by Nick Mason
A number of inflatable pigs were to become tour regulars. At some of the outdoor shows one would float over the audience before being pulled in to disappear behind the stage. Later an identical, but cheaper, cousin would rise in its place and, filled with helium with a propane stomach, explode in a conflagration that on the Hollywood scale of disaster effects was well up at the Die Hard end. At one venue, the propane was replaced with a mix of oxygen and acetylene as an experiment, producing such an explosion that Mark Fisher’s ears still ring, not from the blast, but from the dressing-down he received from Steve O’Rourke.
We also had some fireworks which when they detonated released sheep-shaped parachutes which then gently floated down. The company which made these for us had polished the technique for a Saudi Arabian sheikh whose picture was similarly released for his birthday celebrations – this particular company told us they inherited the job when their predecessors, at the sheikh’s enthronement, had inadvertently used a picture of his cousin, who had just been deposed…
The Animals tour was our first ‘branded’ tour. Previously material from a new album would naturally have been included in any gigs on tour, but this was the first time that we were conscious of going out on the road specifically to promote a particular album. The tour opened at the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund on 23rd January 1977 and after Europe in February and the UK in March we headed over to the States for three weeks in April and May, and a further three weeks in June and July.
We had underestimated our promoters’ enthusiasm for the pig motif. In San Francisco, Bill Graham had organised a pen full of the animals backstage, and none of them seemed very happy to be there. David’s wife Ginger, who he had met on one of our US tours a couple of years earlier, was a strict vegetarian and animal lover, and she was aghast. She leapt into the pen demanding their freedom, and refused to leave until oaths had been sworn as to their future welfare.
Marcel Avram, our long-time German promoter, presented us with a piglet in Munich. Once again a home had to be found for the new arrival, and with various apparently hungry Germans eyeing the piglet greedily, our tour manager Warwick McCredie was drafted in to take it back to the hotel for the night. We were staying at a particularly smart Hilton close to the venue, but Warwick managed to smuggle the piglet in without detection. The real problem was that Warwick’s room had mirrored walls, and the pig kept seeing a myriad of other pigs staring at him. He did not care for this. During the night the piglet cracked most of the glass at floor level, as well as spreading a film of excrement along every surface. The next morning I saw Steve peel off to the reception desk as we hurriedly left after surveying the full horror. I never could quite bring myself to ask him about the conversation that ensued.
The larger stadiums that we now were playing brought with them a range of new problems. At smaller theatre venues, the audience is admitted just before show time, but at a baseball stadium the sheer size of the crowd and the resulting car park requirements mean that the stadium has to be opened three or four hours before the start. The increased scale of the venues also required more elevated levels of fitness, not to mention mountaineering skills, from the road crew. We now had a team known as ‘the quad squad’, the SAS of humpers, who were charged with lugging our quad speakers to the furthest and highest corners of stadiums and auditoria.
We have rarely used a support act on tour. There are a number of reasons for this. In the early days, there was a certain element of combat between the bands appearing on a bill – and the first acts on would aspire to out-perform the headline act, to ‘blow them off the stage’. In our case, our additional props, like the Daleks, also meant that resetting the stage after another band was a lengthy process. In later times, it was more a question that any support act would simply destroy the mood we were trying to create, by over-exciting, boring or alienating our audience. As far as stadium shows were concerned, not having a support act meant that the audience could get to see the main event early in the evening around 8 p.m., rather than sitting through two or three other bands’ sets. Even so, with nothing much to amuse them, stuck either under a baking sun or pouring rain, the crowd could get restless. There were always a few who tended to load up on alcohol or drugs – and then promptly pass out when the band hit the stage. It could sometimes be a distraction, as we tried to spot members of the audience nodding off or completely comatose.
We were becoming increasingly conscious of crowd control, security and safety. With up to 80,000 people swilling around it’s like being elected mayor of a small town for the night, with all the attendant responsibilities including car crashes, petty theft, children being born… There’s even some live music if you’re lucky. We were learning the facts of life of touring, including the realisation that although you may be able to relate to the first thirty rows of people, it is extremely difficult to capture and hold the attention of the invisible ranks at the back of the crowd.
The shows on this tour varied in quality. Although we were still improvising a little, this was limited – but this was not in itself the main problem. The lack of consistent quality was due to other reasons. These were short tours and we were not spending enough rehearsal time on key aspects of the show like seguing from one number to the next, or syncing with the projected films. And my memory is that some of the staging was as erratic as the music, since we never allowed enough time for stage rehearsals. We also always underestimated the weather factor. The wind and the rain were constant threats, and could both play havoc with our sound levels and quality, all of which would affect our concentration and the mood of the audience.
However, on the Animals tour, one feature of the stage set had been developed for the inevitable onslaught of bad weather at open-air stadiums: a set of mechanical umbrellas. These could be raised from under the stage and then opened, and although the motors operating them proved unreliable, they looked terrific bursting from the stage and then flowering out. As we progressed into using more and more gear suspended from trusses such devices became obsolete, but on this tour we could still rely on the audience being surprised by the sudden transformation of the stage into a Continental pavement café. We did try similar individual umbrellas again on the Division Bell tour, but David threw his to the ground in a fit of pique as he said afterwards he felt daft standing under a dripping plastic palm tree, and Rick nearly collapsed with asphyxiation as smoke became trapped in the inverted fish bowl we had thoughtfully created for him.
One consistently effective feature in the shows was the use of cherry-pickers either side of the stage – an idea instigated by Arthur Max. These are the kind of hydraulic lifts used to change the bulbs in street lamps, but instead of a simple cradle, each unit had a spotlamp mounted on it, which was manoeuvred by a black-clad operator squatting behind it. With the addition of revolving beacons, the cherry-pickers made a great opening for any show, as they rose slowly from below stage level. The lights could also be dropped down alarmingly close to the band, close enough to singe the lead guitarist’s hair on at least one occasion.
Despite the larger venues, and the increase in paraphernalia on stage, the crew we were using was about the same size as it had been on the tours a couple of years earlier. We were still sending out for burgers (tour catering was not yet an exact science) or feasting on whatever the promoter decided to provide – usually burgers, or a huge plate of cold cuts.
There were no office facilities at the venues in 1977. Most of the ever-increasing mass of bureaucracy and legal, technical and financial issues was being dealt with out of the hotel rooms of Steve, Robbie and Graeme Fleming, and most of the paperwork had to fit into the rather smart aluminium briefcases that had become the style statement for the upper echelons of the road crew.
For the musicians there was a realisation that the big tours can also be much lonelier – they only discover your body slumped in the hotel bedroom when you don’t show up on the bus two days later. And it’s easier to become isolated from the rest of the band. In the
days when we were all driving around in one van, we simply had to avoid falling out with each other every day otherwise it would have been impossible to carry on. But on the larger tours there is a tendency for people to split into smaller groups.
With the rise in status from club to stadium, the local promoters – in a spirit of goodwill and the hope you will stay with their organisation – are always proposing activities that range from sailing, dune buggies and speedboating to a trip to Disneyland or a visit to the local fish market at 5 a.m. next morning. Often, late at night, one of these outings will be suggested as an excursion for the following day. Everyone agrees, enthused by champagne and canapés, and the arrangements are made – but by first thing the day after, it has usually lost its appeal. So a fleet of limos arrives at the hotel entrance only to find three tired and embarrassed tour party members ready to be picked up, rather than the promised forty.
If you do go out en masse without a promoter or record exec on hand to pick up the bill, an outing involving drinking can easily become a terrifying financial experience as the more experienced participants make their excuses and slip away early, leaving the luckless victim holding the tab, and filled with a grim determination never to socialise again, certainly not in an overpriced hotel bar.
The end of the Animals tour marked another low point. David now says that this was one period when he really felt that it might be all up for Pink Floyd. His view is that we had achieved, and sustained, the success we had originally wanted as a band, and accordingly were finding it difficult to see what more we could do.
We returned to the UK to find that the top floor of the Britannia Row building was beginning to silt up with accountants, as business matters became increasingly obtrusive in our lives. By this time we were all turning up at business meetings with briefcases, almost certainly covered in the hide of animals nearing extinction. This may have made us feel like businessmen, and we were certainly given the impression that we could put off the next album forever because of the revenue we were earning. It sounded so easy: you talked a bit, had lunch and doubled your money.
One of the great attributes of the men in chalk-stripe suits, like doctors, is a good bedside, or deskside, manner. Noel Redding, the bass player with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, always felt he had been turned over particularly badly by the contractual vagaries of the industry, and had a quote handy for anyone wanting to enter the music business and asking his advice: ‘Study law. Buy a gun…’
We should have taken heed. We had been seduced in the afterglow of Dark Side into an involvement with a company of financial advisers called Norton Warburg. In 1977–8 the earnings from Dark Side and Wish You Were Here were flowing through, and tax in the UK for high earners was 83 per cent, and 98 per cent on invested profits. Norton Warburg persuaded us to enter a scheme that would save tax; venture capital was the buzzword, and the proposal was to turn us into a working company by investing Pink Floyd money in a variety of enterprises. The annoying downside was that even should they turn out to be successful, we would have to get rid of them to avoid attracting the interest of the revenue men (and women) by unholy profit-making, since that was the way the deal was constructed.
As it was, this was unlikely to be a concern, since many of these business ideas were so flawed that no banker in their right mind would even consider them. During this period we were involved in carbon-fibre rowing boats, pizzas, and a restaurant on a floating barge. There was a failed hotel that went into fudge manufacturing, a children’s shoe company, the Memoquiz (a precursor of the Game Boy), a car hire business and a skateboarding firm called Benji Boards. In one case, we were puzzled when a company we had been told had been unofficially sanctioned by Rolls-Royce to deal in second-hand cars, seemed to have a number of delivery problems: cars either did not arrive or if they did were worse than the group Bentley in which we had escaped near death on the Jimi Hendrix tour of 1967. Eventually two of the directors of this particular company served a period of time at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
However, we had little time to investigate, as our thoughts and energies had turned to producing an album to follow Animals – and we needed some new material. We were faced by one particular problem. Two of the potential composers in the band, namely David and Rick, had been working on solo projects and so had little if any spare material to present to the band.
David’s solo album, called simply David Gilmour, was released in May 1978 – on the album he worked again with Willie Wilson who had been a fellow Joker Wild before David joined us in 1968. Rick had also been working on his own solo album, Wet Dream, with a band that included Snowy White on guitar. I had briefly worked with Steve Hillage on the production of Steve’s album Green, which was engineered by John Wood, the engineer on our original ‘Arnold Layne’ recording session at Sound Techniques Studios in January 1967.
Whenever any member of the band went off to do any kind of solo work, it never became an issue, as it so easily could have done, and has with other bands – the difficult days of the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards relationship in the 1980s focused around exactly that issue. All of us have done our own albums, and produced other artists, and rather than prove a source of tension or jealousy, it seems that it has actually provided a useful safety valve.
Luckily, Roger solved the shortage of material. While we had all been otherwise engaged, he had been working alone in his home studio. Roger’s demos varied wildly in quality. Some were so good that we could never improve on them in the studio, and would revert to the original. Others were really just rough sketches, over-modulated and distorted. Roger actually disputed this, claiming that they were all of excellent quality, and has threatened to play them in their entirety to me again to prove his point – consequently, I graciously concede to his view.
THE MOMENT that sparked The Wall happened at a show in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium during the Animals tour of 1977. This was a gigantic sports stadium, overlooked by a futuristic tower, that had been constructed for the Olympic Games of the year before. The tower soared up to enormous heights, and by its very scale the venue was not conducive to a warm and fuzzy rapport with the fans.
There was a relatively small but over-excited group in the audience close to the stage, who were probably high on chemicals and definitely low on attentiveness. Being right at the front they were audible and defined our sense of the audience’s mood. During the break between a couple of numbers, this group were shouting out suggestions for songs. When Roger’s eye was caught by one particularly vocal member of the claque yelling, ‘Play “Careful With That Axe”, Roger,’ he finally lost patience, and spat at the offender.
This was more than unusual, it was weird. Roger had always been the spokesman on stage since Syd’s departure, and handled the introductions, the gaps in proceedings when the projectors broke down or the hecklers with some aplomb, and often with some droll observations. This incident just indicated that establishing any kind of bond with the audience was becoming increasingly difficult.
Roger was not alone in feeling depressed about this show. Over the years we had evolved a definitive final encore, where we played a slow twelve-bar blues while the crew gradually removed all the equipment and instruments, leaving one lone, silent musician to walk off stage. On this occasion, David was so upset by the mood of the concert that he refused even to take part in the encore.
Although the spitting incident was unnerving at the time, it did serve to set Roger’s creative wheels spinning, and he developed the outline for a show based around the concept of an audience both physically and mentally separated from their idols. Whether the confrontation in Montreal had any life-changing impact on the hapless spat-upon fan remains unknown; suffice to say that he has never employed a lawyer, nor claimed any royalties for creative inspiration.
The Wall as a piece represents a large amount of material spread across a range of media: the record, the concerts – enhanced with film, stage effects and props – and a movie. This had been Roger’s i
ntention from the outset. He had already shown his fondness for exploring the possibilities of multimedia, but The Wall took things considerably further. The whole project also covered a large amount of time, a period of work that actually lasted from mid-1978, when Roger was creating the initial version, until 1982, with the release of the movie.
Roger had learnt from experience that one maxim for work was to know when the time was right to push an idea ahead. At some point during 1978 he clearly felt that it was that time and set to work in his home studio. By the time he played the results to us – I remember going to his house on at least one occasion to listen to them, and he also brought the tapes into Britannia Row – he actually had two records roughed out, one being The Wall and the other The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-hiking.
Although it later underwent an enormous transformation, and in fact Roger ended up rewriting the whole piece in France, the Wall demo contained sufficient clarity and enough concepts – some only in outline form, others relatively well fleshed out – for us all to understand that this had much more potential than just an album. Equally we all felt less inspired by The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-hiking; it seemed better left for Roger to do on his own (which he did in 1984). The Wall, it was obvious even then, was a major new work – and I think we could all imagine ourselves performing it. It was also a huge relief for us to be presented with such a complete concept so early in the process.
On one of the demo tracks I could hear myself cursing down the phone. Roger had needed a ringing telephone tone as a rhythm, and assuming I was out, had called my home number without bothering to check whether I was there or not. I had picked up the phone and initially thought it was a crank call, since it seemed there was a madman crooning on the other end of the line – hence my swearing. Some time later, it transpired that this had been Roger singing away. Meanwhile, both of us remained confused for some time.