Inside Out

by Nick Mason

  AIR was George Martin’s studio perched high above Oxford Street in London’s West End. After many years, George had moved on from EMI and set up his own dream studio, taking with him Ken Townsend, the studio manager at Abbey Road, to ensure the highest standards. His studios, which were absolutely state of the art, had a very different atmosphere to Abbey Road, which was now actually in dire need of an overhaul and upgrade. Commercial studios were being designed for rock bands rather than as all-encompassing facilities, since rock music was where the new clients were coming from.

  The recording of Meddle was spread over a considerable amount of time, not because we were locked in the studios but because once again we were on the road so much during 1971: when I look back at the calendar, I find we were in Germany in February, various European countries in March, the UK in May, Europe in June and July, the Far East and Australia in August, Europe in September, and the States yet again in October and November.

  To fill the gap while Meddle was in the works, we fell back on that age-old music industry solution: the compilation album of singles and other offcuts. Relics – ‘a bizarre collection of antiques & curios’ – featured just one original song, Roger’s ‘Biding My Time’, in which Rick finally inflicted his trombone playing on us. Relics came out in May, just before we played at the Crystal Palace Garden Party. This was our first major concert in London for some time and one of the outdoor events that the British can be very good at – one-day events lack the marathon aspects of the three-day festivals, and have more of a feel of the nation’s penchant for bandstands. A curious mix of bands was on this particular bill, including Leslie West and Mountain, ourselves, the Faces and Quiver, the latter including Willie Wilson.

  It was an afternoon concert, and our light show was nonexistent, but with the help of our art college chum Peter Dockley and friends, we submerged a huge inflatable octopus in the lake in front of the stage. As a climax to the show the octopus was inflated and came rearing out from the lake. The moment would have been improved if a number of over-enthusiastic and mind-altered fans had not stripped off and taken to the water; in scenes reminiscent of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, these lunatics got tangled with the air pipes and threatened to spoil the performance by thoughtlessly drowning. The event was promoted by Tony Smith, who went on to manage Genesis. Tony remembers that in the aftermath of the show he and his team spent a lot of time clearing up not the usual festival detritus but a shoal of dead fish from the lake who had expired from shock and/or awe.

  Of all the overseas tours, our first visit to Japan in August 1971 was a particular success. The record company organised a press conference (something which we generally hate) and presented us with our first gold records. Although these were completely bogus, as they had not been earned through sales, we nonetheless appreciated the gesture.

  The real reason for the success of this tour was an outdoor show at Hakone. Not only was this a beautiful venue set in countryside a couple of hours outside Tokyo, but a festival audience in Japan was a lot less inhibited than one at an indoor show. For many years these indoor audiences were rather restrained by rock industry standards. Notable for being light on applause, whoopin’, hollerin’ and standing ovations, Japanese concerts generally start at six in the evening. The reason for this, we’re told, is that public transport stops early, people live outside the city and it is too difficult for them to make two journeys. However good the reasons, this did give gigs there the atmosphere of a ‘thé dansant’ and a suggestion that rock should not occupy the minds of people over thirteen. While we were in Japan we managed a trip on the bullet train, visits to temples and stone gardens and an introduction to sushi. For us, and many other bands, sushi became the sophisticated version of egg, sausage and chips on tour. A popular way of improving morale during a tour was to have the local sushi man in, armed with his knives, to bolster flagging spirits (by preparing raw fish, rather than threatening the depressives, that is).

  After Japan we continued to Australia for a short tour, also our first visit, which got off to a challenging start with an outdoor show at Randwick Stadium, the racecourse in Sydney. Still not attuned to the inversion of seasons down under, we were surprised to arrive in August and find ourselves in the depths of an Australian winter, so cold I needed gloves to stop the sticks dropping from my nerveless fingers. The audience, in a testament to true Aussie grit, didn’t seem to notice. We were grateful the rest of the tour was indoors.

  A highlight of this trip was that we got to meet the film director George Greenough. He showed us some footage from a film he was making called Crystal Voyager, a documentary celebration of surfing. Using a camera strapped onto a surfer’s body, he had been able to shoot film within the tubes formed by breaking waves, further enhanced by sunrises and sunsets. It was stunning. We gave George permission to use our music for his film and in return have enjoyed a reciprocal arrangement where we have used his film – updated from time to time – at virtually all our subsequent shows. For the 1994 Division Bell tour he supplied some new footage of even better quality to project during ‘Great Gig In The Sky’.

  On a stop over at Hong Kong airport heading home we phoned the Hipgnosis studio to brief Storm on the cover design for Meddle. The title had been hastily concocted and, maybe inspired by some Zen-like image of water gardens, we told Storm we wanted ‘an ear under water’. Time differences meant that neither party was on top form for the telephone discussion, but even across the intervening miles, we could hear the sound of Storm’s eyes rolling.

  On the flight back to the UK, a truly alarming thunderstorm somewhere over the Himalayas terrified even the cabin crew. As the plane lurched into one deep air pocket, either Roger or David was jerked awake by the clutching hand of a terrified stewardess. This severely set back any chances of us recovering from our fear of flying. We all suffered from this, thanks to various incidents over the years. One time Steve O’Rourke had chartered an elderly DC3 to fly us and some other bands to a festival in Europe. As we sat on the tarmac a baggage cart tore a chunk out of the wing. ‘Don’t worry,’ we were told, ‘we’ll have it repaired in a jiffy.’ Pulling rank, we left the plane immediately and jumped on the next BEA Trident, leaving the luckless support bands to take the terror flight home. Sometime later we had been involved in a near miss with another plane on the approach to Bordeaux airport. On occasions like this, the fact that the four of us would grip our armrests in unison, beads of sweat forming, probably helped contribute to some good group bonding.

  Group dinners were the focal point for all band fights, policy decisions and general jockeying for position. I now feel deeply sorry for some of the unfortunate promoters and record company people who took us out. We frequently behaved appallingly. Our table manners were generally not a problem, but our small talk let us down. We would seize the middle of the table and banish anyone we didn’t know or care to know to the far ends to talk amongst themselves. Fuelled with as expensive a wine as possible, our discussion would become heated, frequently combusting into a full-scale argument. To the outsider it must have looked as if we were on the verge of splitting up. The record executive hosting the meal not only saw his expenses being disallowed, but also the prospect of being held solely responsible for the break-up of the band.

  The members of the band inevitably know each other better than anyone else and therefore how to tease, hurt or indeed cheer each other up. We still treasure in group lore the night Steve O’Rourke sat down to dinner with us and announced that he was in such a good mood that nothing could upset him. Within seven minutes he had left in a fury to have dinner on his own in his room. Roger, aided and abetted by the rest of us, had with very little difficulty found the trigger that would infuriate and finally drive Steve to distraction, simply by suggesting we should discuss a reduction in Steve’s commission. On another occasion, at a breakfast in the City Squire in New York, Roger announced that it was possible to tell truly creative people because their heads were always tilted
slightly to the right. Conversely, the non-creative tilted to the left. Peter Barnes, who handles our publishing, remembers looking round the table. Everyone’s heads, he noticed, were leaning to the right, all – that is – except Steve’s.

  BY THE end of 1971, it seemed as if some of the lethargy I’d been feeling had been shaken off. Roger, talking to Melody Maker, was still relaying ‘a feeling in the group, and certainly there’s a very heavy feeling in my head, that we’ve really let things slide horribly and it’s beginning to drive me crazy’. He looked ahead to our next UK tour as ‘another bit of pressure, because there’s not really enough time between now and 19th January or whenever it starts to perfect anything. To create an hour of something that’s really good is very difficult.’ It might have been difficult but at least he set to with a will. Roger had worked up an outline for a new album. He had some ideas, a number of songs in development – ‘Time’ had a verse and chorus, though no lyrics – and he had created an unusual 7:8 bass riff that seemed quite radical.

  The discussions that developed The Dark Side Of The Moon took place at a band meeting held round the kitchen table at my house in St Augustine’s Road, Camden. This was unusual, since we could see each other every day in the studios or on the road, but we must have felt we needed a change of environment to concentrate on getting our next project under way.

  As well as Roger’s songs, we had several fragments from earlier rehearsal sessions, and a number of more finished items. But there was as yet no coherent theme to help Roger develop his initial work. As we talked, the subject of stress emerged as a common thread, although at the time we weren’t experiencing any particular angst: it was, in fact, one of the most stable periods in our domestic lives.

  Roger was now living in Islington, on the New North Road. At the bottom of his garden, he had put up a workspace that was a half-step up from a potting shed. In fact, potting was done there, but rather than the common garden variety, Judy was creating her ceramics in one half of it. In the other Roger had constructed a home studio, which was modelled on the Ron Geesin approach: three Revox tape recorders, set into a workbench to facilitate the swift transfer of sounds from one machine to the others. Rick was installed in Leinster Gardens in Bayswater with Juliette and their children. I was in St Augustine’s Road with Lindy. Only David had moved out to Royden in Essex, having abandoned his bachelor pad in Chelsea.

  Despite all the tours, I definitely felt involved in life in Camden. Lindy and I had become friends with a number of our neighbours, and there were occasional street parties for major national events. I was certainly aware of the community, as Roger was of his; he became a committed Arsenal fan. With Judy and Lindy we would get together socially a couple of times a week, and spent a lot of time in each other’s houses; I have a clear memory of being in Roger’s house with Lindy when she was heavily pregnant with our first daughter Chloe.

  However, despite this stability, we assembled a list of the difficulties and pressures of modern life that we particularly recognised. Deadlines, travel, the stress of flying, the lure of money, a fear of dying, and the problems of mental instability spilling over into madness…Armed with this list Roger went off to continue working on the lyrics.

  Compared to the rather piecemeal approach of our previous albums, which had often been conceived in an air of desperation rather than inspiration, this felt like a considerably more constructive way of working. Continuing band discussions about the aims and aspirations of the record helped to fuel the process. Using the specific lyrics that Roger devised, the music evolved in the rehearsal studio – and subsequently throughout the recording sessions. This gave Roger the opportunity to see any musical or lyrical gaps and to create pieces to fill them.

  Once Syd left the band in 1968, the onus had fallen on Roger to write the majority of our lyrics. David and Rick were still only occasional lyricists – Rick once said that ‘if the words came out like the music, and we didn’t have anything else to do, then quite a few would be written’. On The Dark Side Of The Moon Roger took on the task with considerable style: his words gave the album our most open and specific lyrics to date – although he would later occasionally be disparaging about them, calling them ‘Lower Sixth stuff’. For the first time we considered it appropriate to print them in their entirety on the album sleeve.

  An early, performable version of Dark Side was produced within a few weeks. The first full roll-out of the piece, already called ‘Dark Side Of The Moon, A Piece For Assorted Lunatics’ (although it would oscillate between this title and ‘Eclipse’ at various times), was at the Rainbow Theatre in North London, during a four-night series of dates in mid-February 1972. The Rainbow, a former cinema, was England’s version of the Avalon or Fillmore ballrooms in San Francisco, and its darkened auditorium hiding an ornate but peeling decor created a distinctive and funky ambience that harked back to our early days at the Roundhouse. It was a relief for Pete Watts and the road crew to be able to set up just the once for the four gigs: by now, we had some nine tons of equipment in three trucks, seven auditorium speakers, a new PA and a 28-input mixing desk with four quad outputs. There were gratifyingly full houses to hear the results: a couple of ads in the back of Melody Maker had proved sufficient for all four shows to sell out.

  However, although the live version of Dark Side was quite advanced, the actual recording of the piece spread throughout 1972, as it was constantly interrupted not only by our touring commitments but by a whole host of other projects: the Obscured By Clouds film track, the release of our own Live At Pompeii film, and a number of concerts with Roland Petit’s Ballet de Marseille. Luckily Dark Side proved to be resilient enough to survive all these distractions. We did not feel oppressed by this mountain of work – on the contrary, it was evidence that we were active, professional musicians. After the doldrums we had encountered around the time of Atom Heart Mother, we had a revitalised sense of purpose.

  Obscured By Clouds was the first of the interruptions. After the success of More, we had agreed to do another sound track for Barbet Schroeder. His new film was called La Vallée and we travelled over to France to record the music in the last week of February. The film was straight out of the aftermath of the ‘Summer of Love’; it mixed a story about a band of hippies from Europe travelling in Papua New Guinea with some ethnographic reportage about the local Mapuga tribespeople (one reviewer made a connection between this documentary feel and the Robert Flaherty film on the people of Aran which had featured Steve O’Rourke’s father).

  We did the recording with the same method we had employed for More, following a rough cut of the film, using stopwatches for specific cues and creating interlinking musical moods that could be cross-faded to suit the final version. Standard rock song construction was optional: one idea could be spun out for an entire section without worrying about the niceties of choruses and middle eights, and any idea in its shortest, most raw version could work without the need to add solos and frills. I was able to try out a very early pair of electronic drums – not as advanced as later syndrums, more like electronic bongoes – on the opening sequence.

  This method of evolving and modifying themes played to our strengths, but we had no scope for self-indulgence since the recording time available was extremely tight. We only had two weeks to record the soundtrack with a short amount of time afterwards to turn it into an album. What impresses me now is that what we actually ended up with was fairly well-structured. A whole series of songs were produced, but my perception is that the song titles were hurriedly allocated under pressure to meet the film schedule.

  The recording took place at Strawberry Studios, based in the Château d’Hérouville, just north of Paris, known by Elton John fans as Honky Chateau. This was a delightful and spacious recording studio in the countryside, but I can only remember being able to enjoy the location on the very last day. We locked ourselves in, put our heads down and played, wrapped up the soundtrack recording and went home. Later we had an altercation with the film co
mpany, and so, rather than releasing the soundtrack as La Vallée, we used the title Obscured By Clouds. Gratifyingly, we discovered later that the film had been retitled La Vallée (Obscured By Clouds) to tie in with our album.

  We still had to remix the material for an album release, but before we could do that we had another tour to Japan. This time we had chartered a DC8 and even after loading all our equipment on board there were still plenty of spare seats. Wives and girlfriends were obvious co-travellers, but the remaining places were filled with passengers who had increasingly tenuous connections with the band, but the kind of careers that apparently allowed them to drop everything and join us at very short notice – usually a bad sign.

  Until this point we had generally been unaccompanied on tour, and having the families and camp followers along for the ride noticeably changed the atmosphere. My memory is that the shows suffered as a result, and that the mood in the band room was less focused. This was exacerbated by the difference in the pace of the tour, not the intensive city-to-city routine of the States, but maybe five dates in three weeks. All this made the tour feel more like an upmarket school outing, a holiday visit rather than a working trip. We were in Japan shortly after the Sapporo Winter Olympics and headed there to enjoy some time on the pistes. At Sapporo there was Alpine music piped through a Tannoy system along the chairlift to get us in the mood, and instead of Glühwein, it was rice and sake. We had difficulty finding ski boots big enough, especially for Arthur Max, who had something like size thirteen feet. We had brought Arthur in to look after our light show, when we remembered just how inventive he had been with the lighting at the Fillmore East in 1970.