Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (43 page)

The warm reception
Animals
had received in the press was not repeated for the live show. Only the ever-gushing Derek Jewell in the
Sunday Times
seemed won over (‘Their presentation is the ultimate in brilliantly staged theatre of despair’). UFO club regular Mick Farren, writing in
New Musical Express,
was less convinced by a ‘depressingly hopeless journey through a menacingly sterile cosmos’. Just like the 1974 tour, there was a wearying familiarity to the complaints: that the show was in danger of overpowering the music.

Hugh Fielder, who’d once hired Gilmour to play guitar in his own band in Cambridge, was now writing for
Sounds
. ‘The trouble was, the whole show ran to a click track,’ says Fielder now. ‘You could hear it start before the show began. There were no computers at the time, so if you wanted that pig to fly out at exactly the right time, you had to be synchronised. And that meant the band, with their heads down, headphones on, hardly looking at each other.’ A week after the Wembley shows,
Melody Maker
printed a letter from an aggrieved Pink Floyd fan, claiming they’d seen David Gilmour yawn during the show.

The North American leg of the tour - now called
In the Flesh -
began at the Miami Baseball Stadium on 22 April. Everything was about to get even bigger. Chief technician Mick Kluczynski later recalled checking the venue for the first open-air American gig and panicking. ‘I walked down on to the field and started looking upwards . . . and up . . . and up,’ he said. ‘I got on the phone to London and told them to double what we’d ordered.’

Once again, lack of rehearsal time brought with it the same problems that had hampered their last tour. ‘The shows varied in quality,’ wrote Nick Mason later. ‘We were not spending enough time on key aspects like segueing from one number to the next. My memory is that some of the staging was as erratic as the music.’

Outdoor shows presented further problems. Playing sports stadia designed to hold as many as 80,000 people, the band found themselves confronted with an audience that had been herded into the venue hours before the show was due to start, many of whom had killed time since by consuming as much booze and drugs as they could get their hands on. The gigs became a godsend for local police officers looking for an easy marijuana bust. The audience was in no frame of mind to concentrate on the nuances and subtleties of the Floyd’s new music, and were still, as Gilmour had complained before, determined ‘to boogie’.

Despite the added pressures, recordings from the
In the Flesh
tour suggest that Gilmour, for one, seemed to spark off having another musician in the band, and both he and Snowy White shook up some of the material, producing some dynamic twin-guitar readings of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. At California’s Oakland Coliseum, White even found himself bundled back on stage for a spur-of-the-moment encore of ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, a song he had never heard, let alone played before.

Offstage, though, the mood was sometimes fraught. Roger Waters preferred to isolate himself from the rest of the group, arriving at the venue alone, and shunning any post-gig parties or meals. In Montreal, he was on the local golf course within minutes of checking into his hotel. The bass player’s attitude was, as ever, a particular problem for Richard Wright, who jumped on a plane after one of the gigs and flew back to England. ‘I was threatening to leave, and I remember saying, “I don’t want any more of it.” Steve [O’Rourke] said, “You can’t, you mustn’t.” ’

At the Oakland Coliseum, promoter Bill Graham filled a backstage pen with pigs in honour of the band’s new mascot. Ginger Gilmour, who was accompanying David on the tour along with baby daughter Alice, was a staunch vegetarian. She demanded the animals be released. ‘I think Ginger eventually went vegan,’ says Emo. ‘Of course, Dave was the complete opposite. He’d be off sneaking steak sandwiches and hamburgers.’

Ginger also found herself clashing with Waters’ new girlfriend, Carolyne Christie. Both came from wildly different backgrounds and, as one associate from the time recalls, ‘they did not see eye to eye. Carolyne was landed gentry, and had all the attitudes associated with her class, and she seemed to have this huge effect on Waters. He went through a massive change in the seventies. Firstly, he had this devout Socialist wife of whom he was very enamoured intellectually, and then he was with this very aristocratic woman, and he seemed to change completely.’

For Richard Wright, Waters’ recent decision to buy a country house had been a prime example of his bandmate’s hypocrisy. ‘I was the first of the band to buy a country house, after
Dark Side of the Moon
,’ said Wright, ‘and Roger sat me down and said, “I can’t believe you’ve done this, you’ve sold out, you’re doing what every other rock star does.” It took him, I think, a year and a half to buy his own country seat. I said, “Roger you’re a hypocrite”, and he said, “Oh, I didn’t want it, my wife wanted it.” Absolute bullshit.’ In Waters’ case, his house was the grandest of the lot: a Georgian mansion in the beautiful Hampshire village of Kimbridge, right on the River Test, a stretch of water renowned for some of the best trout fishing in the country.

The 1942 Oscar-nominated movie
Orchestra Wives
- ‘It’s hep! It’s hot! It’s hilarious!’ - was a fictional account of a swing-era big band and the bitching and cat-fighting that went on between the musicians’ wives. ‘If you’ve ever seen that film, it will tell you what it was like between the Floyd and their other halves,’ says Jeff Dexter. ‘Let’s just say that two of the band members had extremely influential wives.’

As the tour drew on, Waters’ mood became even darker. He was frustrated by playing cavernous, impersonal arenas to audiences that he believed were only there to get stoned or drunk and hear ‘Money’. At Soldier Field, the Superbowl stadium in Chicago, Steve O’Rourke took Waters up to the top of the bleachers behind the stage to look at the crowd. The promoters claimed to have sold out the 67,000-capacity stadium, but Waters was suspicious. ‘I looked down and said, “No, there’s at least 80,000 people there.” I’d done enough big shows to know what 60,000 people looked like.’ When the promoters insisted they’d only sold 67,000 tickets, O’Rourke hired a helicopter, a photographer and an attorney. The crowd was photographed from the air. ‘There were 95,000 people there, and we were due another $640,000.’

On stage, Waters began shouting out random numbers, usually while the band ploughed through ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’. It was only after a few gigs that the others realised that the numbers related to how many shows the band had played on the tour so far, as though he were ticking off the days until he could go home. His health was also suffering. Backstage before a show at the Philadelphia Spectrum, Waters collapsed with stomach cramps. A physician injected him with a muscle relaxant, which enabled him to perform, albeit without any feeling in his hands. The experience would inspire the lyrics in Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. Waters was later diagnosed as suffering from hepatitis.

Playing two nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Waters lost his temper with the audience. ‘Pigs on the Wing’, his acoustic love song to Carolyne, was marred by the noise of exploding fireworks being thrown by members of the audience, a hazardous but frequent occurrence at American stadium shows. Waters was in no mood for interruptions. ‘You stupid motherfucker!’ he shouted. ‘Just fuck off and let us get on with it!’

The final night of the tour was at Montreal’s newly built Olympic Stadium. The construction team had only just moved out, leaving behind a giant crane, which did little to dispel the impersonal atmosphere of the arena. Just a couple of lines into ‘Pigs on the Wing’, the air was rent by a couple of loud explosions: more firecrackers. ‘Oh, for
fuck’s
sake!’ Waters seethed. ‘I’m trying to sing a song up here that some people want to listen to.’ Further firecrackers went off at the start of ‘Wish You Were Here’. By the end of the show, Waters was furious. Accounts vary as to what exactly happened. The bassist has since claimed to have been infuriated by one particularly raucous fan, who was tirelessly screaming his devotion to the band. Others claimed that Waters encouraged the behaviour; some that he was sick of hearing the fan calling for ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’. Waters eventually walked to the lip of the stage, leaned over and spat in the fan’s face.

The band returned to the stage for a final encore, a slow blues jam, while the crew slowly dismantled the equipment around them. But Gilmour was nowhere to be seen. Refusing to join in, he walked out of the dressing room area and into the crowd, just another anonymous long-haired guy in a T-shirt, and made his way to the sound desk to watch the rest of the band playing on without him. ‘I thought it was a great shame to end a six-month tour with a rotten show,’ he said. The guitarist was now pondering whether Pink Floyd still had a future.

CHAPTER EIGHT

WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY?

‘I’d have to say that Roger Waters is one of the world’s most difficult men.’

Nick Mason

‘O
h, dear, dowe have to?’ There is a note of distress in Nick Mason’s voice.

And it had all been going so well.

Pink Floyd’s drummer is on the campaign trail for an updated version of his memoirs, carefully subtitled ‘A
Personal
History of Pink Floyd’. It is winter 2005, and the group’s Live 8 reunion is still foremost in people’s minds. Mason is droll and self-effacing, appearing to have an endless supply of ‘I’m only the drummer’ quips. But he’s clearly proud of the reunited band’s performance in Hyde Park. He painstakingly points out that this thaw in relations between David Gilmour and Roger Waters does not signify a long-term reunion for Pink Floyd, but, unable to help himself, admits that
should
they decide to ‘do something again, my bag is packed and ready to go’. Mason is, after all, as David Gilmour once damned with the faintest of praise, ‘the best drummer for Pink Floyd’.

Mason is conducting interviews from an office/warehouse in a tucked-away little street in Islington, North London. It is the centre of operations for his company, Ten Tenths, which has been hiring out cars, motorcycles, aeroplanes, in fact, every conceivable mode of transport, to film and television companies since 1985. Mason’s own collection of sporty little numbers are among those available for the likes of pop singer Robbie Williams to tear around in for his next video.

After merrily recalling watching jazz pianist Thelonious Monk playing a New York club in 1966, the conversation has moved on through the years and we have arrived, somehow, at
The Wall
: Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, stage show and movie. All of a sudden, Mason’s earlier enthusiasm for his subject seems to have drained away.

‘It’s just that it was such an awful time,’ he explains. ‘I’ve tried to put it out of my mind.’

Roger Waters’ desire to build a wall between himself and Pink Floyd’s audience had been festering for some years before the ‘awful time’ of
The Wall
. But the moment it came closer to becoming a reality had been the final date on the
In the Flesh
tour in July 1977. Waters was mortified by his behaviour (‘Oh my God, what have I been reduced to?’). Backstage, he began a play fight with manager Steve O’Rourke, and a misjudged karate kick led to him cutting his foot.

Carolyne Christie had been at the show with the Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, for whom she’d worked as a secretary. The twenty-eight-year-old Ezrin had overseen albums by Lou Reed, Kiss and the Floyd’s old support band, Alice Cooper. Ezrin, Carolyne and a bleeding Roger Waters piled into a limousine for the drive back to the band’s hotel via a hospital. Also in the car was a psychiatrist friend of Ezrin’s.

‘I always thought it was a wonderful coincidence that I had a psychiatrist with me that night,’ says Ezrin. ‘So we drove Roger to the emergency room to get his foot looked at, and then, as we’re heading onto the hotel, he starts talking about his sense of alienation on the tour, and how he sometimes felt like building a wall between himself and the audience. My friend, the shrink, is fascinated. And, for me, there was a moment’s spark. I don’t know whether it was me or Roger or the shrink that said it first, but one of us went, “Wow! You know that might be a really good idea.” ’

‘I loathed playing in stadiums,’ explained Waters later. ‘I kept saying to people on that tour, “I’m not really enjoying this, you know. There is something very wrong with this.” And the answer to that was, “Oh really? Yeah, well, do you know we grossed over 4 million dollars today”, and this went on more and more. And so, at a certain point, something in my brain snapped, and I developed the idea of doing a concert where we built a wall across the front of the stage that divided the audience from the performers.’

With the tour over, the band returned to England. Gilmour and Wright, encouraged by their wives, planned solo albums. In years to come, Waters would challenge the accusation that he had turned down their compositions and discouraged them from writing: ‘How on earth could I possibly stop Dave Gilmour writing?’ In truth, nobody was entirely sure whether Pink Floyd would even make another album. Solo projects afforded them all some much-needed time apart. Through the end of 1977 and the beginning of 1978, Gilmour would help produce Unicorn’s third album and, to greater commercial success, protégée Kate Bush’s second single, ‘The Man with the Child in his Eyes’.

Despite his lack of songwriting credits on
Animals
, Gilmour also had enough material to start an album of his own. ‘I think Dave was a bit bored and had some time on his hands,’ says Rick Wills, who played bass alongside drummer Willie Wilson. It was the first time the three of them had worked together since their trip to Spain and France over ten years before. Jamming sessions at Gilmour’s home studio led to sessions at Britannia Row and, for tax purposes, a recording stint at Super Bear Studios near Nice in January 1978. The album, entitled simply
David Gilmour
, appeared four months later. Roy Harper and Unicorn’s Ken Baker were among those that contributed lyrics. ‘There’s No Way Out of Here’ and ‘So Far Away’ could have referred to Gilmour’s fraught situation in Pink Floyd, while the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of the female backing vocalists, the resolute mid-tempos and smouldering guitar solos were straight out of the Floyd songbook. Gilmour would later claim, though, that much of the album had a ‘mortality theme’.