by Mark Blake
Nick Mason later summed up the group’s collective mindset: ‘Roger was getting crosser. We were all getting older, there was much more drama between us, people turning up at the studio late. There was more pressure on me to make the drumming more accurate and less flowery.’ At the time, he was more candid, telling Capital Radio DJ Nicky Horne, ‘I really did wish I wasn’t there. But it wasn’t specifically to do with what was going on in the band, as much as what was going on outside the band. I am very bad at closing off my mind to whatever is bothering me. But my alarm and despondency manifested itself in a complete rigor mortis.’ With marital problems, Mason’s mind simply wasn’t on the job.
‘Some of the lads needed to be jollied along a bit,’ joked Waters at the time. In reality, it was the closest Pink Floyd had yet come to splitting up. Later, Mason would claim that each of his bandmates had approached Steve O’Rourke individually to discuss leaving.
Despite the air of unease, some progress was made. Between January and the beginning of March, the album that would become Wish You Were Here began to take shape. ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ had now been expanded to around twenty minutes, and would incorporate longer instrumental passages, backing vocals from The Blackberries and a saxophone solo from Dick Parry. John Leckie ended up overseeing the first sessions on the song, until Floyd’s front-of-house engineer Brian Humphries took over. (Abbey Road agreed to the use of an outside engineer ‘but only because it was the Pink Floyd’.) Humphries’ job had originally been offered to Alan Parsons. ‘They offered me £10,000 a year to become their permanent sound engineer,’ says Parsons. ‘But I also wanted a royalty on the next album, and Steve O’Rourke said no.’ Parsons was also about to start work on his own music, as The Alan Parsons Project. ‘So I also had that going on. I still think that if they’d offered me the job a few months earlier I would have taken it.’
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ had been inspired in some part by Waters’ frustration with the endless speculation about Barrett in the music press. ‘I’ve never read an intelligent piece on Syd Barrett in any magazine, never,’ he complained in 1976. ‘I wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote that lyric because I wanted it to be as close as possible to what I felt. There’s a truthful feeling in that piece. That sort of indefinable, inevitable melancholy about the disappearance of Syd. He’s withdrawn so far away that he’s no longer there.’
The initial plan had been to put the piece on one whole side of the album, like ‘Echoes’ on Meddle, with ‘Raving and Drooling’ and ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ on the other. This was Gilmour’s preferred option. But that would have been the easy option, and Waters was in no mood to make things easy. Instead, he suggested splitting ‘Shine On …’ into two and having it bookend the album. ‘Raving and Drooling’ and ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ would now be put aside for a future Floyd album, with the bassist deciding to write songs more in keeping with the same theme of absence that had so inspired ‘Shine On …’ He only had to look at some of his bandmates for subject matter. ‘No one was really looking anyone in the eye,’ he recalled. ‘It was all very mechanical.’
Waters wrote two new songs on his own, ‘Welcome to the Machine’, ‘Have a Cigar’ and, in partnership with Gilmour, ‘Wish You Were Here’. The songs would be worked up in stages now and later in a second burst of activity at Abbey Road that summer. ‘Welcome to the Machine’ was an unyieldingly bleak dissertation on the human condition, and, more personally, those – a rock ‘n’ roll band, maybe – who spent their lives in search of a dream, only to find that the machine runs on dreams and very little else. ‘People are very vulnerable to their own blindness, their own greed, their own need to be loved,’ explained Waters. ‘Success has to be a real need. And the dream is that when you are successful, when you’re a star, you’ll be fine, everything will go wonderfully well. That’s the dream and everybody knows it’s an empty one. The song is about the business situation which I find myself in. One’s encouraged to be absent because one’s not encouraged to pay any attention to reality.’ The lyrics hardly disguised the autobiographical nature of the song. Making Gilmour take the lead vocal somehow accentuated rather than softened the message. But it is Wright’s VCS3 synth lines that now dominate, giving the song an unremitting bleakness.
‘Have a Cigar’ continued the theme, offering another sarcastic jibe against the air-headed nature of the music industry. Lighter than ‘Welcome to the Machine’, its jazzy lilt was broken up with plenty of spluttering guitar fills and an extended guitar solo. One lyric referred to the time the band had been asked by a record company minion: which of them was Pink? The only problem was that Gilmour felt uncomfortable singing Waters’ words, while Waters struggled with taking the lead vocal. The problem would be rectified in the summer recording sessions.
Finally, the Gilmour/Waters co-written title track assumed the same uplifting quality that had typified the best of Dark Side of the Moon. Its subject matter, though, was as self-questioning as the rest of the album. The line ‘two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl year after year’ could have referred to the sense of dislocation among the band members at the time, as much as to Waters’ crumbling relationship with his wife, which was at least part of its inspiration. ‘It’s about the sensations that accompany the state of not being there,’ offered Waters. ‘To work and to be with people whom you know aren’t there any more.’
Further sessions on the album throughout June were slipped in between a sold-out US tour. In keeping with their press-unfriendly image, the band’s sole advertising for the tour was a syndicated live Pink Floyd show, which was broadcast in each of the major cities in advance of the tour. Demand was such that the Los Angeles Sports Arena shifted all 67,000 tickets in a single day. ‘Raving and Drooling’ and ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ were still in the set, joined by the extended ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, ‘Have a Cigar’, ‘Echoes’ and Dark Side of the Moon. The band’s special effects had been extended even further and now included an arsenal of pyrotechnics, as well as a model aircraft, which zoomed over the audience and ‘crashed’ during Dark Side of the Moon, and which, without fail, would make soundman Brian Humphries duck as it hurtled overhead.
Meanwhile, the Floyd’s trademark circular screen flashed Gerald Scarfe’s images, created in many cases before he or his team of animators had heard any of the Floyd’s new music.
‘I said to Roger, “We can’t get them to do anything as there are no tracks,”’ recalls Scarfe. ‘Roger was like, “Just get them to do anything; I’ll make it fit later on.” Sure enough, what we did do fitted in alongside certain passages. What was frustrating for the animators is that they knew it could have been better if they could have picked up an accent in the music now and again. But that gave it a disjointed feel that somehow complemented the music by not following it precisely.’
This flying-by-the seat-of-the-pants quality had been the norm since Scarfe began his relationship with Pink Floyd on the 1974 tour. ‘I’d produce new bits of film as and when I could, and just turn up at the gig with a can under my arm. Sometimes, because of the traffic, I wouldn’t get there until twenty minutes before showtime, and I’d find Roger in the dressing room, going, “Where the fuck have you been?” They’d lace up the film there and then and put it in anywhere.’
As an outsider coming into the Floyd’s closed circle, Scarfe observed the band members’ individual roles: ‘Nick was the organiser, the ambassador. He approached me at first, but I remember him saying, “Just wait, once you get started you’ll suddenly find you’re dealing with Roger.” Rick was always off to the side somewhere, in his own world. Dave was always very easy-going, but I had the impression he thought it should just be about the music.’
The planned pièce de résistance of the 1975 US tour was an inflatable pyramid designed to float above the stage, anchored by cables, recreating the prism on the sleeve of Dark Side of the Moon. Waters sketched out the design, but, at a height of 60ft when inflated, and powered by a considerable amount of he
lium, the pyramid would prove to be an unwieldy beast.
At the Three Rivers Stadium, Pittsburgh on 20 June, projectionist Pete Revell witnessed the pyramid’s last, ill-fated stand. ‘It used to go up on a pair of hydraulic winches, but at Three Rivers one of them came off, but the other one just kept pumping, so the whole thing flipped upside down. The bottom was like a soft skin, but there was this aluminium framework in the corners, pumped up with helium. All the buoyancy was now pointing at the bottom. This thing shot out into the night sky, like a giant jellyfish.’
The weight of the pyramid sent it over the side of the stadium wall, dragging the ropes behind it. ‘It then started bouncing around the car park,’ says Revell, ‘and as there was this aluminium frame inside, it started busting up cars, lamp-posts. I remember we were trying to get everyone out of the car park, but it was no good. There were about two hundred kids out there with knives and bottles, hacking bits off to keep as souvenirs, inhaling the helium and rabbiting away like Donald Duck. I think what was left of the balloon eventually came down in a river near Pittsburgh.’
While marital and musical angst was rife within the band, the crew were having a rather better time of it. ‘We were very well looked after,’ says Revell. ‘But in the end, we were told we were costing them too much money and were told not to order anything more on room service. In America it was getting silly – you’d phone up at 2 a.m.: “Can I have four gin and tonics and 400 cigarettes, please.” They put a stop to all that.’
Nevertheless, Revell would feel the wrath of his paymasters on the final date of Floyd’s US tour. The band’s increasing use of pyrotechnics had led to run-ins with local fire marshals, and the crew began hiding their flash bombs from the snooping officials, before letting them off at the last possible moment. The decision was taken to mark the end of the North American tour with a gig at the Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario, with, to quote the projectionist, ‘the biggest, loudest, fuck-off explosion ever’ to accompany the Floyd’s ‘crashing plane’. The explosion was suitably dramatic, and, with the gig over, the crew began stripping down the stage. ‘That was when I realised a couple of the bins hadn’t gone off,’ says Pete Revell. ‘We had four sticks of dynamite, flash powder and detonators left over, all out of their tins, that we had to get rid of somehow. I said, “Stand back, I’ll set this lot off.” What we didn’t realise is there was more in these bins than had gone off during the gig.’ The resulting explosion blew out half the stadium’s back wall and windows in some of the nearby houses. ‘One bin went up in the air and we never saw it again. Above us was one of those scoreboards surrounded by light bulbs. The explosion went through the bottom and blew the front out, sending glass and aluminium everywhere. I was in shock for two hours.’ Once he’d sufficiently recovered, Revell was sent for, back at the band’s hotel. ‘They’d pulled a table round and set up four chairs behind it, as if they were a board of directors. I felt like a schoolboy being sent to see the headmaster. They were like, “I think we need to have words.”’
The band were especially sensitive after a previous mishap with pyrotechnics in France.
‘One of them said, “After Paris, we said this would never happen again.” I replied, “I didn’t do Paris”, to which they said, “No, but you’ve just done Canada.”’
Revell kept his job, but a final show in the UK at Knebworth Park was a dispiriting experience for the band. The 40,000-capacity open-air arena ended up holding nearer to 100,000, when the perimeter fence was removed. Floyd were due to headline over Captain Beefheart, The Steve Miller Band and their old friend Roy Harper, all of whom would be using the band’s PA during the day. The jet-lagged road crew arrived late to set up the equipment, only to discover that the backstage generators were liable to voltage fluctuation. This meant that Richard Wright’s state-of-the-art keyboards kept slipping in and out of tune. A decision to buzz the crowd at the start of the gig with two Second World War Spitfires failed to have quite the desired effect, as the road crew were still feverishly preparing the stage at the time. At one point during the gig, half of the PA failed completely. Backstage, in a fit of pique after having his stage clothes stolen, support act Roy Harper smashed up his trailer. Roger Waters witnessed the incident and filed it away for use in a future Pink Floyd song.
Harper’s connection with Pink Floyd would grow stronger during 1975. At Knebworth, he sang lead vocals on ‘Have a Cigar’, reprising his performance on a recorded version of the song from a few weeks earlier. Midway through the US dates, when the band had returned to the UK for a second burst of activity at Abbey Road, they had found Harper in a neighbouring studio, recording his next album, HQ, with producer John Leckie. He had known Pink Floyd since the late sixties, when the two acts had appeared on the same bill at the free festival in Hyde Park. A singular, eccentric talent, Harper also shared some of Roger Waters’ concerns and worldviews.
Waters had been struggling with the lead vocal on ‘Have a Cigar’ for some time. Gilmour had refused to sing it, claiming not to feel sufficient empathy with the lyrics. ‘Roy was in and out of the studio all the time,’ said Waters. ‘I can’t remember who suggested he sing it – maybe I did, probably hoping everyone would go, “Oh no, Rog, you do it.” But they didn’t. They all went, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.”’
‘Roger can write songs but he’s never going to be in the top one hundred as a rock singer,’ said Harper. ‘He tries hard, he’s a good lad. Anyway, neither of them could get up there. I just stood at the back, leaning against a machine and laughing. I said, “I’ll sing it for you”, and someone said, “OK”, and I said, “For a price.”’
Harper delivered the necessary degree of incredulous sarcasm on lyrics that referenced the music biz hysteria that had greeted the band after Dark Side of the Moon – lyrics that referred to riding the gravy train. In years to come, when working with producer Bob Ezrin on The Wall, Waters would tell him, ‘You can write anything you want, just don’t expect a credit.’ Harper’s name would appear on the finished album. But that was all.
‘Roger said, “We must make sure you get a payment for this,”’ says John Leckie, ‘and Roy said, “Just get me a life season ticket to Lord’s [cricket ground].” He kept prompting Roger, but it never came. About ten years later Roy wrote a letter to Roger, and decided that, due to the success of Wish You Were Here, £10,000 would be adequate. And heard nothing at all.’
‘I think it was a bad idea now,’ said Waters. ‘Roy did it very well, but it’s just not us any more.’
Roy Harper wasn’t the only special guest, or old friend to drop by the sessions. When it was discovered that classical violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Stephane Grappelli were recording a duet at Abbey Road, Gilmour suggested Grappelli come in and play a final violin coda to the song ‘Wish You Were Here’. Grappelli haggled over his fee but finally settled at £300. In the end, his playing is virtually inaudible on the final mix. ‘It was terrific fun, though,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘Avoiding his wandering hands.’
One addition to the final mix was a snippet from a radio programme that linked the end of ‘Shine On … Part One’ to the beginning of ‘Wish You Were Here’. The opening lines of the song were mixed in such a way as to sound as if they were coming out of the radio. As Gilmour explained, ‘It’s all meant to sound like the first track getting sucked into the radio with one person sitting in the room playing guitar along to the radio.’ The radio programme and interference was recorded on Gilmour’s own car radio, while someone turned the dial. The tiny sample of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony fitted the beginning of ‘Wish You Were Here’ perfectly.
On 5 June, as the band busied themselves for another day at the coalface, each of them in turn wondered who the bald, overweight man fussing around at the back of the studio was. Most assumed that, as he’d made it past the reception desk into the confines of the studio, he must be, to quote Nick Mason, ‘something to do with one of the engineers’. Hardly ones for confrontation at the best of times, hi
s presence went unchallenged. In the grand tradition of hearsay, nobody present that day can quite agree on the exact circumstances of Syd Barrett’s arrival in the studio.
‘Everyone has a different version of that story,’ says Mason. ‘I talked to at least one person who thought that Syd had been in the studio on at least three or four days, I thought he was only there for an hour, and someone else says he was there for the whole afternoon …’ The drummer remembers a ‘large, fat bloke with a shaven head, wearing a decrepit old tan mac and carrying a plastic shopping bag’. The only known photograph of Barrett at the sessions shows him shaven-headed and wearing a tight-fitting, white, short-sleeved shirt, with the waist-band of his trousers hiked up over his stomach. He is certainly unrecognisable as the Syd Barrett of four years earlier.
For Roger Waters, the physical transformation was shocking. ‘I was in fucking tears,’ he said later. It was Waters that pointed Barrett out to Richard Wright. ‘Roger said, “You don’t know who that guy is, do you? It’s Syd,”’ recalled Wright. ‘It was a huge shock. He kept standing up and brushing his teeth, then putting his toothbrush away and sitting down.’
According to Mason, Wright and Waters, Barrett’s arrival coincided with a playback of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. Gilmour, whose memory of the event is sketchier than the others, claims not to remember which song they were working on, but claimed in one interview that Syd ‘turned up for two or three days and then didn’t come any more’.
According to Richard Wright, at one point, ‘Syd stood up and said, “Right, when do I put the guitar on?” And, of course, he didn’t have a guitar with him, and we said, “Sorry, Syd, the guitar’s all done.”’