Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (60 page)

According to Gilmour, the pieces were then whittled down to ‘a top twenty-five, which in fact became the top twenty-seven, as a couple more got added in’. The process continued, with the individual pieces either scrapped altogether or merged with other ideas. The final selection ran to some fifteen ideas, of which a further four would be discarded before the final tracklisting of eleven songs was agreed.

This process had its drawbacks when, according to Nick Mason, Richard Wright accorded each of his ideas the maximum number of points, skewing the voting. Despite his involvement, Wright was still not contractually a full member of the band; something that clearly rankled. ‘It came very close to a point where I wasn’t going to do the album,’ he said in 2000, ‘because I didn’t feel that what we’d agreed was fair.’

However aggrieved he may have felt, Wright chose to remain, and would be rewarded with five co-writes on the finished album; the first time he’d received a songwriting credit on any new Pink Floyd album since
Wish You Were Here
. However, like Gilmour, Wright did not consider himself a natural lyricist. Dream Academy’s Nick Laird-Clowes and
Momentary Lapse
. . . lyricist Anthony Moore would end up contributing, but Gilmour also now had a full-time writing partner, his new girlfriend.

Polly Samson was a newspaper journalist who’d been introduced to Gilmour at a dinner party. The daughter of Communist parents - a Chinese mother and German father - she had enjoyed an unconventional upbringing. Samson had been expelled from school before drifting into a job in publishing, which led to a stint as a
Sunday Times
gossip columnist in the early nineties. In the meantime, she was bringing up her young son, Charlie, alone, after the departure of his father, playwright Heathcote Williams. Mutual friends had tried to pair her up with Gilmour for some time, before he finally telephoned and invited her to a U2 concert.

At first Samson’s role on the new album was simply one of encouragement. ‘She was trying to persuade me to get on and point me in the direction of where to put my energy,’ recalled Gilmour. The album’s turning point was a song that would eventually be titled ‘High Hopes’, in which Gilmour, with his girlfriend’s encouragement, reflected on his childhood and early life in Cambridge. ‘She helped me get started on “High Hopes”, but it quickly became obvious that it was better if she took part. She tried
not
to take part at first, but I wanted her to and she did.’

Gilmour would work with the rest of the band in the studio, before going back home and spending the evening writing with Polly. ‘There was a whole invisible side to the process,’ he explained. ‘Something that Nick, Rick and Bob weren’t aware of.’

Polly’s presence soon led to tension among some in the Gilmour circle. ‘It wasn’t easy at first,’ admits Bob Ezrin. ‘It put a strain on the boys’ club, and it was almost clichéd to have the new woman coming in and then get involved in the career. But she inspired David and gave him a sense of confidence and challenged him. Whatever David was thinking at the time she helped him find a way of saying it.’

‘Polly has a tendency to ruffle everyone’s feathers,’ Gilmour admitted in
Mojo
magazine. ‘I’m not aware of her having ruffled Nick or Rick’s feathers, but she certainly ruffled the management’s.’

‘High Hopes’ would, nevertheless, give the album the push it needed. ‘It pulled the whole album together,’ said Bob Ezrin. ‘It was the most emotionally complete and clear song we had. We were on the river, in the winter, in good grey England. There’s a special mood about England at that time of year. It makes people go inside, it’s so introspective, and that song captured it.’

Polly Samson’s relationship with Gilmour wasn’t the only one the band had to contend with. Since the end of the
Momentary Lapse
. . . tour, Guy Pratt and Gala Wright had officially become an item. ‘It was an odd time for me,’ says Guy, ‘because Gala and I had just gone on holiday and I think there was a feeling in the camp that we’d get it out of our systems and then it would all go back to normal. Except that didn’t happen. Maybe it was a bigger deal in my mind than it really was, but I felt like I was walking on eggshells all the time.’

To add to the tension, Pratt also lived very near to Richard Wright in Kensington. ‘So, in the usual caring, sharing Pink Floyd style, I was designated Rick’s driver. So I had an hour of silence every morning, with Rick sitting in this horrible tatty VW Golf I was driving at the time.’

Jon Carin and Gary Wallis were brought in to witness Guy’s suffering and complete the band, before recording of the final selected tracks began. Additional support came from a team of five backing vocalists including Sam Brown and
Momentary Lapse
. . . tour singer Durga McBroom, and orchestral arranger Michael Kamen. Tim Renwick came back to play additional guitar, alongside another Floyd veteran, Dick Parry. The saxophonist’s last Pink Floyd album had been
Wish You Were Here
. He had only just resumed playing the instrument again after working for several years as a farrier, when he sent Gilmour a Christmas card.

‘I just rang him up and asked him if he felt like auditioning for the tour,’ said Gilmour. Parry visited the
Astoria
, and, within seconds, it was apparent that he was still up to scratch. He ended up playing on one song, ‘Wearing the Inside Out’.

Meanwhile, keyboard player Carin pestered Gilmour’s guitar tech Phil Taylor into locating some of the band’s old keyboards from the seventies, including a Farfisa organ. Taken out of the warehouse in which they’d been stored, he then sampled sounds, some of which ended up being used on the tracks ‘Take it Back’ and ‘Marooned’. As Andy Jackson later explained, ‘It felt like a proper Pink Floyd album again.’

While Gilmour pulled back from the idea of making a concept album, a theme of sorts began to emerge as the songs developed further. In the light of Pink Floyd’s past troubles there was a certain irony in song titles such as ‘Keep Talking’ and ‘Lost for Words’. But while reluctant to dissect the ideas behind the songs, Gilmour later conceded that much of the album dealt with the theme of communication; and the notion that people simply talking to each other could solve more of life’s problems. ‘Maybe I needed to unload my subconscious,’ he admitted.

Surprisingly, the band broke cover for a rare live performance in September. Floyd played three songs - ‘Run Like Hell’, ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ - at Sussex’s Cowdray Ruins Castle as a fundraiser for the local hospital. Those who’d stumped up the £140 ticket price also got to see star turns from Eric Clapton, Genesis and the surviving members of Queen.

By December, the album was near completion. However, despite Bob Ezrin’s involvement,
Dark Side of the Moon
’s mixing supervisor Chris Thomas would undertake the final mix. ‘That
was
disappointing,’ admits Ezrin. ‘But everybody feels they could do better.’ Now all they had to do was choose an album title. While not feeling quite so concerned about the title as they had been for
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
, nobody could agree on a solution. Over dinner one night, the band’s friend, Douglas Adams, author of
The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, suggested
The Division Bell
, named after the bell used in the House of Commons to summon absent members of parliament to the chambers for voting (Gilmour: ‘it divides the yeses from the nos’). Adams had simply looked over some of the album’s lyrics and spotted the phrase in the words to ‘High Hopes’. In exchange, the band gifted £5,000 to his favoured charity, the Environmental Investigation Agency.

The author’s suggestion had come at just the right moment: the night before the deadline imposed by EMI. Storm Thorgerson would oversee another grandiose idea on the band’s behalf. Inspired by the theme of communication, Storm had sketched out an image of ‘two heads facing, or talking to each other, making up a third face’. The cryptic third face, which may or may not be seen by the viewer, depending on how they were looking, represented, in Storm’s words, ‘the absent face - the ghost of Pink Floyd’s past, Syd and Roger’. Gilmour was unconvinced.

After being presented with another set of sketches, he finally warmed to the idea. Two 3m-high sets of sculptured heads, in the imposing style of the Aku-Aku statues on Easter Island, were then constructed. One set would be built out of stone, the other from metal. They were then transported to a field in Ely, near to where David Gilmour had grown up, where they remained under camouflage netting and twenty-four-hour security until the weather conditions and light were deemed suitable for photographing them. When Thorgerson decided that they needed a row of lights between the two ‘mouths’ to represent speech, they acquired four cheap spotlights and wired them up to the photographer’s car battery. The stone effigies would be used on the cassette version of
The Division Bell
, the metal-plated versions on the CD cover. The metal heads would end up standing guard outside London’s Earls Court when the group next played there.

The mid-eighties had found Gilmour and Mason, like Roger Waters, chasing their respective tails to make music that sounded of the moment. When that moment passed, though, both
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
and Waters’
Radio K.A.O.S.
would suffer as a consequence.
The Division Bell
tried less hard and made no obvious concessions to the modern age, even if some modern bands were keen to declare their love of Pink Floyd. Since the last time Floyd made a studio album, dance music and ‘rave culture’ had made their mark on the musical landscape. (Gilmour told
Q
magazine that he
had
been to an acid house party but ‘not a really big one’.) In 1993, he agreed to be interviewed with Alex Paterson of techno dance duo The Orb for a
Melody Maker
cover story. Gilmour professed to having seen The Orb in concert and to owning a couple of their albums; Paterson raved about Pink Floyd’s
Meddle.
It was no great meeting of like-minded souls, however, even if Nick Mason would later reveal that the early jamming sessions for
The Division Bell
had yielded a set of Orb-style meanderings, jokingly titled ‘The Big Spliff’.

Elsewhere, young American rock band Nirvana’s amalgam of punk and heavy rock, added to the scuzzy good looks of their singer Kurt Cobain, had helped them sell millions of records. A host of like-minded ‘grunge’ rock bands followed, with old-timer Neil Young even making an album with Nirvana’s rivals Pearl Jam.
The Division Bell
was littered with guitar solos, but there was no ‘grunge’ to be found here, thank you. As Gilmour explained, ‘The Floyd is a big old lumbering beast, but it’s
my
big old lumbering beast, and I like it.’

Released in March 1994, the ‘New Floyd’ cruised to number 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. Nobody could have been surprised. Within months, Gilmour was telling the press that
The Division Bell
sounded more like a genuine Pink Floyd album than anything since
Wish You Were Here
. The opening instrumental, ‘Cluster One’, with its static crackles and extraterrestrial twittering - like signals from another galaxy - was certainly familiar Pink Floyd territory. Anyone flipping through the track selector on their CD player might also notice that most of its eleven songs began with some abstract keyboard whirl or sonorous note of unidentifiable origin.

However fearful some may have been of Pink Floyd acquiring their own Yoko Ono, the lyrics on
The Division Bell
had greater clarity than most of those on
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
. Gilmour was unwilling to explain, but it seemed as if his new partner had coerced him into exploring his feelings in greater detail than usual. ‘A Great Day for Freedom’ seemed, at first, to address the demise of the Berlin Wall, but there was another message, of lost optimism and hopes dashed. Similar themes of new beginnings countered with mournful reflection seemed to inform the whole album. Gilmour was in love, perhaps, but still feeling guarded.

‘High Hopes’ was the album’s runaway highlight. With its tolling church bells, keening vocals and remembrance of times past, it was as if the older, world-wearier voice of
Atom Heart Mother
’s ‘Fat Old Sun’ had come back twenty-five years later to update the story. ‘What Do You Want From Me?’ was more combative, musically and lyrically. A slow blues over which Gilmour fired off questions - ‘Do you want my blood, do you want my tears?’ - it had, he admitted, been inspired after a row with Polly Samson, over lack of communication. ‘Marooned’ combined whale song with the sound of an Ibizan beach bar at sunrise, and later landed the band a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
The Division Bell
was more interesting, though, when Gilmour was forced out of his guitar-hero bunker, and made to start singing again, about love and, possibly, sex on ‘Coming Back to Life’, and his own inarticulate nature on ‘Keep Talking’, supplemented by a sample of the computer-aided voice of Professor Stephen Hawking, author of
A Brief History of Time
.

The album floundered on ‘Take it Back’, a Simple Minds/U2-style arena anthem that would have fitted better on
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
or even Gilmour’s solo album,
About Face
. Or neither. Yet for the hardcore fans, the most notable coup was Richard Wright taking his first lead vocal since
Dark Side of the Moon
. ‘Wearing the Inside Out’ had been co-written by Wright with Anthony Moore. It had, commented one Floyd insider, ‘taken Moore to climb inside Rick’s head and get the words out’. Anyone even fleetingly familiar with Wright’s past experiences in Pink Floyd and, one suspects, life in general would have been drawn to the words. The quavering tone and painfully raw lyrics suggested a man finding his way back to civilisation for the first time in a long while. ‘There’s a lot of emotional honesty there,’ offers Bob Ezrin. ‘Fans pick up on the sad and vulnerable side to Rick.’