by Mark Blake
‘David had got himself into a certain depth and decided he needed some help, so he rang me,’ explains Bob Ezrin, who was swiftly recruited to co-produce the record. ‘I think David felt liberated doing something outside of the Floyd, and had a good time making the record.’ Ezrin’s abiding memory of the sessions is Gilmour’s breakneck dashes around the Champs-Elysées in his new Porsche 928. ‘He had right-hand drive in a left-drive country, so I’m in the seat where I think the driver is supposed to be. Terrifying.’
About Face was released in March 1984. Gilmour gamely signed up for a promotional campaign unlike any he had undertaken with Pink Floyd. The album’s first single, ‘Blue Light’, was a funky pop song, which matched Earth, Wind and Fire-style horns to the guitar riff from The Eagles’ ‘Life in the Fast Lane’. Aware of how important it now was for rock stars to make videos, Storm Thorgerson directed a promo, in which a freshly shorn, spruced-up Gilmour played guitar alongside a troupe of dancing girls before falling to his knees on a helipad – complete with helicopter – to play the final guitar solo.
The rest of the album was more convincing. Pete Townshend contributed lyrics to the wistfully romantic ‘Love on the Air’ and a scabrous ‘All Lovers are Deranged’, while Gilmour forced himself out of his comfort zone to write about his feelings; expressing anger and confusion at the killing of John Lennon (‘Murder’), his opposition to having American Pershing-2 missiles on British soil (‘Cruise’), and even his troubled relationship with Roger Waters (‘You Know I’m Right’). ‘It wasn’t initially about that,’ he said, ‘but when I wrote the first verse, people all assumed it was about that and it coloured the rest of the writing.’ If writing the words still proved to be Gilmour’s Achilles’ heel, there was enough of his signature guitar bluster and breathily English vocals to mask any lyrical shortcomings.
Nowadays, the album’s use of then cutting-edge studio technology and celebrity session-men marks it down as a typical mid-eighties solo album from a superstar rocker on day release. Critical response was polite but lukewarm, and the album peaked just outside the UK Top 20 and US Top 30.
‘I thought too much about the album,’ says Gilmour now. ‘I tried too hard to get away from Pink Floyd. It was very rocky, and I think, in some ways, I was being less true to myself than I was on my first solo record.’
The real issue was that ‘the great unwashed’, as Roger Waters would later describe the general public, didn’t really know who anyone in Pink Floyd was. Gilmour willingly addressed the issue at the time: ‘The fact is, our individual names mean virtually nothing in terms of the great record- and ticket-buying public.’
After an uncomfortable appearance on the hip new UK TV show, The Tube, Gilmour set off on a European and North American tour of 24,000-seater theatres, rather than arenas. His touring party included bassist Mickey Feat and former Bad Company guitarist Mick Ralphs. With his own multi-platinum rock band in dry dock, Ralphs, who lived near Hookend Manor, asked if he could join the tour. No slouch as a lead guitarist, Ralphs was content to play back-up to Gilmour in a set that included the whole of About Face, some extracts from the first solo album and just two Pink Floyd numbers.
On stage, without the distraction of flying pigs, a cardboard brick wall or a scowling Roger Waters, Gilmour seemed to relish just playing and singing. As Gerald Scarfe explains, ‘When we were doing The Wall, while Dave never said it that straightforwardly, I think he would have been happy to give a concert without any visual effects. For him, it’s all about the music.’
Also on the tour were support band The Television Personalities, a punk-era group whose sound now borrowed from the psychedelic era. Their cover of ‘Arnold Layne’ impressed Gilmour, but he was less taken by another song, ‘I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives’, during which the band chose to reveal Barrett’s address to the audience. By the time they rolled into Birmingham, The Television Personalities had been removed from the tour.
Nick Mason and Richard Wright attended one of the three nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, with Mason playing drums on an encore of ‘Comfortably Numb’. Poor ticket sales for some dates led to cancellations, but the tour eventually turned a profit. No sooner had Gilmour flown home from the final date in New York on 16 July, than Roger Waters began the American leg of his own solo tour a day later in Connecticut. Waters, it seemed, was almost shadowing Gilmour, with his new solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking, released just six weeks after About Face.
Waters’ new offering was the song cycle, which had been passed over by Pink Floyd in favour of The Wall five years before. The Pros and Cons … told the story of one man’s night of dreaming and waking, counted down in real time, with each song title preceded by a time, beginning at 4.30 a.m. and ending at 5.11 a.m. The front cover picture of a naked female hitch-hiker from behind, belonging to porn model Linzi Drew (a black band obscured the offending rear in some sensitive countries), was the starting point for the story.
In the course of his forty-minute sleep pattern, Waters’ hero juggles the positives and negatives of monogamous family life over meaningless sexual encounters. As well as some more random scenarios, the hero picks up a hitch-hiker with whom he has a fumbled sexual encounter, before being interrupted mid-coitus by knife-wielding Arabs; a metaphor, perhaps, for his conscience. Waters’ rather unique vocal style – plenty of madman shrieks and Dylan-ish whining – was perfect for a lot of the material. His lyrics, too, were darkly witty and sometimes wonderfully politically incorrect. This was Waters rummaging around in another corner of his psyche, exploring the sexual neuroses of a post-war, middle-class Englishman. Adhering to Roger’s customary love of a happy ending, the hero finally wakes up in his own bed, overjoyed to discover his wife lying beside him. ‘It’s a complicated piece of work,’ said Waters in an understatement. ‘Although it’s quite clear to me what was going on, the narrative is by no means linear.’
Waters also shared musical resources with Gilmour. Engineer Andy Jackson and musicians Michael Kamen and Ray Cooper worked on both The Pros and Cons … and About Face. Waters’ trump card, though, was his choice of guitarist. Through girlfriend Carolyne Christie’s friendship with Patti Boyd, Waters bagged himself Patti’s husband, Eric Clapton.
Musically, Clapton’s presence made sense. Aside from bonding over a mutual love of fly-fishing, Waters shared the guitarist’s passion for the blues (bonding over a mutual love of Nashville pianist Floyd Cramer), and, for all the lyrical and thematic complexity, the music rarely deviated from the genre. Furthermore, having Eric Clapton play on his record was an obvious snub to guitar hero David Gilmour.
The problem with The Pros and Cons … is that it suffocates some interesting ideas with too many lyrics, and there are simply not enough tunes. Those tunes, scant as they are, are also used once too often. The title track and first single is one of the few moments of balance, with Clapton’s signature riffing yoked to a deranged lyric in which, at one point, the hero dreams that Yoko Ono is telling him to leap to his death from the wing of an aeroplane. The second single, ‘5.06 a.m. (Every Stranger’s Eyes)’, was a booming power ballad, made less chart-friendly but more interesting by Waters’ vocals, which suggested an asylum inmate muttering to himself in the dark.
A number 13 chart placing in the UK showed that Waters was the least anonymous member of Pink Floyd. Critics, however, were less enamoured, especially Rolling Stone writer Kurt Loder, who’d praised The Final Cut, but denounced Waters’ latest offering as ‘a strangely static, faintly hideous record’. Even Waters’ ally, Melody Maker’s Karl Dallas, found it a struggle, but ended on an upbeat note: ‘His second album, I predict, will blow your wig off.’
‘The Pros and Cons … wasn’t a wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, far-out rock ‘n’ roll album,’ offered Waters in its defence later. ‘It was a very introspective piece about how I felt about my failed marriage [to Judy], my feelings about sex and all kinds of difficult areas.’
To the astonishment of his record company, m
anagement and fans, Eric Clapton also announced that he would now be joining Waters’ band on tour. A year earlier, Clapton had made a comeback with his Money and Cigarettes album, explaining to all that this was his first record since giving up alcohol. Yet his willingness to play in Waters’ band may have had more to do with his own fanciful desire for anonymity; the same impetus behind him forming Derek and The Dominoes in the early seventies, and attempting to convince fans and critics that he was ‘just one of the band’.
The rest of Waters’ group included, among others, The Final Cut’s session drummer Andy Newmark, keyboard players Michael Kamen and Chris Stainton, and additional guitarist Tim Renwick, from Waters’ old alma mater the Cambridge County.
Waters’ show would be split into two sets: the first made up of Pink Floyd songs, including less obvious choices ‘If ‘ (from Atom Heart Mother) and ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ (from The Final Cut), along with the likes of ‘Money’, ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Hey You’. The second set would be The Pros and Cons … in its entirety with the reward of an encore of ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’ from Dark Side of the Moon.
Tim Renwick joined Waters a couple of months before the rehearsals officially began: ‘I went round to Roger’s once a week, going through all the old Pink Floyd stuff as he couldn’t be bothered to work out the chords. He was absolutely charming … until we went on the road.’
The grand unveiling of Waters’ new band and stage show took place in Stockholm on 16 June. Gerald Scarfe and film director Nicolas Roeg had created new animations and films to be projected on to 30ft-high screens covering the back width of the stage. In front of these screens hung three gauzes painted with scenery: a motel window, a motel room wall and a huge television set, designed to recreate the hero’s bedroom. Scarfe’s latest creation was a comically lazy cartoon dog named Reg, who acted out the hero’s neuroses on screen. Nicolas Roeg, whose directorial film credits included The Man Who Fell to Earth and Performance, delivered film footage of, among others, rolling American highways and free-wheeling trucks. The Wall set designer Mark Fisher was on the payroll to co-ordinate the project, later estimating that the film footage alone cost in the region of $400,000.
However, as David Gilmour had already discovered, an individual name didn’t carry the same weight as Pink Floyd. Poor sales led to cancellations in Frankfurt and Nice. On the first of two nights at London’s Earls Court, the performance was below-par and a disgruntled Waters refused to play an encore. The rearranged Pink Floyd songs had an oddly brisk tempo, and many fans found it odd hearing and seeing Eric Clapton playing Gilmour’s guitar parts. Nick Mason, watching from the audience at Earls Court, found it disconcerting to see someone else playing the drums on old Floyd songs. In charge of everything now, Waters was feeling the strain. ‘One of Roger’s problems is that he has great trouble delegating,’ explains Tim Renwick. ‘He took it all on: the music, the production, the lot. So he was constantly walking around with his head in his hands, and you’d have great trouble communicating with him. He was also very, very serious about it all, and he didn’t like anyone else having a laugh. He’d soon stamp on that.’
Adding to Waters’ woes was the issue of sharing the stage with a superstar guitarist. On the opening night of the US tour in Hartford, Connecticut, Waters realised that whenever Clapton took a solo, the audience were on their feet, cheering and waving their cigarette lighters. ‘And then, as soon as Eric finished, the lighters would go off and everyone would sit down,’ says Renwick. ‘And this very much annoyed Roger. He thought people were making too much noise and not paying enough attention to the lyrics. In Hartford, we came to the end of the first half, and Roger just threw down his bass on the floor of the stage – it was still plugged in so there was this dreadful cacophony – stuck his arm in the air, shouted, “The great Eric Clapton!” and stormed off.’
Backstage, an embarrassed Waters apologised to Clapton and the rest of the band. On stage for the second half of the show, he even apologised to the audience ‘for being so unprofessional’.
‘I know that, from that point on, Eric would have gone home if he could,’ says Renwick. ‘When they made the record, Roger had asked Eric if he’d do some stuff live, and he thought it would be a couple of shows, but it turned into several months. Being a man of his word, he couldn’t go back on it …’
Following the last night of the tour in Quebec, Clapton bowed out amicably, taking keyboard player Chris Stainton and Tim Renwick with him for his own band. Waters was forced to address the issue that even with Eric in the band, many of the shows had been sparsely attended, while The Pros and Cons … album had stalled shy of the Billboard Top 30 in America. All of which made his decision to go back on the road in the US the following spring so confusing. The sixteen-date tour played in smaller venues than before and was bluntly titled ‘Pros and Cons Plus Some Old Pink Floyd Stuff – North American Tour 1985’.
Guitarists Andy Fairweather-Low and Jay Stapley joined in place of Clapton and Renwick. Fairweather-Low had been a teen idol in the mid-sixties, as lead singer with Amen Corner, a band that had played alongside Pink Floyd on the 1967 Jimi Hendrix package tour. Stapley was a young session player, who had worked with the singer, jingle-writer and Carolyne Christie’s cousin David Dundas.
‘I was a kid at the time, so doing that tour was a real challenge,’ says Stapley now. ‘We all thought it was odd that Roger was touring again, but one story we heard was that he wanted to prove he could do it without having Eric in the band to help sell tickets. The trouble is I’d grown up listening to David Gilmour and Eric Clapton, but Roger took me aside and told me I shouldn’t try and play like either. Unfortunately, for me, doing songs like “Money” felt a little bit like spitting in church.’
By Waters’ own estimation, the Clapton-assisted tour had left him some £400,000 out of pocket. But as he proudly declared, ‘It was something I wanted to do, not needed to do.’
A similar degree of financial security would allow Pink Floyd band members, both past and present, to take risks in their solo careers. By 1983, Waters’ spurned bandmate Richard Wright had, he claimed, grown tired of sailing around the Greek Islands, and wanted to get back to making music.
Wright was far more daring in his choice of collaborator. Dave ‘Dee’ Harris was a singer and songwriter from the Midlands, and frontman with the group Fashion. A product of the ‘New Romantic’ scene, Fashion’s David Bowie-inspired sounds and dandyish chic placed them alongside, if some way behind, the scene’s standard-bearers – Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. Harris had made two albums with Fashion, but was now growing restless. Attending a music business seminar in New York in 1982, he ran into The Final Cut’s saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft, who told him that the Floyd’s ex-keyboard player wanted to put a band together. A drummer and bassist were invited to attend a jamming session at Wright’s house in Royston, but, ultimately, only Harris showed up.
‘I said to Rick, “Why don’t we just do this together?”’ says Harris now. Wright’s musical favourites at the time included Talking Heads and Brian Eno. ‘He wanted a very electronic sound, which is why I think he wanted to work with me. He had a solo deal with Harvest and we agreed to split it.’
‘It was a bit odd at first when Dave said he could remember going to see Floyd perform when he was fourteen,’ said Wright, ‘but, from the moment we actually started working together, we realised just how close we were.’
Quirky male duos were the rage in electronic pop, from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark to Soft Cell. Wright and Harris would form a duo of their own called Zee. As they were recording at Wright’s own studio, The Old Rectory, Harris and his wife Sue were invited to move into the keyboard player’s rambling country pile (‘Rick was tumbling around in this place’) for eighteen months during the making of the album.
For Harris, who had only turned professional two years earlier, it would prove an eye-opening experience. As a Pink Floyd fan since his teens, he was hoping Wright could
be persuaded into playing the Hammond, ‘but getting him to do it was a nightmare’. Instead, the pair became completely preoccupied with the Fairlight digital sampling synthesiser. ‘It was the toy of the moment and we got stuck on this thing, so everything we did ended up sounding like a fucking robot. Remember, this was the eighties.’
For much of the time, Harris was left to his own devices, while Wright coped with the fallout from his divorce and estrangement from Pink Floyd. ‘Juliette, his ex-wife, was still around,’ Harris recalls. ‘She was fabulous, but there were lots of ups and downs. There was also a communication problem, because, understandably, Rick had other things going on. He’d be flying off to Greece one day, or having his boat built the next … I also realised I had no idea what he actually thought of what I was doing, as he never told me. A couple of times I said to Juliette, “I don’t think Rick likes this”, and she went and told him, and he was like, “No, no, I love it.” What we really needed was an A&R man or a producer.’
A trip to Wright’s house in Grasse in the south of France to write lyrics resulted in a fortnight of ‘us just getting pissed the whole time’. Back in England, Harris worked all-nighters in the studio, under the watchful eye of the Wrights’ housekeeper, Pink: ‘He was this wonderful, flaming Canadian queen. A lovely guy, who was forever on the phone to the wives of the other guys in Pink Floyd. Every time you walked in, you’d hear him – “Oh … my … God” – as he discovered some fresh bit of gossip. I’d hear these stories and think: Christ, this is exactly like being in a semi-pro band, but with millionaires – the same bitching, the wives calling each other this and that …’
Zee’s album, Identity, would be released in the UK and Europe only in March 1984. It met with resounding indifference. Harris plays a very Pink Floyd-sounding guitar on one track, ‘Cuts Like a Diamond’, but the over-use of the Fairlight has rendered the album very dated. Even then, when the duo’s electro-pop sound chimed with the times, the combination of young blade Harris and the dashing, if forty-year-old Wright was perhaps unlikely to bump Duran Duran off the cover of Smash Hits. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd fans just wanted Wright to make music that sounded like Pink Floyd. Or, better still, rejoin Pink Floyd.