Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (27 page)

‘We also did this thing with two tape recorders,’ says John. ‘You get two machines, one on each side of the room, run the tape through one, then thread it through the other and record on the first one and play back on the other. So there’s this delay. The end of “Echoes” when the voices swell up is a snippet of that technique.’

‘Echoes’ had structure and a greater sense of purpose and a stronger melody than any of Floyd’s earlier epics. Even if the process of putting it together was sometimes laboured.

‘There could be periods of boredom and long silences,’ admits Leckie. ‘They were posh boys from Cambridge, after all, and they didn’t suffer fools gladly. They wanted everything to be done properly. They were very critical of sound and tuning and what each other was playing. They were always fiddling about with the equipment, trying to make things sound better. Roger and Dave were undoubtedly the leaders. They were the ones who told you what they wanted. Rick Wright would sit at the back and not say anything for days, but his piano playing was always a highlight of any session.’

Speaking to the press before
Meddle
was released, Waters was visceral in his criticism of the band’s current situation. ‘I’m bored with most of the stuff we play,’ he admitted. Above all, he was determined to rid Floyd’s music of the loathed ‘Space Rock’ label. On tour in America, where the band’s cult following got off on the music’s cosmic imagery, Waters would berate those calling for old favourites such as ‘Astronomy Domine’ and even ‘See Emily Play’ with withering put-downs: ‘You must be joking!’

Waters had been very taken with the rawness and grim candour of the previous year’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, a record inspired by the primal scream therapy Lennon had submitted to in order to tackle issues from his childhood. Part of the Floyd’s purge would involve Roger writing lyrics that connected the group with the real world, even if they couldn’t mirror the abrasiveness of the Plastic Ono Band’s music and still had to rely on what Ron Geesin called ‘that pastel wash’.

Interviewed in 2004, Waters revealed that the inspiration for ‘Echoes’ lyrics came from the sense of disconnection he experienced during his early years living in London, and following Syd’s turbulent departure from the band. Waters and future wife Judy Trim had moved to a flat in Shepherds Bush, West London. One window in the apartment afforded a clear view of the busy Goldhawk Road, down which the couple would observe an ant-like procession of commuters heading off for a day’s toil in the morning and returning in the evening. The lyrics referring to strangers passing in the street were, he explained, ‘all about making connections with other people. About the potential that human beings have for recognising each other’s humanity.’ Perversely, despite the icy distance that would develop between some of those writing and performing the music, the theme of communication, of reaching out, would be one the band would return to obsessively.

While ‘Echoes’ occupied the second half of the album, the first half contained five new songs. Tellingly, two of these, ‘A Pillow of Winds’ and ‘Fearless’, were credited to Waters and Gilmour, and signified their first co-writing partnership since 1968’s flop single ‘Point Me at the Sky’. Both songs seemed almost disarmingly lightweight and in stark contrast to all the
Sturm und Drang
acid rock of just three years earlier. ‘A Pillow of Winds’ was a lovely acoustic jangle (its title supposedly taken from the board game mah jong, of which the band were enthusiastic players), sung by a sleepy-sounding Gilmour, suggesting its protagonist drifting into a hemp-induced doze.

‘Fearless’ (according to John Leckie ‘the highlight of that first side’) made similar use of the acoustic guitars, but Roger’s lyric of facing adversity despite the odds gave it more bite. The strumming guitars eventually fade to be replaced by the combined voices of Liverpool FC’s ‘Kop Choir’ for a refrain of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’; an in-joke for the bassist, who was by then a committed Arsenal FC supporter.

Waters’ solo composition ‘San Tropez’ was a lilting jazzy excursion, with Wright playing a supper-club piano solo after its writer saluted the joys of supping champagne and doing very little in the titular French hotspot.

If ‘San Tropez’ sounded slight, ‘Seamus’ was positively inconsequential. The songwriting blame was shared equally between all four. Here, Gilmour sings a corny blues and blows harmonica punctuated by the barks and howls of a collie called Seamus, who belonged to Humble Pie frontman Steve Marriott. (Gilmour was looking after the dog while Marriott was on tour.) As Leckie admits, ‘It was very funny when Dave played the harmonica and that dog started howling, but I must admit I was surprised to hear it on the finished album.’

Most of
Meddle
invited comparisons not with Floyd’s brain-box competitors Yes or King Crimson, but with the gentler sounds of The Band or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Only the opening instrumental, ‘One of These Days’, seemed tied to the Floyd of old. With its ominous bass riff, BBC Radiophonic Workshop-style sound effects, and Nick Mason hissing the words, ‘One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces’, it sounded like a vamped-up, prog rock version of the Doctor Who theme tune spliced with The Tornados’ ‘Telstar’.

If, as Roger Waters once claimed, ‘
Atom Heart Mother
was the beginning of the end’, then
Meddle
was the beginning of something completely new. Unlike
Ummagumma
or much of
Atom Heart Mother
, it sounded like the work of a band pulling together, rather than four individuals working alone and collectively battling to escape the shadow of their departed frontman.
Meddle
sounded like Pink Floyd’s future.

Integral to this future, though, would be Roger Waters’ desire for a grand show. While cannons, flower petals and roadies in gorilla suits had once accompanied Pink Floyd’s live performances, their May 1971 performance at London’s Crystal Palace Bowl was their most grandiose yet. Taking a break from the
Meddle
sessions, the band shook the crowd out of their stoned torpor with a quadraphonic sound system, exploding smoke bombs and a gigantic inflatable octopus hidden in the lake in front of the stage which reared up during the grand finale of ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’. A spectacular end to the show, even if the effect was slightly spoilt by the sight of a roadie paddling into the water to untangle the beast’s tentacles and coax it up into full view of the crowd.

While Waters would complain that ‘the musicians in the band’, namely Wright and Gilmour, were opposed to ‘anything theatrical’, there was a tacit understanding among all four that, in the absence of a sex-symbol frontman, such as Robert Plant or Mick Jagger, they’d better find other ways to hold an audience’s visual attention. ‘In the seventies people came to hear the music and see the show,’ said Richard Wright. ‘They didn’t come to see me, Dave and Roger jumping around as individuals. We weren’t standard rock ’n’ roll people desperate to be personalities. We were happy not to be in the limelight.’

By 1971, fellow Brits Led Zeppelin had become notorious for their offstage activities, with astronomical hotel bills, Herculean drug habits and used-up groupies to show for it. For Pink Floyd, alcohol and narcotics were imbibed, and, like all English rock bands, they attracted the attention of groupies, although Waters claimed at the time, ‘Unlike most other bands, we’re not heavily into crumpet on the road.’

But like all touring rock bands, they had hours of crushing boredom to contend with. Games of backgammon, Monopoly and the aforementioned mah jong were among their favoured aftershow activities, appealing especially to Roger’s competitive instincts. Yet there were still outbreaks of more traditional rock ’n’ roll behaviour. Recalling the time Gilmour borrowed a fan’s motorcycle and rode it through a restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona, to the complete disinterest of the diners present, Nick Mason said, ‘It reminded us of why we didn’t usually do that sort of thing in the first place.’

Back home, the communal crash-pads of some three years earlier were now a thing of the past. Each of the band had drifted into domesticity. In 1968, Roger and Judy had moved from Shepherds Bush and bought an £8,000 house in Islington’s New North Road, a then rather dour main drag running from the Essex Road south towards Hoxton. It was considered an unusual place for an up-and-coming rock star to make his home. Syd’s old flatmate David Gale, then starting his own theatre company, later moved in to a house just across the road.

Waters called on his architectural design skills and undertook some of the renovation work on the house himself. The décor was impeccably chosen, with plenty of sanded wooden floors and minimalist furnishings on which the couple’s Burmese cats could roam freely. Roger and Judy’s garden shed became their shared workspace. One half served as Waters’ home studio, while the other was given over to Judy’s potter’s wheel and ceramics. Keen to assert her independence, Judy still taught full-time at the Dame Alice Owen School in Islington, whose pupils were apparently later stunned to discover that her husband was a member of Pink Floyd. Waters initially splashed out for an E-type Jaguar, until his Socialist principles got the better of him, and he traded it in for an Austin Mini.

Nick Mason shared none of his old friend’s misgivings. A Lotus Elan would be among several sporty little numbers to end up parked outside the house he shared with Lindy in St Augustine’s Road, Camden. Rick and Juliette Wright and their two young children, daughter Gala and son Jamie, had set up home a few miles west of Nick and Roger in Leinster Gardens, Bayswater.

David Gilmour was now the only unmarried member of Pink Floyd. Since joining the group, he’d relished his freedom in the bachelor pad flat at Richmond Mansions. During a rare break in the band’s schedule, Gilmour dashed off to Morocco for a holiday with girlfriend and Quorum model Jenny Roth. Yet with the start of a new decade, his bachelor days would be numbered. By the end of the year, Gilmour had given up the flat at Richmond Mansions and bought his first property, an abandoned farmhouse, complete with barn and stables, near Royden in Essex. Full of wood carvings, low beams and a wide sweeping staircase, it offered a welcome change of scene for the guitarist, who told one interviewer that year, ‘I’m a country boy at heart.’

Disappearing on tour after first purchasing the house, Gilmour installed Emo to keep an eye on the place. Without electricity or heating, the early-morning din from a nearby chicken farm and the huge, curtain-less windows opening out on the deserted countryside, the house was not the best place to sleep off a hard night’s excesses. But despite Gilmour’s newly single status, the farmhouse would soon benefit from a woman’s touch.

Midway through Floyd’s 1970 American tour, the guitarist had encountered a striking blonde backstage at a gig in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Virginia Hasenbein, known to all as Ginger, was a twenty-one-year-old Philadelphian model, then the face of Leichner make-up, and also part of a troupe of roller-skating dancers. Ginger had been in a relationship with the same man (‘a smooth entrepreneur’, she recalled) since she was sixteen years old. Having met Gilmour after the Floyd gig, she ran into him again at a party later in the week. This time, she later claimed, Gilmour enlisted Waters to distract her boyfriend, and introduced himself. By all accounts, the two were immediately smitten and Ginger flew to New York to hook up with the guitarist just days later.

‘After every gig, he would set up a little chair by the amplifiers, and I’d sit there,’ Ginger told the
Mail on Sunday
newspaper in 2004. ‘David would leave the stage, and we’d be kissing. We never stopped kissing.’

‘She looked like an angel and David fell in love with her,’ recalls one confidant. ‘Ginger was in this roller-skating show at the time, and they used to call her the “Dream On Wheels”. I think there was talk that she was also going to be in a movie. It took something ridiculous like two weeks for her to give everything up - her career, her family, her home - and come to England to be with him. Steve O’Rourke put in an amazing amount of work to help make that happen.’

Back in England, the couple took Gilmour’s E-type Jaguar and drove cross-country to Athens, before catching a boat to Rhodes, where they holidayed in O’Rourke’s newly purchased villa in Lindos.

When they arrived back in England, the couple set about renovating the Essex farmhouse. Over the next couple of years Gilmour would have a music room, home studio and swimming pool (which he dug out himself) installed, while also acquiring a trials bike on which he could hare around the grounds. A retired brewer’s dray horse set up home in the stables, while the Floyd’s old communal transport wagon, a Packard Straight Eight, was put out to pasture in the barn. Later, an absent-minded Emo would leave the trials bike out in the rain only to find the horse eating its saddle. But, for now, life was good.

Strangely, Pink Floyd would manage two albums in 1971. In May, EMI put out
Relics
, an eleven-track compilation, on their low-budget Starline/ Music For Pleasure imprint. Subtitled
A Bizarre Collection of Antiques and Curios
, it bracketed the hits ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’ alongside the non-hits ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, and otherwise forgotten B-sides, including Richard Wright’s charming ‘Paintbox’, a song he’d later dismiss as dreadful.
Relics
also included one previously unreleased composition, ‘Biding My Time’, a leftover from 1969’s abandoned ‘The Man, The Journey’ suite, which had the rare distinction of including a trombone solo from Wright, a homage to his days as a bowler-hatted trad jazz fan in the early sixties.

The sketch of a Heath Robinson-style contraption on the cover of
Relics
would be Nick Mason’s sole foray into album artwork, evidence that those three years hunched over a drawing board at Regent Street Poly had not been entirely wasted. Despite the fact that it was released as a contractual obligation,
Relics
would become a treasured item for the post-
Dark Side of the Moon
Floyd fan wanting to negotiate their way through the band’s sixties era, without having to empty their wallet and buy all of the earlier albums.