by Mark Blake
Backstage during the interval, the sight of David Gilmour’s guitar tech Phil Taylor carrying his master’s wares revealed that Waters would not be the only member of Pink Floyd, past or present, planning to make an appearance. In a closed-off dressing room, a little after 8.30 p.m., David Gilmour was photographed warming up with his guitar while Nick Mason kept time with a pair of drum sticks on a nearby armchair. The ‘great behemoth’, as the guitarist had once described Pink Floyd, was rousing itself from its torpor yet again, while having to make do with any available surface to practise on.
Out front, before an audience still playing guessing games, Roger Waters reappeared alongside Syd Barrett on the overhead screen. As mentioned earlier, the grainy, black and white footage showed the two being interviewed by Austrian musicologist Hans Keller (‘Why does it all got to be so terribly loud?’) for the BBC arts show, Look of the Week. Filmed in May 1967, Barrett and Waters spoke like the well-raised middle-class schoolboys they had been just a few years earlier. Barrett sounded erudite and appeared to be anything but stoned.
The music recommenced with Nick Laird-Clowes leading the Sense of Sound choir through an unearthly new arrangement of Pink Floyd’s ‘Chapter 24’, a song originally inspired by those nocturnal sessions with the Chinese I-Ching at Barrett’s Earlham Street flat, and revitalised by a choral accompaniment and haunting string arrangement. The Floyd’s original promo video for ‘Scarecrow’ crackled into life on the screen above, in which an impossibly youthful-looking Pink Floyd frolicked in a field, before Laird-Clowes joined folk singer Vashti Bunyan for the song itself.
Damon Albarn’s band Blur had dominated the UK charts in the 1990s with a strand of English pop partly derived from the Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Blur’s 1994 album, Parklife, had even deposed Floyd’s The Division Bell from the number 1 slot in the UK that year. Albarn wore his influences on his sleeve, dusting off ‘Word Song’ from Barrett’s Opel album of offcuts and out-takes, and imbuing the track with a wit and sparkle sadly absent from the original, where Syd’s freeform list of unrelated words sounded more like the verbal outpourings of a sick man than the ‘early version of rap’ Albarn claimed it to be.
Damon also coaxed Barrett’s twenty-nine-year-old nephew, Ian, on to the stage to say a few words. Knowing that the entire audience was scrutinising him for a family resemblance hardly helped his nerves. Ian offered a few appreciative words before raising his glass of beer and scuttling gratefully back into the stalls.
Chrissie Hynde had been instrumental in helping pull the show together. Her roughshod takes of ‘Dark Globe’ and ‘Late Night’, with Pretenders guitarist Adam Seymour, stayed close to the dilapidated spirit of the originals. But after the resolutely English Damon Albarn, Kevin Ayers and Captain Sensible, it was strange to hear anybody singing in an American accent.
By the time producer Joe Boyd finally strode on to announce ‘a suitable band to end the show’, sharp-eyed Floyd fans knew what was coming. Now the names of David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright flashed up on the screen above, as they trooped on stage, the same identity parade of tucked-in shirts and worn-in jeans last visible at Live 8. Mason wore a now familiar grin, Wright looked as jittery as ever, but clearly delighted by the crowd’s standing ovation. Gilmour commandeered the centre stage, exuding a brisk, business-like air. Audience calls for Roger Waters were swiftly parried. ‘He was here, too,’ fired back the guitarist. ‘Now the rest of us.’
Except why wasn’t Waters here now? Whispers later circulated that Gilmour had invited him to join them on stage, only to be turned down. Later, Joe Boyd would claim that Waters had only confirmed that he would perform the night before the show, while explaining that he would have to leave the venue by 9 p.m. as he needed to meet his girlfriend, who was flying into London that evening. In the end, this reunion of sorts had come together after another flurry of last-minute calls. Wright had agreed first, Waters next, and Mason once Gilmour had announced his decision to play. However, the guitarist hadn’t confirmed until 2 p.m. that day.
Just as at Live 8, bassist Guy Pratt would find himself otherwise booked, playing in Bryan Ferry’s band at the Cambridge Corn Exchange that night; the venue in which Syd Barrett had made his last public performance thirty-five years earlier. Instead, Oasis’ bass player, Andy Bell, found himself on stage with Pink Floyd, a career curveball he could never have anticipated.
‘Arnold Layne’ performed by the remaining Pink Floyd seemed the only logical ending to the show. The group’s very first single, a creepy psychedelic ode to a Cambridge cross-dresser, it had been produced by Joe Boyd nearly forty years ago. The sound of Wright’s Farfisa organ was lost in the mix, with his voice sometimes following suit. But they ploughed on regardless. Jon Carin was back on stage, playing keyboards and singing backing vocals, with Gilmour also stepping into the fray when Wright’s voice faltered. At just three and a half minutes, the performance was gone in a flash. A simple pop song from a band who had made their mark and earned their millions trading on anything but simple pop.
And then the band were gone, too, back into the wings, as the lights dimmed and the stage was plunged into darkness. The audience, still on their feet, kept up their applause, a hundred barked conversations around the hall seeming to merge into one: ‘Where’s Waters?’
After several minutes, the stage lights came up, and the evening’s performers paraded back on stage: Robyn Hitchcock, Martha Wainwright, Chrissie Hynde, Nick Laird-Clowes, Kevin Ayers … Eventually, Richard Wright appeared, resuming his place at the keyboard. David Gilmour came next, clutching his guitar like a trusty keepsake, followed by Nick Mason, still holding a pair of drumsticks. Realising that the house band’s Simon Finley already occupied the drum kit, Nick took up his spot next to Wright’s keyboards, much like a lounge-bar singer waiting for the pianist to strike up the next song. All that was missing was a martini glass.
Jostling for space on the now cramped stage, the ad-hoc ensemble lurched into ‘Bike’, the same song that had opened the show. Nick Laird-Clowes took the first verse, before flitting around Gilmour and nudging him to take over the vocals. ‘Bike’ had been one of the songs Gilmour recalled hearing when he briefly visited Pink Floyd during the making of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Still trying to eke out a living playing in a covers band in France, Gilmour could hardly have imagined that four decades later, he would be on stage singing the same song. Mason, tapping his drumsticks on the palm of his hands, was clearly unfamiliar with the words. Instead, the gamely smiling drummer looked not dissimilar to the Queen captured on TV at the Millennium Eve celebrations, unsure of the lyrics or handshaking ritual to ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
Behind the three remaining members of Pink Floyd, the drums clattered, guitars were fitfully strummed, and a motley choir of acolytes, contemporaries and otherwise complete strangers bellowed the words to Syd Barrett’s nonsense poem. It was a witty, heartfelt, messy performance, in keeping with the spirit of the occasion. You rather hoped that Pink Floyd’s departed friend would have approved, had he still been around to witness it.
Yet one of Syd Barrett’s oldest friends was still absent. As those in the audience kept wondering, where was Roger Waters, the only performer missing from the grand finale? Was he really on his way to the airport? Had he been invited to join his former bandmates, but chosen not to join in? As the final chord was struck, and the house lights came up, it seemed as if the moment had passed again. Was this really the last time Pink Floyd, or most of them, would be seen together on stage? Another reunion of sorts, then. But still, not quite. How very Pink Floyd.
CHAPTER TWELVE IF I HAD BEEN GOD
‘Being in a rock ’n’ roll band? It’s the easiest job in the world.’
Roger Waters
Roger Waters is quite the thespian on this 12 May 2011 evening. Pink Floyd’s former guitarist, songwriter and conceptualist has brought his production of The Wall to London’s O2 Arena for six nights. When Pink Floyd first staged The Wall thirty years ago
, the band were shackled to their equipment. Tonight, though, Waters dispenses with his bass guitar for many songs, preferring to roam the stage, inhabiting the lead character of Pink, The Wall’s damaged rock star.
Waters arrived on stage earlier playing Pink at his delusional, egomaniacal worst. He delivered the hectoring lyrics to The Wall’s opening song, ‘In the Flesh’, while wearing black leather Gruppenführer-style greatcoat and a pair of jackboots. As the song staggered to a halt, a huge fibreglass Stuka bomber zoomed noisily over the audience before crashing into the wall, triggering plumes of smoke and fire. It was a spectacular entrance.
Now, though, he is alone on stage and performing ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’, Pink’s harrowing plea to his newly estranged wife. Waters is sixty-seven years old, still rail-thin, and dressed in a snug black T-shirt, snugger black jeans and a pair of box-fresh white trainers. There isn’t a guitar to hide behind. Instead, he clutches a hand-held microphone and pours out Pink’s tale of woe, as a single spotlight picks him out from the darkness. It’s a performance at odds with Waters’ stage persona during his time in Pink Floyd. Then, he was a most unwilling rock star. After all, the idea for The Wall originated from his dissatisfaction with stadium shows, and a desire to seal himself off from his audience. Tonight, though, Waters appears to relish the attention and his closeness to the crowd, all 20,000 of them.
However, as Waters delivers his soliloquy, not all of the audience sit in rapt silence. A lone voice can be heard from the stalls, twenty or so rows in front of the stage: ‘Steve . . . Steve . . . Pass this drink to Natalie?’ Heads turn to see one male fan gingerly clambering over the seats, bumping knees and feet with his neighbours while trying to ferry a tray of drinks in wobbly plastic glasses back to his friends.
Despite a chorus of disapproving sighs and tuts from those around him, the fan seems unaware of the disruption he is causing. As Waters pauses for breath, you half expect him to lean over and let fly with a volley of spittle, just as he did at one over-zealous devotee who tried to climb on stage at a Canadian Floyd show in 1977. But, no, times have changed. The fan sits down. The show goes on. In a strange way, it’s rather disappointing.
‘I used to get very snotty with audiences for getting drunk and shouting,’ Waters told an interviewer a few weeks earlier. ‘Now, I am way more relaxed and less critical than I was in those days.’
Waters’ refusal to reprimand an inattentive fan isn’t the only evidence of how much he has changed. In the audience at the O2 this evening are The Wall album’s sleeve designer Gerald Scarfe and his wife, the actor Jane Asher, Syd Barrett’s former girlfriends Jenny Spires and Libby Gausden, and the Floyd’s long-serving cover artist and confidant Storm Thorgerson. What they all know, but many of the audience don’t, is that David Gilmour and Nick Mason will soon join Roger Waters on stage. Sadly, though, there will be one other Pink Floyd member absent from tonight’s reunion.
On 15 September 2008, Richard Wright died at his home in West London. He had been diagnosed with cancer nine months earlier. Wright was a notoriously private man, and his family and friends had not disclosed his condition to the public. As with Syd Barrett’s death two years before, the media responded with numerous obituaries and hastily prepared articles examining the legacy of Pink Floyd’s ‘quiet man’. But the diffident keyboard player was a much harder sell than the reclusive, mysterious Barrett. As The Times’ obituary bluntly explained: ‘Had Rick Wright’s profile been any lower, he would have been reported missing.’
‘I like to use the George Harrison example,’ Nick Mason told this writer, a week after Wright’s death. ‘Because, like George, Rick wrote, he sang, he did a lot of things, but he did become eclipsed by everyone else. Rick could be very droll and very funny, but he suffered from being quieter than the rest of us.’
When considering Wright’s personality compared to those of his bandmates, it was hard not to recall an interview in the 1972 film, Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii. Here, the director Adrian Maben tried to quiz Pink Floyd about their working methods. Busy scoffing beer and oysters, they preferred to answer his questions with questions of their own, in between a barrage of in-jokes and schoolboy banter.
But when Maben asked if the band ever had any difficult moments, Wright immediately engaged. ‘We have a great understanding and tolerance of each other,’ he said, looking rather mournful, ‘but there are a lot of things left unsaid . . . I feel . . . sometimes.’
Quite what those ‘things left unsaid’ were had intrigued Pink Floyd’s audience ever since Wright made his exit from the band in 1981. In every interview he ever gave, Richard Wright blamed his inability to contribute to The Wall on ‘personality issues’ with Waters, and the emotional impact of his first marriage breaking up. The tension between Wright and Waters actually dated back to their time together as students sharing lodgings in Highgate. In recent years, Waters had jokily told interviewers about the time Wright had padlocked the kitchen cupboard containing his food, or refused to pay for his bandmates’ extra order of prawns in a Tokyo restaurant.
The suggestion that Wright was frugal endured, however rich Pink Floyd became. ‘We never grew up, we just grew older,’ Mason admitted. ‘Having given Rick this character we were quite happy to work on the same joke for forty-odd years. It never gets boring, especially when the person in question finds it irritating.’
By the mid-1970s, Wright, like Gilmour, had acquired a villa on Lindos, where he loved to spend time between recording and touring. The Floyd’s friends, families and hangers-ons could wile away the summer months on a beautiful Greek island, enjoying all the perks of a rock star lifestyle. Days in Lindos would be spent racing catamarans around the bay, and the nights enjoying what one attendee remembers as ‘full-moon parties’.
‘There was an awful lot of cocaine around back then,’ one associate admitted, ‘and that didn’t help. But Rick just stopped communicating. It was like he got gazumped by the others. At some point in the seventies he seemed to withdraw into himself.’
But Wright had returned to Pink Floyd in the mid-1980s and rediscovered his abilities as a musician and as a songwriter. When David Gilmour went on the road to promote his 2006 solo album On an Island, he brought Wright along to play keyboards.
Wright’s passion was sailing, and he kept a 65-ft yacht called Evrika moored in the Virgin Islands. He seemed happier on the road than at home. In July 2007, writer Mark Paytress interviewed him for Mojo magazine. Wright had been living alone since the end of his third marriage. Paytress wrote of visiting his mews cottage in Kensington, and finding it to be ‘a surprisingly bare residence – no coffee, half a handshake, two large white sofas . . .’ and how ‘the still handsome man who opened the door cut a lonely figure’.
It was perhaps better to remember Wright from his appearance in Breaking Bread, Drinking Wine, a charming documentary filmed on the On an Island tour. Wright featured prominently, and looked more at ease than ever. ‘I think this is probably the most fun tour I’ve ever done in my life,’ he said, on camera. A week after his death came Gilmour’s Live in Gdansk album. It reiterated Wright’s contribution to the tour, and featured a version of Floyd’s ‘Echoes’, a song so closely identified with the keyboard player.
‘In my view all the greatest Pink Floyd moments are the ones where Rick is in full flow,’ said Gilmour. ‘Like Rick, I don’t find it easy to express my feelings in words, but I loved him and will miss him enormously.’
Wright’s old nemesis, Waters, released a statement of his own, praising ‘Rick’s ear for harmonic progression’ before adding, ‘I am very grateful for the opportunity that Live 8 afforded me to engage with him and David [Gilmour] and Nick [Mason] that one last time. I wish there had been more.’ It confirmed the rumours that Waters had wanted to perform with Pink Floyd again.
There would be a further twist in the tale. In October 2008, David Gilmour attended the music magazine Q’s annual awards ceremony in London. In his acceptance speech for an Outstanding Contribu
tion To Music award, the guitarist revealed that one of Wright’s last wishes had been to play a big outdoor festival, such as Glastonbury. ‘But we weren’t able to do that due to all sorts of strange reasons,’ he said.
The guitarist’s comments referred to the Glastonbury Festival organiser Michael Eavis, who’d turned down Gilmour’s request. Tickets for that year’s festival had sold slowly compared to previous years, and there had been criticism of Eavis’ decision to book the New York hip-hop artist Jay-Z, rather than a traditional, ie safer, rock act, as a headliner. The Sun newspaper claimed that Eavis had turned Gilmour down because he ‘wanted the event to appeal to a younger generation’, but Eavis explained that there simply wasn't room on the bill.
Gilmour subsequently emphasised that he hadn’t wanted to usurp any of the festival’s headline acts, but had simply wanted to play anywhere on the bill, as it was likely to be Wright’s last gig.
Mischievous tales of padlocked kitchen cupboards and disputed restaurant bills were soon overshadowed by the news that the musician had left £24 million to his family in his will. The money was distributed between his three children, with substantial amounts also going to his sisters and their offspring. Wright’s daughter, Gala, inherited his Aston Martin DB5. Gala’s husband, Pink Floyd’s touring bassist Guy Pratt, was given his treasured Bösendorfer piano. Wright had also set aside £20,000 for what he called ‘a really good party’, which was later held in Westbourne Grove.
Guitarist Dominic Miller, who’d played on Wright’s Broken China album, performed at the event, and recalled seeing ‘everyone, roadies, managers, tour managers, designers, friends, girlfriends, wives, producers, retired drug dealers, even the guy who did the sax solo on Dark Side . . .’ Gilmour, Mason and Jeff Beck (the guitarist Wright once claimed Pink Floyd had approached to replace Syd Barrett) all played.
