Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (66 page)

Meanwhile, in his conscious desire to ‘smear politics and philosophy over my music’, Roger Waters was now upsetting Middle America and distancing himself from Middle England. He had taken to performing a new song in concert. ‘Leaving Beirut’ was a piece inspired by his travels in the Middle East as a teenager; a throwback to the time when he and a crew of would-be Cambridge beatniks had crossed Europe in search of adventure. The song’s anti-war message would be misinterpreted in some parts of America, where sensitivity about the country’s involvement in the Iraq War was paramount. Waters was unapologetic. ‘I paint what I see,’ he told writer Jon Shults. ‘I’d like to be remembered as somebody who spoke his truth and stuck by it through thick and thin.’

Waters’ principles put him back into the newspapers again before the end of the year. He was now permanently resident in The Hamptons in Long Island New York, home of his new partner, Laurie Durning. England, it transpired, had lost its appeal. ‘I’ve become disenchanted with the political and philosophical atmosphere,’ he told a visiting journalist from
The Times
. The passing of the anti-hunting bill a year before had been a deciding factor. Despite previously voicing his support for animal rights, Waters refused to buy all his politics and philosophical beliefs off the liberal peg. He attended marches with the Countryside Alliance and denounced the bill as ‘one of the most divisive pieces of legislation we’ve ever had in Great Britain. It’s not a case of whether or not I agree with fox hunting, but I will defend to the hilt their right to take part in it.’

Ça Ira
finally appeared in September 2006. Loosely translated from the French as ‘there is hope’, this was Waters’ three-act opera re-telling the story of the French Revolution. Waters did not perform himself on the album. Instead, Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel and Chinese soprano Ying Huang were among the performers. Though, as one reviewer pointed out, ‘the sound is more Puccini than Pink Floyd’.

As many fans were aware, the opera had been in development since the end of the 1980s. The piece was premiered in its entirety in Rome in November 2005. A complete operatic performance was then staged in Poznan, Poland in August 2006, a month before the album was released. Waters appeared on stage in a non-speaking part, playing the Pope (a performance sadly not preserved on film for posterity).

Despite customary suspicion among critics at any collaboration between the rock and classical worlds, reviews of
Ça Ira
were complimentary. ‘The grand romanticism might throw some Waters die-hards,’ wrote
Rolling Stone
, ‘but the opera does reflect some of the man’s long-term obsessions with war and peace, love and loss.’

‘I’ve always been a big fan of Beethoven’s choral music, Berlioz and Borodin,’ explained Waters. ‘This is unashamedly romantic and resides in that early nineteenth-century tradition, because that’s where my tastes lie in classical and choral music.’
Ça Ira
topped the classical music charts, even if most of his fanbase had wished for a more traditional rock album instead. For Waters, however, the album’s historical theme didn’t detract from its relevance to a modern audience: ‘It’s about freedom, learning, reason, egalitarianism. How to find our way through modern life and come out the other end with more people happier more of the time.’ Whatever the medium, this was familiar Roger Waters territory. Also, as an in-joke to his more dedicated fans, one piece, ‘The Letter’, used a melody line borrowed from ‘Every Stranger’s Eyes’, a ballad on
The Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking
(‘For those that want to look for it: happy hunting’).

Waters busied himself with promoting the album, even appearing on daytime TV chat shows to discuss the work and, inevitably, his relationship with Pink Floyd. The discussions followed a pattern of tackling the opera for 10 per cent of the time and Pink Floyd for the remaining 90 per cent, but Waters took it in his stride; a testament to his mellower old age or twenty years of dedicated psychotherapy. What
Ça Ira
proved above all else was Waters’ ease with the role of composer and conceptualist; creating a piece of art for others to perform. This seemed a fitting new approach for a reluctant rock star who had just turned sixty-three.

In November, Syd Barrett’s family auctioned his possessions through Cheffins auction house in Cambridge. Number 6 St Margaret’s Square was also put up for sale. Among the idiosyncratic home furnishings were strangely customised door handles, offbeat colour schemes and Syd’s hand-painted bicycles. Paul Weller’s observation of a man trapped in a short space of time seemed all the more poignant when you glimpsed the place. This was the home of Roger Barrett, not ‘Syd’. This man had lived frugally and, as it later transpired, below his means, surrounded by books, his own writings, including an unfinished history of art, and a clutch of CDs. No rock music, just jazz such as Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. His scatterbrained approach to DIY - a coffee table with a homemade compartment nailed underneath - seemed proof of his jumbled frame of mind. There was another bleaker side to his life. Unable or unwilling to tackle his health problems, Barrett had often neglected to take his medication and had, his sister Rosemary revealed, lost several fingers due to complications arising from his diabetes.

In December, David Gilmour announced plans to release a tribute single to Barrett: a live performance of ‘Arnold Layne’. Earlier that month, the
Mail on Sunday
ran a story, headlined ‘THE GENIUS NEXT DOOR’, from David Sore, formerly Syd’s neighbour in St Margaret’s Square. He spoke of how intimidating he had found Syd’s behaviour as a child growing up in the 1980s, recalling Barrett’s sometimes very public rages, and bonfires in the back garden in which he burned his paintings and other possessions. Pink Floyd fans were intrigued, if a little amused, by Sore’s claim that he had once heard Barrett shouting, ‘Fucking Roger Waters! I’m going to fucking kill him!’

While many devotees had romanticised about Syd the recluse, rarely venturing beyond the local shops, the reality was rather different. Barrett had been catching the train to London unaccompanied for years, visiting art galleries and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, near to where he’d once lived in Richmond Hill. He had also, as old friend Anthony Stern points out, ‘become another great Cambridge eccentric - bicycling around the town’.

‘Syd turned into Arnold Layne in the end,’ smiles Libby Gausden. ‘Which seemed so ironic. When we were growing up, there was a Cambridge eccentric who used to walk around with a bucket on her head. And Syd used to laugh, but he also used to make us all wonder
why
she had a bucket on her head, what happened to her that made her that way. Now Syd had become another of those odd people in Cambridge.’

When the BBC screened a television documentary about Syd and the early Pink Floyd in 2001, Barrett watched it non-committally, only telling his sister that it had been good to see his old landlord Mike Leonard again.

In the same year, photographer Mick Rock had published a book of his Barrett photographs entitled
Psychedelic Renegades
. A limited edition run of the title included a flyleaf signed by Syd himself. Rock had negotiated the deal with Barrett’s family for an unspecified sum of money, and Syd had been willing to sign his name - R. Barrett - on 325 pieces of paper, which were then bound into each of the copies. This was not quite the hopeless lunatic of legend, then. As Rosemary told one journalist: ‘He was very mad, but he was able to do anything and everything he wanted to do.’

He was, it also transpired, a very rich man. Barrett left over £1.25 million in his will to be divided between his brothers and sisters. The inclusion of his songs on the
Echoes
compilation, the reissue of his solo albums and the ongoing interest in his work had reaped its rewards. While never dealing directly with Syd, David Gilmour had taken a close interest in ensuring that Barrett received his royalties. The auction of his possessions raised more money for the family, with some fans paying over £10,000 for Barrett’s two bicycles, and over £50,000 for his artworks. As one of his former business associates from the sixties had once grumblingly explained: ‘Don’t believe all that stuff about poor old Syd, there’s nothing actually
poor
about him.’

In 2003, Roger Waters had talked of making another rock album. ‘It’s another loony concept thing,’ he explained. ‘It’s about a conversation in a New York bar, and one of the characters is a taxi driver from the Balkans, and his marriage is falling apart . . .’ By early 2007, it still hadn’t appeared. In March, Waters released a new download-only single, ‘Hello (I Love You)’, taken from the soundtrack to the science fiction movie
The Last Mimzy
. A rather slight song, it punched a lot of familiar Pink Floyd buttons, twisting
The Wall
’s lyric ‘Is there anybody out there?’ into ‘Is there anybody in there?’ for the chorus. Waters went back on the road, trekking through Australia, New Zealand and South America, again performing
Dark Side of the Moon
, and telling interviewers that he was open to the idea of playing with Pink Floyd again.

In March, the
New York Daily News
claimed that Floyd would reunite to perform at one of the planned Live Earth charity concerts in June. The Live Earth shows were being staged in seven continents to help raise awareness of global warming. Gilmour quickly denied that Pink Floyd would be appearing, though Waters agreed to play at the US show in the Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

Once again, it seemed as though Waters was trying to broker another reunion, only to find Gilmour unwilling. As Waters admitted in one interview, Pink Floyd had been Gilmour’s baby for the past twenty years, and the guitarist’s legendary obstinacy would make him unlikely to relinquish his control. Old wounds had yet to heal, and Waters knew that better than anyone. ‘I don’t think any of us came out of the years from 1985 with any credit,’ he commented. ‘It was a bad, negative time. And I regret my part in that negativity.’

2007 also marked the fortieth anniversary of the so-called Summer of Love and the release of Pink Floyd’s debut album,
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
. If there was no new Pink Floyd album, the band’s past achievements were deemed ripe for reassessment. In April, the Institute of Contemporary Arts staged a multi-media event to mark the anniversary of ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’. Once described by Peter Jenner as ‘the height of acid use in England’, the event would be commemorated with the screening of film footage from the original show, DJ sets, a one-man play,
The Madcap
, and live performances, including an appearance by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and The Pretty Things, two of the bands that had performed at the original event.

Details of two further concerts were also announced at the same time. On 26 May, Robyn Hitchcock, Cambridge singer-songwriter and one-time frontman of The Soft Boys, and former Blur guitarist Graham Coxon headlined a tribute to Pink Floyd’s ‘Games for May’ concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Forty years earlier the band had upset the classical music venue’s management by switching on a bubble machine and showering the audience with flowers, smearing the hall’s leather seats with burst bubbles and squashed flower stems. It had also been the night Floyd premiered their second single, ‘See Emily Play’. Pink Floyd’s 1967-era lighting designer Peter Wynne-Willson was on hand to provide an authentic psychedelic backdrop; a role he would also undertake two weeks earlier at a tribute night to Syd Barrett, held at London’s Barbican Theatre on 10 May.

Billed as ‘Madcap’s Last Laugh’, the idea had first been mooted by the Barbican’s programmer Bryn Ormrod following Barrett’s death the year before. Ormrod approached Pink Floyd’s original producer and mentor Joe Boyd, who brought in musician and sometime Pink Floyd lyricist Nick Laird-Clowes, once of David Gilmour’s eighties protégés The Dream Academy, and now working under the nom-de-plume, Trashmonk.

Floyd gave the planned gig their blessing and allowed Laird-Clowes access to their archives for securing old footage of the band and Syd. In the meantime, Boyd and Laird-Clowes set about booking acts to appear. Tickets went on sale and sold well, despite an unconfirmed bill. In the weeks running up to the event, the names were released of those slated to appear. These included the ubiquitous Robyn Hitchcock, Blur’s Damon Albarn, Chrissie Hynde and the Soft Machine’s original vocalist and Syd’s old contemporary Kevin Ayers. Fans and critics speculated on whether any of Pink Floyd would perform; the more eagle-eyed noting that Waters’ never-ending
In the Flesh
tour was due to resume, after a day off, at Earls Court the night after the show.

Six days before the event, artist and Floyd confidant Storm Thorgerson threw a launch party for his latest book,
Taken by Storm
, at Abbey Road Studios. David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright all attended, snapped together by the paparazzi, which prompted further speculation over whether any of them would attend the Barrett tribute. Wright, it later transpired, was the first to sign up, asking to perform ‘Arnold Layne’, a song he’d sung on Gilmour’s last solo tour. From here on, the usual whirl of ‘Will they, won’t they?’ rumours continued over the next few days. Nothing was confirmed, nothing was denied. Joe Boyd later explained that he had met up with Waters in New York some weeks before. ‘He was friendly and interested, but not certain of coming along,’ he noted.

An hour before showtime the word had spread among the media that Roger Waters would now definitely be performing. Those dropping into the hall’s backstage catering area were greeted by the sight of the Floyd and Waters’ musical right-hand man Jon Carin eating a meal sandwiched between former Soft Boy and Barrett aficionado Robyn Hitchcock and Led Zeppelin’s old bass player John Paul Jones. There was no sign of Gilmour, Wright, Mason or Waters.