Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (59 page)

Amused to Death
was certainly a better album than its predecessor. While Waters had written it alone, he’d roped in a stellar cast of session men and special guests, alongside The Bleeding Heart Band. The hired hands included drummer Jeff Porcaro and arranger Michael Kamen (both of whom had featured on
The Wall
), while the guests included The Eagles’ Don Henley, country singer Rita Coolidge and guitar hero Jeff Beck, the man once mooted for the Pink Floyd job before David Gilmour.

Beck’s playing on the album’s signature song ‘What God Wants Part 1’ was a singular highlight, and clearly another concerted effort by Waters to snag a guitarist with a reputation to rival David Gilmour’s. Beck later explained that he and Waters had bonded after he’d been allowed to drive Waters’ vintage Maserati through Richmond Park. Waters had also enlisted a co-producer, Pat Leonard, the songwriter who’d penned hits for Madonna and played keyboards on
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
. ‘Whatever Pat had done before didn’t interest me,’ claims Waters. ‘He had sat in a Chicago theatre, aged fourteen, watching Pink Floyd play
Dark Side of the Moon
. He knew all my work and I was impressed.’

One of Waters’ old Bleeding Heart Band members once recalled a conversation in which Waters had declared, ‘I’m just in the process of choosing someone to perform the menial task of producer on my next record.’ Nevertheless, Leonard made his mark on
Amused to Death
, helping to give it the similarly widescreen sound Bob Ezrin had achieved on
A Momentary Lapse
. . . Not that Ezrin went unmentioned on
Amused to Death
. On one song, ‘Too Much Rope’, Waters crooned the line, ‘Each man has his price, Bob, and yours was pretty low’, which most took to refer to their falling-out over Ezrin’s decision to produce Pink Floyd five years earlier. Waters explains that ‘the original line was, “Each man has his price, my friends”, so make of that what you will.’ (‘Isn’t that childish? Isn’t that just amazing?’ commented Ezrin.)

Ezrin wasn’t the only high-profile figure on Waters’ hit list. While recording the album, he’d approached film-maker Stanley Kubrick for permission to use dialogue from Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
on the album. Kubrick refused, and found himself mentioned in a garbled message recorded backwards at the start of the song ‘Perfect Sense Part 1’. Though perhaps Kubrick was paying back Waters for his refusal to allow him to use
Atom Heart Mother
for one of his films over twenty years previously.

On completing the album, Waters invited old friend Ron Geesin over to his Kimbridge manor house. ‘I turned up at half-past twelve and by half-one he still wasn’t there,’ says Geesin now. ‘Roger used to do this when I first knew him. You’d arrive at the time he’d suggested and he still wasn’t back from playing squash. I used to call it the C.L.F. - Calculated Lateness Factor. It was his way of trying to keep you on your toes.’

When Waters finally arrived, he played Geesin some sketches from the opera he’d been working on. ‘I made some vague suggestion, like, “Oh, maybe the brass section should do this or that . . .” and he turned round and said, “I didn’t invite you here to find out what you think . . .” ’

Before leaving, Waters handed Geesin a CD copy of
Amused to Death
. When he went to play it back at home, Ron discovered that the box was empty. ‘So I made this little piece of art, shaped like a CD, on which I wrote a poem about the disc not being in there, and sent it back to him. After three days I phoned him up and he said to me, “What’s this thing in here? I don’t understand it.” He knew perfectly well that it was just an affectionate gift and a joke about how the disc had been missing. We’d done things like this for years. He was just being difficult. Next thing, Roger said to me, “What’s this I hear about you reviewing the album?” I told him that I was doing nothing of the sort, and nor would I have the outlet to do so. He said, “Well, that’s what I’ve heard.” So this went back and forth, and in the end I just said, “Roger, that’ll be that then. Now fuck off.” ’

The two have not spoken since.

To help sell
Amused to Death
, Waters submitted to the sort of promotional campaign that would have met with his withering contempt back in the days of Pink Floyd. He made for a fantastic interviewee: passionately explaining his new album, while taking verbal pot shots at world leaders, TV stations, Pink Floyd, everyone . . . Waters blithely informed one interviewer the only music he was currently listening to was that of vintage soul singer Joe Tex. Elsewhere, he decried Madonna as ‘an awful, ugly, dull person’, and clearly felt no need to prove himself hip: ‘I hope people get fed up with teenagers with baseball hats on back to front and rappers talking over other people’s music.’

That said, he still bit the bullet and submitted a video clip to MTV. ‘I see the irony,’ he told
Details
magazine. ‘But I had to decide whether to get hard-nosed and say, “I will not make a video”, and substantially reduce the chances of people becoming aware of this record.’ The music channel had been in its infancy when Waters began his solo career. Unfortunately, Roger had once clammed up during an MTV interview about
The Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking
(when they asked for his comments about Pink Floyd), and had been sorely under-represented on the channel ever since. Two years later, the relaunched Pink Floyd would enjoy widespread coverage on MTV.

For a man perceived as so single-minded and unyielding, it was also gratifying to hear him admitting to feelings of insecurity about his work. ‘I let people push me down roads I shouldn’t have gone down really,’ he told the
LA Times
. ‘With
Radio K.A.O.S
. I got sidetracked by the technology and the notion that I ought to get a bit more with it. I was right in the middle of all the Pink Floyd litigation and I guess I got a bit insecure about what I was worth and who I was . . .’

Waters also revealed that he had been in therapy throughout most of the 1980s, to learn how to, in his words, ‘free himself from the dictates of destructive sub-personalities’. This admission related to therapy inspired by the psychologist Carl Jung, in which the subject learns how to individuate. The parallels with Waters’ ideas on
Dark Side of the Moon
were obvious. Jung believed that while society prepares most people for the first half of their life, it fails to do so for middle age and beyond. Individuation was therefore a way of preparing the psyche for the second half of life. ‘You stand a better chance of walking your own path,’ said Waters. ‘We’ve all got crosses to bear. My biggest one was my father’s death and having to grow up in a female-dominated society, and because of that, causing my subsequent relationship with women to become very difficult.’ Most hacks, of course, just wanted to know if he was ever going to get back together with Pink Floyd.

Amused to Death
garnered some of the better reviews of Waters’ career. However, the
Daily Telegraph
’s was not one of them: ‘Had he been blessed with even a rudimentary sense of humour and rather more verbal fluency . . . Roger Waters might well be pop’s Martin Amis,’ wrote Charles Shaar Murray. Waters spent one subsequent magazine interview lashing out at Murray and other music critics (‘they can’t fucking write’).
Billboard
magazine, however, decided that
Amused to Death
was ‘one of the most provocative and musically dazzling records of the decade’.

The album certainly suggested that Waters had deeply held convictions about the world around him. This was not the work of a complacent millionaire rock star. In contrast, the last Pink Floyd album had stood for very little. Waters, as ever, had the ideas, the philosophies, the obsessions, but he couldn’t match his bandmates for broader musical appeal. Roger’s music still had to fight it out with the words and the special effects, of which there were many on
Amused to Death
. ‘Perfect Sense Part 1’ encapsulated the problem, with the esteemed soul singer P.P. Arnold wrestling with too many tongue-twisting lyrics, just to get the message across. Nevertheless, this was Roger Waters’ style of making music, for which he felt no need to apologise. With three solo albums proper to his name, the record-buying public should have grown used to it by now. Except they hadn’t.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
may have been a triumph of style over very little substance, but for many,
Amused to Death
offered too much substance.

Asked in 1992 whether he would tour the album, Waters said he would ‘if it sold between three to four million’. In the end,
Amused to Death
would end up selling nearer to a million copies. Peaking in the UK at number 8, it was his highest charting album to date. For its creator, as ever, sales and critics meant little. ‘I think it’s a stunning piece of work,’ he reflected later, ranking it alongside
Dark Side of the Moon
and
The Wall
as one of the best albums of his career. In more verbose moments, Waters would claim, not unreasonably, that had
Amused to Death
been a Pink Floyd record, it would have sold 10 million copies. For all his defiance, the album’s lack of success must have hurt. Waters would not play live for another seven years.

While not quite floating in the Martini glass of Roger Waters’ imagination, Pink Floyd had lain dormant since playing Knebworth. They had lives to live. David Gilmour got divorced, while Nick Mason married TV actress and presenter Annette Lynton, with whom he would have two more children, sons Guy and Carey.

In 1990, the Floyd partners and Steve O’Rourke competed in the Carrera Pan America sports car race in Mexico. O’Rourke had pre-sold the rights to a film of their participation to cover the costs of competing. Three days in, disaster struck, when a Jaguar being driven by Gilmour, with O’Rourke in the passenger seat, sped over the edge of an embankment near the town of San Luis Potisi, leaving the guitarist battered and bruised and the manager with a compound fracture of the leg. Having escaped death, they returned to England, to record a soundtrack to the film.

Realising they needed some help, Gilmour, Mason and Wright rounded up young guns Gary Wallis, Jon Carin and Guy Pratt, and repaired to West London’s Olympic Studios. The sessions offered a stark contrast to the agonisingly slow process of making
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
. Without the pressure of having to create a Pink Floyd album, the musicians simply jammed together, with guitarist Tim Renwick helping out between stints on Bryan Ferry’s new album. They produced seven pieces of new music needed for the soundtrack. It was the quickest Pink Floyd had worked since making the soundtrack to
Obscured by Clouds
. Released in April 1992, neither the film nor the soundtrack would trouble anyone but the most ardent Pink Floyd watcher. Nevertheless, this new way of working would prove crucial to the next Floyd album. Not that David Gilmour was in any hurry to start making that album. Instead, he’d resumed his sideline as a trusty guitarist-for-hire (suggesting to all clients that they donate his fee to charity). Gilmour’s guitar playing graced albums from, among others, Warren Zevon, Propaganda, Paul Young, All About Eve and old pal Roy Harper. He also composed one new song, ‘Me and J.C.’, for the film version of
The Cement Garden
, Ian McEwan’s eerie tale of murder and incest.

In 1992, Gilmour and Mason would reunite only to play a couple of charity gigs in London, including the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Royal Albert Hall, where Richard Wright joined them on stage. In November, EMI issued ‘Shine On’, a boxed set of seven Floyd albums, from
A Saucerful of Secrets
to
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
, plus an extra disc containing their early singles. Critics quickly fanned the embers of the Waters versus Floyd dispute, with both parties taking the bait. Again.

Gilmour informed
Musician
magazine that he had played a lot of the bass guitar on Pink Floyd’s albums and that Waters jokingly thanked him whenever he won a Best Bass Player poll. Waters, meanwhile, quashed the rumour that he had had 150 rolls of toilet paper produced with Gilmour’s face on them, while conceding that he thought it a good idea. There was a pattern to the sniping: that Waters was a poor musician; and that Gilmour and Mason lacked creativity. As the drummer said some years later, ‘If our children behaved this way, we would have been very cross.’

On a more upbeat note, Pink Floyd began 1993 by starting work again. Better still, they started playing together in the studio, without the threat of lawsuits or telephone calls from lawyers to break their concentration. The sessions began at Britannia Row, with just Gilmour, Mason and Wright jamming together, before bassist Guy Pratt was invited to join in.

‘It was thrilling to know you were playing on a Pink Floyd record,’ admits Guy. ‘Sometimes David would come up with ideas and I’d come up with basslines, only to realise how out of step my playing was. David would always have a better alternative - “Yes, that’s great . . . but lose ninety per cent of the notes in it.” ’ These sessions produced random chord sequences, riffs, and ideas. While engineer Andy Jackson was also back in the fold, Gilmour would keep a tape machine near to where he was playing, and simply hit the ‘record’ button whenever he felt the band were getting somewhere. Before long, they decided to call in a co-producer.

‘I sort of assumed we’d do it again,’ said Bob Ezrin, ‘as David and I had stayed in touch on a friendly basis. So Steve O’Rourke rang me and said would I do it, and then told me how much less he would pay me. He always tried that.’

The band eventually found themselves with around sixty-five individual pieces of music from the piles of tapes. They decided to take a novel approach to whittling down the material. ‘We had what we called “the big listen”,’ explained Gilmour, ‘where we listened to all of these pieces, and everyone voted on each piece of music to see how popular it was.’