Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (65 page)

Out front, at 3 p.m., Elton John struggled manfully to perform a duet of T.Rex’s ‘Children of the Revolution’ with disorientated rock casualty Pete Doherty. Four hours later, by the time Madonna dragged baffled Ethiopian famine survivor Birhan Woldo on stage for ‘Like a Prayer’, any timetable or sense of reason had long been abandoned. By 10.30 p.m., with the show almost an hour behind schedule, the bureaucratic forces of evil had threatened a curfew.

With a last-minute reprieve, the familiar sound of a human heartbeat could be heard booming across the darkened park: the beginning of
Dark Side of the Moon
. Pink Floyd could be glimpsed in the wings; a smattering of worn jeans, greying hair, nervous smiles - incongruous rock stars one and all. Behind the stage, a pig floated over Battersea Power Station. For the first time in almost twenty-five years, the four members of the classic Pink Floyd walked out on stage together. Hostilities suspended. For once, the lawsuits, recriminations, clashing egos and musical squabbles were forgotten. For the next few glorious minutes it was all about the music.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HEROES FOR GHOSTS

‘You can’t carry on World War Three for ever.’

Nick Mason

T
here was talk of tears backstage at Live 8. But only among some of the observers. Whether this was solely down to Pink Floyd or the slow erosion of inhibitions after a long day boozing in the Golden Circle, who knows? Anyone that anticipated David Gilmour and Roger Waters falling into a watery-eyed embrace would have had a long wait ahead of them. While some around the band later claimed to have been moved to tears by the band’s performance, Pink Floyd retained the collective stiff upper lip that has been both their saving grace and greatest downfall. Yet, as they’d lined up for a final bow, they had all allowed themselves to look pleased, and, in Waters’ case, rather triumphant.

Pink Floyd’s eighteen minutes on stage eclipsed every performance before it that day, and the one after. By the following morning, a teeth-baring, madly grinning Roger Waters had become the most repeated photograph from Live 8 in all the Sunday newspapers.

Will they do it again? For the next few weeks, stories circulated of promoters promising ever more ridiculous sums of money, ranging from $150 to $250 million, depending on which newspaper or magazine you happened to be reading. Gilmour told anyone that asked that he turned them all down. He has, he insists, achieved closure. Though not without slipping in one last dig at his former nemesis: ‘I’ve been offered the same amount of money to tour Pink Floyd with or without Roger.’

Waters couldn’t resist responding: ‘Maybe he doesn’t quite get how important the symbiosis between the four of us was during the “golden years”. We all made a contribution, but it was the combination of the four separate talents. It was a very, very, special thing.’

For the man who once denounced his bandmates as ‘the muffins’ and had, he claimed on occasion, been its sole driving force, this was a remarkable change of heart. In the months immediately following Live 8, Waters would seem to be the one extending the olive branch. ‘I hope we can do it again,’ he said. ‘If there was another special occasion - something with a political or charitable connection. I could even imagine us doing
Dark Side of the Moon
again.’

Richard Wright remained silent, but Nick Mason couldn’t quite help himself: ‘My bag is packed and ready to go.’ Ever the arbitrator, Mason was just as quick to explain why he didn’t think Gilmour was in a hurry to do it all again. ‘David had the most to lose by doing Live 8. He’s been working on his solo album for some time now, and I think he felt, quite rightly, that doing Pink Floyd again would take all the attention away from that.’

In November, the Floyd drummer and guitarist appeared together in London for Pink Floyd’s induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame. Floyd fan Pete Townshend delivered a glowing introductory speech. Wright was unable to attend as he was having an eye operation (‘poor sausage,’ explained Gilmour). Waters was in Rome for a performance of
Ça Ira
, but was visible above Mason and Gilmour as a looming Orwellian presence on the overhead video screen. It was a moment of dark comedy. Gilmour’s off-the-cuff dedication to Roger, Syd and ‘all the passengers on this fabulous ride we’ve been on’ saw Waters’ face darken briefly. ‘I confess I never felt like a passenger,’ he shot back. Mason ended the performance with a rather excruciating drummer joke. Gilmour looked, as ever, as if he couldn’t wait to go home.

Almost a year after Live 8, though, the guitarist had something to smile about. His third solo album,
On an Island
, was a number 1 hit in the UK, breaking the traditional run of lacklustre sales for Floyd solo records. The inconvenience of playing Live 8 had clearly paid off. In the absence of Pink Floyd, people had gone out and bought the next best thing: a David Gilmour album.

On an Island
was a marking post in the guitarist’s life. Released on 6 March 2006, his sixtieth birthday, it seemed to revisit his past while suggesting a settled, happy present and future. Among the contributors were fellow Cantabrigians, ex-Jokers Wild and
The Wall
surrogate band drummer Willie Wilson and guitarist Rado Klose, once part of The Pink Floyd Sound. Now working as a photographer, Klose has remained Gilmour’s friend since childhood. ‘David phoned up and said, “Are you still playing?” ’ says Klose. ‘We hadn’t played together in forty years. It was an interesting experience.’ Klose bailed out of Pink Floyd in 1965, ‘but I watched, sometimes with open-mouthed amazement, at what happened afterwards. In Cambridge, Floyd are like this huge gravitational object, with a lot of different tribes orbiting around it. I preferred to watch them from a distance.’

Among the album’s other guests were singers David Crosby and Graham Nash, Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera, songwriter Robert Wyatt and Poland’s leading film composer Zbigniew Preisner. Their presence never impinged on Gilmour’s, though.
On an Island
was a vehicle for his voice and guitar playing. There was none of the flash of his last solo album,
About Face
, or the uncertainty of the first. Instead, it was a laid-back, elegiac and terribly English-sounding record. Once again, his co-writer Polly Samson has helped eke out Gilmour’s innermost thoughts, or at least tried to. ‘Polly thinks I’m a little autistic,’ Gilmour told one interviewer.

‘The album has a feeling of contentment to it,’ he said. ‘Tied with elements of melancholy, nostalgia and regret.’ Dedicated to the memory of the late Michael Kamen and Tony Howard, songs such as ‘The Blue’ revisited a dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes theme of mortality that had often crept into Gilmour’s work. ‘I’ve always thought a lot about mortality and it used to scare me deeply.’ Sadly, in the month of the album’s release, yet another of Pink Floyd’s foot-soldiers, engineer Nick Griffiths, died following a transplant operation.

As a contrast, on the song ‘Smile’ Gilmour sounded at the pinnacle of family-man contentment. On ‘This Heaven’ he explored his feelings about spirituality, albeit from an atheist’s perspective: ‘It’s about heaven being here on earth. That thing of being in a church or a place of worship where you can feel the power in the building.’ Only one song, ‘Take a Breath’, worked up a head of steam, though: the guitar clanging away in a manner oddly reminiscent of Syd Barrett’s more electric moments on
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
.
On an Island
was an album made to please one person: Gilmour himself. Anyone else was a bonus. ‘We sometimes sit here, with a glass of wine of an evening and listen to the album from start to finish,’ he revealed. ‘And I still think it sounds fantastic.’

Gilmour launched the album with a BBC-recorded show at London’s Mermaid Theatre, before embarking on a world tour. His choice of bandmates did little to quell the clamour for a Pink Floyd reunion. While drummer Steve DiStanislao and Phil Manzanera were relative new boys, Guy Pratt, Dick Parry, Jon Carin and Richard Wright were familiar names. Carin, Parry and Wright had all played on the album also. With Wright performing stage left to Gilmour, shadowed by Jon Carin, it was a familiar set-up to anyone that had seen a Pink Floyd show in the eighties or nineties.

‘Rick plays beautifully, he has soul and I like having him around,’ offers Gilmour. ‘My difficulty with him on this record was persuading him to get off his arse and come down and do some work. He came down and played Hammond. But then I wanted him to sing on one of them, and that was like pulling teeth. It’s not laziness, just lack of confidence.’

Nevertheless, the notoriously diffident keyboard player would excel during the tour. Gilmour played a set loaded with Pink Floyd songs, revisiting
Obscured By Clouds
for ‘Wot’s. . .Uh the Deal’, and
Atom Heart Mother
for his beloved ‘Fat Old Sun’. Wright took the lead on his own Floyd song, ‘Wearing the Inside Out’, traded vocals with Gilmour on ‘Time’, and received a spontaneous round of applause every time he struck the opening note of ‘Echoes’, the mind-bending, prog-rock extravaganza from 1971. ‘There was a beautiful heckle one night,’ recalls Guy Pratt. ‘ “Give us a ping, Rick!” ’ On the Continent, the audience’s enthusiasm for Wright ensured that, even offstage, the keyboardist was jokingly referred to as ‘Reeechard’ in honour of the frequently heard shouts from the crowd.

In May, Gilmour played three nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall. On one, David Bowie stepped up for a nervy version of ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’. On the final night, Nick Mason took over on the drums for ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’, making it a brief reunion for Pink Floyd Mark III. Mason was, however, otherwise engaged as Roger Waters’ very occasional drummer. Fired up by Live 8, Waters had wasted little time in reviving the ‘In the Flesh’ tour. Opening in Lisbon at the beginning of June, Waters marched his troops through Italy, Iceland, Greece and Scandinavia, and on to London’s Hyde Park. His band still included Floyd faithful Jon Carin, just finished playing on the Gilmour tour, and trusty lieutenants Andy Fairweather-Low, Snowy White and drummer Graham Broad, plus a new would-be guitar hero, David Kilminster, whose CV included previous stints with the likes of Emerson Lake & Palmer’s Keith Emerson. Kilminster’s art-rock credentials seemed appropriate, as the second half of Waters’ show was now given over to the whole of
Dark Side of the Moon
. When their respective schedules or the handy timing of a motor racing event permitted it, Mason would play drums for the full rendition of Pink Floyd’s classic 1973 album. With members split between the two rival camps, fans could now get two surrogate Floyds for their money.

On an Island
’s preoccupation with mortality seemed even more apt in the summer of 2006. On Friday, 7 July, Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett died quietly at home in Cambridge. His health had been deteriorating for some time, and he had gone voluntarily to the hospital in which his father had once worked.

Friends and former bandmates learned of the news at the beginning of the following week. ‘David Gilmour phoned me,’ recalls Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell. ‘He was the one who’d stayed in touch with the family more than any of the others. David knew he’d been ill, so he wasn’t surprised. But I was. I felt incredibly shocked, even though this was somebody I hadn’t seen for thirty-five years. I started thinking about when we’d gone to the first Windsor Rhythm and Blues Festival together. We’d all jumped in Syd’s mum’s old Austin 10, and got lost on the way. It was the first time Cream ever played. Syd was completely starstruck and rooted to the spot during the whole gig. It all came flooding back.’

In Cambridge, Clive Welham, Syd’s one-time drummer in The Mottoes, heard the news on the television: ‘And then before the story had finished, the phone started ringing.’ Welham had seen Barrett in town not long before, standing just a few feet in front of him, queuing in a shop. ‘I didn’t say anything to him,’ says Clive. ‘I did think about it, but then I thought: Why? He doesn’t want to be disturbed.’

One day in Cambridge, Libby Gausden had chosen to approach the man who had once been her first boyfriend. ‘I said, “Do you know who I am, Syd?” And he replied, “Of course I know who you are, you’re Libby”. He understood, but he wasn’t quite right. My father had suffered a stroke, and it had hit his brain, and Syd’s behaviour reminded me of that.’

Years later, Libby’s daughter Abigail, then studying at Cambridge University, saw a man pedalling past her on a bicycle. Abigail was wearing one of her mother’s Biba dresses from the 1960s. ‘Hello little Lib,’ he called out. ‘Hello,’ she replied, unaware of who he was. A friend pointed out that it was Syd Barrett.

Barrett had, however, been a part of these people’s lives a long time ago. To all but his closest family members, he had become a ghost long before he died.

Pink Floyd kept their distance but released a simple statement to the press: ‘The band are naturally very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett’s death. Syd was the guiding light of the early band line-up and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire.’

Coincidentally, writer Tom Stoppard’s latest play,
Rock ’n’ Roll
, which included references to Barrett and extracts of Pink Floyd’s music, had opened in London just weeks before Syd’s death. Initially set in Cambridge in the 1960s, the play tackled the impact of rock music in Czechoslovakia and a disillusioned university don’s struggle to cope with the erosion of his Communist beliefs. The play’s opening scene found the don’s daughter, the embodiment of a sixties ‘hippie chick’, pondering a chance encounter with the elusive Barrett to the strains of Syd’s solo song, ‘Golden Hair’. Both Nick Mason and David Gilmour attended performances of the play.

A quiet family funeral for Barrett took place at Cambridge Crematorium on 18 July. None of the band attended. Tributes to Barrett filled the national press as well as the usual music magazines. Contemporaries ranging from Elton John and David Bowie offered their memories and reflections. From the next generation of musicians, Paul Weller offered a wry observation in
Mojo
magazine: ‘Syd shone so bright for such a short space of time, everyone’s vision is still trapped in that time.’