Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (30 page)

Playing to full houses each night, the band opened the Rainbow shows with
Dark Side of the Moon
, followed by ‘One of These Days’ from
Meddle
, and closed with an encore of ‘Echoes’. In between, they obliged only with the crowd-pleasing ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ and ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’. The message was explicit: the old Floyd was dead; long live the new Floyd. Although, a ghost from the past, an apparently gaunt-looking Syd Barrett, had been spotted in the audience at one of the shows.
Melody Maker
, seemingly back on message after the boxing glove incident of Christmas 1971, raved over ‘burning flashlights, wind-blown sparkle dust and a trip to the dark side of the moon’. Derek Jewell of the
Sunday Times
, one of a new breed of Fleet Street critics determined to take rock music ever so seriously, slipped into a reverie about ‘music overlaid with a maze of extra tapes which titillate the ears’ before finally declaring, ‘Floyd are dramatists supreme’.

Somewhere between the disastrous Brighton Dome gigs and the victorious Rainbow shows, Roger Waters had written a crucial part of the new piece, a dramatic grand finale entitled ‘Eclipse’. ‘I think I arrived at a gig with the song in my pocket,’ Waters told writer John Harris. ‘I said something like, “Here, lads, I’ve written an ending.” ’

Eclipse
would briefly take over as the title of the album. The band changed the name under duress when it was discovered that folk rockers Medicine Head had released an album called
Dark Side of the Moon
. When the dust had settled and the album’s sales turned out to be modest, Floyd reverted to the original title. As Gilmour explained at the time, ‘It didn’t sell well, so we thought what the hell . . .’

The only fly in the ointment was the news that a bootleg from the Rainbow Theatre was now on sale in the nation’s less scrupulous record shops. According to some sources, it would go on to shift over 100,000 copies, with the band’s new
pièce de résistance
still a year away from an official release.

In hindsight, then, the decision to temporarily abandon the making of the record and record a whole other album of new material seems astonishing. Barbet Schroeder, the French movie director for whom Floyd had recorded the soundtrack for
More
, had placed another call. Schroeder’s latest celluloid creation,
La Vallée
, needed some music. Floyd agreed and flew out to Strawberry Studios at Château d’Hérouville on the outskirts of Paris. The studio would be immortalised in the title of Elton John’s album that year,
Honky Chateau
.

In another, unusually focused two-week recording session, Floyd broke with their usual tradition of interminable jamming. Armed with stopwatches, pens, paper and a rough cut of the film, they knuckled down and scored the individual sequences. They managed ten songs in fourteen days, despite flying off for a whistle-stop tour of Japan in the middle of it all. As Nick Mason would admit later, ‘We had no scope for self-indulgence.’

Gilmour, who would later claim, in an uncharacteristic burst of enthusiasm, that he loved the resultant album, also warmed to the discipline. ‘It was rapid stuff,’ he said. ‘We sat in a room, wrote, recorded, like a production line. It’s good to work like that under extreme constraints of time and trying to meet someone else’s needs.’

La Vallée
itself was another spiritual quest in the style of
More
. The female lead, Viviane (played by Schroeder’s wife Bulle Ogier), is married to a French diplomat, and visits the island of Papua New Guinea in search of rare birds’ feathers to sell in her Paris boutique. She becomes distracted by hippie explorer Olivier and joins him to search for a mystical valley (marked on a map with the words ‘obscured by clouds’). They encounter the indigenous people, she ditches her materialistic obsessions, and most of her clothes, and is somehow reborn. The Mapuga tribe of New Guinea, featured in the film, also made a vocal appearance on ‘Absolutely Curtains’, the closing track on the Floyd’s soundtrack album. The film’s preoccupations may seem rooted in a different era, but are really no different from the 2000 Hollywood blockbuster
The Beach
: essentially, it’s all about the plight of shallow Westerners in search of Shangri-La.

The focus and excitement generated by the
Dark Side of the Moon
work-in-progress rubbed off on the soundtrack, which was eventually called
Obscured by Clouds
. The group were clearly no longer ‘dying of boredom’. Firstly, the album made full use of Richard Wright’s recently purchased VCS3 synthesiser, a piece of kit from the team behind the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which would also be put to use on
Dark Side of the Moon
. Secondly, most of the tracks were credited to two or more band members (an unusually democratic move, in the light of future rows over songwriting credits). Finally, with no track longer than five and a half minutes, there was a rare sense of musical economy.

The instrumental title cut was an ominous synth-driven fanfare that suggested gathering storm clouds and was adopted as an intro during the next run of live dates. The following track, ‘When You’re In’, built around an heroic-sounding guitar and keyboard figure, was another instrumental also worked into the set. The title was taken from a catchphrase used by the Floyd’s roadie Chris Adamson.

Adamson, perhaps reviving Paul Newman’s egg-eating stunt from the 1967 prison movie
Cool Hand Luke
, had livened up one day at the Honky Chateau by betting everyone that he could eat a stone of raw potatoes in one sitting. Bets were taken, and Adamson began slicing the vegetables and dousing them in salt. ‘To give him his due, he got through about two and a half pounds before he said, “Fuck it,” ’ recalled Roger Waters. ‘They’re full of starch so it would definitely have killed him if he’d managed to get them all down.’ Adamson would show up later on
Dark Side of the Moon
, uttering the now famous line: ‘I’ve been mad for fucking years.’

Of the vocal tracks on
Obscured by Clouds
, ‘Burning Bridges’ arrived first, a gentle Waters and Wright creation in a similar vein to
Meddle
’s ‘Pillow of Winds’, and ‘Breathe’ from
Dark Side of the Moon
. Elsewhere, Wright’s reflective piano and voice on ‘Stay’ suggested the languid, roach-in-the-ashtray feel of Steely Dan’s debut album,
Can’t Buy a Thrill
, released the same year. In an interview with
New Musical Express
that summer, the keyboard player named
Your Saving Grace
, a 1969 album by the Californian guitarist Steve Miller, as one of his favourite records. Aptly, then, four of the other vocal tracks, ‘Childhood’s End’, ‘The Gold It’s in the . . .’, ‘Wot’s . . . Uh the Deal’ and ‘Free Four’, were all steeped in country, blues and folk-rock influences. For a band that three years before had sounded quintessentially English, Pink Floyd had acquired a disarmingly American lilt. ‘Wot’s . . . Uh the Deal’ was reprised by David Gilmour for his 2006 solo tour, acknowledging its status as one of Pink Floyd’s great lost songs. The acoustic guitars suggest a front-porch jamming session in Topanga Canyon, with Neil Young and Stephen Stills looking on, blowing dope smoke rings. Wright also plays a wonderful, understated piano solo that gives added credibility to producer John Leckie’s observation that his piano playing was often a highlight of any Floyd recording session.

In contrast, Gilmour’s electric guitar honks and chugs on ‘The Gold It’s in the . . .’ rattling away behind a simplistic lyric before running away into a long, whinnying guitar solo of which the similarly honking and chugging Steve Miller would be proud.

Roger Waters’ solo composition ‘Free Four’ remains the album’s biggest surprise. The lyric explored what would quickly become familiar terrain for the bass player including a stark reference to his father’s death in the Second World War. ‘“Free Four” has got all that stuff,’ said Gilmour, years later. ‘Which is where
The Wall
and
The Final Cut
came from.’ Yet whatever the gravitas of its subject, the lyrics were yoked to a nursery-rhyme guitar riff that in part sounds like David Gilmour spoofing Marc Bolan.

Despite its black lyrics, the gonzo riff of ‘Free Four’ was perfect for American FM radio. Floyd still stoically refused to release singles in the UK, but made an exception for America. ‘Free Four’ garnered enough airplay in the States to engender a minor breakthrough.
Obscured by Clouds
was released worldwide in June 1972, and reached number 46 in the US, the first time a Pink Floyd album had cracked the American Top 50.

Despite some striking cinematography,
La Vallée
, the movie, didn’t fare quite so well (even garnering an entry in the 1986 compendium
The World’s Worst Movies
). But for its director Barbet Schroeder, the soundtrack proved a point to the band. ‘I liked the album very much,’ he says now. ‘I do think it surprised the Pink Floyd that they could make such a good album in just two weeks. Perhaps they shouldn’t have taken so long in the studio on all those other records.’

‘It’s one of the annoying things, that the difference between something we spent a week on and something that takes nine months isn’t that great,’ admitted Nick Mason. ‘I mean, the thing that takes nine months isn’t thirty-six times as good.’

The front cover design was also not so good. Courtesy of Hipgnosis, it featured a heavily blurred image from the movie, of one of the characters, obscured by foliage, reaching out to pick fruit from the branches of a tree. Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell had settled on the image after sifting through numerous 35mm slides from the film in search of something, anything, to stick on the cover. When one particular slide was jammed into their film projector, the image became blurred.

‘Suddenly, in front of our very eyes, the out-of-focus quality imbued an ordinary image with more transcendental qualities,’ wrote Thorgerson in his book
Mind Over Matter
. ‘Or so we told Barbet.’

‘They [the band] knew they had another Pink Floyd album coming out soon and didn’t want
Obscured by Clouds
stealing the show,’ laughs Schroeder. ‘So they made sure the cover wasn’t too appealing. I thought it was very funny.’ A claim Thorgerson now rigorously denies.

Although the band made some muddled comments about
Obscured by Clouds
not being a ‘proper Pink Floyd record’, and ‘just a collection of songs’, it quickly secured a number 6 placing in the UK. In America,
Circus
magazine applauded their latest efforts: ‘Pink Floyd can rocket bizarrely from one end of the musical spectrum to the other and come back with songs in their pockets.’ In the UK, the ever-faithful
Disc and Music Echo
was still making do with the same science fiction metaphors: ‘Blasts through your head with aural sunbursts synthesized from some dark, sinister corner of the solar system.’

Yet in the week that
Obscured by Clouds
was released, Floyd were busy with another month-long stint at Abbey Road, recording more of the ‘aural sunbursts’ that would make up their next album. Abbey Road had finally installed the sixteen-track machines they hadn’t installed in time for
Meddle
. Floyd would produce themselves, but were joined by studio engineer Alan Parsons. The twenty-three-year-old had worked as assistant engineer on The Beatles’
Abbey Road
, which had led to a similar role on Paul McCartney’s debut solo album. Now a staff engineer on a £35-a-week salary, Parsons had cut his teeth with Pink Floyd as a tape operator on some of the
Ummagumma
sessions and as a mixing engineer on
Atom Heart Mother
. He was used to the Floyd way of working.

‘They would come into the studio and have no idea of what they were going to do, and just start improvising,’ says Alan now. ‘But the improvisation period had definitely become a lot more structured by the time of
Dark Side of the Moon
. Mainly because they’d been playing it live. They didn’t have to mess around with the compositions. It was an excellent piece of music to see coming together.’

Basic tracks for ‘Us and Them’, ‘Money’, ‘Time’ and ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ would be completed over the next eight weeks. According to Parsons, the band’s work ethic also depended on the distractions around them, primarily BBC2’s surreal comedy show
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
and televised football matches, of which Arsenal FC fan Waters was particularly keen.

With the band distracted, Parsons was free to produce a rough mix of whatever they’d just been working on, and add his own ideas. ‘I was one of a new breed of engineers that didn’t mind making criticisms or suggestions that would normally be made by a producer . . . You could have argued that I should have kept my big mouth shut. And sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn’t.’

One of the engineer’s suggestions related to Richard Wright’s composition, ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, then still being referred to as ‘The Religious Section’ or ‘The Mortality Sequence’. Live, it was performed on the Hammond, and augmented with spoken-word taped effects. Wright played it instead on a grand piano in Abbey Road’s Studio One, thinking the rest of the group were playing along next door in Studio Two. Instead, they’d played him a tape of themselves doing so from an earlier take, taking great delight in surprising him in the doorway when the take was finished. Despite the prank, when the group listened back to Wright’s piano version, they realised it was far superior to what they’d been playing live, and was, as Parsons later claimed, ‘one of the best things Rick Wright ever did’. Yet the engineer still had a nagging feeling that the song needed some extra element, and, on a whim, dubbed on some dialogue of astronauts in space, taken from the NASA recording archives. ‘I think I did it while they were off watching a football game,’ says Parsons. But he quickly met with the Floyd’s disapproval. ‘I thought it worked very well . . . They didn’t think so.’