Inside Out (29 page)

The larger stadiums that we now were playing brought with them a range of new problems. At smaller theatre venues, the audience
is admitted just before show time, but at a baseball stadium the sheer size of the crowd and the resulting car park requirements
mean that the stadium has to be opened three or four hours before the start. The increased scale of the venues also required
more elevated levels of fitness, not to mention mountaineering skills, from the road crew. We now had a team
known as ‘the quad squad’, the SAS of humpers, who were charged with lugging our quad speakers to the furthest and highest
corners of stadiums and auditoria.

We have rarely used a support act on tour. There are a number of reasons for this. In the early days, there was a certain
element of combat between the bands appearing on a bill – and the first acts on would aspire to out-perform the headline act,
to ‘blow them off the stage’. In our case, our additional props, like the Daleks, also meant that resetting the stage after
another band was a lengthy process. In later times, it was more a question that any support act would simply destroy the mood
we were trying to create, by over-exciting, boring or alienating our audience. As far as stadium shows were concerned, not
having a support act meant that the audience could get to see the main event early in the evening around 8 p.m., rather than
sitting through two or three other bands’ sets. Even so, with nothing much to amuse them, stuck either under a baking sun
or pouring rain, the crowd could get restless. There were always a few who tended to load up on alcohol or drugs – and then
promptly pass out when the band hit the stage. It could sometimes be a distraction, as we tried to spot members of the audience
nodding off or completely comatose.

We were becoming increasingly conscious of crowd control, security and safety. With up to 80,000 people swilling around it’s
like being elected mayor of a small town for the night, with all the attendant responsibilities including car crashes, petty
theft, children being born… There’s even some live music if you’re lucky. We were learning the facts of life of touring, including
the realisation that although you may be able to relate to the first thirty rows of people, it is extremely difficult to capture
and hold the attention of the invisible ranks at the back of the crowd.

The shows on this tour varied in quality. Although we were still improvising a little, this was limited – but this was not
in itself the
main problem. The lack of consistent quality was due to other reasons. These were short tours and we were not spending enough
rehearsal time on key aspects of the show like seguing from one number to the next, or syncing with the projected films. And
my memory is that some of the staging was as erratic as the music, since we never allowed enough time for stage rehearsals.
We also always underestimated the weather factor. The wind and the rain were constant threats, and could both play havoc with
our sound levels and quality, all of which would affect our concentration and the mood of the audience.

However, on the
Animals
tour, one feature of the stage set had been developed for the inevitable onslaught of bad weather at open-air stadiums: a
set of mechanical umbrellas. These could be raised from under the stage and then opened, and although the motors operating
them proved unreliable, they looked terrific bursting from the stage and then flowering out. As we progressed into using more
and more gear suspended from trusses such devices became obsolete, but on this tour we could still rely on the audience being
surprised by the sudden transformation of the stage into a Continental pavement café. We did try similar individual umbrellas
again on the
Division Bell
tour, but David threw his to the ground in a fit of pique as he said afterwards he felt daft standing under a dripping plastic
palm tree, and Rick nearly collapsed with asphyxiation as smoke became trapped in the inverted fish bowl we had thoughtfully
created for him.

One consistently effective feature in the shows was the use of cherry-pickers either side of the stage – an idea instigated
by Arthur Max. These are the kind of hydraulic lifts used to change the bulbs in street lamps, but instead of a simple cradle,
each unit had a spotlamp mounted on it, which was manoeuvred by a black-clad operator squatting behind it. With the addition
of revolving beacons, the cherry-pickers made a great opening for any show, as
they rose slowly from below stage level. The lights could also be dropped down alarmingly close to the band, close enough
to singe the lead guitarist’s hair on at least one occasion.

Despite the larger venues, and the increase in paraphernalia on stage, the crew we were using was about the same size as it
had been on the tours a couple of years earlier. We were still sending out for burgers (tour catering was not yet an exact
science) or feasting on whatever the promoter decided to provide – usually burgers, or a huge plate of cold cuts.

There were no office facilities at the venues in 1977. Most of the ever-increasing mass of bureaucracy and legal, technical
and financial issues was being dealt with out of the hotel rooms of Steve, Robbie and Graeme Fleming, and most of the paperwork
had to fit into the rather smart aluminium briefcases that had become the style statement for the upper echelons of the road
crew.

For the musicians there was a realisation that the big tours can also be much lonelier – they only discover your body slumped
in the hotel bedroom when you don’t show up on the bus two days later. And it’s easier to become isolated from the rest of
the band. In the days when we were all driving around in one van, we simply had to avoid falling out with each other every
day otherwise it would have been impossible to carry on. But on the larger tours there is a tendency for people to split into
smaller groups.

With the rise in status from club to stadium, the local promoters – in a spirit of goodwill and the hope you will stay with
their organisation – are always proposing activities that range from sailing, dune buggies and speedboating to a trip to Disneyland
or a visit to the local fish market at 5 a.m. next morning. Often, late at night, one of these outings will be suggested as
an excursion for the following day. Everyone agrees, enthused by champagne and canapés, and the arrangements are
made – but by first thing the day after, it has usually lost its appeal. So a fleet of limos arrives at the hotel entrance
only to find three tired and embarrassed tour party members ready to be picked up, rather than the promised forty.

If you do go out en masse without a promoter or record exec on hand to pick up the bill, an outing involving drinking can
easily become a terrifying financial experience as the more experienced participants make their excuses and slip away early,
leaving the luckless victim holding the tab, and filled with a grim determination never to socialise again, certainly not
in an overpriced hotel bar.

The end of the
Animals
tour marked another low point. David now says that this was one period when he really felt that it might be all up for Pink
Floyd. His view is that we had achieved, and sustained, the success we had originally wanted as a band, and accordingly were
finding it difficult to see what more we could do.

We returned to the UK to find that the top floor of the Britannia Row building was beginning to silt up with accountants,
as business matters became increasingly obtrusive in our lives. By this time we were all turning up at business meetings with
briefcases, almost certainly covered in the hide of animals nearing extinction. This may have made us feel like businessmen,
and we were certainly given the impression that we could put off the next album forever because of the revenue we were earning.
It sounded so easy: you talked a bit, had lunch and doubled your money.

One of the great attributes of the men in chalk-stripe suits, like doctors, is a good bedside, or deskside, manner. Noel Redding,
the bass player with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, always felt he had been turned over particularly badly by the contractual
vagaries of the industry, and had a quote handy for anyone wanting to enter the music business and asking his advice: ‘Study
law. Buy a gun…’

We should have taken heed. We had been seduced in the
afterglow of
Dark Side
into an involvement with a company of financial advisers called Norton Warburg. In 1977–8 the earnings from
Dark Side
and
Wish You Were Here
were flowing through, and tax in the UK for high earners was 83 per cent, and 98 per cent on invested profits. Norton Warburg
persuaded us to enter a scheme that would save tax; venture capital was the buzzword, and the proposal was to turn us into
a working company by investing Pink Floyd money in a variety of enterprises. The annoying downside was that even should they
turn out to be successful, we would have to get rid of them to avoid attracting the interest of the revenue men (and women)
by unholy profit-making, since that was the way the deal was constructed.

As it was, this was unlikely to be a concern, since many of these business ideas were so flawed that no banker in their right
mind would even consider them. During this period we were involved in carbon-fibre rowing boats, pizzas, and a restaurant
on a floating barge. There was a failed hotel that went into fudge manufacturing, a children’s shoe company, the Memoquiz
(a precursor of the Game Boy), a car hire business and a skateboarding firm called Benji Boards. In one case, we were puzzled
when a company we had been told had been unofficially sanctioned by Rolls-Royce to deal in second-hand cars, seemed to have
a number of delivery problems: cars either did not arrive or if they did were worse than the group Bentley in which we had
escaped near death on the Jimi Hendrix tour of 1967. Eventually two of the directors of this particular company served a period
of time at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

However, we had little time to investigate, as our thoughts and energies had turned to producing an album to follow
Animals
–
and we needed some new material. We were faced by one particular problem. Two of the potential composers in the band, namely
David and Rick, had been working on solo projects and so
had little if any spare material to present to the band.

David’s solo album, called simply
David Gilmour,
was released in May 1978 – on the album he worked again with Willie Wilson who had been a fellow Joker Wild before David
joined us in 1968. Rick had also been working on his own solo album,
Wet Dream,
with a band that included Snowy White on guitar. I had briefly worked with Steve Hillage on the production of Steve’s album
Green,
which was engineered by John Wood, the engineer on our original ‘Arnold Layne’ recording session at Sound Techniques Studios
in January 1967.

Whenever any member of the band went off to do any kind of solo work, it never became an issue, as it so easily could have
done, and has with other bands – the difficult days of the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards relationship in the 1980s focused around
exactly that issue. All of us have done our own albums, and produced other artists, and rather than prove a source of tension
or jealousy, it seems that it has actually provided a useful safety valve.

Luckily, Roger solved the shortage of material. While we had all been otherwise engaged, he had been working alone in his
home studio. Roger’s demos varied wildly in quality. Some were so good that we could never improve on them in the studio,
and would revert to the original. Others were really just rough sketches, over-modulated and distorted. Roger actually disputed
this, claiming that they were all of excellent quality, and has threatened to play them in their entirety to me again to prove
his point – consequently, I graciously concede to his view.

T
HE MOMENT
that sparked
The Wall
happened at a show in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium during the
Animals
tour of 1977. This was a gigantic sports stadium, overlooked by a futuristic tower, that had been constructed for the Olympic
Games of the year before. The tower soared up to enormous heights, and by its very scale the venue was not conducive to a
warm and fuzzy rapport with the fans.