Inside Out

by Nick Mason

  Led by David, but with input from Rick, the formal songs were created. My impression is that David had finally got to grips with producing music when he needed it. Perhaps some of the onus of lyric writing had been removed with assistance from Polly Samson, his new girlfriend, later his wife. Maybe the previous tour and album had proved a point, but it definitely felt less pressured, and both David and Rick seemed to produce work more easily. David was still required to lead the process, but with Bob Ezrin on board again, and the friendly face of Andy Jackson handling the engineering, it was a familiar rather than untested team.

  Throughout this preparatory phase, the atmosphere was pleasantly calm. Above all it was litigation-free, as correspondence with Roger via the legal profession had come to an end. I was finding it particularly helpful to be spending so much time making music with the others, and with a real sense of purpose. I have never been the most diligent of drummers when it comes to practising technique, so the simple act of playing together regularly helped get me back in some kind of shape. Since Knebworth in 1990, my only genuinely live performance had been at the Chelsea Arts Ball in October 1992 at the Royal Albert Hall. The Chelsea Arts Club had regenerated itself – and as part of this resurgence they mounted a ball, which was one of the biggest events they had ever done. Tom Jones was appearing, and – as a result of Gary, Tim and Guy working with Tom Jones – we had agreed to provide a guest appearance of three numbers. Inevitably this led on to Jon Carin and Tim turning up. We rehearsed for a day or so, and played a relatively low-key set with virtually no stage effects, films or fireworks.

  After leaving Britannia Row we reconvened on David’s houseboat to develop a core of pieces. From February 1993 through to May we worked on about twenty-five different ideas, trying to play as much as possible together in the studio. The houseboat was certainly more congenial than recording in a bunker. By now David had added a conservatory containing a kitchen, sitting and dining area. The ambience of the river and the benefits of operating in daylight worked its charms again, as did having a definite split between the workspace on the houseboat and the area on dry land where we could sit, talk and discuss progress.

  The album feels much more home-made, very much as a band playing together in one space. I think that Rick in particular felt significantly more integrated in the process this time, compared to Momentary Lapse. It was nice to have him back.

  The songs had been through a substantial sifting process. There was plenty of material and no desperation; instead we were able to simply concentrate on developing ideas. At band meetings we now started whittling down the possible songs to the probables. We set up an extremely democratic system whereby David, Rick and I would each award marks out of ten for each song, regardless of who had originally generated the piece. This should have worked smoothly, had Rick not misinterpreted the democratic principles underlying the voting system. He simply awarded all of his ideas the full ten points, and everything else got nul points. This meant that all of Rick’s pieces had a ten-point head start, and it took David and me a while to work out why this new album was rapidly becoming a Rick Wright magnum opus. The voting system was placed under review, as we came up with various systems of electoral colleges and second preference votes that would have graced any mayoral contest.

  The same issue reappeared a decade later when we were selecting tracks for inclusion on Echoes, the compilation album which required input from David, Rick, myself and Roger. As well as the oars being poked in by a whole galley-load of record company executives, engineers, producers and managers, this time we had to deal with the fact that Roger, like Rick before him, would only vote for his own tracks. God bless democracy.

  Before the summer break we took the eight or nine favourite tracks into Olympic Studios in Barnes, recruiting the other players – apart from the backing singers – from the last tour (Gary, Guy, Tim and Jon) and recorded the lot in a week. This gave us a boost, knowing that we could spend more time developing the songs since we realised the essential elements of each song were already in place.

  In fact, armed with this safety net, we eventually approached the recording after the summer in a very different way to all our previous albums. We recorded all the backing tracks on the Astoria, completed with no more than the three of us – Rick, David and myself – setting up the pieces during a couple of weeks in September. Advances in technology since Momentary Lapse meant that we could master tracks on the boat as we came towards the end of six months of recording – although there was the usual mad panic at the very end involving the use of other studios for some overdubs as the pressure mounted. Some traditions are too deep-rooted to give up completely.

  Once again, it was good to have Bob Ezrin on board, sorting out the drum parts and helping with the frankly tedious process of recording and modifying the drum sounds. As the final shape of the songs emerged, Michael Kamen was brought in: he offered to provide the string arrangements we needed if we could loan him a sound system and some lights for a children’s opera he was putting on in Notting Hill. This seemed like the bargain of a lifetime – an Oscar-winning composer in exchange for a couple of speakers and a few spots. What we hadn’t realised was that the musical extravaganza Michael was planning would have made Starlight Express seem low-key…

  This far into the recording process, all we needed was a deadline or two, generally anathema to all Floyd members. A salutary lesson had been learnt on the previous album, when a certain amount of dilly-dallying on our part, and shilly-shallying from the record company, had resulted in the album coming out alongside Michael Jackson’s Bad and Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel Of Love. Not surprisingly, in that particular contest, our podium position in the charts was distinctly bronze.

  This time the deadline was set by making a commitment to a major tour, due to start in April 1994, the thinking being that with a longer leadtime we could plan ahead and construct the most efficient routing through the vast stadiums of the US. But as none of us were avid football fans, we missed one rather important factor: the tour coincided with the 1994 World Cup in the US, which meant that certain stadiums were not only unavailable on some critical dates, but the pitches could not be used for weeks beforehand to protect the precious turf and maintain their pristine condition. Rather than the logical and elegant tour route we had imagined, the end result looked like it had been devised by a blindfolded man throwing darts at a map of the States – or worse, by the old crew at the Bryan Morrison Agency…

  The final stages of the album involved the trauma of title and cover design. Yet again the choice of title turned out to be a cliffhanger. Even by January 1994 we had reached no agreement, and every day frantic discussions would take place as deadlines were approached with caution, moved and finally missed. David favoured Pow Wow, I liked Down To Earth. Everyone had a favourite. No majority could be reached (even bringing into play our by now vast range of sophisticated voting systems).

  Help was at hand in the rather large shape of Douglas Adams. As well as being the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas was an Apple Mac genius, guitar enthusiast and – fortunately for us – a fan of Pink Floyd. He could bring a marvellous sense of humour to the most desperate moments. He became party to a lot of the discussions about the album title. We found it immensely comforting to talk about our problems with a fellow sufferer of deadline dramas – Douglas was once heard to remark that he loved the sound of deadlines whistling past his ears.

  At dinner one night, we agreed with Douglas that if he came up with a name for the album that we liked, we would make a payment to the charity of his choice. He cogitated for a while and suggested The Division Bell. The real irritation was that it was a phrase contained within the existing lyrics: we really should have read them more carefully.

  Armed at last with a definitive title, Storm Thorgerson came up with a huge variety of ideas, and we finally settled on the concept of the pair of heads forming a single head in a kind of visual illusion. Storm is famous for i
nsisting on doing things for real rather than employing trickery, and so the heads (finally constructed, after various attempts, in both stone and metal) were installed in a suitable field somewhere near Ely.

  I visited the location for the photoshoot one chilly day in February: it was a stunning scene, with the heads parked out in the fens. One of our biggest problems was trying to hide them from the press, who would have loved to pre-empt the album’s release. Army surplus stores were raided and large quantities of camouflage netting were acquired to be draped over the heads in a rather half-hearted attempt to disguise them. The fact that the press failed to get their exclusive was, I suspect, either due to the fact that we had over-estimated the interest in our album, or that the chilly east coast winds whipping in from Siberia seemed an unattractive alternative to the creature comforts of the Groucho Club bar in Soho. Storm, who was out on the photoshoot near Ely Cathedral, remembers that the muddy conditions meant that the lowloader carrying the heads could not reach the centre of the chosen field, so a slightly disgruntled group of photographer’s assistants manhandled the heavy items across the mud and set them up. They were significantly more disgruntled when Storm informed them that it was not the right field.

  Meanwhile, we had been evolving the stage show. Back in 1973 we had done a show at the Hollywood Bowl, and a photo was hanging in Steve O’Rourke’s office as a constant reminder of just how good a stage can look. We had in mind to try and take some of the elements of that particular show and develop them for the stadiums we would be playing. We also wanted to add a degree of flexibility into the proceedings. On the previous tour, the set had been completely nailed down, almost to the second. This time we wanted to have the option of changing the running order and substituting songs.

  We again resisted the use of large video screens showing the live performance. We never have and probably never will feature close-ups of the band in that way. But we did want film pieces for some of the new music, and, having made the decision to perform some of The Dark Side Of The Moon, felt it was time to revisit a number of the Dark Side film clips. Although many had lasted very well and were included once more for the Dark Side suite, much of the film was very dated. In particular the politicians of two decades earlier who featured in Brain Damage were now so passé that half the audience were too young to know who they were. The rest had probably forgotten.

  We convened a number of production meetings with perhaps our best team to date. Marc Brickman (fresh from the opening shows for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona and having fallen out once and for all with Barbara Streisand) was back as lighting designer, armed with a bagload of new technology. He was joined by Mark Fisher as stage designer and Robbie Williams as production manager. Storm was appended to the group since he was responsible for all the additional film required – some six different pieces lasting for around forty minutes. I say appended, due to Storm’s lovable inability to work in any capacity other than as a dictator.

  The initial designs involved a hemisphere sitting on the ground, which then peeled back to reveal the stage. This had to be ditched as soon as it became clear that such a structure, although extremely elegant, would require the removal of the entire audience from the area in front of the stage. The final version was conceived via a number of intricate models, but even these failed to reveal some of the problems of working with the real thing.

  When the stage was fully erected we found that, because of all the multiple levels, niches and alcoves we had constructed, not all the musicians could see each other, requiring visual cueing by video screens or ESP to make contact. It was also something of a health and safety nightmare, with an extraordinary number of trapdoors. I had thought the previous tour’s stage was hard to navigate, but this new stage was positively labyrinthine in a U-boat sort of way, as it was all too easy to head off into some under-stage lighting cul-de-sac in error – or have a severe accident plunging down into some uncharted hole.

  Having wrestled the stage into submission, we had to turn our attention to the instruments, trying to avoid turning our nice, flat surfaces into something resembling a junkyard. Many happy hours were spent in Drum Workshops, the factory of my drum technician Clive Brooks, devising the stands for a drum kit that would work with this staging. Gary Wallis and I ended up with thirty-odd drums, twenty pads, forty-odd cymbals and innumerable other bits of junk bolted to the drum risers, an installation that should have qualified us for the Turner Prize.

  We had hoped to use in-ear monitoring to avoid the unsightly wedges that clutter stage fronts. Unfortunately that didn’t work out, and we were obliged to return to monitors (this was probably one of the last tours to use big wedge monitors, as earpieces have now been perfected). However, I was able to use a tiny radio pack and earpieces which meant my foldback had a volume level no louder than a moderate Walkman, and a mix consisting primarily of bass, percussion and lead guitar, not one recommended for general release.

  Meanwhile, Marc Brickman was dispatched to find the best and latest developments in effects and lighting. For example, the lasers on this tour were far more powerful than anything we had been able to use before and could process the light into alternative colours, rather than the usual green. One of Marc’s expeditions was to the Hughes Corporation. As one of America’s largest arms manufacturers the cessation of eyeball-to-eyeball stand-offs with the USSR had left them anxious to find new uses for all the military technology they now had sculling about idle. Swords into ploughshares sounds great in principle, but it was not quite as easy as it sounds. Unfortunately in spite of the wonderfully cheap deals available we were unable to think of anything to do with a Sidewinder missile – or not during the show anyway…

  Our quest for technical innovation was also thwarted when we found we could not use one particularly and enormously powerful projector – a possibility we explored as an alternative to video – since once the projector’s motor, like a turbine, was started it could not be stopped or the whole thing would explode. The prospect of transporting around the globe a projector permanently running at 400,000 revs per minute daunted even the most hardy professionals on the team. Certainly none of the band was prepared to travel on the same plane.

  As we looked through the back catalogue and decided to return to some older material, we reinstated our acquaintance with Peter Wynne Willson. After his involvement with us in 1967 and 1968, Peter had been working variously with a hippie theatre group touring in a bus, organising lighting for other bands, working as a joiner, manufacturing furniture for Pan’s People choreographer Flick Colby, producing prisms for the disco revolution, and developing a device called the PanCam which used a controlled mirror moving in front of a spotlight.

  Peter met up with Marc Brickman, having in his words ‘a huge amount of fun’ working with some liquid slides and re-creating the Daleks. Technical advances actually made it more difficult to re-create the feel of the originals. The level of heat generated by 6KW of light meant that instead of the original pigmented colours, the colours had to be diachronic. And whereas in the Sixties he could use the heat of the projector to do some of the work, and hairdryers to both heat and cool slides, for the new versions a whole Aircon system had to be installed to influence the gate. However, the new Daleks, larger than ever, were much better in one way: courtesy of safety elements not even considered in the Sixties, they were thankfully less life-endangering than the versions that had once threatened to decapitate us like demented Samurai warriors.

  All was proceeding well on the lighting front. Over in the blue corner, however, where the new film clips were in hand, piles of storyboards were arriving as Storm tried desperately to get some kind of reactions, let alone decisions, while time slipped away. One of our problems was committing to which pieces we were going to play in the show. There was little point in making a half-million dollars’ worth of film if we then decided we didn’t like the song anyway. Eventually we had five different pieces of film in production – if we hadn’t been finishing the
record and rehearsing at the same time we might have had fun experiencing this miniature Hollywood studio.

  Music rehearsals for the tour took place at Black Island studios in West London, slightly held back due to the non-appearance of the lead guitarist and main vocalist, who was once more detained on the boat working on the final mixes. Tim Renwick again deputised as Musical Director. Fortunately, since we had all played the pieces on the record we were all familiar with the new music, which was also nothing like as complicated as the music on the previous record.

  We then decamped to Palm Springs, but instead of being able to work on our tennis forehands, we headed off to actual production rehearsals – at the Norton Air Force Base near San Bernardino. These events were not without drama. At one point a visibly shaken rigger who had been working twenty feet overhead at the apex of the arch descended and suggested clearing the area. The whole structure was buckling, and the thought of a hundred tons of steel work collapsing, coupled with cancelling the shows for at least three months, gave hardbitten tour personnel pause for thought. Luckily it was a rectifiable design fault detail, but proved again that myriad computer calculations and projections do not equal the final assembly.

  The amount of work being generated and undertaken was enormous. We had the films in production, staging and effects being built and equipment assembled; new pieces of stage and show require a great deal of work and modification to operate properly. As is the norm, we had to produce 30 per cent more devices than we ended up with, as we discarded those that didn’t make the grade or proved too expensive or dangerous.