Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (37 page)

While some equilibrium had been restored by the time of the Liverpool Empire show, the band had still received their fiercest dressing down yet in the music press. The 23 November issue of
New Musical Express
included a detailed critique of the band’s Wembley Empire Pool gig a week earlier, written by their star writer Nick Kent. In it, Kent castigated Pink Floyd for their musical lethargy (‘Floyd, as always, let the song sprawl out to last twice as long as it should’), their indifference towards the audience (‘they wander on like four navvies who’ve just finished their tea break’) and the perceived hypocrisy of Waters’ latest lyrics (‘I cannot think of another rock group who live a more desperately bourgeois existence in the privacy of their own homes’). Its opening salvo was especially cutting about David Gilmour: ‘His hair looked filthy there on stage, seemingly anchored down by a surfeit of scalp grease and tapering off below the shoulders with a spectacular festooning of split ends.’ A comment that caused some amusement with laid-back, American backing singers Venetta Fields and Carlena Williams who rather enjoyed challenging the band’s painfully English reserve.

‘The hair thing was a low blow on my part,’ admits Nick Kent now. ‘But I still stand by what I wrote. The Floyd’s whole attitude that night was like, “Oh fuck, I suppose we better do this now”, as if it was all too much trouble. They really did remind me of workmen, wandering on to dig up the road. Like it was a job that had to be done. I saw Rick Wright after that piece came out and he actually
thanked
me for it. He said he didn’t like what I’d written, but at the same time it stimulated some kind of intra-group discussion, because as a group they had become so detached from each other. He said it actually brought them together.’

Kent’s colleague Pete Erskine interviewed a furious David Gilmour a few weeks later. (In a rare example of conviviality between Pink Floyd and a rock critic, Erskine, a sometime builder and carpenter, would end up living in one of the band-owned flats on McGregor Road.) Naturally, Gilmour defended the band’s position to the hilt. Kent had taken umbrage at a line in the new song ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ - ‘Gotta keep everyone buying this shit’ - believing that it was sneering at the band’s fans. But Gilmour claimed that Waters’ lyrics were directed as much at the band as their audience. ‘I’m cynical of our position,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone on our level feels deserving of the superhuman adulation number.’ Gilmour explained that
Sunday Times
writer Derek Jewell’s gushing appraisal of the same Wembley show had irritated them also, as it was ‘probably the worst [show] we’ve done on the whole tour’. Yet the guitarist couldn’t maintain a united front against all of the charges, admitting that there was laziness in the group and confessing that
Dark Side of the Moon
had ‘trapped us creatively’. Privately, Roger Waters found himself acknowledging more than a little truth in some of Nick Kent’s observations. Always fearful of complacency, he had a nagging sense that something needed to change.

By the end of the tour in December, Waters was dedicating some of the performances of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ to ‘Sydney Barrett’. Meanwhile, EMI/Capitol had reissued the group’s first two albums,
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
and
A Saucerful of Secrets
, as a double LP package entitled
A Nice Pair
. Hipgnosis’ packaging included various images relating to the album’s title and similar catchphrases, including ‘a nip in the air’ and ‘a kettle of fish’. However, an attempt to run a photograph of the boxer Floyd Patterson ran aground when he demanded $5,000. Patterson was substituted by a picture of the Pink Floyd football team, in which all four members, plus Steve O’Rourke, the now departed Arthur Max and Hipgnosis’s own Storm Thorgerson could be seen posing. Gilmour later recalled a particularly bloody defeat at the hands of the North London Marxists in which the guitarist nearly bit off part of his tongue. For the title,
A Nice Pair
, Hipgnosis went for the very literal, including a pair of naked breasts and a photograph of court jester Emo wearing a nice pair of Peter Wynne-Willson’s cosmonocles. The gaps in Emo’s teeth, visible in the picture, would soon be rectified, thanks to the generosity of his old friend Gilmour.

‘Dave sent me to his dentist four times,’ admits Emo. ‘The first new set of teeth I had done, I got beaten up about a day later in a pub on the Kings Road, and Dave had to pay to have them done again.’ Gilmour’s largesse would extend to others in the Cambridge fraternity, paying for ex-roadie Pip Carter’s drug rehabilitation, and, over the years, quietly helping out with mortgage payments and tax bills for those friends finding themselves in dire financial straits.

In 1974 Syd Barrett emerged again from his Cambridge hidey-hole. A year before, several months after the Stars débâcle, Barrett had been seen playing guitar alongside former Cream bassist Jack Bruce in a Cambridge church hall. Royalties from the Pink Floyd compilation
Relics
had started coming in, and Barrett again moved to London. After a spell at the Park Lane Hilton he took out a lease on two flats in Chelsea Cloisters, near to Sloane Square. He filled the first sixth-floor apartment with guitars, amplifiers and other possessions, while living in a two-room flat on the ninth.