by Nick Mason
It had been a fairly cheap and cheerful trip. Peter Watts and Alan Styles had the slog of driving the equipment all the way down through Europe. There were no families in tow to go sightseeing with, as we only had a limited number of days to fit in the work. Even so, as films often can, we overran our original schedule, and had to cancel a university gig; however, as the rearranged date came after the release of Dark Side, I think in the end the organisers were actually quite happy to have had the delay, since by the time we appeared they could charge four times the ticket price, while being able to pay us the original contracted fee.
At Pompeii, we were filming in the early autumn but it was still quite hot, shirts-off weather. It was hard work, with no leisurely nights out sampling the local cuisine and wine list, but the atmosphere was enjoyable, with everyone getting on with their jobs. At the end of the amphitheatre sessions, we headed off up the mountain to shoot some cut-ins among the steam of the hot springs, and had a brief chance to explore Pompeii itself.
We were, though, beset by a couple of technical hitches. One of the reels of film was mislaid, and the director had to insert a lengthy sequence featuring nothing but the drumming on ‘One Of These Days’, since the palette of available shots and camera angles was severely limited.
After one showing at the Edinburgh Festival, a premiere was planned at the Rainbow Theatre in the autumn of 1972, but at the last minute Rank, the landlords of the building, invoked a clause preventing any event that was ‘competitive’ with their own activities. Roger declared the fiasco itself ‘rank’, and I liked the promoter Peter Bowyer’s comment that he would wait for the wounds in his back to heal before considering any other similar events.
Live At Pompeii proved to be very disappointing in financial terms, especially as it got lost in the wash of Dark Side, and so for a long time we received very little reward for our efforts. So much so, that when, years later, a New York film mogul approached Roger at a show to tell him he had made millions from the film, he was surprised that instead of Roger congratulating him, he was escorted from the premises…We later learnt that a lot of the paperwork relating to the film had been lost in a fire, proof, as I have learnt over the years, that offices of those handling such matters are prone to levels of self-immolation, flooding and invasion by locusts that even Old Testament prophets would have found unbelievable.
In our quest for upmarket artistry, we had more luck with Roland Petit. Our original discussions in 1970 had been about his idea of creating a ballet based on À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. The work consists of multiple volumes of detailed reminiscences about his life. I know this only because along with the rest of the band I tried to read it; at a time when science fiction was our principal literary diet this was not an easy task. I still like to think I got further than anyone else, but certainly none of us made it beyond volume three. This project was eventually cancelled on numerous grounds. The reading time alone would have been too time-consuming, and the subject matter too challenging for much of our audience.
Roland, however, had not given up on us and had finally got us involved with the Ballet de Marseille, although we had taken the easy option of not writing any original music for the shows, by reusing versions of ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ and ‘Echoes’, the latter with a story line loosely based on Frankenstein. Working with the Ballet was a relaxed expedition. We enjoyed being in Marseilles, David’s fluency in the language was a useful asset with both the corps de ballet and local waiters, and the atmosphere of civilised sophistication, in contrast to the routine of tours and studios, may have appealed to a certain intellectual snobbery in us. In the programme for the ballet, the deputy mayor of Marseilles kindly described us as ‘ces millionaires du disque, idoles de la jeunesse populaire comme de la jeunesse dorée’.
For the shows we played on a raised stage, overlooking the dancers performing in front of us. The major hurdle facing them was that they had worked out the choreographed steps based on our existing recordings. However, in the case of ‘Axe’ each performance varied in length, since the attraction of the piece was the chance to improvise. We rapidly had to engineer a version of constant length, a task exacerbated by our legendary inability to count bars reliably.
As luck would have it Leslie Spitz was with us in France. Leslie was a four-poster bed salesman from the dodgier end of the Kings Road in Chelsea and an expert ligger. His greatest triumph had been getting a seat on board our chartered aircraft on the Japan tour earlier that year. No one had seemed quite sure why he was there, or who had invited him, but we were far too polite to ask. As a payback for that freebie, Leslie was drafted in to count the bars. He was issued with a pile of cards which had the numbers of the bars written on them and – crouched beneath the piano – he was expected to turn up a card every four beats. The result was less than metronomic, as Leslie was easily distracted by loud music and lithe ballerinas, but it did help, and anyway we knew when we were meant to finish because the dancers stopped moving.
It actually all turned out to be a success. The dancers, I think, enjoyed what was really quite a different and populist piece, and they also assembled a surprisingly good football team to play against us after rehearsals. The dance director watching all those expensive legs rushing about in football boots had a fit. After the Marseilles concerts we later took the show to Paris for a few performances in January and February 1973.
The aftermath to all this was an extraordinary lunch at Rudolf Nureyev’s house in Richmond. Marcel Proust had reared his head again, but this time in film format. Nureyev, Roland Petit and Roman Polanski were there along with Roger, Steve and myself. Feeling slightly self-conscious in a truly exotic atmosphere of fine art and lavish decor, we were astonished at the rather louche youth who greeted us and then left us to amuse ourselves until the others arrived and Nureyev made an appearance, which of course he did in style – swathed in Oriental drapery.
Lunch seemed to involve a lot of wine and very little Proust. I think there was talk of resurrecting the Frankenstein project as a quasi-porno film but my memory is a little fuzzy on this. After the meal, in tabloid style, we made our excuses and left before we were drawn too deeply into this demi-monde. We never did get to deal with Proust, Frankenstein, Nureyev or Polanski again although Roland did retain the ballet in the company repertoire for some time, performing to tapes rather than live music.
During our sojourn in Marseilles there were serious machinations on the business front, as our US record deal was sorted out. Our first albums had been released on Capitol’s Tower label, which was principally a jazz and folk label, and not a good fit. Capitol, EMI’s US operation, had then started up a new label called Harvest under the leadership of Malcolm Jones, and we were intended to be the label leaders along with other underground British bands. That hadn’t worked for us either. Although the staff were enthusiastic, we felt a lack of genuine belief in our commercial potential among the higher echelons, and our sales performance in the States had been particularly poor.
Steve O’Rourke had made it clear to EMI that we were not prepared to continue with Capitol. We were proposing to withhold Dark Side from the USA since our contract was expiring after five years, and we were not prepared to waste what we thought to be our best album yet on a record company that wouldn’t support us sufficiently.
After Steve had gone in and batted heavily for the fact that the results just weren’t good enough, even EMI had seen that there was a problem in the US. Bhaskar Menon, who had recently been appointed the chairman of Capitol Records, heard about our unhappiness, and he took the trouble to travel over to Marseilles to see us. His flying visit made all the difference. Bhaskar was still only in his thirties, a graduate of Oxford and the Doon School in India. He had met and impressed Sir Joseph Lockwood, who had brought him into EMI. Later Bhaskar would himself become chairman of EMI.
Bhaskar convinced Steve that he could deliver what was needed in America and we agreed to let him have the record.
It was a shame that he hadn’t been brought in earlier. Unknown to Capitol – and Bhaskar – we had already given up on the company earlier in the year and signed a new deal with Clive Davis at Columbia for the American distribution of all our releases following Dark Side. In our usual non-confrontational way we just forgot to mention it.
A tour to America in early 1973 also gave us a chance to bring to the fore the lighting skills of Arthur Max. He had served a good apprenticeship. After training as an architect – always a good qualification for working with Pink Floyd – he had found himself at Woodstock operating a spotlight continuously for three days (he said) for Chip Monck, one of the pioneer rock lighting and stage designers. Arthur’s arrival coincided with a time when we were growing out of our early light shows. There is a limit to what can be achieved with yet another oil slide, and with bigger venues and longer projection throws the finale was all too often a brilliant frozen moment as yet another glass slide cracked to be followed shortly after by the projector burning out.
Arthur was interested in the power of stage lighting and spotlights rather than oil slides; he was particularly talented in finding ways to exploit theatrical lighting. Our shows immediately gained more visual innovation and he was expert at making the most of the available facilities of an auditorium and exploiting existing technology from other sources. For our version of ‘Echoes’ with the Ballet de Marseille, Arthur interpreted the Frankenstein mood we wanted by installing a welding kit backstage and each evening donning mask and gloves to provide the added effect of genuine argon sparks.
I think Arthur was also responsible for introducing the Genie tower to our shows. These towers were one of the more important innovations in rock staging. Arthur had seen these hydraulic towers being used to change light bulbs in a factory, and adapted the principle to allow them to carry racks of spotlights. For shows that had insufficient set-up time for rigging regular stage lighting, or were out on a field on a stage made out of flat-bed trailers, these towers were a godsend. The fact that they could also be raised as an opening to the show was the icing on the cake. This was also the period when we brought in the circular screen backdrop that has remained a staple of our live shows.
One of Arthur’s greatest shows for us was at Radio City Music Hall in March 1973. This auditorium was a wonder of technology when it was first built and for many years the technical details of the stage riser was classified information, since the technology had been taken direct from the fighter plane lifts on American aircraft carriers.
The stage itself contained six sections, each of which could rise twenty feet and then roll forward. There was also a steam curtain in front of it; this was a tube drilled with holes that sent out a sheet of steam to obscure the stage. This enabled us to start the show with the audience filing into the auditorium, faced by a completely bare stage. When the show began, the steam evaporated, and behind it our set slowly rose with us and all our equipment in place, with flashing police lights attached to the Genie lighting towers. Unlike the bad old days of the Top Rank revolving stages, this was how it should be done.
Unfortunately, Arthur had one major failing: his temper. Roger and I (his two principal contacts in the band) have not spoken to Arthur in over twenty-five years following his final resignation. I’ve rarely come across anyone who could get so fired up quite so quickly. Apart from sacking each venue’s own follow-spot operators on a regular basis, he would scream so much abuse at them during the performance that it would have been foolhardy for him to linger after the show for a post-mortem as it could have been his own. Arthur was also prone to leaving our employment in the middle of a show. Steve would frequently arrive back in the interval to announce that Arthur had dashed his headset and intercom to the ground and left the building in a fit of pique. Eventually we could no longer handle this level of unpredictability and Graeme Fleming, Arthur’s second in command, and a far more phlegmatic character, took over. Arthur went on to become an enormously successful movie art director, working with Ridley Scott and collecting a BAFTA award and an Oscar nomination for Gladiator.
The release for Dark Side was set for March 1973, and we were delighted with the package. Apart from the additional posters and stickers the main image was also perfect. Storm had turned up with a series of ideas and as soon as we first saw the prism design we all knew it was the right one. However, we failed to attend the press launch at the London Planetarium. We were not happy that the record label planned to use a sound system that we didn’t consider good enough. After all the work we had put in to Dark Side, we didn’t want it played to the press on a sub-standard PA system. The row probably all boiled down to a question of money, but we refused to relent and missed the fun. We weren’t a favourite with the music journalists as it was, since none of us had worked that hard to cultivate any kind of relationship with them.
So I have to rely on Roy Hollingworth’s report of the launch for Melody Maker. After cocktails at 8 p.m., the journalists were ushered into the Planetarium: ‘…like standing on the inside of a hollowed-out concrete egg. The egg filled, and the lights dimmed. Laughter from one quarter. A bum pinched no doubt. And then it began…The thick thump, the staggered bumping of a heartbeat filled the blackness, gaining in volume and intensity until it packed against your whole body.’
So far, so good. But after fifteen minutes the audience seemed to be losing interest. ‘Quite a few people were beginning to chatter and light cigarettes. And then, as people found more fun in being funny, the shape of a bunny rabbit appeared on one wall. This was done by holding a cigarette lighter behind a hand, and performing tricks with the fingers. Later I witnessed a swan in strangled flight, and a brace of doves. Then some enterprising fellow scooped the impromptu magic lantern show with an enormous portrayal of a naughty thing.’ Our decision to stay away may have been wiser than we thought.
The record sold fast. We had a gold disc by April in both the UK and the US. Everything happened very quickly. That May we presented a complete Dark Side show at Earls Court. All the elements came together, as we presented the piece in its most developed version. The music had been rehearsed enough to be tight, but was new enough to be fresh. The lighting, thanks to Arthur, was dramatic. There were additional effects including a fifteen-foot spotlit plane that shot down a wire over the heads of the audience to crash on stage in a ball of fire in sync with the explosion in ‘On The Run’. Films accompanied the music, including animation for ‘Time’ by Ian Eames and the Crystal Voyager surfing footage that we had first seen in Australia in 1971. Sadly, none of these shows was filmed or recorded.
Everyone has their own opinion about why The Dark Side Of The Moon sold – and still sells – so spectacularly well. Even for someone intimately involved with the album, the statistics make staggering reading. For example, total sales have been in excess of 35 million and it has been calculated that one household in four in the UK owns a copy in one form or another. At the time of writing Dark Side has been on the US album charts almost continuously since 1973.
My view is that there was no single reason, but a number of factors working together and multiplying the effect. The primary reason – which is true of any great album – is the strength of the songwriting. Dark Side contained strong, powerful songs. The overall idea that linked those songs together – the pressures of modern life – found a universal response, and continues to capture people’s imagination. The lyrics had depth, and had a resonance people could easily relate to, and were clear and simple enough for non-native-English speakers to understand, which must have been a factor in its international success. And the musical quality spearheaded by David’s guitar and voice and Rick’s keyboards established a fundamental Pink Floyd sound. We were comfortable with the music, which had had time to mature and gestate, and evolve through live performances – later on we had to stop previewing work live as the quality of the recording equipment being smuggled into gigs reached near-studio standards.
The additional singers and Dick Parr
y’s sax gave the whole record an extra commercial sheen. In addition, the sonic quality of the album was state of the art – courtesy of the skills of Alan Parsons and Chris Thomas. This is particularly important, because at the time the album came out, hi-fi stereo equipment had only recently become a mainstream consumer item, an essential fashion accessory for the 1970s home. As a result, record buyers were particularly aware of the effects of stereo and able to appreciate any album that made the most of its possibilities. Dark Side had the good fortune to become one of the definitive test records that people could use to show off the quality of their hi-fi system.
The packaging for the album by Storm and Po at Hipgnosis was clean, simple, and immediately striking, with a memorable icon in the shape of the prism. The packaging also featured the Pyramids, which were, for Storm, a cosmic version of the prism. It is one of Storm’s credos that photo shoots should ideally be real rather than faked, and so he set off for Cairo, with wife Libby, baby son Bill and Hipgnosis partner Po in tow. Come the shoot, the entire party were struck down by the Cairo cooking, leaving Storm to head out alone in the dead of night, since a full moon was a requisite part of the photograph. He found himself in a restricted area, with a squad of machine gun-toting soldiers heading his way, frightening him with thoughts of some kind of Midnight Express imprisonment. A small transfer of baksheesh resolved the problem, quieted Storm’s nerves, and allowed him to complete the shoot unmolested.
The record companies handling the album (particularly Capitol in the States under Bhaskar Menon’s instructions) threw every ounce of heavyweight marketing muscle they possessed behind it. A totally committed record company is a fearsome and powerful machine and without doubt their efforts contributed to the album’s success.
And last, but possibly not least, one music critic commented that it was a great album to make love to – some sex clubs in Holland and Sweden, so I am told, used it to accompany their own performances.