Inside Out (21 page)

B
Y THE
end of 1971, it seemed as if some of the lethargy I’d been feeling had been shaken off. Roger, talking to
Melody Maker,
was still relaying ‘a feeling in the group, and certainly there’s a very heavy feeling in my head, that we’ve really let
things slide horribly and it’s beginning to drive me crazy’. He looked ahead to our next UK tour as ‘another bit of pressure,
because there’s not really enough time between now and 19th January or whenever it starts to perfect anything. To create an
hour of something that’s really good is very difficult.’ It might have been difficult but at least he set to with a will.
Roger had worked up an outline for a new album. He had some ideas, a number of songs in development – ‘Time’ had a verse and
chorus, though no lyrics – and he had created an unusual 7:8 bass riff that seemed quite radical.

The discussions that developed
The Dark Side Of The Moon
took place at a band meeting held round the kitchen table at my house in St Augustine’s Road, Camden. This was unusual, since
we could see each other every day in the studios or on the road, but we must have felt we needed a change of environment to
concentrate on getting our next project under way.

As well as Roger’s songs, we had several fragments from earlier rehearsal sessions, and a number of more finished items. But
there was as yet no coherent theme to help Roger develop his initial work. As we talked, the subject of stress emerged as
a common thread, although at the time we weren’t experiencing any particular angst: it was, in fact, one of the most stable
periods in our domestic lives.

Roger was now living in Islington, on the New North Road. At the bottom of his garden, he had put up a workspace that was
a half-step up from a potting shed. In fact, potting was done there, but rather than the common garden variety, Judy was creating
her ceramics in one half of it. In the other Roger had constructed a home studio, which was modelled on the Ron Geesin approach:
three Revox tape recorders, set into a workbench to facilitate the swift transfer of sounds from one machine to the others.
Rick was installed in Leinster Gardens in Bayswater with Juliette and their children. I was in St Augustine’s Road with Lindy.
Only David had moved out to Royden in Essex, having abandoned his bachelor pad in Chelsea.

Despite all the tours, I definitely felt involved in life in Camden. Lindy and I had become friends with a number of our neighbours,
and there were occasional street parties for major national events. I was certainly aware of the community, as Roger was of
his; he became a committed Arsenal fan. With Judy and Lindy we would get together socially a couple of times a week, and spent
a lot of time in each other’s houses; I have a clear memory of being in Roger’s house with Lindy when she was heavily pregnant
with our first daughter Chloe.

However, despite this stability, we assembled a list of the difficulties and pressures of modern life that we particularly
recognised. Deadlines, travel, the stress of flying, the lure of money, a fear of dying, and the problems of mental instability
spilling over into madness…Armed with this list Roger went off to continue working on the lyrics.

Compared to the rather piecemeal approach of our previous albums, which had often been conceived in an air of desperation
rather than inspiration, this felt like a considerably more constructive way of working. Continuing band discussions about
the aims and aspirations of the record helped to fuel the process.
Using the specific lyrics that Roger devised, the music evolved in the rehearsal studio – and subsequently throughout the
recording sessions. This gave Roger the opportunity to see any musical or lyrical gaps and to create pieces to fill them.

Once Syd left the band in 1968, the onus had fallen on Roger to write the majority of our lyrics. David and Rick were still
only occasional lyricists – Rick once said that ‘if the words came out like the music, and we didn’t have anything else to
do, then quite a few would be written’. On
The Dark Side Of The Moon
Roger took on the task with considerable style: his words gave the album our most open and specific lyrics to date – although
he would later occasionally be disparaging about them, calling them ‘Lower Sixth stuff’. For the first time we considered
it appropriate to print them in their entirety on the album sleeve.

An early, performable version of
Dark Side
was produced within a few weeks. The first full roll-out of the piece, already called ‘Dark Side Of The Moon, A Piece For
Assorted Lunatics’ (although it would oscillate between this title and ‘Eclipse’ at various times), was at the Rainbow Theatre
in North London, during a four-night series of dates in mid-February 1972. The Rainbow, a former cinema, was England’s version
of the Avalon or Fillmore ballrooms in San Francisco, and its darkened auditorium hiding an ornate but peeling decor created
a distinctive and funky ambience that harked back to our early days at the Roundhouse. It was a relief for Pete Watts and
the road crew to be able to set up just the once for the four gigs: by now, we had some nine tons of equipment in three trucks,
seven auditorium speakers, a new PA and a 28-input mixing desk with four quad outputs. There were gratifyingly full houses
to hear the results: a couple of ads in the back of
Melody Maker
had proved sufficient for all four shows to sell out.

However, although the live version of
Dark Side
was quite
advanced, the actual recording of the piece spread throughout 1972, as it was constantly interrupted not only by our touring
commitments but by a whole host of other projects: the
Obscured By Clouds
film track, the release of our own
Live At Pompeii
film, and a number of concerts with Roland Petit’s Ballet de Marseille. Luckily
Dark Side
proved to be resilient enough to survive all these distractions. We did not feel oppressed by this mountain of work – on
the contrary, it was evidence that we were active, professional musicians. After the doldrums we had encountered around the
time of
Atom Heart Mother,
we had a revitalised sense of purpose.

Obscured By Clouds
was the first of the interruptions. After the success of
More,
we had agreed to do another sound track for Barbet Schroeder. His new film was called
La Vallée
and we travelled over to France to record the music in the last week of February. The film was straight out of the aftermath
of the ‘Summer of Love’; it mixed a story about a band of hippies from Europe travelling in Papua New Guinea with some ethnographic
reportage about the local Mapuga tribespeople (one reviewer made a connection between this documentary feel and the Robert
Flaherty film on the people of Aran which had featured Steve O’Rourke’s father).

We did the recording with the same method we had employed for
More,
following a rough cut of the film, using stopwatches for specific cues and creating interlinking musical moods that could
be cross-faded to suit the final version. Standard rock song construction was optional: one idea could be spun out for an
entire section without worrying about the niceties of choruses and middle eights, and any idea in its shortest, most raw version
could work without the need to add solos and frills. I was able to try out a very early pair of electronic drums – not as
advanced as later syndrums, more like electronic bongoes – on the opening sequence.

This method of evolving and modifying themes played to our
strengths, but we had no scope for self-indulgence since the recording time available was extremely tight. We only had two
weeks to record the soundtrack with a short amount of time afterwards to turn it into an album. What impresses me now is that
what we actually ended up with was fairly well-structured. A whole series of songs were produced, but my perception is that
the song titles were hurriedly allocated under pressure to meet the film schedule.

The recording took place at Strawberry Studios, based in the Château d’Hérouville, just north of Paris, known by Elton John
fans as Honky Chateau. This was a delightful and spacious recording studio in the countryside, but I can only remember being
able to enjoy the location on the very last day. We locked ourselves in, put our heads down and played, wrapped up the soundtrack
recording and went home. Later we had an altercation with the film company, and so, rather than releasing the soundtrack as
La Vallée,
we used the title
Obscured By Clouds.
Gratifyingly, we discovered later that the film had been retitled
La Vallée
(
Obscured By Clouds)
to tie in with our album.

We still had to remix the material for an album release, but before we could do that we had another tour to Japan. This time
we had chartered a DC8 and even after loading all our equipment on board there were still plenty of spare seats. Wives and
girlfriends were obvious co-travellers, but the remaining places were filled with passengers who had increasingly tenuous
connections with the band, but the kind of careers that apparently allowed them to drop everything and join us at very short
notice – usually a bad sign.

Until this point we had generally been unaccompanied on tour, and having the families and camp followers along for the ride
noticeably changed the atmosphere. My memory is that the shows suffered as a result, and that the mood in the band room was
less focused. This was exacerbated by the difference in the pace of the
tour, not the intensive city-to-city routine of the States, but maybe five dates in three weeks. All this made the tour feel
more like an upmarket school outing, a holiday visit rather than a working trip. We were in Japan shortly after the Sapporo
Winter Olympics and headed there to enjoy some time on the pistes. At Sapporo there was Alpine music piped through a Tannoy
system along the chairlift to get us in the mood, and instead of Glühwein, it was rice and sake. We had difficulty finding
ski boots big enough, especially for Arthur Max, who had something like size thirteen feet. We had brought Arthur in to look
after our light show, when we remembered just how inventive he had been with the lighting at the Fillmore East in 1970.

Another – comparatively straightforward – American tour followed. It was part of a band’s life that you had to try and build
the audience base in the States. We were by now several years into the process, and although we had not yet had a really successful
album, we were able to fill the larger auditoria. Once formally engaged in the process of ‘cracking America’, it goes on forever.

After America and a few dates in Europe we at last had an opportunity to begin serious recording work on
Dark Side –
and for the whole of June we were able to spend time in Abbey Road. We approached the task assiduously, booking three-day
sessions, sometimes whole weeks, and would all turn up for every session, everyone anxious to be involved in whatever was
happening. There was an air of confidence in the studio. Since
Meddle
we had been our own producers, and so we could set our own schedule: at this point we were tending to work on the album track
by track until we were happy with each piece.

The atmosphere seemed more youthful than it had been on our earlier visits to EMI. There was a new generation of engineers
and tape operators – the apprentice engineers – who had grown up with rock music. As in the new breed of commercial studios,
they
realised the importance of a good relationship with the musicians. Gone were the days of studio managers roaming around to
check that you weren’t using their editing scissors or fiddling with the plugboard.

At the beginning of the
Dark Side
recordings we were assigned Alan Parsons, who had been assistant tape operator on
Atom Heart Mother,
as house engineer. After joining EMI’s tape duplication facility, Alan had set his mind to becoming a recording engineer,
gaining experience on the Beatles’
Abbey Road
and
Let It Be
albums, before working as a full-time engineer with Paul McCartney and George Harrison on their solo material, and with the
Hollies on their singles ‘He Ain’t Heavy’ and ‘The Air That I Breathe’. Having come through the EMI apprentice system, Alan
had acquired – as all EMI trainees did – a remarkably thorough knowledge of all the aspects of working in a recording studio.
He was a bloody good engineer. But he also had a very good ear and was a capable musician in his own right. This, combined
with his natural diplomatic skills, helped enormously and meant he could make an active and positive contribution to the album.