Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (33 page)

‘If you give ’em a quick, short, sharp shock, they won’t do it again,’ he explains. ‘I mean, he got off lightly, cos I would’ve give him a thrashing . . .’

The speech was slipped in alongside Wright’s gentle keyboards on ‘Us and Them’. Elsewhere, on the fade-out groove of ‘Money’, Puddie and Henry McCulloch were among those justifying the last time they’d hit someone. Puddie, the only female interviewee, is emphatic: ‘That geezer was cruising for a bruising.’ McCulloch offers an even simpler explanation: ‘Why does anyone do anything? Who knows? I was really drunk at the time.’ Gerry O’Driscoll’s would be the last voice heard on the album, his soft Irish accent punctuating the last few bars of ‘Eclipse’: ‘There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.’

Waters’ quest for ‘honest, human voices’ had worked perfectly.

In Adrian Maben’s footage from Paris six months earlier, the band had, in a rare moment of candour, admitted to conflict. ‘We understand each other very well,’ explains a rather earnest Richard Wright. ‘We’re very tolerant of each other, but there are a lot of things unsaid . . . I feel . . . sometimes . . .’ At which point the keyboard player looks rather dolefully at the camera. ‘How do you get over the difficult times?’ asks Maben. ‘I don’t know how,’ answers Wright, ‘but we do.’

‘Our working relationship was still good during the making of
Dark Side
,’ Gilmour later told
Mojo
magazine. ‘On
Dark Side
, as on all the records, we had massive rows about the way it should be, but they were about passionate beliefs in what we were doing.’ In this case, Gilmour and Waters’ passionate but conflicting beliefs were about how the album should actually
sound
. As Nick Mason later recalled, ‘At times, three separate mixes were done by different individuals - a system which, in the past, had tended to resolve matters, as a consensus normally developed towards a particular mix. But even this was not working.’

‘We argued so much that it was suggested we get a third opinion,’ explained Gilmour. The guitarist favoured a warmer sound (‘I wanted it to be big and swampy’) and preferred the spoken-word segments to appear more subtly in the mix. This was also largely Wright’s preferred choice. Roger was still in thrall to the sound of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band record, and favoured a cleaner, drier mix, with the spoken word segments more dominant. Nick Mason also favoured this approach.

The band took the decision to bring in an outside mediator, or ‘umpire’ as David Gilmour later called the role. ‘Chris Thomas came in for the mixes,’ he said. ‘His role was essentially to stop the arguments between me and Roger.’ Thomas was a friend of Steve O’Rourke’s, had worked as producer George Martin’s assistant on The Beatles’
White Album
, and had just produced John Cale’s
Paris 1919
album.

‘The band felt they needed a fresh pair of ears,’ said Thomas in 2003. ‘Someone who could say, “Can we put some more compression on the guitars?” or “Can we have more echo on that?” ’

Time may have healed some wounds, but when Parsons talks about the decision to bring in Thomas at this late stage in the album, he chooses his words carefully. ‘I’m not sure there
was
a huge conflict on the way the album should be mixed. As the engineer I would have preferred it if my voice had been as loud as anyone else. But Chris made his voice heard. At the end of the day, we were dealing with subtleties by now. Chris didn’t turn the album from being one thing into another.’

During these final weeks, though, Thomas would become involved in the decision to add extra guitars to ‘Money’, reduce the number of guitars in ‘Us and Them’, and apply the finishing touches to the album’s sixty-second fanfare, ‘Speak to Me’. ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ also came under scrutiny. While the band had now opted for a piano, rather than an organ-led version, there was still something missing. Parsons’s NASA archive sound effects may have been rejected, but a voice of some sort was needed. Parsons decided to call session singer Clare Torry.

‘There was a chap who worked at Abbey Road called Dennis,’ says Clare now. ‘Dennis paid all the musicians. He gave Alan my number. But when he rang me, I said I couldn’t do it. I didn’t even know what the job was. It was a Friday evening and I told them I was working. But that was a lie because I was going with my then boyfriend to see Chuck Berry at the Hammersmith Odeon, and I didn’t want to miss that. I suggested Sunday evening. They agreed. I asked who it was and Alan said, Pink Floyd. I was like, “Oh.” I wasn’t really a big fan.’

Torry, a session singer and songwriter, was a regular at Abbey Road, and had sung on numerous albums of cover versions, in which the popular hits of the day were re-recorded by unnamed sessioners. Parsons had heard one such album, and had decided to call her rather than one of the other backing singers already used on the album.

On Sunday, 21 January, Clare showed up at Abbey Road. ‘They explained the album was about birth, and all the shit you go through in your life and then death. I did think it was rather pretentious. Of course, I didn’t tell them that, and I’ve since eaten my words. I think it’s a marvellous album. They played me the track, but when I asked what they wanted me to do on it, they didn’t seem to know.’

Gilmour was in charge of the session, and, after rejecting her original improvised vocals - ‘a lot of “oooh, aaah babys” ’ - Torry began going for longer notes, no specific words, just general wailing, or, as she describes it now, ‘caterwauling’.

‘We told her to sing flat out, then quiet,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘I think we mixed it down from about four versions into the orgasmic version we know and love.’

‘We said, “Just busk it,” ’ said Richard Wright. ‘We told her, “Just go in and improvise.” Think about death, think about horror, which she did, and out came this wonderful vocal.’

‘In the past, Rick has said, “Clare was really embarrassed after doing the vocal,”’ says Torry. ‘He’s right, I
was
embarrassed, but that was because when I walked back into the control room after singing, there was no feedback at all. I thought they hated it. On any other session you’d have got some feedback, even if it was, “My God, that was awful.” ’

It wasn’t until years later, when Clare read an interview with fellow
Dark Side of the Moon
backing singer Lesley Duncan, that she realised she wasn’t alone in her feelings. ‘I knew exactly what Lesley was talking about. Nobody spoke to her, either. There was a sense of, “I can’t wait to get out of here.” I suddenly realised Pink Floyd were like that with
everyone
.’

The end result that evening was a dramatic, striking vocal performance, conjuring sex, fear, death; all the component parts of the album. For Clare, though, it had been just another studio session. Not entirely convinced that her ‘caterwauling’ would make it onto the finished album, she collected her £30 fee from Dennis and was back home in time to go to dinner with her boyfriend.

Chris Thomas’s final credit on the album would read ‘Mix Supervised By . . .’. Like Alan Parsons’ engineer’s credit, the roles between engineer, mixer and producer would become blurred, sometimes to the chagrin of those involved. ‘I worked ridiculously long hours,’ said Parsons, ‘making sure I never missed a session. I wanted my contribution to be special. I wanted everything to be right.’ To this day, he has never made any more money out of
Dark Side of the Moon
than what he was paid at the time. ‘I’m sometimes bitter that I earned little or no money from the album. But that’s offset by the fact that it did wonders for my career.’ Parsons would eventually receive a Grammy Award for his engineering on
Dark Side of the Moon
.

‘Alan Parsons, without doubt, would have done more than simply engineer the record,’ said Nick Mason. ‘We were extremely lucky to have him. Alan was definitely an engineer/producer.’

‘Alan was a very good engineer,’ concurred David Gilmour. ‘But we would have got there with any good engineer operating the knobs and buttons.’

While the band initially agreed to let Chris Thomas mix the album alone, Waters, unable to help himself, snuck into the studio on the first day of mixing. When Gilmour found out, he snuck in on the second day. From then on, the two would sit either side of Thomas, making their feelings known. As Gilmour would later insist, ‘Luckily, Chris was more sympathetic to my point of view than he was to Roger’s.’

Diplomatically, Chris Thomas would later state, ‘There was no difference of opinion between them. There were never any hints that they were going to fall out later.’

Yet, whatever musical tug of war may or may not have been raging between the bassist and the guitarist, Roger Waters was convinced of the album’s worth. ‘I had a very strong feeling when we finished the record that we had come up with something very, very special.’ He played a copy of the just-finished album to his wife Judy. She listened in silence. Then as soon as it ended, she burst into tears. ‘I took that as a very good sign.’ A month after completing the recording, EMI hosted a press reception at the London Planetarium in Baker Street. As EMI’s staff engineer, Alan Parsons was entrusted to produce the event. When the company were unable or unwilling to install a quadraphonic sound system in time, the band tried to stop the event. When that proved impossible, they chose to boycott it. The assembled writers and liggers gathered for cocktails at 8 p.m., to be confronted by life-size cut-outs of Gilmour, Waters and Mason in the Planetarium reception. According to press reports from the time, Richard Wright was the only Floyd to show up in the flesh, though he subsequently claims to have no memory of the event: ‘Did I go or didn’t I? . . . I’m not sure. I guess I did.’

‘I thought the fact that they didn’t show up was rather churlish,’ says Parsons. ‘But it was a case of, “We are Pink Floyd and we want to do it
our
way.”’
Melody Maker
’s subsequent assessment of the album, on first hearing, described some of the music on the first side of the record as ‘diabolically uninteresting’, while describing how various guests made comedy shadows on the wall of the Planetarium as soon as the lights dimmed.

There was, however, another underlying factor to the Floyd’s non-attendance: their relationship, or rather lack of, with the music press. The cosy bond that existed between many rock groups and writers in the mid-1970s did not extend to Pink Floyd. By 1973, the band would submit to interviews, but only rarely and sometimes, it seemed, under duress. ‘We weren’t a favourite with the music journalists, since none of us had worked that hard to cultivate a relationship with them,’ admitted Nick Mason, who would, nevertheless, prove more press-friendly than some of his bandmates at the time.

‘Roger once told me that when they were touring the States they hired a person specifically to reply no to any requests for interviews or talk shows,’ remembered Adrian Maben. ‘This was the Pol Pot quality of the Floyd. Remain unseen, enigmatic; don’t let anyone know who we are.’

The same enigmatic quality would find its way into the artwork for
Dark Side of the Moon
. The original idea for what is now one of the most instantly recognisable album covers of all time was conjured up by Storm and Po at Hipgnosis during one of their weekly nocturnal brain-storming sessions. ‘We’d stay up until, say, 4 a.m., working up ideas and then sell them to a band,’ says Po. However, their creations for the last two Floyd albums,
Obscured by Clouds
and
Meddle
, had not been among their best. The pair had heard some of the new album and had been shown some of the lyrics. ‘So we had some understanding of where Roger’s head was at,’ says Po.

‘Rick Wright suggested we do something clean, elegant and graphic, not photographic,’ explained Thorgerson. At one late-night session, Storm showed his partner a photograph of a prism sat on top of some sheet music, which he’d found in a second-hand photography book. ‘It was a black and white photo,’ remembers Po, ‘but it had a colour beam projected through it to give it a rainbow effect.’ Thorgerson also saw a similar picture in a physics textbook. Their graphic designer, George Hardie, created a line drawing of a prism, but in white on a black background, which was then airbrushed, so EMI’s printers could reproduce it.

In contrast to
Ummagumma
and
Atom Heart Mother
, the design for
Dark Side of the Moon
was clinical and almost cold. According to the band, several other alternative ideas were also proposed, but the only one anyone can remember was a design based on the Marvel Comics character the Silver Surfer. All the ideas were pitched to the band at Abbey Road, during the final recording sessions, but there was no contest.

‘As soon as we saw it, I think everyone said, “That’s the one!” ’ said Waters.

‘I think it took about two minutes,’ laughs Po. ‘They were like, “That’s it!” And went back to finishing the record.’

When EMI agreed to produce a gatefold sleeve, Waters suggested that the colours continue across the inside, augmented by an image of a heartbeat, akin to the blip seen on a hospital oscillator. Thorgerson then decided to add a second prism to the back cover. There would, of course, be no mention of the band’s name or the album’s title anywhere on the outside cover. Clearly on a roll, Hipgnosis then proposed some additional artwork: a sticker featuring a cartoon drawing of the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, and two posters: one featured an infrared image of the pyramids; the other individual photographs of the band members playing live, superimposed over a pink-lit, almost abstract group shot of the band on stage. There were, however, two shots of Roger, though perhaps only for design purposes.

Hipgnosis’ original suggestion of putting everything - posters, stickers and album - in a box was refused by EMI as being too expensive. Nevertheless, in a tribute to the record company’s largesse and Hipgnosis’ admirable blagging skills, Storm and Po were given a budget to fly to Egypt and shoot the pyramids themselves. Unfortunately, Po was struck down by, in his own words, ‘the worst runs you could ever have in your life’, and had to stay back at the hotel, leaving Storm to complete the shoot.