Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (55 page)

For guitarist Jay Stapley,
Radio K.A.O.S.
saw Waters in his element. ‘The studio was Roger’s
métier
. I remember hearing an interview with Dave Gilmour in which he said that you’d sit there with Roger in the studio, and there’d be an introduction to a song playing and he would be able to say, “Right, something needs to happen
now
.” He had this perfect sense of theatre applied to music. I think he was sometimes insecure about his own ability, as he’s not a trained musician. But we all admired Roger’s ability to do what we couldn’t - write amazing lyrics and conceive amazing stage shows.’

But Waters had set himself a tough challenge. With its references to the British miners’ strike, the US bombing of Tripoli, Ronald Reagan, ballistic missiles and even cordless telephones,
Radio K.A.O.S.
is undeniably a product of 1987. Unfortunately, the music was, too. Dominated by Fairlights, reverb-heavy drums and Billy’s synthesised voice,
Radio K.A.O.S.
is an auditory struggle in the twenty-first century, even before you get to the convoluted narrative. In Bob Ezrin’s absence, Waters had co-produced the record with Nick Griffiths and former Deaf School saxophonist Ian Ritchie.

‘Between Ian Ritchie and myself we really fucked that record up,’ admits Waters. ‘We tried too hard to make it sound modern.’ Most of the worthy lyrics and ideas are lost beneath its glossy production and vogue-ish drum sounds, though its closing ballad, ‘The Tide is Turning (After Live Aid)’, with the full-throated accompaniment of the Pontardulais Male Voice Choir, was a surprisingly tuneful single that found an unlikely fan. ‘I heard “The Tide is Turning”, which I really liked,’ claimed David Gilmour. ‘The rest of it’s not really done to my tastes. But I’m obviously biased.’

The album was not to the record-buying public’s tastes, either.
Radio K.A.O.S.
peaked at number 50 in the US and number 25 in the UK, some places lower than
The Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking
. ‘Waters raises a lot of knotty issues over communication but he never really wrestles them to the ground,’ claimed
Rolling Stone
’s review, while also praising the album as ‘his most listenable work since
The Wall
’. Waters would remain bullish in his defence of artistry over sales (‘If you’re going to use sales as a criterion, it makes
Grease
a better record than
Graceland
’), but he also realised that he was now a victim of his own carefully cultivated anonymity. ‘It’s frustrating to find out how many people don’t know who I am or what I actually did in Pink Floyd,’ he told writer David Fricke. ‘I wanted anonymity. I treasure it. But now it’s as if the past twenty years meant nothing.’

The presence of a new Pink Floyd hardly helped his position. Waters launched the
Radio K.A.O.S.
tour in New York in August, a month before the release of
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
and two months before the next Pink Floyd tour. A full bells-and-whistles production, Waters wheeled out some new props alongside the usual animations, back projections and quadraphonic sound. A telephone box was installed in the middle of the audience, for Waters to take questions from fans; an astonishing U-turn from a man who, ten years earlier, had spat on one fan. In another highly surprising move, Moosehead, the Canadian beer company, sponsored the North American leg of the tour.

On stage, Waters broke up selections from the
Radio K.A.O.S.
album with a medley of Pink Floyd songs, including ‘Have a Cigar’ and ‘Mother’, as well as screening the group’s promo film for ‘Arnold Layne’. Keyboard player and vocalist Paul Carrack was one of the newest recruits to The Bleeding Heart Band. Part of his duties included singing such Floyd songs as ‘Money’. ‘My version actually came out as a B-side, and I got death threats for it,’ laughs Carrack. ‘They said I should be shot. We saw rather a lot of madness on the
K.A.O.S.
tour. I can remember arriving at one gig and there was a guy outside who was convinced he was the character of Billy from the album, and that the whole thing had been written about him.’

As a bandleader, Roger Waters proved a saner presence. Just. ‘I know he can be intimidating and demanding,’ admits Carrack. ‘But I wasn’t having any of it, and I think he appreciated it. Roger’s strength is the big concept. He really means it, and you can’t fault his commitment, but he can make hard work of it. I think he sometimes finds it difficult to put over to the band what he wants, because basically his music is very simple and some of the musicians sometimes get a bit scared of what to play and how to play, because he doesn’t always know how to put over what he’s after.’

Camaraderie within The Bleeding Heart Band was good. When the Far East leg of the tour blew out due to poor ticket sales, Waters, undeterred, took the band to Nassau’s Compass Point Studios to record songs for his next album. However, by the time they went back on the road in November, Pink Floyd were on the move.

Come the summer, even David Gilmour realised they could tinker no more.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
finally arrived in the shops at the beginning of September 1987. Leaving their audience in no doubt about who was actually
in
Pink Floyd, the group broke with tradition and included a photograph on the inside sleeve, taken by David Bailey, of a suited and booted Gilmour and Mason smiling smugly into the lens. Richard Wright’s name appeared only among the numerous other session musician credits.

However depleted the team may have been, record-buyers didn’t care.
A Momentary Lapse
. . . went to number 3 on both sides of the Atlantic, held off the top in the UK by Michael Jackson’s
Bad
and the Pet Shop Boys’
Actually
, and in the US by
Bad
and rejuvenated hard-rockers Whitesnake’s
1987
. Mason would later admit that the timing of the album’s release could have been better, rather than going up against such heavy competition. Back then, though, it seemed like an album built to take on such competition, with everything sounding bigger, louder and more expensive, as if every last dollar’s worth was being eked from its numerous hired hands.

The opening track, ‘Signs of Life’, placed a funereal keyboard figure over the sound of Gilmour’s boatman sculling up the River Thames. In grand Pink Floyd tradition it hung on for dramatic effect before allowing the guitarist to pick out his first notes,
à la
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. The album’s signature song, ‘Learning to Fly’, wove its strong melody around the sound of an airborne Nick Mason and lyrics about, in Bob Ezrin’s words, ‘leaving your earthbound tendencies behind and liberating your spirit’. The closing song, ‘Sorrow’, shared a similar sense of purpose and confidence. Written by Gilmour one weekend on the
Astoria
, it housed the album’s best guitar solo, a real note-bending extravaganza, and a lyric some fans, rightly or wrongly, took to be about Roger Waters.

What the album did make clear was just who was now in the driving seat. The wordy politicising of
The Final Cut
and the persistent despair of
The Wall
were nowhere to be found.

Lyrically, nothing here was likely to give Waters sleepless nights, a fact in which he later took great pleasure. Instead, the melancholy mood of most of
A Momentary Lapse
. . . suggests a forty-year-old Gilmour, several glasses of red wine down, reflecting on his life; including his relationships with Waters and his wife Ginger, from whom he was also becoming increasingly estranged. The couple would separate within a year. In ‘Yet Another Movie’, the lyric referring to an empty bed had been inspired by a scene in the couple’s house in Lindos. The guitarist was quick to tell critics that he viewed the album as a return to the glory days of
Dark Side of the Moon
, when, in his view, the music hadn’t taken such a back seat to Waters’ lyrics. ‘That’s what I’m trying to do,’ he insisted. ‘Focus more on the music, restore the balance.’

Not everyone in the band agreed that he had succeeded. Interviewed in 2000, the under-used Richard Wright admitted: ‘Roger’s criticisms are fair. It’s not a band album at all.’

A Momentary Lapse of Reason
was, however, the right Pink Floyd album for the times. Where it falls down is that, like
Radio K.A.O.S.
, it’s stuck in that time. Like most forty-something rockers, one of Gilmour and Mason’s greatest fears must have been that they would sound
passé
. To start, those booming, reverbed drums are the very essence of the mid-eighties, but a world away from the more appealing sound of a loose-limbed, flailing Nick Mason on
Live At Pompeii
. The same drums, burbling bass and synthesisers on ‘One Slip’ are interchangeable with those on Peter Gabriel’s
So
album from a year before, but then session bassist extraordinaire Tony Levin played on both albums. Gilmour’s songwriting partners were similarly rooted in the era. Pat Leonard, his collaborator on ‘Yet Another Movie’, had been the brains behind Madonna’s hits, ‘Like a Prayer’ and ‘Live to Tell’. In the album’s defence, Gilmour plays his heart out, but many of the songs themselves have no such heart. ‘I didn’t think it was the best Pink Floyd album ever made,’ he said later. ‘But I gave it the best damn shot I could.’

Reviewers agreed. The newly launched
Q
magazine, which would draw its readers from a pool of music fans weaned on the likes of Pink Floyd, acknowledged that it was ‘Gilmour’s album, to much the same degree that the four before were Waters’, regarding it as a release of the guitarist’s ‘repressed talent’. Even Waters’ confidant Karl Dallas came down on the Floyd’s side of the fence, despite his earlier promise that Waters’ second album would ‘flip your wig’. ‘The new Floyd album is a classic, and Roger’s is . . . well . . . Roger’s.’

Waters showed no reticence in offering his views on
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
. ‘I think it’s very facile, but a quite clever forgery,’ he told writer David Fricke. ‘The songs are poor in general; the lyrics I can’t quite believe. Gilmour’s lyrics are very third-rate.’

However, outstripping
Radio K.A.O.S.
in the record shops, and with the Floyd selling out arenas to Waters’ theatres, there was already the smell of victory in the air. Then came the pressing matter of just
how
they were going to perform live.

Keyboard player Jon Carin had already been confirmed for the tour, performing alongside Richard Wright. The absence of Waters also left a noticeable gap on stage to Gilmour’s left. The role of Pink Floyd bassist would be taken by Guy Pratt. A 25-year-old session man whose previous clients had included Robert Palmer, Bryan Ferry and The Smiths, his musical talents had been inherited from his father, actor and songwriter Mike Pratt, who had a title role in the sixties drama series
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
and had co-written Tommy Steele’s hit ‘Little White Bull’.

Pratt’s Pink Floyd initiation had come as a teenager when he attended one of
The Wall
shows at London’s Earls Court, while tripping on LSD. ‘The one thing I remember was Roger in his number 1 T-shirt, having this big tirade against Alan Jones from
Melody Maker
,’ says Guy. ‘I was like, “Wow, he’s
really
playing this rock star character well.” I didn’t know he was being himself. I also managed to blag backstage the night they had their crew party. They had all these strippers and all these inflatables from the old tours. Unfortunately, I was on acid, and wandering around dressed like one of The Clash. In those days, I would never have imagined I could play with Pink Floyd. It was out of the question.’ Guy had first come to Gilmour’s attention when he played on Bryan Ferry’s
Bête Noire
album and later when he performed with the guitarist’s protégés Dream Academy.

Like Wright, Nick Mason would perform alongside another musician. In his case, twenty-three-year-old percussionist Gary Wallis, whose highly visual performing style - attacking an array of gongs, drums and cymbals mounted around him in a cage - was the perfect contrast to Mason’s considerably more restrained approach.

Saxophonist Scott Page, who’d already played on
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
, was another addition to the team. By no means a Pink Floyd fan (‘Honest to God, I must be the only person in the world who’s never even heard
Dark Side of the Moon
’), he would be rendered instantly recognisable to fans in even the cheapest stadium seats by his lavish mullet hairstyle. Adding some much-needed glamour were backing singers Rachel Fury, Margaret Taylor and, later, Durga McBroom. Taylor was later replaced by Durga’s sister Lorelei.

One familiar older face among the young pups was Gilmour’s Cambridge friend, the guitarist Tim Renwick. A survivor from Waters’
Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking
tour, Renwick had been playing in the house band for the Cliff Richard musical
Time
, at London’s Dominion Theatre, when he gratefully took Gilmour’s call.

However, arriving in Toronto for rehearsals, the band encountered some problems. Guy Pratt quickly discovered that he hadn’t actually been Pink Floyd’s first choice of bassist. ‘When we turned up to rehearse there were a few newspapers running articles about how Pink Floyd were in town to start their new tour and a lot of them said, “featuring Tony Levin on bass”. So I was there only because Tony hadn’t been available at the last minute. I was like, “Oh,
great
!” ’

The band had hired a hangar at Lester B. Pearson airport in which to rehearse, but there was a noticeable lack of discipline. ‘The Pink Floyd bass gig is not the most difficult one in the world,’ says Guy, ‘but Nick hadn’t played the drums for years, Rick hadn’t done anything for years, and David didn’t seem to really like being in charge that much.’

‘It was a disaster,’ admits Tim Renwick. ‘Nobody could remember how to play anything. It was all so disparate.’