Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (57 page)

There was, as Tim Renwick explains, ‘a tremendous spirit in the band, and a real sense of liberation’. For Gilmour, now shouldering the responsibility of running the show, this involved letting off plenty of steam and enjoying all the perks of the job: from flying planes and hang-gliding on his days off, to a suitable rock star-ish consumption of drugs and alcohol. As Guy Pratt admitted, the touring party included a euphemistically titled ‘ambience co-ordinator’ whose tasks included taking care of any band members’ visiting parents
and
procuring drugs. Interviewed in 2006 and asked what piece of advice he would have given to himself twenty years ago, Gilmour promptly answered: ‘Stop taking cocaine.’

‘It
was
party time,’ confesses Tim Renwick. ‘Dave had fairly recently split from Ginger. Steve O’Rourke was also on a long leash as well. So, if the powers that be were into whooping it up, then the rest of us joined in with great spirit and gusto. It was quite a wild time. Dave, in particular, was a full-on party animal.’

Gilmour had his reasons. ‘I was in a marriage that seemed to be breaking up for rather a long time,’ he later said. He and Ginger would eventually divorce in 1990. After selling Hookend Manor, the couple had moved to a six-bedroom Georgian house in Sunbury overlooking the River Thames. Ginger stayed on, while Gilmour moved into town, resuming a bachelor’s lifestyle in a townhouse in London’s ‘Little Venice’. Ginger would later blame their conflicting lifestyles for the split: ‘I was getting more alternative - starting to meditate - and he was doing more cocaine and hanging out with all kinds of people.’

Marital problems, the fallout from the Norton Warburg scandal and the legal battle with Roger Waters had all taken their toll. ‘I got carried away with the cocaine lifestyle,’ Gilmour later explained. ‘I thought the coke made me more loquacious, but the reality was rather more awful.’

Pink Floyd’s past drug problems would make the headlines again in 1988. In October, EMI issued
Opel
, a collection of Syd Barrett out-takes and rarities. Syd’s brother-in-law, Paul Breen, was interviewed for a radio programme about Barrett. ‘I think [Pink Floyd] is a part of his life which he prefers to forget now,’ he explained. ‘There is a level of contentment now which he probably hasn’t felt since he got involved with music.’ Syd had, he revealed, also started painting again.

In the same month, the
News of the World
trailed Barrett to Cambridge, and took a photograph of him outside his house. Neighbours supposedly told the reporter that Syd was ‘a hopeless case . . .’ and ‘had been in and out of mental hospitals’. It was claimed that fans who turned up at the house found him daubed in a strange white powder and talking gibberish. Jonathan Meades repeated his claims that Syd’s Egerton Court flatmates had locked him in the linen cupboard. As it was the height of the press’s preoccupation with illegal rave parties and acid house music, the story featured that trademark smiley face, but with the mouth turned down, alongside the headline, ACID DROVE PINK FLOYD ROCK STAR UP THE WALL. No member of Pink Floyd, past or present, gave any comment.

In the same year, Barrett’s and Gilmour’s one-time close friend Ian ‘Pip’ Carter was killed during a fight outside a pub in Cambridge. Pip had been, along with Emo, one of Syd’s most attentive courtiers. ‘Pip was a bad boy,’ recalls Libby Gausden. ‘But Syd loved him.’ David Gilmour was among those who attended Carter’s funeral.

‘We wanted to be world-conquering,’ reflected David Gilmour on the
Momentary Lapse
. . . tour. ‘We wanted to leave no one in any doubts that we meant business.’ Back out on the road, the Pink Floyd machine rolled through Europe, the UK (including two shows at London’s Wembley Stadium) and Scandinavia. Even the naturally reticent Richard Wright was now telling journalists that it was the happiest tour he’d ever been on. It was a contrast to the impression he gave some at the start of the jaunt. ‘When I first saw Rick, we were in Toronto,’ said Jon Carin. ‘I came out of the hotel and saw him getting out of a limo and what I saw was a lot of pain. I don’t know if he felt that way, but I really sympathised.’

‘Jon Carin and Gary Wallis were fairly essential in keeping us going at the beginning of the tour,’ admitted Gilmour in
Mojo
magazine. ‘But within a month, those roles reverted back to Nick and Rick taking over their proper parts in what was going on.’

‘What I never realised until I started playing with Pink Floyd was just how much of that sound is down to David and Rick,’ says Guy Pratt. ‘It’s all about the musical relationship between those two, the sound of those two communicating with each other.’

In November, the band released
Delicate Sound of Thunder
, a live album recorded over the last five nights of the tour at New York’s Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum. By the beginning of the New Year it had been certified platinum in the US and gold in the UK. Yet without the lasers, the pig and the ‘Floyd Droids’ to attract the attention, it seemed a strangely soulless affair.

As a suitably extravagant publicity stunt, Gilmour and Mason were invited to Moscow to attend the launch of the Soyuz TM-7 rocket. The astronauts took a cassette copy of
Delicate Sound of Thunder
with them on their flight to a Russian space station, making it the first rock album ever to have been played in space.

A final lap of honour, the ‘Another Lapse’ European tour, was underway by the spring of 1989. In May, the band flew to Moscow again, this time to play five nights in Lushniki. With a shortage of currency, Floyd were essentially playing for free, although basic costs were covered and the Russian government arranged their transport and hotel accommodation. Rumours circulated of payment in caviar and timber (Gilmour: ‘not true’). In truth, the band had chosen to lose money if only for the experience of playing a full, no-holds-barred rock show in the Soviet Union.

Just weeks later, inspired by a scene in a Marx Brothers movie, Gilmour persuaded Steve O’Rourke that it would be a great idea for Pink Floyd to play a free concert on a floating barge moored off Piazza San Marco on Venice’s Grand Canal. O’Rourke had been against the idea since it was mooted months earlier. The show was broadcast live via satellite around the world, but very nearly didn’t happen at all. In a flashback to an early US tour, when the manager had paid the local police to get the band’s stolen equipment back, the Floyd found themselves greasing the palms of local officials to make things happen. A gang of itinerant gondoliers showed up just before showtime and demanded $10,000 to stop them blowing their whistles throughout the gig. Unaware perhaps that any noise they made would be rendered inaudible by the Floyd’s monstrous sound system, they were, in the words of David Gilmour, ‘told to piss off’. Gilmour’s sentiments would be similar when confronted with claims by the local council that the volume of the performance had somehow damaged ancient buildings in the vicinity.

The final show took place in Marseilles on 18 July 1989. It had now been almost eighteen months since the tour had begun. ‘It was over-the-top large,’ says Tim Renwick, ‘and I had started to feel like a pretty small cog in it. On the last week you’d be introduced to people you’d already been around the world with. You lived in this bubble. Back home, taking out the trash was a chore. I came back to earth with a bump.’

Grossing $135 million and playing to a total of 5.5 million people, the sheer scale of the tour and the ambition of the production had set a new benchmark for live rock shows.
Forbes
magazine declared Pink Floyd the world’s highest paid rock band. By now,
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
and
Delicate Sound of Thunder
had both been certified platinum several times over. Just as Pink Floyd’s comeback album had been built to go head to head with the likes of Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Prince, so too did their live gigs send their would-be competitors back to the drawing board. As the 1980s wound to a close, Roger Waters was already plotting a concert that would raise that game even higher. The lawyers may have been called off, but the game of one-upmanship continued.

CHAPTER TEN

THE GRASS WAS GREENER

‘You can’t give up.You have to keep bashing away or else you’re finished as a human being.’

Roger Waters

Today, Roger Waters is the perfect host. The man who routinely ate music critics for breakfast, that’s if he deigned to speak to them at all, has mellowed. A bit, anyway. In the flesh, he still looks like Roger Waters but taller, the hair now flecked with grey, the chipped-tooth smile still a little unnerving. On spying my copy of a recently published book about his former band, his face darkens, before offering a rather disconcerting smile; the same grin afforded the upstart interviewer in
Live At Pompeii
. ‘Have you read this, Roger?’ The interview ended a few minutes ago, so if he walks out now, it won’t harm the story.

There is a pause. Waters picks up the book carefully, as if handling an unexploded bomb or, possibly, some faecal matter, before handing it back. His driver-cum-bodyguard, a wiry, ex-military type, is waiting in the doorway, staring disconsolately in my direction. ‘Don’t believe everything you read,’ says Waters, smiles again, waves his hand and is off.

A few minutes later, I spot him in the back seat of a chauffeured car, grinning as he talks to his driver. The vehicle purrs past the flotilla of boats moored in Chelsea Harbour and out of the car park of London’s Conrad Hotel. Waters once lived near here, briefly, in the den of iniquity that was 101 Cromwell Road before common sense and his first wife prevailed and he found himself the flat in Shepherds Bush. Waters has now split from his second wife, but is, as he mentioned earlier ‘in love again’. It suits him. The taciturn, prickly orator, the reluctant interviewee, is having a good day. It is the summer of 1992 and Roger Waters is charm personified. But then, as he explained earlier, he’s just made what he believes to be one of the best albums of his career.

Roger Waters attacked the 1990s with his customary gusto. For grand gestures, he would prove hard to beat. Pink Floyd saw in the new decade with a headline appearance at Knebworth Park; the open-air venue they’d last played just before releasing
Wish You Were Here
. A charity event to raise money for the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Centre, Floyd headlined a resignedly old-fashioned bill of Cliff Richard, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin’s reunited partners Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and a reluctant second on the bill, Paul McCartney. Torrential downpours dampened the mood out front and in the backstage enclosure, where middle-aged pop stars and record execs in baggy tailored suits and floppily expensive haircuts huddled in the drinks tent or beneath buckled umbrellas. Pink Floyd arrived in helicopters.

On stage, Floyd’s circular screen filled up with so much rainwater it had to be abandoned. Paul McCartney, perhaps wondering why an ex-Beatle was playing below Pink Floyd, extended his set with encore after encore, delaying the headliners’ arrival time.

When they did appear, Floyd’s truncated set was delivered to sheets of rain and strong winds, carrying away the opening notes of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. Emerging from billowing clouds of dry ice, Gilmour, in baggy tailored suit and expensively floppy hair cut, braved the elements at the front of the stage and did his best. They bowed out with ‘Comfortably Numb’ and ‘Run Like Hell’; only one song, ‘Sorrow’, from
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
, broke up the run of standards. With helicopters primed backstage for a swift getaway, it would be Pink Floyd’s last public appearance for three years.

In contrast to a charity show in front of a mere 125,000, Waters would time his next live performance with an event of global and historic importance. In November 1989, East Germany’s Communist government began to relinquish control of the Berlin Wall, the 28-mile barrier constructed twenty-eight years earlier to divide the German city in two and keep workers in the East. The East German government’s decision to let their residents cross the border was followed by the physical dismantling of the wall itself by jubilant East Germans and their Western counterparts. By June 1990, the East German military had begun the official destruction of the wall. It was an extraordinary moment in modern history.

A year earlier, composer Leonard Bernstein (who had once declared himself ‘bored stiff ’ by a performance of Pink Floyd’s
Atom Heart Mother
in New York) had conducted a celebratory concert on both sides of the Berlin Wall. In July 1990, Roger Waters decided to stage a follow-up celebration: a performance of
The Wall
, near the Brandenburg Gate at Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz in the ruins of the real wall. ‘It’s
not
a “Top that!” to David Gilmour and Nick Mason,’ insisted Waters at the time, ‘but it will be gratifying that a few more people in the world will understand that
The Wall
is
my
work and always has been . . . Though after hearing them at Knebworth I don’t think I should worry.’

Rock entrepreneur Mick Worwood, who’d previously helped stage Live Aid, had approached Waters. Worwood was acting in response to an approach from Leonard Cheshire of the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, a charity set up in the aftermath of the Armenian earthquake and other recent disasters. Their target was to raise £500 million, based on £5 for each person killed in any war during the twentieth century.

Waters was introduced to Leonard Cheshire. The seventy-two-year-old fundraiser was a highly decorated former group captain in the RAF, who had flown many bombing missions over Berlin during the Second World War, and had been the UK’s official representative and observer at the bombing of Nagasaki. Appalled by what he had witnessed during the war, Cheshire returned to the UK, and devoted himself to establishing the Cheshire Foundation of Care Homes across the country. To Waters, still preoccupied by the death of his own father in the Second World War, Cheshire was an inspirational figure.