Inside Out (31 page)

While we worked abroad, our advisers dismantled the partnership we had for touring – a throwback to the ideals of Blackhill
– and restructured everything in negotiation with the
gentlemen and ladies of the Inland Revenue. At one point, Nigel Eastaway remembers, we had 200 sets of accounts on hold, waiting
for agreement with the revenue, an indication of the size of the problem. We could hardly get into Britannia Row for the serried
ranks of accountants – but the deal they structured just about covered their costs. Steve O’Rourke and Peter Barnes also negotiated
a major publishing deal with Chappell’s to help provide additional revenue.

The studio in France we started working in, and where most of the groundwork for
The Wall
was carried out, was called Super Bear. Both Rick and David had worked there on solo projects the previous year and liked
the atmosphere. It was located high up in the Alpes-Maritimes about thirty minutes’ drive from Nice, set apart from a small
village, with its own tennis court and pool and plenty of lounging space. We interspersed recording with tennis and occasional
trips to the fleshpots of Nice – the lengthy drive there discouraged too frequent trips.

While Rick and I stayed at Super Bear itself, Roger and David rented villas nearby. Meanwhile Bob Ezrin installed himself
at the sumptuous Negresco Hotel in Nice. An invitation to dinner with Bob was like dining with royalty. In the hotel restaurant,
Bob was on first-name terms with the maitre d’, who was all over Bob, as the expression goes, like a cheap suit in the rain.
After savouring magnificent Michelin three-star cuisine, we would thank Bob effusively as he generously signed the bill. It
was only halfway through the drive back into the hills, subdued probably by the effect of the vintage wines proffered by the
sommelier, that we realised that we were in fact the ones picking up the tab.

Bob’s timekeeping was, to say the least, erratic, but in a strange way his constant lateness – each day he had another more
elaborate and increasingly less credible excuse – served to focus our energies as he became the target for our tongue-in-cheek
resentment. It was great, just like being on tour again.

I had laid down the drum tracks early on at Super Bear, and so spent most of the time as an interested observer. Roger had
rented a large villa above Vence – and I moved in, since the studio accommodation, although delightful, was a curious mix
of boarding school and Espresso Bongo. Each day we used to drive the forty miles from the villa to the studio. Between us,
Roger and I used two sets of tyres on my Ferrari Daytona in eleven weeks.

With the drum parts complete I was excused boots to go to Le Mans. I gave Roger my gold Rolex – a present from EMI after ten
years’ not-so-hard labour – for safe keeping (he did return it) and Steve and I set off on a boy’s own mission for the weekend.
Actually, it was quite a big adventure. This was my first real experience of motor racing, and as deep ends go it was Captain
Nemo territory. Earlier in the year I had managed a brief test session in the two-litre Lola that I was to drive with the
Dorset Racing Team, but had never got to the sort of racing speeds achievable on the five-mile Mulsanne straight, or experienced
racing at night. It is, to say the least, exciting to be travelling at around 200mph, and then to be passed by a Porsche doing
another 40mph more.

The fact that a number of my competitors were world-class sports car champions added to the experience, and the paddock was
a motorsport equivalent of backstage at Woodstock. Le Mans is an extraordinary race, one of the last opportunities for the
amateurs to compete with the big boys, and still have the chance of a result. The Lola ran faultlessly, and my only real scare
was during qualifying when I poked my head too far above the windscreen. The slipstream caught the edge of my helmet and I
thought my head was about to be wrenched off. Fortunately the only ramification was neck ache for the following week. We not
only ended up with a finish – deemed an achievement in itself – but
also gained a 2nd in class and won the index of performance. Steve’s Ferrari finished a few places ahead. This was without
doubt the best form of rejuvenation prior to returning to Berre-les-Alpes.

While I had been let off quite lightly, Rick had a much harder time of it. At some point in the summer, shortly after Le Mans,
Dick Asher at Sony/CBS had proposed a deal, offering to increase the percentage points we would earn if we could deliver a
completed album in time for an end-of-year release. Roger, in consultation with Bob, did a quick calculation and critical
path, and said it might just be possible. The decision was taken to use another studio fifty miles or so away called Miraval.
This was owned by the jazz pianist Jacques Loussier, and was in a faux château. Apart from anything else you could dive off
the walls and swim in the moat. Although all studios trumpet their unique features, this facility had to be one up on any
number of jacuzzis. Recording was divided up between both studios, with Bob oscillating between the two locations. As well
as dealing with the physical divide, Bob was grappling with the job of bridging a developing rift between David and Roger.
Yet somehow he managed to ensure that as well as handling this role, he also got the best work out of both.

The keyboard parts, however, were still to be recorded. The only way to achieve the proposed release date was for Rick to
curtail his summer vacation; we had previously agreed to record through the spring and early summer and then have a break.
As my drum parts were laid down early this was not an issue for me. But when Rick heard, via Steve, that he had to do his
keyboard parts in the summer holidays, he refused point blank. When this was relayed back to Roger, he was stunned and furious.
He felt he was doing an enormous amount of work, and that Rick was not willing to make any effort to help.

The situation was made worse by the fact that Rick had wanted to be a producer on
The Wall –
as
if we didn’t have enough already – and Roger had told him that was OK as long as he made a significant contribution. Alas,
Rick’s contribution was to turn up and sit in on the sessions without doing anything, just ‘being a producer’. This had not
gone down well with Bob either, who felt this particular broth already had too many cooks, and Rick had been relieved from
production duties. Nonetheless Bob volunteered to help Rick with the keyboard sections, but for any of the many possible reasons,
Roger was never satisfied with Rick’s performances.

Whatever bond Rick had enjoyed with Roger in the previous fifteen or so years was terminally broken, and Rick’s downfall was
swift. Steve was happily cruising to America on the
QE2
when he was called by Roger and told to have Rick out of the band by the time Roger arrived in LA, where the album was due
to be mixed. Rick, said Roger, could stay on as a paid player for the
Wall
shows, but after that he was no longer to be a band member. If this was not done Roger threatened to pull the plug on the
whole enterprise. This sounded like a madman with a gun pointed at his own head.

However, rather than fight, Rick acquiesced, perhaps with relief. I think a number of factors contributed to this decision.
The demotion from production responsibilities, along with the difficulties, even with Bob’s help, of providing keyboard parts
that satisfied Roger were exacerbated by the crumbling of his marriage to Juliette, and like all of us he was worried about
the financial implications if we did not finish the album. As it transpired Rick’s decision was quite beneficial for him:
as a salaried performer on
The Wall
he was the only one of us to make money from the live shows. The remaining three of us shared the losses…

I still find it hard to really cover some of the events of this
period properly. Roger was probably still my closest friend, and we were able to enjoy each other’s company. But our friendship
was increasingly put under strain as Roger struggled to modify what had been an ostensibly democratic band into the reality
of one with a single leader.

After the initial recording was completed, operations were transferred to Los Angeles for the mixing phase. Orchestral overdubs
had been arranged and conducted by the composer and arranger Michael Kamen. Brought in by Bob Ezrin, Michael recorded the
arrangements at the CBS studios in New York, only meeting the band at the end of the sessions. In the car park outside the
Producer’s Workshop in LA where the mixing was being carried out, various effects were recorded including the screech of tyres
for ‘Run Like Hell’. This involved Phil Taylor slewing a Ford LTD van around the car park with Roger inside, screaming at
full volume.

Meanwhile, back in Britannia Row, Nick Griffiths was getting on with a long list of other sound effects he had been asked
to gather together, ranging from the Brit Row staff chanting ‘Tear down the wall!’ to the sound of trolley-loads of crockery
being smashed. For one SFX Nick had travelled around the country for a week to record buildings being demolished. He was rather
disappointed to find that the demolition companies were so professional that they were able to bring down huge buildings with
small amounts of explosive at the weak points and there really wasn’t much noise to record. In the middle of this, he took
a call from the States at two in the morning London time. Roger and Bob were on the line, and Nick felt rather fearful, in
case he had messed up the effects. However, they only wanted to ask if he could record two or three kids singing some lines
from ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ in a rather pathetic voice. Nick said, ‘Of course’ but also remembered a favourite album
by Todd Rundgren, which
featured an audience in each of the stereo channels. He suggested recording a whole choir of children. Yes, he was told, but
do the three kids too.

Nick popped down the road from Britannia Row to the local school, where he found the music master Alun Renshaw extremely receptive.
Nick agreed a loose deal whereby in exchange for recording some of the schoolchildren, we would record the school orchestra.
The slave tape carrying the backing track arrived by courier from LA, along with photocopied lyrics. ‘That’s a bit strong,’
Nick thought as he read them early one morning after a long night in the studio.

He set up some mikes, recorded the three children on their own as planned, then invited the rest of the kids in. While Nick
engendered enthusiasm by singing along and jumping up and down in the studio, the recording was wrapped up in the forty minutes
he had available – the length of the lesson that the school had given the children off. The tape was packed up, mixed quickly
and sent back to LA. A few days later Roger rang to say he liked it – and the next time Nick heard the track it was on the
radio.

Following the success of the single, in Nick Griffiths’s words ‘all hell broke loose’. The press had camped on the studio
doorstep, anxious to report on the apparent exploitation of angel-faced schoolchildren by unscrupulous rock stars, only to
find we were safely 7,000 miles away. Following instructions not to talk to them, Nick had to squeeze out of a back window
to escape on a couple of occasions. Eventually a deal was struck with the school, and it was decided that the whole school
should benefit since the recording had been done in school time.

That ‘Another Brick’ appeared as a single was partly due to the influence of Bob Ezrin, who curiously had always wanted to
produce a disco single. We, on the other hand, had abandoned the idea of releasing singles in a fit of pique in 1968 when
‘Point Me
At The Sky’ failed to dent the charts. Bob maintains that such was the lack of enthusiasm to make a single that it was only
at the last minute that the piece was tailored to the requisite length. The tempo was set at a metronomic 100 beats per minute,
which was considered the ideal disco beat, and so the concept of a hit disco single was forced through rather to our bemusement,
a bemusement made even stronger when we ended up as the UK Christmas Number One for 1979.

The album – a double – had been through a number of traumas during the final mixing. I had arrived in Los Angeles a month
after David and Roger (Rick had retreated to his house in Greece). Since the mixing was down to Roger, David, Bob and James,
I had used the time to work on a record with Carla Bley and Mike Mantler in upstate New York. This was recorded in the relaxing
environment of Woodstock in upstate New York, and the sessions produced a collection of Carla’s songs, which were released
as
Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports,
for ease of release and size of advance. By the time I arrived the mix was all but finished – under great time pressure,
with mixes unusually being sent directly to master – but the most extraordinary sense of paranoia permeated the studio. Relationships
with CBS/Sony were not good. Roger, in a negotiation with them over publishing rights, had been outraged when, because
The Wall
was a double album, they tried to reduce the amount he would get per track. When Dick Asher offered to toss for the decision,
Roger’s response was to ask why he should gamble on something he rightfully owned. The record company capitulated. Steve was
also deep in negotiation with CBS, who were fighting their own battle to try and avoid paying independent promotion men to
launch a record. This battle raged for a short period and was lost by the record company when the radio stations in the US
simply refused to play even a Number One record if it wasn’t promoted independently.

We threatened to withhold
The Wall
from CBS and they countered by threatening to take the album by force. The studio was broken into at the time. It was probably
kids, but in the mood of paranoia, everyone thought it must have been a SWAT team of crazed record executives. In reality
no one could have ever assembled the mountains of tapes into any semblance of a record without the entire production team’s
cooperation. However, we were only allowing admittance to people briefed with a secret password. I can now reveal the magic
open sesame. It was ‘I’m from CBS Records’…