Pink Floyd All the Songs

by Jean-Michel Guesdon

  Roger Waters then enters on his Precision bass (from 0:28), simulating a kind of metronome, with, in the background, the heartbeat, which has been recurring periodically since the beginning of the album.

  Before long, David Gilmour delivers a series of powerful, clear-toned chords on his “Black Strat,” reinforced by deep reverb and the Binson Echorec II. He also uses a new guitar processor, the EMS Hi-Fli, which offered distortion effects, phasing, and ADT doubling. Rick Wright answers Gilmour with licks on his Wurlitzer EP-200 and pad sounds on his Farfisa organ. And it is over this intro that Nick Mason uses Rototoms for the first time. These were recorded on June 10: “The main intro for this song was devised because a set of Roto-Toms happened to be in the studio,” explains the drummer, “and we completed it in just a few takes.”5 The sound of these drums is part and parcel of the special color of “Time,” a sonority that was relatively unknown at the time.

  Following this intro of more than two minutes’ duration, the first verse eventually starts with Gilmour singing (doubled) lead vocal, this time with a hoarser timbre. Mason and Waters lay down a very good groove supported by Gilmour with a distorted rhythm part on his Strat (left-hand channel) and Wright, also playing a rhythm part on his Wurlitzer (right-hand channel). The keyboardist also sings lead vocal in the two bridges (in a softer voice), with Gilmour providing vocal harmonies and with superb support from Doris Troy, Lesley Duncan, Liza Strike, and Barry St. John on backing vocals, which were recorded on June 20. In order to modulate the sound of these backing singers, Alan Parsons found an alternative use for a frequency translator, whose original purpose had been to eliminate or attenuate feedback. He now fed the singers’ voices through this device in order to obtain a flanger-like effect.

  On November 1, David Gilmour recorded one of his best-ever solos on his “Black Strat.” The sound is astonishing: bluesy, spacey, and with overtones of Hendrix. The notes literally leap from his guitar, and his playing, which makes abundant use of note bending and the whammy bar, overflows with feeling. Parsons recorded him with a single mic, presumably a Neumann U87, set up in front of his amp. The sound is enormous, the Hiwatt amp head, connected to WEM speakers, delivering extraordinary power. Although Gilmour is not, strictly speaking, one of the world’s greatest guitar virtuosi, his touch is unique. He explains: “I don’t have to have too much technique for it. I’ve developed the parts of my technique that are useful to me. I’ll never be a very fast guitar player.”88 He doubles his solo and uses Fuzz Face and Echorec to obtain the desired color.

  Following the return of the vocals with the second verse and bridge (with contributions from the VCS3), at 5:44 “Time” segues directly into the reprise of “Breathe,” which was given the working title “Home Again.” Other than the words, it is the very same version of the second half of “Breathe” that has been cut and pasted onto the end of “Time.” The instrumentation is identical apart from the absence of the ride cymbal in the last refrain. It is interesting to note that this reprise is an integral part of “Time” in the sense that it is not listed as a separate track.

  The expression quiet desperation in the last verse is borrowed from Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau, which was published in 1854: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The addition is the English way, on the other hand, is typically Floydian.

  For Pink Floyd Addicts

  While watching the BBC Two music show The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972, Richard Wright came across an animation by one Ian Emes, a student at Birmingham College of Art in England, to “One of These Days.” After enthusiastically telling his bandmates about it, they eventually commissioned Emes to make an animation of “Time,” which they projected during their 1973 concerts. Emes later collaborated with Roger Waters on the historic “The Wall: Live in Berlin” concert in July 1990.

  For Pink Floyd Addicts

  The Radiohead song “No Surprises” (on the 1997 album OK Computer) may have been influenced by “Time,” in particular the phrase No alarms and no surprises.

  The Great Gig In The Sky

  Richard Wright, vocal composition by Clare Torry / 4:44

  Musicians

  David Gilmour: pedal steel guitar

  Rick Wright: piano, Hammond organ

  Roger Waters: bass

  Nick Mason: drums

  Clare Torry: vocals

  Gerry O’Driscoll, Patricia Watts: voices

  Recorded

  Abbey Road Studios, London: June 20–22, October 25–26, 1972; January 21, 25–26, February 9, 1973 (Studios Two and Three, Room Four)

  Technical Team

  Producer: Pink Floyd

  Sound Engineers: Alan Parsons, Chris Thomas

  Assistant Sound Engineer: Peter James

  Genesis

  This superb, moving track has its origins in another composition by Rick Wright, “The Mortality Sequence,” written for the live version of Eclipse: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics. Performed on the organ (very much in the spirit of the finale of “A Saucerful of Secrets”), the point of the earlier piece had been to demonstrate that religions did not necessarily offer an optimistic message, but on the contrary could drive us to insanity. Hence the verses from Ecclesiastes and the extracts of speeches by Malcolm Muggeridge. This all-out attack on the church was subsequently abandoned because Pink Floyd feared they would attract the wrath of the substantial section of the American public that was still attached to Christian values. “The Great Gig in the Sky” was then transformed into a musical illustration of Rick Wright’s fear of flying and his horror at the thought of dying mid-flight: “One of the pressures for me—and I’m sure all the others—is this constant fear of dying, because of all the travelling we’re doing on the motorways of America and Europe, and the planes. That for me is a very real fear.”36

  “I think I just, as I always have done, sat at the piano. And those first two chords came,”83 explains Rick Wright. Two chords of remarkable emotional power, it has to be said. “The Great Gig in the Sky” is an instrumental, albeit one that contains two highly meaningful spoken phrases. The first is uttered at 0:39 by Gerry O’Driscoll, the Abbey Road doorman: And I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do, I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it, you’ve gotta go sometime. The second occurs at 3:34 and is spoken by Patricia Watts (the wife of road manager Peter Watts): I never said I was frightened of dying. This is a possible reference to Thanatos and Moros (the personifications of death and fate in Greek mythology).

  Thanks to Clare Torry’s dazzling vocal performance, “The Great Gig in the Sky” is one of the crowning artistic moments on The Dark Side of the Moon. Also worthy of a special mention is the live version of “The Great Gig in the Sky” on the DVD Delicate Sound of Thunder (1989), featuring the backing singers Rachel Fury, Durga McBroom, and Margaret Taylor.

  Production

  It was under the title “Religious Theme” that the base track of “The Great Gig in the Sky” was recorded, on June 20, 1972. However, the Floyd were not satisfied with this initial version, and after rerecording it the following day, again without achieving the desired results, they eventually got the definitive base track down on June 22, with the third take selected for overdubbing. At this stage, Rick Wright recorded the piano and Hammond organ. However, after Nick Mason had recorded his excellent drum part, whose uncompressed sonority (exactly as Alan Parsons wanted) resounds powerfully, amply, and with no trace of aggressivity, on October 25 Wright found himself alone in Studio One, the immense recording studio at Abbey Road used mainly for movie soundtracks and classical music, to rerecord the piano part. Seated this time at a Steinway concert grand, he was under the impression that he was playing live with the others, who were holed up in Studio Two, but in fact Alan Parsons and the group had fooled him: “We put a little practical joke over on Rick, making him think the band were playing live when he was actually listening off tape, and when he looked up at the end of the song
all of us were standing watching him from the [studio] door.”82 The next day, Roger Waters recorded a wonderful bass line that accompanies the piano throughout the piece, Wright recorded a new Hammond organ part, and David Gilmour worked on the track for the first time. His contribution consists of two extraordinary clear-toned pedal steel guitar parts played on his double-neck Fender 1000 in open-G6 tuning (D, G, D, G, B, E) with generous reverb added. Although this is a relatively short passage, as it is confined to the intro, Gilmour’s guitar sound is one of the hallmarks of the piece. It possesses an expansive, emotional quality and also an irresistible power that paves the way for Clare Torry’s stunning voice.

  It was not until nearly three months later that Torry was called in to Abbey Road to take part in a session that would go down in Pink Floyd history. Although pleased with the piece at this stage, everyone felt that it was lacking a certain something. Alan Parsons tried to persuade the Floyd to use extracts of dialogue recorded during a NASA spacewalk, but this is not what they were looking for. According to David Gilmour, it was Roger Waters who suggested bringing in a singer. Parsons then told them about a female vocalist he knew: “They simply said, ‘Who shall we get to sing this?’ And I said, ‘Well, I know a great singer… ’”36 That singer was Clare Torry: “She had done a covers album,” he explains. “I can remember that she did a version of ‘Light My Fire’ [by the Doors—a cover she would later deny ever having done!]. I just thought she had a great voice.”89 Brought in on Sunday, January 21, Clare was not especially enthusiastic. She did not know Pink Floyd very well, and was not exactly a fan of their music. But it was a Sunday and she would get double the usual fee (£30 instead of £15). When she arrived at Abbey Road, the atmosphere was cool. “They didn’t know what they wanted,” she recalls, “just said it was a birth and death concept. I looked suitably baffled and just sang something off the top of my head.”36 It was mainly David Gilmour who took on the task of directing her, helped by Rick Wright. What they particularly wanted was for her to express emotion. Parsons remembers them saying: “‘Sorry, we’ve got no words, no melody line, just a chord sequence—just see what you can do with it.’”36 “I said ‘Let me go into the studio, put some headphones on, and have a go,’” Torry continues. “I started going ‘Ooh-aah, baby, baby—yeah, yeah.’ They said, ‘No, no. If we wanted that we’d have got Doris Troy.’ They said, ‘Try some longer notes,’ and as this went on, I was getting more familiar with the backing track.”45 Torry still did not really understand what it was they were expecting of her, and even wondered whether the best course of action would be to leave. “That was when I thought, ‘Maybe I should just pretend I’m an instrument.’ So I said, ‘Start the track again.’”45 After the first take, Gilmour reassured her that she was getting closer to what they were looking for but that they wanted to try a second take with, if possible, even more emotion. Torry did not like what she was doing, finding her phrases repetitive: “It was beginning to sound contrived. I said: ‘I think you’ve got enough.’ I actually thought it sounded like caterwauling.”45 Rick Wright recalls that she seemed embarrassed upon joining them in the control room afterward but that her performance had sent shivers down his spine: “No words, just her wailing—but it’s got something in it that’s very seductive.”90 Torry nevertheless had the impression that everybody hated her performance, “and when I left I remember thinking to myself, ‘That will never see the light of day.’”82

  The ultimate version is a combination of two tracks performed by the singer, and represents one of the high points of the album, if not of the Floyd’s entire output.

  But the story of her performance does not end there. When she was passing a record store one day, Clare Torry spotted in the window an album featuring a prism and the name Pink Floyd on the cover. Wondering whether it could be the LP she had sung on, she went in and bought a copy. “I bought it and took it back home, and played it from the beginning. And I thought it was fantastic.”45

  Her collaboration with the group continued. She recorded with Roger Waters in 1987 and sang onstage with Pink Floyd in 1990. This would not prevent her from taking legal action against the group years later with the aim of gaining recognition for herself as co-composer of “The Great Gig in the Sky.” The case was settled in 2005, since which time she has shared the composition credit with Rick Wright.

  IN YOUR HEADPHONES

  At the end of the track, at 4:33, a slight acceleration can be heard in the recording, no doubt due to a fluctuation on the master tape that was never corrected.

  Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990), an author and member of MI6 (the British Secret Intelligence Service) during the Second World War, was attracted to revolutionary ideas but rejected left-wing politics after experiencing life in the USSR. He then converted to Catholicism under the influence of Mother Teresa. He was also an ardent denigrator of the Swinging Sixties, and especially of the Beatles, whom he saw as “dummy figures with tousled heads [and] no talent.”

  For Pink Floyd Addicts

  Thanks to an irony of fate, in the seventies this fantastic musical sequence of great emotional power was enthusiastically taken up by the sex shops of Amsterdam, which found that it set exactly the right tone! Similarly, two decades later it would be designated “the best music to make love to” by an Australian radio station. This has apparently been confirmed by David Gilmour, to whom numerous friends are supposed to have confided that the track has an extraordinary erotic power. A little like Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, perhaps… Not bad for a number that started life as “The Mortality Sequence.”

  Money

  Roger Waters / 6:23

  Musicians

  David Gilmour: vocals, electric rhythm and lead guitar

  Rick Wright: keyboards

  Roger Waters: bass, sound effects

  Nick Mason: drums, sound effects

  Dick Parry: tenor saxophone

  Chris Adamson, Henry McCullough, Gerry O’Driscoll, Patricia Watts, Peter Watts: voices

  Recorded

  Abbey Road Studios, London: June 6–8, October 27, 30, November 2, 1972; January 21, 24, 29, February 6, 1973 (Studios Two and Three)

  Technical Team

  Producer: Pink Floyd

  Sound Engineers: Alan Parsons, Chris Thomas

  Assistant Sound Engineer: Peter James

  Genesis

  The second side of the LP The Dark Side of the Moon opens with “Money.” David Gilmour recalls the day Roger turned up with the piece: “I’ve still got his demo of it lurking around somewhere, of him singing it with an acoustic guitar. It’s very funny. And we did it pretty well the same as the demo, apart from the middle section with all the solos and stuff, which we wrote and put together in the studio or in rehearsal.”36 This demo can be heard on the DVD The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon…

  New car, caviar, four-star daydream. Money makes everything possible, even owning a soccer club. In short, Money, it’s a gas. Such is the message of the first few lines of “Money.” Clearly the words to this song are to be understood as ironic, and the allusion to the football team is presumably a reference to the lyricist’s well-known passion for that particular sport. With a strong feel for language that Bob Dylan or John Lennon would not have been ashamed of, Roger Waters denounces the unrestrained—and unrestrainable—power of money, of money as king, and the cynicism of those who have it, in short everything about the capitalist system that is unjust and appalling. “[I am] sure that the free market isn’t the whole answer,” Roger Waters would later reveal in an interview. “My hope is that mankind will evolve into a more cooperative and less competitive beast as the millennia pass. If he doesn’t… [he will disappear] in a puff of smoke.”91 In the meantime, while waiting for the dawning of a new, humanitarian and fraternal, society, the songwriter lambasts all those who have elevated the consumer society to the rank of paramount social model—including exploiters of every hue, those in the hi-fidelity first-class travelling set, those who believe they need
a Learjet, indeed all those who are disinclined to share what they have with others. There is something utterly irrevocable about the statement I’m alright, Jack, keep your hands off my stack!

  A disturbing paradox is that it was thanks to this committed, resolutely anticapitalist song that Roger Waters joined the circle of superrich rock ’n’ roll songwriters. Was his rock star status already making him experience a sense of guilt? This is not out of the question. In the last verse of “Money,” at any rate, it is interesting to note that he abandons the double entendre beloved of bluesmen and says exactly what he thinks, with no beating around the bush: Money, it’s a crime because it’s the root of all evil today. And he even addresses his closing line to those who work hard but are refused a pay raise.

  The Single Effect

  Although the album was a worldwide success, the global destiny of this title, originally a blues number very close to the heart of its creator, was simply astounding. Soon after the release of the album, Capitol Records in the US asked to release the song as a single. Rick Wright admits that nobody in the group had thought of this possibility or could possibly have imagined what would come of it. Selected as the A-side of a single (with “Any Colour You Like” as the flip side), “Money” was released in a number of countries (not the United Kingdom) in May 1973. It climbed the charts with lightning speed, beginning in France, where it reached number 1 that month. It got to number 13 on Billboard and number 10 in Austria. The success of this song would completely change the lives of all the members of the group, who saw themselves propelled into the ranks of international stars within a few weeks, experiencing everything that Waters denounces in his lyrics. Excess and adulation became a part of their everyday experience. “It moved us up into a super league,”83 David Gilmour would later declare. The four of them were caught unawares. At concerts, fans started to demand “Money” and no longer observed the necessary silence during the band’s long instrumental pieces. The Floyd found themselves caught in a paradox situation of earning vast amounts of money with a song that denounces money’s ill effects. Paranoia was lying in wait and would provide them with the subject of their next album, and then The Wall, leading eventually to the breakup of the group. Money, so they say…