. We originally had a six-way
partnership, which they have never queried. They're incredibly
honourable. The Floyd's yearly royalty cheques have kept the wolf from
the door on many occasions. |