Exile in France
Forced into exile by its financial difficulties, the group initially chose to settle in the South of France and to record at Super Bear Studios at Berre-les-Alpes, in the département of Alpes-Maritimes, some twenty kilometers (twelve miles) north of Nice. Super Bear was housed in a former restaurant that had been transformed into a recording studio by Britons Tom Hidley and David Hawkins in 1977 at the request of the musician Damon Metrebian. It was here that David Gilmour and Rick Wright had recorded their debut solo albums (David Gilmour and Wet Dream respectively) the year before. (Before being destroyed by fire in 1986, Super Bear would see an impressive number of artists pass through its doors, including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Elton John, Queen, Kate Bush, and the Alan Parsons Project.) The Floyd would record most of The Wall there, occupying the studio from April to July 1979 to work on definitive takes, rather than demos. However, one peculiarity relating to Super Bear’s geographical situation would lead the group to divide its time between Berre-les-Alpes and another studio 150 kilometers (ninety-three miles) away. This was Studio Miraval, located at Le Val in the commune of Correns (Var département). Miraval had also been founded in 1977, in this case by the French jazz musician Jacques Loussier and the sound engineer Patrice Quef. David Gilmour explains the reasons for this choice: “Superbear, the studio we were mostly at, was high in the mountains, and it’s notorious for being difficult to sing there [due to reduced oxygen levels at high altitudes], and Roger had a lot of difficulty singing in tune—he always did. [laughs] So we found another studio, Miraval, and Roger would go there with Bob to do vocals.”116
After having some of the Britannia Row equipment brought over from London, Roger Waters decided on working hours of 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (leaving himself, as well as the other members of the group and the technical team, time to spend with their families or partying on the Côte d’Azur). Only Rick Wright would record in the evenings (with James Guthrie), from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. But the mood was suffocating. “The atmosphere in the studio was war,” Bob Ezrin would reveal. “But, you know, a very gentlemanly war, because they’re British.”81 Not only did Roger Waters want to be personally in charge of everything, the four musicians hardly ever played together, which did not exactly have a motivating effect on the other members of the group (with the exception of Gilmour). Nick Mason recorded most of his drum parts at the beginning of the sessions and would then entrust them to Ezrin and Guthrie. This enabled the racing car enthusiast to enter the Le Mans 24 Hours (in which he would come second!). James Guthrie would select the best takes in the evening, ready to present them to Waters and Gilmour the next day.
The Ousting of Rick Wright
Rick Wright, who had never regarded the hiring of Bob Ezrin as particularly helpful, and even saw his presence as detracting from the homogeneity of the group (although he would later come to appreciate his arbitration skills!), was unable to get himself credited as co-producer and therefore felt excluded. Or had he excluded himself? “Rick’s relationship with all of us, but certainly Roger, did become impossible during the making of The Wall,” reveals David Gilmour. “He had been asked if he had any ideas or anything that he wanted to do. We would leave the studio in the evening and he would have the whole night to come up with stuff, but he didn’t contribute anything. He just sat there and it was driving us all mad.”81
At the heart of Wright’s conflict with Waters was a fundamental lack of closeness: “Roger and I were never the best of friends,” 116 the keyboard player would later admit. Up to—and especially during—the making of The Dark Side of the Moon, there had been no sign of any tension in their relationship, which had, on the contrary, been perfectly cordial, a relationship in which each of them had his natural place. This was to change with the recording of Wish You Were Here. Wright could no longer abide what he used to describe as Waters’s “ego trip,” which offended his introverted sensibility. By the time production started on The Wall, Wright was in mid divorce. On top of this, he did not really like the project or the music. However, the keyboard player was undergoing a severe creative drought at the time, and had nothing of his own to propose, which infuriated Waters. “He might have seen my situation as not having contributed everything,” emphasizes Wright, “but he wouldn’t allow me to contribute anything.”116 Wright took the decision to put up with Waters’s wrath, to attend all the sessions in order to be seen to be putting in an appearance, and to try to contribute as many keyboard parts as possible. Gilmour would later claim that along with help from Waters, Ezrin, Michael Kamen, and Freddie Mandel, he himself had had to record a fair few keyboard parts. However, this is contested by James Guthrie, who worked alone with Wright and maintains that a large number of keyboard parts were indeed of Wright’s making. The misunderstanding no doubt derives from the isolation in which Rick Wright was recording his parts, with no other member of the team (only Guthrie) present to vouch for him.
The incident that was to provoke the definitive clash between Wright and Waters occurred in the summer. Dick Asher, an executive at CBS Records, offered Pink Floyd an additional percentage if they could complete the album in October. Given their precarious financial situation, Waters had no hesitation in accepting. It seemed a foregone conclusion that they would say yes. Although they had all decided to take their vacation in August before continuing the sessions in Los Angeles, this development obviously forced them to reconsider their schedule. Waters immediately called Ezrin to ask if he would be prepared to start recording the keyboard parts with Rick in Los Angeles a week earlier than anticipated.116 The producer having agreed, Waters then suggested, while he was at it, that Ezrin hire a second keyboard player in order to speed up the sessions if necessary. “If you get all that keyboard overdubbing done before the rest of us arrive we can just about make the end of the schedule,” 116 he argued. Waters asked O’Rourke to call Rick and ask him to cut short his vacation. Wright, who was spending a few days with his family in Rhodes, categorically refused, saying, “I haven’t seen my young kids for months and months. I’ll come on the agreed date,”116 and closing the conversation with the request: “Tell Roger to fuck off.”1 O’Rourke accepted Wright’s reasoning but Waters couldn’t. While he had been battling for months to move the project forward, Wright, who in his eyes was the only one to have done practically nothing, was refusing to break off his vacation in order to save the group’s skin! Waters’s response was not long in coming: “I made the suggestion that O’Rourke gave to Rick: either you can have a long battle or you can agree to this, and ‘this’ was ‘You finish making the album, keep your full share of the album, but at the end of it you leave quietly.’ Rick agreed.”116
Whatever the motives, the harshness and injustice of Waters’s reaction would leave an indelible impression on each member of the group. The others would later voice their regrets: “We were under a lot of pressure,” Mason would explain. “I felt guilty. Still do really.”116 While Gilmour and Mason would in turn abandon Waters in the early eighties, Wright would reveal in an interview: “Hopefully one day I’ll sit down with Roger and he might say, ‘Yes, it was unfair.’” 116 To which Waters, through the columns of Sounds, would retort: “Our paths were not parallel enough.”9
The Beginning of the End
While The Wall marked the end of any real cooperation between Rick Wright and Roger Waters, work on the recording of the album continued apace, at the CBS Studios in New York City (in August) for sessions with the New York City Opera, the New York Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra; at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles (September 6–8); and at the Producers Workshop in Los Angeles (September 12–November 6) for the final takes and mixing. In the final stages, the Floyd realized to their horror that the songs they had were far too long for the four sides of the album. They therefore had to reorganize parts of the track listing and come up with some technical solutions in a hurry. They also had to push back the recording deadline to November.
Nevertheless, the firi
ng of Rick Wright marked a major turning point in Pink Floyd’s career, and the band could no longer return to the way things had been before. This was the beginning of the end, and The Wall was to be the penultimate album with the original lineup (that is to say following the ejection of Syd Barrett). Roger Waters had succeeded in establishing himself as the undisputed captain of the ship. Fortunately, his talent was in proportion to his appetite for domination, as the following opinion expressed in 1999 demonstrates: “They would like to believe that the making of The Wall was a group collaboration—well, okay, they collaborated on it, but we were not collaborators. This was not a co-operative; it was in no sense a democratic process. If somebody had a good idea I would accept it and maybe use it, in the same sense that if someone writes and directs a movie he will often listen to what the actors have to say.”117
Whereas the contributions of Rick Wright and Nick Mason clearly carried no weight in Waters’s eyes, the same was not true of those of David Gilmour, whom he recognized as having written the music for three songs, albeit judging necessary to add that “he didn’t have any input into anything else really. The collaboration with Ezrin was a fertile one; his input was big. And Dave got a production credit—I’m sure he had something to do with the record production; he had very different ideas about that sort of thing. But there was really only one chief, and that was me.”117 Waters would confirm his seizure of power by firing Wright, admittedly after consulting his bandmates, who, in the light of the keyboard player’s failings, could do nothing but give in. Gilmour would try to convince Wright to defend himself, promising him his support should he decide to remain within the group—but without neglecting to emphasize the keyboardist’s catastrophic apathy. For Gilmour, being a member of Pink Floyd was sacrosanct: “If people didn’t like the way it was going, it was their option to leave. I didn’t consider that it was their option to throw people out.”116 Nevertheless, Gilmour had approved Waters’s decision, as had Mason, who was now expecting to suffer the same fate as Wright: “I think in real terms it would have been highly likely that I would have been next. And then after that I think it would have been Dave.”116 Just to add to the confusion, Waters would claim that Gilmour said to him: “‘Let’s get rid of Nick too.’ I bet he doesn’t remember that. How inconvenient would that be? I went ‘Ooh, Dave, Nick’s my friend. Steady!’”123
Even Ezrin was not spared by the infighting. He too feared confrontation with Waters, particularly during the sessions in France, which were the most fraught ones, as he explains: “During that period I went a little bit mad and really dreaded going in [to the studio], so I would find any excuse to come in late the next morning. I preferred not to be there while Roger was there. A lot of the time it was so tense. And a lot of it was directed at me.”116 Ezrin eventually fell foul of Waters when he ill-advisedly revealed the content of the first Wall show to a journalist friend. Bound by a confidentiality clause, to which Waters attached great importance, Ezrin found that he had committed an unpardonable sin. Such was Waters’s fury that he was forced to pay for his own ticket to see the show.
Outside Musicians
For The Wall, Pink Floyd called upon the services of more outside musicians than for any of their previous albums. The most important of these was Michael Kamen, a hugely talented composer and arranger and sometime collaborator of Eric Clapton, David Bowie, Sting, Queen, Metallica, and Kate Bush, to name a few. Kamen would compose a considerable number of movie scores, notably for Lethal Weapon and X-Men, and with this talent was given responsibility for The Wall’s orchestral arrangements.
Six singers were used for the backing vocals: Bruce Johnston (the Beach Boys), Toni Tennille (the female voice in the duo Captain & Tennille), Joe Chemay (Dennis Wilson, Elton John, Christopher Cross), Jon Joyce (Dennis Wilson, Roger Waters, Chicago), Stan Farber (Sparks, Barbra Streisand, Jerry Lee Lewis), and Jim Haas (Bruce Johnston, Roy Orbison, Donna Summer). Another important vocal contributor, of course, was the children’s choir of Islington Green School, which sings on “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).”
Various other musicians were also used who are not credited on the sleeve: on the guitar Joe DiBlasi (Lalo Schifrin, Danny Elfman) and Lee Ritenour (who has played on some three thousand sessions, not least for B. B. King, Steely Dan, and Jaco Pastorius), on the congas Bobbye Hall (Stevie Wonder, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marvin Gaye), on the keyboards Fred Mandel (Alice Cooper, Queen, Elton John), on the concertina Frank Marocco (the Beach Boys [Pet Sounds], Phil Collins, Hans Zimmer), on drums Bleu Ocean (who directed thirty-five snare drummers in the studio!), Jeff Porcaro (the drummer of Toto and one of the greatest of all session musicians) and his father Joe Porcaro (Frank Sinatra, Stan Getz, Steve Vai), on mandolin Trevor Veitch (Tom Rush, Emmylou Harris, Carl Wilson), and on clarinet Larry Williams (Michael Jackson [Thriller], Al Jarreau, George Benson).
The Sleeve
Ever since A Saucerful of Secrets in 1968, Pink Floyd’s album covers had been designed by Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis. For The Wall, Roger Waters turned to Gerald Scarfe and… none other but himself, Scarfe, and Waters having previously collaborated within the context of Wish You Were Here. “From my point of view, it was a happy arrangement […],” says Scarfe of his work on the sleeve, “because Roger in no way tried to impose himself on my work.”115 The cartoonist and illustrator adds that “We were working in separate fields—music and art—and yet the two helped one another. He saw the whole sleeve as being designed by me, but it was Roger’s idea from the beginning that it should be a blank wall.”115
On the front and back, then, a simple wall with gray mortar. (Scarfe drew a number of different versions: one with small bricks, another with larger bricks, one with black mortar, another with light gray mortar.) Neither the name of the group nor the title of the album appears on the cover: “the commercial decision was that nobody would know what the album was, so the logo was put on a separate piece of cellophane inside the shrink-wrap,”115 explains Gerald Scarfe.
The vinyl album’s interior gatefold continues the wall idea, enhanced this time by Scarfe illustrations designed to help listeners understand the story devised by Waters: on the left-hand side a judge (whose face resembles a pair of buttocks) looming over a stadium, with parading hammers and an aircraft nose-diving toward the crowd; on the right-hand side the teacher, the mother, the wife, and some revolting worms… “I had to think, ‘what would be the most obvious symbol of oppression,’ and the most unrelenting, crushing, unthinking thing that I could think of was a hammer. The violence of a hammer when it comes down is horrific.”124 Finally the credits are written by hand and printed in different colors. Rick Wright and Nick Mason are not mentioned at all, and David Gilmour is mentioned only in his capacity as one of the producers and composers.
Technical Details
The main effects used in the recording and mixing of The Wall are relatively limited, which seems incredible when one listens to the final results. James Guthrie mentions “tape delay,” a couple of digital delays, the famous Eventide H910 Harmonizer, and that’s about it. Far more impressive is the number of studios used: no less than six (and they are just the main ones). The first, which was used mainly for preproduction, was Pink Floyd’s own London studio, Britannia Row, where they had recorded Animals in 1976. This time they were in residence from September 1978 to March 1979, preparing demos of the whole album. Bob Ezrin brought in a sixteen-track Stephens, which he considered better than the Floyd’s MCI multitrack. However, this machine was to prove relatively unstable, and for the French sessions the team favored a sixteen-track Studer A80 with the intention of synchronizing it (by means of an API MagLink synchronizer) with a twenty-four-track Studer during the final mix. According to Nick Mason, Ezrin, like James Guthrie, would find the particular combination of the Britannia Row location and equipment inadequate for the definitive recording, not least the MCI 400 console that was used only for monitoring, Guthrie preferring to input straight into the multitrack via preamps. And as
the Floyd had to go into tax exile no later than April 6, 1979, they took off for Super Bear in the Gerps district of Berre-les-Alpes, near Nice, France. This place had charmed both Gilmour and Wright when they chose to record their respective solo albums at the studio in 1978, and they would remain there from April until June. The control room at Super Bear was equipped with an MCI JH-500 console with four Eastlake TM3 monitors, and the tape recorder was none other than the sixteen-track Studer A80. As at Britannia Row, however, Guthrie preferred to input straight onto tape with the help of Klein & Hummel equalizers. To record Roger Waters’s voice they went to Studio Miraval, where Ezrin discovered a facet of the singer-songwriter-bassist hitherto unknown to him: “Actually, you’d be surprised. Some of the stuff that musicians drive themselves crazy over, like a harmony part, he’d sing it, and say, ‘Close enough! Great! Next!’ But if you wanted a sound effect, you went for the real thing. If you wanted the sound of English school kids, you went to an English school.”119 The console at Studio Miraval was a Neve 32x24, and the monitors Lockwood.
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