by Mark Blake
‘Zee was a disaster,’ said Wright later, ‘an experimental mistake, but it was made at a time in my life when I was lost.’
‘It always saddens me when Rick says it was a mistake,’ protests Harris, ‘because he never said that to me at the time.’ However, when Confusion failed to sell, Harris jumped ship for a production job. ‘I wasn’t in the financial situation Rick was. My career was in a very different place. We fell out, and it’s very sad, as I loved Rick dearly.’
Within months, Wright was dividing his time between houses in London, Rhodes and Athens, in the company of his new girlfriend, a fashion designer, former model and aspiring singer named Franka. Pink Floyd fans who were waiting for Wright to find himself and return to the fold would not have to wait much longer.
By the summer of 1985, with Waters and Gilmour back from their solo campaigns, the thorny issue of Pink Floyd’s future became even more pressing. Strangely, the first collaboration between the band members since The Final Cut would take place on Nick Mason’s next studio venture. In August 1985, Mason released his second album, Profiles, a collaboration with former 10cc guitarist Rick Fenn. Singer-songwriter Danny Peyronel, whose son attended the same school as Fenn’s daughter in West London, was roped in to co-write some material and sing lead vocals on one track, ‘Israel’. At Britannia Row, Peyronel told engineer Nick Griffiths that despite being an ardent Pink Floyd fan he sometimes had trouble telling David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ voices apart. ‘He told me it was easy to tell them apart,’ says Peyronel. ‘If it’s in tune it’s Gilmour …’ Most of Profiles was a dummy run for the film and TV commercial music Mason and Fenn would dabble in, with the formation of their company Bamboo Music. A year on, the pair’s music, alongside some vintage Pink Floyd, would be used in the short, autobiographical film, Life Could Be a Dream. The movie explored Mason’s love of motor racing, culminating in footage of him competing in the 1984 Endurance race in Mospor, Canada.
However, one song on the album truly stood out. Entitled ‘Lie for a Lie’, it was a gentle, lilting pop song with last-minute lyrics from Danny Peyronel, which was released as a single. Featuring Mason on drums and Gilmour on lead vocals and guitar, it was the first recording of the partnership that now made up Pink Floyd Mark III.
After About Face, Gilmour had quickly realised that, at thirty-nine years old, he had no desire to start his career again as a solo artist. In the meantime, he threw himself into producing his new discovery, Dream Academy, a high-brow pop trio featuring Nick Laird-Clowes, a singer, songwriter and guitarist introduced to him some years earlier by Jeff Dexter. Dream Academy would enjoy a UK Top 10 hit that year with ‘Life in a Northern Town’. Eager to keep his hand in, Gilmour played guitar for anyone that asked, including Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney and Grace Jones. Inevitably, Floyd were among the rock giants rumoured to be appearing at Live Aid. ‘They asked me to put Pink Floyd back together and I said no, but I’d bring my new band to play,’ said Waters. ‘But they didn’t want me.’ Gilmour showed up at Wembley Stadium anyway, playing guitar for Bryan Ferry.
Waters, meanwhile, remained dogged in his belief that the band was now over, a spent force. He approached Steve O’Rourke to negotiate the future apportioning of the band’s royalties. O’Rourke, adhering to what he believed were the terms of his verbal contract with the band, informed Gilmour and Mason of the approach, which angered Waters, who believed the negotiations should have been kept private.
O’Rourke and Waters’ relationship had often been tense, with the manager’s never-ending quest for a good deal jarring with the latter’s so-called artistic integrity, not least over the issue of playing stadiums. ‘Steve is an effective hustler, a man in a man’s world,’ allowed Waters in 1987. ‘And, to give him his due, he never gave up his job of trying to get me to fill stadiums.’
As just one shareholder of the company Pink Floyd Music, Waters needed Gilmour and Mason’s agreement to dismiss O’Rourke. They refused, as, in their eyes, Pink Floyd was still a going concern, and they wished to retain Steve as their manager. They also believed that dismissing him would strengthen Waters’ position in dissolving the group (they later turned down Roger’s proposal to fire O’Rourke in exchange for him allowing them to continue using the Pink Floyd name).
In October 1985, Waters fired the first shot. He took out a High Court application to prevent the Pink Floyd name ever being used again. Gilmour maintained that it was not Waters’ place to decide whether Pink Floyd worked again, and insisted that he wished to continue the band. Waters didn’t believe it was possible. ‘Roger said, “You’ll never fucking get it together to make a record,”’ said Gilmour, ‘and I said, “We will make a record.” He said, “Well, I’m not leaving. I’ll just sit at the back of the studio and criticise.”’
Two months later, Waters sent a letter to EMI and Columbia informing them that he was leaving Pink Floyd, and asking them to release him from his contractual obligations as a member of the group. Gilmour thought that Waters had taken this decision believing it would expedite the demise of the Pink Floyd name, and also because he could then invoke the ‘leaving member’s clause’ in his contract which allowed him to take up a solo career under a section of the same contract. ‘Having done that, he declared Pink Floyd was over,’ Gilmour told Karl Dallas. ‘I declared that it wasn’t.’
Interviewed in 2004, Waters claimed that he sent in his letter of resignation because of a clause in Pink Floyd’s contract with Columbia relating to a ‘product commitment’. This meant that if the band did not go on releasing albums under the terms of their contract, the record company could potentially sue them and also withhold royalties. While Waters described the clause as ‘ambivalent’, he claimed that the other band members threatened to sue him for potential loss of earnings and legal expenses, on the grounds that he was preventing Pink Floyd from making any more records. ‘They forced me to resign from the band,’ Waters told Uncut magazine, ‘because if I hadn’t, the financial repercussions would have wiped me out completely.’
The case to decide whether anyone could continue using the Pink Floyd name was not due to be heard for another twelve months. Gilmour and Mason deliberated on their next move. Waters terminated his contract with Steve O’Rourke, and appointed The Who’s and The Rolling Stones’ former tour manager Peter Rudge to handle his affairs. His first musical move was to launch himself into another solo project, a soundtrack to the upcoming movie, When the Wind Blows. An animated film based on the 1982 graphic novel by Raymond Briggs, it was a blackly humorous tale of an elderly couple (voiced by actors Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Sir John Mills) and their experiences in the aftermath of a Soviet nuclear strike. David Bowie had originally committed to produce the soundtrack, but when he pulled out, Waters stepped in, eventually sharing the album with contributions from Bowie, Genesis, Squeeze, Paul Hardcastle and The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell.
Work commenced at Britannia Row and the Billiard Room, with members of Waters’ backing group, now called The Bleeding Heart Band (after a lyric from The Wall). Guitarist Jay Stapley and saxophonist Mel Collins remained from the last US tour, joined by guest vocalists ex-Ace and Squeeze singer Paul Carrack and Clare Torry of ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ fame.
Clare, who had not worked with any of Pink Floyd since Dark Side of the Moon, was living near Waters in East Sheen. Both walked their dogs in the same park. Recording sessions, she remembers, took place in the Billiard Room ‘after a sandwich and a pint of beer in our local pub, The Plough’.
Waters’ lyrical contributions to the album are often more potent than the music itself, which, as part of a soundtrack, was sometimes lost beneath the snippets of dialogue, although ‘Folded Flags’ sounded like a cross between Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Grantchester Meadows’. On ‘Towers of Faith’, Waters somehow managed to follow Woody Guthrie’s famous quotation ‘this land is our land’ with ‘this band is my band’, a cheeky quip at his former bandmates, before returning to his indictment of US preside
nt Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies and corporate greed among ‘mohair-suited businessmen’ in the World Trade Center.
‘I always thought “Towers of Faith” was one of the best things Roger ever did,’ ventures Clare Torry. ‘I remembered the lyrics, and I telephoned him after 9/11, because I thought: My God, remember what you wrote in that song.’
Released in October 1986, the final album hardly troubled the charts, with the movie enjoying a limited run at the cinema. It was a less than auspicious start to Waters’ solo career proper. Within days of the album’s release he was back in the Billiard Room recording a follow-up. But by then, all hell had broken loose in his dispute with Pink Floyd.
In February that year, producer Bob Ezrin had received a surprise telephone call, while working in Los Angeles on a Rod Stewart album: ‘It was Roger! I was stunned. We hadn’t spoken since The Wall. He said, “I know I was awful to you, and I apologise, and I’m now a different guy from who I was back then … and I’d really like to talk to you about working together again.”’
Ezrin was delighted and flattered. ‘The truth is, I missed Roger Waters,’ he admits. ‘I still miss Roger Waters. He’s a wonderful, challenging guy to work with.’
The challenging aspect of Waters’ nature was apparent from the start of the conversation.
‘Roger said, “Can you come here now, to England, to talk about this record?” I said, “No, I can’t. Can you come here?” He was like, “I’m not bloody going there.” So we agreed to meet halfway, in New York City.’
Waters and Ezrin met up in Waters’ hotel suite. ‘We had a good time, laughing and telling stories. He apologised for what had happened, saying he’d been going through a difficult time … he played me his new material and I knew exactly where I wanted to take it.
‘So we started to work on a deal. He insisted we start work in England in the summer and we stay there working for three months until we were finished.’ Ezrin pointed out that Waters had never done anything in just three months, and that it wasn’t a realistic schedule. ‘I said to him, “What am I going to do with my wife and kids?” I had four kids at home at the time [and had remarried]. He said he’d lend us one of his houses and arrange to get my children into the American school …’
Back in Los Angeles, Ezrin tried to persuade his family to agree to the move. ‘I was so seduced by the notion of getting back with Roger Waters that I sold my wife hard on it. At first she absolutely refused. Then she slowly came round and said OK.’ Ezrin told Waters the deal was on. ‘And then, about ten days later, my wife just broke down in tears and said, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it.” So I called Roger’s manager, Peter Rudge, and he said, “Don’t do this to me!” … He told Roger and he went nuclear, about me leading him on, wasting his time … And that was it. Roger was never going to talk to me again.’
Two weeks later, Ezrin took another surprise telephone call. This time, from David Gilmour. ‘In my conversations with Roger, he’d told me Pink Floyd was no more, and that “the muffins”, as he referred to them, would never dare carry on without him. Now here’s Dave saying, “We are thinking of doing another Floyd album. I have some songs and I’d love to play them for you.”’
The music in question had been coming together slowly over a period of a few months. Almost a year earlier at Live Aid, Gilmour had been introduced to Jon Carin, the keyboard player in Bryan Ferry’s backing band. Carin was a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, who’d begun his career with the electro-pop band Industry (one big hit: 1983’s ‘State of the Nation’). When Industry split, Carin went into playing sessions, crossing paths with Gilmour again on Bryan Ferry’s Boys and Girls album.
Gilmour invited Carin to Hookend, where the two jammed in Gilmour’s own studio. Carin worked up the beginnings of a piece that would later become the Floyd song, ‘Learning to Fly’. He went back to America, aware that the piece was likely to be used by Gilmour for something, ‘although there was no talk of Pink Floyd at this stage’, as he told Mojo magazine in 2004.
In truth, Gilmour had been fired up by the dispute with Waters, and was determined to make another Pink Floyd album. ‘Dave absolutely saw red, and finally got it together to go back to work,’ said Nick Mason. ‘One of the great spurs was the fact that Roger, hearing about the plans for a new album, had told him, “You’ll never do it.”’
In Waters’ absence, Gilmour had also been casting around for new collaborators – something Waters would make much of in their subsequent war of words. Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera (also managed by Steve O’Rourke) spent time with Gilmour co-writing what would become the song ‘One Slip’. In the summer, ex-10cc guitarist Eric Stewart joined Gilmour at his request in Hookend, later informing a journalist he had been invited ‘to work on a concept that was definitely intended for the next Pink Floyd album. We sat around writing for a period of time, but we couldn’t get the different elements to gel. So the whole concept was scrapped. I don’t want to divulge the concept because, especially knowing Dave, it may well be used in the future.’
‘I don’t think I ever got in Eric to write lyrics,’ insisted Gilmour in 2006. ‘He’s a friend of mine, but in a way we’re too similar; we’re both from the sweeter end of things, we both like melody. We just had a day or two mucking about …’
That same summer, another would-be collaborator approached Gilmour. ‘It was before we’d even started on the project,’ recalled the guitarist, ‘I was in Greece and I think I had a visit from Rick’s then wife, Franka [whom he’d married in 1984], saying, “I hear you’re starting a new album. Please, please, please can Rick be part of it?” I left it for a while because I wanted to be sure that I knew what I was doing before I got anyone’s hopes too high.’
Aside from the problems the band had experienced with Wright during The Wall sessions, there were other issues to be considered. ‘There were one or two legal reasons which made it a little trickier if Rick rejoined,’ said Gilmour later. A clause in his leaving agreement disqualified him from rejoining the band as a full member. ‘And, to be honest, Nick and I didn’t particularly want to get in extra partners – we had put up all the money and taken the biggest risks, and so we wanted to take the largest cut.’
‘I remember having a meeting with them and Steve [O’Rourke] in a restaurant in Hampstead,’ said Wright. ‘I think they wanted to see how I was. I passed the test.’
However, while Gilmour admitted that Richard Wright had been brought back in to make ‘us stronger legally and musically’ (with the legal aspect ahead of the musical), Wright’s input on the album was minimal. He would not be invited to the sessions until February the following year, where he recorded some vocal harmonies, some Hammond organ and one solo, which was rejected from the final mix.
According to Waters in a 1988 Penthouse article, he, too, had a meeting with Gilmour in August that year, in a last-ditch attempt to resolve their differences. Waters informed the interviewer that Gilmour told him that Wright ‘was useful to him’, suggesting that his re-appointment to Pink Floyd was based on the fact that it would make the band look better in the eyes of the public to have three, rather than just two of the classic line-up.
Gilmour’s call to Bob Ezrin came at the moment he decided he needed to consolidate what writing had been done.
‘So Dave came over to see me,’ laughs Ezrin. ‘A totally different approach from Roger’s. Dave came out with his young son, Matthew. We spent three days together and he said, “I’m a family man, you’re a family man, we’ll work it out.”’ A decision was made to record some of the album with Ezrin in England, before reconvening in Ezrin’s home town of Los Angeles, also allowing for holidays and days off. ‘The total opposite from what Roger had proposed.’
Here on in, the precise circumstances surrounding the making of the album become blurred and contradictory, depending on who is telling the story and when they were spoken to. Interviewed specifically for this book in March 2007, Bob Ezrin insisted Gilmour approached him two
weeks after he had turned down Waters. Interviewed for Penthouse magazine in 1988, he claimed he was approached a month later, while Waters insisted, in the same article, that he discovered Ezrin had been hired to work on a Pink Floyd album a week after being told he would not be available to work on Roger’s new record. As Ezrin later admitted: ‘It was a coincidence, but he thought it was a conspiracy.’
Nevertheless, when Ezrin arrived in England late that summer, he joined Gilmour for a month of what the guitarist described as ‘mucking about with a lot of demos’. Ezrin was hired as co-producer alongside Gilmour, and, according to Waters, was now guaranteed a generous number of points from the gross sales of the next Pink Floyd album.
At least, the environment for making the record was more tranquil than the mood between Waters and his ex-bandmates. Recording sessions would take place on Gilmour’s new houseboat studio, Astoria, a 90ft-long vessel moored on the River Thames near Hampton Court and once owned by music hall impresario and slapstick comedian Fred Karno. Gilmour had converted the boat’s dining room into a studio, while turning the connecting living room into a control room.
‘Working there was just magical, so inspirational; kids sculling down the river, geese flying by …’ says Ezrin, who joined Gilmour, Mason and the newly enlisted Jon Carin. Despite being nearly twenty years Gilmour’s junior, Carin was, Ezrin recalls, ‘an old soul, who, in some ways, was closer to vintage Pink Floyd in his tastes than we were’. Working with the latest technology on the Astoria, the band began using samples, experimenting with a seemingly endless number of possibilities for each track. As well as ‘Learning to Fly’, Gilmour also had the bones of what would become ‘The Dogs of War’, ‘Terminal Frost’ and ‘Signs of Life’ (for which Ezrin would record the sound of Gilmour’s boatman, Langley Iddens, rowing across the Thames). In the absence of Waters, Ezrin played bass, enjoying ‘the endless laughter and the sense of adventure. Here we were on the river – like we were on a boys’ camp.’
