Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (29 page)

It was an impression shared by the rock critic Nick Kent, who’d first seen Barrett unravelling on stage in 1967. Kent was then writing for the underground newspaper
Frendz
. The paper’s offices in Notting Hill’s Portobello Road were above a rehearsal space, where he encountered Syd and some of the Stars entourage. ‘This was early 1972, the hippie dream was dying and there were an awful lot of acid casualties like Syd, so he fitted right in,’ explains Kent. ‘Every day you’d encounter people who’d had a bad acid experience coming into the office and trying to tell us their vision of the world. Syd actually wasn’t as bad as most of those people.’ However, Kent also experienced Barrett’s odd conversational tangents. ‘There was a young hippie kid there that day that asked him, “Written any new songs, Syd?” ’ laughs Nick. ‘And Barrett replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.” ’

Back in Cambridge, the boomy, shed-like ambience of the Corn Exchange was unsuited to Syd’s new band. As word spread that Barrett was performing live again, tickets for the 24 February show sold quickly and the venue was packed, with bus-loads of Syd devotees making the trip to Cambridge. Unfortunately, as precursors to punk rock, the incendiary MC5 were bound to make it difficult for any act that had to follow them. Barrett had initially shown willing. He’d shaved off his beard and bought a new pair of velvet trousers. Eyewitnesses recall a set that included Syd’s solo pieces, ‘Golden Hair’ and ‘Octopus’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘Lucifer Sam’. On stage, though, Stars were beset with sound problems, as Barrett sliced a finger on one of his strings and began bleeding, and Jack Monck’s bass amp cut out midway through the show. Syd began to visibly retreat on stage, looking and sounding, once again, as if he’d rather be anywhere else.

Still undeterred, Stars played the Corn Exchange again, just two days later, alongside the progressive rock band Nektar. Mick Brockett was then working as a lighting engineer for Nektar and had previously seen Pink Floyd while working at the Roundhouse. Brockett, who kept a diary at the time, described the gig in one word: ‘pathetic’.

‘I was very disappointed,’ he recalls now. ‘Syd and Twink bombarded our ears, even backstage, with disjointed chord sequences, screaming and yelling, with almost no musical content.’

It would be the last time Stars performed. Just days later,
Melody Maker
appeared with a poor review of the first Corn Exchange show by writer and Syd aficionado Roy Hollingsworth. ‘He changed time almost by the minute, the keys and chords made little sense,’ he wrote. ‘The fingers on his left hand met the frets like strangers. They formed chords, re-formed them and then wandered away again. It was like watching somebody piece together a memory that had suffered the most severe shellshock . . .’

Also in the audience that first night at the Corn Exchange was Clive Welham, the drummer in Barrett’s very first band. ‘Syd just seemed to stand there, doing nothing, looking around, as if to say, “What’s happening?” ’ remembers Clive. ‘I left the gig early. I was almost close to tears. I couldn’t stand to see him like that.’

‘It was a disastrous gig,’ conceded Twink. Barrett showed up on his doorstep, holding a copy of the
Melody Maker
review the morning it came out. ‘Syd was really hung up about it. He said he didn’t want to play any more.’ Stars was over.

Barrett contained his anger until he was back at Hills Road. Ranting and raving, he smashed furniture, before retreating to his bedroom in the cellar. Once down there, he began smashing his head repeatedly against the ceiling.

CHAPTER SIX

NEW CAR, CAVIAR

‘You’ve got to be competitive, aggressive and egocentric - all the things that go to make a real star.’

Roger Waters

I
n London’s cavernous Earls Court exhibition hall it is the favourite topic of conversation as showtime draws near. While the human traffic buzzes between the overpriced food stands, merchandise stalls stacked high with Floyd designer Storm Thorgerson’s latest artistic creations, and bars dispensing warm beer in flimsy plastic cups, the question gets tossed back and forth: Will they or won’t they do
Dark Side of the Moon
?

It is October 1994 and Pink Floyd have been on tour since April. Sometime in July, somewhere in the American Midwest, Pink Floyd had begun performing their 35-million-selling album in its entirety during the second half of the show. Since then, it has been played again randomly as the tour passed through Rotterdam, Basel, Hanover and Rome. London will strike it lucky. Six of Pink Floyd’s fourteen completed gigs at Earls Court will feature the complete
Dark Side of the Moon
. Roger Waters’ dissertation on the human condition is now twenty-one years old. Waters is gone, but his former colleagues and a team of hired hands will reproduce his finest forty-one minutes tonight, rolling back the years for those in the audience old enough to remember it first time around, and those younger who’ve discovered it since. It begins and ends with the sound of a human heartbeat, in between pinwheeling through the gamut of emotions and experience, exploring fear, failure, greed and insanity, beautifully played and packaged for a stadium audience.

It was all very different in 1972.

‘Due to severe mechanical and electric horror we can’t do any more of that bit, so we’ll do something else . . .’

Roger Waters made his announcement about twenty minutes into the first performance of Pink Floyd’s new piece at The Dome, Brighton on 20 January. The plan had been to open the show with their latest work in progress, still unrecorded, but supposedly entitled
Dark Side of the Moon
. Struggling to play in time to a tape of sound effects, their equipment began misbehaving and the band ran aground, just a few bars into a song that in a year’s time would be known as ‘Money’, and which would help turn Pink Floyd into one of the biggest bands on the planet. In reality, it wasn’t the taxing nature of the band’s new music that was the problem. Just as in Pompeii, Floyd’s mammoth sound and lighting rigs were being run from the same power source. Something had to give.

Frustrated, Waters and Gilmour stalked off stage. After a brief respite, they returned to strike up the opening bars to ‘Atom Heart Mother’. Unfortunately, as Nick Mason later admitted when discussing the band’s general frame of mind, ‘We were in acute danger of dying of boredom.’ That night, the cod orchestral rock concerto, albeit minus the orchestra, from 1969, sounded lacklustre and old hat. In a strange way, the band had run out of steam and lost their way yet again.

On the same night in Cambridge, Syd Barrett was jamming on stage at the King’s College Cellars with the musicians that would make up his new band Stars. Yet his old group’s planned musical venture couldn’t have been further from Barrett’s frayed twelve-bar blues.

Nick Mason’s frustration with much of the group’s existing material was shared by his bandmates. Roger Waters, especially, was keen to explore the direction the group had taken with ‘Echoes’, and to create another so-called ‘epic sound poem’ driven by a similar lyrical theme. Despite the red herring of the
Dark Side of the Moon
title, there was still an overwhelming desire to shake off the ‘Space Rock’ image, to write about real people, real emotions and real life.

Dark Side of the Moon
(the definitive article would appear with the 2003 reissue) began the way most Pink Floyd albums began: with the band messing about in a studio for hours and seeing if they could come up with anything worthwhile. On 29 November 1971, having just completed a run of North American dates, the group booked five days at Decca Studios in West Hampstead, the same venue in which David Gilmour had once auditioned with Jokers Wild. Prior to this, they had held a band meeting at Nick Mason’s house in Camden, where Roger Waters pitched an idea.

‘I remember sitting in his [Mason’s] kitchen, looking out at the garden and saying, “Hey, boys, I think I’ve got the answer,”’ he recalled. Waters described his vision for a piece of music ‘all about the pressures and difficulties and questions that crop up in one’s life and create anxiety’.

‘I remember Roger saying that he wanted to write it absolutely straight, clear and direct,’ remembered Gilmour. ‘To say exactly what he wanted to say for the first time and get away from psychedelic patter and strange and mysterious warblings.’

‘That was always my big fight in Pink Floyd,’ said Waters. ‘To try and drag it kicking and screaming back from the borders of space, from the whimsy that Syd was into, to my concerns, which were much more political and philosophical.’

Now a twenty-nine-year-old married man, the bassist was still grappling with many of the same issues that had troubled him since adolescence. At the root of it all was his mother Mary’s staunch belief, drummed into him from an early age, that he needed ‘to get a decent education, a decent job, because you’re going to want to have a family, so you need to prepare . . .’ Roger had, he admitted, believed that he was still in the preparation stage when reality struck: ‘I wasn’t preparing for anything - I was right in the middle of it, and always had been. Fucking hell - this is it!’

With Waters’ encouragement, the four effectively compiled a list of the things that troubled them at this stage in their lives. These ranged from the tedium and danger of air travel to a fear of growing old, the problems of organised religion, violence, greed and, most poignant in the light of their former singer’s situation, insanity.

Further ideas would find their way into the lyrical mix as the work progressed, but for now, they needed some music. At Decca Studios, the band riffled through leftover ideas and snippets discarded from their previous albums. They revisited a gentle piano piece composed by Richard Wright, which had, bafflingly, been rejected by director Michelangelo Antonioni from the
Zabriskie Point
soundtrack two years earlier. It would take shape over the next few months and become ‘Us and Them’. Another of the keyboard player’s downbeat offerings would wind up as ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. Waters brought a couple of ragged home demos - just his voice and an acoustic guitar - that would form the basis of ‘Money’ and ‘Time’. The band’s magpie tendencies reappeared, with the bassist recycling the lyric ‘breathe, breathe in the air . . .’ from ‘Give Birth to a Smile’, a track on
The Body
soundtrack, as a starting point for the song that would eventually become ‘Breathe’.

Progress on the new material stalled in December when Floyd flew to Paris to be filmed again for
Live At Pompeii
. Yet they began recording at Abbey Road Studios throughout January and February 1972, the sessions broken up by further writing stints and rehearsals at The Rolling Stones’ warehouse studios in Bermondsey, South London. With further concert dates booked throughout the UK in February, the band were determined to have something new to play, if only to assuage their own boredom.

Although the Brighton Dome gig had ended badly, Floyd had at least had the chance to premiere some of their new material. Some of the taped special effects that would enhance the finished album were already being used. The opening song ‘Breathe’ was still in a formative stage, yet to acquire the sweet, distinctive pedal steel used on the final version. ‘On the Run’, then still called ‘Travel Sequence’, was seven minutes of jazz-rock noodling between Gilmour and Wright, and nothing like the urgent synthesiser-driven version on the record. Elsewhere, Wright fluffed his lines on a hesitant version of ‘Time’, and a prototype of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, then entitled ‘Mortality Sequence’, included a spoken-word section splicing extracts from St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians with a monologue by Malcolm Muggeridge, the journalist and Christian scholar, then newsworthy for his involvement with the Festival of Light organisation, a pressure group dedicated to upholding Christian values. Muggeridge’s colleague in the Festival of Light, the Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse, would also feel the full brunt of Roger Waters’ ire on a later Pink Floyd song.

Roadtesting up to forty minutes of new material live on stage offered a challenge to both the band and their audience. But at a time when rock music was desperate to be taken seriously as an artform, it was far less of a leap than it might be now. Floyd gigs had often been largely sedentary affairs, with some of the audience positively horizontal and shrouded in the sweet fug of any number of illegal cigarettes. Furthermore, as Waters explained, ‘We wanted the audience to actually
listen
. And later on I’m afraid I used to get terribly annoyed when they didn’t.’

February’s run of gigs continued across the country, with
Dark Side of the Moon
being played in its entirety, such as it was, for the first time at Portsmouth Guildhall. There were still hurdles to be overcome: Coventry’s Locarno Ballroom saw them unveiling their magnum opus at midnight after a set from crowd-pleasing showman Chuck Berry, while a gig at the Manchester Free Trade Hall was abandoned after just one and a half songs following a power cut. The real test of the band’s mettle would be a four-night stand at the Rainbow Theatre at the end of the month; the London premiere of what was being touted as ‘Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics’.

The band had also made a greater effort to ensure they sounded and looked their best. At the beginning of the year, they had taken delivery of a new, custom-built PA, complete with four-channel, 360-degree quadraphonic sound; a far cry from the 1967-era Azimuth Coordinator, with which Richard Wright panned their sound around the four corners of a venue from a gizmo on top of his Hammond organ. In this instance, looking their best didn’t mean abandoning the ubiquitous Floyd uniform of T-shirts and jeans (usually the same jeans but a different T-shirt come showtime), but the deployment of a state-of-the art lighting rig, manned by new crew member Arthur Max, an outspoken American whiz-kid whom the band had first met two years earlier as lighting engineer at San Francisco’s Fillmore West. Max’s greatest claim to fame had been that he’d worked a spotlight at the Woodstock Festival for three days straight.