Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (42 page)

Waters was unimpressed. ‘I don’t think the rest of the boys thought those ideas were that brilliant, either,’ he said. ‘So there was this feeling of, “Well, if you don’t like it, do something better.” So I said, “OK, I will.” And I pedalled around South London on my bicycle with my camera and took some photos of Battersea Power Station.’

The South London power station was then already partially closed, and would cease operation completely by 1980. Drawn to what Waters described as ‘the doomy, inhuman’ image of the building, he proposed the idea of flying a pig between its four towers. ‘It’s a symbol of hope,’ he explained, the ideas inspired by the more optimistic message contained in ‘Pigs on the Wing’.

Hipgnosis agreed to help stage the photoshoot. Waters had already devised the idea of including a huge, inflatable pig as part of the stage show for the band’s next tour. The same company that had produced the original Zeppelin airships had made the pig in Germany. The band took possession of a 30ft model, which, according to Nick Mason, was quickly nicknamed ‘Algie’. The deflated pig was brought to the site, where various members of the Floyd’s road crew and employees of the inflatable company set about trying to inflate it with large quantities of helium. Hipgnosis had hired a team of some fourteen photographers for the day, while Steve O’Rourke had cannily employed a marksman to shoot down the pig should it break free of its moorings, aware that its size and buoyancy could make it hazardous to any airline traffic. But technical problems meant that the pig couldn’t be fully inflated. A second attempt the following day was more successful. The pig became airborne, and, with the aid of mooring ropes, was coaxed up alongside the building. Suddenly, a gust of wind caused the inflatable to slip its moorings. O’Rourke had neglected to book the marksman for the second day, and the helium-filled porker broke free. By the afternoon it had been spotted at some 18,000ft above the coastal town of Chatham in Kent.

‘All hell broke loose,’ remembers Po. ‘The RAF and air traffic control at Heathrow all started reporting this flying pig. We even had a mention on the evening news.’ It was a perfect publicity stunt, and the best possible advertising for the new Pink Floyd album. Finally, at 10 p.m., the band had word that the beast had landed in a farmer’s field in Godmersham, Kent. ‘He was furious,’ says Po, ‘as it had apparently scared his cows.’ Surprisingly, the pig was still in one piece. Roadies were sent to Kent to retrieve it. A third day of shooting went off without a hitch, although this time O’Rourke employed two marksmen, just in case.

But the problems weren’t yet over. ‘When we got the photographs back, the shots from the third day looked rather dull,’ says Po. ‘Whereas the pictures from the first day had this fantastic doomy sky and these wonderful cloud formations. So we used the sky from the first day and dropped in the picture of the pig from the third day. If we’d done that at the beginning, we could have saved thousands of pounds.’

The image of an airborne ‘Algie’ drifting between two pillars at Battersea Power Station made for an eye-catching motif on the cover of
Animals
. The forbidding clouds overhead made the sky look as if it had been lifted from a turbulent landscape painting by J.M. W. Turner, and were as striking as the pig itself. Inside, some downbeat black and white photographs of the partially derelict station’s outhouses added to the grim atmosphere.

Animals
was released on 23 January 1977. The final part of Capital Radio’s
The Pink Floyd Story
aired two days earlier, completing six weeks of build-up to the ‘New Floyd’. But there would be a twist in the ‘tail’, in keeping with the album’s spirit of conniving one-upmanship. ‘We made a very big deal of how we had the exclusive on
Animals
,’ says Nicky Horne, ‘and how we were going to broadcast it first. And the night before, I was driving home, listening to John Peel’s show on the radio, when he said, in John’s inimitable style, “We play tomorrow’s hits today”. . . and he played side one of
Animals
. I think Gilmour had given him a copy of the album. I was absolutely beside myself. After six weeks of us going on and on about our exclusive, we had, of course, got our comeuppance.’

Animals
debuted in the UK at number 2 and at number 3 in the US, just failing to match either of its predecessors. ‘I never expected
Animals
to sell as many as
Wish You Were Here
and
Dark Side of the Moon
,’ said Gilmour. ‘There’s not a lot of sweet, singalong stuff on it.’

‘It’s a very violent album,’ admitted Waters at the time. ‘Violence tempered with sadness.’ The music press agreed. Angus Mackinnon in
New Musical Express
applauded
Animals
as ‘one of the most extreme, relentless, harrowing and downright iconoclastic hunks of music to have been made available this side of the sun’. Mackinnon pinpointed Waters’ reluctance to ‘toe the line taken by most rock names in positions similar to his own’. There was, the review claimed, something surprisingly compassionate about Waters’ ‘supremely agnostic fatalism’ even if he comes across as vitriolic or embittered.

In
Melody Maker
, Karl Dallas earmarked the same lyrics as an ‘uncomfortable taste of reality in a medium (“progressive” rock) that has become in recent years, increasingly soporific’. While the review’s closing line seems rather glib - ‘Perhaps they should re-name themselves Punk Floyd’ - there’s truth in the statement. Since the early seventies Pink Floyd had been lumped with other album-oriented bands under the convenient ‘progressive rock’ banner. Although, as Gilmour cautioned years later, ‘I was never a big fan of most of what you’d call progressive rock. I’m like Groucho Marx - I don’t want to belong to any club that will have me as a member.’

Animals
hardly sat well alongside 1977’s punk calling cards, The Clash’s first album and The Sex Pistols’
Never Mind the Bollocks
, but nor did it fit with the music being made by Floyd’s beardy contemporaries. Yes released
Going for the One
in 1977, an album full of fairytale lyricism and whimsy, while Emerson Lake & Palmer’s
Works Volume I
from the same year contained an entire vinyl side given over to Keith Emerson’s
Piano Concerto
(a similar idea had been explored by Pink Floyd eight years earlier on
Ummagumma
). These bands were not wringing their hands over corporate greed, man’s inhumanity to man, or railing at the ‘fucked-up old hags’ that tried to censor what we watched on TV.

As well as the unprecedented PR exercise of Capital Radio’s
The Pink Floyd Story
, the band also found a music critic that they deemed worthy of their attention. A year earlier Waters had given a revealing interview to Philippe Constantin, a friend who worked at the band’s record label in France. But although he continued to treat most critics with suspicion or outright contempt,
Melody Maker
’s Karl Dallas would suddenly find himself persona grata in a way that few had managed before. Dallas was a musician in his own right and a long-time contributor to
Melody Maker
. He had seen Pink Floyd at the UFO club but had never been a fan. ‘I used to talk to Syd and Roger in the refreshment bar,’ he says. ‘I thought the concept of Pink Floyd was interesting but the music was a bit boring.’

Dallas attended the press conference to launch the
Animals
album at Battersea Power Station. Steve O’Rourke was the sole representative of the Floyd camp, informing one writer that David Gilmour’s non-appearance was because he was having trouble getting a babysitter. The writers were informed that they would not be allowed to take notes. Dallas enterprisingly bootlegged the record on his tape recorder, so that he could listen to it again later at his leisure. His favourable write-up was published a week before the album came out. Floyd’s next tour was due to open in Dortmund, West Germany, at the end of the month, and Dallas found himself invited by EMI to attend a later show at Frankfurt.

‘They were taking a load of journalists out there, and I agreed to go,’ says Dallas. ‘So we went along and had dinner with the band. Dave and Nick were always, “Hail fellow, well met”, but they wouldn’t usually give interviews, so the game was to try and get something quotable out of them, but they were usually one step ahead of us. Unfortunately, Roger was a complete arsehole. He sat at one of the tables and refused to speak to anyone. We were on the same plane back to England, and he completely ignored me. Then, out of the blue, a few days later, I received a letter which began something like, “I don’t usually communicate with members of your ignoble profession,
but
. . .” Typical Roger Waters. But, in short, since coming back from Frankfurt, he’d read my review of
Animals
and liked it.’ The two met again by coincidence at a gig, and Dallas challenged Waters to give him an interview. For the next two years, Dallas would find himself becoming one of the few journalists granted an audience with the band whenever they wished to communicate with the world at large.

Pink Floyd’s latest excursion would take them through the next seven months, visiting Europe, Britain, North America and Canada. The female backing vocalists were gone, but Dick Parry was re-hired to play saxophone, alongside a second guitarist and bassist, Terence ‘Snowy’ White. A friend and confidant of Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, White had a similar musical background in the blues to Gilmour. He had recorded an unreleased album for EMI with his own band Heavy Heart, but had busied himself lately with sessions for songwriter Joan Armatrading, as well as just turning down a gig with Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel. White’s name was passed on to David Gilmour through a mutual friend, Kate Bush’s then manager.

The guitarist had been summoned to Britannia Row during the final sessions for
Animals
. One of David Gilmour’s solos had been accidentally erased, and White walked in to encounter a tense atmosphere and a similarly tense Gilmour. Asked if he wanted the gig, White said yes, but asked if he could at least have a jam while he was here. Gilmour’s reply was a rather blunt: ‘Well, you wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t play, would you?’ At which point Waters suggested White play something. Snowy’s sole contribution to the
Animals
album was a spur-of-the-moment guitar solo used to link the final ‘Pigs on the Wing Part Two’ back to the opening track, ‘Pigs on the Wing Part One’, but only for the eight-track cartridge release of the album. On tour, White would play both bass and rhythm guitar.

The
Animals
tour was a prime example of bigger and louder, though not always better. Promoters found themselves presented with a list of requirements before each gig, specifying the exact amount of space required for the stage, the PA and the lighting towers, and exactly how much power was required to run the show. The sheer scale of it meant that a theatre tour would be impossible. Only sports arenas or football stadiums could accommodate the PA, lighting rig and a whole series of inflatable props. The pig was now either suspended on steel cables to travel the length of the arena, or floated above the stage on cables, where it would explode at some suitably climactic moment in the show. Set designers Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park were also commissioned to create an inflatable ‘nuclear family’, comprising a father, mother and 2.4 children, which would make its debut at the Wembley Empire Pool. The helium-filled family would be pumped up backstage with the help of an industrial fan, and unleashed on the audience during the song ‘Dogs’. In America, the props were extended to include a blow-up car, fridge and TV set. Meanwhile, Nick Mason’s new party piece involved scanning through the airwaves on a transistor radio, picking up random noises for the introduction to ‘Wish You Were Here’.

Gerald Scarfe’s animations were also employed on ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ and ‘Welcome to the Machine’. ‘Now that we finally had the music to work with, the animators were able to do even better than they had on the last tour,’ recalls Scarfe. The visual extravaganza of severed heads, robotic reptiles and seas of blood matched the brutal mood of the music. Pink Floyd’s set was now split into two halves. The first consisted of the whole of
Animals
, but rearranged to open with the album’s closing track, ‘Sheep’. The second set was the whole of
Wish You Were Here
, with encores of ‘Money’ and, occasionally, ‘Us and Them’.

Richard Wright’s prediction that Pink Floyd were in ‘danger of becoming slaves to our equipment’ seemed to have been realised. In Frankfurt, the stage filled with so much dry ice that the band were almost completely obscured. Disgruntled fans threw bottles and drink cans, one of them smashing on Nick Mason’s drum kit. Ensuring that the props and film footage were always in sync with the music increased the pressure. Meanwhile, to aid his concentration, Roger Waters took to wearing headphones at every gig. While helping him stay in time, it gave the impression that the bassist was somehow isolating himself from both his fans and the band. Hired hand Snowy White’s presence on the tour was another source of confusion for the audience. He would be the first member of the band to appear on stage, thudding out the bass guitar introduction to ‘Sheep’, while most of the bemused crowd wondered who he was.

The show arrived in England from Europe, with a five-night stand booked at London’s Wembley Empire Pool. They ran straight into red tape. Officials from the Greater London Council descended on the venue to check that the band’s inflatable pig had been equipped with a safety line as instructed. Roger Waters oversaw the inspection, barking orders to the pig’s operators (‘Halt pig! Revolve pig!’). Further GLC restrictions led to serious sound problems on the opening show at Wembley, with the band’s crew working through the night to rectify the trouble. ‘In a band like this, everyone’s got to be working at full efficiency on stage, technically and emotionally,’ Gilmour told Karl Dallas. ‘I can get over things like that, but Roger can’t. He gets very hung up about it.’