by Mark Blake
In the meantime, Adrian Maben had made yet another approach to the group. ‘I had been fly-fishing with Roger Waters,’ said Maben, ‘and we vaguely discussed the idea of doing an extended version of Live At Pompeii. The band was about to embark on a new recording. Roger somehow managed to persuade the other members of the group, and, after a few months of telephone calls, hesitations and cancellations, I was invited to film certain parts of the recording of Dark Side of the Moon.’
The footage from the January 1973 sessions would become as compelling as the scenes filmed in Pompeii itself. In the space of just over twelve months, Pink Floyd had undergone a significant change. The footage of the band at work in Abbey Road retains a certain time-capsule charm. Spot the countless smouldering cigarettes, a reminder of when smoking was still permitted in the workplace, or Richard Wright’s patterned jumper, straight out of a Christmas 1972 stocking, not to mention the spaghetti junction of cables and leads around the pre-digital studio. Wright plays the haunting piano sequence for ‘Us and Them’, Gilmour is seen tearing off a guitar solo for ‘Brain Damage’ (‘Where would rock ’n’ roll be without feedback?’ he quips to the control room), while Waters is filmed manhandling the Synthi A for ‘On the Run’.
Yet the most enduring scenes were those filmed in the archaic-looking Abbey Road canteen. The four are seen seated at what could conceivably have been a boarding school dining table, preparing for a classic mid-1970s carbohydrate overload. Nick Mason’s order, ‘Can I have egg, sausage, chips and beans … and a tea?’ date-stamps the footage as much as his Zapata moustache ever could.
Amid much slurping and gnawing, Roger Waters clambers onto his high horse to challenge the claim – made off camera by a person unknown – that a broad knowledge of music is not an essential qualification for a record producer. Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke is mentioned. Waters’ tone becomes fabulously haughty: ‘Steve knows what rock ’n’ roll’s about, but he’s got no idea what the equipment’s about and he’s got very little idea – in terms of technicalities – what the music’s about.’ At some point, the same unknown voice pipes up, ‘We all know you’re God Almighty, Roger.’
Just as in Paris a year earlier, it is the bass player that dominates proceedings. At the far end of the table, Wright chews away, largely ignoring the argument, Mason asks a minion to fetch him a slice of apple pie (‘no crust’), and Gilmour concentrates on his own meal, offering a knowing, ruminative smile to the camera.
The band, minus Wright, are interviewed individually and are all slightly more forthcoming than they were in Paris, though Gilmour manages to evade a question about drugs. ‘I still think that most people see us as a drug-oriented group … Of course, we’re not …’ He smirks. ‘You can trust us.’
‘I’m a bit embarrassed by that young chap in Live At Pompeii,’ said Gilmour in 2006. ‘I find it excruciating, because he was pretentious and naive.’
For a record that subsequently acquired a reputation as a classic ‘stoner’ album, none of those involved in Dark Side of the Moon recall, or admit to, any significant use during its making. Alcohol was officially banned at Abbey Road, but that didn’t stop Pink Floyd having a bar and an ice bucket, and keeping a fridge stocked with Southern Comfort. Cocaine would find its way onto the subsequent tour, but there was, by all accounts, none of it in the studio – only the occasional joint.
‘Some of the interview bits done in the canteen at EMI are really funny,’ said Waters later. ‘You can see we were fucking stoned. Dave and I were completely out of our brains. I was going through a stage where I was giving up nicotine, so I’d roll a joint every morning. I was out of my brain for a couple of years, pretending not to smoke cigarettes.’
Of the three interviews it is the resolutely un-stoned Nick Mason that offers the most honest comment. ‘Unfortunately, we mark a sort of era,’ he admits. ‘We’re in danger of becoming a relic of the past. For some people we represent their childhood: 1967, Underground London, the free concert in Hyde Park …’
As the new songs developed, so too did the themes behind them, broadening out from Waters’ initial abstract ponderings on the pressures of modern life. The pressures had now become more specific. The damning lyric of wartime cannon fodder in ‘Us and Them’ seems inextricably linked to the Vietnam War then still occupying the headlines, and infiltrating American politics via the Watergate scandal of 1972. The song also, inevitably, touched on the fate of his father.
‘Time’ was even more explicit in its handwringing, fretting over unfulfilled hopes and dreams, as well as containing another outright reference to Waters’ childhood and not knowing when real life was about to begin. The song’s denunciation of the rat race was also a nod to the human worker ants that Waters and Judy Trim used to watch day after day from their Shepherds Bush flat, and which had so inspired the song ‘Echoes’. Similar inspiration had come from a message spray-painted on a wall near their local tube station in the late sixties.
‘If you got the tube at Goldhawk Road, there was this inspired bit of graffiti,’ recalled Waters. ‘It said: “Get up, go to work, do your job, come home, go to bed, get up, go to work …” It was on this wall and seemed to go on for ever, and as the train sped up, it would go by quicker and quicker until – bang! – you suddenly went into a tunnel.’
While Waters couldn’t have made his preoccupations – fear, death, violence – more topical and more removed from the old cosmic flights of fancy, there was still one pressing theme that linked the new music to the past. One day Waters had been seated in the Abbey Road canteen when he suddenly felt himself, in his words, ‘recede’. The sound of the people next to him talking became indistinct, and everything he saw seemed to diminish in size. He was not, he insisted, stoned. Getting up from the table, he went back into the studio and waited for the feelings to subside. He would later claim that he thought he was going mad and had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The parallels with Syd Barrett were unavoidable.
The theme of madness had now become central to the new album, most explicit on its closing ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’. ‘When I say, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon”, what I mean is, “If you feel that you’re the only one … that you seem crazy cos you think everything is crazy, you’re not alone,”’ explained Waters. ‘There’s a camaraderie involved in the idea of people who are prepared to walk the dark places alone. A number of us are willing to open ourselves up to all those possibilities. You’re not alone!’
‘Syd’s mother blamed me entirely for his illness,’ said Waters years after the event. ‘I was supposed to have taken him off to the fleshpots of London and destroyed his brain with drugs’ (a suggestion refuted by Libby Gausden: ‘I don’t think Win blamed him for anything. I think Syd would have gone off the rails an awful lot sooner if it hadn’t been for Roger Waters’). While trying to shake off the ghost of Barrett in public, and distance themselves from his era, ‘Brain Damage’ seemed to be about Barrett’s experience, and the ‘Is he or isn’t he mad?’ dilemma that had so frustrated the group. This time, though, Waters had written a happier ending to the story. The exultant gospel vocals of ‘Eclipse’ and the penultimate line of ‘everything under the sun is in tune’ suggested that we may all be mad, but there is still hope.
During the final sessions for the album, Waters had another brain-wave. While the songs were now almost complete, he suggested recording snippets of speech to be woven into the songs, linking the narrative and tapping into the lyrics. He compiled a series of questions relating to death, violence and insanity, and wrote them down on separate pieces of card. These were turned face down on a music stand in Studio Three. Each would-be speaker would then be invited to turn up a card, answer the question, then turn up the second card and answer the next question which would be linked to the first, for example: ‘When was the last time you were violent?’ followed by ‘Were you in the right?’
Potential interviewees were rounded up at Abbey Road. From the band’s
immediate circle of roadies came potato-eating champion Chris Adamson, Peter Watts and his then wife Patricia (nicknamed Puddie), roadie Bobby Richardson, aka ‘Liverpool Bobby’, and another occasional Floyd road crew member, Roger ‘the Hat’ Manifold.
Scouring the building, Waters also collared Gerry O’Driscoll, a middle-aged Irishman employed as a handyman and caretaker, alongside Paul and Linda McCartney and guitarist Henry McCulloch, who, as Wings, were recording the album Red Rose Speedway at the same studio. Alan Parsons was also invited to take part, but on being asked, ‘What do you think Dark Side of the Moon is all about?’ confessed to not being able to come up with an interesting answer, and found his contribution cut. Strangely, the same fate would befall Paul and Linda. Waters was looking for spontaneity and candid, off-the-cuff remarks. The former Beatle and his wife were both too guarded, too keen to put on an act. As Waters would complain later, ‘He was trying to be funny, which wasn’t what we wanted at all.’
Replying to questions such as ‘Are you afraid of dying?’ and ‘Do you ever think you’re going mad?’, the other contributions proved far more revealing and, in the context of the finished album, atmospheric. The opening track, ‘Speak to Me’, collaged sounds lifted from elsewhere on the album – ticking clocks, jangling coins – set against an eerie, booming heartbeat. But its most striking elements were Peter Watts’ deranged laughter, and Chris Adamson and Gerry O’Driscoll’s pronouncements: ‘I’ve been mad for fucking years – absolutely years’ and ‘I’ve always been mad, I know I’ve been mad, like most of us have …’
Similar snippets of speech now peppered the rest of the album. Waters had lost the question cards by the time he’d tracked down Roger the Hat, and was forced to bluff it. The roadie’s answers were funny, candid and among the most memorable on the record, as he can be heard recalling a road rage incident with a motorist in North London, in response to the question, ‘When was the last time you were violent?’
‘If you give ’em a quick, short, sharp shock, they won’t do it again,’ he explains. ‘I mean, he got off lightly, cos I would’ve give him a thrashing …’
The speech was slipped in alongside Wright’s gentle keyboards on ‘Us and Them’. Elsewhere, on the fade-out groove of ‘Money’, Puddie and Henry McCulloch were among those justifying the last time they’d hit someone. Puddie, the only female interviewee, is emphatic: ‘That geezer was cruising for a bruising.’ McCulloch offers an even simpler explanation: ‘Why does anyone do anything? Who knows? I was really drunk at the time.’ Gerry O’Driscoll’s would be the last voice heard on the album, his soft Irish accent punctuating the last few bars of ‘Eclipse’: ‘There is no dark side of the moon. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.’
Waters’ quest for ‘honest, human voices’ had worked perfectly.
In Adrian Maben’s footage from Paris six months earlier, the band had, in a rare moment of candour, admitted to conflict. ‘We understand each other very well,’ explains a rather earnest Richard Wright. ‘We’re very tolerant of each other, but there are a lot of things unsaid … I feel … sometimes …’ At which point the keyboard player looks rather dolefully at the camera. ‘How do you get over the difficult times?’ asks Maben. ‘I don’t know how,’ answers Wright, ‘but we do.’
‘Our working relationship was still good during the making of Dark Side,’ Gilmour later told Mojo magazine. ‘On Dark Side, as on all the records, we had massive rows about the way it should be, but they were about passionate beliefs in what we were doing.’ In this case, Gilmour and Waters’ passionate but conflicting beliefs were about how the album should actually sound. As Nick Mason later recalled, ‘At times, three separate mixes were done by different individuals – a system which, in the past, had tended to resolve matters, as a consensus normally developed towards a particular mix. But even this was not working.’
‘We argued so much that it was suggested we get a third opinion,’ explained Gilmour. The guitarist favoured a warmer sound (‘I wanted it to be big and swampy’) and preferred the spoken-word segments to appear more subtly in the mix. This was also largely Wright’s preferred choice. Roger was still in thrall to the sound of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band record, and favoured a cleaner, drier mix, with the spoken word segments more dominant. Nick Mason also favoured this approach.
The band took the decision to bring in an outside mediator, or ‘umpire’ as David Gilmour later called the role. ‘Chris Thomas came in for the mixes,’ he said. ‘His role was essentially to stop the arguments between me and Roger.’ Thomas was a friend of Steve O’Rourke’s, had worked as producer George Martin’s assistant on The Beatles’ White Album, and had just produced John Cale’s Paris 1919 album.
‘The band felt they needed a fresh pair of ears,’ said Thomas in 2003. ‘Someone who could say, “Can we put some more compression on the guitars?” or “Can we have more echo on that?”’
Time may have healed some wounds, but when Parsons talks about the decision to bring in Thomas at this late stage in the album, he chooses his words carefully. ‘I’m not sure there was a huge conflict on the way the album should be mixed. As the engineer I would have preferred it if my voice had been as loud as anyone else. But Chris made his voice heard. At the end of the day, we were dealing with subtleties by now. Chris didn’t turn the album from being one thing into another.’
During these final weeks, though, Thomas would become involved in the decision to add extra guitars to ‘Money’, reduce the number of guitars in ‘Us and Them’, and apply the finishing touches to the album’s sixty-second fanfare, ‘Speak to Me’. ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ also came under scrutiny. While the band had now opted for a piano, rather than an organ-led version, there was still something missing. Parsons’s NASA archive sound effects may have been rejected, but a voice of some sort was needed. Parsons decided to call session singer Clare Torry.
‘There was a chap who worked at Abbey Road called Dennis,’ says Clare now. ‘Dennis paid all the musicians. He gave Alan my number. But when he rang me, I said I couldn’t do it. I didn’t even know what the job was. It was a Friday evening and I told them I was working. But that was a lie because I was going with my then boyfriend to see Chuck Berry at the Hammersmith Odeon, and I didn’t want to miss that. I suggested Sunday evening. They agreed. I asked who it was and Alan said, Pink Floyd. I was like, “Oh.” I wasn’t really a big fan.’
Torry, a session singer and songwriter, was a regular at Abbey Road, and had sung on numerous albums of cover versions, in which the popular hits of the day were re-recorded by unnamed sessioners. Parsons had heard one such album, and had decided to call her rather than one of the other backing singers already used on the album.
On Sunday, 21 January, Clare showed up at Abbey Road. ‘They explained the album was about birth, and all the shit you go through in your life and then death. I did think it was rather pretentious. Of course, I didn’t tell them that, and I’ve since eaten my words. I think it’s a marvellous album. They played me the track, but when I asked what they wanted me to do on it, they didn’t seem to know.’
Gilmour was in charge of the session, and, after rejecting her original improvised vocals – ‘a lot of “oooh, aaah babys”’ – Torry began going for longer notes, no specific words, just general wailing, or, as she describes it now, ‘caterwauling’.
‘We told her to sing flat out, then quiet,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘I think we mixed it down from about four versions into the orgasmic version we know and love.’
‘We said, “Just busk it,”’ said Richard Wright. ‘We told her, “Just go in and improvise.” Think about death, think about horror, which she did, and out came this wonderful vocal.’
‘In the past, Rick has said, “Clare was really embarrassed after doing the vocal,”’ says Torry. ‘He’s right, I was embarrassed, but that was because when I walked back into the control room after singing, there was no feedback at all. I thought they hated it. On any other session you’d have got some feedback,
even if it was, “My God, that was awful.”’
It wasn’t until years later, when Clare read an interview with fellow Dark Side of the Moon backing singer Lesley Duncan, that she realised she wasn’t alone in her feelings. ‘I knew exactly what Lesley was talking about. Nobody spoke to her, either. There was a sense of, “I can’t wait to get out of here.” I suddenly realised Pink Floyd were like that with everyone.’
The end result that evening was a dramatic, striking vocal performance, conjuring sex, fear, death; all the component parts of the album. For Clare, though, it had been just another studio session. Not entirely convinced that her ‘caterwauling’ would make it onto the finished album, she collected her £30 fee from Dennis and was back home in time to go to dinner with her boyfriend.
Chris Thomas’s final credit on the album would read ‘Mix Supervised By …’. Like Alan Parsons’ engineer’s credit, the roles between engineer, mixer and producer would become blurred, sometimes to the chagrin of those involved. ‘I worked ridiculously long hours,’ said Parsons, ‘making sure I never missed a session. I wanted my contribution to be special. I wanted everything to be right.’ To this day, he has never made any more money out of Dark Side of the Moon than what he was paid at the time. ‘I’m sometimes bitter that I earned little or no money from the album. But that’s offset by the fact that it did wonders for my career.’ Parsons would eventually receive a Grammy Award for his engineering on Dark Side of the Moon.