by Mark Blake
In Melody Maker, Karl Dallas earmarked the same lyrics as an ‘uncomfortable taste of reality in a medium (“progressive” rock) that has become in recent years, increasingly soporific’. While the review’s closing line seems rather glib – ‘Perhaps they should re-name themselves Punk Floyd’ – there’s truth in the statement. Since the early seventies Pink Floyd had been lumped with other album-oriented bands under the convenient ‘progressive rock’ banner. Although, as Gilmour cautioned years later, ‘I was never a big fan of most of what you’d call progressive rock. I’m like Groucho Marx – I don’t want to belong to any club that will have me as a member.’
Animals hardly sat well alongside 1977’s punk calling cards, The Clash’s first album and The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, but nor did it fit with the music being made by Floyd’s beardy contemporaries. Yes released Going for the One in 1977, an album full of fairytale lyricism and whimsy, while Emerson Lake & Palmer’s Works Volume I from the same year contained an entire vinyl side given over to Keith Emerson’s Piano Concerto (a similar idea had been explored by Pink Floyd eight years earlier on Ummagumma). These bands were not wringing their hands over corporate greed, man’s inhumanity to man, or railing at the ‘fucked-up old hags’ that tried to censor what we watched on TV.
As well as the unprecedented PR exercise of Capital Radio’s The Pink Floyd Story, the band also found a music critic that they deemed worthy of their attention. A year earlier Waters had given a revealing interview to Philippe Constantin, a friend who worked at the band’s record label in France. But although he continued to treat most critics with suspicion or outright contempt, Melody Maker’s Karl Dallas would suddenly find himself persona grata in a way that few had managed before. Dallas was a musician in his own right and a long-time contributor to Melody Maker. He had seen Pink Floyd at the UFO club but had never been a fan. ‘I used to talk to Syd and Roger in the refreshment bar,’ he says. ‘I thought the concept of Pink Floyd was interesting but the music was a bit boring.’
Dallas attended the press conference to launch the Animals album at Battersea Power Station. Steve O’Rourke was the sole representative of the Floyd camp, informing one writer that David Gilmour’s non-appearance was because he was having trouble getting a babysitter. The writers were informed that they would not be allowed to take notes. Dallas enterprisingly bootlegged the record on his tape recorder, so that he could listen to it again later at his leisure. His favourable write-up was published a week before the album came out. Floyd’s next tour was due to open in Dortmund, West Germany, at the end of the month, and Dallas found himself invited by EMI to attend a later show at Frankfurt.
‘They were taking a load of journalists out there, and I agreed to go,’ says Dallas. ‘So we went along and had dinner with the band. Dave and Nick were always, “Hail fellow, well met”, but they wouldn’t usually give interviews, so the game was to try and get something quotable out of them, but they were usually one step ahead of us. Unfortunately, Roger was a complete arsehole. He sat at one of the tables and refused to speak to anyone. We were on the same plane back to England, and he completely ignored me. Then, out of the blue, a few days later, I received a letter which began something like, “I don’t usually communicate with members of your ignoble profession, but …” Typical Roger Waters. But, in short, since coming back from Frankfurt, he’d read my review of Animals and liked it.’ The two met again by coincidence at a gig, and Dallas challenged Waters to give him an interview. For the next two years, Dallas would find himself becoming one of the few journalists granted an audience with the band whenever they wished to communicate with the world at large.
Pink Floyd’s latest excursion would take them through the next seven months, visiting Europe, Britain, North America and Canada. The female backing vocalists were gone, but Dick Parry was re-hired to play saxophone, alongside a second guitarist and bassist, Terence ‘Snowy’ White. A friend and confidant of Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, White had a similar musical background in the blues to Gilmour. He had recorded an unreleased album for EMI with his own band Heavy Heart, but had busied himself lately with sessions for songwriter Joan Armatrading, as well as just turning down a gig with Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel. White’s name was passed on to David Gilmour through a mutual friend, Kate Bush’s then manager.
The guitarist had been summoned to Britannia Row during the final sessions for Animals. One of David Gilmour’s solos had been accidentally erased, and White walked in to encounter a tense atmosphere and a similarly tense Gilmour. Asked if he wanted the gig, White said yes, but asked if he could at least have a jam while he was here. Gilmour’s reply was a rather blunt: ‘Well, you wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t play, would you?’ At which point Waters suggested White play something. Snowy’s sole contribution to the Animals album was a spur-of-the-moment guitar solo used to link the final ‘Pigs on the Wing Part Two’ back to the opening track, ‘Pigs on the Wing Part One’, but only for the eight-track cartridge release of the album. On tour, White would play both bass and rhythm guitar.
The Animals tour was a prime example of bigger and louder, though not always better. Promoters found themselves presented with a list of requirements before each gig, specifying the exact amount of space required for the stage, the PA and the lighting towers, and exactly how much power was required to run the show. The sheer scale of it meant that a theatre tour would be impossible. Only sports arenas or football stadiums could accommodate the PA, lighting rig and a whole series of inflatable props. The pig was now either suspended on steel cables to travel the length of the arena, or floated above the stage on cables, where it would explode at some suitably climactic moment in the show. Set designers Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park were also commissioned to create an inflatable ‘nuclear family’, comprising a father, mother and 2.4 children, which would make its debut at the Wembley Empire Pool. The helium-filled family would be pumped up backstage with the help of an industrial fan, and unleashed on the audience during the song ‘Dogs’. In America, the props were extended to include a blow-up car, fridge and TV set. Meanwhile, Nick Mason’s new party piece involved scanning through the airwaves on a transistor radio, picking up random noises for the introduction to ‘Wish You Were Here’.
Gerald Scarfe’s animations were also employed on ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ and ‘Welcome to the Machine’. ‘Now that we finally had the music to work with, the animators were able to do even better than they had on the last tour,’ recalls Scarfe. The visual extravaganza of severed heads, robotic reptiles and seas of blood matched the brutal mood of the music. Pink Floyd’s set was now split into two halves. The first consisted of the whole of Animals, but rearranged to open with the album’s closing track, ‘Sheep’. The second set was the whole of Wish You Were Here, with encores of ‘Money’ and, occasionally, ‘Us and Them’.
Richard Wright’s prediction that Pink Floyd were in ‘danger of becoming slaves to our equipment’ seemed to have been realised. In Frankfurt, the stage filled with so much dry ice that the band were almost completely obscured. Disgruntled fans threw bottles and drink cans, one of them smashing on Nick Mason’s drum kit. Ensuring that the props and film footage were always in sync with the music increased the pressure. Meanwhile, to aid his concentration, Roger Waters took to wearing headphones at every gig. While helping him stay in time, it gave the impression that the bassist was somehow isolating himself from both his fans and the band. Hired hand Snowy White’s presence on the tour was another source of confusion for the audience. He would be the first member of the band to appear on stage, thudding out the bass guitar introduction to ‘Sheep’, while most of the bemused crowd wondered who he was.
The show arrived in England from Europe, with a five-night stand booked at London’s Wembley Empire Pool. They ran straight into red tape. Officials from the Greater London Council descended on the venue to check that the band’s inflatable pig had been equipped with a safety line as instructed. Roger Waters oversaw the i
nspection, barking orders to the pig’s operators (‘Halt pig! Revolve pig!’). Further GLC restrictions led to serious sound problems on the opening show at Wembley, with the band’s crew working through the night to rectify the trouble. ‘In a band like this, everyone’s got to be working at full efficiency on stage, technically and emotionally,’ Gilmour told Karl Dallas. ‘I can get over things like that, but Roger can’t. He gets very hung up about it.’
The warm reception Animals had received in the press was not repeated for the live show. Only the ever-gushing Derek Jewell in the Sunday Times seemed won over (‘Their presentation is the ultimate in brilliantly staged theatre of despair’). UFO club regular Mick Farren, writing in New Musical Express, was less convinced by a ‘depressingly hopeless journey through a menacingly sterile cosmos’. Just like the 1974 tour, there was a wearying familiarity to the complaints: that the show was in danger of over-powering the music.
Hugh Fielder, who’d once hired Gilmour to play guitar in his own band in Cambridge, was now writing for Sounds. ‘The trouble was, the whole show ran to a click track,’ says Fielder now. ‘You could hear it start before the show began. There were no computers at the time, so if you wanted that pig to fly out at exactly the right time, you had to be synchronised. And that meant the band, with their heads down, headphones on, hardly looking at each other.’ A week after the Wembley shows, Melody Maker printed a letter from an aggrieved Pink Floyd fan, claiming they’d seen David Gilmour yawn during the show.
The North American leg of the tour – now called In the Flesh – began at the Miami Baseball Stadium on 22 April. Everything was about to get even bigger. Chief technician Mick Kluczynski later recalled checking the venue for the first open-air American gig and panicking. ‘I walked down on to the field and started looking upwards … and up … and up,’ he said. ‘I got on the phone to London and told them to double what we’d ordered.’
Once again, lack of rehearsal time brought with it the same problems that had hampered their last tour. ‘The shows varied in quality,’ wrote Nick Mason later. ‘We were not spending enough time on key aspects like segueing from one number to the next. My memory is that some of the staging was as erratic as the music.’
Outdoor shows presented further problems. Playing sports stadia designed to hold as many as 80,000 people, the band found themselves confronted with an audience that had been herded into the venue hours before the show was due to start, many of whom had killed time since by consuming as much booze and drugs as they could get their hands on. The gigs became a godsend for local police officers looking for an easy marijuana bust. The audience was in no frame of mind to concentrate on the nuances and subtleties of the Floyd’s new music, and were still, as Gilmour had complained before, determined ‘to boogie’.
Despite the added pressures, recordings from the In the Flesh tour suggest that Gilmour, for one, seemed to spark off having another musician in the band, and both he and Snowy White shook up some of the material, producing some dynamic twin-guitar readings of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. At California’s Oakland Coliseum, White even found himself bundled back on stage for a spur-of-the-moment encore of ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, a song he had never heard, let alone played before.
Offstage, though, the mood was sometimes fraught. Roger Waters preferred to isolate himself from the rest of the group, arriving at the venue alone, and shunning any post-gig parties or meals. In Montreal, he was on the local golf course within minutes of checking into his hotel. The bass player’s attitude was, as ever, a particular problem for Richard Wright, who jumped on a plane after one of the gigs and flew back to England. ‘I was threatening to leave, and I remember saying, “I don’t want any more of it.” Steve [O’Rourke] said, “You can’t, you mustn’t.”’
At the Oakland Coliseum, promoter Bill Graham filled a backstage pen with pigs in honour of the band’s new mascot. Ginger Gilmour, who was accompanying David on the tour along with baby daughter Alice, was a staunch vegetarian. She demanded the animals be released. ‘I think Ginger eventually went vegan,’ says Emo. ‘Of course, Dave was the complete opposite. He’d be off sneaking steak sandwiches and hamburgers.’
Ginger also found herself clashing with Waters’ new girlfriend, Carolyne Christie. Both came from wildly different backgrounds and, as one associate from the time recalls, ‘they did not see eye to eye. Carolyne was landed gentry, and had all the attitudes associated with her class, and she seemed to have this huge effect on Waters. He went through a massive change in the seventies. Firstly, he had this devout Socialist wife of whom he was very enamoured intellectually, and then he was with this very aristocratic woman, and he seemed to change completely.’
For Richard Wright, Waters’ recent decision to buy a country house had been a prime example of his bandmate’s hypocrisy. ‘I was the first of the band to buy a country house, after Dark Side of the Moon,’ said Wright, ‘and Roger sat me down and said, “I can’t believe you’ve done this, you’ve sold out, you’re doing what every other rock star does.” It took him, I think, a year and a half to buy his own country seat. I said, “Roger you’re a hypocrite”, and he said, “Oh, I didn’t want it, my wife wanted it.” Absolute bullshit.’ Water’s country seat was near Horsham in Sussex. Though his next property would be grander still: a Georgian mansion in the beautiful Hampshire village of Kimbridge, right on the River Test, a stretch of water renowned for some of the best trout fishing in the country.
The 1942 Oscar-nominated movie Orchestra Wives – ‘It’s hep! It’s hot! It’s hilarious!’ – was a fictional account of a swing-era big band and the bitching and cat-fighting that went on between the musicians’ wives. ‘If you’ve ever seen that film, it will tell you what it was like between the Floyd and their other halves,’ says Jeff Dexter. ‘Let’s just say that two of the band members had extremely influential wives.’
As the tour drew on, Waters’ mood became even darker. He was frustrated by playing cavernous, impersonal arenas to audiences that he believed were only there to get stoned or drunk and hear ‘Money’. At Soldier Field, the Superbowl stadium in Chicago, Steve O’Rourke took Waters up to the top of the bleachers behind the stage to look at the crowd. The promoters claimed to have sold out the 67,000-capacity stadium, but Waters was suspicious. ‘I looked down and said, “No, there’s at least 80,000 people there.” I’d done enough big shows to know what 60,000 people looked like.’ When the promoters insisted they’d only sold 67,000 tickets, O’Rourke hired a helicopter, a photographer and an attorney. The crowd was photographed from the air. ‘There were 95,000 people there, and we were due another $640,000.’
On stage, Waters began shouting out random numbers, usually while the band ploughed through ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’. It was only after a few gigs that the others realised that the numbers related to how many shows the band had played on the tour so far, as though he were ticking off the days until he could go home. His health was also suffering. Backstage before a show at the Philadelphia Spectrum, Waters collapsed with stomach cramps. A physician injected him with a muscle relaxant, which enabled him to perform, albeit without any feeling in his hands. The experience would inspire the lyrics in Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’. Waters was later diagnosed as suffering from hepatitis.
Playing two nights at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Waters lost his temper with the audience. ‘Pigs on the Wing’, his acoustic love song to Carolyne, was marred by the noise of exploding fireworks being thrown by members of the audience, a hazardous but frequent occurrence at American stadium shows. Waters was in no mood for interruptions. ‘You stupid motherfucker!’ he shouted. ‘Just fuck off and let us get on with it!’
The final night of the tour was at Montreal’s newly built Olympic Stadium. The construction team had only just moved out, leaving behind a giant crane, which did little to dispel the impersonal atmosphere of the arena. Just a couple of lines into ‘Pigs on the Wing’, the air was rent by a couple of loud explosions: more firec
rackers. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ Waters seethed. ‘I’m trying to sing a song up here that some people want to listen to.’ Further firecrackers went off at the start of ‘Wish You Were Here’. By the end of the show, Waters was furious. Accounts vary as to what exactly happened. The bassist has since claimed to have been infuriated by one particularly raucous fan, who was tirelessly screaming his devotion to the band. Others claimed that Waters encouraged the behaviour; some that he was sick of hearing the fan calling for ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’. Waters eventually walked to the lip of the stage, leaned over and spat in the fan’s face.
The band returned to the stage for a final encore, a slow blues jam, while the crew slowly dismantled the equipment around them. But Gilmour was nowhere to be seen. Refusing to join in, he walked out of the dressing room area and into the crowd, just another anonymous long-haired guy in a T-shirt, and made his way to the sound desk to watch the rest of the band playing on without him. ‘I thought it was a great shame to end a six-month tour with a rotten show,’ he said. The guitarist was now pondering whether Pink Floyd still had a future.
CHAPTER EIGHT WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY?
‘I’d have to say that Roger Waters is one of the world’s most difficult men.’
Nick Mason
‘Oh, dear, do we have to?’ There is a note of distress in Nick Mason’s voice.
And it had all been going so well.
Pink Floyd’s drummer is on the campaign trail for an updated version of his memoirs, carefully subtitled ‘A Personal History of Pink Floyd’. It is winter 2005, and the group’s Live 8 reunion is still foremost in people’s minds. Mason is droll and self-effacing, appearing to have an endless supply of ‘I’m only the drummer’ quips. But he’s clearly proud of the reunited band’s performance in Hyde Park. He painstakingly points out that this thaw in relations between David Gilmour and Roger Waters does not signify a long-term reunion for Pink Floyd, but, unable to help himself, admits that should they decide to ‘do something again, my bag is packed and ready to go’. Mason is, after all, as David Gilmour once damned with the faintest of praise, ‘the best drummer for Pink Floyd’.