by Mark Blake
Mason is conducting interviews from an office/warehouse in a tucked-away little street in Islington, North London. It is the centre of operations for his company, Ten Tenths, which has been hiring out cars, motorcycles, aeroplanes, in fact, every conceivable mode of transport, to film and television companies since 1985. Mason’s own collection of sporty little numbers are among those available for the likes of pop singer Robbie Williams to tear around in for his next video.
After merrily recalling watching jazz pianist Thelonious Monk playing a New York club in 1966, the conversation has moved on through the years and we have arrived, somehow, at The Wall: Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, stage show and movie. All of a sudden, Mason’s earlier enthusiasm for his subject seems to have drained away.
‘It’s just that it was such an awful time,’ he explains. ‘I’ve tried to put it out of my mind.’
Roger Waters’ desire to build a wall between himself and Pink Floyd’s audience had been festering for some years before the ‘awful time’ of The Wall. But the moment it came closer to becoming a reality had been the final date on the In the Flesh tour in July 1977. Waters was mortified by his behaviour (‘Oh my God, what have I been reduced to?’). Backstage, he began a play fight with manager Steve O’Rourke, and a misjudged karate kick led to him cutting his foot.
Carolyne Christie had been at the show with the Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, for whom she’d worked as a secretary. The twenty-eight-year-old Ezrin had overseen albums by Lou Reed, Kiss and the Floyd’s old support band, Alice Cooper. Ezrin, Carolyne and a bleeding Roger Waters piled into a limousine for the drive back to the band’s hotel via a hospital. Also in the car was a psychiatrist friend of Ezrin’s.
‘I always thought it was a wonderful coincidence that I had a psychiatrist with me that night,’ says Ezrin. ‘So we drove Roger to the emergency room to get his foot looked at, and then, as we’re heading onto the hotel, he starts talking about his sense of alienation on the tour, and how he sometimes felt like building a wall between himself and the audience. My friend, the shrink, is fascinated. And, for me, there was a moment’s spark. I don’t know whether it was me or Roger or the shrink that said it first, but one of us went, “Wow! You know that might be a really good idea.”’
‘I loathed playing in stadiums,’ explained Waters later. ‘I kept saying to people on that tour, “I’m not really enjoying this, you know. There is something very wrong with this.” And the answer to that was, “Oh really? Yeah, well, do you know we grossed over 4 million dollars today”, and this went on more and more. And so, at a certain point, something in my brain snapped, and I developed the idea of doing a concert where we built a wall across the front of the stage that divided the audience from the performers.’
With the tour over, the band returned to England. Gilmour and Wright, encouraged by their wives, planned solo albums. In years to come, Waters would challenge the accusation that he had turned down their compositions and discouraged them from writing: ‘How on earth could I possibly stop Dave Gilmour writing?’ In truth, nobody was entirely sure whether Pink Floyd would even make another album. Solo projects afforded them all some much-needed time apart. Through the end of 1977 and the beginning of 1978, Gilmour would help produce Unicorn’s third album and, to greater commercial success, protégée Kate Bush’s second single, ‘The Man with the Child in his Eyes’.
Despite his lack of songwriting credits on Animals, Gilmour also had enough material to start an album of his own. ‘I think Dave was a bit bored and had some time on his hands,’ says Rick Wills, who played bass alongside drummer Willie Wilson. It was the first time the three of them had worked together since their trip to Spain and France over ten years before. Jamming sessions at Gilmour’s home studio led to sessions at Britannia Row and, for tax purposes, a recording stint at Super Bear Studios near Nice in January 1978. The album, entitled simply David Gilmour, appeared four months later. Roy Harper and Unicorn’s Ken Baker were among those that contributed lyrics. ‘There’s No Way Out of Here’ and ‘So Far Away’ could have referred to Gilmour’s fraught situation in Pink Floyd, while the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of the female backing vocalists, the resolute mid-tempos and smouldering guitar solos were straight out of the Floyd songbook. Gilmour would later claim, though, that much of the album had a ‘mortality theme’.
On the front cover the guitarist posed outside his Essex barn studio looking less like the lord of the manor and more like he’d come to muck out the stables. Gilmour promoted the album, but was guarded in most interviews, though he did make a point of telling Sounds, ‘One of the nice things about recording in France is that I don’t have to give quite as much to the taxman.’ Aptly, then, one of the songs on the album was titled ‘Mihalis’, named after his new boat, bought to go with his new villa in Lindos. The album crept into the UK Top 20.
No sooner had Gilmour vacated Super Bear than Richard Wright moved in to make his record. Wet Dream would be released in September 1978. It featured Floyd’s hired-help guitarist Snowy White, and was full of Wright’s calling-card Hammond and synthesiser. The songs themselves were rather slight, with the main inspiration being Wright’s holiday home in Lindos (‘Holiday’ and ‘Waves’) and the gloomy state of his marriage. ‘Against the Odds’ alluded to the turmoil in his personal life, while his wife Juliette’s lyrics to ‘Pink’s Song’ seemed to be an open letter asking for forgiveness from the couple’s housekeeper. Wet Dream failed to chart. ‘It was rather amateurish,’ says Wright. ‘The lyrics weren’t very strong, but I think there’s something rather quaint about it.’
For hardcore Pink Floyd fans, though, both records contained some worthwhile moments. Waters would later air his frustration about Wright’s approach to songwriting: ‘Rick would write these odd bits. But he secreted them away and put them on those solo albums that were never heard. He never shared them. It was unbelievably stupid.’
Back in England, both Mason and Waters had been busy. While the drummer produced ex-Gong guitarist Steve Hillage’s Green album, Waters’ girlfriend Carolyne had produced the couple’s second child, a daughter, India. Roger had also been busy, writing and demoing songs for another two albums. His productivity would prove a blessing in disguise, as Pink Floyd were about to discover.
In 1976 the group had hired a firm of financial advisers, Norton Warburg, to oversee their financial affairs. Under Prime Minister James Callaghan’s Labour government, earners in the Pink Floyd bracket could pay as much as 83 per cent in tax. Norton Warburg suggested the band put a percentage of their gross earnings into various venture capital enterprises to save giving it to the taxman. Floyd’s money was subsequently invested in pizza restaurants, skateboards, a security firm, a money and chequebook printing venture … With the exception of a property deal in Knightsbridge, most of these enterprises under-performed or failed dismally. When a financial adviser from Norton Warburg was appointed to run the band’s affairs at Britannia Row, he discovered that those higher up in the firm had been skimming off funds from the investment company to offset against their disastrous enterprises. (Norton Warburg subsequently collapsed.) This meant a loss to the band of, in their estimation, £3.3 million. Additional skulduggery meant that the band’s tax planning for the next financial year was in chaos, making them liable for tax on money they’d actually lost. The nature of the arrangement also meant that any decision taken by one band member regarding their investments affected the others. ‘It was,’ as Gilmour later understated, ‘very tricky.’
In July, with the extent of the financial fiasco slowly unfolding around them, the band met at Britannia Row where Waters presented them with his two ideas: a ninety-minute demo provisionally entitled Bricks in the Wall and a demo of what would become his first solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking. The band voted for Bricks in the Wall over The Pros and Cons … (with only Steve O’Rourke apparently in favour of the second). Yet each of them still had reservations about what they’d heard.
‘It was like a skele
ton with lots of bones missing,’ offered Nick Mason, ‘Roger made the most appalling demos, but what an idea!’
Gilmour was more cautious. ‘It was too depressing, and boring in places, but I liked the basic idea.’
By September, the full extent of the Norton Warburg problem had become even more apparent. The band withdrew from the deal and demanded the return of all their uninvested money. They eventually began legal proceedings to sue the company for £1 million on the grounds of fraud and negligence. ‘The whole experience cast an enormous cloud over us,’ wrote Mason. ‘We always prided ourselves on being smart enough not to be caught out like this. We had been utterly wrong.’
There was now an even greater need to earn money, and quickly.
Realising that Bricks in the Wall would only work as a double album, and would present a greater challenge than anything the band had attempted before, Waters decided to bring in an outside producer and collaborator. On past experience, Gilmour also understood the importance of a mediator and agreed.
‘I needed a collaborator who was musically and intellectually in a similar place to where I was,’ said Waters later, claiming that Gilmour and Mason weren’t sufficiently interested and that Wright was ‘pretty closed down at that point’. Carolyne Christie suggested her old boss, Bob Ezrin, who’d just given an ultra-modern sound to ex-Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel’s first solo album.
Ezrin flew to England and spent the weekend at the bassist’s country house. ‘The demo he played me needed a lot of work,’ says Ezrin, ‘but it was obvious that there was something very exciting there.’ Ezrin agreed to take on the role of co-producer.
In an all-night session in London – ‘not chemically unassisted’ – Ezrin wrote a script for what he then believed to be an imaginary movie, plotting out Waters’ story, working out where the music would fit, what was working, what wasn’t working, and what else was needed. ‘So I ended up producing like a forty-page book that night … The next day at the studio, we had a table read, like you would with a play, but with the whole of the band, and their eyes all twinkled, because then they could see the album.’
Roger Waters’ story was divided into two parts, with its chief character, later to be known as Pink, effectively flashing back on his life. The first part was inspired by Waters’ own life, beginning with the death of his father in the Second World War (effectively, the first ‘brick in the wall’), before moving through further ‘bricks’ in his relationships with an over-protective mother and bullying schoolteachers. ‘Whenever something bad happens, he isolates himself a bit more,’ explained Waters.
Ezrin suggested broadening out the story. ‘We went out of our way to take it away from being a completely autobiographical work. Roger was thirty-six at the time, and it was “The Roger Waters Story”. My sense, though, was that our audience probably wasn’t that interested in a 36-year-old rocker that was complaining! But that they might be interested in a Gestalt character, Pink, that was a composite of all the dissipated rockers we have known and loved. And that allowed us to get into some really crazy stuff.’
The second half of the story was inspired by both Waters’ experience of the music business and the demise of Syd Barrett. Pink becomes that dissipated rocker, pumped full of drugs and forced to perform on stage, where he starts hallucinating and transforms into a Hitlerian megalomaniac.
‘If you looked at the original lyrics, Roger was being very honest about his fear and pain and isolation,’ says Ezrin. ‘But when we turned him into Pink, we were able to give him even more fear, pain and isolation.’
In the last dramatic chapter of the story and album, a deranged Pink finds his audience becoming increasingly fascist, and the concert becomes less of a rock show and more of a political rally. The dramatic coda to the piece finds Pink tearing down ‘the wall’, and becoming a caring, vulnerable human being once more. Another happy ending, then?
Ezrin believed that by creating a third-person character, Waters could ‘express levels of fear, alienation and isolation that otherwise would have been unacceptable – and just wrong’. Yet it was difficult to separate the character of Pink from the notion of this complaining, yet very rich rock star. As Richard Wright admitted, after first hearing the demos, ‘There were some things where I thought: Oh, here we go again – it’s all about the war, about his mother, about his father being lost….’
The scale of Waters’ vision was larger than any of his bandmates might have imagined. ‘He came round to my place in Chelsea, and played me the demos,’ says artist Gerald Scarfe. ‘It was all very rough, but he told me The Wall was going to be a record, a show and a movie. He obviously had the whole thing mapped out in his head. We used to play a lot of snooker and drink Carlsberg Special Brew together round at his house, and I do remember him saying, “I’ll never be in this position again, Gerry …” Presumably having his hand on the steering wheel to this extent.’
Over the coming months, Scarfe worked through the songs and ideas, sketching out the characters and creating storyboards for the individual scenes. ‘I envisaged Pink as a vulnerable creature,’ he explained, going on to render Pink’s schoolteachers, his wife and his mother; creating the grotesque images that would become the defining look of the album, the stage show and the movie. With the songs still being worked on, Scarfe’s images would influence Waters’ lyrics, while new lyrics would be passed on to the artist and could inspire a new drawing.
Back at Britannia Row, there was another new addition to the team. Soundman Brian Humphries was now, in the words of one band member, ‘burnt out’ by five years of working with Pink Floyd. The decision was taken to bring in another engineer, but one with more experience than Britannia Row’s in-house soundman Nick Griffiths. Alan Parsons recommended twenty-five-year-old James Guthrie to the group. ‘Brian Humphries was great, but real old school,’ said Nick Mason. ‘James brought a young ear.’ After being interviewed by Steve O’Rourke and Roger Waters, it was carefully pointed out to Guthrie that he was being hired as a co-producer.
‘I saw myself as a hot young producer,’ Guthrie later told writer Sylvie Simmons. Regrettably, Floyd failed to tell Guthrie about Bob Ezrin, and vice versa. ‘When we arrived, I think we both felt we’d been booked to do the same job.’
‘There was confusion, when we first began,’ agrees Ezrin. ‘As you can imagine, there were three of us – myself, James and Roger – all with these very strong ideas about how this album should be made.’ For Ezrin, though, there was also the hurdle of Waters’ attitude to be overcome. ‘There was what you might call a public school atmosphere to the sessions,’ he says. ‘And Roger was very much the head boy and some-times he could be a bully. I was the new kid, so, sure, I got tortured. But I came to London with a New York punk attitude. So very early on, there was a moment when Roger was pushing me and I turned around and said, “Read my lips, motherfucker, you cannot talk to me like that!” And the rest of the band were instantly on side, going, “Yessss!” And I think that held me in good stead from that point onwards.’
Ezrin’s role quickly extended to helping ‘broker a collaboration’ between Waters and the rest of the band. ‘Roger’s initial concept was that these were his songs, his stuff, and I was brought in to handle “the muffins” – that was literally how he referred to them. But this needed to be a Pink Floyd project. So I wanted to get the other guys involved, and we had to meet with Roger’s natural resistance, because he had a very clear vision in his head of what the album ought to be.’
Sessions at Britannia Row continued until March 1979, and, as an accomplished keyboard player and songwriter himself (he’d co-written Alice Cooper’s 1975 hit ‘Elected’), Ezrin was able to translate his ideas into music in the studio.
‘Ezrin is the sort of guy who’s thinking about all the angles,’ said Gilmour. ‘How to make a shorter storyline that’s told properly, constantly worried about moving rhythms up and down, all that stuff which we’ve never really thought about.’
By M
arch, another set of demos had been completed. But the full extent of the band’s financial situation was about to impact on their lives.
‘We were going bankrupt,’ said Waters. ‘We’d gone from fourteen-year-olds with ten quid guitars and fantasies of being rich and famous, and made the dream come true with Dark Side of the Moon. And then, being greedy and trying to protect it, we’d lost it all.’
Under the tax laws of the time, the only solution to avoid losing everything was for the band to leave the UK by 6 April 1979 and make sure they didn’t return until at least 365 days later. They were advised to earn as much money as possible during their time away, which, due to their non-residency, they would not be taxed on.
Within a month of being given this advice, all four had packed up their families and moved out of the UK. While they already had second homes abroad, it was still the beginning of what David Gilmour would describe as twelve months of ‘a rather nomadic existence’. With the new tax year looming, the band quickly decided to hire the Super Bear Studios near Nice, bringing over as much of their own equipment from Britannia Row as they could. Also, to improve the general ambience at Super Bear, the band arranged to rip out the existing carpet to reveal the original marble floor underneath. Once work was underway, Ezrin proposed a then radical method of recording, in which drum and bass tracks were recorded on a sixteen-track machine and then copied to a mixed-down version on twenty-four-track, after which the drums were reduced to a few tracks and other instruments and overdubs were added. The intention was to sync up both the sixteen- and twenty-four-tracks, with everything on the sixteen-track coming through louder and clearer, as the tapes had been stashed away and not played repeatedly and worn out in the meantime. This contributed to the full, dense sound of the finished album, though Ezrin found his English counterparts alarmed by this process of working, especially when it came to erasing anything on the twenty-four-track: ‘It was like witchcraft.’
