Although the idea of using “We’ll Meet Again” was abandoned, possibly for rights reasons, Roger Waters decided to pay homage to Vera Lynn in this song appropriately entitled “Vera.” Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn? he sings, before repeating almost word by word the line But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day from “We’ll Meet Again,” changing it to: … we would meet again/Some sunny day.
At the beginning of the song, a snatch of dialogue from the movie Battle of Britain (1969), directed by Guy Hamilton, takes Pink/Waters back to his childhood and the death of his father. This sequence was clearly carefully chosen to illustrate Pink returning to his origins, a process initiated at the end of “Nobody Home.” “This is supposed to be brought on by the fact that a war movie comes on the TV,”126 confirms Waters. The dialogue from the movie merges with the voice of a television announcer, followed by the sound of fighter aircraft and an explosion.
Production
It is at the precise moment of the explosion that Roger Waters launches into the first verse of this melancholy song, his voice colored by a slight delay. He is accompanied by David Gilmour playing arpeggios on his classical Ovation 1613-4 in the midst of a string ensemble brilliantly orchestrated and conducted by Michael Kamen and recorded by the New York Symphony at the CBS Studios in New York City in August. A short instrumental bridge follows in which Gilmour comes in on bass and Rick Wright produces synth pads and crystalline sounds (with delay) on his Prophet-5 (from 0:43), before Waters ends his song in a nostalgic atmosphere reminiscent of the wartime cabaret style.
A Vera Lynn song did open the Alan Parker movie and The Wall live shows. Not “We’ll Meet Again,” but “The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot,” another of the singer’s successes, which tells of a little boy who has lost his father and has to endure a Christmas without any presents…
For Pink Floyd Addicts
Stanley Kubrick’s black humor was evidently appreciated by Roger Waters: “We’ll Meet Again” is incorporated into the soundtrack to the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)—and where else but during the final, fateful scene?
Bring The Boys Back Home
Roger Waters / 1:27
Musicians
David Gilmour: vocals (reprise of “Is There Anybody Out There?”)
Roger Waters: vocals
Joe Porcaro: snare drum
Bleu Ocean: direction of snare drummers
Thirty-five New York drummers: snare drum
Michael Kamen: orchestration and conducting
New York Symphony: orchestra
New York City Opera: backing vocals
Recorded
Britannia Row, Islington, London: September 1978–March 1979
Super Bear Studios, Berre-les-Alpes, Alpes-Maritimes (France): April–July 1979
Studio Miraval, Domaine de Miraval, Le Val, Var (France): April–July 1979
CBS Studios, New York City: August 1979
Producers Workshop, Hollywood: September 12–November 1, 1979
Technical Team
Producers: Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, Roger Waters
Co-producer: James Guthrie
Sound Engineers: James Guthrie, Nick Griffiths, Patrice Quef, Brian Christian, Rick Hart, John McClure
Genesis
Roger Waters has revealed to Tommy Vance that for him, “Bring the Boys Back Home” was the “central song on the whole album.”126 It is “partly about not letting people go off and be killed in wars, but it’s also partly about not allowing rock and roll, or making cars or selling soap or getting involved in biological research or anything that anybody might do, not letting that become such an important and ‘jolly boys game’ that it becomes more important than friends, wives, children, other people.”126 In other words, Waters is attributing Pink’s pathological isolation to his career and the obligations that go hand in hand with being a rock star. Representative of these pressures is the manager who knocks on his door and tells him: Time to go.
Nevertheless, “Bring the Boys Back Home” remains first and foremost an antiwar song. Bring the boys back home/Don’t leave the children on their own, sings Waters. In the same surge of patriotism, the drums celebrate the homecoming of the lucky ones who have returned from the battlefield and commemorate the fallen. But what about the children who, like Pink, will never experience the joy of welcoming home a revered father… As another flashback, this song also sums up the action of The Wall from the very beginning, which explains why we successively hear the voices of the schoolmaster, the phone operator, the groupie, and finally Pink himself, asking, Is there anybody out there? The only newcomer in Pink’s confined world is his manager.
Production
“Bring the Boys Back Home” occupies a unique place in the history of Pink Floyd. It was the first time one of their songs was treated more like a piece of musical theater than rock music—even of the progressive variety! The track starts with a group of thirty-five snare drummers assembled at Bob Ezrin’s request by Bleu Ocean, a professional drummer said to have played for the Monkees without ever being credited. The session was held at the CBS Studios in New York City in August. Jordan Rudess, the keyboard player with Dream Theater, recalls having been invited along by Bleu Ocean despite having only a rudimentary grasp of the snare drum. He turned up to record at the studio and duly started to play, along with the other thirty-five musicians. “But as I’m doing so,” explains Rudess, “I become aware that Bob Ezrin is looking at me across the room, eyebrow slightly askew and finally he says: ‘I don’t think so.’”134 He followed the proceedings from the control room, and clearly remembers the team wondering where to position the piece on the album! On October 4, Joe Porcaro, the father of Jeff Porcaro, recorded a military drum at the Producers Workshop in Los Angeles. This was the final element in the rhythm section. Following fifteen seconds of massed snare drums, the New York Symphony and the impressive chorus of the New York City Opera explode into a powerful lyrical passage masterfully orchestrated and conducted by Michael Kamen with the help of Bob Ezrin. Roger Waters’s lead vocal blends with the voices of the chorus, emerging at certain points, where it sounds close to the breaking point, and transforming the last word of the song into a howl of pain (0:49). The snare drums continue to beat out their martial rhythm after the other musicians have fallen silent. This is when the procession of sound effects and voices begins, most of which have already been repeated since the beginning of the album: Wrong, do it again!—the desolate ringing of a telephone—Time to go!—the sound of the television—Are you feeling okay?—There’s a man answering, see he keeps hanging up!—crowd noises, laughter—the backing vocals of “Is There Anybody Out There?—and finally Waters/Pink ending the song with that recurring question: Is there anybody out there?
For Pink Floyd Addicts
There are two versions of “Bring the Boys Back Home.” The album version includes the voice of Roger Waters. The more symphonic movie version, performed by the New York City Opera, was chosen for the B-side of the single “When the Tigers Broke Free.”
Comfortably Numb
David Gilmour, Roger Waters / 6:24
Musicians
David Gilmour: vocals, vocal harmonies, acoustic rhythm guitar, electric rhythm and lead guitar, pedal steel guitar, bass, Prophet-5
Rick Wright: organ
Roger Waters: vocals, bass
Nick Mason: drums
Lee Ritenour: acoustic guitar
Michael Kamen: orchestration and conducting
New York Symphony: orchestra
Recorded
Britannia Row, Islington, London: September 1978–March 1979
Super Bear Studios, Berre-les-Alpes, Alpes-Maritimes (France): April–July 1979
Studio Miraval, Domaine de Miraval, Le Val, Var (France): April–July 1979
CBS Studios, New York City: August 1979
Producers Workshop, Hollywood: September 12–November 1, 1979
Technica
l Team
Producers: Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, Roger Waters
Co-producer: James Guthrie
Sound Engineers: James Guthrie, Nick Griffiths, Patrice Quef, Brian Christian, Rick Hart, John McClure
Genesis
“Comfortably Numb” represents a climax both within the narrative of The Wall and in terms of the artistic collaboration between Roger Waters and David Gilmour. Concluding the third act of this conceptual work, this song plays a decisive role in the album’s storyline. It is here that Pink’s metamorphosis takes place, under the influence of an unknown substance with strange powers, which is injected into him by a physician. This is his “confrontation with the doctor,”126 as Roger Waters puts it to Tommy Vance, and indeed “The Doctor” was the song’s working title. Shut away in his hotel room, Pink has failed to respond to either the repeated banging on his door at the end of the previous song (“Bring the Boys Back Home”) or his manager’s persistent attempts to make him see sense, given that the concert is fast approaching: Time to go! All to no avail. Enter a physician who asks: Hello, is there anybody in there? a question that echoes the song “Is There Anybody Out There?” His offer to ease the rock star’s pain is clearly full of significance.
It seems that Roger Waters’s description of Pink’s mental deterioration in this song was inspired by a real-life incident that occurred in the summer of 1967. During the International Love-In Festival, Marc Bolan’s wife discovered Syd Barrett in such a serious cataleptic state that he was unable to recognize her. Aware of the seconds ticking away, the stage manager started panicking and shouting “Time to go! Time to go!” exactly as Pink’s manager (who also bangs on the hotel room door) does at the end of “Bring the Boys Back Home.” Although Barrett was eventually led onto the stage, he was present in body only that evening and was unable to support the other three members of the group…
Roger Waters and David Gilmour share the lead vocal in “Comfortably Numb.” The verses are sung by Roger Waters, playing the part of the physician, and the refrain by David Gilmour in the role of Pink. In Waters’s sections, his voice is so fragile and dreamlike that one wonders whether he is trying to embody the drug and its effect on Pink’s neurons. In the first refrain, Pink addresses the following words to the physician: Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying. He is then plunged deep into his past and the memory of a fever that makes him feel “comfortably numb.” Is this an expression of the sense of paralysis we feel when we suddenly discover that our childhood has disappeared for good? Or is it a reference to Pink’s possessive mother (as Alan Parker gives us to think in his movie, in which we see Pink marrying a “rock chick”—out of love perhaps, but more likely to escape from the web his mother has woven around him in order to protect him from the outside world)?
The physician then administers an injection with the aim of getting Pink through the show. Pink’s plunge into the past continues until the end of the last refrain. Waters has revealed that this passage derives from an experience he had had a few years before: “I was in Philadelphia; I had terrible stomach pains. I can’t remember exactly when it was, but this idiot said, ‘Oh, I can deal with that,’ and gave me an injection of some kind. God knows what it was, but I went (sound of hitting floor).”36 He adds that the two hours that followed were the longest two hours in his life as he was incapable of playing or moving his arms during the concert.
The message is clear: Waters is targeting the world of entertainment, and rock ’n’ roll in particular, where money takes precedence over everything else—with no regard to the physical or mental health of those paid to go onstage. It is also a frontal attack on an economic model based on profit. Open season on the moneymen, in a sense… From a musical point of view, “Comfortably Numb” is universally recognized as a Pink Floyd masterpiece and as a perfect example of Gilmour’s melodic subtlety combined with Waters’s dark poetry. This song is David Gilmour’s main contribution to The Wall—in the capacity of composer at least.
Production
“Comfortably Numb” is one of the rare tracks on the album that starts with neither sound effect nor segue. David Gilmour explains the genesis of the song: “I actually recorded a demo of ‘Comfortably Numb’ at Berre Les Alpes while I was doing my first solo album [David Gilmour, 1978], but it was only a basic little chord pattern which was really not much else,”36 he explains. In the end, the guitarist did not have time to include it on his solo album, and put it to one side. It was only much later, at the insistence of Bob Ezrin, who was extremely keen for Gilmour to contribute to the writing of The Wall, that he returned to it. James Guthrie remembers: “The day that he turned up with ‘Comfortably Numb,’ sang a ‘la-la’ melody over the top of these chords, was fantastic.”116 Ezrin then asked Waters to write the words. Waters did so, but with little enthusiasm, according to Ezrin. When he reappeared with the finished lyric, the producer was full of admiration, and has called the song text “one of the greatest ever written.”116
Although there was no dispute about the authorship of the words, the same cannot be said of the music. Gilmour has subsequently maintained throughout many an interview that his collaboration with Waters on this track amounted to “my music, his words,”116 claiming that Waters had asked him to adapt his music to the length of his lines, thereby forcing him to change the structure of the piece. However, Roger Waters would dispute this version of events, which in his opinion is too black and white: “What happened is Dave gave me a chord sequence, so if you wanted to fight about it I could say that I wrote the melody and the lyrics, obviously. I think in the choruses he actually hummed a bit of the melody, but in the verses he certainly didn’t.”116 Listening to Gilmour’s demo, it seems that Waters’s memory had played tricks on him because the refrain and its melody were fully formed and only the verses remained vague. But as he himself would say, “Arguing about who did what at this point is kind of futile.”116
Ego Problems
Unfortunately, the disagreements between the two men were not confined to the songwriting. Other major bones of contention were the arrangements and mixing. Gilmour and Waters failed to see eye to eye on two main points. Firstly the strings that Bob Ezrin had Michael Kamen arrange and record in New York City were judged by David Gilmour to be excessively syrupy. He wanted a more pared-down rock sound. However, the producer fought his corner and Roger Waters supported him: “They sounded fantastic, almost the best thing that Michael ever did in my view. I loved it.”135
The second area of dispute concerned the drum part recorded by Nick Mason, which the guitarist considered slapdash. “We had another go at it and I thought that the second take was better.”29 Gilmour then reworked the song and took it upon himself to present a new version that he now considered perfect, but Waters did not like it at all, and “That was the big argument.”135 Each of them justified his own vision of the song forcefully, conceding nothing, Gilmour, for his part, wanting to defend at all costs one of the very few titles he had written for the album. They would describe this sparring as no less than a battle. Finally, in the light of their respective stubbornness, they reached a compromise: “So the song ended up with 4 bars of his and 4 bars of mine… the whole track is like that. It was a weird sort of bargaining thing between he and I.”135 The most distressing thing about this whole episode is that both Gilmour and Waters have since admitted that they are unable to hear the difference between the rejected versions and the version used in the end. “It was more an ego thing than anything else,”29 Gilmour would admit in 1993…
Musically, “Comfortably Numb” opens with four bars consisting of the brass conducted by Michael Kamen, a pedal steel guitar played by David Gilmour (a sonority that had been absent in Pink Floyd’s music since Wish You Were Here), Rick Wright’s Hammond organ, Roger Waters’s bass, and Nick Mason’s drumming. Roger Waters has awarded himself the lead vocal in all the verses, singing in a drawling voice and a patronizing, paternalistic tone in keeping with the character of the
shady Dr. Feelgood. The first syllables of each verse are repeated by a very present echo, creating the impression that they are reverberating in Pink’s befuddled head. David Gilmour in turn takes the lead vocal in the refrains, supported by his Ovation Custom Legend, in “Nashville” tuning (as on “Hey You”), a second acoustic rhythm part, this time played by Lee Ritenour, and the superb strings orchestrated and conducted by Michael Kamen—one of the areas of disagreement.
A Landmark Solo
At the end of the first refrain, Gilmour plays one of the song’s two guitar solos on his “Black Strat,” with Big Muff distortion and colored by Yamaha rotary speaker. His touch is as brilliant, and his performance as inspired, as ever. Roger Waters sings lead vocal in three more verses before Gilmour returns for the final refrain. After his last phrase he launches into his second solo, which remains one of the highlights of his career as a guitarist. He would explain that he recorded it relatively quickly, in five or six takes: “From there I just followed my usual procedure, which is to listen back to each solo and mark out bar lines, saying which bits are good.”29 Having identified the most successful passages, all that remained to do was to bring the faders up and down for each of the tracks used in order to arrive at a single, polished solo. “That’s the way we did it on ‘Comfortably Numb.’ It wasn’t that difficult,”29 he would conclude. The results are breathtaking. Gilmour surpasses himself in the intensity of his performance, his “Black Strat” thundering through his Hiwatt amp, colored by Yamaha rotary speaker and Big Muff. This solo would go down in the annals of music history, among other things being voted fourth-best rock solo of all time by the magazine Guitar World. Supporting the guitarist are Mason with a very good drum part and Wright on organ. It is highly likely that Gilmour is also playing bass in this section, given that the style is substantially more aggressive than that of Waters. He is also on the Prophet-5 and playing distorted rhythm guitar.
Pink Floyd All the Songs Page 58
