Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (2 page)

In worn-out denim and black T-shirt, David Gilmour gazes imperiously into the middle distance. More than any of his bandmates, Gilmour has always looked like the quintessential seventies hippie musician: barefoot, laid-back, one hank of his long hair usually tucked behind his ear to keep it off his face as he fussed with the settings on his amp, or nudged an effects pedal with his toes. The hair is long gone, the remains shaved tight to the scalp, and the waistline is thicker. But Gilmour seems to carry himself with greater confidence now. Cradling his guitar, he sets about singing lyrics written by his one-time nemesis - Roger Waters. Gilmour has been Pink Floyd’s only frontman since the mid-1980s. The target for most of Waters’ ire, he has overseen two platinum-selling Floyd albums and record-breaking tours without his former partner. He exchanges thin smiles with Mason and the crowd, including his wife and some of his children watching from the enclosure in front of the stage, but barely glances at the bassist.

Just a few feet away, Roger Waters mans his own corner. His greying hair is longer, still touching the collar of a washed-out blue shirt. His sleeves are rolled up, revealing an expensive-looking watch that jangles every time he moves. Waters doesn’t seem so much to play his bass as assault it. Chin jutting regally, he scowls and jerks his head in time to the music while wringing the neck of his instrument. He smiles frequently, but bares his teeth and the grin becomes disconcertingly aggressive. Despite this threatening demeanour, Waters looks delighted to be back on stage with the same men he threatened with legal action twenty years previously. Tellingly, while Gilmour sings, Waters mouths the words, as if reminding all those watching that these are
his
songs.

‘Breathe’ is a balmy, low-key overture. The sweet guitar figure prompts the obligatory raising of glowing cigarette lighters above the heads of the crowds, while beatific smiles appear on the faces of those who’ve spent the past ten and a half hours hunkered down in their vantage points waiting for this moment. Written by the then thirty-year-old Waters, ‘Breathe’ set out the lyrical agenda of
Dark Side of the Moon
; a plaintive exploration of the fears and insecurities of early adulthood, the realisation that, in the bass player’s own words, ‘you’ve been sitting around waiting for life to start only to suddenly realise that it’s already started.’ That it’s being rendered by the same men thirty years later makes it seem all the more prescient.

With barely a word of acknowledgement to the crowd, ‘Breathe’ segues into ‘Money’, the US single that helped to break Pink Floyd in America. In contrast, this is loud, overdriven hard rock. The lyrics have since become a predictable target for those dismissive of Floyd’s multi-millionaire status. But its subject matter is pertinent for Live 8 and, as Mason later explains, ‘Sir Bob wanted us to do it.’ Either way, the sheer drive and tempo of the song makes it ideal for an outdoor event. Gilmour solos restlessly, before the song is hewn in two by a saxophone solo from Dick Parry, the same musician who played on the original track, who ambles on stage, also looking as if bound for the ninth hole. As the pair negotiate the song’s final bend, there is a flicker of eye contact between Gilmour and Waters. Then it’s gone.

Backstage earlier, Nick Mason had calculated that there would be ‘over three hundred years of old rock ’n’ roll experience’ on stage. But it’s the group’s life experience that’s important. As one Floyd insider once put it, ‘Pink Floyd’s music is like a beautiful girl walking down the street who won’t talk to you.’ For a band notable for their corseted English reserve and inability to communicate with each other outside the music, this outbreak of peace has brought all the humanity and emotion concealed in their songs to the surface. Suddenly, it all makes perfect sense.

In the context of today’s performance, ‘Wish You Were Here’ sounds like what it is: a simple love song to a departed friend. Gilmour and Waters both play acoustic guitars, while another Floyd familiar, second guitarist Tim Renwick, steps out of the shadows to help them along. Waters sings the second verse, his harsher, cracked voice a contrast to Gilmour’s sweeter tone. The song is short, simple and rapturously received. Its inspiration and meaning is not lost on this audience. It is a song partly about the one member of the original Pink Floyd not on stage tonight.

The closing song is as inevitable as it is anticipated. To have not played it would have been seen as heresy. ‘Comfortably Numb’ is taken from
The Wall
, a concept album about a rock star’s tortuous decline. Sharing the lead vocals again, Waters and Gilmour sing of
The Wall
’s burnt-out muso, slipping into pillowy, drug-induced nirvana, before Gilmour delivers the pay-off moment - a guitar solo that carries the song to a grand, Hollywood climax, the sort plundered inexpertly by so many rock bands since. It’s grandiose, spectacular and oddly moving.

Previously stoic expressions break into relieved grins as the four wander to the centre of the stage. Waters, his arm already around Mason and Wright, gestures towards an uncomfortable-looking Gilmour, mouthing the words, ‘Come on.’ Hesitantly, the guitarist allows himself to be embraced, and the reunited Pink Floyd take their bow. A slogan in the audience captures the moment: ‘Pink Floyd Reunited! Pigs Have Flown.’

At 11.15 p.m., Sir Paul McCartney strides on stage to play Live 8’s closing set. But even he can’t shift the attention away from what has come before. In the US, there is speculative talk of lucrative reunion tours and the possibility of another Pink Floyd album. In the UK, the
Guardian
more irreverently concedes that although the band members ‘look like senior partners in a firm of chartered accountants . . . twenty-four years after they last shared a stage, they sound fantastic.’

Watching their performance on TV, backstage at the Canadian Live 8 event in Barrie, was Bob Ezrin, Floyd’s effusive long-time collaborator and co-producer of
The Wall
. ‘I thought it was stunning, the stuff legends are made of,’ he enthuses a few weeks later. ‘I was so overjoyed and, yeah, I have to admit, I cried. Then I became slowly aware that everyone was watching
me
watch Pink Floyd.’

For the band’s followers, record companies, dewy-eyed former colleagues, everyone, Live 8 offered hope of a longer-term reconciliation. David Gilmour swiftly quashed any such speculation. ‘It’s in the past for me. Done it. I don’t have any desire to go back there,’ he said. ‘It’s great to put some of that bitterness behind us, but that’s as far as it goes.’

Before rehearsals for Live 8, David Gilmour and Roger Waters had last spent time in each other’s company on 23 December 1987, in the words of the guitarist, to ‘thrash out the terms of our divorce’. Convening on Gilmour’s houseboat-cum-studio, the pair finalised the deal with an accountant and a computer to settle the terms of a legal document relating to use of the name Pink Floyd.

Previously, Waters had filed law suits against both Gilmour and Mason, believing that the band name should have been put to rest following his official departure in 1985. For nearly twenty years, Waters had been the group’s dominant songwriter, devising the original concepts behind albums such as
Dark Side of the Moon
and
The Wall
, writing the bulk of the lyrics and, in his own words, ‘driving the band’. Refusing to cede to his demands, Gilmour and Mason had elected to continue as Pink Floyd. Three months before this final meeting, the pair had released a new Floyd album,
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
, signing up Richard Wright to play on the subsequent tour. Two months later, despite being denounced by Waters as ‘a fair forgery’, the album had notched up platinum sales, confirming that the Pink Floyd brand was strong enough to weather even the loss of a key member.

Then again, it wasn’t the first time the band had lost one of its number. At Live 8, Roger Waters had acknowledged the one Pink Floyd member missing that night, dedicating ‘Wish You Were Here’ to ‘everyone that’s not here, but particularly, of course, Syd’.

Syd Barrett, once Pink Floyd’s lead singer, guitarist and guiding light, had dropped out of both the band and the music business some three decades earlier. As his former bandmates performed to over 100,000 fans in Hyde Park and to a television audience of over 2 billion people around the world, Syd Barrett remained at home in a semi-detached house in suburban Cambridge. At his own request, Barrett no longer had any direct contact with Pink Floyd or wished to be reminded of his time in the band. For him, it had long been over.

CHAPTER TWO

THE ENDLESS SUMMER

‘Freedom is what I’m after.’

Syd Barrett

I
t was made public four days after the event. On Friday, 7 July 2006, Syd Barrett died. The cause of death was given as pancreatic cancer, though his health had been declining for many years. Syd’s family informed David Gilmour, who relayed the news to his former bandmates and others in the Floyd’s circle of friends. Respecting Syd’s family’s wishes, none of Pink Floyd had seen or spoken to Syd in many years. When the news finally broke worldwide on Tuesday, 11 July, photographs of Barrett appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the world. It was an extraordinary and unprecedented reaction to the death of a man who had not made a record in over thirty years, and had not spoken about his time as a pop star for just as long.

In the spring of 1968, Pink Floyd had parted company with their original singer and childhood friend. By then, David Gilmour had joined the group to provide some musical stability, as Barrett’s drug use and increasingly fractious state of mind had rendered him a liability. In January that year, on their way to perform a show, the rest of the band took the decision not to collect Syd, a decision that would have a profound effect on the rest of their lives.

The week before Pink Floyd’s Live 8 performance, the
London Evening Standard
despatched a journalist to Barrett’s house in Cambridge, in an attempt to interview the band’s elusive former singer. Barrett refused to answer the door. His sister Rosemary revealed that she had told her brother of Pink Floyd’s imminent reunion, only to be met with a blank response. ‘That is another life for him,’ she explained, ‘another world in another time.’ The nickname of Syd, acquired in that previous life, had been abandoned. For many years Syd had been known once again as Roger Barrett.

The anonymous semi-detached house at 6 St Margaret’s Square, Cambridge, where Barrett spent his final years, gave away very little about the identity of its sole occupant. There were none of the trappings beloved by rock stars of all generations: no wall-mounted gold discs to be glimpsed through the gaps in the curtains or expensive sports cars lined up in the driveway. Yet there was none of the neglect some might expect after hearing the rumours and whispered half-truths about the mental state of its owner. Barrett had lived there alone since the death of his mother in 1991. He had never married, fathered any children or held down a job for a significant length of time since his alter ego left Pink Floyd in the 1960s.

Every so often the outside world would impinge on his private universe. Pictures of the navy-blue front door would be splashed across the newspapers, alongside an image of the occupant himself. Caught unawares on his doorstep by photographers, Syd always looked baffled, sometimes angry or scared, invariably half-dressed with a middle-age paunch on display. Any glimpse of his down-at-heel appearance supplied more grist to the Syd Barrett rumour mill.

Syd would undergo these intrusions whenever his past life became a topic of interest in the present day. When Pink Floyd reconvened without him to play Live 8, it was inevitable that the press would descend. Previously, during the media frenzy surrounding acid house raves in the late 1980s, Barrett was held up by the
News of the World
as a cautionary example of the dangers of taking LSD. Of course, they knew he would never sue. But then, who knew what he might do? Neighbours spoke of hearing deathly screams in the middle of the night, while others said they’d heard him bark like a dog. Since the early nineties, though, Roger Barrett simply spent his days painting, reading and cycling to the local shops. He led a quiet, though not completely reclusive existence. Invariably, after each intrusion on his privacy, the trail would go cold again and Syd would be left alone, with only the occasional uninvited fan knocking on his door.

Yet, whatever their context, the photographs of the old Syd Barrett that accompanied these newspaper exposés were still unavoidably compelling. Those same pictures appeared again after his death. Taken almost forty years earlier, they showed Syd dolled up in his best Kings Road clothes, wavy hair teased into an explosive halo, eyes smouldering into the camera, as he blueprinted the image of the doomed rock star, a cliché adopted by countless would-be Syds ever since.

‘He was someone that people would point out on the street,’ recalls David Gilmour of his childhood friend. ‘Syd had that charisma, that magnetism.’

The shared history of Pink Floyd’s three chief protagonists - Barrett, Gilmour and Waters - is irrevocably tied to the city of their youth.

Cambridge’s reputation as a seat of learning began as early as the thirteenth century. With the striking architecture of its colleges and the River Cam winding its way through the city, it retains a traditional English quality. Yet as a counterpoint to any quaintness, the landscape around the city comprises rugged fenland. The atmosphere seeped into Pink Floyd’s music from the start. The title of the group’s first album,
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
, was taken from
The Wind in the Willows
, Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s novel set on a riverbank. In the chapter of the same name, two of the book’s animal characters embark on a bizarre spiritual quest. ‘Grantchester Meadows’, Roger Waters’ softly played interlude on the band’s
Ummagumma
album, was named after the beautiful, heavily wooded riverbank area tucked away towards the south of the city, near David Gilmour’s family home.