The work involved was immense, considering the amount of overdubs, overlays, inserts and cross-fades required. And since the
tape was constantly rolling, it always suffered some degradation, which had to be painstakingly treated and returned to health.
That Alan and Chris between them delivered a sonic finish that still
offers stunningly good sound quality over thirty years later is a testament to the engineer’s art.
When the recording was complete, it was immediately apparent that, despite the disparate elements of spoken words, sound effects
and songs, the album had emerged as a homogeneous whole. It was also refreshing to be able to return to the finished piece
with fresh ears after letting Chris get on with completing the work on the final mixes.
The album’s release date was set for 3rd March 1973. In the meantime we had seen the release of
Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii,
more touring in Europe and North America – including an appearance at the Hollywood Bowl and one date in Canada when we discovered
one of our backing singers had disappeared, the reason being that she had been arrested with her boyfriend for holding up
a grocery store. And we had also seen the final fruits of our original conversation with the choreographer Roland Petit.
Live At Pompeii
had turned out to be a surprisingly good attempt to film our live set a year or so before. We had been approached by the
director Adrian Maben, whose idea was to shoot us playing in the empty amphitheatre beneath Vesuvius. Adrian described the
concept of the movie as ‘an
anti-Woodstock
film, where there would be nobody present, and the music and the silence and the empty amphitheatre would mean as much as,
if not more than, a crowd of thousands’. Opening and closing the set with ‘Echoes’, we played as if to an audience, intercut
with shots of bubbling, steaming and flowing lava, or of the band stalking across the volcanic landscape. At a time when rock
films were either straight concert footage or attempts to copy
A Hard Day’s Night,
the idea was appealing.
The elements that seem to make it work – none of which we had thought much about during the filming in October 1971 – were
the decision to perform live instead of miming and the rather
gritty environment created by the heat and the wind. Only a few sequences were added later in a studio – the versions of ‘Careful
With That Axe’ and ‘Set The Controls’ along with the blessedly short reworking of ‘Seamus’ with Mademoiselle Nobs.
It had been a fairly cheap and cheerful trip. Peter Watts and Alan Styles had the slog of driving the equipment all the way
down through Europe. There were no families in tow to go sightseeing with, as we only had a limited number of days to fit
in the work. Even so, as films often can, we overran our original schedule, and had to cancel a university gig; however, as
the rearranged date came after the release of
Dark Side,
I think in the end the organisers were actually quite happy to have had the delay, since by the time we appeared they could
charge four times the ticket price, while being able to pay us the original contracted fee.
At Pompeii, we were filming in the early autumn but it was still quite hot, shirts-off weather. It was hard work, with no
leisurely nights out sampling the local cuisine and wine list, but the atmosphere was enjoyable, with everyone getting on
with their jobs. At the end of the amphitheatre sessions, we headed off up the mountain to shoot some cut-ins among the steam
of the hot springs, and had a brief chance to explore Pompeii itself.
We were, though, beset by a couple of technical hitches. One of the reels of film was mislaid, and the director had to insert
a lengthy sequence featuring nothing but the drumming on ‘One Of These Days’, since the palette of available shots and camera
angles was severely limited.
After one showing at the Edinburgh Festival, a premiere was planned at the Rainbow Theatre in the autumn of 1972, but at the
last minute Rank, the landlords of the building, invoked a clause preventing any event that was ‘competitive’ with their own
activities. Roger declared the fiasco itself ‘rank’, and I liked the promoter Peter Bowyer’s comment that he would wait for
the
wounds in his back to heal before considering any other similar events.
Live At Pompeii
proved to be very disappointing in financial terms, especially as it got lost in the wash of
Dark Side,
and so for a long time we received very little reward for our efforts. So much so, that when, years later, a New York film
mogul approached Roger at a show to tell him he had made millions from the film, he was surprised that instead of Roger congratulating
him, he was escorted from the premises…We later learnt that a lot of the paperwork relating to the film had been lost in a
fire, proof, as I have learnt over the years, that offices of those handling such matters are prone to levels of self-immolation,
flooding and invasion by locusts that even Old Testament prophets would have found unbelievable.
In our quest for upmarket artistry, we had more luck with Roland Petit. Our original discussions in 1970 had been about his
idea of creating a ballet based on
À la recherche du temps perdu
by Marcel Proust. The work consists of multiple volumes of detailed reminiscences about his life. I know this only because
along with the rest of the band I tried to read it; at a time when science fiction was our principal literary diet this was
not an easy task. I still like to think I got further than anyone else, but certainly none of us made it beyond volume three.
This project was eventually cancelled on numerous grounds. The reading time alone would have been too time-consuming, and
the subject matter too challenging for much of our audience.
Roland, however, had not given up on us and had finally got us involved with the Ballet de Marseille, although we had taken
the easy option of not writing any original music for the shows, by reusing versions of ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ and
‘Echoes’, the latter with a story line loosely based on
Frankenstein.
Working with the Ballet was a relaxed expedition. We enjoyed being in
Marseilles, David’s fluency in the language was a useful asset with both the corps de ballet and local waiters, and the atmosphere
of civilised sophistication, in contrast to the routine of tours and studios, may have appealed to a certain intellectual
snobbery in us. In the programme for the ballet, the deputy mayor of Marseilles kindly described us as
‘ces millionaires du disque, idoles de la jeunesse populaire comme de la jeunesse dorée’.
For the shows we played on a raised stage, overlooking the dancers performing in front of us. The major hurdle facing them
was that they had worked out the choreographed steps based on our existing recordings. However, in the case of ‘Axe’ each
performance varied in length, since the attraction of the piece was the chance to improvise. We rapidly had to engineer a
version of constant length, a task exacerbated by our legendary inability to count bars reliably.
As luck would have it Leslie Spitz was with us in France. Leslie was a four-poster bed salesman from the dodgier end of the
Kings Road in Chelsea and an expert ligger. His greatest triumph had been getting a seat on board our chartered aircraft on
the Japan tour earlier that year. No one had seemed quite sure why he was there, or who had invited him, but we were far too
polite to ask. As a payback for that freebie, Leslie was drafted in to count the bars. He was issued with a pile of cards
which had the numbers of the bars written on them and – crouched beneath the piano – he was expected to turn up a card every
four beats. The result was less than metronomic, as Leslie was easily distracted by loud music and lithe ballerinas, but it
did help, and anyway we knew when we were meant to finish because the dancers stopped moving.
It actually all turned out to be a success. The dancers, I think, enjoyed what was really quite a different and populist piece,
and they also assembled a surprisingly good football team to play against us after rehearsals. The dance director watching
all those
expensive legs rushing about in football boots had a fit. After the Marseilles concerts we later took the show to Paris for
a few performances in January and February 1973.
The aftermath to all this was an extraordinary lunch at Rudolf Nureyev’s house in Richmond. Marcel Proust had reared his head
again, but this time in film format. Nureyev, Roland Petit and Roman Polanski were there along with Roger, Steve and myself.
Feeling slightly self-conscious in a truly exotic atmosphere of fine art and lavish decor, we were astonished at the rather
louche youth who greeted us and then left us to amuse ourselves until the others arrived and Nureyev made an appearance, which
of course he did in style – swathed in Oriental drapery.
Lunch seemed to involve a lot of wine and very little Proust. I think there was talk of resurrecting the Frankenstein project
as a quasi-porno film but my memory is a little fuzzy on this. After the meal, in tabloid style, we made our excuses and left
before we were drawn too deeply into this
demi-monde.
We never did get to deal with Proust, Frankenstein, Nureyev or Polanski again although Roland did retain the ballet in the
company repertoire for some time, performing to tapes rather than live music.
During our sojourn in Marseilles there were serious machinations on the business front, as our US record deal was sorted out.
Our first albums had been released on Capitol’s Tower label, which was principally a jazz and folk label, and not a good fit.
Capitol, EMI’s US operation, had then started up a new label called Harvest under the leadership of Malcolm Jones, and we
were intended to be the label leaders along with other underground British bands. That hadn’t worked for us either. Although
the staff were enthusiastic, we felt a lack of genuine belief in our commercial potential among the higher echelons, and our
sales performance in the States had been particularly poor.
Steve O’Rourke had made it clear to EMI that we were not prepared to continue with Capitol. We were proposing to withhold
Dark Side
from the USA since our contract was expiring after five years, and we were not prepared to waste what we thought to be our
best album yet on a record company that wouldn’t support us sufficiently.
After Steve had gone in and batted heavily for the fact that the results just weren’t good enough, even EMI had seen that
there was a problem in the US. Bhaskar Menon, who had recently been appointed the chairman of Capitol Records, heard about
our unhappiness, and he took the trouble to travel over to Marseilles to see us. His flying visit made all the difference.
Bhaskar was still only in his thirties, a graduate of Oxford and the Doon School in India. He had met and impressed Sir Joseph
Lockwood, who had brought him into EMI. Later Bhaskar would himself become chairman of EMI.
Bhaskar convinced Steve that he could deliver what was needed in America and we agreed to let him have the record. It was
a shame that he hadn’t been brought in earlier. Unknown to Capitol – and Bhaskar – we had already given up on the company
earlier in the year and signed a new deal with Clive Davis at Columbia for the American distribution of all our releases following
Dark Side.
In our usual non-confrontational way we just forgot to mention it.
A tour to America in early 1973 also gave us a chance to bring to the fore the lighting skills of Arthur Max. He had served
a good apprenticeship. After training as an architect – always a good qualification for working with Pink Floyd – he had found
himself at Woodstock operating a spotlight continuously for three days (he said) for Chip Monck, one of the pioneer rock lighting
and stage designers. Arthur’s arrival coincided with a time when we were growing out of our early light shows. There is a
limit to what can be achieved with yet another oil slide, and with bigger venues
and longer projection throws the finale was all too often a brilliant frozen moment as yet another glass slide cracked to
be followed shortly after by the projector burning out.
Arthur was interested in the power of stage lighting and spotlights rather than oil slides; he was particularly talented in
finding ways to exploit theatrical lighting. Our shows immediately gained more visual innovation and he was expert at making
the most of the available facilities of an auditorium and exploiting existing technology from other sources. For our version
of ‘Echoes’ with the Ballet de Marseille, Arthur interpreted the Frankenstein mood we wanted by installing a welding kit backstage
and each evening donning mask and gloves to provide the added effect of genuine argon sparks.
I think Arthur was also responsible for introducing the Genie tower to our shows. These towers were one of the more important
innovations in rock staging. Arthur had seen these hydraulic towers being used to change light bulbs in a factory, and adapted
the principle to allow them to carry racks of spotlights. For shows that had insufficient set-up time for rigging regular
stage lighting, or were out on a field on a stage made out of flat-bed trailers, these towers were a godsend. The fact that
they could also be raised as an opening to the show was the icing on the cake. This was also the period when we brought in
the circular screen backdrop that has remained a staple of our live shows.
One of Arthur’s greatest shows for us was at Radio City Music Hall in March 1973. This auditorium was a wonder of technology
when it was first built and for many years the technical details of the stage riser was classified information, since the
technology had been taken direct from the fighter plane lifts on American aircraft carriers.
The stage itself contained six sections, each of which could rise twenty feet and then roll forward. There was also a steam
curtain
in front of it; this was a tube drilled with holes that sent out a sheet of steam to obscure the stage. This enabled us to
start the show with the audience filing into the auditorium, faced by a completely bare stage. When the show began, the steam
evaporated, and behind it our set slowly rose with us and all our equipment in place, with flashing police lights attached
to the Genie lighting towers. Unlike the bad old days of the Top Rank revolving stages, this was how it should be done.