Gilmour’s Stamp
From the very beginning, the new guitarist’s contribution would prove essential to the Floyd’s musical aesthetic. “[Dave] was much more a straight blues guitarist than Syd, of course, and very good,” explains Rick Wright. “That changed the direction, although he did try to reproduce Syd’s style live.”17
Paradoxically, it was with Gilmour, a rhythm ’n’ blues guitarist, that Pink Floyd would go on to create an authentically European rock music, one that was at the same time oriented toward the cosmos and relatively dark-hued (the influence of Roger Waters). A Saucerful of Secrets was to be the first installment in a symphonic, progressive tetralogy that would continue with Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, and The Dark Side of the Moon.
When Gilmour joined the group, Norman Smith was convinced that he would claim the role of leader. But as Nick Mason explains, “Norman had obviously failed to register the rather tall bass player standing at the back!” All the same, the new guitarist felt he could play a key role within the group: “I thought I could contribute a musical discipline, being a better musician than all of them except Rick Wright,” he would later declare. “I felt I had a gift for melody and hoped to make them better in this area.”31 And in fact Gilmour would steadily assert himself as album succeeded album, imposing his own stamp—consisting of an inimitable voice and dazzling guitar solos—that would become an integral part of the Pink Floyd sound. David Gilmour was the missing cog that would enable the group to scale the heights of glory.
A Less Than Unmitigated Success
Pink Floyd’s second album was released in the United Kingdom (in mono and stereo) on June 28 (or 29), 1968, and quickly climbed to number 9 on the charts. It was also well received by the French public, who powered it to number 10. But although the LP was a promising commercial success on either side of the English Channel, it was not exactly a resounding triumph overall. The British critics were somewhat scathing. The NME found the title song “long and boring,” while Barry Miles, in the columns of the it, compared it unfavorably with Vladimir Ussachevsky’s avant-garde electronic work “Metamorphosis” (1957). “I was surprised when Saucerful was criticised harshly in the press,” comments Nick Mason with dry humor. “I thought it had some very new ideas.”1
In the United States, where it went on sale on July 27, Saucerful was a flop, becoming the only one of the group’s albums not to chart. More surprisingly, it was severely criticized by the countercultural magazine Rolling Stone, Jim Miller describing it as “mediocre” and regretting the departure of Syd Barrett. Today, opinions have shifted in the album’s favor. The website AllMusic gives it three and a half stars, while The Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music awards it four.
The Sleeve
The sleeve of A Saucerful of Secrets was Pink Floyd’s first to be designed by Hipgnosis, a graphic designers’ collective founded by Storm Thorgerson (1944–2013) and Aubrey Powell (b. 1946) a little while before. Thorgerson was born in Potters Bar, Middlesex (now in Hertfordshire), but spent his childhood in Cambridge, where he made the acquaintance of Syd Barrett and Roger Waters at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys (his mother was friends with Roger Waters’s). He then studied English and philosophy at the University of Leicester, followed by film and graphic art at the Royal College of Art. In 1968, Storm Thorgerson asked his friends Roger Waters and David Gilmour to persuade the EMI management to commission him to design the artwork for their second album (the Beatles having been the only other group up to this point who were allowed to externally commission covers).
The sleeve illustration is, without doubt one of the most fascinating in the entire history of psychedelic rock. It consists of superimposed cosmic elements that give the impression of a vision, of a journey in space and time. Thorgerson and Powell have revealed to Q magazine that they wanted to depict three “‘altered states of consciousness,’—religion, drugs, and Pink Floyd music.”32 In another interview, Storm Thorgerson explains that “the cover is an attempt to represent things that the band was interested in, collectively and individually, presented in a manner that was commensurate with the music. Swirly, blurred edges into red astrology/Dr. Strange images merging into images, a million miles away from certain pharmaceutical experiences.”33 And continuing this theme: “In one’s youth, […] drugs, particularly acid, were pivotal in shaping your world view, but no specific style was derived from drugs. I never even smoked dope when I worked.”32 On the reverse are the black-and-white faces of Nick Mason, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Rick Wright, semi-obscured by the cosmic order. Exit Syd Barrett.
The Recording
The recording of A Saucerful of Secrets began on August 7, 1967. Between then and the end of the year, twenty or so sessions would be held in three different London studios: EMI, Sound Techniques (where nothing that was actually used on the album was recorded), and De Lane Lea. Of the dozen or so tracks mainly by Syd Barrett that the group worked on during this period, only two, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and “Jugband Blues,” would make it onto the album. The other sessions were devoted either to the group’s next single, “Apples and Oranges”/“Paint Box,” or to material that for the most part would end up on Syd Barrett’s solo albums.
In 1968, the group recorded mainly at Abbey Road, with the exception of final mixing at De Lane Lea on May 8. They laid down some ten songs (none by Barrett other than outtakes, possibly). The very last session for this second album took place on May 15, a little more than nine months after the first. Altogether they had spent a total of more than fifty days in the studio (including mixing, editing, and mastering). This was an enormous length of time for a group at the start of its career, suggesting that the managers at EMI saw Pink Floyd as the future of rock.
Among the sound engineers who worked on the album were, at EMI, Peter Bown and also Ken Scott, who would have an outstanding career working with the Beatles, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Lou Reed, and Devo, to mention just a few of his artists. Martin Benge was in charge of mixing (in the famous Room 53) before later turning toward classical music, notably collaborating with Yehudi Menuhin and Daniel Barenboim. The assistant sound engineers included John Barrett (Paul McCartney, Kate Bush), Jeff Jarratt (who had already worked on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn), John Kurlander (Elton John, Toto), Richard Langham, Peter Mew (Donovan, the Hollies), Michael Sheady (Syd Barrett, Stéphane Grappelli), and John Smith. Meanwhile the sound engineer at De Lane Lea Studios was Michael Weighell, who apparently worked without an assistant.
Technical Details
At both EMI and Sound Techniques, the equipment was by and large the same as that for the group’s previous studio work. At De Lane Lea, then located at 129 Kingsway, London WC2, the control room was kitted out with a Sound Techniques console with eighteen inputs and four outputs (very popular at the time), a four-track Ampex AG-440 tape recorder, and four Tannoy Lockwood Major Studio Monitors. Among the main studio effects were a Fairchild 666 compressor and an Altec 436B. In the sixties, De Lane Lea was one of London’s hip studios, attracting artists such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix.
The Instruments
After immortalizing his Fender Esquire on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Syd Barrett turned his back on it toward the end of 1967 in favor of a white Fender Telecaster. He seems to have used this only for the Floyd’s second album, as he would hardly be seen playing it after that. As an acoustic instrument, his choice fell on the Levin LT 18. Roger Waters remained faithful to his Rickenbacker 4001, and Nick Mason kept faith with his Premier kit with two bass drums. Rick Wright introduces new sonorities with a Hammond M-102 “Spinet” organ, a Mellotron MK2, a vibraphone, and a xylophone. Future guitar hero David Gilmour was no better off for instruments than the others when he took part in the early recording sessions for the album. His only guitar was a white Fender Telecaster with rosewood neck that his parents had given him for his twenty-first birthday (March 6, 1967). In the studio with t
he Floyd he also borrowed Syd’s Fender, which was reclaimed before long, leaving the group’s new guitarist with his one and only instrument. David would soon take steps to remedy this, accumulating a fantastic collection of world-renowned guitars during the course of his career. As for effects, he used a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, a Vox wah-wah, and the indispensable Binson Echorec. His amplifier was a 100-watt Selmer Stereomaster with Selmer 2x12 All Purpose speakers.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
For the sleeve of A Saucerful of Secrets, Storm Thorgerson used a picture of Dr. Strange (the “Sorcerer Supreme”) drawn by Marie Severin and taken from issue 158 of Marvel’s Strange Tales. Dr. Strange can be made out on the right-hand side of the sleeve. Also discernible on the front cover is the character Living Tribunal, who, in the comic book, is responsible for maintaining cosmic equilibrium.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
During the Jimi Hendrix tour, there was a concert in which Syd was unable to perform at all. Fortunately, the group had anticipated his incapacity on this occasion, and it was Davy O’List, singer and guitarist with the Nice (led by Keith Emerson, later of Emerson, Lake & Palmer fame), who took his place, without anyone noticing the subterfuge!
The British progressive rock band Marillion paid tribute to Pink Floyd on the sleeve of its first album, Script for a Jester’s Tear (1983), whose artwork is by Mark Wilkinson. Lying on the floor between the record player and the fireplace is a copy of A Saucerful of Secrets.
Steve O’Rourke, the “Best of Managers”
The (forced) departure of Syd Barrett (made public in April 1968) brought about far-reaching changes to the Pink Floyd team. Peter Jenner and Andrew King had already terminated their collaboration with Pink Floyd the previous month. They wanted to continue to oversee the career of the only member of the group whom they had ever believed in—Syd—while taking advantage of the glare of publicity to launch a young songwriter named Mark Feld who had just started an avant-garde folk group, Tyrannosaurus Rex, under the name Marc Bolan.
Pink Floyd’s Brian Epstein
In the wake of their split from Jenner and King, which at least had the merit of clarity, Waters, Wright, Mason, and Gilmour signed a new management contract with Bryan Morrison, who immediately passed them over to his assistant. Steve O’Rourke had liked Pink Floyd’s musical approach ever since their very first sessions at Sound Techniques studios. Born in Willesden (an Irish district of London) in 1940, O’Rourke was the son of an Irish fisherman from the Aran Islands who appears as a shark hunter in the famous 1934 semi-documentary Man of Aran. “Steve O’Rourke, after training as an accountant, had worked as a salesman for a pet food company,” writes Nick Mason. “His employers eventually dismissed him when they discovered he was racing his company car at Brands Hatch every weekend and delegating his rounds to other salesmen so he could spend time running a club called El Toro in the Edgware Road. A subsequent three-month stint with another booking agency provided him with more than sufficient experience for Bryan to consider him fully qualified.”5 Andrew King would later admit: “Steve was much harder than Peter and I […]. And I was rather jealous of him. He sorted out some big mistakes we’d made in our contractual relationship with EMI.”1 He also remarks that: “Steve had one client—the band—and nothing would compromise him in what he would do for the band. They could not have had a better manager.”1
Steve O’Rourke rapidly climbed the rungs of the Bryan Morrison Agency. It was largely on his advice that in July 1968, just before Pink Floyd embarked on their second United States tour, Bryan Morrison sold his agency to NEMS Enterprises, the company founded by Brian Epstein, who had died a few months before, and now run by Vic Lewis.
At the beginning of the seventies, O’Rourke crossed a new threshold when he left NEMS to set up his own agency, EMKA Productions (named after his daughter Emma Kate), and, exerting more and more of an influence, convinced Waters, Gilmour, Wright, and Mason, then in the process of recording The Dark Side of the Moon, to quit Capitol in the United States and sign a more lucrative deal with Columbia, while remaining faithful to Harvest EMI in Europe. The change would only come into effect after the group’s next album, Wish You Were Here (1975).
Racing Driver and Philanthropist
While looking after Pink Floyd’s career and subsequently, after the clash with Roger Waters (it was Steve O’Rourke who would also take charge of negotiating the difficult separation), the careers of David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason, Steve O’Rourke would devote himself to another of his great passions. Having acquired a BRM 1957, and then a Ferrari 512 BB, in 1979 he started to take part in motor races (including the 24 Hours of Le Mans a number of times, notably with Nick Mason in 1982). He was also the designer of the Emka prototype, powered by an Aston Martin 5.5-liter V8. He subsequently took part in various other prestigious races including the BPR Endurance Series and the FIA GT Championship. Steve O’Rourke died of a stroke in Miami, Florida, on October 30, 2003. Mason, Wright, and Gilmour paid their last respects at his funeral, which took place at Chichester Cathedral in Sussex on November 14, 2003, with a performance of “Fat Old Sun” and “The Great Gig in the Sky,” while Dick Parry (the saxophonist on The Dark Side of the Moon) played Steve’s coffin into the cathedral on his saxophone. Three years later, David would dedicate his solo album On an Island to his former manager.
The main characteristic of this honest and loyal manager (in spite of the reproaches leveled at him by Waters when the group split up) was to protect the image of his artists at all times while ensuring they benefited from the ideal creative conditions. Admired not least for his human qualities, Steve O’Rourke also discreetly supported various charitable organizations, in particular the EMI Music Sound Foundation and Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy.
EMKA Productions, founded by Steve O’Rourke at the beginning of the seventies, shares its name with EMKA Ltd., a division of Universal Television that has no connection with the Pink Floyd manager, unlike EMKA Racing, a company he set up in 1980 in order to indulge his passion.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
Steve O’Rourke makes a brief appearance in Don’t Look Back, the documentary by D. A. Pennebaker about Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour.
Let There Be More Light
Roger Waters / 5:39
Musicians
David Gilmour: vocals, electric rhythm and lead guitar, backing vocals
Rick Wright: vocals, organ, backing vocals, vibraphone (?)
Roger Waters: bass, backing vocals
Nick Mason: drums, percussion
Recorded
Abbey Road Studios, London: January 18, March 25, April 1, 23, 26, May 2, 1968 (Studio Three, Room 53)
Technical Team
Producer: Norman Smith
Sound Engineers: Ken Scott, Martin Benge, Peter Bown
Assistant Sound Engineers: Richard Langham, John Barrett, Peter Mew
Genesis
In his book Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, the group’s drummer claims that Roger Waters had been inspired to write “Let There Be More Light” by Pip Carter, “one of the odder characters of the Cambridge mafia, now deceased. Out of the Fens, and with some gipsy blood, Pip worked for us at odd times as one of the world’s most spectacularly inept roadies—a hotly contested title—and had a distressing tendency to remove his shoes within the confines of the van.”5 But this is only one interpretation. In an interview with the British rock magazine ZigZag in 1973, Roger Waters revealed that he had always been, and still was, an assiduous reader of science fiction. “I suppose the reason I liked to read science fiction novels was that they give the writer the chance to expound and explore very obvious ideas. Sticking something in the future, or in some different time or place, allows you to examine things without thinking about all the stuff that everybody already knows about, and reacts to automatically […]. Also, you get some bloody good yarns, and I like a good yarn.”34
The songwriter may therefore have drawn his inspiration from
works by various great science fiction authors, such as the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Rull cycle by A. E. van Vogt. In the third verse, Waters references Carter’s father. John Carter is the main character in the Barsoom series, a soldier in the American Civil War, who, after being transported to the planet Mars, falls madly in love with Dejah Thoris, a princess of the red people. Later in the song, Waters evokes the Rull, a wormlike species endowed with prodigious technological powers, and the eleventh-century Hereward the Wake, also known as Hereward the Outlaw and Hereward the Exile.
There is also an allusion to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), in which extraterrestrials bring to bear their enormous skills in order to save planet Earth, and the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), directed by Robert Wise, which also deals with the theme of the highly evolved, pacifist extraterrestrial.
Thus according to Waters, it is aliens who have the ability to bring enlightenment to the world, or at any rate to add to it, hence the song’s title. In any case, the world Roger Waters draws the listener into represents a dramatic change from the world of Syd Barrett. Musically too, the difference is spectacular, with the theme of science fiction now the order of the day. “Let There Be More Light” was released as a single (with “Remember a Day” as the B-side) in the United States and Japan (without charting), and subsequently became one of the group’s warhorses onstage.
Pink Floyd All the Songs Page 12
