by Mark Blake
‘That was always my big fight in Pink Floyd,’ said Waters. ‘To try and drag it kicking and screaming back from the borders of space, from the whimsy that Syd was into, to my concerns, which were much more political and philosophical.’
Now a twenty-nine-year-old married man, the bassist was still grappling with many of the same issues that had troubled him since adolescence. At the root of it all was his mother Mary’s staunch belief, drummed into him from an early age, that he needed ‘to get a decent education, a decent job, because you’re going to want to have a family, so you need to prepare …’ Roger had, he admitted, believed that he was still in the preparation stage when reality struck: ‘I wasn’t preparing for anything – I was right in the middle of it, and always had been. Fucking hell – this is it!’
With Waters’ encouragement, the four effectively compiled a list of the things that troubled them at this stage in their lives. These ranged from the tedium and danger of air travel to a fear of growing old, the problems of organised religion, violence, greed and, most poignant in the light of their former singer’s situation, insanity.
Further ideas would find their way into the lyrical mix as the work progressed, but for now, they needed some music. At Decca Studios, the band riffled through leftover ideas and snippets discarded from their previous albums. They revisited a gentle piano piece composed by Richard Wright, which had, bafflingly, been rejected by director Michelangelo Antonioni from the Zabriskie Point soundtrack two years earlier. It would take shape over the next few months and become ‘Us and Them’. Another of the keyboard player’s downbeat offerings would wind up as ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. Waters brought a couple of ragged home demos – just his voice and an acoustic guitar – that would form the basis of ‘Money’ and ‘Time’. The band’s magpie tendencies reappeared, with the bassist recycling the lyric ‘breathe, breathe in the air …’ from ‘Give Birth to a Smile’, a track on The Body soundtrack, as a starting point for the song that would eventually become ‘Breathe’.
Progress on the new material stalled in December when Floyd flew to Paris to be filmed again for Live At Pompeii. Yet they began recording at Abbey Road Studios throughout January and February 1972, the sessions broken up by further writing stints and rehearsals at The Rolling Stones’ warehouse studios in Bermondsey, South London. With further concert dates booked throughout the UK in February, the band were determined to have something new to play, if only to assuage their own boredom.
Although the Brighton Dome gig had ended badly, Floyd had at least had the chance to premiere some of their new material. Some of the taped special effects that would enhance the finished album were already being used. The opening song ‘Breathe’ was still in a formative stage, yet to acquire the sweet, distinctive pedal steel used on the final version. ‘On the Run’, then still called ‘Travel Sequence’, was seven minutes of jazzrock noodling between Gilmour and Wright, and nothing like the urgent synthesiser-driven version on the record. Elsewhere, Wright fluffed his lines on a hesitant version of ‘Time’, and a prototype of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, then entitled ‘Mortality Sequence’, included a spoken-word section splicing extracts from St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians with a monologue by Malcolm Muggeridge, the journalist and Christian scholar, then newsworthy for his involvement with the Festival of Light organisation, a pressure group dedicated to upholding Christian values. Muggeridge’s colleague in the Festival of Light, the Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse, would also feel the full brunt of Roger Waters’ ire on a later Pink Floyd song.
Roadtesting up to forty minutes of new material live on stage offered a challenge to both the band and their audience. But at a time when rock music was desperate to be taken seriously as an artform, it was far less of a leap than it might be now. Floyd gigs had often been largely sedentary affairs, with some of the audience positively horizontal and shrouded in the sweet fug of any number of illegal cigarettes. Furthermore, as Waters explained, ‘We wanted the audience to actually listen. And later on I’m afraid I used to get terribly annoyed when they didn’t.’
February’s run of gigs continued across the country, with Dark Side of the Moon being played in its entirety, such as it was, for the first time at Portsmouth Guildhall. There were still hurdles to be overcome: Coventry’s Locarno Ballroom saw them unveiling their magnum opus at midnight after a set from crowd-pleasing showman Chuck Berry, while a gig at the Manchester Free Trade Hall was abandoned after just one and a half songs following a power cut. The real test of the band’s mettle would be a four-night stand at the Rainbow Theatre at the end of the month; the London premiere of what was being touted as ‘Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics’.
The band had also made a greater effort to ensure they sounded and looked their best. At the beginning of the year, they had taken delivery of a new, custom-built PA, complete with four-channel, 360-degree quadraphonic sound; a far cry from the 1967-era Azimuth Coordinator, with which Richard Wright panned their sound around the four corners of a venue from a gizmo on top of his Hammond organ. In this instance, looking their best didn’t mean abandoning the ubiquitous Floyd uniform of T-shirts and jeans (usually the same jeans but a different T-shirt come showtime), but the deployment of a state-of-the art lighting rig, manned by new crew member Arthur Max, an outspoken American whiz-kid whom the band had first met two years earlier as lighting engineer at San Francisco’s Fillmore West. Max’s greatest claim to fame had been that he’d worked a spotlight at the Woodstock Festival for three days straight.
Playing to full houses each night, the band opened the Rainbow shows with Dark Side of the Moon, followed by ‘One of These Days’ from Meddle, and closed with an encore of ‘Echoes’. In between, they obliged only with the crowd-pleasing ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ and ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’. The message was explicit: the old Floyd was dead; long live the new Floyd. Although, a ghost from the past, an apparently gaunt-looking Syd Barrett, had been spotted in the audience at one of the shows. Melody Maker, seemingly back on message after the boxing glove incident of Christmas 1971, raved over ‘burning flashlights, wind-blown sparkle dust and a trip to the dark side of the moon’. Derek Jewell of the Sunday Times, one of a new breed of Fleet Street critics determined to take rock music ever so seriously, slipped into a reverie about ‘music overlaid with a maze of extra tapes which titillate the ears’ before finally declaring, ‘Floyd are dramatists supreme’.
Somewhere between the disastrous Brighton Dome gigs and the victorious Rainbow shows, Roger Waters had written a crucial part of the new piece, a dramatic grand finale entitled ‘Eclipse’. ‘I think I arrived at a gig with the song in my pocket,’ Waters told writer John Harris. ‘I said something like, “Here, lads, I’ve written an ending.”’
Eclipse would briefly take over as the title of the album. The band changed the name under duress when it was discovered that folk rockers Medicine Head had released an album called Dark Side of the Moon. When the dust had settled and the album’s sales turned out to be modest, Floyd reverted to the original title. As Gilmour explained at the time, ‘It didn’t sell well, so we thought what the hell …’
The only fly in the ointment was the news that a bootleg from the Rainbow Theatre was now on sale in the nation’s less scrupulous record shops. According to some sources, it would go on to shift over 100,000 copies, with the band’s new pièce de résistance still a year away from an official release.
In hindsight, then, the decision to temporarily abandon the making of the record and record a whole other album of new material seems astonishing. Barbet Schroeder, the French movie director for whom Floyd had recorded the soundtrack for More, had placed another call. Schroeder’s latest celluloid creation, La Vallée, needed some music. Floyd agreed and flew out to Strawberry Studios at Château d’Hérouville on the outskirts of Paris. The studio would be immortalised in the title of Elton John’s album that year, Honky Chateau.
In another, un
usually focused two-week recording session, Floyd broke with their usual tradition of interminable jamming. Armed with stopwatches, pens, paper and a rough cut of the film, they knuckled down and scored the individual sequences. They managed ten songs in fourteen days, despite flying off for a whistle-stop tour of Japan in the middle of it all. As Nick Mason would admit later, ‘We had no scope for self-indulgence.’
Gilmour, who would later claim, in an uncharacteristic burst of enthusiasm, that he loved the resultant album, also warmed to the discipline. ‘It was rapid stuff,’ he said. ‘We sat in a room, wrote, recorded, like a production line. It’s good to work like that under extreme constraints of time and trying to meet someone else’s needs.’
La Vallée itself was another spiritual quest in the style of More. The female lead, Viviane (played by Schroeder’s wife Bulle Ogier), is married to a French diplomat, and visits the island of Papua New Guinea in search of rare birds’ feathers to sell in her Paris boutique. She becomes distracted by hippie explorer Olivier and joins him to search for a mystical valley (marked on a map with the words ‘obscured by clouds’). They encounter the indigenous people, she ditches her materialistic obsessions, and most of her clothes, and is somehow reborn. The Mapuga tribe of New Guinea, featured in the film, also made a vocal appearance on ‘Absolutely Curtains’, the closing track on the Floyd’s soundtrack album. The film’s preoccupations may seem rooted in a different era, but are really no different from the 2000 Hollywood blockbuster The Beach: essentially, it’s all about the plight of shallow Westerners in search of Shangri-La.
The focus and excitement generated by the Dark Side of the Moon work-in-progress rubbed off on the soundtrack, which was eventually called Obscured by Clouds. The group were clearly no longer ‘dying of boredom’. Firstly, the album made full use of Richard Wright’s recently purchased VCS3 synthesiser, a piece of kit from the team behind the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which would also be put to use on Dark Side of the Moon. Secondly, most of the tracks were credited to two or more band members (an unusually democratic move, in the light of future rows over songwriting credits). Finally, with no track longer than five and a half minutes, there was a rare sense of musical economy.
The instrumental title cut was an ominous synth-driven fanfare that suggested gathering storm clouds and was adopted as an intro during the next run of live dates. The following track, ‘When You’re In’, built around an heroic-sounding guitar and keyboard figure, was another instrumental also worked into the set. The title was taken from a catchphrase used by the Floyd’s roadie Chris Adamson.
Adamson, perhaps reviving Paul Newman’s egg-eating stunt from the 1967 prison movie Cool Hand Luke, had livened up one day at the Honky Chateau by betting everyone that he could eat a stone of raw potatoes in one sitting. Bets were taken, and Adamson began slicing the vegetables and dousing them in salt. ‘To give him his due, he got through about two and a half pounds before he said, “Fuck it,”’ recalled Roger Waters. ‘They’re full of starch so it would definitely have killed him if he’d managed to get them all down.’ Adamson would show up later on Dark Side of the Moon, uttering the now famous line: ‘I’ve been mad for fucking years.’
Of the vocal tracks on Obscured by Clouds, ‘Burning Bridges’ arrived first, a gentle Waters and Wright creation in a similar vein to Meddle’s ‘Pillow of Winds’, and ‘Breathe’ from Dark Side of the Moon. Elsewhere, Wright’s reflective piano and voice on ‘Stay’ suggested the languid, roach-in-the-ashtray feel of Steely Dan’s debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, released the same year. In an interview with New Musical Express that summer, the keyboard player named Your Saving Grace, a 1969 album by the Californian guitarist Steve Miller, as one of his favourite records. Aptly, then, four of the other vocal tracks, ‘Childhood’s End’, ‘The Gold It’s in the …’, ‘Wot’s … Uh the Deal’ and ‘Free Four’, were all steeped in country, blues and folk-rock influences. For a band that three years before had sounded quintessentially English, Pink Floyd had acquired a disarmingly American lilt. ‘Wot’s … Uh the Deal’ was reprised by David Gilmour for his 2006 solo tour, acknowledging its status as one of Pink Floyd’s great lost songs. The acoustic guitars suggest a front-porch jamming session in Topanga Canyon, with Neil Young and Stephen Stills looking on, blowing dope smoke rings. Wright also plays a wonderful, understated piano solo that gives added credibility to producer John Leckie’s observation that his piano playing was often a highlight of any Floyd recording session.
In contrast, Gilmour’s electric guitar honks and chugs on ‘The Gold It’s in the …’ rattling away behind a simplistic lyric before running away into a long, whinnying guitar solo of which the similarly honking and chugging Steve Miller would be proud.
Roger Waters’ solo composition ‘Free Four’ remains the album’s biggest surprise. The lyric explored what would quickly become familiar terrain for the bass player including a stark reference to his father’s death in the Second World War. ‘“Free Four” has got all that stuff,’ said Gilmour, years later. ‘Which is where The Wall and The Final Cut came from.’ Yet whatever the gravitas of its subject, the lyrics were yoked to a nursery-rhyme guitar riff that in part sounds like David Gilmour spoofing Marc Bolan.
Despite its black lyrics, the gonzo riff of ‘Free Four’ was perfect for American FM radio. Floyd still stoically refused to release singles in the UK, but made an exception for America. ‘Free Four’ garnered enough airplay in the States to engender a minor breakthrough. Obscured by Clouds was released worldwide in June 1972, and reached number 46 in the US, the first time a Pink Floyd album had cracked the American Top 50.
Despite some striking cinematography, La Vallée, the movie, didn’t fare quite so well (even garnering an entry in the 1986 compendium The World’s Worst Movies). But for its director Barbet Schroeder, the sound-track proved a point to the band. ‘I liked the album very much,’ he says now. ‘I do think it surprised the Pink Floyd that they could make such a good album in just two weeks. Perhaps they shouldn’t have taken so long in the studio on all those other records.’
‘It’s one of the annoying things, that the difference between something we spent a week on and something that takes nine months isn’t that great,’ admitted Nick Mason. ‘I mean, the thing that takes nine months isn’t thirty-six times as good.’
The front cover design was also not so good. Courtesy of Hipgnosis, it featured a heavily blurred image from the movie, of one of the characters, obscured by foliage, reaching out to pick fruit from the branches of a tree. Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell had settled on the image after sifting through numerous 35mm slides from the film in search of something, anything, to stick on the cover. When one particular slide was jammed into their film projector, the image became blurred.
‘Suddenly, in front of our very eyes, the out-of-focus quality imbued an ordinary image with more transcendental qualities,’ wrote Thorgerson in his book Mind Over Matter. ‘Or so we told Barbet.’
‘They [the band] knew they had another Pink Floyd album coming out soon and didn’t want Obscured by Clouds stealing the show,’ laughs Schroeder. ‘So they made sure the cover wasn’t too appealing. I thought it was very funny.’ A claim Thorgerson now rigorously denies.
Although the band made some muddled comments about Obscured by Clouds not being a ‘proper Pink Floyd record’, and ‘just a collection of songs’, it quickly secured a number 6 placing in the UK. In America, Circus magazine applauded their latest efforts: ‘Pink Floyd can rocket bizarrely from one end of the musical spectrum to the other and come back with songs in their pockets.’ In the UK, the ever-faithful Disc and Music Echo was still making do with the same science fiction metaphors: ‘Blasts through your head with aural sunbursts synthesized from some dark, sinister corner of the solar system.’
Yet in the week that Obscured by Clouds was released, Floyd were busy with another month-long stint at Abbey Road, recording more of the ‘aural sunbursts’ that would make up their next album. A
bbey Road had finally installed the sixteen-track machines they hadn’t installed in time for Meddle. Floyd would produce themselves, but were joined by studio engineer Alan Parsons. The twenty-three-year-old had worked as assistant engineer on The Beatles’ Abbey Road, which had led to a similar role on Paul McCartney’s debut solo album. Now a staff engineer on a £35-a-week salary, Parsons had cut his teeth with Pink Floyd as a tape operator on some of the Ummagumma sessions and as a mixing engineer on Atom Heart Mother. He was used to the Floyd way of working.
‘They would come into the studio and have no idea of what they were going to do, and just start improvising,’ says Alan now. ‘But the improvisation period had definitely become a lot more structured by the time of Dark Side of the Moon. Mainly because they’d been playing it live. They didn’t have to mess around with the compositions. It was an excellent piece of music to see coming together.’
Basic tracks for ‘Us and Them’, ‘Money’, ‘Time’ and ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ would be completed over the next eight weeks. According to Parsons, the band’s work ethic also depended on the distractions around them, primarily BBC2’s surreal comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus and televised football matches, of which Arsenal FC fan Waters was particularly keen.
With the band distracted, Parsons was free to produce a rough mix of whatever they’d just been working on, and add his own ideas. ‘I was one of a new breed of engineers that didn’t mind making criticisms or suggestions that would normally be made by a producer … You could have argued that I should have kept my big mouth shut. And sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn’t.’
One of the engineer’s suggestions related to Richard Wright’s composition, ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, then still being referred to as ‘The Religious Section’ or ‘The Mortality Sequence’. Live, it was performed on the Hammond, and augmented with spoken-word taped effects. Wright played it instead on a grand piano in Abbey Road’s Studio One, thinking the rest of the group were playing along next door in Studio Two. Instead, they’d played him a tape of themselves doing so from an earlier take, taking great delight in surprising him in the doorway when the take was finished. Despite the prank, when the group listened back to Wright’s piano version, they realised it was far superior to what they’d been playing live, and was, as Parsons later claimed, ‘one of the best things Rick Wright ever did’. Yet the engineer still had a nagging feeling that the song needed some extra element, and, on a whim, dubbed on some dialogue of astronauts in space, taken from the NASA recording archives. ‘I think I did it while they were off watching a football game,’ says Parsons. But he quickly met with the Floyd’s disapproval. ‘I thought it worked very well … They didn’t think so.’
