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Roger
wanted Rock out.
Dave thought Nick was next.
Bob gave them the hit and got sacked too.
Now, for the first time, all the architects of ‘The Wall’ speak out on
the project that destroyed Pink Floyd.
Sylvie Simmons dons her hardhat
The Cast :
ROGER WATERS - Writer, vocalist, bass-player, producer.
DAVID GILMOUR - Vocalist, guitarist, producer, co-writer (of
"Comfortably Numb," "Young Lust," "Run Like Hell").
RICK WRIGHT - Keyboard player, for the first half of ‘The Wall’ as a
member then as a salaryman.
NICK MASON - Drummer.
JAMES GUTHRIE - Engineer, co-producer.
GERALD SCARFE - Artist, animator.
BOB EZRIN - Producer (former clients: Alice Cooper, Kiss), co-writer (of
‘The Trial’), aged 29 when ‘The Wall’ began.
On June 16 (huh??-vbc) this year Rick Wright finally did what every
therapist advises: confronted his Nemesis. "I think the only one who’s
actually seen Roger in the last 18 years. John Carin (sic), who was
playing with Roger and was on the last two tours I’d done, said, ‘Please
come along.’ I still had a lot of anger -- I haven’t spoken to him since
‘The Wall’ -- but I thought, Oh shit, why not? I don’t have to *see* him.
I was sitting in the audience signing autographs while he performed
on-stage. When he did Pink Floyd music it felt very odd -- that I wasn’t
up there, or Dave or Nick." When the show was over Rick Wright decided
to go backstage.
"It was a difficult one -- for both of
us. There are a lot of issues that maybe one day we’ll talk about but at
the time I didn’t want to go into all that. I just said, Hello, how are
you, you’re looking well."
"He stood in front of me, grinning" says Roger Waters. "I think he’d had
a couple, there was a bit of Dutch courage going on, but he was
perfectly gracious. So was I, I think. He introduced me to his wife, I
said hello, and that was it. It wasn’t uncomfortable. We didn’t have
much to say to one another." Wright and Waters had known each other,
played together, since the early ‘60s. Until ‘The Wall,’ when Roger
threw him out of Pink Floyd.
‘The Wall’ is the concept album of
concept albums, a multi-leveled -- lyrically, musically, visually --
architectural structure, each brick a scar on the psyche. ‘Dark Side Of
The Moon’ has been named as the thinking man’s favorite album to have
sex and take drugs to; the practical use of ‘The Wall’ for the millions
who made it a Number 1 album (five weeks in Britain, 15 in the US) can
only be speculated. Bleak, claustrophobic, but with moments of
flesh-tingling beauty, its themes of paranoia, megalomania, betrayal,
breakdown and collapse appeared to permeate the people who made it.
It’s ‘The Wall’’s 20th birthday this
month -- November 30, happy birthday! -- and as part of the celebrations
there’s a double live album, produced by James Guthrie (also mixing the
DVD of ‘The Wall’ film, which Waters found "terrible" but at least gave
work to the future Saint Bob) who right now has 110 reels of 2-inch tape
from three nights of concerts in 1980 and four in ’81 baking in an oven
–seriously; eight hours, gas mark 2. Apparently, the glue they used to
bind oxide to tape makes the reels go soft as they get older. Something
from which its musicians do not appear to suffer.
Since this first upsurge of
as-near-as-dammit communal Waters-Gilmour-Mason-Wright activity in the
best part of two decades, the web has been buzzing with speculation of a
thawing of tensions, a reunion; a millennium show; the Pyramids. "Ugh,"
Roger Waters shudders. "The idea of having to stay in this big bowl of
porridge swimming around -- no, I’m going to get out, hose myself down,
ah, that’s better. Now I can get on with my life. The idea of getting
involved with any of them again -- and you can imagine, they’re
constantly trying to get me to leap back into the porridge -- even doing
this live album, the sleevenotes, it’s brought back to me how crazy it
all is. I don’t want anything to do with it or them." His distaste is
palpable.
In a studio filled with racing car
posters in King’s Crown, London, 3,000 miles from Waters’ Long Island
home, his old friend Nick Mason’s manner is far less severe, though his
own detached, good-natured way just as dismissive. "Would *you* want to
put 200 road crew together to work on New Year’s Eve? Everyone’s seen
‘Spinal Tap’ and that wonderful reunion moment at the end. I suppose if
I had a sort of fantasy about it it would have happened for something
like Live Aid. There’s obviously an enormous sense of mistrust or
betrayal or anger or whatever. I think one gets over it, but it would be
quite difficult to revisit the areas that made it so much fun in the
beginning."
David Gilmour, urbane, *very* English,
camouflaging his true feelings in language -- passives, convoluted
double negatives -- talks about Waters blithely, almost warmly at times,
like an old sparring partner. "Obviously one sits and thinks about these
things on occasion and I have thought, What would it be like if we all
stood together in a studio and said ‘Shall we do something?’ I don’t see
how that could possibly work -- We invited him if he wanted to come and
play on ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ at Earl’s Court with us, but he politely
said, No thank you. I actually invited him to my 50th birthday party, to
which he also said, Thank you, no. I haven’t made the hugest of efforts
to draw him back into our fold, but I have been unstintingly polite."
And in the house in Atlanta, Georgia,
where he lives with his American wife, Rick Wright still seems like a
man in shock. Oddly enough the most conciliatory of the four, his talk
of injustice, betrayal and ongoing therapy is accompanied by the sound
of thumping hammers. There are builders working away behind us. They’re
building, as it happens, a wall.
THE FOUNDATIONS.
July 6, 1977. On the last night of the "‘Animals’ In The Flesh" tour
at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Roger Waters spits at a fan.
DAVID GILMOUR: I can remember not enjoying it much as a show. They’d
just finished building this big stadium and the crane was still in there,
they forgot to dismantle it and couldn’t get it out. I was so
unenamoured that I went out and sat on the mixing desk for the encore --
that might have not contributed to Roger’s mood. I think Roger was
disgusted with himself really that he had let himself go sufficiently to
spit at a fan.
ROGER WATERS: I’m not sure I hit him.
NICK MASON: Well, Roger is not exactly a man known for peace and love --
But we were sympathetic, even if we didn’t feel as passionately as he
did -- those stadium shows *are* very strange. When we’re playing, we’re
watching the audience, the same way the audience is watching us, and all
you can really see is those front rows and -- I’m not saying they’re all
nutters, but what you tend to get, particularly if it’s what’s
euphemistically called ‘festival-seating’ -- ie no seats -- is the
people who are mad enough to be able to push their way to the front, the
air-guitar players, the people who know all the words and rather sad
ones who have been waiting all day and collapse just as the band comes
on-stage.
DAVID GILMOUR: Roger never liked touring anyway very much, he was always
rather tense and irritable. He was disgusted with the business in many
ways, as we all were. The big change came with the huge success of ‘Dark
Side Of The Moon’ -- the audiences liked to "interact," shout a lot.
Previous to then, even though we played large places, 10,00-seaters, you
could hear a pin drop at appropriate moments. So it had been a shock --
but four years on I was getting used to the idea that that’s the way it
had to be.
ROGER WATERS: It just became more and more oppressive. Those places
weren’t built for music, they were built for sporting events, and it’s
not unnatural to experience a ritualisation of war, because that’s all
sport is. What was going through my mind -- my whole body -- was an
enormous sense of frustration, a feeling of what are we all doing here,
what’s the point? And the answer that kept clanging back monotonously
was: cash and ego. That’s all it’s about.
BOB EZRIN: I met Roger through his then wife Carolyne, who once worked
for me. On the ‘Animals’ tour, they stopped in Toronto where I was
living, and on the limousine ride out to the gig Roger told me about his
feeling of alienation from the audience and his desire sometimes to put
a wall between him and them. I recall saying flippantly, "Well why don’t
you?." A year, 18 months later I got a call asking me to come to his
home to talk to him about the possibility of working together on this
project called ‘The Wall.’
THE MASTER BUILDER.
The ‘Animals’ solo tour over,
the band goes their separate ways -- Gilmour and Wright to make solo
albums, Roger to his house in the country to start writing.
ROGER WATERS: Sometimes during the day I’ll get this very blank feeling
-- not an empty feeling, it’s very full -- and I’ll realise suddenly
that I’m really long-sighted, everything becomes very out-of-focus, and
I think, "Oh, I’m going to write a song." Then one has to take it by the
scruff of the neck and use whatever craft I’ve developed over the years
to finish it off, but the initial creation is a passive act. My view is
it may be an expression of what Jung describes as the collective
unconscious -- human beings seem to have this need to illuminate and
express their relationship with everything else. I’m trying to think
whether I’d had any psychotherapy at that point and I think the answer
is no, that didn’t come until later -- 1981, I think.
Initially, I had two images -- of
building a wall across the stage, and of the sado-masochistic
relationship between audience and band, the idea of an audience being
bombed and the ones being blown to pieces applauding the loudest because
they’re the centre of the action, even as victims. There is something
macabre and a bit worrying about that relationship -- that we will
provide a PA system so loud that it can damage you and that you will
fight to sit right in front of it so you can be damaged as much as
possible -- which is where the idea of Pink metamorphosed into a Nazi
demagogue began to generate from.
[The theme of insanity] has something to do with Syd, but with my own
experiences as well. "When I was a child I had a fever, my hands felt
just like two balloons" is about the indescribable feeling in my body
during a high-fever delirium where everything felt too big. On the
couple of occasions in my life where I have felt myself approaching
metal breakdown it has felt like delirium, so my connection with how Syd
or other schizophrenics must feel is taken from both that childhood
memory and the odd moments on my life of great personal stress when I
have experienced the edges of that same feeling...
BOB EZRIN: Roger invited me down for the weekend -- he had a lovely
house in the country with an appropriately dark studio area. It was one
of those wonderfully moody, grey fall weekends in England. He sat me in
a room and proceeded to play me a tape of music all strung together,
almost like one song 90 minutes long, called ‘The Wall,’ then some bits
and bobs of other ideas that he hoped to incorporate in some way, which
never made it to the album but resurfaced later on some of his solo work.
The English countryside under the weight of humidity and cloud was the
perfect setting for this music and I was transported. It wasn’t complete,
it wasn’t in anything like the final form of the work, but it captured
the atmosphere and I just knew after listening to it that it was going
to be an important work -- and that it was going to take a lot of work
to pull it into something cohesive.
ROGER WATERS: I could see it was going to be a long and complex process
and I needed a collaborator who I could talk to about it. Because
there’s nobody in the band that you can talk to about any of this stuff
-- Dave’s just not interested, Rick was pretty closed down at that
point, and Nick would be happy to listen because we were pretty close at
the time but he’s still more interested in his racing cars. I needed
somebody like Ezrin who was musically and intellectually in a more
similar place to where I was.GILMOUR -- We never made plans immediately
after finishing a project to get together and start the next thing, we
always took a little bit of time off. I’d been persuaded by a couple of
old friends that I’d been in a band with pre-Pink Floyd that we should
just go in and make an album off the cuff, and have a bit of fun. Rick
was doing an album. When we did meet up again in a studio in London,
Roger had the idea that he wanted to make one of two projects that he
had been working on at his home studio during that time. He came in with
two fairly well-formed, largely demoed ideas: one was ‘The Wall’ and one
was what eventually became his first solo album, which had one very nice
tune but in my memory it was too much the same. Between us we decided
‘The Wall’ would be the one we would start working on when we reconvened
in September.
RICK WRIGHT: At that time we were, in theory, bankrupt. Our accountants
had lost our money, we owed huge amounts of tax, and we were told me
must go away for a year, make an album to try and repay the tax we owed,
so it was a pretty scary time for us all.
NICK MASON: The tapes were very poor quality -- Roger always made
dreadful demos even though they were made on very sophisticated
equipment -- but it was immediately clear that it was an interesting
idea that could be developed musically.
RICK WRIGHT: But there were some things about it where I thought, "Oh
no, here we go again -- it’s all about the war, about his mother, about
his father being lost." I’d hoped he could get through all of this and
eventually he could deal with other stuff, but he had a fixation...
Every song was written in the same tempo, same key, same everything.
Possibly if we were not in this financial situation we might have said,
"Well, we don’t like these songs," and things might have been different.
But Roger had this material, Dave and I didn’t have any, so we’ll do it.
DAVID GILMOUR: It is true that we had some financial crisis, but I don’t
think that happened until after we’d started putting together the first
bit of ‘The Wall’ at Brittania Row studios between September and
Christmas. I thought it was a very good concept at the time -- I don’t
like it quite as much now, with the benefit of hindsight I found it a
bit whingeing -- and well worth exploring. I was willing -- have been
before and since -- to let Roger have full rein of his vision.
BRICK BY BRICK : THE BUILDING PROCESS.
In an all-night session, Bob
Ezrin ploughed through Roger Waters’ tapes.
BOB EZRIN: What I did that night was write a script for an imaginary
‘Wall’ movie -- as distinct from the *film*; I had nothing to do with
that and was actually opposed to the idea of codifying it in any fixed
imagery. I just had this sense of a narrative sound-scape -- *saw* it,
more than heard it -- and organised all the pieces of music we had and
some we didn’t, plus sound effects and cross-fades, into a cohesive tale.
I felt who the central character was and I came to the conclusion that
we needed to take it out of the literal first-person and put it in the
figurative -- resurrecting old Pink to whom they had referred in the
past. I came in the next day with a script -- which, by the way, is in
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- handed it out to everybody and we did
a table-read of ‘The Wall.’ It was a whole other way of doing things
when you’re making music, but it really helped to crystallise the work.
From that point on we were no longer fishing, we were building to a
plan.
ROGER WATERS: The basic shape of it didn’t change. Some songs changed a
lot, others -- "Don’t Leave Me Now," "Is There Anybody Out There?," "Mother"
-- are almost exactly as they were originally.
BOB EZRIN: Once we got out of Roger’s house and into the studio, it was
very much a collaborative effort, everybody had their opinions and
contributions. It got very exciting sometimes. Often we’d have these
bash-em-up’s where we’d get into furious arguments about an approach to
a song that would go on for weeks -- as they’re English and I’m Canadian
we were very gentlemanly about it, but no-one would budge. But the
conclusion when there was that kind of conflict -- the synthesis of two
opposing ideas -- was very much stronger than the original idea itself.
ROGER WATERS: I seem to remember the four of us in the beginning before
the recording going through the demo and throwing stuff out.
DAVID GILMOUR: Just sitting around and bickering, frankly. Someone would
say, "I don’t like that one very much," someone else might agree, and
then Roger would look all sulky and the next day he’d come back in with
something brilliant. He was pretty good about that during ‘The Wall --
he became less good during ‘The Final Cut.’ Some of the songs -- I
remember "Nobody Home" -- came along when we well into the thing and
he’d gone off in a sulk the night before and come in the next day with
something fantastic. It’s often good to be geed up into a little state
of rage.
ROGER WATERS: They would like to believe, for whatever reasons, that the
making of ‘The Wall’ was a group collaboration -- well, OK, they
collaborated in it, but they 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. It sounds to me a bit like ‘Animal Farm,’ the pig
fight about who was more equal than others. Since the break-up they’ve
been at great pains to point out how it wasn’t really my work at all and
we all did it together. Well that’s bollocks. It’s just not true, as
anybody who’s listened to what they’ve done since can see -- the fact
that they don’t actually do it, they get other people to do it. It’s so
*clear.* ‘The Wall’ I think is a terrific piece of work and I’m really
proud of it. No, I’ll go no further down there.
NICK MASON: It really did feel like a band working on a record -- maybe
in a slightly dysfunctional way, but I think most bands are
dysfunctional.
ROGER WATERS: Rick didn’t have any input at all, apart from playing the
odd keyboard part, and Nick played the drums, with a little help from
his friends. And Dave, yeah, Dave played the guitar and wrote the music
for a couple of songs, but he didn’t have any input into anything else
really. We co-produced it, I think, Ezrin and myself -- the
collaboration with Ezrin was a pretty 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.
DAVID GILMOUR: Roger was obviously one of the main producers because it
was his idea and he was very, very good about many things to do with
production, like dynamics. I’ve always been one of the producers on Pink
Floyd records, and while I might not argue with Roger much over lyrics I
think I know as much as anyone in or around the band about music and
would certainly give my opinions quite forcibly. Bob Ezrin was in there
partly as a man in the middle to help smooth the flow between Roger and
I, whose arguments were numerous and heated.
NICK MASON: We were looking at the way we worked to see if we could
improve it, and everybody thought it would be enormously helpful to have
an outside influence. Roger had met Bob Ezrin, and it seemed a good idea
to have this hot young engineer, James Guthrie, to complement him.
JAMES GUTHRIE: At the time I got the phone call from the manager, Steve
O’ Rourke, summoning me to his office, I saw myself as a hot young *producer!*
He told me the band were looking for some new blood and they’d heard my
work -- specifically 'The Movies' and 'Runner' -- and sent me to meet
Roger to see how the chemistry was between us. Basically, I wasn’t told
about Bob [Ezrin] and Bob wasn’t told about me. When we arrived I think
we felt we’d been booked to do the same job.
BOB EZRIN: There was an awful lot of confusion as to who was actually
making this record when I first started. Titles notwithstanding, we were
all very high-powered people, very specific in our approach to things,
very opinionated and at the height of our careers creatively, so it was
heady times -- I think at that point Roger wanted the project to be his.
But when one member in a band declares prominence over the others, it
can make it difficult to work together and I think he was sensitive to
that -- or as sensitive as Roger can be -- so he brought me in, I think,
as an ally to help him manage this process through. As it turns out, my
perception of my job was to be the advocate of the work itself and that
very often meant disagreeing with Roger *and* other people and being a
catalyst for them to get past whatever arguments might exist.
RICK WRIGHT: I really enjoyed the days of ‘Dark Side...’ or ‘Wish...’
when we might have been fighting but we were doing it together. I was
concerned that an outside producer might lose what the four of us would
do together. But on the other hand I thought "God, we do need a referee."
ROGER WATERS: We *were* working shoulder-to-shoulder up to and including
‘Dark Side...’ From that point on we weren’t. We’d achieved what we set
out to achieve together and the only reason we stayed together after
that was through fear and avarice.
DAVID GILMOUR: There’s three sections of ‘The Wall’-making: first in
Brittania Row in London, going through the stuff, having ideas, demoing
it all up, then France, where we made the bulk of the album, and Los
Angeles where we went to finish it up and mix it. In France,
particularly, we worked very well, very hard. It’s amazing how much we
actually got done in a comparatively short time.
NICK MASON: The pace was fast and furious, very focused. We were
actually running two studios in France at once.
DAVID GILMOUR: Superbear, the studio we were mostly at, was quite high
in the mountains and it’s rather notorious for being difficult to sing
there, and Roger had a lot of difficulty singing in tune. He always did
-- ha ha. So we found another studio, Miraval, and Roger would go there
with Bob to do vocals.
BOB EZRIN: We were working to a deadline which was a declared vacation
-- we had a lot of vacations! I once added it up and I think the whole
process probably came out to four or five months of real studio time,
but spread out over a year because we did short hours and took a lot of
vacations. They were all family guys and wanted to work 10-6 -- no,
*Roger* decided we were working 10-6. We worked gentlemen’s hours, wore
gentlemen’s clothes, ate gentlemen’s food, even had tea and biccies
brought in every day at the appropriate time. It was all very civilised.
And considering we were doing at the same time some fairly
countercultural stuff, it created almost a schizophrenic feeling of
surreality about the project -- in France, even more so. Some of us were
living in Nice, some had rented entire towns, some were living at the
studio, it was all quite fragmented, but we would come together at the
studio and be creating these amazing things made out of some of the most
banal elements -- drum sound effects were nothing more than roasting
pans being thrown at the floor.
I came in with a lot of ideas that
were slightly foreign to the English team. We pioneered the multiple
machine approach to recording that is now accepted as standard operating
procedure. We cut our basic tracks on a 16-track, copied them to a
mixed-down version on a 24-track, took all the drums and bounced them
down to just a few tracks, put them on the 24, then added all of our
overdubs, instruments, sound effects, vocals. The plan at the end was to
sync up the 16- and the 24-track so they would run together, and the
instruments on the 16- would come back sounding absolutely glorious,
because the tapes had been stored and not played and worn-out over all
the months we’d been working, then all the overdubs would slot on top of
them and we would have this wonderful-sounding album. It sounded a bit
like witchcraft to everybody when I proposed it. To their credit, they
embraced the concept, but as we got closer to the moment of truth they
got more and more nervous. Guthrie in particular. I remember as we were
finishing up one song it was necessary to erase the copy-drums from the
24-track, which meant that if the two tapes didn’t sync up there would
be no drums at all. James blanched when I made him press the erase
button; it was like asking him to shoot a child. When it worked, you’ve
never seen such a look of relief on the faces of so many people. That
process has a tremendous amount to do with why that album has got that
incredible presence and such a density of sound.
TWO SONGS: COMFORTABLY NUMB.
JAMES GUTHRIE: Everyone -- including Roger -- was encouraging Dave to
come up with some ideas, and the day he turned up with "Comfortably
Numb," sang a la-la melody over the top of these chords, was fantastic.
DAVID GILMOUR: Roger and I had a good working relationship. We argued a
lot, sometimes heatedly -- artistic disagreements, not an ego thing. I
don’t think we argued over who would take lead vocals, Roger was not
over-bothered who sang -- but overall we were still achieving things
that were valid. Things like "Comfortably Numb" are really the last
embers of Roger and my ability to work collaboratively together -- my
music, his words. I had the basic part of the music done. I gave Roger
the bits of music, he wrote some words, he came in and said, "I want to
sing this line here, can we extend this by so many bars so I can do that,"
so I said, "OK, I’ll put something in there."
ROGER WATERS: Karl Dallas wrote a book some years ago that infuriated me
because he said it was Dave who wrote one of the compelling songs on the
thing, "Comfortably Numb." That’s just not true... What happened is Dave
gave me a chord sequence, so if you wanted to fight about it -- and I
don’t want to fight about it -- I could say that I wrote the melody, and
all the lyrics, obviously. I think in the choruses he actually hummed a
bit of the melody, but in the verses he certainly didn’t. That’s never
been a problem for me, I think it’s a great chord sequence. Why are we
talking about this? Arguing about who did what at this point is kind of
futile.
BOB EZRIN: "Comfortably Numb" started off as a demo of Dave’s -- a piece
in D with a lovely, soaring chorus and a very moody verse. At first
Roger had not planned to include any of Dave’s material but we had
things that needed filling in. I fought for this song and insisted that
Roger work on it. My recollection is that he did so grudgingly, but he
did it. He came back with this spoken-word verse and a lyric in the
chorus that to me still stands out as one of the greatest ever written.
The marriage of that lyric and Dave’s melodies and emotionally
spectacular guitar solo -- every time I hear that song I get goosebumps.
DAVID GILMOUR: We went to LA with two versions of it -- we recorded one
backing track, just the drums basically, which Roger and Bob liked a lot
but I felt was a bit loose in places so we did another take which I
liked better -- and we had quite a large row about which of these two
versions we should use. In the end, we used bits of both, and I’m not at
all sure if you played me one of those backing tracks and then the other
one I’d know the difference now, but it seemed incredibly important at
the time. You can divide "Comfortably Numb" into dark and light -- the
bits I sing, "when I was a child..." are the light, the "hello is there
anybody in there" that Roger sings are the dark -- and on the dark stiff
I wanted to have a bit more of the grungey guitar element, while Roger
and Bob wanted it just drums and bass and orchestra. We argued
vociferously about that and I lost on that occasion, and I still feel I
was right. On-stage I would always add the grungier tone.
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL Part 2
ROGER WATERS: On the demo I made it
was just me singing to an acoustic guitar.
DAVID GILMOUR: It wasn’t my idea to do disco music, it was Bob’s. He
said to me, "Go to a couple of clubs and listen to what’s happening with
disco music," so I forced myself out and listened to loud,
four-to-the-bar bass drums and stuff and thought, "Gawd awful!" Then we
went back and tried to turn one of the "Another Brick In The Wall" parts
into one of those so it would be catchy. We did the same exercise on
"Run Like Hell."
BOB EZRIN: I’d just done a session in New York and Nile Rodgers and
Bernard Edwards were in the next studio. I heard this drum beat and went
"Wow, would that ever work great with rock ‘n’ roll!" When I got to
England a few months later and I started listening to "Another Brick...,"
that beat kept playing through my head.
NICK MASON: I don’t remember anyone complaining. There is a standard
speed for a disco track and we followed that to the letter. It was
recorded in a very disco way -- drums and bass put down on their own and
everything added gradually on top.
BOB EZRIN: The most important thing I did for the song was insist it be
more than just one verse and one chorus long, which it was when Roger
wrote it. When we played with the disco beat I said, "Man, this is a hit!
But it’s one minute 20, it’s not going to play. We need two verses and
two choruses." And they said, "Well you’re not bloody getting them. We
don’t do singles, so fuck you." So I said, "OK fine," and they left. And
because of our two machine set-up, while they weren’t around we were
able to copy the first verse and chorus, take one of the drum fills, put
them inbetween and extend the chorus. Then the question is, what do you
do with the second verse, which is the same? And, having been the guy
who made 'School’s Out,' I’ve got this thing about kids on a record and
it *is* about kids after all. So while we were in America, we sent Nick
Griffiths to a school near to the Floyd studios [in Islington]. I said,
I want Cockney, I want posh, fill ‘em up" -- and I put them on the song.
I called Roger into the room, and when the kids came in on the second
verse there was a total softening of his face and you just knew that he
knew it was going to be an important record.
ROGER WATERS: It was great -- exactly the thing I expected from a
collaborator.
DAVID GILMOUR: And it doesn’t in the end not sound like Pink Floyd.
THE FALL-OUT.
The atmosphere in the various
studios ranged from "tension" to "all-out war." It reached its nadir
with the firing of Wright.
BOB EZRIN: There was tension between the band members, even tension
between the wives of the band members. There was a period in France
where it was very hostile, that passive-aggressive English-style
conflict.
NICK MASON: Bob probably sees it as war because he was under attack. He
was going through what can only be described as an unreliable phase of
his life -- he was staying down in Nice, we were all up in the hills,
and he’d drive down there when he finished work and I suspect have a
wild time and then be astonished when we were pissed off when he’d
arrive back the next morning late.
BOB EZRIN: Roger and I were having a particularly difficult time. During
the period I went a little mad and really dreaded going in to face the
tension, so I would find any excuse to come in late the next morning. I
preferred not to be there while Roger was there.
ROGER WATERS: There was certainly tension involved, but my feeling as I
got up in the morning and climbed in the car in France to go off to work
was a good, positive feeling, eager to get to the studio. Obviously, we
were having problems with Rick -- he was sort of there but not there.
DAVID GILMOUR: Most of the arguments came from artistic disagreements.
It wasn't total war, though there were bad vibes -- certainly towards
Rick, because he didn't seem to be pulling his weight.
RICK WRIGHT: I wanted to work, but Roger was making it very difficult
for that to happen. I think he was already thinking of trying to get rid
of me.
BOB EZRIN: I saw it happening and it really made me quite ill. I felt
that so much pressure was being put on Rick that it was virtually
impossible for him to live up to expectations. It was almost as though
he was being set up to fail. Under the circumstances I don't see how
anybody could have survived.
ROGER WATERS: Why did I fire Rick? Because he was not prepared to
cooperate in making the record. (Wearily) What actually happened was
‘The Wall’ was the first album where we didn't divide the production
credit between everybody in the band. At the beginning of the process,
when I said I was going to bring Bob Ezrin in and he was going to get
paid, I said, "I'm going to produce the record as well, so is Dave, so
we're going to get paid as well, but Nick, you don't actually do any
record production, and Rick, neither do you. So you're not going to get
paid." Nick said fair enough, but Rick said, "No, I produce the records
just as much as you do." So we agreed we would start making the record
and we would see. But who would be the arbiter? We all agreed on Ezrin.
So Rick sat in the studio -he would
arrive exactly on time, which was very unusual, and stay to the bitter
end every night. One day Ezrin said to me -- he was slightly irked by
this brooding presence very occasionally going "I don't like that" -- "Why's
Rick here again?" I said, "Don't you get it? He's putting in the time to
prove he's a record producer. You talk to him about it." So he did.
After that Rick never came to another session, unless he was directly
asked to do keyboard tracks. And he became almost incapable of playing
any keyboards anyway. It was a nightmare. I think that was the beginning
of the end.
But in the end of the end, since you
ask, we had agreed to deliver the album at the beginning of October and
we took a break in August to go on holiday. I sat down with a bunch of
sheet music and paper and wrote out all the songs and what was needed
and made up a schedule, and it became clear to me that we couldn't get
it finished in the time available. So I called Ezrin, "Would you be
prepared to start a week earlier on the keyboard parts with Rick in Los
Angeles?" Eventually he went, "All right. Thanks, pal," --because of the
idea of doing keyboard tracks with Rick. I said, "Look, you can get
another keyboard player in as well in case it's stuff he can't handle,
but if you get all that keyboard overdubbing done before the rest of us
arrive we can just about make the end of the schedule."
A couple of days later I got a call
from O'Rourke. I said, "Did you speak to Rick?" "Yeah. He said, 'Tell
Roger to fuck off.'" Right, that's it. Here I was doing all this work
and Rick had been doing nothing for months and I got "Fuck off." I spoke
to Dave and Nick and said, "I can't work with this guy, he's impossible,"
and they both went, "Yeah, he is." Anyway, it was agreed by everybody.
In order not to get a long drawn-out thing I made the suggestion that
O'Rourke gave to Rick: either you can have a long battle or you can
agree to this, and the '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. So the idea of the big bad Roger suddenly getting rid of Rick
for no reason at all on his own is nonsense.
DAVID GILMOUR: (Sigh) I did not go along with it. I went out to dinner
with Rick after Roger had said this to him and said if he wanted to stay
in the band I would support him in that. I did point out to Rick that he
hadn't contributed anything of any value whatsoever to the album and
that I was not over-happy with him myself -- he did very very little; an
awful lot of the keyboard parts are done by me, Roger, Bob Ezrin,
Michael Kamen, Freddie Mandell -- but his position in the band to me was
sacrosanct. My view, then and now is, 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.
ROGER WATERS: I had a meeting with Dave in my garden in the South of
France at which Dave said, "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!"
NICK MASON: I think in real terms it would be highly likely that I would
have been next. And then after that I think it would have been Dave.
That's what's curious when we talk about it now. I think it's just that
Roger was feeling more and more that this was his idea and he wanted
total control. Roger and I have been friends since we were students,
before the band even existed, so I suppose in that way my position was
stronger.
But what I think had been the case is
there had always been a sort of philosophical division within the band:
Roger and I were seen as the ones who liked the special effects, the
show, the technology, the non-music in a way, whereas Dave and Rick took
a more musically pure position. That's a very broad generalisation, but
since this was conceived from the beginning as a big theatrical
production, I think that's where the conflict started -- because Rick is
absolutely not someone you would have a fight with, he's extremely mild.
He was his own worse enemy in that he could have perhaps given a little
bit more and maybe defused the situation, but I think Roger manoeuvred
brilliantly (laughs). Made Stalin look like an old muddle-head. We all
felt fairly hopeless at the time to change it or do anything. Roger made
it fairly clear that if Rick stayed, he and the album would not, and I
think the threat of what was hanging over us in terms of financial --
not just losses but actual bankruptcy -- was pretty alarming. We were
under a lot of pressure. I felt guilty. Still do really. In retrospect
one likes to think that one would have behaved better and done things
differently. But probably we would have done completely the same thing.
RICK WRIGHT: It would have been quite easy to say, "Oh he left because
he had a cocaine problem or a drink problem." I can honestly say that it
really was not a drug problem. It was taken without a doubt by him, me,
Dave, Nick, Bob Ezrin, but purely socially, it wasn't lying around in
the studio.
ROGER WATERS: There *were* people who were doing a lot -- some of us had
big, big problems. I certainly wasn't doing drugs at that point.
RICK WRIGHT: When I think about, right from the beginning Roger and I
were never the best of friends, but we weren't enemies either until he
went into his ego trip. Once he decided he wanted to control everything,
his first step was, "I'll get rid of Rick, I've never like him anyway."
It was part of his big game plan to become the leader, the writer, the
producer and have people play for him. I think the next step of his
plan, though they were buddies, was to get rid of Nick, that’s what I’ve
heard, and then Dave become the guitarist and use session musicians. You
may think that’s all rubbish, but I suspect that’s how he was thinking.
I think he would tell you that I'd
lost interest in the band -there are times around ‘Animals’ where I
would sit down with our manager and say, "I've got to leave this band, I
can't stand the way Roger's being," but I wasn't really serious about
leaving, though sometimes I wasn't happy. At the time I was going
through a divorce, I wasn't that keen on ‘The Wall’ anyway, and I didn't
have any material. He might have seen my situation as not having
contributed everything but he wouldn't *allow* me to contribute anything.
We had a break after we finished recording in France and I went to
Greece to see my family. I get a call from Steve saying, "Come to LA
immediately, Roger wants you to start recording keyboard tracks." I said,
"I haven't seen my young kids for months and months, I'll come on the
agreed date. " He said, "Fair enough, I understand." Come the agreed day,
Steve met me and said, "Roger wants you out of the band."
NICK MASON: He just took it and left. I think there must have been an
element of him that just thought, "Well I've had enough anyway if it's
going to be like this."
RICK WRIGHT: I fought my corner. Dave and Nick would say, "This is not
right, we think it's unfair. "When we had the meeting Roger said, "Look,
either you leave or I'm not going to let you record my material for ‘The
Wall.'" It was maybe a game of bluff but that's what he said to me.
Remember we were in a terrible financial situation and he said to me, "You
can get your full royalties for the album but you can basically leave
now and we'll get a keyboard player to finish it." And I spent many days
and sleepless nights thinking about his whole thing.
I could have called his bluff and said,
"OK, go and do a solo album," and I think Roger would have then said,
"OK, I'm scrapping all this material" -- it was his, so he had the right
to do that. I thought about it and thought about it and I decided I
can't work with this guy any more whatever happens, I was terrified of
the financial situation and I felt the whole band was falling apart
anyway. I didn't know, and I think I'll never know 'til the day I die,
what would have happened if I'd said, "No, I'm not going to go." So, I
made the decision, rightly or wrongly, to leave. But I also made the
decision I'm going to finish recording this album and I want to be in
the live shows and then we'll say goodbye.
The interesting thing about all that
is why, if Roger thought I couldn't perform, why he then said, "OK,
that's fine, you can finish recording and do the live shows." It's very
weird and bizarre, and it was a time in my personal life -- I would say
I was confused.
JAMES GUTHRIE: Rick did some great playing on that album, whether or not
people remember it -- some fantastic Hammond parts.
RICK WRIGHT: My therapist is convinced I'm still extremely angry about
the whole thing and in a sense I am. I think it was nasty. This is my
band as much as it's his. But the fact that Dave and Nick and Roger fell
out immediately afterwards -- they did ‘The Final Cut,’ but that was
ridiculous as I understand it, they virtually had physical fights in the
studio, Dave refused to have his name on the credits -- kind of helped
me deal with the fact that I'd left the band. But I don't like the way
it was done -- after 18 years I still feel it was wrong. Hopefully one
day I'll sit down with Roger and he might then say, "yes, it was
unfair."
ROGER WATERS: No. It was absolutely the right thing to do.
THE WALL.
The album was completed in Los
Angeles, its cover designed by Gerald Scarfe and Roger Waters. The
sleevenotes to the original vinyl release credited three producers, one
co-producer, four engineers, three writers, two orchestra arrangers, six
backing vocalists, a sound equipment man and Islington Green School. The
names Rick Wright and Nick Mason are nowhere to be seen.
RICK WRIGHT: I’d forgotten about that -- Nick was left off as well? I
wonder why – but at the time I’d left the band and sort of given up.
NICK MASON: I wasn’t too happy. It was rectified on later pressings, I
think.
GERALD SCARFE: I think Roger had a strong idea what ‘The Wall’ cover
should look like -- completely white with the bricks on it. I did a
little rough drawing one evening while we were staying together in
France that had all the little characters inside that I’d designed for "The
Trial" poking out of the wall.
DAVID GILMOUR: Storm [Thorgerson] had already been pushed out a little
bit by then. Roger was very displeased with him -- these are very old
stories and I can’t claim to remember every detail but I think it
culminated in Hipgnosis putting ‘Animals’ into a book of album covers
and saying it was theirs and didn’t put in that it was from an idea by
Roger. Roger’s keen quest for credit on everything at the time made him
rather upset.
NICK MASON: There were a number of playbacks. One of the executives from
CBS was absolutely appalled -- went back and said, "This is terrible,
rubbish, what are we going to do?" Of course, it all turned out fine.
JAMES GUTHRIE: Unlike most bands who have to answer to the record
company, with the Pink Floyd, it’s more, "We’re going to make an album
now, you’ll hear it when it’s finished." The official playback was at
CBS Records in Century City. I went in a couple of hours early with a
quarter-inch tape to set up the sound system in their conference room.
By the time we got to the bit where the stukas swooped down, it was so
loud it blew the right speaker, so we hunted the entire building for an
office that was big enough and had a sound system that was even halfway
decent. We eventually found one and took all the furniture out, threw in
a load of cushions, turned the lights off and just played the album.
RICK WRIGHT: The playback was a very difficult, strange time. I think I
was emotionally numb.
DAVID GILMOUR: It was a magical moment: "Yep, we’ve pretty well nailed
it."
ROGER WATERS: A great, classic piece of work.
ON WITH THE SHOW.
Pink Floyd’s biggest
spectacular yet: 45 tons of equipment, 106 decibels of quadrophonic
sound, a bomber plane, inflatables, Gerald Scarfe’s monstrous puppets, a
fake Pink Floyd band in masks and 340 bricks erected by concealed
hydraulic lifts into a 160x35ft wall.
BOB EZRIN: We had rough-mixed everything in France, pulled it together
in sequence, had a table with a model of the stage and teeny rubber men
and mock-inflatables, and we played the record while playing the show on
the table top, so the first time the band heard ‘The Wall’ was a
complete audio-visual experience. We were not just making an album, we
were also building the stage show from the script. Roger and I would
start our day at 8.30 in the morning at Gerald Scarfe’s house looking at
animation and then we would talk to Mark Fisher, architect designer
extraordinaire, about the stage design. We spent a lot of time weighing
bricks and making sure that if they fell forwards nobody would get
killed. At that point we were even thinking of designing our own venue
to take on the road – this surreal tent in the shape of a worm.
ROGER WATERS:The other guys in the
band had nothing to do with the show -- they like to think they did but
they didn’t. If you read the programme of the show its says on the
inside page, "’The Wall,’ written and performed by Roger Waters,
performed by Pink Floyd," and that’s what it was. I was no longer
interested in working in committee with anybody.
I started working with Gerald to see what kind of ideas he came up with.
Probably out of his ideas for the animation came the idea, hey, perhaps
this could be a movie at some point. The original scripts I started to
write were about a story happening around a rock ‘n’ roll show with us
performing and bombing the audience -- a strange, surreal thing -- and
it wasn’t until [director] Alan Parker eventually became involved that,
much at his instigation, we dropped the idea of using any live footage
of the band performing the piece and adopted the idea that it should
become a straight-forward narrative.
GERALD SCARFE: I had previously done some things with ‘Wish You Were
Here’ and I became very friendly with them all. When Roger had written
‘The Wall,’ he came to me and played the raw tapes and said he wanted to
make an album, a show and a film. He was completely honest about where
the whole thing had come from. A couple of beers and he would ramble on,
as we all do, about things that happened to him that had upset him.
We seemed to get on well. I like
Roger’s sense of humour -- he has this rather acerbic sense of humour
which I do too, a cynical view of life, and he’s extremely witty. We
used to play a tremendous amount of snooker together, it became almost
fanatical -- competitive, but it wasn’t played for enormous amounts of
money. Roger won, mainly. Roger is one of those wonderful people as far
as I was concerned who seems to understand that when you hire an artist
you hire what the artist does, you don’t tell them what to do. Obviously,
you have discussions, but it was up to me as to how I illustrated it.
The idea of using inflatables was something they had devised earlier,
but the designs were all mine.
First of all I had to decide what Pink
would look like -- I saw him as this embryonic little prawn-like figure
who was completely vulnerable, because a lot of it is about how we hide
behind a wall because we don’t want other people to hurt us. The wife I
made like a serpent that would strike and sting -- I have no idea what
his ex-wife looks like so it was definitely not based on her. The
teacher was based vaguely on a teacher I’d known myself. That mother was
an old-fashioned ‘50’s comforting type with these very strong arms that
turned into walls. The hammers came from me looking for a very cruel,
unthinking image, something intractable that couldn’t be stopped, and
then the idea of them goosestepping came from that.
It had humour to it, I hope, in parts,
but it was generally pretty bleak. I suppose the overall story is. "Goodbye
Blue Skies" (sic) is one on my favorite pieces of animation. For me that
was very much a hymn to the Second World War and the sadness of it all.
I was a small child during the war so I understood the feeling of
bombers and gasmasks -- they used to make them for children in the shape
of Mickey Mouse because they were frightening, claustrophobic things to
wear. I designed some creatures called the Frightened Ones who had heads
like gasmasks and were running into air-raid shelters. Animation doesn’t
have to be little Disney bunnies running around, it’s unlimited,
surreal. I tried very hard with the open brief that all the guys in Pink
Floyd gave me -- yes, I dealt mainly with Roger, but all the guys were
completely on my side -- to give them my very best. Directing animation
is a very time-consuming thing, so it took over a year. An awful lot of
snooker.
RICK WRIGHT: As I saw it, Roger’s original concept for the show was
literally to build a wall, go home and leave the audience pissed off.
But once that wall was built and the visual stuff put on it and the
holes so that people could appear it became a very good theatrical
device.
DAVID GILMOUR: I suppose with things like ‘Spinal Tap’ coming out later
with their wonderful "Stonehenge" -- but it all seemed to have a meaning
and a point, and if mockery was going to stop us it would have stopped
us many years before that. The shows were terrific. I enjoyed them
thoroughly. As they went along, through the 30-odd shows that we did, I
became more aware of the restriction imposed by something that was so
choreographed -- there was not really much room for letting the music go
away into its own thing. But you just have to look on it as a different
thing -- it’s as much a theatrical piece as it is a musical piece.
I was in charge of all the mechanics
of making it work. I had a six-foot-long cue-sheet draped over my
amplifier for the first few shows which I had memorised after that, so
I’d know exactly where a cue would come from, because it could come from
a floor monitor or from film, and I had one control unit to adjust the
digital delay lines on my equipment and Roger’s, Rick’s and Snowy [White]’s,
so I didn’t really notice what was going on around me terribly much.
NICK MASON: The drums were in an armored cage, so when the wall
collapsed it wouldn’t destroy them. It was a curious, rather nice
environment -- almost like being in a studio, except you’re interacting,
and odd, because it’s half-live. Not much spontaneity, but we’re not
well-known for our duck-walking and general gyrating about on-stage.
RICK WRIGHT: Why did I agree to play? Maybe I couldn't actually handle
the idea of just standing up in the room and saying, "Right, that's it,
bye-bye." I thought, if I'm going to leave at least I know I've got
another month or so to carry on working - even possibly with the hope in
the back of my mind that things might change. On the live performances
Roger was being reasonably friendly. It was difficult but I tried to
forget all my grudges, and I enjoyed playing ‘The Wall.’ I put
everything I could into the performances, and I think Roger approved of
that. We would talk civilly to each other. It wasn't too bad at all.
NICK MASON: Of course it was. But the British are bloody good at that -
just get on with it in spite of the fact that they're absolutely
seething.
ROGER WATERS: It was a 'fait accompli,' Rick was being paid a wage, he
seemed happy with that, we were happy with that, and that was the end of
it -- or maybe he wasn't happy with it but it's not something we
discussed. Backstage it was all pretty separatist -- separate trailers,
none facing each other -- ha-ha -- with all our little camps. The
atmosphere was awful, but the job, the show, was so important that
certainly on-stage I don't think that affected me at all.
RICK WRIGHT: It just seemed to me another example of why I'm not sad to
leave, because the band had lost any feeling of communication and
camaraderie by this time. But bands can go on-stage and perform music
even if they hate each other. It was a band that I felt was falling to
pieces -- which of course it did.
BOB EZRIN: I was asked to be involved with the show and I couldn't -- I
was going through a divorce and fighting for custody of my children.
That and another incident, where in my naivety I took a phone call from
a friend who happened to be a journalist and broke my non-disclosure
with the band when he teased information out of me, so upset Roger, who
was already feeling very nervous and was dealing with the Rick situation.
That was it. I was banned from backstage. I went anyway, New York was
sort of my territory, all the security at the venue knew me from Kiss
and Alice Cooper. When the Pink Floyd security said, "He can't come in,"
they said, "Like hell he can't!" I had to buy my ticket, but saw the
show. It was flawless and utterly overwhelming. In "Comfortably Numb,"
when Dave played his solo from the top of the wall, I broke into tears.
It was the embodiment of the entire experience. In the final analysis it
produced what is arguably the best work of that decade, maybe one of the
most important rock albums ever.
THE FINAL CUT.
In 1980-81 ‘The Wall’ played
in Los Angeles, New York, Dortmund and London, returning to Earl’s Court
to film footage ultimately not used in the movie. Then the band started
work on ‘The Final Cut.’
ROGER WATERS: I had complete control of 'The Final Cut.'
DAVID GILMOUR: That discussion came up on occasions. It wouldn't have
been to the band's benefit for Roger to have total control, he wasn't up
to it. He hasn't had huge success with anything over which he's had
total control.
ROGER WATERS: The concept [of ‘The Wall’'s theme influencing its
author's behaviour] is a convenient view for people. It's a short step
from leader to dictator. We're all volunteers. Nobody had to stay. Even
during ‘The Final Cut,’ where everything finally exploded, I was always
completely willing to make the record on my own. We'd been arguing since
1974, for God's sake. Too long. At a certain point you have to say, this
is not working, the point has come to break up.
DAVID GILMOUR: Roger said it was over. I said I would probably make
another record. He made it clear he wouldn't make another record with us;
I made it clear that it was my intention so to do.
ROGER WATERS: I want people around me who are creative, lively,
interested and interesting. Dave is none of those things. He doesn't
have any ideas and he's not interested really in people who do, except
insofar as they can write records that he can put his name on, which is
what's been happening since I left.
NICK MASON: I would never have imagined that we *could* have carried on
without him until Dave said, "We can. Let's have a go." The feeling was,
It's not your band to kill.
ROGER WATERS: I didn't decide that the band would have to die. I
expressed my view that that would been (sic) the best thing. I would be
distressed if Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr made records and went on
the road calling themselves The Beatles. If John Lennon's not in it,
it's sacrilegious. I don't want to put words into Dave's mouth but from
what I've read I have a suspicion his view would be that a lot of people
would hold the view that it wasn't OK to go on calling the band Pink
Floyd when Syd ceased to function. The body of work that the four of us
produced together post-Syd has some of that connection to the same
things that The Beatles' work has a connection to, and that for me makes
Pink Floyd important. And to continue with Gilmour and Mason, getting in
a whole bunch of other people to write the material, seems to me an
insult to the work that came before. And that's why I wanted the name to
retire.
END
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