Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (63 page)

Just after
The Division Bell
tour, Mason began writing his own book about the band. ‘Then I ran up against a lot of disapproval from Dave,’ he reveals, ‘because at one point it was going to be the official history of Pink Floyd.’ Gilmour’s main objections were that he thought Mason would treat the subject with too much levity and that any official history of the band would have to involve input from all the members, past and present.

‘There was a period of mild deception,’ Gilmour complained later, ‘as there was a chap taking pictures on
The Division Bell
tour without me knowing anything about it. I got rather grumpy about the book, because I didn’t think that what I saw conveyed enough of the artistic process, and asked him to can it, which he did.’ Some suggested that Mason not performing on stage with Gilmour and Wright at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony was evidence of Gilmour’s disapproval.

Although temporarily shelved, Mason’s book,
Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd
, would surface in 2004, after each of the band members, including Roger Waters, had read the manuscript. Further amendments would be made between the book’s hardback and paperback publications.

‘Ten or fifteen years ago I was the tall guy in black, standing in the corner, scowling at everyone. And I don’t feel like that now,’ Roger Waters lectures Trent Reznor, rock music’s latest version of the tall guy in black. In 1999 the two were put together for a shared interview in the American magazine,
Revolver
.

Waters had never heard Reznor’s band, the angsty, agitated Nine Inch Nails. However, Reznor, twenty-three years Waters’ junior, had spent his troubled childhood on a farm in the middle of Pennsylvania, where Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
was something of a lifeline. Waters seemed genuinely touched on learning this.

On being told that Reznor’s last album had sold poorly, he offered some more fatherly advice: ‘Modigliani never sold any pictures; Van Gogh peddled his for a bowl of soup. I’ve been through some of the same things.’

It had been nine years since Waters performed
The Wall
in Berlin. Nine years in which Pink Floyd had made another album and promoted it with one of the highest grossing tours in history. In the meantime, Waters had returned to family life and tinkering, endlessly it seemed, with his planned opera about the history of the French Revolution.

‘I think at some point we’ve all had the “opera conversation”,’ admits ex-Bleeding Heart Band guitarist Jay Stapley. Waters had first publicly discussed his plans in 1989. In September 1995, word spread that the work, entitled
Ça Ira
, and co-written with Waters’ friends, the French librettist Étienne Roda-Gil and his wife Nadine Delahaye, would be released the following year. By the summer of 1997, it had still not materialised, although it was said that Waters was now in discussions about a stage play of
The Wall
, and also making another solo rock album.

Ça Ira
had begun in 1988 when Roda-Gil presented Waters with a libretto, suggesting that he set it to music. Waters ended up demoing a two-and-a-half-hour piece at the Billiard Room in East Sheen. This had found its way to the then French president, François Mitterand, who suggested the Paris Opera record it as part of the upcoming bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution. And then, nothing. ‘It sat on the shelf for six years,’ explained Waters. This was partly due to the sudden death of Nadine, but also to some resistance elsewhere because, according to Waters, ‘me being English stuck in the Gallic craw’.

Étienne Roda-Gil died in 2004, and a year later Waters recruited a co-producer, Rick Wentworth, and went into Abbey Road Studios with an orchestra to record several sections from the opera, as a taster for his new label, Columbia. The company offered him a deal for the album but suggested he write an English version. Waters went back to the score, adding in new scenes and later recording in both French and English.

Finally, in 1999, he broke his silence: not with
Ça Ira
, or a new solo album, but with a series of live dates. ‘Roger Waters in the Flesh’ opened in Wisconsin in July 1999 and continued for just over a month, before resuming the following summer. Promotional posters for the show trumpeted Waters as ‘The Creative Genius of Pink Floyd’, and the setlist was designed to drive this message home. Several chunks of
The Wall
vied for space with ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘Wish You Were Here’ and the obligatory segments from
The Final Cut
and his solo records. Partway into the tour, Waters began playing a new song, ‘Each Small Candle’, as his final encore.

Eric Clapton’s former guitarist Doyle Bramhall II now joined mainstays Andy Fairweather-Low and Snowy White, while keyboard player Andy Wallace was now sharing the stage with Pink Floyd’s Jon Carin. Producer James Guthrie had worked with both Floyd and Waters, and had brokered the exchange between the two camps. Gilmour gave his blessing (‘You must do it,’ he told Carin. ‘He’s a brilliant man’). On stage Jon would also cover some of the vocal parts formerly sung by his old boss, most notably on a version of ‘Dogs’ from the
Animals
album.

Aside from 1991’s Guitar Legends festival, Waters had played live only once since
The Wall
in Berlin: at a benefit show in aid of the preservation of Walden Woods, in Massachusetts in 1992. The Eagles’ Don Henley, whose band backed Waters on a handful of Floyd songs, had arranged the charity concert. This gig had been the catalyst for the current tour.

‘I really enjoyed the contact with the audience that night,’ admitted Waters, ‘and thought maybe I should have another go at it. After I toured
Radio K.A.O.S
., I stopped in the face of a lack of demand. I felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall.’

In the event, some of Waters’ gigs had to be moved to larger venues to accommodate the crowds, and also the size of the projection screen being used behind the stage. For some watchers, there was still the issue of rearranged Floyd songs to be overcome, especially a sprightly, funked-up version of ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’, which concluded with a tag-team guitar solo by Snowy White and Doyle Bramhall II. Assuming his customary persona of the ‘tall guy in black’, Waters soon had a familiar routine: part circus ringmaster, part orchestral conductor, and part rock star. When Bramhall or Jon Carin were singing, he would mouth the words, smile dotingly from the sidelines, or loom over Andy Fairweather-Low, wringing the neck of his bass like a farmer seeing off a particularly plucky Christmas turkey. In a stark contrast to his onstage persona with Pink Floyd, Waters appeared to be having the time of his life.

‘He has his eye and ear on everything,’ said Fairweather-Low. ‘At the end of the show, if a single lighting cue is wrong, Roger’s aware of it. I have never worked with anyone like it.’

Jon Carin talked Richard Wright into attending one of the shows. ‘I found it difficult listening to him performing Pink Floyd songs because I wanted to be up there,’ Wright told writer Jerry Ewing. ‘When they were playing “Comfortably Numb” and “Wish You Were Here” it just wasn’t as good, but when it got to his solo work, I could relax.’

Carin and Wright’s wife Millie persuaded him to go backstage after the show. ‘I hadn’t seen Roger in, what, eighteen or nineteen years,’ said Wright. ‘So I shook his hand, said, “How are you?” and we both felt awkward. And that was it. There was no great meaningful conversation. But I thought: We’re grown men now; all this bullshit should stop.’

With the first leg of the tour over, Waters helped oversee a remastered version of
The Wall
movie, providing a running commentary with Gerald Scarfe. Director Alan Parker, the third ‘megalomaniac’ in the equation, also contributed. EMI and Pink Floyd had no intention of allowing the twentieth anniversary of
The Wall
album to pass unnoticed. March 2000 saw the release of
Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live: Pink Floyd 1980-81
, pieced together over seven nights at Earls Court.

In an unusual display of détente between the estranged parties, Waters and Pink Floyd were all interviewed about the album, though neither could resist the occasional snipe at each other. If the others weren’t quite so taken with it, Waters’ opinion of
The Wall
remained undiminished. He told everyone that, if pushed, he thought it was still his finest achievement to date. Back on tour throughout the US that summer, Waters would feature five songs from the album in his set, commemorated with a live album and video also entitled
In the Flesh
.

In 2001 there were some harsh reminders of everyone’s mortality. The year would see the premature deaths of Roger’s first wife, Judy Trim, Gilmour’s friend the author Douglas Adams, and the band’s former booking agent and tour manager Tony Howard. Gilmour would perform at a memorial service for Adams later that summer. Also that year, he would be invited by old friend Robert Wyatt to participate in the annual Meltdown Festival at London’s Royal Festival Hall. Wyatt was the curator of the week-long event that also featured performances by Elvis Costello and Tricky. In his first solo show since 1984, Gilmour mixed old Floyd faithfuls, including ‘Comfortably Numb’ and ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, with the Syd Barrett gem ‘Terrapin’ and such oddities as ‘Hush-A-Bye Mountain’ from the movie
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
. Also included was a brand-new composition, ‘Smile’.

Gilmour would return to the Royal Festival Hall for three nights, six months later. Playing the same eclectic set, he was joined by Richard Wright for one song. A week later he played two further nights in Paris. Asked if Pink Floyd had now split up, Gilmour’s answer was the most decisive it had been: ‘I can’t see us doing anything in the near future. I have something else I’m doing, and that’s what my mind is concentrating on.’ He was now plotting another solo album.

The first hesitant steps towards reconciling the past and present members of the band would be taken in January 2002. At a beach party on the Caribbean holiday island of Mustique, Nick Mason had an unexpected encounter with Roger Waters. ‘I suddenly felt a forceful pair of hands grasp my shoulders and then my neck,’ Mason wrote later. The two old friends would spend the afternoon together, having their first proper conversation in years.

A month later, Waters was back out on tour, with two shows planned at London Wembley Arena in June. Mason was invited to play drums on ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ at both shows. He accepted the offer, pattering around the kit on the Floyd’s vintage space odyssey. It was the first time the two former friends had played on stage since
The Wall
in 1981. Waters’ son Harry, whose voice as a three-year-old could be heard on
The Wall
, was now playing keyboards in his father’s band. Harry was Mason’s godson.

Playing live again was an opportunity for Waters to take his mind off events elsewhere in his life. He was going through another period of profound change. His third marriage, to Pricilla, had now broken down and they would soon divorce, but he now had a new partner, the actress and film-maker Laurie Durning.

Waters addressed the upheaval in his life with unflinching honesty. ‘Through twenty years of psychotherapy, I’ve finally managed to learn to live in the moment,’ he told
The Times
. ‘I had some very powerful feelings of abandonment when I was a child, which I’m only beginning to extricate myself from now. I’m nearly sixty and I’m just beginning to feel I can operate as an adult.’

Pink Floyd’s legacy would be revisited again before the year was out. In November, EMI released
Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd
. Choosing the twenty-six tracks proved something of a chore. Interviewed just before the album’s release, Gilmour explained that Waters had all but given up on the song selection. ‘He gets very grumpy because he thinks I tell Nick and Rick what they’ve got to do and outvote him,’ said the guitarist. ‘But I don’t think six tracks from
The Final Cut
is what people want. I wanted “Fat Old Sun” on there but none of the others were having it . . .’

The final selection acknowledged all eras of the band’s history. Syd Barrett received a royalties boost with the inclusion of five of his songs. Waters, meanwhile, smarted over the presence of tracks from
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
and
The Division Bell
. ‘It pisses me off no end that tracks from those records get included. But there’s nothing I can do about it.’

Waters, nevertheless, had the opportunity to indulge himself with his own compilation,
Flickering Flame: The Solo Years Part 1
. Splicing together the best songs from each of his albums, it was a more inviting listening experience than any of the original records. As Waters wearily told interviewers when discussing his challenging solo albums, ‘I now realise that not everyone wants to go that deep.’ The one new song, ‘Flickering Flame’, included a stream-of-consciousness lyric that was in parts incredibly bombastic, especially when Waters likened himself to legendary Native Americans such as Geronimo and Crazy Horse, insisting that, like them, he’ll be ‘the last one to lay down my gun’. Elsewhere in the song, though, he acknowledged his marital problems and the death of his friend Philippe Constantin (whose 1976 interview with Waters remains one of the most revealing ever). The final telling lines offered a plea to his own ego to ‘let go of the bone’, with the hope that he might then, finally, be free.

The thirtieth anniversary reissue of
Dark Side of the Moon
, now retitled
The Dark Side of the Moon
, was the only Pink Floyd activity in 2003. Instead of the album’s original engineer Alan Parsons, long-time Floyd collaborator James Guthrie oversaw the 5.1 Surround Sound mix. Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright roused themselves to talk to the press. For once, the backbiting was kept to a minimum. Instead, the band sounded genuinely proud of their achievement, even if only Waters claimed to have known all along just how good it really was: ‘One of the truly great moments in the history of rock ’n’ roll.’