Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (45 page)

Mason and Wright stayed in accommodation at the studio. Waters and Gilmour rented houses nearby. Mason, finding his lodgings rather wanting, eventually moved into Waters’ upmarket villa near the town of Vence. Bob Ezrin, meanwhile, booked himself into the exclusive Negresco Hotel in Nice.

Despite the lavish surroundings, the pressure to deliver an album ensured that they worked to a tight schedule (‘very un-Floydlike,’ said Nick Mason). Waters instigated a strict 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. working day, to ensure that he was able to spend his evenings with Carolyne and their two children. He became particularly angry when Ezrin repeatedly showed up late.

Clearly, at some point during the French recording sessions, the producer’s New York punk attitude started to crumble under Waters’ singular English disdain. Ezrin was on a lower royalty rate than the band, which delighted Waters no end. So much so that he made badges for the band that read NOPE (No Points Ezrin). In 2004, Ezrin would inform
Mojo
writer Phil Sutcliffe that the bassist’s behaviour reminded him of being bullied as a child at school in Toronto.

‘It took me back to that time, when I was a gangly kid,’ he said darkly. ‘It started off playful but what was playful to Roger was very painful to me.’ Ezrin would also claim that his late arrival at the studio was because he dreaded going in, as the ‘atmosphere, especially around Roger, was so tense. It was this horrible, passive-aggressive, English-style conflict, where so much was just unsaid. Roger is a tough guy, and he’s tougher on himself than anyone. But he takes the harshness and perfectionism that he applies to himself and applies it to other people, which is sometimes not the right thing to do.’

The band would subsequently deflect Ezrin’s complaints by claiming that Bob was, in the words of Nick Mason, ‘going through an unreliable phase of his life’, with the implied suggestion being that the producer was enjoying far too many late nights out in Nice. Ezrin would subsequently admit to not being ‘in the best shape emotionally’, not least because of problems in his marriage. However, the producer’s run-ins with Roger Waters would comprise just a small part of the overall conflict. Tensions were also running high between the respective wives. Meanwhile, the relationship between Waters and Richard Wright had all but broken down.

The recording process at Super Bear rarely involved all four band members being in the studio at the same time. While this had the liberating effect of allowing each one enough time to record their parts, it ran the risk of isolation and of separate camps within the group. At Super Bear, Nick Mason, who had, much to Waters’ surprise, learned to read sheet music for the drums, recorded most of his parts during the early sessions, which were then left for Ezrin and James Guthrie to edit together. Having effectively laid down the foundations for the others to build on, this had the added benefit to Mason of allowing him to duck out of the later sessions and race his Ferrari at Le Mans. (He came second in his class.)

Guthrie’s long working day would involve engineering the 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. shift with Waters and Gilmour, before returning to the studio until the small hours with Richard Wright. As ever, each of the band and their collaborators would have a different take on the ‘Rick Wright situation’.

For Waters, part of his ongoing issues with Wright during
The Wall
sessions stemmed from the keyboard player’s desire for a producer’s credit on the album.

‘Up until
The Wall
, we’d always had “Produced By Pink Floyd” on our records,’ said Waters. ‘Although most of the production work had been done by me and Dave. So I put it to Nick and Rick that Bob Ezrin would be producing the record with me and Dave, and you won’t because you never have. Nick went, “Fine, no problem.” But Rick went, “But I
can
produce the record, I can help.” I said, “I don’t think you can, Rick, you never have in the past.” ’ Waters agreed to give Wright a 1 per cent point and producer’s credit on the album, but only after a trial period in which he was ‘seen to be producing the album’.

‘I did have reservations when Bob Ezrin was brought in,’ admitted Wright. ‘But it was not a financial thing about losing production points, but because I thought the band was losing one of its strengths, which was that even if we would fight each other we were all hands together as a group. I think our best work came out of that, and I thought that we ran the risk of losing that if we brought in an outside producer. Now I think bringing Bob in was the right decision.’

‘We’d been working on the record for a few weeks, and Rick, unusually, would be in the studio for the whole time, from the moment we started in the morning to the moment we finished at night,’ said Waters. ‘One day Bob Ezrin asked me why Rick was always sitting in the studio. And I said, “Don’t you get it? He thinks he’s producing the record . . . Have you noticed occasionally how he goes, ‘Uh, uh, uh, I don’t like that.’” And Ezrin says, “Yes, it’s rather irritating.” And I said, “He thinks that’s record producing.” ’

According to Waters, Ezrin challenged Wright, after which he claims the keyboard player stopped coming into the studio, and only showed up when he was requested to, preferring to work on his own at night.

‘I went in at night because the whole album had been mapped out, and I could just go in and do a piano part,’ said Wright. ‘But it
was
very hard if Roger or Bob wasn’t there to say, “That’s good” or “That’s not so good.” But this idea that I was sitting around wasting my time is not really fair.’

‘Rick’s relationship with all of us, but certainly Roger, did become impossible during the making of
The Wall
,’ said Gilmour. ‘He had been asked if he had any ideas or anything that he wanted to do. We would leave the studio in the evening and he would have the whole night to come up with stuff, but he didn’t contribute anything. He just sat there and it was driving us all mad.’

Bob Ezrin offers a gentler assessment of Wright’s problems: ‘Rick is not a guy who performs well under pressure, and it sometimes felt that Roger was setting him up to fail. Rick gets performance anxiety. You have to leave him alone to freeform, to create . . .’

Outside the band, the marital difficulties that had beset Wright during the making of
Animals
had escalated. ‘At the time of
The Wall
I think I was depressed,’ he said. ‘For whatever reason - the divorce, a terrible relationship with my first wife - and I wasn’t offering anything because I wasn’t feeling very good within myself. But I’m pretty sure the others interpreted it as, “He doesn’t care”, “He’s not interested”.’

Halfway through the sessions, Columbia offered a deal increasing the percentage points the band could earn if they could deliver a finished album in time for the Christmas market. Further sessions were booked at jazz pianist Jacques Loussier’s Miraval Studios in Provence to run parallel with the recordings at Super Bear. As well as saving time, the studio’s location was helpful to Waters, who, determined to sing as much of the album as possible, used it to record many of his vocal parts. ‘Super Bear was quite high in the mountains and it’s notorious for being quite difficult to sing there,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘And Roger had a lot of difficulty singing in tune.’ Bob Ezrin meanwhile was entrusted to flit between the two studios, appeasing Waters in one and Gilmour in another.

With holidays booked for August, the original plan was to reconvene in Los Angeles, where they were booked into Cherokee Studios and the Producers’ Workshop, in the first week of September. Waters devised a schedule for what still needed to be done, ‘and I realised it was impossible’. With many of the keyboard parts still unrecorded, he proposed starting ten days earlier, and suggested Ezrin hire an additional keyboard player - ‘because you’re going to need it’ - to work alongside Wright.

However, Wright was in no mood to cut short his family visit to Rhodes. ‘The rest of the band’s children were young enough to stay with them in France but mine [Gala aged nine and Jamie aged seven] were older and had to go to school. I was missing my children terribly.’

The exact circumstances of quite how and why Wright was ousted from Pink Floyd now depend on which of the protagonists is telling the story.

‘I got Steve O’Rourke to call Rick and tell him the new plan,’ said Waters. The Floyd’s manager was enjoying a cruise on the
QE2
at the time. ‘A couple of days later I got a call from Steve and he said, “I’ve found Rick, he’s in Greece.” I said, “Oh, is that OK, then?” and he said, “No, he said, ‘Tell Roger to fuck off.’ ” And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.’

‘I didn’t say, “Tell Roger to fuck off,” ’ insisted Wright. ‘I said, “No, I’m coming on the agreed date.” We’d all agreed, and I had specific time with my children, and there was no indication to me that we were that far behind schedule. Steve said, “Fair enough, I understand.” And that was the last I heard of it, until I arrived in LA and Steve said, “Roger wants you out of the band.” ’

David Gilmour’s quiet holiday in Dublin was rudely interrupted by the news of Waters’ ultimatum. As the flat he was renting didn’t have a telephone, the guitarist was forced to ring his bandmate from a public call box. ‘I remember saying, “Roger, you can’t do that. Rick’s been in the band all along. If you don’t like it, your choice is to leave, it isn’t to throw someone out.” I said, “You’re letting this get very personal, aren’t you?” and I won’t quote what he said.’

However much Gilmour may have objected to Waters’ railroading behaviour, he couldn’t ignore the fact that the two of them were still capable of producing some brilliant work together. Renting villas near to each other, Gilmour and Waters would often drive to Super Bear together each morning. ‘We had some pretty major arguments during
The Wall
, but they were artistic disagreements,’ Gilmour insisted later. ‘The intention behind
The Wall
was to make the best record we could. I can remember driving with Roger one morning and he said, “God, we must never stop working together, we make a great team.” ’

When work resumed in Los Angeles, Wright approached Gilmour and asked him to go out for a drink to discuss Waters’ ultimatum. Sitting in a restaurant, Gilmour told the keyboard player that he would defend his right to remain in the band, despite agreeing with Waters that he wasn’t contributing as much as he should. ‘I said, “You have to make your own mind up about this, Rick, but you haven’t really pulled your finger out, have you?” ’

Waters’ position was clear: either Wright agreed to leave quietly at the end of the album or Waters would refuse to release
The Wall
as a Pink Floyd album.

‘Roger’s attitude was, “It’s my record, and I’ve let the rest of you play on it,” ’ says Bob Ezrin. ‘With everything that was going on financially with the band, he was the one standing there holding what he saw as a satchel full of pound notes.’

Wright agonised for days before agreeing to quit. ‘I was terrified of the financial situation, and I felt the whole band was falling apart anyway,’ he said. ‘But I made the decision to finish recording the album and I told them I wanted to do the live shows.’ Clearly, whatever reservations Waters may have had about Wright’s musicianship didn’t impinge on him wanting to present a united Pink Floyd for publicity purposes, once the album came out. The news of Wright’s departure was also kept out of the music press.

In the 1990s, when relations between Waters and the re-formed Pink Floyd were still poor, the bassist would tell interviewers that, while they were in France making
The Wall
, Gilmour had suggested they fire Mason as well as Wright. This would tally with Wright’s suspicion that Waters wanted sole control of Pink Floyd, with Gilmour as his guitarist, and any other roles fulfilled by session musicians. Gilmour later refuted any suggestion of firing the drummer. Mason said at the time that he felt ‘like the ship’s cook. I see various commanders come and go, and, when things get really bad, I just go back down to the galley.’ Nick now favours the traditional Pink Floyd stance of ignoring the problem in the hope that it will just go away. Which, in this case, it has. ‘I am happy to say that everyone denies even considering getting me out of the band,’ he says.

‘But I’m certainly not going to undertake a forensic investigation into the matter.’ Unsurprisingly, Wright’s name was not included anywhere on the original
Wall
album. Yet neither was Nick Mason’s, until he insisted, and it was added to later pressings.

Wright, however, never shared Mason’s bluff exterior or innate sense of self-preservation. He also believed that his forced departure was a personal more than musical issue: ‘I annoyed Roger and he annoyed me.’ He had always been an easy target for Waters since their days at Regent Street Poly. ‘Roger used Rick as a punchbag,’ said Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon, recalling their trip to Greece in 1966, and Pink Floyd’s ex-manager Andrew King once said, ‘Roger thought
everybody
needed toughening up.’

Subsequently, persistent rumours would circulate that cocaine use was also to blame for Wright’s departure. ‘There
were
people who were doing a lot of drugs,’ Waters told writer Sylvie Simmons. ‘Some of us had big, big problems. Though I wasn’t taking drugs at that point.’

Wright has always disputed any rumours that he had a cocaine problem. ‘I can honestly say that it really was not a drug problem,’ he said in 1999, while admitting that cocaine was taken socially by all band members during the time in which the band was making
The Wall
.

‘Rick’s such a sweetheart, but he’s suffered rather badly from everything that’s happened,’ said one associate. In Wright’s own rather sad words from 2000: ‘Since I’ve been talking to a therapist, I’ve realised I was probably depressed. He thinks I’m still angry about the whole thing.’

Amid all this drama, somehow an album was still being made. By August 1979, the running order of songs for
The Wall
was largely finalised. What would become known as ‘Comfortably Numb’ was still being called ‘The Doctor’, while the opening song had yet to acquire the title ‘In the Flesh’ and was still known as ‘The Show’. At Cherokee Studios, Richard Wright fulfilled his duties, with additional keyboards played by session men Peter Woods and Freddie Mandel. When Nick Mason failed to nail the unusual rhythm on the song ‘Mother’, Jeff Porcaro, drummer with session band extraordinaire Toto, stepped in. ‘Nick, to his credit, had no great pretence about it,’ remembered Waters. ‘He just said, “I can’t play that.” ’