Inside Out (27 page)

The first show was in Atlanta, where the strength of the wind was outside our safety parameters and sufficient for the whole
thing to fail. We tried hard to remedy the problem by sending the whole rig for repair and redesign during a series of indoor
shows, but, bugged by poor weather, the difficulties of transporting the helium, and further high winds, when we got to Pittsburgh
two weeks later, we eventually – like Captain Hornblower faced with an out-of-control mainsail – instructed someone to cut
the thing free.

The device ascended to a few hundred feet before inverting, allowing the balloon in its peak to emerge like a teardrop through
the base. ‘My God, it’s giving birth,’ one chemically affected American shouted as it emerged. Now of course the fabric had
insufficient lift – so as the teardrop headed for the stratosphere the world’s biggest wet blanket settled ungracefully into
the car park
to be ripped to shreds by some scavenging souvenir hunters. At the end of this show, we were able to walk to the front of
the stage, drop down to the ground and stroll without any hassle to our nearby hotel. This brought home the fact that our
pyramid was more recognisable than we were – which was just how we liked it.

One small, but telling, clue that these tours were getting bigger and bigger was the size of the crew breakfast. I happened
to be in one of the crew’s rooms when breakfast arrived. The fact that it was after a show at two in the morning was one oddity,
but it was the scale of the meal that impressed me. The breakfast was clearly designed to avoid eating again within the next
twenty-four hours. Steak, eggs, bacon, sausage, hash browns, waffles, muffins and pancakes were accompanied by a platter of
fresh fruit, cereal, French toast and syrups. Juice, coffee and a selection of liqueurs finished off the repast.

Our own appetite for stage effects was equally excessive, and continued through to Canada where, following our final North
American show, some over-zealous crew member, encouraged by Alan Frey, our long-serving American agent, decided the easiest
way to dispose of the remaining explosive was to attach it to the stadium’s illuminated scoreboard and fire it off. The explosion
was devastating. The board erupted in smoke, flame and scores of a thousand goals a side. Not only did we have to pay for
a replacement scoreboard but also a great deal of glass for the neighbouring houses. Fortunately we made our excuses and left
before the locals tracked us down.

We then rushed back to England on a completely crazed timetable for a technically challenged show at Knebworth. Time was too
short or we were too frazzled. Part of the problem was that the generators were unstabilised. During the afternoon it became
clear that all Rick’s electric keyboards needed retuning. However, we managed to miss the significance of this and as darkness
fell
and our stage lights were operated, Rick’s keyboards were changing pitch in unison with the sound. It sounded awful. It transpired
that every time the master volume was turned up, the keyboards went out of tune. Below the stage, Phil Taylor, Robbie Williams
and the technician from the generator company, in a scene reminiscent of
Das Boot,
strove to churn round the generator handle in an attempt to control the damage. Phil recalls that their efforts were ‘manful,
but hopeless’ as the keyboards continued to see-saw between sharp and flat.

Rick walked off in despair at one point, and somehow or another we staggered through the show using only one piano and one
less sensitive keyboard, and a more modest light show. Yet although we were painfully aware of the technical problems below
and on stage, we managed to distract the audience with a great effect, when – instead of using model planes as we had done
on other shows – we managed to co-ordinate a fly-past by two original Spitfires low over the crowd as the show opened.

P
ERHAPS INFLUENCED
by the stately grandeur of Knebworth, this was the period we embarked on a little light empire building. We bought a building
at 35 Britannia Row, just off the Essex Road in Islington. Britannia Row was a three-storey block of church halls which we
in due course set about converting into a recording studio and storage facilities for our ever-expanding quantity of stage
equipment. We were not dissatisfied with Abbey Road, but we were spending so much time in the studios that it seemed worthwhile
creating an environment we could customise for our needs. It was also the mood of the times for bands to build their own recording
studios: Pete Townshend had Eel Pie Studios and the Kinks owned Konk Studios.

The original deal we had agreed with EMI – where we had taken a cut in our percentage in exchange for unlimited studio time
at Abbey Road – had lapsed, and so we were conscious that we might start incurring escalating studio costs. Somehow we convinced
ourselves that Britannia Row would be a money-saving move. Indeed, we probably had dreams of a successful commercial studio,
despite the substantial capital outlay it entailed.

At the time Roger and I were the only London-based band members – David was still living north of London near Royden in Essex
and Rick was now up in Royston, south of Cambridge. So the location of Britannia Row in London N1 was reasonably convenient
for David and Rick, quite convenient for me (I was living in Highgate, a few miles north-west), and annoyingly handy for Roger,
whose place in Islington was only a couple of hundred
yards away. Inconveniently for him, with the demise of his marriage to Judy, he was soon on the move to south-west London.

Of the three floors in the building we had bought, the ground floor was required for the studio. This meant that the main
storage facility had to be above, which in turn entailed installing a chain hoist system to lug tons of equipment up and down,
augmented with a fork-lift truck that teetered dangerously between the street and an unprotected trap door. The top floor
became an office and home to a billiards table, which was one of the first pieces of equipment Roger insisted we needed. This
helped him through the duller moments of recording; and thereafter billiard tables have tended to manifest themselves wherever
he records. Should he tire of the lure of the green baize, he could sustain himself with the substantial fare offered by the
studio caretaker – Albert Caulder, the father of one of our former roadies, Bernie – who devised a magnificent hamburger generously
laced with garlic.

Our master plan for Britannia Row was to glide into becoming kings of the rental business on the assumption that other bands
would be desperate to lease our equipment. Regrettably most of them did not need the wildly elaborate kit that we insisted
on building for our shows, and most of the lighting towers and quadraphonic mixers stayed lurking in the back of the storeroom
until they were, like loyal but elderly family pets, gently dispatched to a better world. As time went on, one by one the
others slipped away from commercial involvement in both the rental and property side of the business, until I found myself
the only remaining shareholder. Fortunately, in 1986, the management team of Brian Grant and Robbie Williams took it over.
When last heard of it was flourishing, and has counted Pink Floyd among its clients.

If the rental company turned out to be a self-imposed millstone round our necks, the studio facility was much more interesting.
We had asked Jon Corpe, our old friend from the Regent Street Poly, to design the studio. Jon’s plans incorporated a breeze
block called lignacite for the structure. Lignacite – a composite of sawdust, sand and cement – is acoustically far less reflective
than brick, which meant we could use it as the final finish for the studio instead of the usual bizarre blend of pinewood,
crazy paving and carpet that was the preferred decor of the day.

Our intention was to build a shell in the full knowledge that any acoustic imperfections could be tuned out afterwards with
pads and soft materials. We dug out the ground floor enabling us to drop a complete block structure within the framework of
the existing building. This studio structure was floated on rubber insulating pads set onto a concrete slab. This was necessary
to avoid the inevitable noise injunctions from the neighbours as well as stopping the rumble of trucks and buses trundling
down the nearby New North Road. Like most recording studios, we seemed to suffer more complaints about tired and emotional
people spilling out of the premises late at night, rather than noise escaping from the carefully constructed dungeons.

We also wanted to design a studio that could be used by any one of us on our own without an expert engineer or tape operator
on hand to help. This meant designing a system that was simple enough for visiting players to be able to locate their headphone
sockets without sending in an assistant to point out the relevant place. This worked surprisingly well. Everything was clearly
labelled in layman’s terms: the headphone socket would be called ‘headphones’ instead of the indecipherable code that tended
to be the norm in the big commercial studios.

Our decision to avoid any excessive cosmetic decoration gave the place a fashionably austere feel. It was also our natural
inclination – the Pestalozzi warden’s house that Roger, Jon Corpe and I had designed for a project as architectural students
was so forbidding no
right-minded person would have wanted to live there. Roger was reported as saying ‘It looks like a fucking prison’ when he
first saw the finished result at Britannia Row. ‘That’s appropriate, I suppose…’ There was no natural light and after some
hours the place could take on the grim and claustrophobic qualities of a nuclear bunker – although obviously much more stressful,
particularly in the small control room, which was extremely cramped and had an uncomfortable seating arrangement along the
back wall, perhaps to discourage visitors. At the time, the studio itself was still the most important area of activity in
the recording process; more recently, with the ability to plug digital instruments and samplers straight into the mixing desk,
bands tend to spend most of their time in the control room, rendering large studios obsolete, and large control rooms obligatory.

The construction work had taken up most of 1975, but by the end of that year we had been able to test out the equipment on
a couple of jobs, one of which involved working with Robert Wyatt on some Mike Mantler songs. We had a mixing board and a
24-track tape machine from the American company MCI which, although not the most expensive available, was professional quality.
This is where we recorded
Animals
in 1976. Although studios owned by bands might be an opportunity for considerable self-indulgence, Britannia Row represented
a more minimalist, or perhaps parsimonious, approach.

Brian Humphries was in charge of the engineering. Although Brian had worked on our film music, our live shows and
Wish You Were Here,
the oppressive lack of space at Britannia Row, combined with the effects of life on tour, seemed to take an especial toll
on him, as he began to show signs of wear and tear as the album progressed. This was exacerbated by the fact that Brian never
totally realised that among a band noted for their left-of-centre sensibilities, it was wiser to keep his own somewhat more
right-wing views to himself, especially when Roger was in earshot. For some reason, he used one particularly horrible scrap
of duster throughout the whole job to clean off the marks on the mixing desk; it became his comfort blanket. Roger later had
it framed and presented it to Brian after the completion of recording.

Much of the material for
Animals
already existed in the form of songs that Roger had previously written. ‘Dogs’ had been performed even before the
Wish You Were Here
album, on the Autumn 1974 tour of the UK, as a song called ‘Gotta Be Crazy’, and elements of ‘Sheep’ had appeared on the
same tour as ‘Raving And Drooling’. The music had thus been in gestation for well over a year, and had benefited from some
toughening-up in front of the audiences on the tour.