Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (52 page)

The problem with
The Pros and Cons
. . . is that it suffocates some interesting ideas with too many lyrics, and there are simply not enough tunes. Those tunes, scant as they are, are also used once too often. The title track and first single is one of the few moments of balance, with Clapton’s signature riffing yoked to a deranged lyric in which, at one point, the hero dreams that Yoko Ono is telling him to leap to his death from the wing of an aeroplane. The second single, ‘5.06 a.m. (Every Stranger’s Eyes)’, was a booming power ballad, made less chart-friendly but more interesting by Waters’ vocals, which suggested an asylum inmate muttering to himself in the dark.

A number 13 chart placing in the UK showed that Waters was the least anonymous member of Pink Floyd. Critics, however, were less enamoured, especially
Rolling Stone
writer Kurt Loder, who’d praised
The Final Cut
, but denounced Waters’ latest offering as ‘a strangely static, faintly hideous record’. Even Waters’ ally,
Melody Maker
’s Karl Dallas, found it a struggle, but ended on an upbeat note: ‘His second album, I predict, will blow your wig off.’

‘
The Pros and Cons
. . . wasn’t a wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, far-out rock ’n’ roll album,’ offered Waters in its defence later. ‘It was a very introspective piece about how I felt about my failed marriage [to Judy], my feelings about sex and all kinds of difficult areas.’

To the astonishment of his record company, management and fans, Eric Clapton also announced that he would now be joining Waters’ band on tour. A year earlier, Clapton had made a comeback with his
Money and Cigarettes
album, explaining to all that this was his first record since giving up alcohol. Yet his willingness to play in Waters’ band may have had more to do with his own fanciful desire for anonymity; the same impetus behind him forming Derek and The Dominoes in the early seventies, and attempting to convince fans and critics that he was ‘just one of the band’.

The rest of Waters’ group included, among others,
The Final Cut
’s session drummer Andy Newmark, keyboard players Michael Kamen and Chris Stainton, and additional guitarist Tim Renwick, from Waters’ old alma mater the Cambridge County.

Waters’ show would be split into two sets: the first made up of Pink Floyd songs, including less obvious choices ‘If ’ (from
Atom Heart Mother
) and ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ (from
The Final Cut
), along with the likes of ‘Money’, ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Hey You’. The second set would be
The Pros and Cons
. . . in its entirety with the reward of an encore of ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’ from
Dark Side of the Moon
.

Tim Renwick joined Waters a couple of months before the rehearsals officially began: ‘I went round to Roger’s once a week, going through all the old Pink Floyd stuff as he couldn’t be bothered to work out the chords. He was absolutely charming . . . until we went on the road.’

The grand unveiling of Waters’ new band and stage show took place in Stockholm on 16 June. Gerald Scarfe and film director Nicolas Roeg had created new animations and films to be projected on to 30ft-high screens covering the back width of the stage. In front of these screens hung three gauzes painted with scenery: a motel window, a motel room wall and a huge television set, designed to recreate the hero’s bedroom. Scarfe’s latest creation was a comically lazy cartoon dog named Reg, who acted out the hero’s neuroses on screen. Nicolas Roeg, whose directorial film credits included
The Man Who Fell to Earth
and
Performance
, delivered film footage of, among others, rolling American highways and freewheeling trucks.
The Wall
set designer Mark Fisher was on the payroll to co-ordinate the project, later estimating that the film footage alone cost in the region of $400,000.

However, as David Gilmour had already discovered, an individual name didn’t carry the same weight as Pink Floyd. Poor sales led to cancellations in Frankfurt and Nice. On the first of two nights at London’s Earls Court, the performance was below-par and a disgruntled Waters refused to play an encore. The rearranged Pink Floyd songs had an oddly brisk tempo, and many fans found it odd hearing and seeing Eric Clapton playing Gilmour’s guitar parts. Nick Mason, watching from the audience at Earls Court, found it disconcerting to see someone else playing the drums on old Floyd songs. In charge of
everything
now, Waters was feeling the strain. ‘One of Roger’s problems is that he has great trouble delegating,’ explains Tim Renwick. ‘He took it all on: the music, the production, the lot. So he was constantly walking around with his head in his hands, and you’d have great trouble communicating with him. He was also very, very serious about it all, and he didn’t like anyone else having a laugh. He’d soon stamp on that.’

Adding to Waters’ woes was the issue of sharing the stage with a superstar guitarist. On the opening night of the US tour in Hartford, Connecticut, Waters realised that whenever Clapton took a solo, the audience were on their feet, cheering and waving their cigarette lighters. ‘And then, as soon as Eric finished, the lighters would go off and everyone would sit down,’ says Renwick. ‘And this very much annoyed Roger. He thought people were making too much noise and not paying enough attention to the lyrics. In Hartford, we came to the end of the first half, and Roger just threw down his bass on the floor of the stage - it was still plugged in so there was this dreadful cacophony - stuck his arm in the air, shouted, “The
great
Eric Clapton!” and stormed off.’

Backstage, an embarrassed Waters apologised to Clapton and the rest of the band. On stage for the second half of the show, he even apologised to the audience ‘for being so unprofessional’.

‘I know that, from that point on, Eric would have gone home if he could,’ says Renwick. ‘When they made the record, Roger had asked Eric if he’d do some stuff live, and he thought it would be a couple of shows, but it turned into several months. Being a man of his word, he couldn’t go back on it . . .’

Following the last night of the tour in Quebec, Clapton bowed out amicably, taking keyboard player Chris Stainton and Tim Renwick with him for his own band. Waters was forced to address the issue that even with Eric in the band, many of the shows had been sparsely attended, while
The Pros and Cons
. . . album had stalled shy of the Billboard Top 30 in America. All of which made his decision to go back on the road in the US the following spring so confusing. The sixteen-date tour played in smaller venues than before and was bluntly titled ‘Pros and Cons Plus Some Old Pink Floyd Stuff - North American Tour 1985’.

Guitarists Andy Fairweather-Low and Jay Stapley joined in place of Clapton and Renwick. Fairweather-Low had been a teen idol in the mid-sixties, as lead singer with Amen Corner, a band that had played alongside Pink Floyd on the 1967 Jimi Hendrix package tour. Stapley was a young session player, who had worked with the singer, jingle-writer and Carolyne Christie’s cousin David Dundas.

‘I was a kid at the time, so doing that tour was a real challenge,’ says Stapley now. ‘We all thought it was odd that Roger was touring again, but one story we heard was that he wanted to prove he could do it without having Eric in the band to help sell tickets. The trouble is I’d grown up listening to David Gilmour and Eric Clapton, but Roger took me aside and told me I shouldn’t try and play like either. Unfortunately, for me, doing songs like “Money” felt a little bit like spitting in church.’

By Waters’ own estimation, the Clapton-assisted tour had left him some £400,000 out of pocket. But as he proudly declared, ‘It was something I
wanted
to do, not
needed
to do.’

A similar degree of financial security would allow Pink Floyd band members, both past and present, to take risks in their solo careers. By 1983, Waters’ spurned bandmate Richard Wright had, he claimed, grown tired of sailing around the Greek Islands, and wanted to get back to making music.

Wright was far more daring in his choice of collaborator. Dave ‘De’ Harris was a singer and songwriter from the Midlands, and frontman with the group Fashion. A product of the ‘New Romantic’ scene, Fashion’s David Bowie-inspired sounds and dandyish chic placed them alongside, if some way behind, the scene’s standard-bearers - Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. Harris had made two albums with Fashion, but was now growing restless. Attending a music business seminar in New York in 1982, he ran into
The Final Cut
’s saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft, who told him that the Floyd’s ex-keyboard player wanted to put a band together. A drummer and bassist were invited to attend a jamming session at Wright’s house in Royston, but, ultimately, only Harris showed up.

‘I said to Rick, “Why don’t we just do this together?” ’ says Harris now. Wright’s musical favourites at the time included Talking Heads and Brian Eno. ‘He wanted a very electronic sound, which is why I think he wanted to work with me. He had a solo deal with Harvest and we agreed to split it.’

‘It was a bit odd at first when Dave said he could remember going to see Floyd perform when he was fourteen,’ said Wright, ‘but, from the moment we actually started working together, we realised just how close we were.’

Quirky male duos were the rage in electronic pop, from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark to Soft Cell. Wright and Harris would form a duo of their own called Zee. As they were recording at Wright’s own studio, The Old Rectory, Harris and his wife Sue were invited to move into the keyboard player’s rambling country pile (‘Rick was tumbling around in this place’) for eighteen months during the making of the album.

For Harris, who had only turned professional two years earlier, it would prove an eye-opening experience. As a Pink Floyd fan since his teens, he was hoping Wright could be persuaded into playing the Hammond, ‘but getting him to do it was a nightmare’. Instead, the pair became completely preoccupied with the Fairlight digital sampling synthesiser. ‘It was the toy of the moment and we got stuck on this thing, so everything we did ended up sounding like a fucking robot. Remember, this
was
the eighties.’

For much of the time, Harris was left to his own devices, while Wright coped with the fallout from his divorce and estrangement from Pink Floyd. ‘Juliette, his ex-wife, was still around,’ Harris recalls. ‘She was fabulous, but there were lots of ups and downs. There was also a communication problem, because, understandably, Rick had other things going on. He’d be flying off to Greece one day, or having his boat built the next . . . I also realised I had no idea what he actually thought of what I was doing, as he never told me. A couple of times I said to Juliette, “I don’t think Rick likes this”, and she went and told him, and he was like, “No, no, I
love
it.” What we really needed was an A&R man or a producer.’

A trip to Wright’s house in Grasse in the south of France to write lyrics resulted in a fortnight of ‘us just getting pissed the whole time’. Back in England, Harris worked all-nighters in the studio, under the watchful eye of the Wrights’ housekeeper, Pink: ‘He was this wonderful, flaming Canadian queen. A lovely guy, who was forever on the phone to the wives of the other guys in Pink Floyd. Every time you walked in, you’d hear him - “Oh . . . my . . . God” - as he discovered some fresh bit of gossip. I’d hear these stories and think: Christ, this is exactly like being in a semi-pro band, but with millionaires - the same bitching, the wives calling each other this and that . . .’

Zee’s album,
Confusion
, would be released in the UK and Europe only in March 1984. It met with resounding indifference. Harris plays a very Pink Floyd-sounding guitar on one track, ‘Cuts Like a Diamond’, but the over-use of the Fairlight has rendered the album very dated. Even then, when the duo’s electro-pop sound chimed with the times, the combination of young blade Harris and the dashing, if forty-year-old Wright was perhaps unlikely to bump Duran Duran off the cover of
Smash Hits
. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd fans just wanted Wright to make music that sounded like Pink Floyd. Or, better still, rejoin Pink Floyd.

‘Zee was a disaster,’ said Wright later, ‘an experimental mistake, but it was made at a time in my life when I was lost.’

‘It always saddens me when Rick says it was a mistake,’ protests Harris, ‘because he never said that to me at the time.’ However, when
Confusion
failed to sell, Harris jumped ship for a production job. ‘I wasn’t in the financial situation Rick was. My career was in a very different place. We fell out, and it’s very sad, as I loved Rick dearly.’

Within months, Wright was dividing his time between houses in London, Rhodes and Athens, in the company of his new girlfriend, a fashion designer, former model and aspiring singer named Franka. Pink Floyd fans who were waiting for Wright to find himself and return to the fold would not have to wait much longer.

By the summer of 1985, with Waters and Gilmour back from their solo campaigns, the thorny issue of Pink Floyd’s future became even more pressing. Strangely, the first collaboration between the band members since
The Final Cut
would take place on Nick Mason’s next studio venture. In August 1985, Mason released his second album,
Profiles
, a collaboration with former 10cc guitarist Rick Fenn. Singer-songwriter Danny Peyronel, whose son attended the same school as Fenn’s daughter in West London, was roped in to co-write some material and sing lead vocals on one track, ‘Israel’. At Britannia Row, Peyronel told engineer Nick Griffiths that despite being an ardent Pink Floyd fan he sometimes had trouble telling David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ voices apart. ‘He told me it was easy to tell them apart,’ says Peyronel. ‘If it’s in tune it’s Gilmour . . .’ Most of
Profiles
was a dummy run for the film and TV commercial music Mason and Fenn would dabble in, with the formation of their company Bamboo Music. A year on, the pair’s music, alongside some vintage Pink Floyd, would be used in the short, autobiographical film,
Life Could Be a Dream
. The movie explored Mason’s love of motor racing, culminating in footage of him competing in the 1984 Endurance race in Mospor, Canada.