Inside Out (20 page)

This experimentation could be seen as either a brave radicalism or an enormous waste of expensive studio time. Either way
it allowed us to teach ourselves techniques which might at first be clearly nonsensical but eventually lead to something usable.
One still unused experiment from this time was an exploration of backward vocals. A phrase written out backwards letter for
letter and then read out will not sound correct when reversed, but a spoken phrase recorded and played backwards can be learnt
and recited. This gives a very odd effect when it is in turn played backwards. ‘Neeagadelouff’ was one I remember: it should
come out as ‘fooled again’.

The final version of ‘Echoes’, running at twenty-two minutes, took up one entire side of the album. Unlike CD technology,
vinyl imposed a certain set of restrictions, since loud passages actually took up more of the surface, and in any case even
playing
pianissimo
throughout it would be difficult to record more than half an hour on any one side. We now had to find the rest of the record.
It seems a little strange in hindsight that we ran ‘Echoes’ as the second side. It may be that we were still thinking, perhaps
under record company influence, that we should have something suitable for radio play to open an album.

‘One Of These Days’ was built round a bass guitar sound that Roger created by feeding the output through a Binson Echorec
unit. The Binson had been a mainstay of our sound for many years, starting in the Syd Barrett era – noticeably on ‘Interstellar
Overdrive’, ‘Astronomy Domine’ and ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ – and it was really only digital technology that superseded it. The Binson
used a rotating steel drum surrounded by tape heads. By selecting different heads it gave a range of repeat patterns to any
signal fed into it. The sound quality was horribly degraded, but if you describe hiss as white noise it makes the effect more
palatable.

There were various alternative echo units around which were similar in technology but lacked the same sound quality. The Italian-made
Binson, though, was highly fragile and not suited to the rigours of a life on the road. Like a highly trained rifleman, Peter
Watts could often strip them down and reassemble them at speed during a gig to perform running repairs in order to get at
least one moved back up to the front line.

The bass line on ‘One Of These Days’ was played in unison by Roger and David. One of the basses needed new strings and we
dispatched one of the road crew to the West End to replenish our stocks. He went AWOL for three hours, during which the recording
was completed, using the old strings. When he eventually returned, we suspected he had been visiting his girlfriend who ran
a boutique. His protestations of innocence were rather undermined by the smart new pair of trousers he reappeared in. The
song included, unusually, a bass solo as well as one of my rare vocal performances, and an example of one experiment that
did make it out of the lab. The line was recorded at double-tape speed using a falsetto voice; the tape was then replayed
at slow speed. There are times when it really does seem necessary to do things in the most complicated way possible.

The titles of the other songs on that side related very much to
our lives of the period. ‘San Tropez’, a song Roger brought in complete and ready to record, was inspired by the Floyd expedition
to the south of France the previous summer and the house we had rented there. Roger, Judy, Lindy and myself used to play the
Chinese tile game mah-jong on a fairly regular basis and this craze provided the inspiration for the title ‘A Pillow Of Winds’,
the name of one of the scoring combinations.

‘Fearless’ was an overused expression – a soccer-inspired equivalent of ‘awesome’ – that had come from Tony Gorvitch, the
manager of Family and a good friend of Steve and Tony Howard’s. The football theme was continued in the fade-out with Liverpool’s
Kop choir singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ – it was odd that Roger was so keen to do this, considering that he was a committed
Arsenal fan. Tony Gorvitch had also supplied us with the expressions ‘elbow’ – as in ‘being given the…’ – and ‘Who’s Norman?’
The latter was a band room phrase we used to indicate somebody we didn’t know and whom we might wish to have removed – maybe
the technique we had used on the Band at the Fillmore.

Finally there was ‘Seamus’. In a rather embarrassed way I can only describe this as a novelty track. Dave was looking after
a dog, the Seamus in question, for Steve Marriott of the Small Faces. Steve had trained Seamus to howl whenever music was
played. It was extraordinary, so we set up a couple of guitars and recorded the piece in an afternoon. Curiously we did it
all over again when we made the
Live At Pompeii
film, this time using another dog, called Mademoiselle Nobs. On the positive side, even when hard pressed, at least we resisted
the temptation to construct an entire album of barking dogs, and to audition a clutch of session dogs desperate to make it
in the music business.

Overall, the whole album was immensely satisfying to make. As
Atom Heart Mother
had been a bit of a sidetrack, and
Ummagumma
a live album combined with solo pieces,
Meddle
was the first album we had worked on together as a band in the studio since
A Saucerful Of Secrets
three years earlier. It is relaxed, and quite loose, and ‘Echoes’ has, I think, lasted well. Certainly, compared to its predecessor,
Atom Heart Mother, Meddle
seems refreshingly straightforward. David certainly has a great deal of affection for this album, which for him contains
a clear indication of a way forward.

The principal
Meddle
recordings were split between EMI and AIR London with a small amount of work carried out at Morgan Studios in West Hampstead.
This was because EMI, in another display of their innate conservatism, would not commit to the new sixteen-track tape machines.
In a fit of high dudgeon, we insisted we had to have access to one and marched off to AIR, where we did the bulk of the work.

AIR was George Martin’s studio perched high above Oxford Street in London’s West End. After many years, George had moved on
from EMI and set up his own dream studio, taking with him Ken Townsend, the studio manager at Abbey Road, to ensure the highest
standards. His studios, which were absolutely state of the art, had a very different atmosphere to Abbey Road, which was now
actually in dire need of an overhaul and upgrade. Commercial studios were being designed for rock bands rather than as all-encompassing
facilities, since rock music was where the new clients were coming from.

The recording of
Meddle
was spread over a considerable amount of time, not because we were locked in the studios but because once again we were on
the road so much during 1971: when I look back at the calendar, I find we were in Germany in February, various European countries
in March, the UK in May, Europe in June and July, the Far East and Australia in August, Europe in September, and the States
yet again in October and November.

To fill the gap while
Meddle
was in the works, we fell back on that age-old music industry solution: the compilation album of singles and other offcuts.
Relics –
‘a bizarre collection of antiques & curios’ – featured just one original song, Roger’s ‘Biding My Time’, in which Rick finally
inflicted his trombone playing on us.
Relics
came out in May, just before we played at the Crystal Palace Garden Party. This was our first major concert in London for
some time and one of the outdoor events that the British can be very good at – one-day events lack the marathon aspects of
the three-day festivals, and have more of a feel of the nation’s penchant for bandstands. A curious mix of bands was on this
particular bill, including Leslie West and Mountain, ourselves, the Faces and Quiver, the latter including Willie Wilson.

It was an afternoon concert, and our light show was nonexistent, but with the help of our art college chum Peter Dockley and
friends, we submerged a huge inflatable octopus in the lake in front of the stage. As a climax to the show the octopus was
inflated and came rearing out from the lake. The moment would have been improved if a number of over-enthusiastic and mind-altered
fans had not stripped off and taken to the water; in scenes reminiscent of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea,
these lunatics got tangled with the air pipes and threatened to spoil the performance by thoughtlessly drowning. The event
was promoted by Tony Smith, who went on to manage Genesis. Tony remembers that in the aftermath of the show he and his team
spent a lot of time clearing up not the usual festival detritus but a shoal of dead fish from the lake who had expired from
shock and/or awe.

Of all the overseas tours, our first visit to Japan in August 1971 was a particular success. The record company organised
a press conference (something which we generally hate) and presented us
with our first gold records. Although these were completely bogus, as they had not been earned through sales, we nonetheless
appreciated the gesture.

The real reason for the success of this tour was an outdoor show at Hakone. Not only was this a beautiful venue set in countryside
a couple of hours outside Tokyo, but a festival audience in Japan was a lot less inhibited than one at an indoor show. For
many years these indoor audiences were rather restrained by rock industry standards. Notable for being light on applause,
whoopin’, hollerin’ and standing ovations, Japanese concerts generally start at six in the evening. The reason for this, we’re
told, is that public transport stops early, people live outside the city and it is too difficult for them to make two journeys.
However good the reasons, this did give gigs there the atmosphere of a
‘thé dansant’
and a suggestion that rock should not occupy the minds of people over thirteen. While we were in Japan we managed a trip
on the bullet train, visits to temples and stone gardens and an introduction to sushi. For us, and many other bands, sushi
became the sophisticated version of egg, sausage and chips on tour. A popular way of improving morale during a tour was to
have the local sushi man in, armed with his knives, to bolster flagging spirits (by preparing raw fish, rather than threatening
the depressives, that is).

After Japan we continued to Australia for a short tour, also our first visit, which got off to a challenging start with an
outdoor show at Randwick Stadium, the racecourse in Sydney. Still not attuned to the inversion of seasons down under, we were
surprised to arrive in August and find ourselves in the depths of an Australian winter, so cold I needed gloves to stop the
sticks dropping from my nerveless fingers. The audience, in a testament to true Aussie grit, didn’t seem to notice. We were
grateful the rest of the tour was indoors.

A highlight of this trip was that we got to meet the film director George Greenough. He showed us some footage from a film
he was making called
Crystal Voyager,
a documentary celebration of surfing. Using a camera strapped onto a surfer’s body, he had been able to shoot film within
the tubes formed by breaking waves, further enhanced by sunrises and sunsets. It was stunning. We gave George permission to
use our music for his film and in return have enjoyed a reciprocal arrangement where we have used his film – updated from
time to time – at virtually all our subsequent shows. For the 1994
Division Bell
tour he supplied some new footage of even better quality to project during ‘Great Gig In The Sky’.

On a stop over at Hong Kong airport heading home we phoned the Hipgnosis studio to brief Storm on the cover design for
Meddle.
The title had been hastily concocted and, maybe inspired by some Zen-like image of water gardens, we told Storm we wanted
‘an ear under water’. Time differences meant that neither party was on top form for the telephone discussion, but even across
the intervening miles, we could hear the sound of Storm’s eyes rolling.

On the flight back to the UK, a truly alarming thunderstorm somewhere over the Himalayas terrified even the cabin crew. As
the plane lurched into one deep air pocket, either Roger or David was jerked awake by the clutching hand of a terrified stewardess.
This severely set back any chances of us recovering from our fear of flying. We all suffered from this, thanks to various
incidents over the years. One time Steve O’Rourke had chartered an elderly DC3 to fly us and some other bands to a festival
in Europe. As we sat on the tarmac a baggage cart tore a chunk out of the wing. ‘Don’t worry,’ we were told, ‘we’ll have it
repaired in a jiffy.’ Pulling rank, we left the plane immediately and jumped on the next BEA Trident, leaving the luckless
support bands to take the terror flight
home. Sometime later we had been involved in a near miss with another plane on the approach to Bordeaux airport. On occasions
like this, the fact that the four of us would grip our armrests in unison, beads of sweat forming, probably helped contribute
to some good group bonding.

Group dinners were the focal point for all band fights, policy decisions and general jockeying for position. I now feel deeply
sorry for some of the unfortunate promoters and record company people who took us out. We frequently behaved appallingly.
Our table manners were generally not a problem, but our small talk let us down. We would seize the middle of the table and
banish anyone we didn’t know or care to know to the far ends to talk amongst themselves. Fuelled with as expensive a wine
as possible, our discussion would become heated, frequently combusting into a full-scale argument. To the outsider it must
have looked as if we were on the verge of splitting up. The record executive hosting the meal not only saw his expenses being
disallowed, but also the prospect of being held solely responsible for the break-up of the band.

The members of the band inevitably know each other better than anyone else and therefore how to tease, hurt or indeed cheer
each other up. We still treasure in group lore the night Steve O’Rourke sat down to dinner with us and announced that he was
in such a good mood that nothing could upset him. Within seven minutes he had left in a fury to have dinner on his own in
his room. Roger, aided and abetted by the rest of us, had with very little difficulty found the trigger that would infuriate
and finally drive Steve to distraction, simply by suggesting we should discuss a reduction in Steve’s commission. On another
occasion, at a breakfast in the City Squire in New York, Roger announced that it was possible to tell truly creative people
because their heads were always tilted slightly to the right. Conversely, the non-creative
tilted to the left. Peter Barnes, who handles our publishing, remembers looking round the table. Everyone’s heads, he noticed,
were leaning to the right, all – that is – except Steve’s.