Inside Out

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Inside Out Page 25

by Nick Mason


  It was a pity that before I’d even started work on The Final Cut, Roger felt it necessary to announce aggressively that since whatever I did ‘was drumming’, I couldn’t claim either extra royalties or credit for any of this work. This really did seem like behaviour beginning to border on the megalomaniac, particularly since I posed no threat to his plans. I decided to look on the bright side: at least it was a way of escaping from the fraught atmosphere in the studio.

  If I was not having much fun, David was certainly not having an easy time either. Roger was studiously ignoring any of David’s suggestions, which is why he probably wanted Michael on board to augment the musical input. In many ways Michael was probably as much a substitute for David as for Rick or Bob, given his melodic strengths and his experience in writing, and arranging. It may well have been paranoia, but it did look as though David was being frozen out. By the time The Final Cut was finished Roger was effectively running the show. I think we had always worked on the basis that the writers should have the final say on how the work should be produced. With no writing contribution at all from David his role was inevitably eroded.

  However, I have no recollection of discussing whether it should be released as a Roger Waters solo album. In any case, such a plan would probably already have been too late. The record company were expecting a Pink Floyd album, and would not have taken kindly to being presented with a Roger Waters solo work. I would have resisted it because it would, I think, have signalled the end of the band, and I do have an unfortunate tendency to operate in the belief that ‘if we do nothing, maybe the problem will go away’. And the option of us starting all over again on a group album at some point in the future seemed unthinkable. We should of course have resolved these issues at the time, but we somehow dodged them completely.

  Although we possessed a remarkable ability to enrage and upset each other, while still maintaining a straight face, we never acquired the skill of talking to each other about important issues. After The Dark Side Of The Moon there had been a pronounced tendency for all of us to deliver criticism badly – and to take it even worse. Roger is sometimes credited with enjoying confrontation, but I don’t think that’s the case. I do think Roger is often unaware of just how alarming he can be, and once he sees a confrontation as necessary he is so grimly committed to winning that he throws everything into the fray – and his everything can be pretty scary. On the positive side I think it is an enormous asset to his golf, tennis and poker playing… David, on the other hand, may not be so initially alarming, but once decided on a course of action is hard to sway. When his immovable object met Roger’s irresistible force, difficulties were guaranteed to follow.

  What ensued was a massive argument about credits; eventually David’s name disappeared, although it was agreed that he would still be paid. Michael Kamen remained as co-producer – along with James Guthrie.

  Why were we prepared to go along with what felt like Roger’s takeover? We accepted so many things as inevitable that, looking back, seem unnecessary. Such craven compliance might have been the result of gradual changes wrought in the band structure over the previous decade. Perhaps lacking confidence in his own writing abilities, David may have felt that if we confronted these issues we risked losing Roger and being unable to continue. Or in the aftermath of Rick’s departure maybe we feared being marginalised and then negotiated out individually. It pains me to admit it, but whatever the reasons, the tendency to cast Roger as the ultimate villain, though tempting, is probably misplaced.

  I remember this period as particularly tense, with a sense of struggling to hold things together. My own life was not exactly in apple-pie order. After the year away I was dealing with my own dramas. I was breaking up my marriage to Lindy and about to hurtle into a new relationship with my present wife Annette. Given my penchant for avoiding confrontation in emotional issues and real life it would smack of understatement to say this was not an easy time. It was particularly dreadful for Lindy and my two daughters Chloe and Holly, although I have a bad feeling that I probably felt that I was the one really suffering.

  By the time of the album’s release in March 1983 another Floyd connection had been severed. Due to some heavy budgetary overspend on one video shoot, Storm and Po had disbanded Hipgnosis (citing ‘visual differences’ perhaps) and despite Gerald Scarfe’s involvement in The Wall, Storm might reasonably have expected to pick up the job. However, both Gerry and Storm were passed over, and Roger chose to design the cover himself. He used Willie Christie to take the pictures – I think this was a slight embarrassment for Willie, since he happened to be Roger’s brother-in-law as well as an excellent photographer – but the absence of Hipgnosis did add another few decibels to the impression of the ‘Last Post’ being sounded for the Pink Floyd that once had been.

  I don’t think Roger feels entirely happy with The Final Cut – ‘deeply flawed’ is one comment he made, I believe – but there must be many things about it he is happy with. The fact that it is dedicated to his father spells out how personal the record was to him, and in a way how disenfranchised from it the rest of us were. For me the record represents such a difficult time in my life that this overrides any real judgement of the pieces. As with all our records the final finished disc is as much a diary of a certain number of months of my life, rather than a musical piece that I can view objectively.

  Music is capable of tapping directly into a particular phase of your life, and you can maintain affection for dreadful songs for years and years (‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is’ as Noel Coward put it). For recording musicians, the odd thing is that this time-frame is out of kilter, as the reality of an album actually exists in a period up to a year prior to its release. For me, The Final Cut is the latter half of 1982, rather than 1983…

  After The Final Cut was finished there were no plans for the future. I have no recollection of any promotion and there was no suggestion of any live performances to promote the record. It would have been hard to imagine a show that could follow The Wall, anyway. But it was another factor in how David and I viewed the future. Both David and myself regarded playing live and touring as an integral part of being in the band. If being part of a Roger-led Floyd meant that there would be no live shows (‘due to indiscipline, all touring has been cancelled this term’) and only aggravation in the recording studio, the future prospect seemed distinctly unappealing.

  Consequently, David and Roger both went off to work on solo projects. David’s About Face album and tour concentrated more on playing and less on spectacle. Much of the material played was from his solo albums, but the tour and album helped us later on in a number of ways: they showcased David at his very best as a musician, and the strong relationship that he was able to build up with the press and the record company stood us in extremely good stead when we most needed it four years later. It might also be the case that it brought home to him the necessity of putting on the full theatrical show if one wanted to fill the big arenas.

  Just before his tour reached the Hammersmith Odeon, David approached me and suggested it would be nice to have Rick and myself make an appearance at the end of the last London show to join him on ‘Comfortably Numb’. It sounded fun, and I turned up in the afternoon to have a run-through and check out playing someone else’s kit. This felt a little strange, particularly as I hadn’t played the piece for four years, but Chris Slade, the drummer on David’s tour, couldn’t have been nicer. After years of drummers grumpily surrendering their kit saying, ‘Don’t use the snare’, it proved the case that the more able the drummer the more relaxed the attitude… The song sounded wonderful and we loved playing it. I hate to lapse into metaphysical parlance, but I think we did feel some particular magic performing together again, and I think this was a moment that contributed to the subsequent events of 1986.

  Roger, meanwhile, was reviving the Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking project that he had prepared demos for years earlier as an alternative to The Wall. The album was released shortly after
David’s Hammersmith shows, following which Roger proceeded to put on what was his version of a Pink Floyd tour, utilising new animation from Gerry Scarfe as well as elements from Fisher Park. I went to see his show at Earls Court, and found the experience had an astonishingly depressing effect on me. The first half was made up of Floyd numbers and gave me the impression of being a (rather elderly) Peter Pan at the nursery window – that was my part being played by someone else. In retrospect this one event probably had as much to do in galvanising me as anything else. I realised I could not quite so easily let go and watch the train roll on without me.

  Rick was working with Dave Harris on a project called Zee (they released an album almost simultaneously with Roger), and I became involved with a short documentary film that neatly combined music and motor racing. In fact it tied in perfectly with a collaboration I had formed with a friend of mine, Rick Fenn, the 10cc keyboard player with whom I had set up a small company to provide music for commercials and films.

  The idea for Life Could Be A Dream involved a deal with Rothmans and their team of World Sports Car Championship Porsche 956 cars. I would drive with the works team in some of the 1,000-km races with a camera on board. As an added bonus I would get a drive at Le Mans with René Metge and Richard Lloyd (by pure coincidence, Richard had in a previous life been a Decca producer and had been responsible for recording Rick’s first song with Adam, Mike & Tim). With a soundtrack, we thought this might have some commercial potential. I must admit, sadly, that I had very little compunction about wearing all the tobacco company logos – and paid careful attention as to how to field difficult questions about smoking. We then went on to make an album, which included a single called ‘Lie For A Lie’ that David generously provided vocals on. Even with his help it failed to get close enough to the charts to tarnish the paintwork, let alone dent it.

  There was little chance of Pink Floyd performing together in this period, although in 1985 there was a vague possibility of us appearing at Live Aid. Eventually David was the only one of us who made it, playing guitar with Bryan Ferry, which had the added bonus of introducing him to keyboard player Jon Carin.

  I used the greater amount of spare time to learn how to fly, finally conquering the fears that had been engendered by too many knuckle-whitening flights on tour. This obviously set a trend and somewhere along the line David also got his pilot’s licence – as did Steve O’Rourke. We ended up sharing planes for a number of years, and frightening ourselves far more than we ever did on all those commercial flights.

  This phase of solo projects – which might have offered the four of us a useful breathing space – in fact only served to create another source of dissatisfaction. Roger had decided, around this time, that he would renegotiate his individual deal with Steve, and he wanted to keep these negotiations confidential. Steve felt, both on moral grounds and also probably for financial reasons, that he was obliged to inform the rest of us. This betrayal – as Roger saw it – coupled with his belief that Steve had tended to represent David more strongly throughout the tetchy Final Cut negotiations, led Roger to want to replace Steve as his manager.

  We did meet and talk; we even had a relatively relaxed meeting in 1984 at a Japanese restaurant, soothed by sushi and sake, to discuss all the things we weren’t going to do – and then Steve joined us to hear about it. Roger was doubtless misled by our general bonhomie and acquiescence into believing that we accepted Pink Floyd was almost over. David and I meanwhile thought that after Roger had finished Pros And Cons, life could continue. We had, after all, had a number of hiatuses before. Roger sees this meeting as duplicity, rather than diplomacy – I disagree. Clearly, our communication skills were still troublingly nonexistent. We left the restaurant with diametrically opposed views of what had been decided.

  IN 1986 DAVID and I decided to try and make another album, without Roger. There had not been any specific single moment of revelation when we resolved to go ahead. David had in fact made up his own mind quite early on, and had been working on a number of demos. There then followed a number of half-conversations, when Steve O’Rourke might have said, ‘Do you want to…?’ or David might have asked me, ‘Well, should we or not?’ Eventually these discussions gathered their own momentum, and we finally agreed, ‘Let’s do it.’ Once the decision was made it was irreversible. It was a little like losing Syd in 1968: the alternative options only seem alarming in hindsight. We did not know exactly how it was to be done, but we felt it must be possible. Despite my personal track record as rock ’n’ roll’s resident vicar of Bray, I was totally committed to the decision. I am still slightly surprised by this show of will. So much of our previous work had consisted of Roger’s songwriting and direction, and yet I had great faith in David’s ability to awaken any dormant abilities relatively quickly, as well as confidence in his vocals and guitar work, which had contributed so much to the band’s sound.

  I don’t think we considered whether there would be any legal ramifications, but we were certainly aware of the risks. At a time when the press was still interested in the fight with Roger, there was a disturbing possibility that we might give them a field day by releasing an album that proved the gainsayers correct by revealing ourselves as no more than money-grubbing forgers. Another potential horror was that we might be defeated by our erstwhile colleague in a shoot-out among the megastore shelves, always a significantly powerful drive, and a sad indictment of our real motivations compared to the dream of bringing beautiful music to lovely people. The damage to our egos was potentially more damaging than any financial disasters.

  Throughout the recording process the ongoing struggle with Roger continued unabated, and provided its own roller-coaster entertainment. Endless phone calls with lawyers were replaced by lengthy meetings, often held in the Dickensian surroundings of the Inns of Court. In the hope of finding a clinching piece of evidence, hours of discussion revolved about the dullest aspects of our history, namely the legal niceties of what we thought we might have agreed to verbally eighteen years earlier. Litigation is a remarkable experience, as you select your gladiators for their fighting skills and then sit back to watch them perform. It is probably the most overpriced form of entertainment I have ever encountered, and also the most nerve-racking.

  Away from the legal front line, there had been some discussion and attempts at reconciliation. I had dinner one night with Roger, who said that he would settle for being released from Steve’s contract. Unfortunately, Steve was a significant part of our enterprise and I think we felt that we were bound together, perhaps more than necessary. Part of the problem was that nothing was written down. There was a verbal agreement – just as binding as a written one, so the lawyers tell us – between Steve and the band, which meant that any actions by one individual had to be ratified by the rest of us. Discussions were muddied by a lack of understanding, certainly by me, of what the implications really were – as a result the issues remained unclear and any trust uncertain. In retrospect, we should have settled with Roger then and there.

  However, I did think I understood Roger’s predicament. On the one hand he felt that he was Pink Floyd, and had carried the band on his shoulders for ten years or more as a writer and director of operations. But as long as the band existed as any sort of entity, it represented a real obstacle to his solo career, since the record company would always be waiting for a Pink Floyd release. Any of his solo work would be seen as intermediate filler material and would be unlikely to receive the kind of promotional support that would accrue to a band album.

  What Roger really needed was for the band to be formally dissolved to clear the way for his own solo career, and he probably assumed that this would happen if he withdrew his services, given that Rick was no longer technically a member, I had done little beyond motor racing and becoming a garage proprietor, and even David had become more of a producer and guest guitarist with other musicians than a band member. What no one anticipated was David’s response to what I think he felt was the lack of cred
it and exposure for his contributions and ideas. The division of spoils – and more particularly credit – is often unfair, but he had perhaps suffered the most injustice. Even I, not prone to confrontation, felt aggrieved that after twenty years I thought I was being told to quietly lie down, roll over and retire.

  Although in the past I had usually sided with Roger, who was after all one of my oldest friends, I was mortified at the suggestion that I had contributed nothing and was unemployable without him now. The quote I am credited with that I particularly like is ‘Roger was fond of saying no one’s indispensable and… he was right’.

  In retrospect, Roger probably made a tactical error in going to law – and at one point we were all set to go to court. However, since ‘patience’ is not a word that appears in Roger’s thesaurus, his innate desire to act rather than wait meant he was driven to bring everything to the boil – and achieved the opposite result to the one he intended. For David in particular, one of the great spurs was the fact that Roger, hearing about the plans for a new album, had told him ‘You’ll never do it.’

  Roger had already intimated that he thought that Pink Floyd was finished, and his falling out with Steve had escalated. With everyone feeling angry, we dug trenches to maintain our respective positions and refused to budge. Roger broke the phoney war by announcing to the world that the band ‘was over’. This was a surprise to the rest of us. And it proved another incentive to make the album.

 

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