Inside Out

by Nick Mason

  I think we all knew that The Dark Side Of The Moon was a very good record when we finished it – definitely much better as a complete piece than anything we had done before, but I certainly had no real inkling of its commercial potential, and was as surprised as everyone else when it simply took off.

  When Lindy and I decided to move home from Camden to Highgate, I went along to my bank manager to request a bridging loan. He asked me what I could offer as security. I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a Number One album in America.’ He was not impressed, and said he was looking for something a little more concrete…

  AFTER THE success of The Dark Side Of The Moon we were brought back down to earth when we had to start tackling yet another album. On this occasion, Dark Side actually added to the burden, since we were particularly anxious to avoid accusations of cashing in on the album’s success by simply replicating it. We clearly felt that after one album was released, we really should get back into the studio to start on the next one, even though at that point we were not locked into a contract that demanded we churn out one or two albums a year. In fact we were under no obligation to deliver within any timeframe. I do not remember any huge pressure from EMI to deliver Dark Side II: The Lunatic Returns, but this may well be a tribute to Steve O’Rourke’s managerial ability in deflecting brickbats and any other missiles sent out by the record company.

  We returned to Abbey Road in the autumn of 1973, following a tour of the States in June and a welcome summer break. Lindy and I had stayed in a house near Vence in the Alpes-Maritimes, not far from L’Ousteroun where Roger would later stay during the recording of The Wall, and close to where Bill Wyman had a house. It had been a complete change, incredibly quiet, and a chance to relax completely with the family.

  At Abbey Road we began work with a blank sheet: there were no fragments of songs or unused out-takes left over after Dark Side. The sessions started out quite well. Our suspicions should have immediately been aroused.

  Preliminary discussions threw up the idea of a record created entirely out of sounds that had not been produced by musical instruments. This seemed suitably radical, and so we started out on a project we called ‘Household Objects’. The whole notion seems absurdly laboured now, when any sound can be sampled and then laid out across a keyboard, enabling a musician to play anything from barking dogs to nuclear explosions. In 1973 it took us two months to assemble – slowly and laboriously – what could now probably be achieved in an afternoon. However, the length of time involved was not a problem for us. In fact it was a blessing. We found the project was a brilliant device to postpone having to create anything concrete for the foreseeable future, since we could busy ourselves with the mechanics of the sounds rather than the creation of the music.

  Almost everything we’ve ever recorded in a studio has been extracted by someone at some point and subsequently bootlegged. However, no such recordings exist of the ‘Household Objects’ tapes for the simple reason that we never managed to produce any actual music. All the time we devoted to the project was spent exploring the non-musical sounds, and the most we ever achieved was a small number of tentative rhythm tracks.

  We investigated the domestic sound world in a variety of ways: percussion was created by sawing wood, slamming down hammers of different sizes or thudding axes into tree trunks. For the bass notes we clamped and plucked rubber bands, and then slowed the resulting sounds to lower tape speeds.

  Like some adult playgroup we set about breaking light bulbs and stroking wine glasses, and indulged in various forms of water play including stirring bowls of water before pouring them into buckets. We unrolled lengths of adhesive tape, sprayed aerosols, plucked egg slicers and tapped wine bottle tops. Chris Adamson remembers being sent out to local hardware shops to find brooms of various bristle strengths, and asked to track down a specific kind of elastic used to power the propeller of a model aeroplane. After a number of weeks, musical progress was negligible. We could sustain the pretence no longer, and the whole project was gently laid to rest.

  Group momentum was pretty well non-existent. The early days of total commitment were beginning to dissipate. Some of us had started families and were experiencing the responsibilities and distractions that young children provide. In my case, my daughter Chloe was two, while Rick had two kids, Gala and Jamie. In the extended Pink Floyd family, Steve O’Rourke had two daughters, Katy and Shena. Peter Watts had two children, Naomi and Ben. Roger did not have children yet, but interestingly, he was one of the prime movers in making sure that we never went on tour for too long. Three weeks away in the States seemed plenty. The schedule and style of touring were hardly conducive to family life on the road. One rental car at the airport was still enough for band and management to get to hotel and gig; even one additional person would automatically break up this tight-knit unit, and require a second rental car, doubling transportation costs.

  Off the road, we were increasingly conscious that life existed outside the band. All of us were working with other musicians either as performers or producers. Amongst the mass of demo tapes musicians sent, David had received one from a schoolgirl whose songwriting and voice stood out above the rest. He encouraged her career over a period of time, and was rewarded by seeing her achieve great success with her first single ‘Wuthering Heights’ and album The Kick Inside: it was Kate Bush.

  I collaborated on an album with Robert Wyatt of the Soft Machine. Our long relationship with the Soft Machine dated back to the underground days of the Roundhouse and UFO, and the US tour in the late Sixties, when I remember their vocalist Kevin Ayers, in a hotel room at the Chelsea in New York, dangling upside down off the side of the bed as part of the digestion process demanded by whichever macrobiotic diet he was then following.

  In May 1973 I had received a postcard from Robert suggesting I might like to produce his solo record. The day the card arrived I heard that he had fallen from a window, and been paralysed from the waist down. A one-off benefit for Robert was organised in November that year at the Rainbow Theatre: Soft Machine opened the show, and then we played, performing a cut-down version of the Earls Court gigs, including the plane descending over the audience…but this was not a testimonial for a wrecked career.

  Within six months of his accident Robert was ready to start work again – although unable to use a full drum kit, he could still handle vocals, keyboards and percussion. Recording for his solo album, Rock Bottom, took place during the winter of 1973 at The Manor, Virgin’s house studio near Oxford, a studio which had been set up specifically for rock music, providing accommodation, a relaxed atmosphere, and total freedom to record away from the constraints of scheduled sessions. Bootleg, a huge and immovable Great Dane, was also in attendance. Exposure to Robert’s fertile stream of ideas was the most rewarding musical experience I had enjoyed outside the band.

  It also allowed me to return to Top Of The Pops – for a rinse, trim and blow-dry – since we produced a single as well as the album and, slightly to our surprise, it entered the charts. This was a rather offbeat version of the Monkees’ ‘I’m A Believer’, which featured a fabulously avant-garde violin solo by Fred Frith of Henry Cow. Although the appearance was slightly soured by the BBC’s reluctance to show Robert in his wheelchair, the director was eventually shamed into giving way, and a good time was had by all. Since not all the original musicians were available, and it was of course mimed, we had to bring in some extra help. This included Andy Summers on guitar, who was at a bit of a loose end since the Police had yet to be invented.

  Pink Floyd continued to spend most of the rest of 1974 delaying the evil moment of making a record. In the same way that we had released Relics when Meddle was taking its time to emerge, we once again succumbed to the blandishments of the record company and released a compilation album. Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and A Saucerful Of Secrets were sandwiched together as a double album called A Nice Pair, in a cover that contained a selection of visual jokes and puns (Storm’s idea of an out-of-focus pair of spectacle
s remains a personal favourite).

  We also embarked on a short tour of France in the summer of 1974, a tour which contained an element of penance for some previous greed. Two years earlier we had committed to an advertising photo for the French soft drinks company Gini. This had been shot in Morocco for use in France only, and we thought the experience had been conveniently left behind – apart from the occasional twinge of guilt about falling for such easy money. At this time touring for most bands was still seen primarily as a way of promoting records to boost album sales, with the odd chance to get some income from the larger venues. Promotion was usually limited by the promoter’s budget to a rash of flyposting and a few radio plugs from the band.

  However, we had forgotten that inserted in the contract with Gini was a clause which ensured that, instead of being left to our relatively low-key promotional devices, we would on this occasion be accompanied by a circus of Gini-promoting extras, mainly consisting of an ad agency’s view of ‘trend setters’; for this read Page Three models and Easy Rider bikers. Like an unfortunate cat with a can tied to its tail, we were followed everywhere we went in France by a frightful gaggle of groovy people in dark glasses and leather jackets, sporting gigantic Gini bitter lemon signs. Steve spent a lot of time negotiating the exact distance we could keep them apart from us, but even so our hard-earned credibility with our French fans was left in tatters whenever we came to town.

  The general feeling was that our crew had the most fun. They had no qualms about enjoying the company of our co-travellers, and in fact were deeply grateful to the band for giving them access to the bevy of models who accompanied us on tour, and with whom they could while away the duller hours of a roadie’s life.

  Roger and I tried to erase this particular memory during September and October by working on a set of films for a tour we were due to start later in the autumn. For the early Dark Side shows we had used clips from the surfing documentary Crystal Voyager and Ian Eames’s animation for ‘Time’, but now we wanted to have a complete sequence of films to project throughout the show. The films, a mix of library footage and specially shot sequences to accompany the songs, were in place for the beginning of a major British tour – our first in two years – which opened in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, at the beginning of November.

  Phil Taylor, who had worked for a number of other bands, came in to work on the 1974 tour, and he now describes it as ‘shambolic’. He had arrived during rehearsals for the tour, which were taking place at the Unit Studios in King’s Cross – next to the Wimpey bar – where we were working on some new songs including ‘Shine On’ and ‘Raving And Drooling’. The definition of a ‘rehearsal studio’ is actually a large room with nothing in it, in which you can make a lot of noise.

  This was a gloomy period for the band – although the audiences were hopefully unaware of this. The weather didn’t help: a wintry rain and low clouds accompanied us from Edinburgh to Cardiff. Although, for the first time, we had the funds available to develop our stage show in the way we wanted, there was a good deal of dissatisfaction with what we were doing, or perhaps how we were going about it. We now came to realise that what we had thought was a good idea – never touring for more than one month – had a downside. In a three-week tour, the first week or so of a tour would effectively be a mobile production rehearsal; by the second week the performances would start to gain some cohesion; and by the final week we would be thinking less about the music and more about going home.

  Our dissatisfaction was exacerbated by personnel problems. Peter Watts had left us after seven years as chief roadie. He had become increasingly – and then totally – unreliable. However, since the four of us in the band were not completely in tune with each other, and we had no clear chain of command, our handling of the situation was inept. Peter was fired – at least once – by one band member in the morning, only for another of us to reinstate him the same afternoon. What I didn’t realise for some time was that Peter had developed a serious drug habit. I clearly had a rather naive view of the crew’s appetites. Many years later I discovered that one long-serving crew member had initially joined, not out of devotion to the music, but to pay off a drug debt he owed another member of the crew. When the situation with Peter became impossible, we tried to behave with more understanding than we had been able to with Syd, and arranged for Peter to undergo treatment at a clinic, which, though not totally ineffectual, did little to solve the core problem – sadly, Peter died of an overdose in 1976.

  When Peter left, the lighting director Arthur Max had been promoted to crew chief, but the highly strung temperament and ego that made Arthur such a talented lighting designer made him impossible as a team leader. However, there was no obvious alternative candidate from the remainder of the crew, a disparate bunch of technical boffins and equipment humpers. Arthur’s personality added an extra twist to the general air of tension and chaos. Phil Taylor encountered Arthur Max at his most dogmatic. Arthur was in charge of all technical aspects including the sound, which he knew little about. Phil asked Arthur, ‘What should I do?’ to which Arthur simply shouted, ‘Don’t ask me about it, just do it!’ On one occasion Arthur wanted to film the show, and so he flooded the stage in bright white light, which rather starkly eradicated any of the light show.

  We had also taken on a studio engineer at short notice who had no experience of working in a live concert environment, and whose job was made more difficult by a number of factors, some technical, some of his own making. The halls we were now playing after the success of Dark Side were a step up from the university circuit, and often tended to be large echoing civic halls with difficult acoustics and nowhere convenient to put the mixer board. The very elaborate Bereza mixing desk that we had ordered (customised for our performance needs) arrived late, had severe teething problems, and was like no desk this particular engineer had encountered before.

  He also made the mistake of failing to establish a congenial rapport with the rest of the crew: one night they rigged up an array of fireworks beneath the new, miracle, mixing desk. When the luckless engineer switched the desk on, the explosives ignited, leaving him considerably shaken, since he thought he had blown the brand-new equipment to smithereens…Now marked down as a natural victim, his days on the road were numbered. After three shows we felt obliged to replace this luckless sound engineer with Brian Humphries, the engineer we’d first encountered at Pye Studios when we were recording the score for Barbet Schroeder’s film More. Brian had been recording the show for a radio broadcast and when he finished his work, we hoicked him out of the BBC van and placed him behind the desk. He was familiar with both band and crew, and his experience in the studio, and on the road with Traffic, at last gave us confidence that the sound quality would be acceptable. However, showing a new sense of caution, we did ask Chris Thomas to sit with Brian and evaluate him. Brian either showed he could handle the pressure, or failed to notice Chris was there.

  As a band we were also demonstrating a distinct lack of commitment to the necessary input required. We seemed to be more interested in booking squash courts, for example, than perfecting the set. As a result our shows were a wildly erratic mix of the good and bad (and occasionally ugly) both technically and musically. The exception to this state of affairs was provided by the two backing singers, Carlena Williams and Venetta Fields, who always performed wonderfully, looked great and went to sleep whenever the band started arguing or sulking.

  After the way the Earls Court performances in May 1973 had gelled so perfectly, the problems we had experienced on the tour added to our frustration, and to the sense that we were all pulling in slightly different directions. Inevitably we were castigated by some of the music press, notably receiving a mugging from Nick Kent of the New Musical Express, who, also being a particularly fervent Syd Barrett devotee, was unrestrained in his attack. The trouble was that we recognised that some of his criticisms were valid, and in fact his comments may have had some influence on drawing us back together.

&
nbsp; I think it might be true to say that we were close to calling it a day. Steve O’Rourke always maintained that each member of the band came to him separately at some point to vent his irritation, going as far as threatening to leave. Roger certainly could see there were easier ways of achieving his ends and David was thinking of alternatives. Even Rick, who was better known for thinking about thinking, was reaching the end of his tether… I thought I’d hang on, wash up the teacups and liberate the typewriter on my way out.

  Eventually we managed to pull ourselves into some semblance of order. Brian Humphries was confirmed as the live sound mixer during our four shows at the Empire Pool, Wembley, in mid-November. Andy Bereza got the new wonder desk he had invented to work. Arthur Max was reallocated to his natural habitat behind the lighting desk and the PA team of Robbie Williams and Mick Kluczynski were promoted to tour managers. Meanwhile the band had enough of a discussion to make some positive decisions and address the problems of playing together. But we were all grateful when Christmas arrived, and the tour ended in Bristol. As a final coda I had rather imperiously arrived at the hotel in yet another second-hand bargain – this time a Ferrari 265 GTB4. I spent most of the next morning changing the spark plugs in order to get the Ferrari to start, followed by yet another journey from hell, with memories of the Bentley, as the brakes failed to do more than offer the gentlest hint of retardation even when pressed hard enough to engender leg cramps.

  We did get back to work in the studios in January 1975. It was far from easy. The increased isolation of multi-track recording created a marked shift in the atmosphere as the whole process grew increasingly drawn out and demanding. From my point of view, the drum parts had become more structured and had to be learnt more carefully. In the early days I had been able to stay closer to arrangements that had been developed for live shows. The separation of each drum onto a different track meant it took even longer to get a result. This was part and parcel of general improvements in studio technology, but it did nothing to help the sense that we were not a band playing together.