by Will Romano
Dripping with sarcasm, “Have a Cigar” is an ingenuously constructed song (sung by band friend, folkie/prog-folk songwriter Roy Harper) exposing the mindless—and endless—spiel and spin of slithering record industry types attempting to worm their way into the very core of big sellers like Floyd.
Poetically, the song collapses upon itself, shrinking in the mix to transistor radio sound quality (a commentary on the band’s acceptance of its own commercialism?). As the transistor radio seems to fade, we pick up another signal: Someone is flipping through radio stations (a commentary on homing in on some kind of artistic clarity?) until the scratchy and distant sound of a twelve-string (in the right channel) is met by a clearer, panned-slightly-to-the-left-channel six-string acoustic guitar just before Gilmour sings the now-famous/infamous line, “So, so you think you can tell . . .”
Essentially, “Wish You Were Here” undercuts whatever optimism comes through in “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”: That Barrett is lost inside his own head and can’t be helped is a foregone conclusion. He was a formidable general in his day, but now he—and perhaps the writer of the song—are hopeless, just a casualty of the war/life.
In an eerie coincidence, rumor had it that while the band was mixing the song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” Barrett ambled into the studio at Abbey Road. He hadn’t been invited and at first no one even recognized the rather rotund man with shaved head and eyebrows, murmuring something about wanting to lay down guitar tracks. Waters spotted him and pointed him out to the others.
The band was shocked and saddened at this bit of ungodly synchronicity. (Reportedly, Waters was reduced to tears when Barrett began speaking.) They were speechless.
After this strange encounter, Barrett retreated into what was probably his first love, painting, and, as has been reported, never saw his former Floyd bandmates again.
ANIMALS
While Floyd clearly still owed a tremendous debt to Barrett (if, for nothing else, the concept of madness and the strain of madness being shoved under Waters’s nose as a viable theme for rock records), the band increasingly became a vehicle for Waters’s repressed anger, misanthropy, and childhood scars.
This was never more apparent than on the next three albums released by the band—1977’s Animals, 1979’s The Wall, and 1983’s The Final Cut.
At its most basic, Animals, written nearly entirely by Waters (perhaps informed by George Orwell), divides the human race into three classifications: pigs (the privileged and ruling classes), dogs (the rebels, mavericks, hunters), and sheep (everyday people just trying to get through their lives). By personifying animals, it forces us to see human behavior and archetypal human personality traits more objectively.
At its most complex, Animals is a descent into the human (and British) psyche and subconscious motivations that decries the power of “the man,” the inner workings of a democratic Western society, its inherent contradictions, and the ills that plague it.
Animals opens with a Dylanesque folky acoustic strumming and Waters’s nasally vocal twang for the song “Pigs on the Wing (Part One),” and is followed by the Gilmour-sung meditation on disillusionment titled “Dogs” (featuring some of the guitarist’s best work on the album), “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” (snorting beasts of the title noisily announce the entrance of the song about decadence), “Sheep” (animal-on-animal violence and the great masses being kept in line through fear), and “Pigs On the Wing (Part Two)” (the companion piece to the opener, which may refer to ultimately accepting your station in life).
These large-as-life themes were expanded to gigantic proportions for the record’s accompanying visuals: A fifty-foot swine, designed by the German company Balloon Fabrik, was tied to the smokestacks of the Battersea Power Station while snapshots were taken for the LP’s cover.
Reportedly, the dirigible was accidentally loosed over Hyde Park and touched down (or crashed) a farm in Chilham. That same pig, filled with helium, was used for the band’s live show—just one of the many extravagant props that the band used for their live productions, which also included a giant octopus, a dual-mirror wheel to cast blinding beams of light, one large bespectacled schoolteacher marionette, a ditched plane, and other spectacles.
In many ways, Animals was the start of it all—the supersize Floyd show. From here on in, fans would come to expect the mind-blowing lengths to which Pink Floyd would go to entertain a crowd in the 1970s and the early part of the 1980s.
THE WALL
Floyd performed, on and off, for the first six months of 1977 in support of Animals. Gigging in arenas in North America and Europe, Waters became irritated first by the impersonal nature of the venues (calling them “oppressive”) and then by the audiences themselves. (Waters famously spat on a rowdy fan in Montreal at Olympic Stadium.)
Waters once again reflected on the affairs of his life and gleaned a new subject for a concept record, The Wall, centered on an aging, emotionally and detached rocker named Pink, who’s fallen prey to his fears, perhaps much like Waters. Building a barrier between himself and the outside world appears to be one way for Pink to protect himself.
“I started thinking, ‘What is this wall and what’s it made from?”’ Waters told Guitar World. “Then the idea started to occur to me that the individual bricks might be from different aspects of the history of my life and other people’s lives.”
We journey through Pink’s haunted psyche, experiencing the trauma and lurid details of his birth, cruel school headmasters, the death of Pink’s father in the war, a smothering mother (who attempts to shelter her son, to a fault), the icy effects of the Cold War, an adulterous wife, the slow spiral toward madness, and an acknowledgement of the pain the rock star has caused those around him by being emotionally unavailable in songs such as “Comfortably Numb,” “Another Brick in the Wall (Part I),” “Mother,” “Goodbye Cruel World,” “Goodbye Blue Sky,” “The Trial,” “Young Lust,” and “Empty Spaces.”
In later years Gilmour, embittered by legal wrangling with Waters, called The Wall a “catalog of people Roger blames for his own failings in
Perhaps. But, interestingly, some of Gilmour’s most memorable and biting guitar work appears on The Wall—from the famous, towering blues-based solo in “Comfortably Numb’ to the glassy, heavily compressed funky rhythm guitar of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)” (featuring the voices of a chorus of children recorded in the stairwells of the Arts High School in North London) and the fingerpicking style he employs in “Goodbye Blue Sky.”
While it’s difficult to argue that the band’s twenty-six-song double album was evidence of Floyd curtailing their self-indulgent tendencies, the individual songs that appear on The Wall are bite-size bits (no “Echoes” here) that, by virtue of being so, defined mainstream music. The Wall went to number one in the U.S. in 1980 and number three in Britain.
STAGING THE WALL
Transferring Waters’s jaundiced dream to the stage required a construction crew: A crane was needed to erect a thirty-five-foot high wall (which was nearly 160 feet across) of white cardboard bricks.
The wall separating the band from the audience, a stage design concept created by illustrator Gerald Scarfe, had built-in holes so concertgoers could see the band. By show’s end, the wall would come crashing down and the band would be on full display.
“The Wall blew my mind,” says Trans-Siberian Orchestra mastermind Paul O’Neill. “The whole concept of putting the bricks up little by little during the show so that by the mid of show, the stage is walled off and then you hear someone say, ‘Is there anybody out there?’ It was brilliant. They were always pushing the envelope. It has withstood the ultimate critic—time.”
OUTSIDE THE WALL: THE FINAL CUT AND BEYOND
The effect of The Wall—both musically and visually—is immeasurable and spawned the semi-animated movie adaptation, 1982’s Pink Floyd: The Wall, directed by Alan Parker, starring Boomtown Rats front man and future Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof.
In 1
983, Floyd released The Final Cut, a semi-symphonic final studio record helmed by Waters (who wrote all the music), and yet another concept album, largely exploring the same thematic territory as Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall. In this installment, Waters takes cynical aim at the military, organized religion, and the very societal fabric of England.
The Final Cut is merely an extension of the barrier—the wall—Waters had erected the previous few albums. There are some genuine magical musical moments here (e.g., “Paranoid Eyes,” “The Hero’s Return”), but too much of it feels like retread, as if Waters were wallowing in his own misery, sometimes to the point of melodrama. In addition, the R&B-tinged rocker “Not Now John” and the cautionary tale of societal conformity “Your Possible Pasts,” both Top 10 U.S. hits, wouldn’t have been out of place on The Wall.
All of this only served to further heighten the tension between Waters and his remaining bandmates, who were had already waved good-bye to keyboardist Wright, who’d been ousted prior to the recording of The Final Cut.
It appears Waters began thinking of Floyd as the vehicle for his own personal reflection and pain—the other members were there to help orchestrate and bring his grand (and sour) ideas to life. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Unsurprisingly, given the band’s morale, Floyd didn’t tour The Final Cut, and in 1985, Waters announced he was leaving the band, having already released a 1984 solo record, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking. (Gilmour countered with his own solo album, About Face, his second, the same year.)
For all intents and purposes, the band was no more—reportedly never to be a whole again. This didn’t stop fans from continuing to flood the record stores to buy Floyd albums or gobble up anything even remotely tied to the band.
Floyd’s mystique had grown to enormous proportions in their absence—more than anyone could have known. By the mid-1980s, Floyd laser shows were cropping up at various venues, such as New York City’s Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, playing to the stoner crowd and the average Floyd fanatic hungry for the band’s marriage of dazzling light displays and aural atmospherics.
Still, the band members kept their distance and continued to work separately until Gilmour and Mason decided to reassemble the band, without Waters, and even extended an invite to the bassist’s nemesis and erstwhile Pinky, Wright.
Waters was furious, even calling the events that transpired “the Floyd fraud.” A bitter war of the words in the press and legal battle ensued. Waters sued his former mates over the rights to the name but lost, and the Gilmour version of the band released A Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987, which went on to sell millions, making Floyd one of the biggest comeback stories in music of the decade. (Waters had released his 1987 solo album Radio K.A.O.S. earlier in the year, but it was soon overshadowed.)
Floyd was a virtual inspiration for any “dinosaur” act that’s ever been written off as dead: The revamped and rejuvenated band played sold-out shows (multiple nights in a single city in some cases) across three continents, wowing audiences with classic material, syncopated laser light displays, one flying bed, and a giant inflatable pig. (Waters owned the rights to the pig and, to avoid legal action, Gilmour and Mason attached testicles to the monster swine.)
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)
Wish You Were Here (1975)
The Wall (1979)
Live at Pompeii: The Director’s Cut (DVD, 2003)
A faceless label executive: Welcome to the machine.
“David Gilmour, over the years, polished and honed Pink Floyd,” says Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. “They’ve played to their strengths. Particularly Gilmour, who had that really shiny veneer of excellent skillful guitar playing, which made Pink Floyd, then and now, one of the most important bands of all time.”
The double live Delicate Sound of Thunder followed in 1988, capitalizing on the band’s recent success and world tour. Two years later Floyd emerged with Rick Wright as a formal member and the number-one U.S. record, The Division Bell— Gilmour’s first real foray as the leader into conceptual rock, on the subject of communication (which might even address the rift between him and Waters in “Lost for Words”).
Nineteen ninety-five’s live P.U.L.S.E. followed. Waters was reportedly invited to perform with Floyd in England on the night the band was filming for the accompanying video release of P.U.L.S.E., but he declined.
Ten years went by, Floyd was a memory, and then the impossible: Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason reunited for a four-song set at the Live 8
ALAN PARSONS: TALES OF IMAGINATION
The Alan Parsons Project (APP), formed in 1975 by engineer/producer Alan Parsons (who was then best known for his work with Pink Floyd on the band’s 1973 hi-fi breakthrough, The Dark Side of the Moon), and master songwriter Eric Woolfson, dented the U.S. Top 40 from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s with such orchestrated, progressive pop songs as “(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” “I Wouldn’t Want to be Like You,” “Games People Play,” “Eye in the Sky,” and “Don’t Answer Me.”
Unlike other studiocentric outfits such as Mandalaband and the art-pop band 10cc, APP married a four-on-the-floor techno-dance feel with odd time signatures and expansive symphonic elements, producing deceptively complex tunes that, at their core, were very melodic.
“Alan and I met at Abbey Road [Studios],” said Woolfson before his untimely death in December 2009. “He was working in one studio and I was working in another, and we were very similar heights as far as our size. We saw eye to eye, literally, so we got [to] talking and I was impressed with this guy. He was very modest, despite the fact that he was working with some of the biggest artists of the day.”
Woolfson eventually came to manage Parsons and finally work with him in the Alan Parsons Project. With Parsons and Woolfson at the helm, and a stable of first-rate session musicians (including members of bands such as Pilot, Ambrosia, and Curved Air), APP had the potential to metamorphose into whatever the two protagonists had envisioned the music to be—and they dared to dream in wide-screen.
APP, as Pink Floyd had before them, became known for their aural visions, beginning with 1976’s Tales of concert to end global poverty in Hyde Park in 2005. The band acknowledged the debt they owed Syd Barrett, and on they went with their set.
Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe (1976)
Pyramid (1978)
Eye in the Sky (1982)
Robot (1977)
Mystery and Imagination, based on short stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe—a literary figure Woolfson had been fascinated with as a child growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, in large part due to filmmaker Roger Corman’s cinematic interpretation of the author’s timeless and terrifying stories.
“I remember being petrified that Pink Floyd would get hold of the idea,” Woolfson said. “We called everything by fake song titles ... so that nobody would know what the real subject matter was.”
Parsons and Woolfson used anything and everything at their disposal to experiment with sound, including sampled noises, various stringed instruments, and orchestras.
“I remember when we were recording in Kingsway Hall in London, which has a marvelous sound, and the underground trains, when they’d pass, would give you a terrible rumble, which sometimes necessitated a retake,” Woolfson said. “We were in the middle of recording a section of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and in comes this fantastic rumble. That sound was mixed in as a subsonic effect. We couldn’t have picked a better place to record.”
Despite APP’s reputation as a synth-based studio band, Parsons and Woolfson were bound and determined to skirt the use of synthesizers in favor of more organic sonic elements.
“For the first two albums, I kind of almost avoided synths,” says Parsons. “It was really odd that I got the title of electronic synth wizard.”
When released, Tales of Mystery and Imagination was a Top 40 hit in the U.S., and entered the British charts in the
Top 60. Its success was enough to convince Woolfson and Parsons that APP was a viable project, and they continued to release Top 10 U.S. albums such as 1977’s I Robot (based on the Isaac Asimov book I Robot) and 1982’s Eye in the Sky, and Top 20 hits like 1980’s Turn of a Friendly Card (inspired by Woolfson’s and Parson’s time in the gaming Mecca Monaco) and 1984’s Ammonia Avenue.
In many cases, the varied sound textures and overall atmosphere of the records gave the productions an uncommon and often subtle sonic richness. “To be a producer/engineer like Alan is really a talent,” said Woolfson. “It only just hit me when I began managing him.”
Other audiophile dreams included 1978’s Pyramid (which bears conceptual and musical links to Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon), 1979’s Eve (on the psychological impact of the fairer sex’s stranglehold on the male psyche), 1985’s Vulture Culture, 1986’s Stereotomy, and 1987’s Gaudi—boasting such musical attributes as symphonic pomp and Györgi Ligeti—style choral clusters.
“If there was anything unusual, we went for it,” Woolfson said. “Alan’s approach was, you didn’t just play one line on one instrument. You’d play a line and then about another half dozen different things with it, and then he cherry-picked what combinations worked. Alan had layers of sound on top of layers, which was his technique. I used to joke, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum and so does Alan Parsons.’ If there was a space, he wanted to fill it with something.”