by Mark Blake
For a man perceived as so single-minded and unyielding, it was also gratifying to hear him admitting to feelings of insecurity about his work. ‘I let people push me down roads I shouldn’t have gone down really,’ he told the LA Times. ‘With Radio K.A.O.S. I got sidetracked by the technology and the notion that I ought to get a bit more with it. I was right in the middle of all the Pink Floyd litigation and I guess I got a bit insecure about what I was worth and who I was …’
Waters also revealed that he had been in therapy throughout most of the 1980s, to learn how to, in his words, ‘free himself from the dictates of destructive sub-personalities’. This admission related to therapy inspired by the psychologist Carl Jung, in which the subject learns how to individuate. The parallels with Waters’ ideas on Dark Side of the Moon were obvious. Jung believed that while society prepares most people for the first half of their life, it fails to do so for middle age and beyond. Individuation was therefore a way of preparing the psyche for the second half of life. ‘You stand a better chance of walking your own path,’ said Waters. ‘We’ve all got crosses to bear. My biggest one was my father’s death and having to grow up in a female-dominated society, and because of that, causing my subsequent relationship with women to become very difficult.’ Most hacks, of course, just wanted to know if he was ever going to get back together with Pink Floyd.
Amused to Death garnered some of the better reviews of Waters’ career. However, the Daily Telegraph’s was not one of them: ‘Had he been blessed with even a rudimentary sense of humour and rather more verbal fluency … Roger Waters might well be pop’s Martin Amis,’ wrote Charles Shaar Murray. Waters spent one subsequent magazine interview lashing out at Murray and other music critics (‘they can’t fucking write’). Billboard magazine, however, decided that Amused to Death was ‘one of the most provocative and musically dazzling records of the decade’.
The album certainly suggested that Waters had deeply held convictions about the world around him. This was not the work of a complacent millionaire rock star. In contrast, the last Pink Floyd album had stood for very little. Waters, as ever, had the ideas, the philosophies, the obsessions, but he couldn’t match his bandmates for broader musical appeal. Roger’s music still had to fight it out with the words and the special effects, of which there were many on Amused to Death. ‘Perfect Sense Part 1’ encapsulated the problem, with the esteemed soul singer P.P. Arnold wrestling with too many tongue-twisting lyrics, just to get the message across. Nevertheless, this was Roger Waters’ style of making music, for which he felt no need to apologise. With three solo albums proper to his name, the record-buying public should have grown used to it by now. Except they hadn’t. A Momentary Lapse of Reason may have been a triumph of style over very little substance, but for many, Amused to Death offered too much substance.
Asked in 1992 whether he would tour the album, Waters said he would ‘if it sold between three to four million’. In the end, Amused to Death would end up selling nearer to a million copies. Peaking in the UK at number 8, it was his highest charting album to date. For its creator, as ever, sales and critics meant little. ‘I think it’s a stunning piece of work,’ he reflected later, ranking it alongside Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as one of the best albums of his career. In more verbose moments, Waters would claim, not unreasonably, that had Amused to Death been a Pink Floyd record, it would have sold 10 million copies. For all his defiance, the album’s lack of success must have hurt. Waters would not play live for another seven years.
While not quite floating in the Martini glass of Roger Waters’ imagination, Pink Floyd had lain dormant since playing Knebworth. They had lives to live. David Gilmour got divorced, while Nick Mason married TV actress and presenter Annette Lynton, with whom he would have two more children, sons Guy and Carey.
In 1990, the Floyd partners and Steve O’Rourke competed in the Carrera Pan America sports car race in Mexico. O’Rourke had pre-sold the rights to a film of their participation to cover the costs of competing. Three days in, disaster struck, when a Jaguar being driven by Gilmour, with O’Rourke in the passenger seat, sped over the edge of an embankment near the town of San Luis Potisi, leaving the guitarist battered and bruised and the manager with a compound fracture of the leg. Having escaped death, they returned to England, to record a soundtrack to the film.
Realising they needed some help, Gilmour, Mason and Wright rounded up young guns Gary Wallis, Jon Carin and Guy Pratt, and repaired to West London’s Olympic Studios. The sessions offered a stark contrast to the agonisingly slow process of making A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Without the pressure of having to create a Pink Floyd album, the musicians simply jammed together, with guitarist Tim Renwick helping out between stints on Bryan Ferry’s new album. They produced seven pieces of new music needed for the soundtrack. It was the quickest Pink Floyd had worked since making the soundtrack to Obscured by Clouds. Released in April 1992, neither the film nor the soundtrack would trouble anyone but the most ardent Pink Floyd watcher. Nevertheless, this new way of working would prove crucial to the next Floyd album. Not that David Gilmour was in any hurry to start making that album. Instead, he’d resumed his sideline as a trusty guitarist-for-hire (suggesting to all clients that they donate his fee to charity). Gilmour’s guitar playing graced albums from, among others, Warren Zevon, Propaganda, Paul Young, All About Eve and old pal Roy Harper. He also composed one new song, ‘Me and J.C.’, for the film version of The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan’s eerie tale of murder and incest.
In 1992, Gilmour and Mason would reunite only to play a couple of charity gigs in London, including the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Royal Albert Hall, where Richard Wright joined them on stage. In November, EMI issued ‘Shine On’, a boxed set of seven Floyd albums, from A Saucerful of Secrets to A Momentary Lapse of Reason, plus an extra disc containing their early singles. Critics quickly fanned the embers of the Waters versus Floyd dispute, with both parties taking the bait. Again.
Gilmour informed Musician magazine that he had played a lot of the bass guitar on Pink Floyd’s albums and that Waters jokingly thanked him whenever he won a Best Bass Player poll. Waters, meanwhile, quashed the rumour that he had had 150 rolls of toilet paper produced with Gilmour’s face on them, while conceding that he thought it a good idea. There was a pattern to the sniping: that Waters was a poor musician; and that Gilmour and Mason lacked creativity. As the drummer said some years later, ‘If our children behaved this way, we would have been very cross.’
On a more upbeat note, Pink Floyd began 1993 by starting work again. Better still, they started playing together in the studio, without the threat of lawsuits or telephone calls from lawyers to break their concentration. The sessions began at Britannia Row, with just Gilmour, Mason and Wright jamming together, before bassist Guy Pratt was invited to join in.
‘It was thrilling to know you were playing on a Pink Floyd record,’ admits Guy. ‘Sometimes David would come up with ideas and I’d come up with basslines, only to realise how out of step my playing was. David would always have a better alternative – “Yes, that’s great … but lose ninety per cent of the notes in it.”’ These sessions produced random chord sequences, riffs, and ideas. While engineer Andy Jackson was also back in the fold, Gilmour would keep a tape machine near to where he was playing, and simply hit the ‘record’ button whenever he felt the band were getting somewhere. Before long, they decided to call in a co-producer.
‘I sort of assumed we’d do it again,’ said Bob Ezrin, ‘as David and I had stayed in touch on a friendly basis. So Steve O’Rourke rang me and said would I do it, and then told me how much less he would pay me. He always tried that.’
The band eventually found themselves with around sixty-five individual pieces of music from the piles of tapes. They decided to take a novel approach to whittling down the material. ‘We had what we called “the big listen”,’ explained Gilmour, ‘where we listened to all of these pieces, and everyone voted on each piece of music to see how popular it
was.’
According to Gilmour, the pieces were then whittled down to ‘a top twenty-five, which in fact became the top twenty-seven, as a couple more got added in’. The process continued, with the individual pieces either scrapped altogether or merged with other ideas. The final selection ran to some fifteen ideas, of which a further four would be discarded before the final tracklisting of eleven songs was agreed.
This process had its drawbacks when, according to Nick Mason, Richard Wright accorded each of his ideas the maximum number of points, skewing the voting. Despite his involvement, Wright was still not contractually a full member of the band; something that clearly rankled. ‘It came very close to a point where I wasn’t going to do the album,’ he said in 2000, ‘because I didn’t feel that what we’d agreed was fair.’
However aggrieved he may have felt, Wright chose to remain, and would be rewarded with five co-writes on the finished album; the first time he’d received a songwriting credit on any new Pink Floyd album since Wish You Were Here. However, like Gilmour, Wright did not consider himself a natural lyricist. Dream Academy’s Nick Laird-Clowes and Momentary Lapse … lyricist Anthony Moore would end up contributing, but Gilmour also now had a full-time writing partner, his new girlfriend.
Polly Samson was a newspaper journalist who’d been introduced to Gilmour at a dinner party. The daughter of Communist parents – a Chinese mother and German father – she had enjoyed an unconventional upbringing. Samson had been expelled from school before drifting into a job in publishing, which led to a stint as a Sunday Times gossip columnist in the early nineties. In the meantime, she was bringing up her young son, Charlie, alone, after the departure of his father, playwright Heathcote Williams. Mutual friends had tried to pair her up with Gilmour for some time, before he finally telephoned and invited her to a U2 concert.
At first Samson’s role on the new album was simply one of encouragement. ‘She was trying to persuade me to get on and point me in the direction of where to put my energy,’ recalled Gilmour. The album’s turning point was a song that would eventually be titled ‘High Hopes’, in which Gilmour, with his girlfriend’s encouragement, reflected on his childhood and early life in Cambridge. ‘She helped me get started on “High Hopes”, but it quickly became obvious that it was better if she took part. She tried not to take part at first, but I wanted her to and she did.’
Gilmour would work with the rest of the band in the studio, before going back home and spending the evening writing with Polly. ‘There was a whole invisible side to the process,’ he explained. ‘Something that Nick, Rick and Bob weren’t aware of.’
Polly’s presence soon led to tension among some in the Gilmour circle. ‘It wasn’t easy at first,’ admits Bob Ezrin. ‘It put a strain on the boys’ club, and it was almost clichéd to have the new woman coming in and then get involved in the career. But she inspired David and gave him a sense of confidence and challenged him. Whatever David was thinking at the time she helped him find a way of saying it.’
‘Polly has a tendency to ruffle everyone’s feathers,’ Gilmour admitted in Mojo magazine. ‘I’m not aware of her having ruffled Nick or Rick’s feathers, but she certainly ruffled the management’s.’
‘High Hopes’ would, nevertheless, give the album the push it needed. ‘It pulled the whole album together,’ said Bob Ezrin. ‘It was the most emotionally complete and clear song we had. We were on the river, in the winter, in good grey England. There’s a special mood about England at that time of year. It makes people go inside, it’s so introspective, and that song captured it.’
Polly Samson’s relationship with Gilmour wasn’t the only one the band had to contend with. Since the end of the Momentary Lapse … tour, Guy Pratt and Gala Wright had officially become an item. ‘It was an odd time for me,’ says Guy, ‘because Gala and I had just gone on holiday and I think there was a feeling in the camp that we’d get it out of our systems and then it would all go back to normal. Except that didn’t happen. Maybe it was a bigger deal in my mind than it really was, but I felt like I was walking on eggshells all the time.’
To add to the tension, Pratt also lived very near to Richard Wright in Kensington. ‘So, in the usual caring, sharing Pink Floyd style, I was designated Rick’s driver. So I had an hour of silence every morning, with Rick sitting in this horrible tatty VW Golf I was driving at the time.’
Jon Carin and Gary Wallis were brought in to witness Guy’s suffering and complete the band, before recording of the final selected tracks began. Additional support came from a team of five backing vocalists including Sam Brown and Momentary Lapse … tour singer Durga McBroom, and orchestral arranger Michael Kamen. Tim Renwick came back to play additional guitar, alongside another Floyd veteran, Dick Parry. The saxophonist’s last Pink Floyd album had been Wish You Were Here. He had only just resumed playing the instrument again after working for several years as a farrier, when he sent Gilmour a Christmas card.
‘I just rang him up and asked him if he felt like auditioning for the tour,’ said Gilmour. Parry visited the Astoria, and, within seconds, it was apparent that he was still up to scratch. He ended up playing on one song, ‘Wearing the Inside Out’.
Meanwhile, keyboard player Carin pestered Gilmour’s guitar tech Phil Taylor into locating some of the band’s old keyboards from the seventies, including a Farfisa organ. Taken out of the warehouse in which they’d been stored, he then sampled sounds, some of which ended up being used on the tracks ‘Take it Back’ and ‘Marooned’. As Andy Jackson later explained, ‘It felt like a proper Pink Floyd album again.’
While Gilmour pulled back from the idea of making a concept album, a theme of sorts began to emerge as the songs developed further. In the light of Pink Floyd’s past troubles there was a certain irony in song titles such as ‘Keep Talking’ and ‘Lost for Words’. But while reluctant to dissect the ideas behind the songs, Gilmour later conceded that much of the album dealt with the theme of communication; and the notion that people simply talking to each other could solve more of life’s problems. ‘Maybe I needed to unload my subconscious,’ he admitted.
Surprisingly, the band broke cover for a rare live performance in September. Floyd played three songs – ‘Run Like Hell’, ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ – at Sussex’s Cowdray Ruins Castle as a fundraiser for the local hospital. Those who’d stumped up the £140 ticket price also got to see star turns from Eric Clapton, Genesis and the surviving members of Queen.
By December, the album was near completion. However, despite Bob Ezrin’s involvement, Dark Side of the Moon’s mixing supervisor Chris Thomas would undertake the final mix. ‘That was disappointing,’ admits Ezrin. ‘But everybody feels they could do better.’ Now all they had to do was choose an album title. While not feeling quite so concerned about the title as they had been for A Momentary Lapse of Reason, nobody could agree on a solution. Over dinner one night, the band’s friend, Douglas Adams, author of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, suggested The Division Bell, named after the bell used in the House of Commons to summon absent members of parliament to the chambers for voting (Gilmour: ‘it divides the yeses from the nos’). Adams had simply looked over some of the album’s lyrics and spotted the phrase in the words to ‘High Hopes’. In exchange, the band gifted £5,000 to his favoured charity, the Environmental Investigation Agency.
The author’s suggestion had come at just the right moment: the night before the deadline imposed by EMI. Storm Thorgerson would oversee another grandiose idea on the band’s behalf. Inspired by the theme of communication, Storm had sketched out an image of ‘two heads facing, or talking to each other, making up a third face’. The cryptic third face, which may or may not be seen by the viewer, depending on how they were looking, represented, in Storm’s words, ‘the absent face – the ghost of Pink Floyd’s past, Syd and Roger’. Gilmour was unconvinced.
After being presented with another set of sketches, he finally warmed to the idea. Two 3m-high sets of sculptu
red heads, in the imposing style of the Aku-Aku statues on Easter Island, were then constructed. One set would be built out of stone, the other from metal. They were then transported to a field in Ely, near to where David Gilmour had grown up, where they remained under camouflage netting and twenty-four-hour security until the weather conditions and light were deemed suitable for photographing them. When Thorgerson decided that they needed a row of lights between the two ‘mouths’ to represent speech, they acquired four cheap spotlights and wired them up to the photographer’s car battery. The stone effigies would be used on the cassette version of The Division Bell, the metal-plated versions on the CD cover. The metal heads would end up standing guard outside London’s Earls Court when the group next played there.
The mid-eighties had found Gilmour and Mason, like Roger Waters, chasing their respective tails to make music that sounded of the moment. When that moment passed, though, both A Momentary Lapse of Reason and Waters’ Radio K.A.O.S. would suffer as a consequence. The Division Bell tried less hard and made no obvious concessions to the modern age, even if some modern bands were keen to declare their love of Pink Floyd. Since the last time Floyd made a studio album, dance music and ‘rave culture’ had made their mark on the musical landscape. (Gilmour told Q magazine that he had been to an acid house party but ‘not a really big one’.) In 1993, he agreed to be interviewed with Alex Paterson of techno dance duo The Orb for a Melody Maker cover story. Gilmour professed to having seen The Orb in concert and to owning a couple of their albums; Paterson raved about Pink Floyd’s Meddle. It was no great meeting of like-minded souls, however, even if Nick Mason would later reveal that the early jamming sessions for The Division Bell had yielded a set of Orb-style meanderings, jokingly titled ‘The Big Spliff’.