Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (41 page)

The world around him would hardly improve his frame of mind. During one of the longest, hottest summers on record, violence erupted at the Notting Hill Carnival, the now annual celebration of West Indian culture of which the Floyd’s former manager Peter Jenner had been the first treasurer. Police officers arrested a pickpocket near Portobello Road, prompting a group of black youths to come to his defence. Riot police were met with a hail of bricks, bottles and traffic cones. The incident would be eulogised in the song ‘White Riot’ by an angry new rock band called The Clash.

The economic and social environment influenced a musical sea change of which The Clash were not the only proponents. By the mid- 1970s, there was a growing unease among some critics and fans with what they saw as the complacent attitude of rock’s super-league bands. Pink Floyd’s financial status, general aloofness and age (each of the band members was now in his thirties) made them a target for critics who believed that rock music should be made by younger, hungrier bands.

By 1974, groups had sprung up on both sides of the Atlantic championing a return to short songs and the death of the concept album. In New York, The Ramones shambled on stage looking like a sixties motorcycle gang, playing tracks that sometimes barely lasted two minutes. In Essex’s Canvey Island, Dr Feelgood - all short hair and tight suits - peddled their own revved-up brand of dirty rhythm and blues.

Before long, others had arrived, and the music press had begun championing the likes of The Clash, The Damned and The Sex Pistols,

‘punk rock’ groups whose confrontational songs didn’t require a quadraphonic PA system to be heard properly, and seemed a world away from Pink Floyd’s studied introspection. Floyd were hardly the worst offenders, or the most maligned. With their gatefold album sleeves, musical virtuosity and arty conceits, Yes, Jethro Tull, Supertramp, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Genesis found themselves even more in the firing line.

Like The Ramones and Dr Feelgood, punk bands shunned the laid-back hippie fashion sense of the old guard. Beards and flares were out; their drug of choice was speed, not marijuana. Their musical brevity and anti-everything stance made them an attractive proposition to those fans bored of watching millionaire rock stars the size of matchstick men playing at the far end of football stadiums.

The Hipgnosis design team had enjoyed an early encounter with punk rock. Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell was photographing pop singer Olivia Newton-John behind the company’s Denmark Street studios when he heard someone coughing up phlegm and spitting out of a nearby window. It was The Sex Pistols’ singer Johnny Rotten (in real life, a twenty-year-old Hawkwind fan called John Lydon). The band and their manager Malcolm McLaren had moved into a rehearsal space in the same building. Over the coming months, Storm and Po would regularly pass the aspiring punk rockers in the communal hallway.

One day, Lydon appeared wearing a customised Pink Floyd T-shirt. Above the Floyd’s logo, he’d added the words ‘I Hate’. Po recalls: ‘I said, “Are you having a fucking go at me?” He said, “Yes, you and all that other
shit
you’re always playing.” Mind you, they were terribly nice and polite most of the time.’

The accusations of complacency were hardly unfounded. The young guard of 1966 was now the old guard of 1976. A year before The Who had released
The Who By Numbers
, a highly confessional album in which Pete Townshend bemoaned his own band’s slide from hungry young mods to corporate rock monsters. Townshend’s lyrics from another Who song, ‘New Song’, created in 1977 about writing the same old song with some new lines, which everybody wanted to cheer - could have related to Roger Waters, who’d been voicing similar concerns since the success of
Dark Side of the Moon
. Yet while Townshend strived to engage with these young upstarts, and found himself riding on a degree of goodwill from those punk bands that had grown up listening to The Who, Pink Floyd remained indifferent. The growing distance between them and their audience may have troubled Waters, but, unlike Townshend, he was not given to drunken nights at the Roxy club in the company of various Sex Pistols. He remained resolutely aloof.

‘When was punk?’ quipped Waters in 1992. ‘I didn’t notice it.’

Gilmour was more accommodating, just. ‘I don’t think we felt alienated by punk, we just didn’t feel it was particularly relevant to us,’ he later told
NME
. ‘I’m always amazed when I meet young English musicians who were big in the punk era, and they say they loved everything we did - and that includes one of The Sex Pistols! No, I’m not going to tell you which one.’

Nick Mason would end up producing The Damned’s second album,
Music for Pleasure
, at Britannia Row in 1977: ‘But that’s only because they wanted Syd Barrett to do it. Obviously, he wasn’t available, and I think they were rather disappointed to get me.’ The Damned’s desire to create, in their words, a ‘psychedelic punk masterpiece’ was thwarted, as their bass guitarist Captain Sensible soon realised. ‘Nick Mason was not an unpleasant bloke,’ said the Captain. ‘But, here we were, bunking the Tube everyday and saying, “Fuckin’ hell, Nick, I nearly got caught by the ticket collector this morning”, and all he could say was, “I came in my Ferrari.” There just wasn’t a meeting of minds.’

Yet while his age, wealth and reputation may have been against him, Roger Waters’ concerns - with inequality, prejudice, rampant monetarism, the numbing of the human spirit - weren’t so far removed from those being expressed by some of these young bands. Pink Floyd’s next album,
Animals
, would chime with the times rather more than anyone might have expected.

In a concerted burst of activity throughout the last half of 1976, Waters pieced together a new concept: a nightmarish future world in which the human race had been reduced to three sub-species: dogs, pigs and sheep. Each had different traits designed to reflect the foibles and preoccupations of human beings: the clawing, fighting dogs; the tyrannical, despotic pigs; and, inevitably, the mindless sheep. The concept was borrowed from George Orwell’s 1945 satirical novel
Animal Farm
, in which the animal society is an allegory for the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime. In Pink Floyd’s version the sheep ultimately rise up to conquer their oppressors. A happy ending of sorts to a concept that never quite hung together as well as
Dark Side of the Moon
or Floyd’s next concept album,
The Wall
.

‘Sometime during the middle of recording it, it seemed like the right thing to do, to tie it all together,’ explained Waters. ‘Raving and Drooling’ and ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ would now be reworked at Britannia Row to fit the theme of the new album. The former would become the song ‘Sheep’, while the second would become ‘Dogs’. Waters would contribute two further songs, ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ and ‘Pigs On the Wing’. Once again, Waters was the dominant songwriter and ideas man.

Subsequently, some band members have claimed that the mood around the band was better than it had been during
Wish You Were Here
. Though Nick Mason later recalled that ‘Roger was in full flow with the ideas, but he was really keeping Dave down, and frustrating him deliberately.’ Part of the subsequent problem between the two would lie in the allocation of royalties. These were allocated per song, and Gilmour had a co-writing credit on only one track, ‘Dogs’, which was, nevertheless, the longest song on the album, taking up most of the first side.

At the eleventh hour, Waters appeared with ‘Pigs on the Wing’, which he promptly split into two, so that one verse opened the album and the second one closed the album, making it two separate pieces of music and bumping up his royalties even further. But while the others may have felt aggrieved by this situation, none of them was bringing very much to the table. Gilmour, by his own admission, was never the quickest or most prolific of songwriters, and he now had another distraction: Ginger had just given birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter named Alice. In the meantime, neither Mason nor Wright was contributing new songs. In the drummer’s case this was less unusual, but considering how many songwriting credits the keyboard player had on
Wish You Were Here
, something had clearly changed.

‘It was partly my fault, because I didn’t push my material,’ says Wright.

‘Or I was too lazy to write anything. But Dave
did
have something to offer, and only managed to get a couple of things on there.’

In truth, Wright was distracted by problems in his marriage to Juliette. But for him, the
Animals
sessions also marked the beginning of a swift decline in his relationship with Waters: ‘
Animals
was a slog. It wasn’t a fun record to make, but this was when Roger
really
started to believe that he was the sole writer for the band. He believed that it was only because of him that the band was still going, and obviously, when he started to develop his ego trips, the person he would have his conflicts with would be me.’

Most of the songs that made up
Animals
would be among Waters’ most forthright and vitriolic to date. But if Gilmour was, as Mason maintained, being ‘kept down’ by the bassist when it came to songwriting credits, he makes up for it in his explosive playing. Gilmour does some of his best work on
Animals
. He takes just one lead vocal on the Gilmour/ Waters-written ‘Dogs’, giving the bassist’s sour lyrics the same sweetening makeover they received on ‘Welcome to the Machine’, only to make them even more affecting in the process. While the guitarist would freely admit to not sharing Waters’ bitter worldview, he never lets the mask slip on this caustic dismissal of money-hungry corporate climbers. There’s something almost unbearable about Gilmour’s unflinching delivery on the line ‘Just another sad old man, all alone and dying of cancer . . .’ Partway through, the song slows down to a funereal pace, allowing Wright to reprise the weeping synthesiser sounds used on
Wish You Were Here
. Waters assumes the lead vocal on the final verses, reeling off repeated statements in a high-pitched, slightly strangulated tone (‘Who was fitted with collar and chain’). The nature of these final lyrics prompted some comparisons to the beatniks’ set-text of some ten years earlier, the Allen Ginsberg poem ‘Howl’ (‘Who walked all night with their shoes full of blood’). For all those music press accusations of complacency, these were not the lyrics or sentiments you would find expressed on an album by any of Floyd’s contemporaries.

‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ was briefer, simpler but no less unpleasant. The metronomic, funky rhythm and repetitive cowbell almost puts the listener in mind of Free’s ‘Alright Now’, especially when Gilmour starts playing some bluesy fills around the beat. In reality, the song was a close relative to
Wish You Were Here
’s ‘Have a Cigar’. Then comes a barrage of grotesque honking noises, as Waters starts singing about the tyrannical pigs, while name-checking the pro-censorship campaigner Mary Whitehouse. ‘I kept throwing that verse about Mary Whitehouse away,’ said Waters. ‘But I kept coming back to it.’ The lyrics ‘bus stop rat bag’ and ‘fucked-up old hag’ also find their way into the song. The combination of lyrical spite and pristine musicianship makes the song sound even nastier.

While ‘Sheep’ is again credited to Waters alone, it’s difficult to imagine the song without Gilmour’s contribution. The group’s savage humour finds a way in with the inclusion of the 23
^rd
Psalm, albeit modified to celebrate a Lord who maketh me to hang on hooks in high places and converteth me to lamb cutlets, in which the unquestioning sheep - a metaphor for unquestioning Pink Floyd fans, maybe? - rise up and savage their masters. The song fell victim to what Waters had complained about on
Wish You Were Here
, by ‘going on and on and on’, but Gilmour’s closing guitar solo, a moment of pure heavy metal riffing, justifies the wait. ‘Sheep’ was the only song from
Animals
to be considered for the band’s setlist when they reconvened in 1987. While Gilmour may have loved the guitar solo, he declined to play it on the grounds that he could never sing it with the same amount of venom as Waters did.

‘Pigs on the Wing Part One’ and ‘Part Two’, the bassist’s last-minute additions to
Animals
, offered a tiny ray of hope amid all the ranting and raving. The sentiments behind the song were inspired by events in Waters’ life outside the band. ‘I’m in love,’ he said at the time. ‘The first verse poses the question, “Where would I be without you?”, and the second says, “In the face of all this other shit, I know you care about me and that makes it possible to survive.” ’

It marked the first time an outright love song had found its way on to any Pink Floyd album. Waters’ new romantic interest was Carolyne Anne Christie. The daughter of a military captain, she was the niece of the Marquis of Zetland, part of the Zetland-Dundas lineage of landowners, with estates in Scotland and Yorkshire. Her involvement in the music business extended much further than her relationship with Pink Floyd’s bassist. Carolyne had previously worked for Atlantic Records and was employed by Canadian record producer Bob Ezrin when she met Waters. She was also still married to her second husband, Robert ‘Rock’ Scully, manager of The Grateful Dead. According to Scully, in his autobiography
Living with the Dead
, their 1974 marriage took place purely so Carolyne could obtain a green card and join Led Zeppelin on a US tour. Carolyne’s background and outlook - she was a member of the British aristocracy and a rock ’n’ roll fan - couldn’t have been more different from those of Waters’ first wife, Judy. Roger and Judy had not had any children together, but in November 1976, Carolyne gave birth to her and Roger’s first child, a son called Harry.

Animals
was completed by Christmas. Taking a break from new fatherhood, Waters turned his attention to the pressing matter of the album’s front cover. In an unprecedented turn of events, Hipgnosis had found their initial ideas for the sleeve rejected. Among several ideas presented was a drawing of a small child in his pyjamas stumbling into his parents’ bedroom and seeing them having sex (‘Copulating . . . like animals!’ explains Storm Thorgerson).