Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (35 page)

‘ “Money” was the song,’ says Menon. ‘That was the obvious choice. Though I did have to work very hard to persuade the group and Steve O’Rourke that we should put it out.’

‘At first they didn’t agree because they said the time signature was too unusual,’ remembers Jeff Dexter. ‘I played it at the Roundhouse and could see how well it worked. You knew it was going to be a monster hit. But I think at the time Pink Floyd were taking a leaf out of Led Zeppelin’s book, who were shifting shitloads of albums without having to go through all that radio bullshit.’

For the band themselves, the memory of their last single, 1968’s disastrous ‘Point Me at the Sky’, was still too raw.

‘We decided that if the public didn’t want to buy our singles we didn’t want to put any out,’ says Nick Mason.

‘We didn’t think anything would happen with “Money”,’ admitted Richard Wright. ‘And, suddenly, it just did.’

A shorter version of the song, with the word ‘bullshit’ edited out to appease prudish radio programmers, was released in America on 7 May. By the end of the following month, it had crept to number 26. With blanket airplay on US Top 40 radio, taking it into the homes of non-album buyers and non-Floyd fans, it finally peaked at number 13. The provocative lyrics, in which a soon to be very rich rock ’n’ roll band sang of greed and selfishness, Gilmour’s squalling guitar, Dick Parry’s similarly squalling sax, and that clubfooted but compelling funk rhythm all helped to make it a song that sounded fantastic when played on the radio.

It didn’t take long for the band to feel the ripples. In June, Pink Floyd returned to America for eleven dates, running from New Jersey down to Florida. On the opening night at the Union City Roosevelt Stadium, they broke all box office records. Through Detroit, Ohio and Kentucky, most of the shows were sold out, and the audience’s reaction was the same wherever they played. Where once the Floyd faithful would sit, rapt, contemplating the twenty-minute mind trip of ‘Echoes’, they were now louder, more animated and, as Gilmour grudgingly explained, ‘ready to boogie’.

‘Everywhere we played, we suddenly found ourselves confronted with an audience that just wanted to hear the big hit,’ said the guitarist. They wanted to dance, drink beer and have a good time. And they wanted to hear ‘Money’. ‘That’s all you’d hear, throughout the show, until we finally played it: “Money” ... play “Money” ...’

The unthinkable had happened; Pink Floyd were now pop stars. It could only go downhill from there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

RIDING THE GRAVY TRAIN

‘That’s why I stay in the group. I’m worried about the others - what’s going to become of them.’

Roger Waters

I
n a private room at London’s exclusive members’ club, The Groucho, Richard Wright conveys the genteel manner of a retired public school teacher. He has that rather absent air you’d expect to find in one who has spent their adult lifetime in a higher seat of learning. You half expect to see chalk dust on his elbows. It is 1996 and Pink Floyd’s keyboard player is now fifty-four. The paisley-shirted psychedelic poster boy of 1967, second only in the ranks to Syd Barrett, is gone, as is the bearded hipster of 1972’s
Live At Pompeii
. Wright’s hair is now completely white, and, while his jeans and brogues are high street issue, you suspect that the overcoat hanging on the back of a nearby chair is from somewhere a little more up-market and outside your price range.

In conversation, he is nervous, obliging, reticent and precise. Wright is here to talk about his new solo album, a record that will disappear off the radar of all but the most dedicated of Pink Floyd fans within a few months. It is, nevertheless, an album full of aural tics and moments of familiarity that make you scrabble around in the back of your mind, trying to remember which Pink Floyd song it now reminds you of.

When you ask Wright about the Floyd albums he rates the most highly, you already know the answer. Now back in the group as a full-time member, he doesn’t bother subscribing to David Gilmour’s party line: that the new Floyd is on a par with the old Floyd. Wright’s tastes are strictly old school.

‘
Dark Side of the Moon
and
Wish You Were Here
,’ he answers. ‘But if I was forced to name one,
Wish You Were Here
.’

‘Or
Wish You
Weren’t
Here
,’ as Roger Waters once called it, balefully recalling the mood in the studio during its making. Pink Floyd had ended 1973 playing a benefit concert for Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt, who had broken his back after falling from a window, but before Christmas, they reconvened at Abbey Road, and began messing around again with the
Household Objects
project, on hold since 1971.
Dark Side of the Moon
’s number 1 chart position and the hit single ‘Money’ had been the start of what Nick Mason would later describe as ‘Floyd’s scorched earth policy’, but, contrarily, they had gone back to trying to make music with wine glasses, saws, rolls of sticky tape and buckets of water.

‘I remember a rubber band being stretched between two objects to make a bass sound, with matchsticks as frets,’ says engineer Alan Parsons. ‘Actually, I was always rather disappointed it never came to anything.’

In truth, it was a delaying tactic, a ruse to make the band feel they were doing something without actually having to write any new songs. Yet something was salvaged out of the aborted sessions: the high-pitched sound produced by a finger on the rim of a wine glass became a starting point for one of Pink Floyd’s most enduring songs.

As 1974 rolled in, the group dispersed to spend time with their families or to sample a musical life outside the Floyd bubble. Nick Mason produced an album for folk rockers Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, before doing the same for Robert Wyatt’s
Rock Bottom
album and its spin-off hit single, a cover of The Monkees’ ‘I’m a Believer’. David Gilmour produced the Cambridge band Unicorn, in between occasional stints playing guitar for Tim Renwick’s and Willie Wilson’s band Sutherland Brothers and Quiver. It was through Unicorn that Gilmour was also introduced to an unknown teenage singer-songwriter, Kate Bush, who would record her demos at his home studio.

In the meantime, Gilmour splashed out on a town house in Notting Hill, Mason moved a few miles up the road from Camden to Highgate, and Wright bought himself a country manor house in Royston, near Cambridge, installing his own studio, The Old Rectory, which would become a popular haunt for many local bands. The Floyd’s keyboard player even found himself participating in a Parents and Teachers Association benefit gig for neighbouring Therfield village. It was an event that saw
Atom Heart Mother
co-writer Ron Geesin performing an improvised act with a folding chair and a length of drainpipe. ‘The villagers in attendance were totally bemused,’ recalled one of his fellow performers.

Wright’s house parties were lavish, hedonistic affairs. ‘There was a time when going to Rick and Juliette’s place was fantastic fun,’ recalls Jeff Dexter. ‘I think it was Rick’s thirtieth birthday party, when I had a real Kesey-type trip. There was also a beauty contest that night, with a few cross-dressers, too, all dressed up sparkly, taking it quite seriously. One fellow traveller thought it would be a good idea to have all the “sparklers” in the pool, so we pushed many of them off the catwalk into the water.’

The Floyd’s property portfolios would expand even further over the next two years: Wright and Gilmour purchased villas on Rhodes, and Mason bought a place in the South of France. Meanwhile, Waters acquired a villa in Volos on the Greek coast, which quickly became his wife Judy’s pet project.

‘I have to accept that, at that point, I became a capitalist,’ admitted Waters in 2004. ‘I could no longer pretend that I was a true Socialist.’ He salved his left-wing conscience by eventually siphoning a percentage of his earnings into a charitable trust.

The band also acquired a number of flats in McGregor Road, Ladbroke Grove. Gilmour would allow the Floyd’s road manager Peter Watts to live in his property there after he’d finished working for the band. Iain ‘Emo’ Moore would also frequent band-owned flats during the seventies. ‘The Floyd let people they knew who were on hard times live in those flats for very little money. They were often rented or lent to people,’ recalls one visitor. ‘They had these scrupulous Socialist principles, and they really believed this was the right thing to do. Waters was instrumental in this.’

Peter Watts had been the longest-serving member of the Floyd’s crew, having joined six months before David Gilmour. Unfortunately, his drug use had now made him a liability. Watts was repeatedly sacked, for such misdemeanours as nodding off on Mandrax while driving the band’s car, but would always end up being re-hired. The group would pay for a drug treatment course, but to no long-term avail. Watts was fired in 1974, and died in August 1976 in Gilmour’s flat on McGregor Road. His daughter, Naomi, would go on to become a world-famous model and actress.

Pink Floyd spent the first half of the year in a state of general inertia. ‘We were all rather badly mentally ill,’ joked Waters at the time. ‘We were all completely exhausted for one reason or another.’ Having achieved the success they’d longed for with
Dark Side of the Moon
, the band were pondering the inevitable question: What do we do now? As Waters would later explain, ‘All the things you wished for when you started a band had now happened. It had all come true.’ Away from the music, there were also wives and girlfriends to be appeased. Ginger had been living with David Gilmour for four years, and wanted to get married. Meanwhile, Waters’ relationship with Judy was in terminal decline.

Nobody was feeling particularly inspired when the band met up again in a grim, windowless rehearsal studio in London’s Kings Cross. They would begin work on three new pieces. The first, ‘Shine On’, would later incorporate the wine glass sound from
Household Objects
, but came together from a distinctive four-note guitar figure cooked up by Gilmour. The second, ‘Raving and Drooling’, had a harder edge and a throbbing riff similar to the one that had driven ‘One of These Days’. The third, ‘Gotta Be Crazy’, was bleaker still. These were not pop songs for those fans who’d bought into the band through the hit single ‘Money’.

Waters had written the lyrics for all three. The first was at least in part inspired by Syd Barrett. The other two found him at his most misanthropic yet, spitting venom at the corporate machinations of the music industry and the lemming-like mentality of the band’s new mainstream audience. ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ even contained the line, ‘You’ve got to keep everyone buying this shit’.

‘Raving and Drooling’ and ‘Shine On’ (which would acquire its full title of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’) would be introduced into the Floyd’s set during a tour of France that summer. On the Continent, the band ran into further problems. Two years earlier they’d struck a deal with Gini, a French drinks company, to appear in a photograph advertising a soft drink. The picture had been taken in Morocco, for use only in France, for which the band had been paid handsomely. ‘In a fit of madness we all agreed that we’d do it,’ said Nick Mason. ‘We thought we’d rip them off for loads of cash, and of course that didn’t happen. We’d intended them to subsidise the tour, so we could make the tickets cheaper, and in the end no one could work out whether the tickets were cheaper.’ Again, wrestling with his principles, Waters insisted the band donate the money to charity. On tour in France, though, the group discovered that a clause in their contract meant being tailed by a gaggle of models hired by Gini to promote what Gilmour later called ‘that fucking drink’. With tour sponsorship unheard of at the time, the Floyd’s promotional stunt was greeted with suspicion. Waters would write a song, the still unreleased ‘Bitter Love’, lamenting the whole sorry affair.

The French dates also served as rehearsal for a larger UK tour planned for later in the year. The band had now acquired a 40ft circular screen to be positioned at the back of the stage, onto which they could project films and images. Footage from surfer George Greenough’s
Crystal Voyager
movie had been used previously for ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, along with Ian Eames’s animated sequence for ‘Time’. Eames had been discovered by the band when he created a similar animated sequence, in the pre-promo video age, to accompany ‘One of These Days’ for the BBC’s music show
The Old Grey Whistle Test
. The band now wanted a complete library of images. Roger Waters and Arthur Max busied themselves in an editing suite in Soho, London, working out a running order and identifying where the ‘dead periods’ were going to fall in the show, and how to fill them.

One of the first people they contacted was cartoonist and film-maker Gerald Scarfe. ‘Nick Mason had phoned me years before, and said the group had seen a film I’d made for the BBC called
Long Drawn-Out Trip
,’ says Scarfe now. He had made the animated film in Los Angeles in 1971, ‘a stream-of-consciousness drawing’ that included as many images as he could think of relating to the United States. This collage of Jimi Hendrix, John Wayne and Mickey Mouse had fascinated Waters and Mason. ‘I was invited to do something for them back then, but for whatever reason it never happened. Nick called me again, and I went and had a meeting at his house. They wanted me to come up with some images to show on tour. They gave me a pile of Floyd albums to listen to.’

Scarfe’s animations would include a human figure that dissolves into sand and a robotic monster for the song that would become ‘Welcome to the Machine’ and would be unveiled on their 1975 dates. In the meantime, his cartoon drawings would be used in the Hipgnosis-designed programme for the 1974 tour. Billed a ‘Super, All-Action Official Music Programme for Boys and Girls’, the programme was an expert pastiche of an American pulp comic, with each of the group recreated as action heroes, including Gilmour as a fearless biker named ‘Dave Derring’.