by Mark Blake
On 7 July, during a break in the Wish You Were Here sessions, Gilmour married girlfriend Ginger at Epping Forest Register Office, and the Syd tale takes on another curious twist. In conversation with Mojo magazine in 2006, Gilmour disputed any stories that Syd had attended his wedding. Yet at least three of the guests claim they saw Syd at a post-wedding meal at Abbey Road. Ex-manager Andrew King recalled Barrett looking ‘like the type of bloke who serves you in a hamburger bar in Kansas City’. Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley referred to him as ‘an overweight Hare Krishna-type chap’. But whatever the frequency of his visits, there could be no possible reconciliation. Barrett was clearly very sick. The band moved on, and he moved back to Chelsea, where he would remain on and off for the next six years.
‘He doesn’t want to be bothered,’ Bryan Morrison told one inquisitive reporter. ‘He just sits there on his own, watching television all day and getting fat.’
Towards the end of the Wish You Were Here sessions, Hipgnosis presented the band with ideas for the album cover. Aware of the theme of emotional absence running through the music and, in some cases, the personal lives of the band, Storm Thorgerson hit on the idea of an ‘absent’ (read: ‘hidden’) cover. He proposed concealing the cover in a black opaque cellophane wrap. The idea was mooted during a meal in the Abbey Road canteen, with the band, Steve O’Rourke and anyone else that happened to be eating alongside them, listening in. The band agreed, with the only record company proviso being that the cellophane wrap included a sticker identifying the name of the band and the album. The hidden sleeve featured another enduring Floyd image: two business-suited men shaking hands, one of them on fire.
Thorgerson explained his thinking in a radio interview at the time: ‘The handshake was a symbol of the whole notion of how you may get hold of somebody, shake them by the hand, and they’re trying to tell you how much they’re really there when they gripped you, but in fact they’re miles away.’ For most, the burning man was taken as a very literal reference to the notion of ‘getting burnt’ in business. Photographed on an empty Hollywood film lot, the flaming stuntman, Ronnie Rondell, was frequently seen risking life and limb in such TV shows as Charlie’s Angels. In what would become a familiar artistic approach of layers within layers for Pink Floyd album covers, Hipgnosis included separate designs along the same theme for the back and inside covers. Of these an image of an upturned diver, the top half of his body concealed beneath motionless water, was the most striking. ‘A dive without a splash? An action without its trace? Is it present or absent?’ offered Thorgerson later.
The photograph had been taken at Lake Mono in California. The yoga-trained diver had assumed a handstand position, and held his breath underwater while waiting for the ripples in the lake to subside and the photograph to be taken. Designer George Hardie’s creation for the sticker and the record label itself repeated the theme of the insincere handshake, with two robotic hands clasped together.
Wish You Were Here was released worldwide in September 1975. But that summer’s appearance at Knebworth would be the last Pink Floyd live show until 1977. In an interview conducted for the Wish You Were Here Songbook, published a month after the album’s release, Roger Waters made little attempt to disguise the unrest and dissatisfaction he felt. ‘I’m sorry, I wanted to do this interview, but my mind’s scrambled …’ he protests at one point. Instead, Waters ran through the difficulties experienced while making the album, refusing to present the kind of united front David Gilmour had worked so hard to maintain during his encounter with NME at the beginning of the year.
The bass player’s willingness to admit to problems within the band had manifested itself in a suggestion during the making of the album to include segments of dialogue, in the style of the ‘interviews’ on Dark Side of the Moon. ‘I’d like to have heard us argue and talk things over on this record,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have heard extracts of the conversations that took place during the recording.’
Waters’ idea may not have been that far-fetched. Throughout some dates on the tour, Storm Thorgerson and Waters’ friend Nick Sedgwick had accompanied the band. Also from Cambridge, Sedgwick had moved in the same circles since his teenage years. By the mid-1970s, he was working as a freelance writer. Nick played golf with Waters and had previously spent time with Roger and Judy in Greece. Waters had invited him and Storm to accompany the band on tour and write, as Roger would later describe it, ‘the definitive book on the experience in Pink Floyd’.
Photographer Jill Furmanovsky, one of the few music press personnel allowed access to the Floyd’s inner sanctum, also joined them on some dates. ‘Storm got me to take pictures of everything,’ said Jill. ‘He would ring me up and say, “Quick, come to Room 253 as Dave’s playing back-gammon” or “Roger’s playing golf”.’ Yet as the photographer would also admit, ‘You never knew with the Floyd if you were persona grata or non grata. Even some of the individual members of the band weren’t always sure if they were in the band or not, let alone if a photographer was welcome.’
The vibe around the tour was what Jill Furmanovsky describes as a ‘dark soap opera’. It also filtered beyond the bands to their wives and girlfriends. After a Floyd gig in the US, Waters called his now estranged wife Judy back home in England. Another man answered the phone. The couple would divorce that year.
Sedgwick and Thorgerson had chronicled the band’s 1974 UK dates, and written up their impressions. Early chapters were distributed to the band. ‘We all sat down and read it, and it was fascinating,’ said Waters. ‘Dave read it and said, “Yeah”, and then, a couple of days later, he just exploded. He started saying things like, “If this is true, then I might as well not be in the band”, because it didn’t fit with how he thought of himself and his role in the band. It described me as the leader. So the whole book was suppressed.’
‘I don’t think it’s strictly true to say that David stopped it,’ says Storm Thorgerson. ‘I think it was circumstantial that the book didn’t come out. They had to go and make Wish You Were Here, Roger was getting divorced, and I was busy. We didn’t follow it through, either. But it does display the dynamic in the group at that time. I had tapes of certain discussions, some arguments. At times, people perhaps said things they wished they hadn’t.’
There was, perhaps, a further complication. Thorgerson had also joined Pink Floyd on tour in the US, without Sedgwick. ‘There were various indiscretions that occur more on foreign tours than on domestic tours,’ he admits. ‘And I think we would have been very likely to report them in the book.’
It was Sedgwick that would conduct the interview with Waters for the subsequent Wish You Were Here Songbook. He would remain one of Waters’ closest confidants, and golf partner, long after the bassist’s split from Pink Floyd. ‘Nick was the only one of us that Roger didn’t cut out of his life,’ says another of his Cambridge contemporaries. The book remains unpublished.
Whatever turmoil the band were experiencing made little difference to the public’s reaction to Wish You Were Here. The album debuted at number 1 in both the UK and US, despite the lack of any tour dates to promote it. Sounds was effusive in its praise (‘light years better than Dark Side of the Moon’), but others were less impressed. Pete Erskine’s review in New Musical Express arrived at the conclusion that ‘as a last, desperate, uninspired measure they’ve finally succumbed to recycling the more obvious musical bits of [Dark Side of the] Moon’. No great fan of the previous album, though, Erskine admitted that ‘where Moon seemed aimless and sometimes positively numbskull, Wish You Were Here is concise, highly melodic and very well played’. Melody Maker’s Allan Jones came in much harder: ‘It forces one to the conclusion that, for the last two years (possibly longer), Floyd have existed in a state of suspended animation … Wish You Were Here sucks. It’s as simple as that.’
The criticism extended across the water. Rolling Stone’s Ben Edmonds berated the band for gimmickry over music and cited ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ as a fumbled opportunity
for Waters really to sing about Syd Barrett. There was a recurring theme in the complaints: that Floyd were too insular, disconnected from reality, and that Waters’ lyrics were below par and too quick to bite the hand that feeds. Yet with 900,000 advance orders for the album in the US (the largest for any Columbia release), Floyd’s new American paymasters hardly needed to worry. Wish You Were Here would go on to sell 6 million copies in its first year alone.
The record’s subsequent reputation as the serious Pink Floyd fan’s album du jour lies in the fact that it distills the very essence of the band’s sound at the time: that sense of dislocation and of emotions struggling to get out, anchored to music that sounds similarly cold and melancholy. ‘I’m glad people have copped the sadness,’ said Waters. ‘It’s a very sad record.’ Much of the credit for this sound lies at Richard Wright’s door. His ghostly synthesiser seems to dominate Wish You Were Here, especially on the second half of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. Of the song’s nine parts, Wright takes a songwriting credit on eight of them. No wonder it’s his favourite Pink Floyd album. For the others, opinion was predictably divided. In 1995, Gilmour told Guitarist magazine: ‘I think it’s [Wish You Were Here] better in some ways than Dark Side of the Moon.’ The spoken-word segments on Dark Side … had sometimes niggled him. ‘There were moments when we didn’t concentrate hard enough on the music side of it as we should have done. That was absorbed into an effort to try and make the balance between the music and the words a better one on Wish You Were Here.’
Waters felt differently: ‘Some of it goes on and on and on … I think we made a basic error in not arranging it in a different way so that some of the ideas were expanded lyrically before they were developed musically.’ Interviewed barely a year after the album came out, Nick Mason expressed surprise at how good he thought it was. He’d been largely absent in mind, if not in body, and Wish You Were Here would be the first Pink Floyd album on which he didn’t receive a writing credit. For the first time, Mason’s name didn’t appear anywhere on a Pink Floyd record.
Number 35 Britannia Row was an imposing-looking, three-storey converted chapel just off Islington’s Essex Road. 1976 would be the first year since Pink Floyd began in which they didn’t play live. Freed up to concentrate on how best, or not, to spend their money, the band had purchased the building with a view to turning it into a recording studio and warehouse facility. With the group off the road, their arsenal of PA and lighting systems was finally located under one roof and available for hire by other bands. Two companies were formed. Road crew members Mick Kluczynski and Robbie Williams were entrusted with the job of running Britannia Row Audio, while Graeme Fleming headed up Britannia Row Lighting. In truth, it was also a way to provide jobs for all three while the band weren’t touring.
For Pink Floyd, the prospect of owning their own studio was both good for the ego and, so they thought, their bank balances. The original terms of their deal with EMI Records involved them receiving unlimited studio time at Abbey Road, in exchange for a cut in their percentage. But now the deal had lapsed, the band were conscious that any lengthy trawls through the ‘rubbish library’ might be hampered by the sound of a ticking studio clock.
The top floor of number 35 was converted into an office, complete with billiards table. The middle floor became the storage facility, while the ground floor was turned into a studio. Unfortunately, few of the Floyd’s contemporaries required the band’s quadraphonic mixing desk or space-age lighting effects, and the companies were only allowed to hire out existing Floyd equipment and not purchase anything new. The rental side of the business eventually floundered, until Robbie Williams and his business partner moved in, bought the equipment from the band, and set up an independent production company in the 1980s.
In the meantime, the Floyd’s new studio fared rather better. Designed by Waters, Mason and another of their Regent Street Poly classmates, Jon Corpe, it was, claimed Mason, ‘fashionably austere’, or, according to Waters, ‘a fucking prison’. The dour interior design may have been rather forbidding, but it was, at least, theirs. With Brian Humphries and new in-house engineer Nick Griffiths installed, and with their road crew on call on the floor above, Britannia Row became Pink Floyd’s centre of operations and their very own bunker. But it needed to pay for itself, and required a steady stream of bands booking studio time, while still leaving the place free for whenever Pink Floyd wanted to use it. In the meantime, the studio’s accounting system wasn’t quite as stringent as it might have been. The members of the band were earning huge sums, but spending the same. ‘It was a bit like the Apple situation with The Beatles,’ according to one insider.
With the group off the road, Nick Mason spent the first part of the year producing albums for Robert Wyatt and French jazz rockers Gong. Yet the drummer would also spend time in 1976 reprising his role as Pink Floyd’s resident ambassador. Nicky Horne, DJ on London’s independent station, Capital Radio, had an evening show, Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It, which was the station’s rival to the BBC’s John Peel show. Horne played the heavyweight, album-oriented bands of the era, and was an unashamed Pink Floyd fan.
‘Nick Mason introduced himself to me after a gig at the Hammersmith Odeon,’ says Nicky Horne now. ‘I have no idea whose gig it was, but I was upstairs in the green room when he came over. He said, “Hello, I’m with Pink Floyd, and I know you play us a lot on your programme, so thank you, we appreciate it.” I was rather taken aback.’ Mason gave Horne his telephone number and invited him round for tea.
‘He had this place in Highgate, and I remember he had a miniature Bugatti that he drove around the garden in. So we were very much like boys with their toys – buzzing around the garden. Then we had tea, all very English, and Nick talked about Pink Floyd’s image. It seemed so incongruous that he was being this hospitable, when the band had such a reputation for not giving interviews and not being approachable. He asked me if I had any ideas about how they might go about improving that. I hadn’t been on air for very long and I was still a bit naive, so I thought, Sod it, and said, “I’d really like to do the definitive Pink Floyd interview for my show.” Amazingly, he agreed.’
Capital Radio’s The Pink Floyd Story would be broadcast in six parts over six consecutive weeks beginning in December 1976. In the months preceding this, Horne had unlimited access to all four of the band, but on the proviso that they would have pre-approval of each of the programmes before broadcast (‘We’d never normally do that, but we thought: Fuck it, it’s Pink Floyd’). It was an unprecedented PR exercise from a band usually so wary of publicity.
Nicky Horne amassed hours of interviews with each of the Floyd, but found Waters the most fascinating. Now separated from Judy, Roger had moved out of Islington to a house in Broxash Road, near Clapham Common, South London. Horne spent a day there.
‘I was surprised because I expected him to be reticent and difficult and guarded, but with Roger it was all quite close to the surface. He was disarmingly honest about the problems they’d had making Wish You Were Here and his feelings about Syd Barrett. Those feelings were very raw. One of the sessions was almost like therapy. I said, “Tell me about guilt”, and he would talk for twenty minutes.’
Among the exclusive material made available for the programme was the unedited interview between Waters and Roger ‘The Hat’ Manifold, the roadie whose voice could be heard on Dark Side of the Moon. Manifold’s stoned ruminations on violence, death and the problems of working with musicians (‘They should be more like normal people’) were both sharp and funny. At one point the two could be heard puffing on a joint.
‘Nick gave me that tape as he wanted me to hear it,’ says Horne. ‘I think because it showed Roger in a different light. You could tell that when he’d had a couple of joints you could delve anywhere, deep into his psyche. He wasn’t guarded at all.’
Midway into the project, Horne realised that there was one important interviewee missing. ‘I wanted Syd, and Dave Gilmour told me he was living at the P
layboy Apartments in Park Lane. They knew where he was because they were sending him his royalty cheques. So I went there and they said, “No, he’s now staying at the Hilton.”’
Horne found out the room number at the Hilton and made his approach. ‘The door was opened by this huge guy with no hair and no eyebrows – just completely bald. I thought he must be a bouncer or a bodyguard. I said, “Dave Gilmour’s sent me to talk to Syd.” And this guy looked at me and, with immense difficulty, sort of contorting his face, said, “Syd. Can’t. Talk.” And closed the door. I went downstairs and rang Dave and told him about this guy I’d just met and what he’d said, and Gilmour replied, “That wasn’t a bouncer, that was Syd.” It was tragic to see him like that.’
The broadcast of The Pink Floyd Story was due to coincide with the release of Pink Floyd’s next album. In April 1976, Floyd began an eight-month stint at Britannia Row to record the follow-up to Wish You Were Here. They went back to the two songs rejected from the last album, ‘Raving and Drooling’ and ‘Gotta Be Crazy’. Re-examining the lyrics he’d written almost two years earlier, Waters found himself eventually sketching out another concept. If Wish You Were Here had been dominated by Waters’ disillusionment, then the next Floyd album would find him in a an even spikier, and more confrontational mood.
The world around him would hardly improve his frame of mind. During one of the longest, hottest summers on record, violence erupted at the Notting Hill Carnival, the now annual celebration of West Indian culture of which the Floyd’s former manager Peter Jenner had been the first treasurer. Police officers arrested a pickpocket near Portobello Road, prompting a group of black youths to come to his defence. Riot police were met with a hail of bricks, bottles and traffic cones. The incident would be eulogised in the song ‘White Riot’ by an angry new rock band called The Clash.