by Mark Blake
While Richard Wright’s departure was still being kept a secret, Waters was forthcoming in a rare interview with Newsweek: ‘We have been pretending that we are jolly good chaps together, but that hasn’t been true in seven years. I make the decisions. We pretended it was a democracy for a long time, but this album was the big own-up.’
Backstage visitors were often surprised by the understated normality of the band members, despite the melodramatic performance being staged out front every night. One Earls Court visitor was struck by the sight of David Gilmour eating sushi and toying with a Rubik’s Cube during the interval, completely unfazed by the fact that, just minutes later, he would be perched on top of the wall playing a guitar solo in front of nearly 20,000 fans: ‘David doesn’t do “freak out”.’
Cambridge associate Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon went backstage at the same shows, but offered a gloomier verdict. ‘They all had separate caravans,’ he grumbles. ‘I told Dave the music was too loud, and he said I should take more drugs. Alcohol and cocaine, presumably.’
Come July, the band went their separate ways for the rest of the year. Norton Warburg finally crashed, and its founder Andrew Warburg disappeared to Spain. He returned a year later, and would end up serving three years in prison for fraudulent trading and false accounting. As well as rich rock stars, it transpired that Warburg’s activities had also resulted in considerable losses to ordinary members of the public.
David and Ginger now had a second child, Clare, and would soon have a new home to replace the Essex farmstead. Hookend Manor, in Oxfordshire, was once a fourteenth-century Tudor monastery, and was owned by Alvin Lee, guitarist with Ten Years After. Lee had built his own studio in the property, and installed waterbeds in each of the eleven bedrooms. The property was supposedly haunted, and Lee decided to sell when he realised he didn’t need somewhere with quite so many rooms; a decision taken after he discovered a friend living in one of them without him even knowing about it.
‘Alvin never opened the curtains in his playroom. He was like a vampire,’ recalls Emo, who moved in with the Gilmours. ‘We found a secret hiding place in one of the floorboards. We unscrewed it, and there was somebody’s hash and grass. No cocaine, unfortunately.’
Meanwhile, Nick Mason and James Guthrie applied the finishing touches to the drummer’s first solo album, Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports, which had been recorded at the end of The Wall sessions, but would not be released until May 1981. The album was a collection of songs written by Mason’s recent discovery, jazz vocalist Carla Bley, with contributions from her husband, the trumpeter Michael Mantler, and old pal Robert Wyatt. The album’s most intriguing song was ‘Hot River’, which, promised Mason, ‘contains all my favourite Pink Floyd clichés of the last fourteen years’. To nobody’s great surprise, though, the album failed to chart. In November, EMI put out A Collection of Great Dance Songs, the first Pink Floyd compilation since 1971’s Relics, which tapped into material from Meddle onwards. Roger Waters was sufficiently disinterested in the project to permit Storm Thorgerson to design the cover.
Waters was preoccupied with other matters. The third stage of The Wall campaign was the movie. Plans for it were already afoot when Floyd returned to play the final Wall shows in the New Year: eight nights at Westfalenhalle in Dortmund, Germany, and a further six at Earls Court.
‘When I watched that show in LA, I kept thinking how you could turn this into a film,’ says Barbet Schroeder, ‘and I eventually realised that there was no way you could.’ Not everyone felt the same way, though. Alan Parker was a 36-year-old English film-maker, whose CV had included Bugsy Malone, Fame and his 1978 breakthrough, Midnight Express, a savage drama set in a Turkish prison, which received several Oscar nominations. Parker approached EMI about the possibility of making a movie of The Wall. He and his director of photography, Michael Seresin, flew to Dortmund to watch one of the live shows. Parker was astounded by what he saw: ‘Coming from the slow, archaic film process, to see everything – every hoist, every light, every cue – hit on time, was wonderfully impressive.’
Waters had intended The Wall movie to be a combination of live concert footage and additional animated scenes. EMI were reluctant to commit, however, and MGM eventually agreed to fund the project, to the relief of the band, who had put up some of the initial start-up costs. Parker was tied up completing his latest film, Shoot the Moon, and suggested Michael Seresin should co-direct along with Gerald Scarfe. The pair arranged to shoot five of the six final nights at Earls Court, but it proved a disaster. The band was unable to compromise any aspect of the meticulously precise stage show to suit the filming. Instead, as Gerald Scarfe recalls, ‘Every time I put my lights on, fans would start shouting that I was spoiling the show.’ None of the footage would make it into the final film, and, to date, none has been made available to the public.
With Waters’ original plan scrapped, Parker agreed to commit as director and began taking a radically different approach to the project: no live footage, no actual dialogue, the story portrayed by actors and animated sequences, with the Floyd’s music from The Wall moving the narrative on.
Tellingly, in Gerald Scarfe’s original storybook for the film, the animated version of the main character was known as Pink, whereas the human version was called Roger. However, as Parker quickly discovered, after a couple of screen tests, Waters was not cut out for acting. Parker recalled being impressed by videos he had seen of Bob Geldof, the out-spoken lead singer with the Irish rock band Boomtown Rats. Despite a run of hits, it had been some six months since the band had troubled the Top 10, and their lead guitarist had just walked out. At least a decade younger than anyone in Pink Floyd and a product of the punk revolution, Geldof was disdainful of anything Floyd had done since the Syd Barrett days. Having condemned The Wall storyline as ‘bollocks’, he was enticed by the prospect of acting in a major film, and receiving a hefty pay cheque.
With Michael Seresin replaced by producer Alan Marshall, and with Alan Parker now on board as director, Gerald Scarfe found himself moved sideways. His title would now be ‘designer’.
‘Alan could get the money from Hollywood as he had the clout,’ says Scarfe. ‘If he directed it, they would put the money in; they wouldn’t if I was directing it. I was an unknown. I stepped aside, and I was relieved, as I had enough to do with the animation sequences.’
Recalling the process of making the film would elicit some dramatic reactions from all parties involved. Roger Waters would tell Rolling Stone that it was ‘the most unnerving, neurotic period of my life with the possible exception of my divorce’. (Coincidentally, Waters would begin his first course of psychotherapy sessions in the same year.) Alan Parker would liken the experience to ‘going over Victoria Falls in a barrel’. Gerald Scarfe recalls driving to Pinewood film studios at 9 a.m. with a bottle of Jack Daniels on the passenger seat beside him. ‘I’m not a heavy drinker,’ he insists, ‘but I had to have a quick slug before I went in.’ As he explains, ‘Someone said to me, “Well, what do you expect if you put three megalomaniacs in a room together?”’
Showing considerable foresight, Parker persuaded Waters to take a six-week holiday during the actual filming. With one of the megalomaniacs out of the picture, he began a frantic, sixty-day shoot. British character actors including Bob Hoskins (Pink’s manager) and Joanne Whalley (playing a groupie) joined Bob Geldof as the adult Pink and thirteen-year-old Kevin McKeon as the young Pink. Familiar vignettes from the album and stage show were recreated. While initially sceptical, Geldof seemed drawn to the role of the damaged rock star, recognising parallels with his own misadventures in the music business.
‘I’m not going to waste my time on Geldof, trying to explain The Wall to him,’ said Waters. ‘But he understands. He just doesn’t realise that he understands.’
Geldof’s bravado compensated for his lack of acting experience. He refused to stop filming after cutting his hand during the hotel-wrecking scene; overcame his inability to swim to float in a swimming pool o
f fake blood; and achieved the right haunted stare for a scene in which Pink shaves off his body hair (something Syd Barrett had done to himself in 1967).
By the time Pink mutated into a political tyrant, Geldof was afraid he was turning the same way himself. Decked out in a military uniform, complete with the crossed hammers motif, he presided over a scene filmed at London’s New Horticultural Hall, featuring a rally of real-life skinheads, recruited from the East End of London. Subsequent scenes of a riot between the skins and the police found the action continuing with great gusto after the cameras had stopped rolling. In between the human action scenes, Gerald Scarfe had organised a team of up to fifty artists to produce nearly fifteen thousand hand-coloured drawings, bringing back to life the characters that had graced the album and the stage show.
When Waters returned from his vacation he was incensed by the artistic licence Parker had taken with what he perceived as his film. ‘I think he was fearful I wouldn’t let him back in,’ Parker told writer Karl Dallas, ‘and I was just as paranoid about the cut being tampered with.’
‘The trouble is Roger and I had lived this thing together for about three years,’ says Gerald Scarfe. ‘So when it came to the film, Roger didn’t want to relinquish control. So there was me and Roger on one side and Parker on the other – and that’s when the war started.’
After one row, Parker threatened to walk out. ‘That’s when Roger’s and my relationship became unworkable,’ said Gilmour. ‘We had to persuade Alan Parker to come back to it, because there was very big money invested, and the entire film company at Pinewood were going to remain loyal to Alan, because he’s a film-maker, not Roger Waters. So I had to go to Roger and say to him, “Give him what it says in his contract … I’m sorry, otherwise we’ll have to have a meeting of the shareholders and directors” – which is me, Nick and Roger – “and we’ll out-vote you.” There was nothing he could do.’
Waters could at least distract himself with the film soundtrack. Holed up with James Guthrie, he oversaw the transfer of the music from the original Wall master tapes. New versions of ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’, ‘Mother’ and ‘Outside the Wall’, among others, would be recorded. Tim Renwick stepped in for one track, as ‘David couldn’t be bothered to redo it’. Bob Geldof also recorded his own vocals for a version of ‘In the Flesh’ under Gilmour’s guidance. One new song was recorded. In the movie, ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’ soundtracked a flashback to Pink’s father in the Second World War and the young Pink discovering some of his dead father’s personal effects, including a letter of condolence to Pink’s mother, rubber-stamped by King George VI. The song had not been included on The Wall, as it was felt to be too autobiographical. It was released as a single in July 1982 to coincide with the film’s release. With Waters offering more of a spoken-word soliloquy about his father’s death than a conventional vocal, and with the notable absence of any guitar solos, the song scraped into the Top 40 in the UK, but disappeared completely in America.
The Wall opened at London’s Leicester Square in May, and cleared nearly £50,000 at the box office in its first week. David Gilmour would subsequently consider the film to be ‘the least successful of the three ways of telling that particular story’. Alan Parker would protest that it was a struggle between his own interest in delivering cinematic action and Waters’ desire to ‘delve into his psyche to find personal truths’.
‘I once had a very heated conversation with Alan Parker where he said to me that the perfect film is made up of one hundred perfect minutes,’ said Waters. ‘That, to me, seems to be wrong. There’s got to be lots and lots of imperfect minutes to make a perfect hundred. And that’s the feeling I got from watching the movie – that every minute was trying to be full of action. I found it a bit difficult to watch in a sitting. I’ve become kind of numbed by it.’
With the absence of conventional dialogue, The Wall asked a lot of its creators, actors and, ultimately, its audience. Bob Geldof acquits himself well, having sufficient charisma (not to mention an endless supply of haunted stares) to compensate for his lack of proper lines. In Alan Parker’s quest for cinematic action, there are also some powerful set pieces. The opening scenes, in which soldiers under fire are spliced with footage of rock fans stampeding into an arena, is a literal interpretation of Waters’ hatred of playing what he saw to be violent stadium gigs. The scenes outside the arena, in which the fans are roughed up by the police, were directly inspired by events at one of Pink Floyd’s Los Angeles concerts in 1975. Similarly, the film contains poignant moments from Roger Waters’ own childhood. In an early scene, the young, fatherless Pink is seen tagging along behind another child’s father at a children’s playground, and being brushed aside.
‘As soon as I could talk, I was asking where my daddy was,’ said Waters in 2004. ‘In 1946 everybody got demobbed, and, suddenly, all these men appeared. Now they were picking their kids up from nursery school, and I became extremely agitated.’
Like the album and stage show before it, Gerald Scarfe’s animations are now so crucial to The Wall movie that it is impossible to imagine it without them. There are only fifteen minutes of animated sequences in the whole film, but Scarfe’s garish parade of malevolent worms, blood, guts and copulating flowers seem to dominate. Ostensibly, the same nagging doubt remains about the movie as it does about the album: that, at times, it’s hard to care or sympathise with the central character of Pink, with his self-pity, his pretensions, his narcissism …
It’s tempting to think that at least some of the band felt the same way. When the film opened in New York, Nick Mason excused himself from attending, as he simply couldn’t face watching it again. Richard Wright’s non-appearance was excused with the party line ‘Rick is on holiday’. But by the summer, they could hardly keep up the pretence any longer, and the band made public the news of his departure. Yet these days, even The Wall’s creator has little empathy with the monster he created. ‘The one disappointment I had – and it’s my fault – is that it gave me the chance to introduce my sense of humour to the piece,’ said Waters. ‘And I signally failed to do that. It’s extremely dour.’
Back then, life in Pink Floyd was about to become even more dour.
CHAPTER NINE INCURABLE TYRANTS AND KINGS
‘When you’ve been in a pop group for fifteen years, things that made you laugh about someone when you started can irritate the shit out of you later.’
David Gilmour
On 2 May 1982, the British submarine HMS Conqueror torpedoed the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, killing 368 men on board. The sinking was the latest act of aggression in the Falklands War, a conflict that had begun a month before when Argentine forces attempted to claim the islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. Argentina and the United Kingdom both believed the islands to be their territory, but it was the UK that had claimed sovereignty since the nineteenth century.
For a generation that had grown up in Britain after World War II and the Korean War, the Falklands conflict would be the first taste of military action. Confusion over the precise whereabouts and the intention of the cruiser, and political misinformation between the British military and cabinet ministers would spark controversy. But to the then serving Conservative government, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, there was political capital to be made: a marauding foreign force had invaded a British dependency; retribution had been swift and decisive.
For Roger Waters, a songwriter informed by the shadow of war on his own life, this latest conflict was yet more grist to the mill. By the time Pink Floyd began work on a follow-up album to The Wall in July 1982, the war in the South Atlantic was foremost in his mind. The futile loss of lives on both sides was one factor, but there was also the belief that the conflict was being manipulated as a potential vote-winner in a country puffed up with nationalist pride.
‘I’m not a pacifist,’ said Waters. ‘I think there are wars that have to be fought, unfortunately. I just don’t happen to think that the Falklands was one of
them.’
The death of Pink Floyd Mark II came not with a bang, nor a whimper, but with a sort of bark. The Final Cut, the last Pink Floyd album to feature both Roger Waters and David Gilmour, is, as Gilmour tactfully pointed out at the time, ‘very much Roger’s baby’. With all that this implies. Gilmour was sidelined, and sang lead vocals on just one song. Waters performed the remainder of the album in that heartfelt, hysterical, affecting, and occasionally rather affected, strangulated bark. It would be impossible to imagine these songs being sung by anyone else.
The final credits of The Wall movie promised that the soundtrack was now available. Having re-recorded some songs from the original album for the film, the band had planned to piece together enough for another full-length record, Spare Bricks. When the Falklands conflict began, Waters became distracted, and started writing the piece that would eventually be subtitled ‘Requiem for a Post-War Dream’. Inevitably, this new work would be dedicated to his father, Eric Fletcher Waters. Spare Bricks was immediately forgotten.
‘The Final Cut was about how, with the introduction of the Welfare State, we felt we were moving forward into something resembling a liberal country where we would all look after one another,’ explained Waters. ‘But I’d seen all that chiselled away, and I’d seen a return to an almost Dickensian society under Margaret Thatcher. I felt then, as now, that the British government should have pursued diplomatic avenues, rather than steaming in the moment that task force arrived in the South Atlantic.’
However left-leaning his views may have been in private, David Gilmour was less enamoured of Waters’ overt politicising. With wearying inevitability, the two butted heads the moment Waters proposed the album.
‘There were all sorts of arguments over political issues, and I didn’t share his political views,’ explained Gilmour in 2000. ‘But I never, never wanted to stand in the way of him expressing the story of The Final Cut. I just didn’t think some of the music was up to it.’
