Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (46 page)

Meanwhile, at the Producers’ Workshop on Hollywood Boulevard, Bob Ezrin oversaw the editing of various tape loops (including Waters’ maniacal schoolteacher’s voice used on ‘Another Brick in the Wall’), and more session players. Pink Floyd’s former closed-shop policy had been completely abandoned. Hired gun guitarist Lee Ritenour was brought in to beef up one of
The Wall
’s heaviest rock numbers, ‘Run Like Hell’. Clarinets, concertinas and a mandolin were added to the closing track, ‘Outside the Wall’. Backing vocals were supplied by, among others, Beach Boy Bruce Johnston and Toni Tennille of the MOR pop duo The Captain and Tennille, both of whom contributed to the thunderous heavy metal pastiche ‘In the Flesh’, as well as ‘The Show Must Go On’ and ‘Waiting for the Worms’, in the last of which Pink fantasises about leading a Fascist rally through the streets of London.

Toni Tennille was highly conscious of just how different her music was from Pink Floyd’s, and arrived at the sessions expecting to encounter a stereotypical, dope-smoking hard rock band. She was immediately disarmed when the ultra-professional and very un-stoned Gilmour told her that he’d watched her singing on a children’s TV show that very morning.

Bruce Johnston’s involvement had come about when Floyd had been unable to co-ordinate a recording session with all of the Beach Boys. He too found his preconceptions quashed after arriving at Roger Waters’ rented tax shelter house in Beverly Hills. ‘I thought: God! Pink Floyd. They’re ultra-civilised people making this bizarre album,’ recalled Johnston. ‘Roger’s got a staff that work for him, beautiful furniture, a nice wife, a couple of little babies . . . We even talked about getting together and playing tennis.’

Also at the Producers’ Workshop, Waters and Ezrin set about recording the countless sound effects needed for the album. Waters taped the sound of Hollywood Boulevard at night by simply hanging a microphone out of the studio window. Gilmour’s guitar tech Phil Taylor was sent out into the studio car park to create the sound of screaming tyres on his station wagon for ‘Run Like Hell’. Taylor was also entrusted with finding a television set to be smashed with a sledgehammer for ‘One of My Turns’, in which Pink freaks out in his hotel room in front of a groupie. Back at Britannia Row, engineer Nick Griffiths was told to record the sound of smashing crockery for the same song. The groupie’s voice belonged to actress Trudy Young, whom Ezrin had recorded in Toronto earlier that year. Her exaggerated Valley Girl accent - ‘Oh my
God
! What a fabulous room . . . are all these your
guitars
?’ - would become one of the most enduring non-musical moments on
The Wall
. The song began with the sound of Pink attempting to place a collect call to his wife, and hearing another man answering the phone; a direct reference to the incident on the last American tour when Waters had telephoned his ex-wife Judy.

Earlier that summer, while the band stayed at Super Bear, Ezrin had also overseen extra sessions at Columbia’s own studios in New York. Waters had agreed to Ezrin’s suggestion to add orchestral arrangements to various songs, including ‘Nobody Home’, ‘The Trial’ and what would become ‘Comfortably Numb’. Musicians from the New York Philharmonic and New York Symphony Orchestras were hired. ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ was also bolstered by a choir from the New York City Opera and thirty-five hired snare drummers.

Native New Yorker Michael Kamen was brought in to help score the orchestral arrangements. Kamen was a musician, arranger and acolyte of composer Leonard Bernstein. His rock ’n’ roll experience had been acquired as musical director of David Bowie’s 1974 US tour. Like Toni Tennille and Bruce Johnston, Kamen was baffled by his new employers. With none of Pink Floyd present at the sessions, he could only speculate about his latest clients. ‘I’d wondered how they functioned,’ he told
Circus
magazine. ‘Were they a band or a fucking board meeting?’ While in New York, Ezrin had been producing guitarist Nils Lofgren at the Power Station studios. Also recording there were the funk band Chic, making their third album,
Risqué
, containing the future dancefloor hit ‘Good Times’. ‘I stood out in the hallway listening to [Chic’s] Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards play, and hearing this whole other approach to rhythm,’ recalls Ezrin now. ‘And I kept going out to listen because what they were doing was so funky, and there I was, working with white people, who weren’t very funky at all, and thinking: Damn! Maybe we can do some of that!’

Back at Super Bear, Ezrin’s idea would find a home on ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’,
The Wall
’s stinging condemnation of the education system, in which Pink is bullied by tyrannical schoolmasters, before standing up to his oppressors. The song contained a winning chorus that denounced the need for education, and refused to bow to ‘thought control’. By the spring of 1979, only Gilmour’s clipped guitar figure gave any hint of the disco rhythm of the finished version. ‘There was all that delayed guitar and the synthesiser melody and Roger’s voice on top,’ remembers Ezrin. ‘It was a funereal, gloomy thing,’ recalls Nick Mason. ‘Dirge-like might be a little too disparaging.’

Ezrin suggested adding a disco beat to the track, telling David Gilmour to go to a nightclub and actually
listen
to some of the music he was talking about. The guitarist grudgingly obliged. Waters and Mason had no such reservations. ‘I thought the disco drums were great,’ says Mason. ‘But then I did have a slightly more simplistic approach anyway.’ Another song on the album, ‘Run Like Hell’, would have a similar drum beat in the end.

Listening to the new version of the song, Ezrin had another brainwave. ‘The minute I heard the song with the beat on, I said, “This is a smash.” But the problem was it was only one verse and one chorus long.’

Despite a couple of ventures into the US singles market in recent years, Floyd were still resistant to the idea of chasing hits. ‘Roger said, “Fuck it, we don’t want a single,” ’ says Ezrin. ‘So I started pleading, but he was like, “No, I’m not going to be told what to do.” So we waited until they’d gone home, and copied the track. I found a small disco break that we picked out of a verse, stuck it into the middle to link it and stuck the first verse back in and tacked the ending on. Now we had a single. James [Guthrie] and I played the song to Roger and he liked it.’

But with two verses exactly the same, the song needed some extra input. ‘There’s some controversy over who said, “Let’s put some kids on it,” ’ admits Ezrin. The producer had used children’s voices on albums for Alice Cooper and Lou Reed, so has largely been credited as suggesting the same for
The Wall
. ‘I’m known as “the kid guy”, but James recalls that it was Roger’s idea. Whoever said it, it was a great idea.’

Guthrie and Ezrin made a twenty-four-track reel of the song, leaving twenty tracks open. They sent the tape from France to Nick Griffiths at Britannia Row in London. ‘We said to Nick, “Please find us some kids, and just fill up the tracks. Have them do it every way possible - cockney, posh, nasty, angelic . . .” ’

Griffiths contacted Islington Green school in nearby Prebend Street and enlisted the help of the school’s head of music, Alun Renshaw. Described as an ‘anarchic teacher’ in what was then a struggling inner-city comprehensive, Renshaw had previously written his own socially conscious musical,
Requiem for a Sinking Block of Flats
, which had been staged at the school. He had a poster for the Sex Pistols’
Never Mind the Bollocks
on the wall of the music room, and took what might be described as a highly individual approach to teaching. As one of his former pupils recalls, ‘We’d go outside in Alun’s music lesson, sit on the side of the road, listen to the cars and then be told to
draw
the sound.’

Griffiths asked Renshaw if he could round up some children to sing at Britannia Row. ‘I thought: Great, yes!’ says Renshaw, who was enticed by the promise of free recording time for the school orchestra. ‘I wanted to make music relevant to the kids - not just sitting around listening to Tchaikovsky. I thought the lyrics were great - “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control . . .” I just thought it would be a wonderful experience for the kids.’ Unfortunately, Renshaw forgot to ask permission from the school’s headmistress; an oversight that would have a serious impact in the months to come.

Alun rounded up those children he could find, not all from the school choir. As one of them recalls, ‘I think it was more of a case of, “What are you doing?” “Nothing?” “Come with me.” ’ Caroline Greeves (formerly Woods) was among the twenty or so pupils who found themselves at Britannia Row. To start with, Griffiths recorded just three pupils on their own before inviting the rest to join, conducting them as best he could. ‘We sang in our best school choir voices, but then we were told to shout and make it a lot more cockney,’ says Caroline. ‘They’d played us a tape of the song first and I remember it ran on to the next track. I went home that night and told my brother, who was a big Pink Floyd fan, that not only had I sung on their next album, I’d also heard some of their unreleased material.’

Not all of the ad-hoc choir were so easily impressed. ‘I was a mod wannabe and not interested in Pink Floyd at the time,’ says pupil Tabitha Mellor, who was more impressed by the ‘Space Age sound desk’ but baffled by the bales of straw placed behind them at Britannia Row during the recording. ‘The engineers told us it was to absorb the sound and improve the acoustics.’

With the session complete, Griffiths multi-tracked the voices to make it sound like the work of a full choir and then Federal Expressed the tape back to the band in Los Angeles. ‘We threw it up on the console and I opened all the faders,’ says Ezrin, ‘and when that
gang
came back at us, it sounded just spectacular. Roger was beaming. From the moment we heard it, we knew we had a hit record.’ While the group agreed to release the song as a single, none of them knew it would give them a Christmas number 1 hit.

The artistic disagreements between David Gilmour and Roger Waters during
The Wall
would, in many cases, have a positive result on the songs. As James Guthrie recalled, ‘Roger was always willing to edit, to throw away something that wasn’t working, no matter how much time he might have put it into it.’ The song ‘Nobody Home’ was a late addition to the album, recorded in October at the Producers’ Workshop. Challenged to write something by Gilmour, Waters left the studio ‘in a sulk’, according to the guitarist, before coming back the next morning with ‘something fantastic’. Waters’ temper had yielded one of the most atmospheric and moving songs on the record. In ‘Nobody’s Home’, Pink sits in his LA hotel room, spaced out in front of the television, unable or unwilling to do anything else. The lyrics were loaded with references to Syd Barrett; ‘the wild, staring eyes’, ‘the obligatory Hendrix perm’ and ‘elastic bands keeping my shoes on’ all referred to his appearance and disconnected behaviour during Pink Floyd’s first US tour in 1967.

For some of Syd’s other friends, certain moments on
The Wall
took them right back in time. ‘There’s a moment on the album where you hear this voice, and it’s meant to be Pink’s manager, saying, “It’s time to go . . . It’s time to go,” ’ says Matthew Scurfield, of the spoken words leading into the song ‘Comfortably Numb’. ‘That reminds me of being with Syd in Earlham Street, and the band were downstairs waiting to take him to the gig: “Come on, let’s get him away from sitting on the floor or at the table, painting and being in his own fairytale world.” ’

For ‘Comfortably Numb’, Waters would also write about his own experience during Floyd’s 1977 US tour, when he was struck down with what transpired to be hepatitis and was injected with a muscle relaxant which enabled him to go on stage and perform. In the song, Pink undergoes the same experience, slipping into a state of delirium before playing the show. But what would become one of the defining songs of Pink Floyd’s career was blighted with arguments.

‘“Comfortably Numb” was
the
song we argued about the most,’ remembers Bob Ezrin. Gilmour originally presented Waters with a chord sequence left over from his solo album sessions (‘I never used it then, but thought: I’ll store that and come back to it later’). Yet, as Ezrin explains, Waters was resistant to using it as ‘this was Roger’s record, about Roger, for Roger’. Ezrin insisted, as the existing song needed filling out. Waters went away and begrudgingly wrote what started out as a spoken-word verse and additional lyrics for the chorus. ‘And what he came back with just gave me goosebumps,’ says Ezrin.

Nevertheless, by the time they reached Los Angeles they had two versions of the song. One was stripped-down and harder, with very little of Michael Kamen’s orchestral arrangements; the other was what Ezrin describes as ‘the grander Technicolor, orchestral version’. Gilmour wanted the harder arrangement; both Waters and Ezrin favoured the wide-screen orchestral version. ‘So that turned into a real arm-wrestle,’ says Ezrin. Having repaired to an Italian restaurant in North Hollywood to thrash out a compromise, a full-scale argument erupted. ‘But at least this time there were only
two
sides to the argument: Dave on one side; Roger and I on the other.’ Finally, the deal was struck. The body of the song would comprise the orchestral arrangement; the outro, including that final, incendiary guitar solo, would be taken from the Gilmour-favoured, harder version. ‘I’m so glad we did that,’ raves Ezrin, who clearly adores the song. ‘ “Comfortably Numb” still makes me think of being in bed with a comforter pulled up around your ears, and a pillow over your head, saying, “Leave me alone. I want to be alone in this cocoon.” And then, at the end, Dave breaks out and declares himself, and a whole measure of beauty and anger has to be expressed.’

As Gilmour ruefully admitted, ‘I think things like “Comfortably Numb” were the last embers of mine and Roger’s ability to work collaboratively together.’

‘This is terrible. It’s rubbish. What are we going to do?’