Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (48 page)

On every night of the tour, a radio DJ was hired to act as master of ceremonies, egging on the audience before the gig and during the intervals, but also lampooning the role of the traditional MC. Four backing singers were hired for the tour, but, as an added twist, each show would open with the appearance of a ‘surrogate band’, which the audience believed to be Pink Floyd, rising from underneath the stage.

‘Roger once told me his dream was to have a surrogate Pink Floyd so he could go to the Bahamas and they could play at Earls Court,’ says Gerald Scarfe. As the first song, ‘In the Flesh’, drew to a close, complete with exploding fireworks and a crashing Stuka aeroplane, the fake Floyd would freeze, revealing the real Floyd behind them. The surrogate band would include drummer Willie Wilson, guitarist Snowy White, keyboard player Peter Wood and bassist Andy Bown, and would also play alongside the real group during parts of the show. Each surrogate band member would also wear a prosthetic mask of their respective counterpart’s faces, specially moulded by a Hollywood make-up artist.

The band and crew were also required to wear a
Wall
uniform - black shirts, with the hammer insignia stitched on to the breast - though the group abandoned the shirts for some dates, Waters wearing a white T-shirt with, tellingly, the number 1 emblazoned across his chest.

Rehearsals commenced at the MGM film lot in Culver City, Los Angeles in January 1980. Rick Wills, who’d turned down the surrogate band, as he’d landed a big-money gig with Foreigner, had recommended bassist Andy Bown in his place. A multi-talented musician who’d played alongside Peter Frampton in The Herd, Bown took a leave of absence from his regular day job of playing keyboards for Status Quo. He was by no means a Pink Floyd fan.

‘I didn’t know anything about them,’ Bown admits now. ‘It wasn’t until I got sent cassettes of the album that I realised it was called
The Wall
. I thought it was called
The War
. I’d misheard on the telephone, you see.’ Andy also listened to
Animals
, and was pleasantly surprised. ‘I thought: Cor, that’s a bit heavy, but also quite simple. I hadn’t realised that Pink Floyd was mainly three chords. One of them is A minor, that’s the only difference.’

Gilmour was in charge of rehearsals, and, for the first week, the surrogate band ran through the set without Roger Waters. As the days went by, Andy became increasingly curious about the absent bass player. ‘All I kept hearing was, “Oh, Roger’s coming tomorrow . . . Oh no, not tomorrow, the day after.” Everyone seemed to think he was God. I was like, “Who
is
this Roger?” ’

When he finally arrived, Waters and Bown rehearsed side by side, both playing bass. ‘And then Roger made a fucking awful mistake, and I turned to him and said, “If you’re going to play like that I want smaller billing.” And I rather think that broke the ice.’

Three further weeks of rehearsals at the venue preceded the opening night at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena on 7 February. With barely twenty-four hours to go, Floyd’s long-serving lighting technician Graeme Fleming was removed from the job. His replacement was Bruce Springsteen’s lighting designer Marc Brickman, who answered a call from Steve O’Rourke, believing it was an invitation to watch the show. Instead, Brickman found himself put in charge of the lights for the whole tour, despite never having heard the album. He would later tell
Q
magazine that it was ‘the most terrifying experience of my life’.

For Waters it was the realisation of a dream. With the wall in place, Waters roamed the empty arena, climbing up to the furthest seats in the venue. ‘My heart was beating furiously and I was getting shivers up and down my spine,’ he remembered. ‘And I thought it was fantastic that people could actually see and hear something from everywhere they were seated.’

For the surrogate band members, the opening of the show was an exhilarating, if bizarre moment. ‘We had the masks on, but you could still see the first five or six rows,’ remembers Willie Wilson. ‘But the look on their faces when we stopped playing and the real band appeared was very amusing.’

A quarter of the way into the opening night gig, sparks from the crashing Stuka set one of the stage curtains alight. Waters began shouting, ‘Stop, stop’, but some of the band believed this was part of his performance and carried on playing. They only stopped when pieces of the burning curtain started landing on the stage. ‘Half the fans panicked and began running for the exits,’ said James Guthrie, who was now in charge of the front-of-house sound. ‘The other half were all stoned and thought it was a pretty far-out part of the act.’ The Stuka was grounded for the next few shows under orders from the LA fire department. Movie director Barbet Schroeder, for whom Floyd had recorded the
More
and
Obscured by Clouds
soundtracks, attended a show at the Sports Arena. ‘I will remember it for the rest of my life,’ he says. ‘The sheer noise and the sensation when the wall fell down at the end of the show was especially impressive . . . particularly in a city with a well-known earthquake problem.’

On stage, the meticulous timing and choreography left little room for manoeuvre. ‘You could never risk having a drink before the show,’ explained Gilmour. ‘I had great piles of cue sheets hanging over my amps, because every song needed four different settings for four different people. At the beginning and end of every number, everyone was looking at me, waiting for the next cue.’

Los Angeles was followed by five sold-out nights at the Nassau Veteran Memorial Coliseum on New York’s Long Island. Andy Warhol showed up one night, as did Bob Ezrin, who was now persona non grata with Roger Waters.

‘I did a stupid, stupid thing,’ says Ezrin. ‘But I had no idea the lengths some people will go to for a story.’ Ezrin had been involved in the development of
The Wall
stage show since the beginning, when a tabletop model of the set had been built, complete with tiny figurines and miniature inflatables. Asked by Waters to help stage the tour, he declined, as he was in the middle of a divorce and custody battle. Waters was determined to keep all details about the upcoming shows a secret, and made Ezrin sign a non-disclosure agreement. ‘I had a friend who was a big Floyd fan and was living in LA,’ explains Ezrin. ‘I arranged tickets for him to see
The Wall
at the Sports Arena. A week or so before, he rings me up, saying he couldn’t get the time off work to go to the gig and begging me to tell him what it was like. Then, one week before the opening night, there’s this article in
Billboard
magazine, giving a detailed account of the show, “as described over dinner with Bob Ezrin”! Once he saw that, Roger went nuclear. He shut me down, looking for breaches of contract so he didn’t have to pay my expenses. I screwed up, sure, but it didn’t call for that violent a reaction.’

Ezrin was banned from attending any of the shows: ‘Not that that stopped me.’ Undeterred, he bought his tickets, hired a limousine and turned up backstage at the Memorial Coliseum. Pink Floyd’s security team refused to let him in, but the staff security had previously been employed by Ezrin’s old clients Kiss and immediately ushered him through.

‘It was the best rock show I ever saw,’ says Ezrin. Not for the last time at a Pink Floyd gig, the producer was moved to tears. The source of his emotion was the final epic denouement of ‘Comfortably Numb’, in which Gilmour appeared on top of the wall, lit by brilliant blue and white lights.

While Waters sang the opening verse, the guitarist would wait in the darkness for his cue to begin singing: ‘I’d be up there in the pitch-black looking down at the audience. When I opened my mouth to start singing and the lights hit, the whole audience would look upwards, gasping. It was a fantastic moment.’

Behind the scenes, Gilmour was actually standing on a flight case on casters, on top of the hydraulic lift platform to give him the extra height to appear above the Wall. The makeshift and potentially life-threatening platform was held in place behind him by guitar tech Phil Taylor, clinging on in the darkness for dear life.

The closing moments of the show, after which the wall came down, found the real and fake Floyds and their backing singers joining together at the front of the stage. The final song, ‘Outside the Wall’, was performed amid the discarded bricks, by the makeshift band on acoustic guitars, mandolins, clarinets and tambourines. It was a rare moment of outright human contact with the audience, and with each other.

There was no such contact going on backstage. The VIP area was carpeted in Astroturf, and scattered with café-style tables and parasols and even pinball machines. Ezrin found himself welcomed by Gilmour and Mason, but noticed that Waters stayed in his separate dressing room. ‘We’d have four Winnebagos parked in a circle,’ admitted Waters years later, ‘with all the doors facing away from the circle.’

‘Roger wanted it that way,’ said Wright. ‘Dave and Nick and I didn’t. Roger would travel in his own car to the gig, stay in different hotels from anyone else. He created the isolation.’

Quite how Wright coped with performing in a band from which he had just been fired is a testament to his terribly English stiff upper lip. As one former associate bluntly put it, ‘Had Pink Floyd been an American group, they’d have punched each other’s lights out long ago.’

‘It wasn’t that bad,’ insisted Wright. ‘Basically I shut myself off from the whole idea that I was leaving the band. I actually fooled myself into thinking that, maybe if I play as well as I can, Roger will admit that he was wrong.’

There would be no such change of heart, yet the browbeaten keyboard player would end up having the last laugh. Andy Bown recalls having a conversation with Steve O’Rourke during the rehearsals. ‘It was costing the band an incredible amount of money just to set up those shows. Steve said, “Guess how much we’re in the hole for?”, and it was some phenomenal figure. I won’t tell you as it’s a personal matter, but I thought: Fucking hell!’

Despite sold-out shows, the cost of production was overwhelming. Waters has since told interviewers that the band lost around $600,000 staging
The Wall
. All except Wright. Under the terms of his new deal, the band he had co-founded were paying him as a hired hand. Any losses were made by the other three.

Witnessing the sold-out run in New York, concert promoter Larry Magid approached the band at the end of February, offering them a $2 million guarantee (plus all their expenses) to bring the show to Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium for two nights. There were no further
Wall
shows planned until London in August, but Waters flatly refused.

‘I said to the others, “You’ve all read my explanation of what
The Wall
is about,” ’ Waters told writer Chris Salewicz. ‘It’s three years since we did that last stadium and I saw then that I would never do one again.
The Wall
was entirely sparked off by how awful that was and how I didn’t feel that the public or the band or anyone got anything out of it that was worthwhile. And that’s why we’ve produced this show strictly for arenas. And I ain’t fuckin’ going.’

Considering the financial pressure of the Norton Warburg situation, Waters’ decision to turn down the money seems extraordinary. The rest of the band disagreed, and immediately approached Andy Bown to see if he would stand in for Waters.

‘I immediately said yes,’ says Bown. ‘I would have been delighted.’

But the band backed down. ‘In the end they bottled out,’ said Waters. ‘They didn’t have the balls to go through with it at that point.’

Back in the UK by the end of April (their year of tax exiledom now over) rehearsals began at Shepperton film studios for the forthcoming six nights at Earls Court. Thirty of Gerald Scarfe’s original paintings for
The Wall
were put on display in the lobby of the venue, and ten of them were promptly stolen. On stage, Gilmour modelled a fashionably short haircut, while Waters sported his number 1 T-shirt and berated
Melody Maker
’s Alan Jones for being ‘a stupid shit’ (Jones hadn’t liked
The Wall
). Waters’ cutting tone was employed for some of the between-song announcements: ‘This one’s for all you disco fans,’ he declared before ‘Run Like Hell’. ‘As if to say, “What I am doing is high art. Now, get this, you peasants,” ’ grumbles Nick Kent, who slated the Earls Court shows in
New Musical Express
, suggesting the group should offer the audience refunds on their tickets.

While Richard Wright’s departure was still being kept a secret, Waters was forthcoming in a rare interview with
Newsweek
: ‘We have been pretending that we are jolly good chaps together, but that hasn’t been true in seven years. I make the decisions. We pretended it was a democracy for a long time, but this album was the big own-up.’

Backstage visitors were often surprised by the understated normality of the band members, despite the melodramatic performance being staged out front every night. One Earls Court visitor was struck by the sight of David Gilmour eating sushi and toying with a Rubik’s Cube during the interval, completely unfazed by the fact that, just minutes later, he would be perched on top of the wall playing a guitar solo in front of nearly 20,000 fans: ‘David doesn’t
do
“freak out”.’

Cambridge associate Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon went backstage at the same shows, but offered a gloomier verdict. ‘They
all
had separate caravans,’ he grumbles. ‘I told Dave the music was too loud, and he said I should take more drugs. Alcohol and cocaine, presumably.’

Come July, the band went their separate ways for the rest of the year. Norton Warburg finally crashed, and its founder Andrew Warburg disappeared to Spain. He returned a year later, and would end up serving three years in prison for fraudulent trading and false accounting. As well as rich rock stars, it transpired that Warburg’s activities had also resulted in considerable losses to ordinary members of the public.

David and Ginger now had a second child, Clare, and would soon have a new home to replace the Essex farmstead. Hookend Manor, in Oxfordshire, was once a fourteenth-century Tudor monastery, and was owned by Alvin Lee, guitarist with Ten Years After. Lee had built his own studio in the property, and installed waterbeds in each of the eleven bedrooms. The property was supposedly haunted, and Lee decided to sell when he realised he didn’t need somewhere with quite so many rooms; a decision taken after he discovered a friend living in one of them without him even knowing about it.