Pink Floyd All the Songs

by Jean-Michel Guesdon

  The Dark Side of the Moon marked Pink Floyd’s entry into the elite club of record industry superstars, along with the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and the Who, that were still active on the music scene. This was borne out by the 700,000 copies sold in the United Kingdom alone in the weeks following its release, as well as the sellout gigs, from the two shows at Earls Court Exhibition Hall in London in May 1973 (May 18 and 19) to the US tour from June 17 to 28, and the following year, the French tour (June 18 to 26), sponsored by a well-known soft drink brand (Gini).

  A Time of Doubt

  The financial rewards that accompanied this success were considerable. David Gilmour and Nick Mason each bought themselves a mansion in London, in Notting Hill and Highgate respectively, as well as a villa in the South of France (Gilmour) and on the island of Rhodes, Greece (Mason). Rick Wright, too, treated himself to a property on Rhodes, but also acquired a country house called the Old Rectory in Royston near Cambridge, where he had a recording studio installed. Roger Waters, meanwhile, spent a fortune on a fabulous villa in Volos, at the foot of Mount Pelion in Thessaly (Greece). “I have to accept, at that point, I became a capitalist,” he acknowledges, not without humor, many years later. “I could no longer pretend that I was a true Socialist.”1 The group also founded its own publishing company, Pink Floyd Music Publishing, and discovered along the way that, over the last three years, EMI had failed to collect a substantial sum of money from abroad!

  The money, which from then on flowed freely, enabling them to realize their “wildest teenage dreams,”102 also sowed the seeds of discontent within the Pink Floyd machine, which had been well-oiled up to that point. Nick Mason embarked on some projects of his own, producing the Principal Edwards album Round One (1974) and, notably, Rock Bottom (1974), a masterpiece of progressive rock by Robert Wyatt (former vocalist and drummer of Soft Machine), while David Gilmour, after producing for the group Unicorn, was poised to launch the career of the sixteen-year-old singer and composer Kate Bush. “We were at a watershed then, and we could easily have split up then. And we didn’t, because we were frightened of the great out there,” Roger Waters explains, “beyond the umbrella of this trade name—Pink Floyd,”102 adding, “from my perspective now, to look back upon how I felt then, scared as I was of my own shadow, you know, never mind my relationship with audiences…”102 There was probably also the worry of wanting to produce a worthy successor to the already legendary The Dark Side of the Moon.

  Household Objects, the Comeback/Orphans of the Moon

  In their quest for this worthy successor, Pink Floyd decided in 1973 to revive their album project based entirely on everyday objects. They had attempted to get it off the ground in 1971, at the start of the Meddle sessions, but without success. In October 1973, David Gilmour told Sounds magazine, “I think, strategically, our best thing to do next would be something weird, far out, and the kind of thing that nobody could possibly understand.”9 It was during that October and early November that the group tried to record several tracks in Studio Two at Abbey Road, including “The Hard Way” and “Papa Was a Rolling Floyd” (!), with Alan Parsons and Peter James at the mixing desk. There was no shortage of ideas: drinking glasses, knives, rolls of Scotch tape, the sound of footsteps, and bottles, among other things, were going to form the basis for what they hoped would be an all-new musical approach. Nick Mason was confident: “I think it will happen one day, because most of the ideas we’ve tried seem to work really very well so far.”9 Unfortunately, the group soon reached the limits of the project and gave up on it, for good this time, although “Wine Glasses” would later put in an appearance on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” This impasse was to take Floyd to the brink of breakup: “Group momentum was pretty well non-existent,” Nick Mason confided. “The early days of total commitment were beginning to dissipate.”5 Rick Wright then came up with the idea that each member of the band should spend six months of the year on personal projects, and the other six touring or recording with the Floyd. “Then there’s no reason why we can’t carry on for a long time.”9

  Back Down to Earth with the New Album…

  At the end of 1974, the band seemed to have run out of steam. Commenting on their onstage performance, Nick Kent wrote in November 1974 in the columns of NME: “The Floyd in fact seem so incredibly tired and seemingly bereft of true creative ideas one wonders if they really care about their music anymore. […] I mean, one can easily envisage a Floyd concert in the future consisting of the band simply wandering on stage, setting all their tapes into action, putting their instruments on remote control and then walking off behind the amps in order to talk about football or play billiards. I’d almost prefer to see them do that. At least it would be honest.”95 Although this vitriolic article by the legendary rock critic appeared several months after Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason had abandoned the Household Objects project for good and laid the foundations of their new album in the course of several rehearsals at the King’s Cross studio (January 1974), it would nevertheless play a part in bringing them down from cloud nine. “That review [by Kent] would have been one of the things which would have—once we’d got over our initial ire—we would have taken on board and realized that there was more than a germ of truth in it,”102 David Gilmour admitted.

  In January 1975, the four band members met at Abbey Road (in Studio Three, which had been completely refurbished) for the recording of what would become their ninth studio album. Roger Waters originally wanted to make a new concept album with, as its musical backbone, a suite entitled “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” a striking four-note phrase that Gilmour had hit upon, and a long poem by Waters about the absence of Syd Barrett. The theme itself was supposed to act as a kind of therapy, exposing everything that wasn’t working within the band, in the hope of finding a lasting solution and setting the band back on the right track. But Gilmour was opposed to this artistic approach. He was keen to have side one of the new LP consist of the whole of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” like the title song on Atom Heart Mother or “Echoes” on Meddle, and, on side two, to have two compositions the band had worked on at the King’s Cross sessions, “Raving and Drooling” and “Gotta Be Crazy.” “I had a legendary row with the rest of the band,” he recalled in an interview in 1994. “After Dark Side we were really floundering around. I wanted to make the next album more musical, because I felt some of these tracks had been just vehicles for the words. We were working in 1974 in this horrible little rehearsal room in King’s Cross without windows, putting together what became the next two albums. There were three long tracks, including ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond,’ which I wanted to record.”39

  After some fraught discussions, the guitarist-vocalist finally came around to Roger Waters’s way of thinking, and in the meantime Rick Wright and Nick Mason had also been convinced. So “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” would be split into two parts, one at the beginning and one at the end of the album, which would also feature some new tracks. “There’s one song that’s about Syd, but the rest of it isn’t. It’s a much more universal expression of my feelings about absence. Because I felt that we weren’t really there. We were very absent,”102 Waters confessed. The other theme that emerges is the London foursome’s total disillusionment with the record industry, which finds expression in “Welcome to the Machine” and “Have a Cigar.”

  Wish You Were Here really brought to a head the rift that was undoubtedly brewing within the group, as Waters explained: “I know that Dave and Rick, for example, don’t think that the subject matter or theme of the record and the ideas developed are as important as I think they are. They’re more interested in music, as abstract form as much as anything else.”9 It was this irreconcilable difference that would eventually lead to the breakup of the band.

  The First Album with Columbia

  Wish You Were Here came out on September 12, 1975, in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, and the following day in the United States. Stateside the album was distributed not b
y Capitol but by Columbia (in preference to Warner and Atlantic), after a contract was signed at the end of 1972 at the initiative of manager Steve O’Rourke. He would have had no trouble convincing Columbia Records president Clive Davis, but the decision was a great disappointment to Bhaskar Menon, head of Capitol, who nevertheless managed to retain rights to The Dark Side of the Moon.

  The new opus from the Floyd was a resounding success worldwide. It went to number 1 in the United Kingdom (spending 104 weeks on the charts and being certified double platinum), in the United States (six million copies sold, certified six times platinum), in Australia (seven times platinum), and in the Netherlands. In France it sold a million copies (diamond disc), twice as many as in Germany, and three times as many as in Canada. As for the critics, while some turned up their noses, such as Allan Jones of Melody Maker, who spoke of “a critical lack of imagination,”96 a great many more were completely won over by this new record. “Where The Dark Side Of The Moon seemed flatulent, morose, aimless, positively numbskull, Wish You Were Here is concise, highly melodic and in a pleasingly simple fashion,”97 wrote Peter Erskine in the columns of NME. In the United States, Robert Christgau noted in the Village Voice: “The music is not only simple and attractive, with the synthesizer used mostly for texture and the guitar breaks for comment, but it actually achieves some of the symphonic dignity (and cross-referencing) that The Dark Side of the Moon simulated so ponderously.”98

  The Sleeve

  The sleeve for Wish You Were Here has legendary status among rock album covers. It was also one of the most complex ever produced by Hipgnosis. Having discussed it at length with the four band members and listened to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” Storm Thorgerson set to work on the theme of absence, with the formidable challenge of coming up with something as good as—or even better than—the visual for The Dark Side of the Moon, yet different from it. “It seemed therefore appropriate that, in the end, the cover should be absent,” explained Thorgerson. “This is the end piece of the puzzle.”102 In his remarkable book, he writes: “But how do you represent absence? Especially with a presence, ie the presence of a design. We couldn’t do a blank cover because the Beatles had done that with the White Album. Instead we devised a hidden cover. LPs in those days were often ‘shrink’ wrapped in clear, thin plastic, like cellophane, same as many CDs today. We suggested it was made black and opaque so the public could not see what was inside.”65 A sticker (designed by George Hardie) was affixed to the black plastic wrapper featuring two mechanical hands engaged in a handshake against a background of the four elements, as it was feared that, without this, the factory wouldn’t pack the record properly. “I got very preoccupied with four, with the number four,” Thorgerson explained in The Story of Wish You Were Here. “There were four words in the title, four members of the band, and four elements to life—air, fire, water and earth. So the first thing that was done was a postcard. The postcard said ‘Wish you were here.’”102 It’s the same photo as on the inner sleeve—of a diver in a lake or a swimmer doing a headstand in the water—a photo that is all the more extraordinary as there are no ripples radiating out from him. The photo was taken by Aubrey Powell at Mono Lake in the Sierra Nevada, south of Death Valley in California. “The guy is doing a yoga position in a yoga chair locked into the mud,” explains Powell. “Poor man, with a breathing apparatus on. And he had to hold his breath so I didn’t get any bubbles.”102 The other photograph on the inner sleeve shows a windswept grove (in Norfolk) with, in the foreground, a red veil behind which one can make out the dark silhouette of a woman.

  The cover photo is more enigmatic still: we see two men shaking hands, and the man on the right is on fire. A highly symbolic image: the burning man is the person conspicuous by his burning absence, or, if you prefer, the person whose shadow still hung over Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason—Syd Barrett, of course (who incidentally was the composer of “Flaming” on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn). Storm Thorgerson thought it was a brilliant idea, “maybe because it was so outrageous.”102 The photo shoot took place in a studio lot at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California, with two stuntmen, Danny Rogers and Ronnie Rondell, the latter in the role of the burning man. “I was doing a lot of fire work in those days,” Ronnie Rondell commented. “I had the special suits for full envelop fire. […] The effects man will step out and he’s got a wand with a fire on the end of it. And they go: ‘We’re ready, action,’ and he just touches the three or four spots, steps out, everything is burning, and it’s a still picture. Shaking hands. Nothing to it.”102 In fact, that’s not quite the case. Aubrey Powell had to take at least fifteen shots because the wind kicked up in the Los Angeles region, eventually causing the fire to whip around Rondell’s face. “He fell to the ground, absolutely smothered with foam and blankets,” Powell recalls. “He got up and he said ‘That’s it, no more.’”102

  On the back of the sleeve, a man dressed in a business suit is standing in the desert with a record in his hand, and one foot resting on a briefcase. On closer inspection, it becomes apparent that this man has no face, wrists, or ankles. It’s a suit without a body that, in a way, is looking at us. Storm Thorgerson later spelled out the meaning of this mysterious image: “Our Floyd salesman is morally absent, lacks integrity, not really who he thinks he is, and is therefore absent, no face, faceless.”65 A dig at the record industry…

  The Recording

  While the birth of Wish You Were Here can be traced back to the King’s Cross studio sessions in January 1974, during which the four musicians worked on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” as well as “Raving and Drooling” and “Gotta Be Crazy,” the sessions proper for the album got under way a year later, running from January 13 to March 3, 1975, in Abbey Road Studio Three.

  Alan Parsons, who had a big hand in the success of The Dark Side of the Moon, naturally came to mind. “They offered me £10,000 a year to become their permanent sound engineer,” said Parsons. “But I also wanted a royalty on the next album, and Steve O’Rourke said no.”1

  While Parsons launched himself into a career as an author-composer, setting up the Alan Parsons Project with producer, pianist, and vocalist Eric Woolfson (the album Tales of Mystery and Imagination would come out in 1976), Pink Floyd’s choice fell on Brian Humphries, whose credits included having recorded the Ummagumma live record and Music from the Body by Roger Waters. He was brought on board initially to fill the gap left by the defection of their concert sound engineer: “I was asked to record the Floyd at the Empire Pool, which is now the Wembley Arena,” explains Brian Humphries. “When I saw the Floyd before they went on, they said: ‘Oh, do us a favour. Will you go and sit with our sound engineer?’ And I said ‘OK.’”102 Humphries eventually took over from him and was in charge for the last three concerts at Wembley (from November 15 to 17, 1974). Then he was officially hired to record the next album. “Usually EMI does not allow outside engineers to work at Abbey Road,” he later said, “but for the Floyd, they waived the ruling and I was allowed to work on the board.”101 Nevertheless it was John Leckie, who had worked on Meddle in 1971, who had the job of recording the first four sessions for the album (from January 13 to 16), assisted by Peter James. They were surprised to see Brian Humphries turn up on January 14 as an assistant. Three days later, Leckie handed it over to Humphries, and left to work on the next Roy Harper album.

  A Difficult Labor

  Wish You Were Here ended up taking some seventy sessions (mixing, cross-fades, and editing of various kinds), a record for the Floyd. “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” accounted for nearly fifty, while “Have a Cigar” alone needed fifty-six takes, an unprecedented feat by the band. These figures speak for themselves: Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason certainly lacked concentration, if not inspiration. However, the finished product does not feel ponderous; indeed, the music is radiant. Wish You Were Here is David Gilmour and Rick Wright’s favorite Pink Floyd album. Waters responded in a more nuanced fashion when asked by a journalist whether he wa
s happy with it: “No. [But] I’m not unhappy with it. It’s not bad.”9

  From January until the beginning of March, Pink Floyd spent four days a week recording at Abbey Road. But they were struggling, and couldn’t seem to regain the creative energy of Dark Side. The unexpected and phenomenal success of their last album and the massive impact of their newfound glory literally numbed them. “Finding ourselves shut up in Abbey Road Studio Three felt like a real constraint,” Waters relates. “Most of us didn’t wish we were there at all; we wished we were somewhere else. I wasn’t happy being there because I got the feeling we weren’t together.”45 Humphries remembers that there were days when “[they] didn’t do anything. They were thinking about ideas. It became a case of two would be in the studio, and two were running late. Or, as it was always known, they were out playing squash.”102 Rick Wright attributed this apathy partly to getting started too late. “It’ll be a two-year gap between Dark Side and the next one, and that’s too long in my opinion,”9 he declared during production.

  Despite everything, they finally knuckled down to the task and in the end filled most of the twenty-four tracks of the Studer A80 in Studio Three. Nick Mason admitted to being somewhat discomfited by the new recording techniques: “The separation of each drum onto a different track meant it took even longer to get a result. This was part and parcel of general improvements in studio technology, but did nothing to help the sense that we were not a band playing together.”5 The harmony that had prevailed during the creation of Dark Side was no more. There was a change in the group dynamics. Waters slowly started to gain ascendancy over his colleagues. According to Humphries, Wright forced himself to stay in the studio to ensure he was credited on the record, even though he didn’t agree with the approach that Waters was imposing on them, an attitude that got on David Gilmour’s nerves. Conversely, when Wright was recording his keyboard overdubs, the other three would go out of the studio and leave him alone with the sound engineer. “Working in that atmosphere wasn’t easy,” 99 Humphries later said.