!!!ROGER KEITH "SYD" BARETT PASSES AWAY AT AGE 60!!!
--/\==Syd Barrett, one of the original members of legendary rock group Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 60 from complications arising from diabetes.
The guitarist was the band's first creative force and an influential songwriter, penning their early hits.
He joined Pink Floyd in 1965 but left three years later after one album. He went on to live as a recluse, with his mental deterioration blamed on drugs.
"He died very peacefully a couple of days ago," the band's spokeswoman said.
"There will be a private family funeral."
He was the first guy I'd heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent - his impact on my thinking was enormous
David Bowie
A statement from Pink Floyd said: "The band are naturally very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett's death.
"Syd was the guiding light of the early band line-up and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire."
David Bowie described Barrett as a "major inspiration", saying: "I can't tell you how sad I feel.
"The few times I saw him perform in London at UFO and the Marquee clubs during the '60s will forever be etched in my mind.
"He was so charismatic and such a startlingly original songwriter. Also, along with Anthony Newley, he was the first guy I'd heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent.
Barrett (third from left) struggled with drugs and fame in the 1960s
"His impact on my thinking was enormous. A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed."
Born Roger Barrett in Cambridge, he composed songs including See Emily Play and Arnold Layne, both from 1967.
He also wrote most of their album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But he struggled to cope with fame and drugs.
Dave Gilmour was brought in to the band in February 1968 and Barrett left that April, releasing two solo albums soon after.
The band's biggest-selling releases, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, emerged in the post-Barrett era, with the band selling an estimated 200 million albums worldwide.
Just as Pink Floyd were about to achieve global success, Barrett retreated from public life and returned to Cambridge.
Little was known about his whereabouts for 20 years until he was tracked down living with his mother.
Barrett became one of rock's most reclusive characters
But his influence remained, with younger fans and artists discovering his music.
Former Blur guitarist Graham Coxon released a statement saying: "Lost him again... for bang on 20 years Syd led me to better places."
"From my agape 17-year-old first listen to Bike to, just the other day, Jugband Blues.
"Languished in his noise... dreamt in his night... stared at his eyes for answers..."
Barrett's biographer Tim Willis said the guitarist's music left a lasting legacy.
"I don't think we would have the David Bowie we have today if it wasn't for Syd," he told BBC Radio Five Live.
"Bowie was very much a kind of clone of Syd in the early years. His influence is still going.
"New bands discover him all the time. There's always a Syd revival going on - if it wasn't the punks, it was REM, and I'm sure that Arnold Layne and Emily Play as pop songs will live forever."
#PINK FLOYD LATEST BLACK NEWS FROM ME#
#####MESSAGE IN THE MUSIC######
# This is a message from ´The Wall´ This is a hidden message in the song ´Empty Spaces´ from ´The Wall´. In it, Roger Waters says: ´Congratulations, You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to old pink, care of the funny farm, Chalfont...(interruption) Roger, Carolyn´s on the phone! (Roger) Okay!´.
Empty Spaces
------------------------------
This is a message from ´Amused to Death´ In this one, Roger Waters says: ´Julia, (pause) however, (pause) in the light and visions of Stanley, (pause) we´ve changed our minds. (pause) We have decided to include a backward message, (pause) Stanley, (pause) for you, (pause) and for all the other book partners´.
Perfect Sence
-----------------------------
This is a message from ´Division Bell´ What´s said in this one is: Voice1: Hello - Childs Voice: yes - Voice1: Is that you Charlie? - Childs Voice: Yes - Voice1: Hello Charlie - Childs Voice: yes - Phone gets hung up and you hear Voice1: Great.
Division Bell
------------------------------
Go here to get more hidden messages
http://members.aol.com/ZyboMan/backward/index.html
###############################
##DANGER! DEMOLITION IN PROGRESS###########
Roger wanted Rick 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 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 Caron (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.
Top
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.
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.
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.
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.´
Top
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Top
BRICK BY BRICK : THE BUILDING PROCESS
In an all-night session, Bob Ezrin ploughed through Roger Waters´ tapes.
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.
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.
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.
WATERS -- I seem to remember the four of us in the beginning before the
recording going through the demo and throwing stuff out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.´
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.
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.
MASON -- The pace was fast and furious, very focused. We were actually
running two studios in France at once.
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.
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.
Top
TWO SONGS: COMFORTABLY NUMB
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.
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.´
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.
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.
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.
Top
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL PART II
WATERS -- On the demo I made it was just me singing to an acoustic guitar.
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.´
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.
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.
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.
WATERS -- It was great -- exactly the thing I expected from a collaborator.
GILMOUR -- And it doesn´t in the end not sound like Pink Floyd.
Top
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!´
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.
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.
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.
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.´
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.´
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.
GUTHRIE -- Rick did some great playing on that album, whether or not
people remember it -- some fantastic Hammond parts.
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.´
WATERS -- No. It was absolutely the right thing to do.
Top
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
WRIGHT -- The playback was a very difficult, strange time. I think I was
emotionally numb.
GILMOUR -- It was a magical moment: ´Yep, we´ve pretty well nailed it.´
WATERS -- A great, classic piece of work.
Top
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
###############################
Top
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.´
WATERS -- I had complete control of ´The Final Cut.´
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
###############################
NEWS
Two new Roger Waters songs released in September 2004. After a long break there is finally news from Roger Waters. The 2 songs To Kill the Child and Leaving Beirut are written as a reaction to the war in Iraq. Lyrics and more information here.
##Pink Floyd biography by drummer Nick Mason has been released. The history of Pink Floyd written by the band´s drummer has been long awaited. The title is ´Inside Out - A Personal History of Pink Floyd´. It has 360 pages with many photos. Order from the links below.
##25th anniversary DVD release: PINK FLOYD THE WALL. A deluxe limited edition DVD will be released in november 2004 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the classic Pink Floyd album. Preorder below. More info on Pink Floyd The Wall.
Buy this video from Amazon!
Make sure to order the version that suits your tv-system or DVD region.
##DVD also in region 1: The Pink Floyd And Syd Barrett Story. A BBC documentary about Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett is shortly released in Region 1 (NTSC). The 49 minutes DVD includes: early footage of the band performing, recording from live show at UFO Club and more. Interviews with Roger Waters and David Gilmour and bonus tracks (coverversions of old Barrett songs). The DVD is released with soundtrack in Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS. More info
Order DVD from Amazon
## The Wall Live In Berlin on SPECIAL EDITION DVD The Wall Live In Berlin has been re-released on a special edition DVD in region 2. The SE is in 16:9 Widescreen and features an extra sound track in DTS 5.1 surround sound, a documentary and more. The soundtrack has also been rereleased on Super Audio CD (SACD). More info soon
##DVD release: Inside Pink Floyd, A critical review 1967 - 1974. New DVD with a review of the Pink Floyd albums with lots of rare and previously unreleased material from live and studio performances with the band. More about Inside Pink Floyd.####################
##Other Highlights and rarities
Rare BBC recordings of Syd Barrett released on CD. The Radio One Sessions of Syd Barrett has been released from the BBC archives march 2004. The recordings was made for the legendary Radio One show hosted by John Peel in 1970. Order the CD from the links below.
## ´The F
