by Nick Mason
The original deal we had agreed with EMI – where we had taken a cut in our percentage in exchange for unlimited studio time at Abbey Road – had lapsed, and so we were conscious that we might start incurring escalating studio costs. Somehow we convinced ourselves that Britannia Row would be a money-saving move. Indeed, we probably had dreams of a successful commercial studio, despite the substantial capital outlay it entailed.
At the time Roger and I were the only London-based band members – David was still living north of London near Royden in Essex and Rick was now up in Royston, south of Cambridge. So the location of Britannia Row in London N1 was reasonably convenient for David and Rick, quite convenient for me (I was living in Highgate, a few miles north-west), and annoyingly handy for Roger, whose place in Islington was only a couple of hundred yards away. Inconveniently for him, with the demise of his marriage to Judy, he was soon on the move to south-west London.
Of the three floors in the building we had bought, the ground floor was required for the studio. This meant that the main storage facility had to be above, which in turn entailed installing a chain hoist system to lug tons of equipment up and down, augmented with a fork-lift truck that teetered dangerously between the street and an unprotected trap door. The top floor became an office and home to a billiards table, which was one of the first pieces of equipment Roger insisted we needed. This helped him through the duller moments of recording; and thereafter billiard tables have tended to manifest themselves wherever he records. Should he tire of the lure of the green baize, he could sustain himself with the substantial fare offered by the studio caretaker – Albert Caulder, the father of one of our former roadies, Bernie – who devised a magnificent hamburger generously laced with garlic.
Our master plan for Britannia Row was to glide into becoming kings of the rental business on the assumption that other bands would be desperate to lease our equipment. Regrettably most of them did not need the wildly elaborate kit that we insisted on building for our shows, and most of the lighting towers and quadraphonic mixers stayed lurking in the back of the storeroom until they were, like loyal but elderly family pets, gently dispatched to a better world. As time went on, one by one the others slipped away from commercial involvement in both the rental and property side of the business, until I found myself the only remaining shareholder. Fortunately, in 1986, the management team of Brian Grant and Robbie Williams took it over. When last heard of it was flourishing, and has counted Pink Floyd among its clients.
If the rental company turned out to be a self-imposed millstone round our necks, the studio facility was much more interesting. We had asked Jon Corpe, our old friend from the Regent Street Poly, to design the studio. Jon’s plans incorporated a breeze block called lignacite for the structure. Lignacite – a composite of sawdust, sand and cement – is acoustically far less reflective than brick, which meant we could use it as the final finish for the studio instead of the usual bizarre blend of pinewood, crazy paving and carpet that was the preferred decor of the day.
Our intention was to build a shell in the full knowledge that any acoustic imperfections could be tuned out afterwards with pads and soft materials. We dug out the ground floor enabling us to drop a complete block structure within the framework of the existing building. This studio structure was floated on rubber insulating pads set onto a concrete slab. This was necessary to avoid the inevitable noise injunctions from the neighbours as well as stopping the rumble of trucks and buses trundling down the nearby New North Road. Like most recording studios, we seemed to suffer more complaints about tired and emotional people spilling out of the premises late at night, rather than noise escaping from the carefully constructed dungeons.
We also wanted to design a studio that could be used by any one of us on our own without an expert engineer or tape operator on hand to help. This meant designing a system that was simple enough for visiting players to be able to locate their headphone sockets without sending in an assistant to point out the relevant place. This worked surprisingly well. Everything was clearly labelled in layman’s terms: the headphone socket would be called ‘headphones’ instead of the indecipherable code that tended to be the norm in the big commercial studios.
Our decision to avoid any excessive cosmetic decoration gave the place a fashionably austere feel. It was also our natural inclination – the Pestalozzi warden’s house that Roger, Jon Corpe and I had designed for a project as architectural students was so forbidding no right-minded person would have wanted to live there. Roger was reported as saying ‘It looks like a fucking prison’ when he first saw the finished result at Britannia Row. ‘That’s appropriate, I suppose…’ There was no natural light and after some hours the place could take on the grim and claustrophobic qualities of a nuclear bunker – although obviously much more stressful, particularly in the small control room, which was extremely cramped and had an uncomfortable seating arrangement along the back wall, perhaps to discourage visitors. At the time, the studio itself was still the most important area of activity in the recording process; more recently, with the ability to plug digital instruments and samplers straight into the mixing desk, bands tend to spend most of their time in the control room, rendering large studios obsolete, and large control rooms obligatory.
The construction work had taken up most of 1975, but by the end of that year we had been able to test out the equipment on a couple of jobs, one of which involved working with Robert Wyatt on some Mike Mantler songs. We had a mixing board and a 24-track tape machine from the American company MCI which, although not the most expensive available, was professional quality. This is where we recorded Animals in 1976. Although studios owned by bands might be an opportunity for considerable self-indulgence, Britannia Row represented a more minimalist, or perhaps parsimonious, approach.
Brian Humphries was in charge of the engineering. Although Brian had worked on our film music, our live shows and Wish You Were Here, the oppressive lack of space at Britannia Row, combined with the effects of life on tour, seemed to take an especial toll on him, as he began to show signs of wear and tear as the album progressed. This was exacerbated by the fact that Brian never totally realised that among a band noted for their left-of-centre sensibilities, it was wiser to keep his own somewhat more right-wing views to himself, especially when Roger was in earshot. For some reason, he used one particularly horrible scrap of duster throughout the whole job to clean off the marks on the mixing desk; it became his comfort blanket. Roger later had it framed and presented it to Brian after the completion of recording.
Much of the material for Animals already existed in the form of songs that Roger had previously written. ‘Dogs’ had been performed even before the Wish You Were Here album, on the Autumn 1974 tour of the UK, as a song called ‘Gotta Be Crazy’, and elements of ‘Sheep’ had appeared on the same tour as ‘Raving And Drooling’. The music had thus been in gestation for well over a year, and had benefited from some toughening-up in front of the audiences on the tour.
Towards the end of recording Roger created two pieces called ‘Pigs On The Wing’ to open and close the album, designed to give the overall shape of the album a better dynamic and enhance the animal aspect of it. An unwanted side effect was that it opened up the question of the share-out of publishing royalties (which are based on the number of tracks, not their length) since it gave Roger two additional tracks, and meant that the longer piece ‘Dogs’, co-written with David, was not split up, but left as a single track. This was the kind of issue that would later prove contentious.
With a tour in the offing, we had been discussing the need to augment the band on tour, using another guitarist to play some of the pieces that David had overdubbed in the studio, and Steve invited a guitarist called Snowy White along to meet us. Snowy had played with the former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green as well as Cockney Rebel, and had just finished touring the States with Al Stewart when he received a message that Steve had been trying to get in touch, after Snowy had been recommended
to Steve by Hilary Walker, who worked with Kate Bush.
Snowy remembers arriving in the control room at an unfortunate moment. While Brian was on a break, Roger and I had assumed engineering duties, and successfully erased David’s recently completed guitar solo. This was a perfect moment for me to recognise Roger’s seniority… Snowy was given a cursory interview by David (‘You wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t play, would you?’) and later Roger (‘Since you’re here you might as well play something’), who gave Snowy a shot at a solo on ‘Pigs On The Wing’, a part made redundant when the track was split in two for the final album. However, Snowy had the consolation of the whole track – including his solo – appearing on the eight-track cartridge version, and thus appreciated by the select minority who purchased it. Snowy later appeared on the Animals tour, walking on every night to open the show with the bass intro to ‘Sheep’, confusing the front few rows of the audience as they tried to work out which of the Fab Floyd this character was, since there were no programmes or announcements to explain his appearance.
My memory of this period is that I enjoyed making this album more than Wish You Were Here. There was some return to a group commitment, possibly because we felt that Britannia Row was our responsibility, and so we were more involved in making the studio and the recording a success. Given that it belonged to us, we really could spend as long as we wanted in the studio, and there was no extra cost involved in unlimited frames of snooker or billiards.
Compared to some of our earlier efforts, Animals was really quite a straightforward album. My view is that it was not as complex in its construction as Dark Side, or Wish You Were Here. After recording the numbers the assembly seemed a relatively painless process, but maybe we had just got quicker at doing it. I have to say I don’t have any particularly strong memories of the recording sessions themselves; it’s much more to do with Britannia Row as a place.
Some critics felt that the music on Animals was harder and tougher than anything else we had done. There were various reasons why that might have been so. There was certainly a workman-like mood in the studio. We had never encouraged a stream of visitors to our previous recording sessions, but at Britannia Row the lack of space meant there was really only room for the crew in the cockpit.
Any harder edge may also have been a subconscious reaction to the accusations of ‘dinosaur rock’ that were being thrown at bands like Led Zeppelin, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and ourselves. We were all aware of the arrival of punk – even anyone who didn’t listen to the music could not have failed to notice the Sex Pistols’ explosion into the media spotlight. Just in case we had missed this, locked in our Britannia Row bunker, Johnny Rotten kindly sported a particularly fetching ‘I hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt.
Punk was perhaps also a reaction to the decision by record companies to concentrate on what they thought of as guaranteed earners rather than taking risks with new acts – whereas in the 1960s they would have signed up anything with long hair, even a sheepdog. Nearly thirty years later the same is true once again. If a record company pays a huge amount of money for an established act, it is odds on that they will recoup the investment; they could spend the same amount on a dozen new bands and lose the whole lot. Financially it is perfectly understandable, but it does not foster fresh talent. One of the messages of punk was that it was possible to make records for thirty quid and some change. Although we could sympathise with the sentiments, we were, however, on the wrong side of the divide, as far as the punk generation were concerned. ‘Of course, you don’t want the world populated only with dinosaurs,’ I said at the time, ‘but it’s a terribly good thing to keep some of them alive.’
Britannia Row made an unlikely Winter Palace, but the punk movement was the moment when we found ourselves on the wrong end of a cultural revolution, just as we had been very much on the right end of it during the underground days of 1966 and 1967. The ten-year cycle had turned, and will doubtless turn on. The cool blissed-out hippies of yesteryear are now harassed and stressed-out parents who mutter about the banality of Pop Idol and the incomprehensible lyrics on Top Of The Pops. They have, inevitably, found themselves turning into their parents – although now they, at least, are excruciatingly aware of the irony…
A year or so after the release of Animals, I got a call from Peter Barnes, our publisher. He wanted to know if I would like to produce an album for the Damned at Britannia Row. I don’t think I was first choice. They really wanted Syd to produce them, which would have been remarkable, but impractical. I enjoyed the experience, probably rather more than they did. Unfortunately they were having a nasty dose of musical differences at the time, so there were conflicting messages about what they wanted to achieve.
The band contained a curious mix of outlooks. Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible were of the punk persuasion, but of the two I found the Captain considerably more alarming. Though Rat might set fire to something in fun on the spur of the moment, the Captain would have spent some time beforehand carefully assembling highly flammable materials. Dave Vanian was a dedicated Goth, while Brian James was the one who seemed to want to move the band into new musical areas. The Captain was not taken with this philosophical change. The suggestion of a particular bass line using a glissando slide was rejected out of hand, and the idea of more than a couple of takes was seen as heresy. We finished the album, and mixed it in the time Pink Floyd would have taken to set up the microphones.
Nick Griffiths, a former BBC engineer, who had joined us at the very end of the Animals recording, engineered these sessions. Nick remembers that one of the Damned crew took it upon himself to write all over those expensive Lignacite walls. The only solution was to painstakingly grind away the graffiti. Even the band were embarrassed, and although the vision of Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible donning rubber gloves is unlikely, they certainly issued orders for the scrawling to be scrubbed off.
In December 1976 the recording and mixing of Animals was complete, and work started on the album cover. Hipgnosis had presented three ideas, and just for once none of them appealed. So the cover emerged from a concept of Roger’s, executed by Storm, based around Battersea Power Station, an odd vision of the future on the banks of the Thames, which was nearing the end of its active service. Initially completed in the early 1930s, and designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott – designer of Britain’s iconic red telephone box, now also superseded – the building in fact consisted of two linked power stations; it was the second of these, constructed in 1953, that provided the skyline of London with its four towering chimneys. At the time Roger was living in Broxash Road, just off Clapham Common, and so was driving across London to reach the studios in Islington on virtually a daily basis, a route which took him past the looming chimneys of the power station, and provided the seed for the idea used on the cover.
A maquette for an inflatable pig was made by Andrew Saunders – with involvement from Jeffrey Shaw – and then the actual object was built for us by a German company. Ballon Fabrik had learnt their craft constructing the original Zeppelins, but in a nice display of swords into ploughshares, they subsequently built a number of inflatables for us. We ended up in early December at the disused power station with a giant porcine balloon (which was known as ‘Algie’ for some reason) – some thirty foot long, full of helium and very truculent – straining at its tether. As an extra precaution we had a trained marksman on standby in case Algie made a run for it.
Photography was scheduled for 2nd December, but the weather was inclement; we also had some rigging problems, so we decided to reconvene the following day. Unfortunately, although the weather had improved by early the next morning, the marksman had not arrived and was not in position by launch time. There was a sudden gust of wind, the steel hawser snapped, and Algie was off, ascending into the heavens at about two thousand feet a minute, a lot faster than the police chase helicopter scrambled to intercept it. This was not a deliberate stunt and we were well aware that apart from losing an expensive piece of kit we could cause a
major aviation disaster. Lawyers were summoned, emergency plans mapped out, and scapegoats nominated.
One of my favourite memories from the whole incident is the meeting involving our lawyer Bernard Sheridan, at which Linda Stanbury, our PA at the time, indoctrinated in the mentality of tour paperwork and overhearing the news that the pig was heading towards Germany, groaned ‘But it hasn’t got a carnet…’ (The bureaucracy of touring was daunting. Endless lists of equipment, forms in triplicate every time the trucks were loaded up. The team could not cut any corners. At any border crossing, the customs control might decide on a whim to go through the whole damn lot. The annoying thing was that even the customs didn’t seem to know how the forms worked. On one occasion we had a run-in with the authorities when Belgian customs tore off the wrong part of a form, or stamped the wrong section of a carnet, and it took three years to convince the Belgian authorities that we had not had a mammoth car boot sale of three articulated lorries’ worth of equipment. The encouragement of free movement within the European Community has led to at least one advantage.)
Thankfully the pig descended of its own accord, and was recovered by a farmer in Kent with no damage done. There was a story of an airline pilot spotting the errant pig as he came in to land at Heathrow, but being afraid to report it in case flight control thought he had been drinking. Sadly I think this is apocryphal. The awful truth is that the image of the pig was stripped into the final cover later on, because the best image of the power station, in a moody cloudscape, had been taken on an earlier recce day, when Algie was absent.