Whatever meaning is attributed to “Careful with That Axe, Eugene,” this is a musical epic that confirms the new direction being taken by Pink Floyd while at the same time closing the book on the Syd Barrett era.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
It should not be forgotten that the word axe, despite its connotations of slashing and severing, is also used by guitarists to designate their chosen instrument.
The scream that issues from Roger Waters in “Careful with That Axe, Eugene,” and later “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” and “Run Like Hell” (The Wall) is perhaps to be interpreted as a primal scream along the lines of the psychotherapy of the same name that inspired John Lennon to write his first post-Beatles album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, in 1970.
MORE
ALBUM
MORE
RELEASE DATE:
United Kingdom: June 13, 1969
Label: Columbia Records
RECORD NUMBER: SCX 6346
Number 9 (United Kingdom), number 2 (France), number 4
(Netherlands)
Cirrus Minor / The Nile Song / Crying Song / Up The Khyber / Green Is The Colour / Cymbaline / Party Sequence / Main Theme / Ibiza Bar / More Blues / Quicksilver / A Spanish Piece / Dramatic Theme OUTTAKES Theme (Beat Version) / Hollywood / Seabirds / Paris Bar (?) / Stephan’s Tit (?)
More, a Psychedelic Soundtrack with a Touch of Folk
More was not the first time Pink Floyd had collaborated with the world of motion pictures: their music had already served as the soundtrack for a number of documentaries, including Peter Whitehead’s Jeanetta Cochrane and Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), Peter Sykes’s The Committee (1968), and Anthony Stern’s San Francisco (also 1968). But More was the first time they had written music specifically for a movie. As Rick Wright commented at the time: “Films seem to be the answer for us at the moment. It would be nice to do a science-fiction movie—our music seems to be that way oriented.”47 In the absence of an opportunity in science fiction, the four members of the Floyd would end up composing and performing the music for a story of love and self-destruction.
A Movie Debut with a Tragic Storyline
After studying in Paris, Barbet Schroeder became a spiritual younger brother of the masters of the French New Wave, writing for the French movie magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and getting his first break in moving pictures as Jean-Luc Godard’s trainee on the set of Les Caribiniers (The Soldiers, 1963). After this he founded a production company with Éric Rohmer called Les Films du Losange, which produced Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales between 1962 and 1972.
More was Barbet Schroeder’s first full-length work and his first success. It is the story of Stefan (Klaus Grünberg), a German student from Lübeck who has just obtained a degree in mathematics. In need of a break, he hitchhikes to Paris. During a game of poker in a Paris bar, he strikes up a friendship with Charlie (Michel Chanderli), a big-time gambler and small-time crook with good connections in the criminal underworld of the French capital. One evening, Stefan and Charlie, who are poor, attend a party in an apartment in a well-to-do part of town. There, Stefan meets Estelle (Mimsy Farmer), a young and enigmatic New Yorker addicted to drugs, and it is love at first sight. A few days later, Estelle is preparing to leave for the island of Ibiza and suggests that Stefan join her there. There they embark on a torrid and chaotic love affair punctuated by moments of psychedelic euphoria and disappointment in matters of the heart, set against a background of hard and soft drugs. This scenario ends with the departure of Estelle—a new embodiment of the femme fatale—and the death of Stefan—the antihero of this modern Greek tragedy—from an overdose. “I had already been living in Ibiza for fifteen years,” explains Barbet Schroeder, “so naturally I chose that location for the film. At that time I was thinking about a number of stories, stories that involved the figure of the ‘femme fatale,’ but a modern ‘femme fatale.’ Like a vampire movie. I was also influenced by the story of Icarus whose wings were burnt because he flew too close to the sun.”48
Barbet Shroeder’s Challenge: Movie “Anti-Music”
As seen through Schroeder’s lens, Estelle and Stefan are symbols par excellence of the Western postwar generation, young people seeking an alternative way of life within a society that is affluent and materialistic, but marked still by the anguish of the Second World War and the Nazis’ evasion of justice. This hallucinogenic love story, set against the majestic backdrop of Ibiza, is all the more intense because it is obvious that it can only end in tragedy. What was required was a musical soundtrack in tune with the emotions felt by the two main characters while also reflecting the atmosphere and special charm of Ibiza. “Like everyone at the time, I listened to the great proliferation of music,” explains Barbet Schroeder. “I discovered Pink Floyd, who had only made two records and who fascinated and excited me.” And the director continues: “[I decided] that this was the characters’ music, this was what they listened to, what they liked to listen to.”49
Barbet Schroeder therefore traveled to London to meet the four members of Pink Floyd. “I explained my idea to them… I’m against movie music. At the time, I was a real disciple of Rohmer, who was opposed to movie music. So for me, it’s source music, as it is known. In other words, music that comes out of the scenes, that is part of the scenes, that is what the people are in the process of listening to […]. When we did the mixing, we rerecorded the music coming out of a loudspeaker in a room, for example. In each case, we tried to respect the place and the texture of the place.”49
“Barbet […] approached us with the film virtually complete and edited,” explains Mason. “Despite these constraints and a fairly desperate deadline, Barbet was an easy man to work with—we were paid £600 each, a substantial amount in 1968, for eight days’ work around Christmas—and there was little pressure to provide Oscar-winning songs or a Hollywood-style soundtrack. In fact, complementing the various mood sequences, Roger came up with a number of songs for the film that became part of our live shows for some time after.”5
A Combination of Bucolic Folk and Hard Rock
More was also the Floyd’s first complete album without Syd Barrett, although his influence can still be felt on some of the tracks, mainly the acoustic ones. The musical challenge with which Barbet Schroeder had presented the group allowed David Gilmour, Rick Wright, Nick Mason, and above all Roger Waters, who composed five songs and co-composed six others (out of a total of thirteen), to cross a new barrier. In this soundtrack, Pink Floyd abandoned the space rock of A Saucerful of Secrets (with the possible exception of “Cirrus Minor”) for a kind of bucolic folk (“Cymbaline” and “Green Is the Colour”) that intermittently calls to mind the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention, but also, and this was something completely new, for hard rock (“The Nile Song” and “Ibiza Bar”).
Having said that, there is no lack of cohesion to the work as a whole. The compositions of a pastoral nature, just like the rock numbers and Spanish-sounding melodies—whether sung or instrumental—are so many stages in the dramaturgy of the movie. They amount to the perfect musical illustration of the journey undertaken by Estelle and Stefan from Paris to Ibiza—the word journey needing to be understood here in both the physical and emotional sense, for Barbet Schroeder claims that More derives from personal experience. It is an “utterly tragic story, a story about a femme fatale and heroin, not about the psychedelic generation.”49 And the director adds: “I introduced LSD into the movie as a way [for the characters] to stop taking heroin.”49 To put it another way, Pink Floyd’s music, by turns tranquil and harrowing, accompanies a couple’s steady decline on the Spanish island.
After being shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1969, Barbet Schroeder’s film opened in New York movie theaters on August 5 and in French theaters on October 21. It would also be released in various other countries, although not in the United Kingdom. The Pink Floyd album, meanwhile, had gone on sale in British record stores on June 13, 1969. And it was a hi
t, both there and more especially in Europe, reaching number 2 in France (certified gold in 1977), number 4 in the Netherlands, and number 9 in the United Kingdom. In the columns of the French music magazine Rock & Folk, Philippe Paringaux wrote: “More is a disc of stunning quality, and Pink Floyd are quite definitely one of the most mature groups (if not THE most) of the day. […] More reflects […] perfectly the spirit in which Pink Floyd have always conceived their music: technique of unwavering rigor at the service of a tumultuous imagination. The impossible marriage of madness and reason (‘Main Theme’ being the perfect illustration).”47 And to sum up, Barbet Schroeder makes the following very apt observation: “To make an album, they would take a year, it was an extraordinary feat of work. And here, in two weeks, they achieved more than all their other albums together.”49 In the United States, on the other hand, where it was released on August 9, their LP would make it only as far as number 153—and that was in 1973, after it had been reissued! When promoting his movie, the director would explain that not only did the US media have reservations about the picture, they literally detested Pink Floyd’s music, which they regarded as indigestible.
The Sleeve
The More sleeve was the second to be designed for Pink Floyd by Hipgnosis. The photography is taken from a scene of the movie in which Stefan and Estelle, having concocted and ingested a magic potion containing hashish, pot, benzedrine, nutmeg, and banana (the skin of which is reputed to have psychedelic properties), set off to do battle with a windmill, just as Don Quixote did three and a half centuries earlier. The effect of the narcotics is subtly conveyed by the blue-and-yellow bichrome color scheme deliberately chosen by Storm Thorgerson to evoke an LSD trip. On the reverse is a black-and-white photograph of the couple communing with Ibiza’s magnificent landscape.
The Recording
At the point where Pink Floyd became involved in writing and recording More, the group had been working since September 1968 on their future double album Ummagumma, which would not be finished until July 1969 and not released until October of that year. While they already had a lot on their plates, the group accepted this new project regardless, and quickly got down to work. Barbet Schroeder remembers: “We shut ourselves away in a studio for a week or two, I no longer remember how long. And, in an extremely intense manner, the music was composed and performed in great haste… and in a very rich way. There was no need for it to be composed for a specific image, because this was not movie music as such… I needed to check, and I even had stopwatches with me. I would say… ‘At this point, it would be better if it sounded like this.’ But in actual fact it was as if they were making an album and I was using extracts from the album for this or that scene.”49 What’s more, the director would find the music so emotionally powerful that he had to lower the volume in order to prevent the soundtrack from taking precedence over the movie!
In order to synchronize their compositions with the images, the Floyd employed an empirical method, as Nick Mason confirms: “There was no budget for a dubbing studio with a frame-count facility, so we went into a viewing theatre, timed the sequences carefully (it’s amazing how accurate a stopwatch can be), and then went into Pye Studios in Marble Arch, where we worked with the experienced in-house engineer Brian Humphries.”5
Because More was not an EMI project, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason had no access to Abbey Road Studios. As an alternative, their choice fell on the renowned Pye Recording Studios in London, where the Kinks, Donovan, the Searchers, and Long John Baldry had recorded before them.
The four members of the group were now, for the first time ever, their own producers. As Nick Mason comments, they did, however, have Brian Humphries by their side, a sound engineer who had previously worked with the Kinks and Nancy Sinatra, among others. The sessions were held at the beginning of February 1969, just a few days after Pink Floyd had performed “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and “A Saucerful of Secrets” live on French television (on ORTF’s Forum Musiques).
Those involved are unclear about how long it actually took the group to record the soundtrack, but they all agree that the project was brought to a conclusion with exceptional speed. According to Barry Miles, the recording was completed in five sessions extending from midnight to 8 a.m. In September 1969, Barbet Schroeder revealed to Philippe Paringaux that “Pink Floyd composed their music in the afternoon, while rewatching the movie, and then recorded in the evening five days in a row between midnight and 9 a.m. on a sixteen-track tape recorder. The guy at the studio told me he had never seen such conscientious musicians!”50 In an interview with Rock magazine in 1971, the four band members confirmed this version of events, although they spoke of six sessions: “We liked it, although it was an incredible rush job. The guy came in and asked if we could do it right away. After viewing the footage and timing the different scenes, we went into the studio late at night, writing nearly all the material and recording it in six sessions. Just got it done in time. Later, we took some more time out in the studio to do the tracks up a bit for the album.”9 “Yes, it was eight days to do everything from writing, recording, editing… but everything we did was accepted by the director. He never asked us to redo anything.”3
In addition to the thirteen songs on the album More, another three were recorded during the sessions: “Theme (Beat Version),” “Hollywood,” and “Seabirds.” They can be heard in Schroeder’s picture, but as the master tapes have apparently been lost for good, it looks unlikely that we will ever get the chance to play them on disc… “Fortunately, the original tapes of the music have never been found,” the director has confirmed, “because there would have been a tendency to remaster, to make something very big out of something designed to be simply what the characters were listening to in the movie.”49 That’s one way of looking at it…
Technical Details
Pink Floyd was thought to have recorded More on a sixteen-track Ampex MM-1000. The console was probably a Neve or a Neumann. According to the author Glenn Povey, however, two eight-track tapes emerged on the market at the end of the nineties with the name Bryan Morrison Agency (which was looking after the Floyd at that time) and the initials BH, most likely those of the sound engineer Brian Humphries, marked on the box. The vendor of the two tapes explained that he had worked at Pye Studios in the seventies and had been told one day that four multitrack tapes containing the More recordings were still in the studio archives but would soon be wiped under the company’s ten-year rule. After he salvaged the tapes and attempted to remix them, two had been stolen, leaving the remaining two in his possession. These two tapes contained “Main Theme,” “Paris Bar,” “Stefan’s Tit,” “Ibiza Bar,” and “Dramatic Theme.” It is not now known what became of the tapes, but if genuine, they would indicate that Pink Floyd had recorded on an eight-track machine (probably an Ampex) rather than a sixteen-track as Barbet Schroeder claimed.
At Pye, the premises comprised two sound studios, the first, which Pink Floyd used in early 1969, measuring 40 by 30 by 16.5 feet (12 by 9 by 5 meters) and the second 20 by 20 by 16.5 feet (6 by 6 by 5 meters). Both were equipped with Tannoy/Lockwood monitors.
The Instruments
Toward the end of the Saucerful of Secrets sessions, the group had given David Gilmour a white 1966 or 1967 Fender Stratocaster with maple fingerboard and white pickguard. This would serve as his main guitar on More, in conjunction with the same amp that he had previously used. In terms of acoustic instruments, he seems to still be playing his Levin LT 18, but also uses a classical guitar with nylon strings, which has unfortunately not been identified. It might, however, be the same Levin Classic 3 used by Roger Waters on the show An Hour with the Pink Floyd, filmed for US television in April 1970. The other members of the group are playing the same instruments they had used on their previous record.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
On the album, the tracks are presented in a different order from that of the movie.
David Gilmour was di
stinctly unlucky with his surname! The guitarist appears in the credits for the movie More as “Dave Gilmore”—as he does on the early copies of A Saucerful of Secrets.
Pink Floyd All the Songs Page 17