by Mark Blake
The opening track, ‘Signs of Life’, placed a funereal keyboard figure over the sound of Gilmour’s boatman sculling up the River Thames. In grand Pink Floyd tradition it hung on for dramatic effect before allowing the guitarist to pick out his first notes, à la ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. The album’s signature song, ‘Learning to Fly’, wove its strong melody around the sound of an airborne Nick Mason and lyrics about, in Bob Ezrin’s words, ‘leaving your earthbound tendencies behind and liberating your spirit’. The closing song, ‘Sorrow’, shared a similar sense of purpose and confidence. Written by Gilmour one weekend on the Astoria, it housed the album’s best guitar solo, a real note-bending extravaganza, and a lyric some fans, rightly or wrongly, took to be about Roger Waters.
What the album did make clear was just who was now in the driving seat. The wordy politicising of The Final Cut and the persistent despair of The Wall were nowhere to be found.
Lyrically, nothing here was likely to give Waters sleepless nights, a fact in which he later took great pleasure. Instead, the melancholy mood of most of A Momentary Lapse … suggests a forty-year-old Gilmour, several glasses of red wine down, reflecting on his life; including his relationships with Waters and his wife Ginger, from whom he was also becoming increasingly estranged. The couple would separate within a year. In ‘Yet Another Movie’, the lyric referring to an empty bed had been inspired by a scene in the couple’s house in Lindos. The guitarist was quick to tell critics that he viewed the album as a return to the glory days of Dark Side of the Moon, when, in his view, the music hadn’t taken such a back seat to Waters’ lyrics. ‘That’s what I’m trying to do,’ he insisted. ‘Focus more on the music, restore the balance.’
Not everyone in the band agreed that he had succeeded. Interviewed in 2000, the under-used Richard Wright admitted: ‘Roger’s criticisms are fair. It’s not a band album at all.’
A Momentary Lapse of Reason was, however, the right Pink Floyd album for the times. Where it falls down is that, like Radio K.A.O.S., it’s stuck in that time. Like most forty-something rockers, one of Gilmour and Mason’s greatest fears must have been that they would sound passé. To start, those booming, reverbed drums are the very essence of the mid-eighties, but a world away from the more appealing sound of a loose-limbed, flailing Nick Mason on Live At Pompeii. The same drums, burbling bass and synthesisers on ‘One Slip’ are interchangeable with those on Peter Gabriel’s So album from a year before, but then session bassist extraordinaire Tony Levin played on both albums. Gilmour’s song-writing partners were similarly rooted in the era. Pat Leonard, his collaborator on ‘Yet Another Movie’, had been the brains behind Madonna’s hits, ‘Like a Prayer’ and ‘Live to Tell’. In the album’s defence, Gilmour plays his heart out, but many of the songs themselves have no such heart. ‘I didn’t think it was the best Pink Floyd album ever made,’ he said later. ‘But I gave it the best damn shot I could.’
Reviewers agreed. The newly launched Q magazine, which would draw its readers from a pool of music fans weaned on the likes of Pink Floyd, acknowledged that it was ‘Gilmour’s album, to much the same degree that the four before were Waters’, regarding it as a release of the guitarist’s ‘repressed talent’. Even Waters’ confidant Karl Dallas came down on the Floyd’s side of the fence, despite his earlier promise that Waters’ second album would ‘flip your wig’. ‘The new Floyd album is a classic, and Roger’s is … well … Roger’s.’
Waters showed no reticence in offering his views on A Momentary Lapse of Reason. ‘I think it’s very facile, but a quite clever forgery,’ he told writer David Fricke. ‘The songs are poor in general; the lyrics I can’t quite believe. Gilmour’s lyrics are very third-rate.’
However, outstripping Radio K.A.O.S. in the record shops, and with the Floyd selling out arenas to Waters’ theatres, there was already the smell of victory in the air. Then came the pressing matter of just how they were going to perform live.
Keyboard player Jon Carin had already been confirmed for the tour, performing alongside Richard Wright. The absence of Waters also left a noticeable gap on stage to Gilmour’s left. The role of Pink Floyd bassist would be taken by Guy Pratt. A 25-year-old session man whose previous clients had included Robert Palmer, Bryan Ferry and The Smiths, his musical talents had been inherited from his father, actor and song-writer Mike Pratt, who had a title role in the sixties drama series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and had co-written Tommy Steele’s hit ‘Little White Bull’.
Pratt’s Pink Floyd initiation had come as a teenager when he attended one of The Wall shows at London’s Earls Court, while tripping on LSD. ‘The one thing I remember was Roger in his number 1 T-shirt, having this big tirade against Alan Jones from Melody Maker,’ says Guy. ‘I was like, “Wow, he’s really playing this rock star character well.” I didn’t know he was being himself. I also managed to blag backstage the night they had their crew party. They had all these strippers and all these inflatables from the old tours. Unfortunately, I was on acid, and wandering around dressed like one of The Clash. In those days, I would never have imagined I could play with Pink Floyd. It was out of the question.’ Guy had first come to Gilmour’s attention when he played on Bryan Ferry’s Bête Noire album and later when he performed with the guitarist’s protégés Dream Academy.
Like Wright, Nick Mason would perform alongside another musician. In his case, twenty-three-year-old percussionist Gary Wallis, whose highly visual performing style – attacking an array of gongs, drums and cymbals mounted around him in a cage – was the perfect contrast to Mason’s considerably more restrained approach.
Saxophonist Scott Page, who’d already played on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, was another addition to the team. By no means a Pink Floyd fan (‘Honest to God, I must be the only person in the world who’s never even heard Dark Side of the Moon’), he would be rendered instantly recognisable to fans in even the cheapest stadium seats by his lavish mullet hairstyle. Adding some much-needed glamour were backing singers Rachel Fury, Margaret Taylor and, later, Durga McBroom. Taylor was later replaced by Durga’s sister Lorelei.
One familiar older face among the young pups was Gilmour’s Cambridge friend, the guitarist Tim Renwick. A survivor from Waters’ Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking tour, Renwick had been playing in the house band for the Cliff Richard musical Time, at London’s Dominion Theatre, when he gratefully took Gilmour’s call.
However, arriving in Toronto for rehearsals, the band encountered some problems. Guy Pratt quickly discovered that he hadn’t actually been Pink Floyd’s first choice of bassist. ‘When we turned up to rehearse there were a few newspapers running articles about how Pink Floyd were in town to start their new tour and a lot of them said, “featuring Tony Levin on bass”. So I was there only because Tony hadn’t been available at the last minute. I was like, “Oh, great!”’
The band had hired a hangar at Lester B. Pearson airport in which to rehearse, but there was a noticeable lack of discipline. ‘The Pink Floyd bass gig is not the most difficult one in the world,’ says Guy, ‘but Nick hadn’t played the drums for years, Rick hadn’t done anything for years, and David didn’t seem to really like being in charge that much.’
‘It was a disaster,’ admits Tim Renwick. ‘Nobody could remember how to play anything. It was all so disparate.’
But Gilmour knew whom to call.
‘David rang me in August, and they were due to open in October,’ remembers Bob Ezrin. ‘He said, “Bob, in my usual inimitable style, I never fail to try and do these things on my own and, as always, I realise I need help. Can you come and help me?”’ he laughs. ‘I found the show to be in some disarray. The problem was there was no producer or director on stage, and David was busy working out which guitar to play. He couldn’t do all this other stuff. There was no sense of flow to the show, the setlist needed rearranging …’
Ezrin took charge, viewing proceedings from in front of the stage and communicating with the motley crew via a megaphone.
&nbs
p; ‘Bob really started knocking us into shape,’ says Renwick. ‘Jack-booting around this aircraft hangar, shouting orders, being very loud and demonstrative. One of the first things he did was make sure that if you weren’t playing, you couldn’t be seen loitering on stage; you were blacked out, or offstage.’ Ezrin would remain with the tour until ‘the baby was walking and I could go back to making some money in my own career’.
Aside from the issue of co-ordinating eleven people on stage, there was also the stage set itself to be considered. Gilmour and Mason first approached The Wall tour’s design team, Jonathan Park and Mark Fisher, but both had already allied themselves to the Radio K.A.O.S. tour. Instead, set designer Paul Staples was brought into the fold to work alongside Floyd mainstays, lighting designer Marc Brickman and production director Robbie Williams, veterans from, respectively, The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon campaigns. Their aim was simple. As Marc Brickman explained, ‘The idea is always to pull the last kid in the last seat of the stadium into the show.’
The Floyd’s stage set would be effectively housed inside a steel framework, around 80ft high and spanning the width of the stage, from which pods of light were then suspended. Additional lighting and dry ice machines also operated from tracks above the stage. Trapdoors in the stage itself also opened to reveal extra robotic-looking lighting pods (nicknamed ‘Floyd Droids’ and given individual names Manny, Moe, Jack and Cloyd) that elevated into view at key moments in the show. The back of the stage was filled, as usual, with the band’s familiar circular screen onto which new and old images were projected, including Storm Thorgerson’s specially commissioned films for ‘Learning to Fly’ and ‘On the Run’. The flying pig, aeroplane and a giant mirror ball completed the visual extravaganza. It would take a supporting team of some 160 technicians, riggers, electricians and more to keep the show on the road.
The tour opened on 9 September in Ottawa’s Lansdowne Park Stadium. The set’s greatest surprise came with its choice of opening number, ‘Echoes’ from Meddle, which was given its first airing in over a decade. A challenge for all concerned, the piece would be dropped before the end of the month, with Nick Mason later claiming that the band’s new young musicians were simply too good to replicate the shoddy, hippie-ish feel of the original recording.
‘There’s a bit in “Echoes” we call “the wind section” where it all falls apart, and then comes back in,’ explains Guy Pratt. ‘Some of the younger players, mentioning no names, couldn’t get their heads around it not being a set number of bars. It was like, “You have to feel it and know instinctively when to come back in.” David’s great line about that was, “The trouble with modern musicians is that they don’t know how to disintegrate.”’
Including the whole of A Momentary Lapse of Reason made commercial sense, but meant that the first half of the show was unfamiliar to most, and overshadowed by the second half, which ran the gamut of ‘One of These Days’ to a final encore of ‘Run Like Hell’, stopping off at ‘Wish You Were Here’, ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ en route. ‘One of These Days’ would be the oldest song played (Mason later explaining that the sixties-era Floyd sounded ‘too early’). The Final Cut and Animals were also overlooked, although ‘Sheep’ came close to being included, until Gilmour decided that vocally it was too much Roger Waters’ song.
Aside from the dazzling special effects, the presence of younger and more flamboyant band members made a huge difference. The athletic leaps and bounds made by percussionist Gary Wallis to strike the highest cymbals in his drum cage diverted attention from the staid-looking, middle-aged gentleman playing the drum kit beside him. The elaborately coiffured saxophonist Scott Page was also given to strapping on a guitar and appearing on stage when he wasn’t actually needed. ‘Scott and Gary came with the territory,’ says Bob Ezrin. ‘This was meant to be a more visual show. There’s a lot of “Ooh-aah factor” to a Pink Floyd concert. People want to say, “Wow, look at that!” So they gave it to them.’
The age difference between the original Floyd and some of the hired hands was, initially, not a problem. ‘They treated us very well,’ recalls Guy Pratt. ‘Mind you, I was terrified of David. Nick was the easiest to get on with, as he was such a lovely, amusing man.’
By their own admission, Guy and Jon Carin were also committed Pink Floyd fans, eager to hear stories from past campaigns. ‘I was always plugging David for stories,’ admits Guy. ‘The problem was, he’d start telling a story and, because I was such a Pink Floyd anorak, I’d start correcting him on it. Rick is actually fantastic for reminiscences, whereas David sometimes pretends to have forgotten.’
However, being fifteen years younger than his bosses presented Guy with one immediate problem, when Richard Wright’s beautiful teenage daughter Gala turned up later during the Australian leg of the tour: ‘There’s a certain ethical code of the road. You don’t get involved with anyone that’s part of the management, you don’t get involved with anyone in catering, unless it’s an absolute last resort, and if you get involved with one of the backing singers it will always end in tears. But there’s no ruling about daughters of the band – and that was when the age difference did become apparent.
‘We weren’t officially an item on that tour, but it was obvious there was something going on, and it certainly didn’t make me popular, as everyone was in love with Gala.’ However, her father didn’t feel inclined to take Guy aside. ‘I was more worried about David and Nick. No one actually cautioned me, but there was a bit of eyebrow-raising.’
As the Floyd moved through North America, the gap closed between their shows and the Radio K.A.O.S. tour. ‘We were playing Toronto when Floyd were rehearsing just up the road,’ remembers Paul Carrack. ‘Having them nearby added a bit of spice. There was tension there, and we all knew Roger was under a lot of pressure, but I think he felt vindicated because he was doing something different. We did some Floyd tunes, but not many.’
Roger had expressly banned members of Pink Floyd from attending any of his gigs, so Floyd’s monitor technician was despatched undercover to one to report on how much pyrotechnics and special effects Waters was using. While rehearsing in Toronto, Scott Page, Jon Carin and Waters’ old solo bandmate Tim Renwick were among those who walked unrecognised into Waters’ gig. ‘We wanted to see the competition,’ says Renwick. ‘And, pardon the pun, but I thought it was a bit watery. It was more like a tribute band.’ During one part of the show, a spotlight scanned the audience landing on random members of the crowd. ‘And I remember praying,’ laughs Guy Pratt, ‘absolutely praying that it landed on Tim Renwick.’
Ticket sales for some of Waters’ shows were not all they could have been. Playing to an audience of 3,000 people in a 6,000-seater hall in Cincinnati was not good for his ego, but Waters remained upbeat, despite knowing that Pink Floyd were playing to 80,000 people the following night. ‘I felt like Henry the Fifth,’ he laughed. “‘We happy few, we band of brothers …” I felt a huge kinship with [the audience], because there was only a few of them.’
Nevertheless, there would still be dissenting voices in the Pink Floyd audience. ‘There would be people who would make their feelings known about Roger not being there, just by shouting very loudly during moments when the rest of the audience was being very quiet,’ Gilmour told Q magazine, while also revealing that on one occasion, he spotted a whole row of fans wearing ‘Fuck Roger’ T-shirts.
Unable to stop any of the Floyd shows going ahead, Waters was still hurling legal missiles from the sidelines, including a writ for over $35,000 in copyright fees for the Floyd’s use of his flying pig. Unknown to the band, Waters had also bought up the rights to animated films by Ian Eames and Gerald Scarfe, which he had then placed with a company he owned. However, as Gilmour pointed out, ‘We never agreed that he owned the rights. Pink Floyd, all of us, had commissioned those pieces of work and paid for them.’ To circumvent the problem with the pig, Floyd ensured that their new version included a pair of hefty testicle
s to distinguish it from Waters’ original female version. As Gilmour glumly explained: ‘A pig’s a pig, for Christ’s sake, but adding the testicles was amusing for us.’
However, as the year ground to an end, it seemed as if the legal battle between the two parties was finally coming to an end. Interviewed for Rolling Stone magazine in November, Waters was all but admitting defeat: ‘I’ve finally understood that no court in the land is interested in this airy-fairy nonsense of what is or isn’t Pink Floyd. All I could possibly get out of it is a slice.’
The size of the slice would be decided on 23 December 1987, when Gilmour, Waters and Gilmour’s accountant convened on the Astoria houseboat to end the matter once and for all. ‘We hammered it out over a few hours, printed it out, signed it and that’s the legal document we are bound by today,’ explained Gilmour. The terms of the agreement released Waters from any arrangements with Steve O’Rourke, and allowed Gilmour and Mason to use the Pink Floyd name in perpetuity. Waters would get his slice, maintaining his control over, as Gilmour explained, ‘various bits and pieces’, most notably The Wall.
Waters would no longer attend board meetings or attempt to veto Gilmour’s and Mason’s plans. Instead he retreated to plan his next move, while sniping at his former bandmates in the press. Gilmour, for his part, invariably took the bait.
Both warring factions would grace the pages of the music press. Waters would usually appear looking stick-thin and imposing in the black sunglasses and black-suit-white-T-shirt uniform of the older rock star. ‘With Carolyne, Roger got into a very American rock story,’ reflected his ex-manager Peter Jenner. ‘Helicopters, nannies and the south of France.’