Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (54 page)

Here on in, the precise circumstances surrounding the making of the album become blurred and contradictory, depending on who is telling the story and when they were spoken to. Interviewed specifically for this book in March 2007, Bob Ezrin insisted Gilmour approached him two weeks after he had turned down Waters. Interviewed for
Penthouse
magazine in 1988, he claimed he was approached a month later, while Waters insisted, in the same article, that he discovered Ezrin had been hired to work on a Pink Floyd album a
week
after being told he would not be available to work on Roger’s new record. As Ezrin later admitted: ‘It was a coincidence, but he thought it was a conspiracy.’

Nevertheless, when Ezrin arrived in England late that summer, he joined Gilmour for a month of what the guitarist described as ‘mucking about with a lot of demos’. Ezrin was hired as co-producer alongside Gilmour, and, according to Waters, was now guaranteed a generous number of points from the gross sales of the next Pink Floyd album.

At least, the environment for making the record was more tranquil than the mood between Waters and his ex-bandmates. Recording sessions would take place on Gilmour’s new houseboat studio,
Astoria
, a 90ft-long vessel moored on the River Thames near Hampton Court and once owned by music hall impresario and slapstick comedian Fred Karno. Gilmour had converted the boat’s dining room into a studio, while turning the connecting living room into a control room.

‘Working there was just magical, so inspirational; kids sculling down the river, geese flying by . . .’ says Ezrin, who joined Gilmour, Mason and the newly enlisted Jon Carin. Despite being nearly twenty years Gilmour’s junior, Carin was, Ezrin recalls, ‘an old soul, who, in some ways, was closer to vintage Pink Floyd in his tastes than we were’. Working with the latest technology on the
Astoria
, the band began using samples, experimenting with a seemingly endless number of possibilities for each track. As well as ‘Learning to Fly’, Gilmour also had the bones of what would become ‘The Dogs of War’, ‘Terminal Frost’ and ‘Signs of Life’ (for which Ezrin would record the sound of Gilmour’s boatman, Langley Iddens, rowing across the Thames). In the absence of Waters, Ezrin played bass, enjoying ‘the endless laughter and the sense of adventure. Here we were on the river - like we were on a boys’ camp.’

Yet the mood was still being interrupted by the ongoing legal dispute with Roger Waters. In June, Steve O’Rourke, believing his management contract with Waters had been terminated illegally, had filed a suit against Waters to the tune of £25,000 for retrospective commissions; a dispute made more complex by the fact that O’Rourke had only ever had a verbal contract with the band. In October, Waters began High Court proceedings to seek the dissolution of the Pink Floyd partnership; an action again made more complex by the verbal nature of the agreement. As Gilmour explained: ‘The phone would be going every five minutes with this lawyer and that lawyer wanting to know this and that.’

There was also a problem with Nick Mason: his drumming.

‘I hadn’t played for four years and I didn’t even like the sound or feel of my own playing,’ wrote Mason later.

‘Nick seemed to not really be able to play,’ agreed Gilmour. ‘His ability and confidence seemed to have disappeared.’

‘Roger worked on everybody’s confidence,’ suggested Ezrin. ‘In Rick’s case it destroyed him. With Nick it had been a matter of him being marginalised on
The Final Cut
. He hadn’t been practising, and he just wasn’t sounding like himself.’

The use of sampled drums and computer technology removed the need for a human drummer, at least for the time being. The need for a lyricist posed more of an immediate problem. Gilmour’s next approach was to Liverpudlian poet and songwriter Roger McGough, who’d enjoyed a brief taste of pop stardom in the mid-sixties band Scaffold. While Gilmour denied that he was ‘looking for a concept’ for the album, he admitted to meeting with McGough: ‘I can’t remember exactly what happened with him,’ he later told writer Phil Sutcliffe, ‘but he’s the sort of person I wouldn’t be averse to working with.’

By November, the album had run into difficulties. According to Roger Waters, that same month, Gilmour, Ezrin and Columbia executive Stephen Ralbovsky had a lunch meeting at Langan’s Brasserie in Hampton Court, in which Ezrin and Ralbovsky told Gilmour that ‘this music doesn’t sound a fucking thing like Pink Floyd’. In the same interview, Waters also claimed Ezrin had expressed similar sentiments to Michael Kamen, who had earlier declined to be involved with the album.

‘They got halfway through making that record and then scrapped it,’ said Waters again in 2000. ‘Because the record company said, “You can’t get away with this; you’ve got to make something that at least sounds like a Pink Floyd record.” I know for a fact that they used to sit around and go, “Well, what would Roger do now?” ’

Gilmour guardedly said that ‘by Christmas I had a tape with some stuff on it, and I wasn’t overly thrilled with it.’ He also admitted that ‘there was some lack of confidence within the record company and we let a few of the top execs come to the studio and listen to about four tracks and they went away very happy.’ Ezrin later acknowledged: ‘We weren’t there yet.’ Both accepted that Waters’ absence had created a hole in the project. ‘There was never a question about the quality of the music or the vocals,’ says Ezrin. ‘But we acknowledged we’d lost our main lyricist.’

‘It was tough not having Roger there to say, “Shall we do this or
this
,” ’ conceded Gilmour. ‘It was a slow process until the stuff we’d got sounded like we were getting somewhere.’

In January 1987, Canadian songwriter Carole Pope flew to England at Ezrin’s behest. Pope had previously been part of a folk-rock duo called Rough Trade. ‘I had suggestions for concept albums in the Pink Floyd style,’ Pope later explained. ‘By the time I left England in February, they still couldn’t decide what to do.’ Pope also recalled one song, which never made it on to the finished album, entitled ‘Peace Be With You’, ‘a nice, mid-tempo thing about Roger Waters’.

‘Carole had a very different style, very poetic, and it didn’t come to anything,’ recalls Ezrin now. ‘A lot of people went through my mind. And it’s interesting, because, if you’re Pink Floyd, you can go ask for anything. It was great to be able to stretch and say, “Boy, I’d really like to try that one and that one . . .” ’

Finally, Gilmour struck lucky through his own connections. Anthony Moore was a singer-songwriter who’d previously played in the experimental rock bands Slapp Happy and Henry Cow. Roughly the same age as Gilmour and from a similar background, he had also been managed by Peter Jenner. By this time, Gilmour was, he said, happy for the album to ‘be a bunch of songs, and if a mood or theme came along to tie it all together, so much the better’. Moore wrote the bulk of the lyrics for three songs: ‘On the Turning Away’, ‘The Dogs of War’, and ‘Learning to Fly’.

Co-written with Ezrin and Jon Carin, ‘Learning to Fly’ was a quite literal song about Gilmour’s latest hobby. Following Nick Mason’s lead, the guitarist had been taking flying lessons (the two bandmates would later jointly buy a plane of their own), often providing an escape from the legal and musical turmoil in his life. Mason supplied the necessary sound effects, while, between them, the song acquired a familiar guitar and keyboard pattern that earmarked it as
very
Pink Floyd. Finally, some serious progress was being made. ‘It was a turning point,’ said Ezrin. ‘It felt like a complete Floyd work, and that made everybody feel gratified, because that was what we’d been told by Roger we were incapable of doing.’

Aside from his visit to Gilmour in August, Waters also dropped by the
Astoria
a second time to see Bob Ezrin. Michael Kamen had tried to broker a truce between Waters and Ezrin. Gilmour wasn’t present, but Ezrin confirms a visit from Waters and Carolyne Christie - then his new bride - and experiencing the feeling that ‘we were being checked out’.

To complicate matters, Waters was still a shareholder and director of Pink Floyd Music. Gilmour and Mason were unable to form a new company with so many legal issues still unresolved. Waters, therefore, began exercising his right to block any decisions being made by his former bandmates. ‘At the moment, we have to have a board meeting for every single decision we want to do as a group,’ complained Gilmour at the time, ‘and Roger comes and he votes against it.’

In February, following a stint at London’s Mayfair and Audio International Studios, the sessions moved to Los Angeles, under the terms of Gilmour’s deal with Ezrin. On one level, at least, it was a relief. ‘It was fantastic because office hours are not in sync,’ recalled Gilmour, ‘so the lawyers couldn’t call in the middle of recording unless they were calling in the middle of the night.’

In LA, Mason graciously handed over the reins to session drummers Carmine Appice and Jim Keltner, a decision he was to rue on the subsequent tour when he found himself having to learn the parts anyway. Appice and Keltner would be just two of the countless hired hands that would eventually leave their mark on the next Pink Floyd album. ‘Musicians in Los Angeles are reliable,’ Gilmour told
Q
magazine. ‘They turn up, know exactly what you want and work quickly.’

The issue of just
how
quickly was of particular importance. With Waters in the process of finishing his next solo album and with legal battles already raging, Gilmour wanted to release another Pink Floyd record as soon as possible. Working with a drummer who was having trouble drumming, with a keyboard player who wasn’t legally entitled to rejoin the band as a full member, and locked in a legal battle with the band’s departed main lyricist, it’s little wonder that the process of making the album was so laboured. In short, Gilmour needed all the help he could get.

‘We were both rather nervous about how the album would be received,’ admits Mason. ‘And I think that’s why we spent so much time and worked with so many people to make sure we got the thing right.’

Stage two of the campaign now involved booking a tour. And quickly. Before the album had even been completed, the band approached promoters to book dates. At which point Waters sent out letters to every single promoter in North America saying he would sue them if they put Floyd tickets on sale.

While Gilmour and Mason were due an advance from the record company once they’d delivered the new album, that would only cover the cost of making the record. With Waters threatening to put an injunction on the band and, potentially, freezing their bank accounts, the tour could be jeopardised. To cover the cost of initial dates, Gilmour and Mason had to stump up the money themselves. Mason was now separated from his wife Lindy, and found himself a ‘bit short of the ready cash’ for the millions required. Instead he put his treasured 1962 GTO Ferrari down as collateral and cobbled together his half of the funds.

In Pink Floyd’s favour, most promoters took umbrage at Waters’ threat. Ezrin’s friend, Canadian promoter Michael Cohl, was the first to step in, agreeing to put tickets on sale for a date at the Canadian National Exhibition Stadium in Toronto almost six months later in October. All 60,000 tickets sold out in a matter of hours, leading to two further shows being added, securing a figure in the region of $3 million gross income. Other promoters came on board. Confidence boosted, the band still had to ensure that they had a team of lawyers primed and ready to go to court should Waters manage to persuade a judge that it was illegal for this version of Pink Floyd to perform.

With the album completed, despite the best efforts of the respective legal teams (‘the only
real
winners in all this’, as Mason later remarked), the band now found themselves stumped for an album title. Acutely aware that any title could be misconstrued as relating to the band’s situation or leave them open to mockery from Waters, they rejected three possibles -
Signs of Life
,
Of Promises Broken
and
Delusions of Maturity
- in favour of
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
, a phrase lifted from the lyrics to ‘One Slip’. In the end, Waters would still make hay (‘a lapse of reason, indeed’ etc).

The last piece of the puzzle would be artist Storm Thorgerson, whose last proper Pink Floyd commission (excluding
A Collection of Great Dance Songs
) had been 1975’s
Wish You Were Here
. ‘I was brought back to help give
Momentary Lapse
. . . a Floyd look and a Floyd feeling,’ said Thorgerson. Inspired by a lyric from the new album’s ‘Yet Another Movie’ (‘a vision of an empty bed’), Thorgerson suggested staging a scene of 700 empty beds arranged on a beach. ‘David said, “Sure, just do it,”’ recalls Thorgerson. They transported the props to their chosen location, Saunton Sands in North Devon, and laid out the beds one by one. Then rain stopped play. The photograph was finally taken a fortnight later. It was a suitably grand and expensive concept for what would be a grand and expensive album and tour.

In June, with Pink Floyd still applying the finishing touches to their record, Roger Waters unveiled his new album. The gloves were off again.
Radio K.A.O.S.
was another concept album. But what a concept. The story’s central character was a disabled Welsh boy named Billy gifted with telepathic powers. Billy’s carer is his twin brother, a coal miner, who is imprisoned during the miners’ strike (an industrial dispute which then Prime Minister Thatcher attacked with much the same gusto as she did Argentina in the Falklands War). Billy is sent to stay with his uncle in Los Angeles, where he discovers that his telepathic gifts enable him to hack into computer systems. Billy befriends a local DJ (voiced by Jim Ladd, one of the original MCs on
The Wall
tour) on the fictitious Radio K.A.O.S. station, and tells him of his and his twin brother’s plight. Billy hacks into a military satellite, and tricks the world into believing that ballistic missiles are about to be detonated in major cities throughout the globe. The closing track, ‘The Tide is Turning (After Live Aid)’, arrives at the conclusion that war is futile, and that the love of one’s family and the world in general is more important than anything else. (Although it was later reported that Waters added this happy ending at the suggestion of EMI, who believed the album was too bleak without it.) For added complication, the album’s sub-plot addressed the fictional Radio K.A.O.S. station’s attempts to stand up against the rigid formatting of American radio at the time. The entire album was dedicated to ‘All those who find themselves at the violent end of monetarism.’ Even Waters wasn’t convinced: ‘I accepted halfway through the record that, as a narrative form, the album was doomed to failure.’ He also admitted that ‘the part where Billy pretends he’s just started the Third World War I now find faintly embarrassing.’