Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (25 page)

On returning from the US, the band were presented with the score and booked into Abbey Road. This time, Norman Smith would be listed on the finished album as executive producer only. ‘A neat way of saying that he didn’t actually do anything,’ said Gilmour. ‘I told them it was time they produced themselves,’ insists Smith now, ‘and that they should call me if they got stuck. I only received one phone call for that album, so it was clear they could look after themselves.’ One of Norman’s jobs, though, had been to book the classical session musicians. But there were problems. Mason revealed to Geesin that the first beat of the bar was absent from his score, rendering it virtually unplayable by the hired musicians.

‘I was also not a conductor,’ admits Ron. ‘I made the mistake of giving the brass players more credit for thinking than they deserved. I’d been working with the top players from the New Philharmonic Orchestra on some TV commercials, and they would give you their ideas about a score. The EMI players were quality session musicians, but you’d ask them a question, and it was all: “You tell us”; “What do you want here?”; “I don’t understand!” One of the horn players was being especially mouthy. I was getting distraught. I thought: Fucking hell, I’ve wrecked myself doing this work, and it deserves to be done properly. Eventually, when I went to hit him, they had me removed.’

Geesin’s replacement was John Aldiss, a highly experienced conductor and King’s College Cambridge alumnus, whose choir had already provided some ethereal vocals on the Floyd epic.

‘That was fine by me,’ says Ron. ‘Except the way I’d envisaged the playing was a lot more percussive and punchy. I was very much into black jazz, like Mingus and Ellington, and my score reflected that. But John Aldiss hadn’t a bloody clue about jazz, so the way he got them to play it was a bit wet.’

Considering its bungled score and uppity session musicians,
Atom Heart Mother
’s six-part title track hangs together better than might be expected. The orchestrated overture, ‘Father’s Shout’, does, as Waters suggested, inspire images of cheroot-smoking high plains drifters, compounded by the sound of whinnying horses, but the whole thing plods rather than canters. The second section, ‘Breast Milky’, is better, with the choir complementing Wright’s organ fills and Gilmour’s sleepy guitar solo. It’s Gilmour that saves ‘Funky Dung’ from living up to its title, his staccato fills and lazy riffs almost a dummy run for
Dark Side of the Moon
’s instrumental ‘Any Colour You Like’, before the choir return with some eerie Gregorian-style chanting. ‘Mind Your Throats Please’ suggests Waters, hank of hair hanging over his face, cigarette smouldering between his fingers, hunched over the console at Abbey Road, teasing out as many shivery sound effects as he can, including the noise of a crashing vehicle later reprised on
Dark Side of the Moon
. The closing ‘Remergence’ gathers together all the earlier strands in the fashion of a classical music coda, with frantic brass and strings and Nick Mason’s plodding drums limping over the finishing line.

An inquisitive A&R man nosing around the sessions fell for Waters’ sense of humour when the bass player and Geesin hid a record player under the desk and played a crackly 78rpm disc through the studio speakers, telling him it was ‘the new stuff’. In truth, opinion on the real thing was divided.

‘It wasn’t how I envisaged it, but it was a good compromise,’ says Geesin now. ‘I wanted more punch, but then again the Floyd always seemed to need that pastel wash on their music, even on the punchy stuff.’

As early as the mid-1970s, Waters and Wright were publicly expressing dissatisfaction with the album, while in the nineties Gilmour would dismiss it as ‘probably our lowest point artistically’. But, as Geesin suggests, ‘that could be because Dave had the least to do with it.’

Tirelessly vilified by lazy music critics for being progressive rock at its worst,
Atom Heart Mother
is less self-indulgent than its reputation suggests. While Harvest’s prog-rock pioneers The Moody Blues and Barclay James Harvest would forge entire careers out of orchestral rock, Floyd only flirted briefly with the genre. ‘I think it’s significant that I took all of the band, except for Roger, to see Wagner’s
Parsifal
at Covent Garden,’ says Ron, ‘and they all fell asleep.’

The album’s second half makes fewer demands on the listener, though, as Geesin says, ‘they were just scraps that they scraped together.’ Roger Waters’ solo composition, ‘If ’, seemed to pick up where his own ‘Grantchester Meadows’ had left off on
Ummagumma
. Waters’ vocal sounds incredibly fey (‘prissy and English’ as he would later describe some of his own work) as he enunciates over the daintiest of melodies. The lyrics were less pastoral, addressing some soon-to-become-familiar issues, such as the threat of madness that would be explored in greater detail on
Dark Side of the Moon
and
The Wall
. Meanwhile, lyrics mourning the loss of a friendship and references to ‘the spaces between friends’ were construed by some to refer to Syd Barrett. Syd showed up at the studio unannounced during the album sessions, accompanied by old Cambridge pal Geoff Mottlow, but, according to Ron Geesin, ‘he spun out again as quickly as he spun in’.

When asked in an interview in 2004 about Nick Mason’s recent book about the band, Roger Waters expressed his surprise that ‘there wasn’t more sex in it’. What to make then of Richard Wright’s ‘Summer ’68’, a song about the band’s second US tour in which its composer sings of the spiritual emptiness following an encounter with a groupie. Real or imaginary? ‘In the summer of ’68, there were groupies everywhere,’ said Wright, years later. ‘They’d come and look after you like a personal maid, do your washing, sleep with you and leave you with a dose of the clap.’ The song was a welcome exploration of human emotions after four years of interplanetary musings and psychedelic whimsy.

Gilmour’s contribution, ‘Fat Old Sun’, is similarly grounded, betraying the influence of hip new West Coast act Crosby, Stills and Nash, even if the vocalist’s unmistakably English tones and the ‘distant bells’ and ‘new-mown grass’ in the lyrics suggest bucolic, summer evenings by the Mill Pond in Cambridge rather than on a hippie ranch in Laurel Canyon.

Only ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’, the group-credited closing contribution (in reality, the work of Nick Mason), seems tied to the old Floyd tradition of sound effects for their own sake. To a backdrop of gentle piano and guitar-led jamming, the piece unfolds with the mouth-watering sound of Floyd’s chief roadie, Alan Styles, preparing a breakfast of cereal, toast, eggs, bacon and coffee, complete with amplified crunching, chewing, sizzling and gulping (tapes from the sessions typically began with the likes of ‘Egg Frying Take One’, followed by a startled ‘Whoops!’). At various intervals, Styles’s East Anglian tones drift across the stereo channels (‘I like marmalade . . .’) before the track closes with the sound of an hypnotically dripping tap recorded in Nick Mason’s kitchen. Harmless fun, but the joke runs dry over thirteen minutes. Gilmour would later declare ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ as ‘the most thrown-together thing we’ve ever done’. Nevertheless, it was performed live, and made a minor star of the titular roadie.

Alan Styles was a Cantabrigian who’d once worked the punts on the River Cam. His long hair, moustache and fashionably tight jeans belied the fact that he was several years older than the band. Alan had been in the Merchant Navy and became a physical training instructor while doing his National Service in Germany. An accomplished musician in his own right, he had played sax in the Cambridge band Phuzz alongside Pink Floyd’s future saxophonist Dick Parry.

‘Alan was a real character,’ recalled Nick Mason in 1973. ‘But he got to be such a big star that we were afraid to ask him to do things like lifting gear. In the end, we had to fire him.’

Styles chose to remain in the United States while on a Pink Floyd tour. He quit the music industry completely and eventually built his own houseboat, last moored in San Francisco. He still lives in California.

Pink Floyd’s new composition had already made its way into the group’s setlist by June that year, some four months before the album’s release. Still called ‘The Amazing Pudding’, it was performed in full at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music in Shepton Mallet, a three-day shindig that also featured Led Zeppelin and Fairport Convention. The event was blighted by interminable traffic jams and a shortage of edible food. It’s a testament to the hardiness of the seventies rock fan that any were still there when the band appeared on stage five hours late at around 3 a.m. Even more extraordinary is that the John Aldiss Choir and the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble lasted that long to join the group for the grand finale.

In the audience was BBC producer Jeff Griffin. When Blackhill staged its second free festival in Hyde Park in July, Floyd were announced on a bill with Kevin Ayers and the Edgar Broughton Band. Steve O’Rourke agreed to Griffin’s request for a Floyd in-concert session, a few days before the Hyde Park gig, as it would also double up as a much-needed rehearsal for the show. ‘When Steve told me they needed a twelve-piece brass section and a twenty-piece choir, I nearly fell over,’ recalls Griffin now. ‘First of all there was the cost, and, secondly, the technical feasibility of recording the whole lot at somewhere like the Paris Theatre.’ Nevertheless, Jeff found the money and John Peel compered the show.

‘But there was still the issue that the piece didn’t have a title,’ says Griffin. ‘John wandered out to get an evening paper, and I think it was Roger who was looking over his shoulder. Peely was like, “Come on, what’s the name of this piece? I bet you find something in the paper.” And there in the
Evening Standard
was this story about a woman who’d been fitted with a nuclear-powered pacemaker. Roger was like, “That’s it - Atom Heart Mother.” Which had nothing whatsoever to do with the piece of music. We were saying, “Why?”, but the band were like, “Why not?” ’

At Hyde Park and the Paris Theatre, Floyd opened their set with ‘Embryo’, a track lasting more than ten minutes was only eventually released on the
Works
anthology. At Hyde Park, the sound of children giggling and chattering echoed around the park, causing many looks of stoned confusion amid the crowd, until they realised that the sounds were actually coming from Richard Wright’s keyboards. Their twenty-three-minute ‘Atom Heart Mother’ finale, complete with choir and brass, made a lasting impression on Ron Geesin. ‘I left in tears,’ he admits. ‘The performance of the brass was terrible.’ It was later discovered, in a possibly unconnected incident, that one of the tuba players had suffered the indignity of having a pint of beer upended into his instrument.

Floyd returned to America twice that year, running up against the customary setbacks that blighted their Stateside visits. In New Orleans, the band’s rental truck, containing every piece of equipment, was stolen. Steve O’Rourke would have to bribe the local police to ensure its return. Separate choirs and orchestral players were hired for the East and West Coast legs of the tour at enormous expense to help reproduce ‘Atom Heart Mother’ in its entirety. Not everyone was impressed. John Mendelsohn of the
LA Times
delivered a lacerating put-down of the band’s gig at the Santa Monica Civic Center: ‘Ultimately one can scarcely keep from wondering why the four human components of Pink Floyd bother to come out on stage at all when computers could hardly fail to make as interesting a use of their arsenal of gadgets.’

Composer Leonard Bernstein attended a show in New York, but was, David Gilmour revealed, bored stiff by the Floyd’s latest composition. Still, the piece had some celebrity devotees. Director Stanley Kubrick would approach the group with a view to using ‘Atom Heart Mother’ in his upcoming movie,
A Clockwork Orange
. While the idea appealed to the Floyd’s artier pretensions, Roger vetoed the plan when he discovered that Kubrick wanted the freedom to cut up the piece to fit his film.

Whatever misgivings some, including the band themselves, may have had about the album, which was released in October 1970, they would not impact on its success.
Sounds
applauded the record’s ‘rich, gentle atmosphere’;
Beat Instrumental
declared it an ‘utterly fantastic record that moves Floyd into new ground’. But
Rolling Stone
, never easily pleased by Pink Floyd, canned the second half in particular as ‘English folk at its deadly worst’. However,
Atom Heart Mother
outstripped
Ummagumma
and gave Floyd their first number 1 album in the UK, and a then respectable number 55 chart placing in the US.

With three Top 10 albums to their name, Floyd’s financial situation had now improved. ‘Our royalties cover us now,’ Nick Mason told one journalist. ‘For years previously we’d been paying off enormous debts. All our royalties and everything else were just being used to pay our running costs. The band still doesn’t make any money but at least we’re not fighting to pay back debts.’

For Gilmour, not before time. ‘Nine months after I joined, we started to give ourselves £30 a week,’ he recalled. ‘For the first time we were earning more than our roadies. Money’s the biggest single pressure on people. Even if you’ve got it, you have the pressure of not knowing whether you should have it. It can be a moral problem.’

Apart from the music, the album’s appearance would become a major talking point for critics and fans. The Hipgnosis team had chosen the most obtuse and irrelevant image they could think of and something as far removed from psychedelia as possible: a cow. Lulubelle III, to give the beast its full name, was photographed in a field in Hertfordshire. It was, as Storm Thorgerson later elaborated, ‘perfect, because it was just so
cow
’. The duo presented the image to Roger Waters, who, as Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell recalls, ‘burst out laughing, and loved it’. The band insisted that the image remain unspoiled by the name of the group or the album’s title.