Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (51 page)

The opening sounds of several perfectly enunciating British news-casters, including one discussing the Falklands War, gives the whole record an identifiably English flavour, which must have baffled American audiences not traditionally inclined to take notice of wars in parts of the world they had never heard of. ‘Not Now John’, the one song on which Gilmour sang lead vocals, was released as a single in the UK and US, after Steve O’Rourke persuaded the band that American radio stations were keen to play it. One of the album’s few up-tempo tracks, its chorus line of ‘fuck all that’ was hastily substituted by a new line of ‘stuff all that’. Gilmour’s rasping vocal and squalling guitar were still red herrings. A song about the unquestioning, ‘fuck all that’ mentality of the jingoistic Brit, ‘Not Now John’ was still a punchy, cynical number. For British listeners there also seemed something prickly and snobbish about its closing lines of ‘Where’s the bar?’ repeated in French, Italian, Greek, Spanish and, finally, English: ‘Oi, where’s the fucking bar?’ The song made it into the UK Top 30, but failed to do anything in America.

Critical reaction veered from
Melody Maker
’s blunt assessment that
The Final Cut
was ‘a milestone in the history of awfulness’ to
Rolling Stone
’s belief that it was ‘art-rock’s crowning masterpiece’. In
NME
, Richard Cook claimed that Waters’ songwriting was ‘blown to hell. Like the poor damned Tommies that haunt his mind.’

Waters granted an interview to Karl Dallas, in which he admitted that ‘communication in the band isn’t too good’ while insisting that his comments in an earlier interview did not suggest ‘the end of the band, which is nonsense’, only that he was now toying with the idea of making a solo album.

David Gilmour stuck to the party line in an interview from the same year. ‘We did have an argument about the production credits,’ he explained carefully, ‘because my ideas of production weren’t the way that Roger saw it being [sic]. [
The Final Cut
] is very good but it’s not personally how I would see a Pink Floyd record going.’

In years to come, Gilmour would become increasingly bullish in his dismissal of the record, trotting out a standard response that there are only three good songs on the album: ‘ “The Fletcher Memorial Home”, “The Final Cut” and, umm, I can’t remember right now . . . there’s two of them anyway.’

However disliked it may now be among some of their audience and the band themselves (even Waters would later admit that ‘not everything can be a fucking masterpiece’),
The Final Cut
could never find Pink Floyd accused of complacency. The musical offerings from many of their sixties and seventies contemporaries at the time prove how difficult some of their peers found it to stay relevant in the new decade. The Rolling Stones’
Dirty Work
album saw the beleaguered Jagger/Richards partnership hitting an all-time low, and The Who’s
It’s Hard
suggested that even their old firebrand Pete Townshend was all out of puff. In such lacklustre company,
The Final Cut
, however heavy-going, sounded as if Pink Floyd still gave a shit about
something
.

Without a tour or any serious promotional campaign to support the album, the band seemed to have fallen into professional limbo by 1983. Meanwhile, their one-time frontman, Syd Barrett, had left London and returned to Cambridge. His excessive spending had left him penniless and his poor diet had given him stomach ulcers. Syd’s old management company, Blackhill, was now looking after Ian Dury and The Clash, when a ghost from their past appeared in the office.

‘I think he wanted us to sign a passport form,’ recalls Peter Jenner. ‘He could barely talk, and he looked like a bouncer. He’d put on an enormous amount of weight and was wearing this overcoat that looked more like a tent. We were like, “
Who
is that?” A whisper went round the office. “My God, it’s Syd.” ’

By now, Barrett’s mother had sold the house in Hills Road and moved, with her son, to nearby St Margaret’s Square. Barrett agreed to an operation to alleviate his stomach problems. According to Tim Willis’s superlative biography,
Madcap
, Roger Waters’ mother Mary helped him find a gardening job, but it didn’t last long. In 1982, as his former band released their challenging new album, Barrett drifted back to London and booked himself into his old haunt, the Chelsea Cloisters. Within weeks he was gone again. According to Barrett myth, walking back to Cambridge. ‘I have no idea if he really did
walk
back,’ ventures old friend David Gale, ‘but that’s the story.’

Two journalists from a French magazine,
Actuel
, trailed Barrett to Cambridge, bringing with them a bag of laundry he’d left behind at Chelsea Cloisters. Barrett answered the door, politely offering to pay them for his clothes. Asked if he played guitar while living in London, he replied, ‘No, I watch TV, that’s all.’ He allowed the pair to take a photograph before scuttling back into the house.

Old friends would run into him from time to time, but they didn’t encounter the same Syd they’d known before. Sue Kingsford was driving to her parents’ house on the outskirts of Cambridge when she saw Barrett standing by the side of the road, looking as if he were trying to hitch a lift.

‘So we stopped the car and told him to get in,’ says Sue. ‘ “Where are you going, Syd?” “I’m not going anywhere.” We took him to a pub, the Tickell Arms. He had a pint of Guinness, but didn’t say a single word. In the end, I said, “Great to see you, Syd, I have to go home now.” He said, “Yes, great to see you, too.” And we drove him back to Cambridge.’

In interviews, Roger Waters would often state that Syd was suffering from schizophrenia, though his family never confirmed this. ‘I think Syd was just terribly unlucky with one trip,’ offers Libby Gausden. ‘Syd’s mother, Win, always thought somebody had slipped something into his drink. That really was what she believed. I don’t think she knew anything about drugs.’

However, throughout the first half of the 1980s, he voluntarily spent time in nearby Fulbourn psychiatric hospital (‘That was awfully ironic,’ says Libby Gausden. ‘Syd loved that area, and we often used to sit and look at the hospital’) and, according to some, Greenwoods Therapeutic Community near Billericay in Essex. Once again, though, he is said to have ended up walking back to Cambridge.

‘We’d get reports back about Syd during this time,’ says Storm Thorgerson. ‘He seemed very protected by his family, and I think Pink Floyd were supporting him financially. But I don’t think he was happy. One wishes it could have all been better.’

With Pink Floyd’s future uncertain, David Gilmour seemed determined to keep busy. The Gilmours now had a new addition to the family, a third daughter, Sara. The guitarist also spent his time demoing songs at his home studio, and singing backing vocals on Kate Bush’s brilliantly bizarre new album,
The Dreaming
.

For Gilmour’s second solo album, 1984’s
About Face
, he rounded up an A-list roster of session players, including drummer Jeff Porcaro and bassist Pino Palladino. By the time sessions began at Pathé-Marconi Studios in Paris, Gilmour had also called in the cavalry.

‘David had got himself into a certain depth and decided he needed some help, so he rang me,’ explains Bob Ezrin, who was swiftly recruited to co-produce the record. ‘I think David felt liberated doing something outside of the Floyd, and had a good time making the record.’ Ezrin’s abiding memory of the sessions is Gilmour’s breakneck dashes around the Champs-Elysées in his new Porsche 928. ‘He had right-hand drive in a left-drive country, so I’m in the seat where I think the driver is supposed to be. Terrifying.’

About Face
was released in March 1984. Gilmour gamely signed up for a promotional campaign unlike any he had undertaken with Pink Floyd. The album’s first single, ‘Blue Light’, was a funky pop song, which matched Earth, Wind and Fire-style horns to the guitar riff from The Eagles’ ‘Life in the Fast Lane’. Aware of how important it now was for rock stars to make videos, Storm Thorgerson directed a promo, in which a freshly shorn, spruced-up Gilmour played guitar alongside a troupe of dancing girls before falling to his knees on a helipad - complete with helicopter - to play the final guitar solo.

The rest of the album was more convincing. Pete Townshend contributed lyrics to the wistfully romantic ‘Love on the Air’ and a scabrous ‘All Lovers are Deranged’, while Gilmour forced himself out of his comfort zone to write about his feelings; expressing anger and confusion at the killing of John Lennon (‘Murder’), his opposition to having American Pershing-2 missiles on British soil (‘Cruise’), and even his troubled relationship with Roger Waters (‘You Know I’m Right’). ‘It wasn’t initially about that,’ he said, ‘but when I wrote the first verse, people all assumed it was about that and it coloured the rest of the writing.’ If writing the words still proved to be Gilmour’s Achilles’ heel, there was enough of his signature guitar bluster and breathily English vocals to mask any lyrical shortcomings.

Nowadays, the album’s use of then cutting-edge studio technology and celebrity session-men marks it down as a typical mid-eighties solo album from a superstar rocker on day release. Critical response was polite but lukewarm, and the album peaked just outside the UK Top 20 and US Top 30.

‘I thought too much about the album,’ says Gilmour now. ‘I tried too hard to get away from Pink Floyd. It was very rocky, and I think, in some ways, I was being less true to myself than I was on my first solo record.’

The real issue was that ‘the great unwashed’, as Roger Waters would later describe the general public, didn’t really know who anyone in Pink Floyd was. Gilmour willingly addressed the issue at the time: ‘The fact is, our individual names mean virtually nothing in terms of the great record- and ticket-buying public.’

After an uncomfortable appearance on the hip new UK TV show,
The Tube
, Gilmour set off on a European and North American tour of 24,000-seater theatres, rather than arenas. His touring party included bassist Mickey Feat and former Bad Company guitarist Mick Ralphs. With his own multi-platinum rock band in dry dock, Ralphs, who lived near Hookend Manor, asked if he could join the tour. No slouch as a lead guitarist, Ralphs was content to play back-up to Gilmour in a set that included the whole of
About Face
, some extracts from the first solo album and just two Pink Floyd numbers.

On stage, without the distraction of flying pigs, a cardboard brick wall or a scowling Roger Waters, Gilmour seemed to relish just playing and singing. As Gerald Scarfe explains, ‘When we were doing
The Wall
, while Dave never said it that straightforwardly, I think he would have been happy to give a concert without
any
visual effects. For him, it’s all about the music.’

Also on the tour were support band The Television Personalities, a punk-era group whose sound now borrowed from the psychedelic era. Their cover of ‘Arnold Layne’ impressed Gilmour, but he was less taken by another song, ‘I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives’, during which the band chose to reveal Barrett’s address to the audience. By the time they rolled into Birmingham, The Television Personalities had been removed from the tour.

Nick Mason and Richard Wright attended one of the three nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, with Mason playing drums on an encore of ‘Comfortably Numb’. Poor ticket sales for some dates led to cancellations, but the tour eventually turned a profit. No sooner had Gilmour flown home from the final date in New York on 16 July, than Roger Waters began the American leg of his own solo tour a day later in Connecticut. Waters, it seemed, was almost shadowing Gilmour, with his new solo album,
The Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking
, released just six weeks after
About Face
.

Waters’ new offering was the song cycle, which had been passed over by Pink Floyd in favour of
The Wall
five years before.
The Pros and Cons
. . . told the story of one man’s night of dreaming and waking, counted down in real time, with each song title preceded by a time, beginning at 4.30 a.m. and ending at 5.11 a.m. The front cover picture of a naked female hitch-hiker from behind, belonging to porn model Linzi Drew (a black band obscured the offending rear in some sensitive countries), was the starting point for the story.

In the course of his forty-minute sleep pattern, Waters’ hero juggles the positives and negatives of monogamous family life over meaningless sexual encounters. As well as some more random scenarios, the hero picks up a hitch-hiker with whom he has a fumbled sexual encounter, before being interrupted mid-coitus by knife-wielding Arabs; a metaphor, perhaps, for his conscience. Waters’ rather unique vocal style - plenty of madman shrieks and Dylan-ish whining - was perfect for a lot of the material. His lyrics, too, were darkly witty and sometimes wonderfully politically incorrect. This was Waters rummaging around in another corner of his psyche, exploring the sexual neuroses of a post-war, middle-class Englishman. Adhering to Roger’s customary love of a happy ending, the hero finally wakes up in his own bed, overjoyed to discover his wife lying beside him. ‘It’s a complicated piece of work,’ said Waters in an understatement. ‘Although it’s quite clear to me what was going on, the narrative is by no means linear.’

Waters also shared musical resources with Gilmour. Engineer Andy Jackson and musicians Michael Kamen and Ray Cooper worked on both
The Pros and Cons
. . . and
About Face
. Waters’ trump card, though, was his choice of guitarist. Through girlfriend Carolyne Christie’s friendship with Patti Boyd, Waters bagged himself Patti’s husband, Eric Clapton.

Musically, Clapton’s presence made sense. Aside from bonding over a mutual love of fly-fishing, Waters shared the guitarist’s passion for the blues (asking him to play like one of their heroes Floyd Cramer), and, for all the lyrical and thematic complexity, the music rarely deviated from the genre. Furthermore, having Eric Clapton play on his record was an obvious snub to guitar hero David Gilmour.