Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (62 page)

Later on in the tour, as predicted, a similar message flashed up on the stage at London’s Earls Court. When interviewed, the band members denied all knowledge, as did Storm Thorgerson and Steve O’Rourke, who were considered the likeliest culprits. However, a set of Floyd reissues at the end of 1994 threw up more ‘evidence’. One photograph included in new CD insert artwork for
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
included the word ‘Enigma’ in the bottom right-hand corner; another contained the word ‘Publius’.

The mystery would remain unsolved, though lighting director Marc Brickman later claimed that he had been told by O’Rourke to arrange the stage signals at the shows in New Jersey and London. Nick Mason was the only band member ever to comment on the riddle. Questioned about it in 2005, he explained that it had, in fact, been the idea of a puzzle fanatic employed at EMI Records, but that no prize had ever been won. As a testament to the tenacity and obsessiveness of some fans, the Publius Enigma still commands its own dedicated website.

By the end of July,
The Division Bell
tour had reached Europe, and Polly Samson had become Mrs Gilmour. The Czech president, Vaclav Havel, attended the show at Prague’s Starhov Stadium and invited the band to dinner. Yet one invitation issued by the band would not be accepted. With the tour due to end with a run of fourteen nights at London’s Earls Court, the group invited Roger Waters to join them on stage for
Dark Side of the Moon
.

‘I thought it would be a good thing for the fans,’ explained Gilmour, ‘but also with the safety cushion of knowing that he wouldn’t do it. It was a genuine offer, though.’

Waters declined. He had maintained a dignified silence throughout
The Division Bell
tour, but would later denounce what he saw as ‘the inherent betrayal’ of Pink Floyd playing songs, especially those from
The Wall
, in football stadiums: ‘There would have to be some other reason for me to stand on stage with Dave Gilmour and play
Dark Side of the Moon
. There’s too much history.’

The first night at Earls Court proved a disaster. No sooner had Jon Carin struck up the opening notes to ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, than he found himself pulled off stage again. A 1,200-capacity stand at the rear of the arena had collapsed just as the show began. No one was seriously injured, however, and the band rescheduled the gig for the following week. On another night at Earls Court, author Douglas Adams, who was celebrating his birthday, was invited to strap on an acoustic guitar and join the band on stage for ‘Brain Damage’.

The last gig at Earls Court would be the last of the tour, and, as it transpired, the final night of any Pink Floyd tour. The complete opposite to the
Momentary Lapse
. . . eighteen-month marathon, this one had lasted less than twelve. ‘Some people were pissed off that it hadn’t been made the full year,’ ventures Tim Renwick. ‘I can’t say what the full reasons were but I suspect it was partly because Polly was new to the whole thing and found it all quite difficult.’

In truth, perhaps Gilmour simply felt there was nothing more to prove. Having played to over 5 million people and grossed some £150 million, how much more did Pink Floyd need? ‘Wasn’t it one of the most successful rock tours in history?’ ventures Bob Ezrin. ‘In David’s mind there must have been some feeling of wanting to prove that he could do it without Roger Waters. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t have that sense of, “So
there,
Rog.” ’

‘Pink Floyd is not only me,’ offered Gilmour. ‘I’m bound up by other people’s desires and choices and politics, as well as my own. I have more say than anyone else, but I’m the one to whom that position has fallen. But not through choice.’

He was clearly in no hurry to do it all again.

Summer 1995 would see the death of another of the Cambridge contingent’s old associates. In July, Gilmour attended the funeral of Julian Hough. A theatre and television actor during the 1970s and ’80s, Hough had been another victim of what Anthony Stern describes as ‘The Cambridge Syndrome’. The son of a brilliant academic, the literary historian Graham Hough, Julian had been stricken with depression and drifted into a life of homelessness. He had not been heard from in months when his body was finally found and identified.

In June 1995, less than a year after the final show on
The Division Bell
tour, Pink Floyd released
Pulse
, a double live album. A video of the show from Earls Court followed soon after. The first 2 million copies of the album were issued in a limited edition box with an LED flashing light on the spine, a novelty that soon riled anyone watching TV in their living room, constantly aware of a red light blinking away on the shelf. It topped the charts in both America and the UK.

Arriving so soon after 1988’s
Delicate Sound of Thunder
,
Pulse
seemed superfluous. Its only real point of interest was a live version of
Dark Side of the Moon
. Nick Mason admitted that it was a crying shame they’d never thought to sanction an official live version of the piece in the seventies.

Listening at home, without Storm Thorgerson’s mind-blowing movies and 400 Varilights to dazzle the senses, there were also plenty of moments when you noticed the Waters-shaped hole in the band. While Guy Pratt tried hard, nobody else could do that hectoring, maniacal vocal on ‘Run Like Hell’ with quite such gusto. ‘Comfortably Numb’ slowed to a torpid crawl, with Richard Wright bluffing away in place of an absent Waters. As compensation, the keyboard player positively excelled on ‘Astronomy Domine’, another nagging reminder of how integral he had been to Pink Floyd’s sound in the early days.

At the end of the year, it was announced that Pink Floyd were to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In January 1996, all three attended the ceremony at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The band were presented with their award by Billy Corgan, frontman with Smashing Pumpkins, an American hard rock band whose latest release had been a sprawling, conceptual affair partly inspired by
The Wall
. Corgan sat in with Wright and Gilmour for an acoustic version of ‘Wish You Were Here’, looking as if he couldn’t quite believe his luck.

Unusually Richard Wright would become the most active member of Pink Floyd that year. While he had written and played on
The Division Bell
, he still had reservations about it: ‘I liked the record, but it was also frustrating, because I felt that it wasn’t going in the right direction all the time.’ Wright had wanted to make ‘A Floyd album, like we used to - more thematic, with all the music having a logical link.’ It’s not known whether he suggested any concepts of his own. Once again, without Waters, thematic ideas seemed a little thin on the ground.

Before
The Division Bell
tour had ended, though, Wright was telling interviewers of his immediate plans to make another solo album. That year, Wright licensed the music to ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, enabling it to be re-recorded for use in a TV ad for a painkiller (Gilmour: ‘That’s Rick’s business. I didn’t approve of it but I had no control over it’).

By spring 1995, Wright was in Studio Harmoine in Paris, working on a new album. He corralled some familiar names into helping out, including lyricist Anthony Moore and guitarist Tim Renwick, along with drummer Manu Katche, whom Wright had seen playing on Peter Gabriel’s world tour, and guest vocalist, and occasional thorn in Roger Waters’ side, Sinead O’Connor. The album,
Broken China
, would be released the following year.

The inspiration behind the record came from much closer to home. Following the break-up of his first marriage, Wright had moved to Greece to be nearer his girlfriend Franka. The two married, but the relationship didn’t last. By 1989, Wright had become involved with a twenty-eight-year-old model named Mildred Hobbs, known to all as Millie, who would go on to become his third wife. Millie had been hospitalised suffering from clinical depression during the making of
The Division Bell
.
Broken China
told her story, though at first Wright was reluctant to reveal her identity, only telling interviewers that it was about a ‘close friend that suffered from depression’.

‘It was a moral dilemma,’ he explained later. ‘I wasn’t using Millie’s name in the beginning because I didn’t want it to be seen as me using her to promote the album.’ Odder still, Wright would also reveal that his wife’s former therapist, Gerry Gordon, had contributed lyrics to two of the songs on the album.

There was clearly something purgative about
Broken China
, as it charted his wife’s experiences through the different stages of her illness. Musically, it explored the more ambient aspects of Pink Floyd’s sound. The instrumentals, ‘Sweet July’ and ‘Interlude’, could have soundtracked a reflective spell in a flotation tank. ‘Runaway’ was more
outré
, with voguish percussion that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on an album by the then ultra-hip Massive Attack. (The Orb would later remix the song.) David Gilmour played guitar on ‘Breakthrough’, but, according to Wright, didn’t make the final mix (although Gilmour would later perform the song live himself). Sinead O’Connor proved a sympathetic collaborator, delivering a piteous vocal on both ‘Breakthrough’ and ‘Reaching for the Rail’. Wright’s lead vocal on
The Division Bell
had been a high point, but his voice was less enduring over the long run, even if, on ‘Hidden Fear’ there was almost something of Scott Walker in his haughty, sombre tone. As someone who would admit to his own periods of depression, Wright’s empathy with the subject matter was obvious.

In its Storm Thorgerson-designed sleeve,
Broken China
looked very much like a Pink Floyd album. The trouble is, it wasn’t.

Suffering a similar fate to most Floyd members’ solo works, the album failed to sell beyond the staunchest Floyd supporters. By the end of the year, Wright had dropped back out of view, concentrating on being a father to his young son, Benjamin, and heading off to the Virgin Islands on his yacht. Asked about the current status of Pink Floyd, Wright’s pithy reply seemed wholly accurate: ‘Pink Floyd is like a marriage that’s on permanent trial separation.’

Observers could catch only fleeting glimpses of Pink Floyd as the decade wound to an end. Gilmour became a father again. Having adopted Polly’s son Charlie, the couple would go on to have three more children: Joe, Gabriel and Romany. Being a member of Pink Floyd in the seventies and eighties had helped destroy all of the band members’ first marriages. As Gilmour later explained, ‘Raising my children is my priority now, and not missing their youth. That happened with my first children.’

Gilmour would also trade in the classic cars and vintage aeroplanes he’d once owned, withdrawing from Intrepid Aviation, the company he’d started to help fund his flying hobby. What had begun as a pastime had quickly become too much of a business. ‘You collect Ferraris and then you’ve got to collect people to look after your Ferraris,’ he observed. ‘Life gets very complicated.’

Gilmour turned fifty in 1996, and hired London’s Fulham Town Hall for an exclusive performance by the Floyd tribute band, The Australian Pink Floyd, and their Fab Four counterparts, The Bootleg Beatles. The presence of George Harrison among Gilmour’s guests added an extra frisson to the occasion. Guy Pratt and Richard Wright joined the fake Floyd on stage for a rousing encore of ‘Comfortably Numb’. The subsequent changes in Gilmour’s life and choice of friends were summed up by one of those that attended the party: ‘There are some of us who were invited to Dave’s fiftieth but didn’t get invited to his sixtieth. I think the fiftieth was the cut-off point for some of the people in his life.’

In 1999 Polly Samson published her first collection of short stories,
Lying in Bed
. She and Gilmour were now more likely to appear in the pages of society magazines than music papers. When snapped at some exclusive event, Gilmour, however, would usually look ill at ease. Once asked how he dealt with being recognised in the street, he explained that his automatic response was to ‘duck my head or look in a shop window’.

In the same year, Gilmour submitted to a rare interview with
Q
magazine, answering readers’ questions. Asked what he did all day, he replied: ‘Change a nappy, take a child to school, strum a guitar . . .’ He didn’t even know if he still had a solo record deal: ‘I’ll have to ask my lawyer.’ Gilmour seemed in no hurry to return to the fray, preferring family life in his new West Sussex farmhouse. Several Floyd fans wrote to the magazine complaining about his disappointing attitude. But were they really surprised?

‘Dave’s problem is he worked damn hard on
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
and he took the whole thing on his shoulders,’ offered Richard Wright. ‘When it came to
The Division Bell
, he felt he was taking the whole thing on his shoulders again, and I don’t think he’s in any hurry to do it again.’

‘To be honest, I just don’t know what I want to do,’ said Gilmour. ‘And I’m afraid the others will just have to wait for me. It’s hard. Pink Floyd is a lumbering great behemoth to rouse out of its torpor.’ Instead, it was easier for Gilmour to keep his hand in, playing on other people’s records. In 1999, he guested on Paul McCartney’s rock ’n’ roll album
Run Devil Run
, showing up in his backing band for an appearance on the TV chat show
Parkinson
.

Nick Mason was now living with his new family in Camilla Parker-Bowles’s old house in the Wiltshire village of Corsham (‘She was very helpful and gave me many tips about gardening’). His enduring love of speed and cars found him becoming a regular competitor in the London to Brighton vintage car rally. In 2000, he clambered back behind the drum kit for a fund-raising party for the fiftieth anniversary of Formula 1. Having described himself at various times as the band’s ‘ship’s cook’ and ‘sous chef’, Mason’s willingness to play down his role in Pink Floyd was rather disingenuous. He was the closest the band had to an archivist, having diligently kept scrapbooks during the group’s earliest years.