Copyright
Copyright © 2017, Éditions du Chêne/EPA—Hachette Livre
Translation copyright © 2017 Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers
Translation by Richard George Elliott and Jackie Smith by arrangement with Cambridge Publishing Management
Jacket design by Amanda Kain
Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Original title: Pink Floyd, La Totale
Texts: Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin
Published by Éditions du Chêne/EPA—Hachette Livre 2017
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LCCN: 2017930325
ISBNs: 978-0-316-43924-4 (hardcover), 978-0-316-43923-7 (ebook)
E3-20171017-JV-PC
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
The Cambridge Syndrome
Joe Boyd, Creator of the UFO Club
1967: Arnold Layne / Candy and a Currant Bun
1967: See Emily Play Scarecrow
THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
1967: Apples And Oranges / Paint Box
A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS
1968: It Would Be So Nice / Julia Dream
1968: Point Me At The Sky / Careful With That Axe, Eugene
MORE
UMMA-GUMMA
ZABRISKIE POINT
ATOM HEART MOTHER
RELICS
MEDDLE
OBSCURED BY CLOUDS
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
WISH YOU WERE HERE
ANIMALS
THE WALL
1982: When The Tigers Broke Free / Bring The Boys Back Home
THE FINAL CUT
A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON
THE DIVISION BELL
THE ENDLESS RIVER
Glossary
Bibliography
Newsletters
Foreword
Founded by Joe Boyd and John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the UFO Club opened its doors at 31 Tottenham Court Road on December 23, 1966. The occasion was marked by a show named “UFO Presents Night Tripper,” which included underground movies from New York plus music from Soft Machine and… Pink Floyd. The Floyd presented psychedelic versions of old blues songs, an enthralling light show, and, most importantly, occupying the front of the stage, a singer and guitarist with long curly hair and a vacant gaze that gave him an air of being lost in his own strange thoughts. His name? Syd Barrett. Jenny Fabian, author of the book Groupie, would never forget the thrilling performance by the still largely unknown quartet: “They were the first group to open people up to sound and colour,”11 she writes.
A few months later, on June 16 and August 4 respectively, the Floyd’s first single, “See Emily Play,” and first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, were released, marking the start of Pink Floyd’s vinyl odyssey, the magical adventure of four students named Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason. The adventure would continue with A Saucerful of Secrets, which saw the arrival of David Gilmour as Syd Barrett’s successor (although Syd still has a presence on that album), the soundtrack of Barbet Schroeder’s movie More, plus Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall… truly legendary albums in which the genres heroic fantasy, space opera, psychedelia, symphonic rock, and musique concrète (concrete music) rubbed shoulders or followed in succession. Albums that took Pink Floyd to the top of the prog-rock hierarchy and enabled them to establish themselves as one of the most influential groups not only in the history of rock, but in twentieth-century music as a whole.
It is to this unique musical approach, which continues to attract real interest and inspire no less real musical vocations today, that this book pays tribute. From their first single in 1967 to the album The Endless River in 2014, Pink Floyd has recorded tracks ranging from the acoustic ballad to the orchestral suite, from the movie soundtrack to the concept album. Analyzing the words and music, detailing the instruments, recording studios, producers, sound engineers, session musicians, and telling countless anecdotes, Pink Floyd: All the Songs uniquely and exhilaratingly offers total immersion in the creative process of this British band. The book is based on Pink Floyd’s official British discography (antecedent to the box set The Early Years: 1965–1972, released in November 2016). The outtakes described in it also form part of the official discography and therefore do not include bootlegs. These outtakes have been added to the track listings of several Pink Floyd albums rereleased on CD, notably Works, Zabriskie Point, and the Experience Edition series. Where the track listing of the US pressing differs, we have pointed this out. Similarly, in order to be as honest as possible with our readers, where the name of a musician or a recording date is uncertain or even unknown, we have indicated this with a (?). Finally, the B-sides of singles that have already been or are subsequently covered in the book within the context of an album are accompanied by an asterisk.
Over forty years ago, Pink Floyd went down in history with their three brilliant albums Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, and The Dark Side of the Moon. Pink Floyd: All the Songs turns the spotlight on the complete works, examining each one in a new and objective light. The curtain opens with “See Emily Play,” the strange story of a young woman with a tendency to borrow other people’s dreams and cry after dark.…
Note: The order of appearance of the musicians in the technical listing for each track has been chosen on the basis of the orchestral position of each instrument in the group: first of all the guitars, followed by the keyboards, and then the rhythm section, comprising the bass and drums (or percussion). Additional musicians are listed after the band members.
The Cambridge Syndrome
Since the second half of the sixties, Cambridge has been known for more than just the excellence of its university. This small city, through which the River Cam meanders, owes at least part of its latter-day renown to a group of young progressive rock musicians who, postdating the Beatles and the Rolling Stones by a few years, ushered in rock’s second revolution, that of psychedelia and avant-gardism. Three of Pink Floyd’s founder-members grew up in Cambridge and underwent their musical initiation there at the beginning of the decade, a time when the musical life of the prestigious university city was astonishingly vibrant. “Cambridge was a great place to grow up,” says David Gilmour. “You’re in a town dominated by education, you’re surrounded by bright people. But then it’s als
o got this rural heart that spreads practically to the centre. There were great places to meet up with friends.”1 This intellectually stimulating place with its pastoral setting was to leave its mark on the early years of the Floyd.
Roger Barrett, the Soul of the Group
Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett, the soul of the group, was born at 60 Glisson Road, Cambridge, on January 6, 1946. He was the fourth of Winifred (née Flack) and Arthur Max Barrett’s five children. An eminent anatomist and histologist at the university, Dr. Barrett was also an enlightened music lover (a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society) and, as a very good classical pianist, an experienced practical musician. It was therefore only natural that he should instill an interest in music in his three sons (Alan, Donald, and Roger) and two daughters (Rosemary and Ruth). At the tender age of seven, Roger and his sister Rosemary won a classical piano competition as a duo. Winifred was an extremely open-minded woman said by some to be related to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first Englishwoman to have gained a degree in medicine and to have been elected a mayor.
In 1950, the Barrett family moved to a larger house at 183 Hills Road. After a few years, Syd entered the prestigious Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where he took little interest in any of his subjects except art (for which he showed quite an aptitude), and displayed even less enthusiasm for the strict discipline that was enforced at the school.
On December 11, 1961, just a few weeks after being diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Arthur Max Barrett died aged fifty-two. Syd was profoundly affected by the loss. Before long, the family’s worsening financial circumstances forced his mother to take in lodgers, radically changing the atmosphere that had reigned in the family home up to then. The teenager took refuge more than ever in his painting and music, and started listening to the US pioneers of rock ’n’ roll, whose records were aired regularly on Radio Luxembourg, but also Lonnie Donegan, who started the fashion for skiffle in the United Kingdom.
After trying his hand at the ukulele and the banjo at the age of eleven, Syd took up the guitar two or three years later. His first instrument was probably an acoustic Hofner Congress, bought for £12, which he strummed in the family sitting room with friends on a Sunday afternoon. In spring 1962, Syd Barrett joined his first group, Geoff Mott and The Mottoes, which was the occasion for him to swap his acoustic guitar for an electric costing £25. According to Roger Waters, this was a Futurama III, imported by Selmer and manufactured in Czechoslovakia. It was the same model that George Harrison was using in Hamburg. In addition to Barrett, this neighborhood band comprised Geoff Mott on lead vocals and guitar, Tony Sainty on bass, and Clive Welham on drums. Their material consisted of the latest hits by the Shadows and rock ’n’ roll numbers recorded a few years earlier by Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly. The rehearsal venue was Barrett’s home. “Roger’s old playroom now had the atmosphere of a coffee bar as the teenagers chatted, smoked, listened to records or proudly showed off their new guitars,” write Mike Watkinson and Pete Anderson.2
David Gilmour, a Child of Grantchester
At this time, Clive Welham was in the habit of turning up at Syd Barrett’s house with one of his best friends, a certain David Gilmour. Born in Trumpington, a village near Cambridge, in 1946, David Jon Gilmour spent part of his childhood in the district of Newnham, specifically at 109 Grantchester Meadows, not far from the celebrated meadow bordering the Cam, which the group was to immortalize in a song a few years later. He was the eldest of Sylvia and Doug Gilmour’s four children, the other three being Peter, Mark, and Catherine. Sylvia was initially a teacher and subsequently a film editor, working on a regular basis for the BBC, while Doug was a senior lecturer in zoology at Cambridge University. Like Syd Barrett, David Gilmour came from a family of intellectuals interested in different forms of artistic expression, in particular, music. “My parents sung well,” he recalls, “my brother played flute, and my sister the violin.”3 He himself chose the guitar, under the influence of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley as well as various great names from the blues, from Howlin’ Wolf to the duo Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and the Shadows (featuring Hank Marvin on Stratocaster). And then there were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who had started to shake things up. Years later, Gilmour would remember spending hours with Barrett playing the Stones’ first single, “Come On,” over and over again, music that sealed a firm friendship…
Roger Waters, the Group’s Political Conscience
Another musician with similar musical tastes to Syd and David was George Roger Waters. Born in Great Bookham, Surrey, on September 6, 1943, George Roger, more readily called Roger, was the youngest son of Mary and Eric Fletcher Waters. His father, a physical education teacher, was simultaneously a devout Christian and a member of the Communist Party. A conscientious objector when Great Britain declared war against Nazi Germany, Eric served as an ambulance driver during the Blitz. Abandoning his pacifist ideals, he subsequently enlisted in the British Army, joining Z Company of the Eighth Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. On February 18, 1944, Second Lieutenant Waters fell at Aprilia, on the Italian Front, following the Allied landing at Anzio. As a result, Roger Waters, then aged five months, would never know his father. The resulting trauma was to haunt him for years and would play a key role in many of his future compositions, in particular those on the albums The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983).
The following year, Mary Waters and her sons left Surrey, which was being subjected to heavy V-1 bombardment, to go and live at 42 Rock Road in Cambridge. A teacher by profession, Mary obtained a position at Morley Memorial Primary School on Blinco Grove, where she was to oversee not only her own son’s education, but Syd Barrett’s as well.
A few years later, Roger Waters entered the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where Syd Barrett also studied. Their initial bond was founded on rock ’n’ roll and the Beat literature of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Roger Waters was a politically committed teenager. By the tender age of fifteen, he was already a member of the Cambridge Young Socialists and the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (YCND), a pacifist organization that advocated the unilateral nuclear disarmament of the United Kingdom. It was in one of the YCND’s marches, for which he designed the poster, that he became firm friends with Syd Barrett.
All Roads Lead to London
In 1962, the paths of the three friends diverged as they pursued their different studies. In September, Syd Barrett embarked on an art course at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (to which he had won a scholarship) on Collier Road, where David Gilmour was studying modern languages (including French); Roger Waters left Cambridge to study architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic in London.
Between 1962 and 1964, all three notched up a variety of musical experiences. Leaving Geoff Mott and The Mottoes, Syd Barrett joined Those Without in 1964 (the band’s name was inspired by the title of Françoise Sagan’s 1957 novel Dans un mois, dans un an, translated into English as Those without Shadows), which had risen out of the ashes of the Hollerin’ Blues (whose name had been taken from Charley Patton’s “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” recorded in 1929). Syd played both a Hofner 500/5 bass and a 1960 six-string Hofner Committee.
David Gilmour played with various bands, including the Newcomers and the Ramblers, before joining the blues-rock group Jokers Wild in 1964.
As for Roger Waters, in autumn 1963 he became a member of Sigma 6, a group formed by two of his fellow students at the polytechnic, Clive Metcalf and Keith Noble. “I was doing architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic,” recalls Roger. “I suppose we formed several groups there. It wasn’t serious, we didn’t play anywhere. […] We just sat around talking about how we would spend the money we would make. […] In college there’s always a room where people seem to gravitate to with their instruments and bits of things […]”4 Clive Metcalf was on bass, Keith Noble on vocals, Roger Waters on lead guitar, Rick Wright on rhythm guitar and keyboards, Nick Mason on drums, and, occasionally, Keith’s sister
Sheilagh Noble and Juliette Gale, Rick’s future wife, also on vocals. At the beginning of 1964, the group was renamed the Abdabs (without Sheilagh Noble). Their repertoire consisted of US standards such as “Summertime,” blues such as “Crawling King Snake,” and numbers written by Ken Chapman, a friend of Metcalf’s who would become the group’s manager. It was here that Roger Waters made the acquaintance of Rick Wright and Nick Mason.
Rick Wright and Nick Mason
Richard William Wright was born on July 28, 1943, in Pinner, Middlesex, to Daisy and Cedric Wright. His father was a biochemist at Unigate Dairies (then Uniq plc) and the family lived in Hatch End, a well-heeled suburb in northwest London. Rick was the beneficiary of a middle-class education, attending a very select private school. He initially learned piano and trumpet and, later, while convalescing from a broken leg, taught himself the guitar by listening to the American pioneers of the blues. He then developed this musical knowledge further at the Eric Gilder School of Music in London, where he studied composition and theory. It was at this time that he discovered the jazz of Miles Davis (the LPs Kind of Blue and Porgy and Bess in particular), John Coltrane, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, and others. Yet in 1962, he enrolled in the architecture program at Regent Street Polytechnic. Nick Mason would remember him as “… someone quiet, introverted…”5
Nicholas Berkeley Mason hails from Edgbaston, a suburb of Birmingham, where he came into the world on January 27, 1944. In addition to their son, his parents Sally and Bill (properly Rowland Hill Berkeley Mason) also had three daughters: Sarah, Melanie, and Serena. Immediately after the war, Nick’s father, a documentary filmmaker, was given the opportunity to join the Shell Film Unit. The entire Mason family moved to London, where they lived in the affluent district of Hampstead. The young Nick was put through a number of educational establishments and, inevitably, came to see the rock ’n’ roll revolution as a potent message of emancipation. At twelve years of age, he would spend whole nights listening to the show Rockin’ to Dreamland on Radio Luxembourg and bought himself Elvis Presley’s early 78s. Smitten with rock ’n’ roll, he dreamed of starting a band with his pals, even though none of them could really play an instrument! It was more or less by default that Nick turned to percussion, and partly too because he was given a pair of brushes as a present: “After the failure of my early piano and violin lessons, this seemed a perfectly legitimate reason to become a drummer.”5 The story then moves to Frensham Heights, a private school in Surrey (where he would meet his future first wife, Lindy), and subsequently, in 1962, the polytechnic, where he got to know Rick Wright and Roger Waters. “One afternoon, as I tried to shut out the murmur of forty fellow architectural students so that I could concentrate on the technical drawing in front of me, Roger’s long, distinctive shadow fell across my drawing board,” he recalls in his autobiography. “Although he had studiously ignored my existence up until that moment, Roger had finally recognized in me a kindred musical spirit trapped within a budding architect’s body. The star-crossed paths of Virgo and Aquarius had dictated our destiny, and were compelling Roger to seek a way to unite our minds in a great creative adventure,” writes the Pink Floyd drummer tongue-in-cheek, before shattering the illusion: “No, no, no. […] The only reason Roger had approached me was that he wanted to borrow my car.”5
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