David Gilmour (Pink Floyd) in Musician: ca 1987

Pink Floyd
By David Fricke

So ya/ Thought ya/ Might like to go to the show/ To feel the warm thrill of confusion/ That space cadet glow/ Tell me is something eluding your sunshine?/ Is this not what you expected to see?/If you'd like to find out what's behind these cold eyes! You'll just have to claw your way through the/Disguise.... "In The Flesh" The Wall

Pink Floyd performs The Wall Something snapped in Montreal. It was partly the strain of a long tour to a close-the accumulated jet lag, hotel food, pre- and post-show ennui and oppressive stadium squeeze of faceless but demanding flesh of the 1977 Animals tour. It was partly the strain of that lifestyle accumulated over ten exhausting years ("How about the time at Dunstable in '67 when the audience poured beer on us from the balcony?") and knowing it had already sucked the heart and soul out of one bandmate and friend early on. It was also partly- actually a big part-the knowledge that they were playing a bad show their last night out. What's more, the very vocal majority of people in that black hole of steel and concrete were less concerned with what they had to play and say than with who they were. 'They" were Pink Floyd and that was enough.

Roger Waters spit on a kid in the front rows that night. Pink Floyd's singer-bassist-songwriter also spent a lot of time afterward brooding on what his fame had done to him and how he came to such a scary pass. He later spent a lot of time writing it all down in a series of brutally confessional, emotionally graphic songs that eventually became Pink Floyd's multi-platinum 1979 seller The Wall.

Guitarist David Gilmour had no idea at the time that the Montreal concert had struck such a devastating chord in Waters. "None of us," he explains, meaning Floyd drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright, "were aware of it at the time. I just thought it was a great shame to end up a six-month tour with a rotten show. In fact, I remember going offstage for the encore and going back to the sound mixing board in the middle of the audience to watch the encore while Snowy (White), the guitar player who was with us at the time, played guitar on the encore."

But if The Wall is very much Waters' acutely autobiographical examination of the way not just rock n' roll but society as a whole feasts at the expense of its creative spirits, its roots and lessons are hardly unfamiliar to the rest of the Floyd. Gilmour remembers, with a hint of bitter resignation, the point at which Pink Floyd's audience changed from an attentive, devoted megacult hanging on Ummagumma's every last resonating echo to an awesome, often unmanageable mob that responded mostly to spectacle. It was, ironically, the Floyd's 1973 hit single "Money," Waters' contemptible assessment of wealth and itself part of a fantastically successful album, The Dark Side Of The Moon-at this writing, 433 weeks on the Billboard top 200 LPs, with a bullet, no less-that was a life-death-and-reincarnation cycle in song.

Pink Floyd have, in one sense, only themselves to blame. They compensated for each leap in popularity and concert hall size from The Dark Side Of The Moon on with expansive stage productions shooting very real, introspective (and in the case of the savagely misanthropic Animals, almost paranoic) lyrical concerns into the realm of the visually surreal, like Floyd's reflection seen in some sinister funhouse mirror. What do you remember most about that Animals tour- Gilmour's stinging solo stretch on "Dogs" and the vengeful gallop of "Sheep" or that giant inflatable pig with the electric eyes zipping across the top of the arena like some giant fat out of hell?

As an album, The Wall is a direct rebuke of that rock arena psychology and its bigger social parallel. As a film, The Wall is an all-too-literal translation by director Alan Parker of Waters screen- and album-play, a dazzling series of reality nightmares-a bit like one enormous Hipgnosis album cover with Gerald Scarfe's Fantasia-in-hell animation from the concert-heavy on the fascist implications of rock's mob complex. But as a concert, seen by an exclusive club of a few hundred thousand in New York, Los Angeles, Germany and London, The Wall was an ingenious manipulation of that complex to make Waters' point. The gradual building and subsequent demolition of the wall, the overhead buzzing of the plane, the grotesque inflated dolls and duplicate Floyd band were all calculated, not just to illustrate the album, but to get the same roaring Pavlovian response that first pulled Waters' hairtrigger in Montreal. The Wall audience was the metaphor.

The capping irony of Pink Floyd's staggering success from Dark Side to The Wall is the media and the public's insistence on categorizing the group as the last living truly psychedelic band, a "space band." Their early recordings (with and without founding member Syd Barrett) like "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun," aimed at the outer limits. Yet since The Dark Side Of The Moon, Pink Floyd and Waters in particular have concerned themselves more with a murky inner space, the battered passage of body and soul through a perilous lifetime. Where Peter Townshend is obsessed with growing old in rock 'n' roll, Roger Waters is worried more about surviving long enough to enjoy old age.

The Floyd have also become fanatical about another inner space, the recording studio. Longtime sound and sound-processing freaks (they debuted a rudimentary quadraphonic sound system at a 1967 London concert), they are meticulous recorders and go as long as two years between albums. Their imminent release, The Final Cut, a collection of Wall rerecordings and new tracks designed as a soundtrack companion to the film, was supposed to be finished in time for the movie's premiere back in July. Yet David Gilmour freely admits that many of the band's technical "achievements" come about simply from tinkering with whatever toys are lying around in the studio.

That David Gilmour is freely admitting anything seems remarkable. Around their inner spaces, Pink Floyd long ago constructed an inpregnable wall of media silence that often leaves even their most devoted acolytes guessing. Fortunately, the New York premiere in August of The Wall (with Boomtown Rat Bob Geldof as "Pink") gave Gilmour a good promotional excuse to sit with me in the airy comfort of his plush New York hotel suite and talk of all things Floyd.

Relaxing in a summery shirt-and-pants outfit with a day-old beard, Gilmour is a willing, lively conversationalist, often amused by the serious, almost academic way Floyd fans treat some of the band's casual studio accidents. He maintains a strong interest in music outside the Floyd, producing a number of records for the mid-70s. U.K. band Unicorn, discovering British pop thrush Kate Bush and recording the first-aside from Syd Barrett's-of the Floyd's solo albums (1978's David Gilmour). According to Alan Parsons, who engineered Atom Heart Mother and Dark Side Of The Moon, he is also."the most technically minded of the tour." For the 1980 Wall concerts, he played conductor as well as guitarist, cueing not only the band but the stage hands throughout the show. "I didn't dare even have a beer before the show," he cracks. "A concentration lapse for a second and the whole thing could tall apart."

Considering Pink Floyd's stony ten-year silence, this interview is quite an event. It may not be the last word on Pink Floyd, but at least it's one less brick in the wall.

MUSICIAN: From a musical standpoint, The Wall is a very unique Pink Floyd record. In comparison to the other post Dark Side albums like Wish You Were Here and Animals, it seems to be almost conventional in its execution and songs.

Where the other albums featured long, expanded pieces undergoing subtle structural and improvisatory changes, The Wall features relatively uncomplicated songs and often simple guitar-based arrangements.
GILMOUR: The idea of The Wall was so big and there was such a lot of stuff that Roger wanted to get across lyrically that there was no other way to do it, really. As it was, we had to struggle to get it on a double album. And also, none of the stuff had ever been out on the road before. The Dark Side Of The Moon was toured before the album was made. That determined things-they worked onstage before they ever got to record. 'And I suppose that's the difference on this thing. It was purely made in the studio.

MUSICIAN: What was the process by which the songs and arrangements developed?
GILMOUR: Roger had done a demo, at home, of the entire piece and then we got it into the studio with Bob Ezrin (producer of The Wall album with Waters and Gilmour) and the rest of us. We went through it and started with the tracks we liked best, discussed a lot of what was not so good, and kicked out a lot of stuff. Roger and Bob spent a lot of time trying to get the story line straighter, more linear conceptually. Ezrin is the sort of guy who's thinking about all the angles all the time, about how to make a shorter story line that's told properly, constantly worried about moving rhythms up and down, all that stuff which we've never really thought about.

So we checked out the songs and Roger was sent away to write other songs, which he did. In fact, some of the best stuff, I think, came out under the pressure of saying, "That's not good enough to get on, do something."

We worked on it like that for a long time, four months I think.

MUSICIAN: Were the arrangements of the songs developed during this demo process?
GILMOUR: Some of the arrangements are very close to how Roger originally had them. Most of them are just changed, perhaps, a bit. That's just the normal process we use. Bash things on and try 'em... move things around if you don't like it.

MUSICIAN: Did you feel a need to telescope instrumental or musical ideas you would normally have expanded on in Animals or even Dark Side?
GILMOUR: I don't think it was a matter of telescoping. It was a matter of being economical and making things say what they're trying to say, quite snappily and not waste the time. That was the mood we were in and certainly Bob Ezrin helped. Very snappy and to the point.

MUSICIAN: "Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2" is an interesting case in point because it is a very simple song, actually just one verse and a chorus. Yet you built it up into a powerful top-forty single with quite a radical treatment.
GILMOUR: It was originally a very short song. There was going to be a quick guitar solo and that was it. There was only one verse ever recorded and we put the solo stuff on the end. Roger and myself sang the verse and then we thought we'd try getting some kids to sing on it. I made up a backing track with a sync pulse up on it so we could later sneak it back in with the original track. We were in L.A. at the time, so I sent the tape to England and got an engineer to summon some kids. I gave him a whole set of instructions-ten-to-fifteen-year-olds from North London, mostly boys-and I said get them to sing this song in as many ways as you like. And he filled up all the tracks on a 24-track machine with stereo pairs of all the different combinations and ways of singing with all these kids.

We got the tape back to L.A., played it, and it was terrific. Originally, we were going to put them in the background, behind Roger and me singing on the same verse. But it was so good we decided to do them on their own. But we didn't want to lose our vocal. So we wound up copying the tape and mixing it twice, one with me and Roger singing and one with the kids. The backing is the same. And we edited them together.

MUSICIAN: What about the other extreme, something like "The Trial" which is very Brecht-Weilian with the violins and orchestra?
GILMOUR: That's largely Roger and Bob Ezrin collaborating. I think it was written by Bob with the immediate intention to do that with an orchestra, although we did demos of it with synthesizers and stuff.

MUSICIAN: It's ironic that Pink Floyd has this reputation for being a "space band," making weird music, ma-a-an, because I find Pink Floyd is not so much about weird sounds, but about sound processing. You take a basic sound, even a nice piano or acoustic guitar as on the short Animals bits "Pig On The Wing," and process it, giving it a certain dramatic air.
GILMOUR: I like our music to feel three-dimensional. It's about trying to invoke emotions in people, I suppose. You feel larger than life in some sort of way. Let's face it-none of us in Pink Floyd are technically brilliant musicians, with great chops who can change rhythms, fifteen or sixteen bars here, there and everywhere. And we're not terribly good at complicated chord structures. A lot of it is just very simple stuff dressed up.

We stopped trying to make overtly "spacey" music and trip people out in that way in the 60s. But that image hangs on and we can't seem to get short of it.

Crazy Diamond In the Rough

The child loved the spot, and Otter thinks if he came wandering back from wherever he is-if he is anywhere by this time, poor little chap-he might... stop there and play, perhaps. So Otter goes there every night and watches-on the chance, you know, just on the chance.

"The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,"

chapter seven of The Wind in the Willows

In the beginning, there was Syd Barrett. To this day, certain Floyd freaks insist he was Pink. It is certainly true that even now the spirit of Syd Barrett-for a brief meteoric period in 1966 and '67 the band's main songwriter, lead guitarist and truly psychedelic adventurer-hangs over Pink Floyd.

David Gilmour remembers that Syd -born Roger Keith Barrett in Cambridge, England on January 6,1946-could turn heads even at an early age with his arrestingly handsome manlike looks, dark tousled hair and enigmatic smile. "He was a truly magnetic personality. When he was very young, he was a figure in his hometown. People would look at him in the street and say, 'There's Syd Barrett,' and he would be only fourteen years old," recalls Gilmour, a teenage pal of Syd's. Barrett also had these deep laser eyes that shot out from early Floyd publicity photos and record covers. But that, says Gilmour with a tinge of sadness, came later.

George Roger Waters was also a Cambridge boy and a school chum of Syd's, although two years older. When a band he was playing with in London found itself in need of a new guitarist, he brought in Syd who had since moved to the city and was staying in the same flat. This was 1965. The other members of the group were drummer Nick Mason and organist Richard Wright, fellow architecture students of Waters'. Barrett came up with the name Pink Floyd, borrowing it from two Georgia blues men named Pink Council and Floyd Anderson. Given the times and the town, it was only natural that Pink Floyd would soon fall in with the inevitable exploding underground.

But if Pink Floyd, through their pioneering use of light shows and psychedelic theatrics, came to represent the scene, Syd Barrett surely represented its soul. His songwriting was at once whimsical and poignant-Pink Floyd's debut '67 single "Arnold Layne" was a typically Sydian compassionate portrait of a transvestite who pinched women's clothes from neighborhood washlines, the followup "See Emily Play," the Floyd's only hit single for the next six years, captured in the paisley pop pastels of Rick Wright's spooky organ and Barrett's underground fuzz guitar the free spirit and second childhood of the New Acid Age. Syd played his guitar as if he were furiously digging a hole to China, building extended improvisational rave-ups like "Interstellar Overdrive" on vicious scratching solos and stuttering guitar monologues while the band wailed maniacally behind him.

To help get wherever he was going in his mind and music, Barrett took acid, lots of it. (Ironically, Gilmour notes, the rest of the band were purely drinkers.) It got him as far as The Piper At The Gates of Dawn, the Floyd's brilliant, breathtaking '67 debut album with its psychotic instrumental rampages and blowout rockers, meditative ballads and altered pop fairy tales. He wrote or co-wrote all but one of the songs. But even then, Syd started seriously freaking out.

On a brief, disastrous sojourn to America to promote "See Emily Play," the Floyd did a lip-sync appearance on American Bandstand, only Syd "was not into moving his lips that day." When Mr. Clean, Pat Boone, tried interviewing Syd on another TV show, Syd's only reply was a completely blank stare'. Gilmour remembers seeing the band perform in England in the fall of '67 and thinking, "They were a piece of crap. Syd was thrashing about on his guitar terribly and everyone thinking it was wonderful."

The rest of the Floyd didn't. After enlisting Gilmour to shore up the guitar end the next January, they eased Barrett out entirely by the spring of '68. But out of a mixture of pity and genuine respect for his native talents, they never entirely gave up on him. Gilmour, with help from Waters and Wright, produced two Barrett solo albums-The Madcap Laughs in 1969 and Barrett a year later. "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," the centerpiece of Wish You Were Here, seemed less a tribute to Syd than a pleading to return, particularly at a time when the group was desperately floundering on a sequel to Dark Side.

Fifteen years after Syd Barrett came to his brief fame, he is nothing more than one of rock's great MIAs, a tragic casualty of his own daring. Yet to hear David Gilmour talk about him, it's as if Pink Floyd still holds on to a thin thread of hope that Syd will someday come back from wherever he went.

MUSICIAN: Do you feel Syd's mental breakdown was directly attributable to the psychedelic experience?
GILMOUR: In my opinion, it would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I'll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don't think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it. And there were other problems he had. I think the whole swimming pool thing in The Wall movie comes from one of Syd's episodes.

MUSICIAN: How far gone was Syd when you produced those two solo records for him? How did you deal with him?
GILMOUR: With extreme difficulty. EMI understood Syd's potential at the time. They knew he was very talented and could write great songs and they wanted him to carry on. So they got an EMI producer (Malcolm Jones) who started recording this album and he spent ages on it. I think it was over six months. Eventually, EMI thought that too much money had been spent and nothing had been achieved.

So Syd came and asked if we could help him. We went to EMI and said, "Let us have a crack at finishing it up." And they gave us two days to do it-and one of those days we had a Pink Floyd gig, so we had to leave the studio at four in the afternoon to get on a train and go to the show.

But basically. Roger and I sat down with him -after listening to all his songs at home-and said, "Syd, play this one. Syd, play that one." We sat him on a chair with a couple of mikes in front of him and got him to sing the song. On some of them, we lust put a little bit of effect on the track with echo and double-tracking. On one or two others, we dubbed a bit of drums and a little bass and organ But it was like one side of the album was six month's work and we did the other tracks in two and a half days. And the potential of some of those songs.. they could have really been fantastic.

MUSICIAN: The second solo record, Barrett, has much more instrumentation on it.
GILMOUR: We had more time to do that. But trying to find a technique of working with Syd was so difficult. You had to prerecord the tracks without him, working from one version of the song he had done, and then sit Syd down afterwards and. try to get him to play and sing along, with a lot of dropping in. Or you could do it the other way around, where you'd get him to do a performance of it on his own and then try to dub everything else on top of it. The concept of him performing with another bunch of musicians was clearly impossible because he'd change the song every time. He'd never do a song the same twice, I think quite deliberately.

MUSICIAN: There is a popular Syd story that he actually turned up unannounced at the mixing session for "Shine On' You Crazy Diamond" and said he was ready to "do my bit."
GILMOUR: He did show up, yeah

MUSICIAN: Did he say anything?
GILMOUR: He showed up at the studio. He was very fat and he had a shaved head and shaved eyebrows [note Bob Geldof's eyebrow-shaving scene in The Wall] and-no one recognized him at all first off. There was just this strange person walking around the studio, sitting in the control room with us for hours. If anyone else told me this story, I'd find it hard to believe, that you could sit there with someone in a small room for hours, with a close friend of yours for years and years, and not recognize him. And I guarantee, no one in the band recognized him. Eventually, I had sussed it. And even knowing, you couldn't recognize him. He came two or three days and then he didn't come anymore.

MUSICIAN: How do you feel about the cult lionization of Syd Barrett, with things like the Syd Barrett Appreciation Society (an English fan club of sorts that actually published a newsletter, Terrapin, after one of his songs)?
GILMOUR: It's sad that these people think he's such a wonderful subject, that he's a living legend when, in fact, there is this poor sad madman who can't deal with life or himself. He's got uncontrollable things in him that he can't deal with and people think it's a marvelous, wonderful, romantic thing. It's just a sad, sad thing, a very nice and talented person who's just disintegrated.

MUSICIAN: That feeling comes through on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." It seems a very sad song, almost a pleading.
GILMOUR: It is sad. Syd's story is a sad story romanticized by people who don't know anything about it. They've made t fashionable but it's just not that way.

Acoustic Architecture

David Gilmour came into Pink Floyd by a rather circuitous route. After his star-crossed buddy Barrett packed his art school bags for London and the future Floyd, Gilmour continued playing the Cambridge club circuit with his own combo Joker's Wild featuring drummer Willie Wilson (soon-to-be Sutherland Brothers and Oulver) and current Foreigner bassist Rick Wills. He also did time in France as a male model but got back to England in the fall of '67, just in time for psychedelia's full flower and Syd's mental collapse. When the Floyd offered him Syd's guitar spot, he accepted for reasons that had nothing to do with rock's brave new world. "I joined the Pink Floyd," he grins, "for the stardom and the girls."

But when Gilmour-who was twenty-one at the time- joined the group in early '68, they were actually having trouble even getting arrested. A succession of potent but inconsistent singles bombed, Syd was well into his fourth dimension, and the Floyd were about to bump their two managers. They were also saddled with an aging repertoire of Syd's songs even as underground pundits dismissed them as nothing without him. A Saucerful Of Secrets changed all that.

In the great Floyd vinyl canon, A Saucerful Of Secrets holds a minor but pivotal position, testament that there was life after Syd. Recorded partly with Barrett and finished with Gilmour. the album's stark primal pulse and long atmospheric instrumental brooding mark as radical a departure from Barrett's shards of sounds as The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn was from the pop chart fluff of the day. These are not just the idle meanderings of buzzed-out space rangers, however. Crucial tracks like Roger Waters' gravity-free samba "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" and the twelve-minute "found sound" suite, "A Saucerful Of Secrets," reveal a passion for structure-not surprising for a bunch of ex-architecture students-dosed with a keen interest in open-ended improvisation. Successive recordings like the sorely underrated movie soundtrack More (to a Barbet Schroeder film of the same name) and the muddy but intoxicating live half of the double-album Ummagumma (cue Waters' hellish scream in "Careful With That Axe, Eugene") build substantially on Saucerful's humble beginnings. Yet it is still A Saucerful Of Secrets which reverberates with the thrill of discovery.

MUSICIAN: What was the genesis of the track "A Saucerful Of Secrets"?
GILMOUR: I had just joined when we started doing that track. Basically, it was the architecture students in the band. They'd sit down with a piece of paper and they'd start it like this-It's gotta go right here and then it's gotta go right up there -and they were drawing these peaks and troughs and things on a chart, working out where the piece was going to go.

The whole first part of it was kind of like a war, I think. I didn't fully understand it myself at the time. But it seemed to me like a war. The first part is tension, a buildup, a fear, and the middle with all the clashing and banging, that's the war going on. The aftermath is a sort of requiem.

The start of it was done with the edge tones of cymbals. We'd get some cymbals and put a nice microphone right on the edge of it, then beat the cymbal very gently with soft mallets. That actually produces a tone not a bit like a cymbal. The whole first section is basically that, a series of those tones, with lots of stuff tacked on top.

For the next section, Nick played a drum pattern, snipped and spliced it together into a loop, and we ran it on a tape recorder for hours and hours. Then there's me playing the guitar, turned up real loud and using the leg of a microphone stand like a steel bar, running it up and down the guitar fingerboard.

MUSICIAN: It's interesting that the track was worked out as a structured piece because it actually sounds like it is just growing of its own accord.
GILMOUR: I remember sitting there, thinking, "My God, this isn't what music's all about." I had just come straight out of a band that spent most of its time rehashing early Jimi Hendrix songs to crowds of strange French people. Going straight into this was culture shock.

MUSICIAN: Yet just at the time when Pink Floyd was beginning to develop a new group identity apart from Syd, you released Ummagumma with live "hits," so to speak, and an album of solo tracks from each member As career moves go, you could have done much better.
GILMOUR: We just didn't know what else to do at the time. We were a bit short on material. Also, what we were very good at, at that time, was live performance. We were going Out around England and Europe selling Out anything we wanted to. We were one of the top drawing bands, apart from Hendrix and Fleetwood Mac in their earlier incarnation.

MUSICIAN: How much of the Floyd show was actually spontaneous improvisation at the time?
GILMOUR: A lot of it. There was a whole passage of time when we would have nothing planned. We'd just say, "We're gonna do this" and waffle away for a little while, go, "Ready for the next one?" and nod each other into it.

I mean, we were doing stuff like "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" which is basically one chord. We were just creating textures and moods over the top of it, taking it up and down, not very subtle stuff. There was a sort of rule book of our own that we were trying to play to. And it was largely about dynamics.

Echoes of an Endless Choir

Not counting Relics, a 1971 compilation of early odds and sods, the next three albums represent Pink Floyd's awkward but intensely experimental transition from loosely organized space jams to the meticulous orchestration, concentrated songs and emotional directness of The Dark Side Of The Moon. With its ill-fitting horns and cathedral choir, the ambitious title suite hogging half of 1970's Atom Heart Mother is the Floyd's least successful major work, according to Gilmour.

He also thinks "Echoes," the twenty-three minute entree on '71's Meddle, points the way toward The Dark Side Of The Moon in its liquid fusion of regulation rock progressions, purposeful application of sound effects and cohesive arrangement of concept fragments. That the Floyd had yet to complete an album that was more than just the sum of rather innovative parts is evident on Meddle's side one, which ranged from the wind tunnel rush and locomotive rhythm of the instrumental overture "One Of These Days" to Roger Waters' snide cabaret shuffle "San Tropez" and the throwaway blues coda "Seamus." Ditto Obscured By Clouds, the soundtrack for another Barbet Schroeder film Le Valle~ a pleasant diversion of piecemeal delights only distinguished by Roger Waters' increasing lyrical interest in less galactic matters.

"The big difference after 'Echoes,"' Gilmour explains, "is Roger started to write lyrics with a meaning. The lyrics for 'Echoes' were just an excuse to hang the music on. I think that started-Roger suddenly realizing what he can do lyrically- on Obscured By Clouds." Gilmour specifically cites "Free Four," an amiable enough acoustic stroll with fuzz bass punctuation in which Waters considers with bittersweet humor the life-and-death equation, a deep concern triggered by his obsession with the childhood loss of his father in World War II. That obsession eventually came to play a crucial role in The Wall. More immediately, the madness of life and the fear of death would take up the whole of The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Given the sales records it shattered, its reputation as every high-fidelity enthusiast's greatest hit and the great commercial breakthrough it presented for Pink Floyd, David Gilmour's confession that "I thought The Dark Side Of The Moon, at the time, was a little weak musically" may send certain fans into deep shock. "Some of the songs," he insists, "I didn't think were that good, as chord structures. My argument, after The Dark Side Of The Moon when we went to do Wish You Were Here, was to try and get some of the feeling and musical power of 'Echoes' with the lyrical power of Dark Side Of The Moon.

As far as the several million fans who still swear by their battered copies of Dark Side are concerned, Gilmour doth protest too much. From its immaculate rich-echo-and-deep-bass production to the sensual gentility of "Us And Them" and soaring Baptist fire of guest vocalist Clare Torry's wordless wail on "The Great Gig In The Sky," The Dark Side Of The Moon is the archetypal Floyd album, the band's first completely successful attempt to give melodic and emotional shape to their vast musical space.

MUSICIAN: What was the development of "Echoes"? Coming right after "Atom Heart Mother," it seems to be a much more unified piece.
GILMOUR: A lot of the stuff we did in those days was lust sitting around in the rehearsal room plunking around for ideas, searching for ideas, desperately trying to come out with little things and work on those.

MUSICIAN: Was "Echoes" one idea or a collection of them?
GILMOUR: It's quite a few ideas developed together. It's quite complicated. It was the first time we'd used 16-track. Take the choir at the end, the everlasting backwards choir. Have you ever heard that musical thing where they get a tone that seems to go on...you know, like those Escher paintings where the staircases go up and up and up and never getting anywhere. Well, there's a tone and it keeps going ding, ding. ding, ding, and up and up and the same time they are surreptitiously taking out high frequencies, so that it never gets anywhere. That's what the choir on the end does, right on the very end of "Echoes."

The whole beginning of "Echoes" was a complete accident. There was a piano at Abbey Road and they had it miked. We'd put the microphone Out through a Leslie in the studio at the same time as Rick was playing it. He was just sitting there, plunking away. Every once in awhile, he'd come up with this note and it had a strange resonance to it. It was kind of a feedback thing so it would resonate in the studio. Bing! A complete accident. We said, "That's great!" and we used it as the start of the piece. At a certain point later on. where we had to go move on musically, we tried to recreate the sound and edit it together. But we couldn't get that note to resonate again in the same way.

MUSICIAN: Alan Parsons told me the story of how on "Money" you got the cash registers in perfect sync with the beat. You actually measured out with a ruler the length of tape that was necessary and spliced it.
GILMOUR: You're trying to get the impact from the cash register, the "snap, clack, crrsshl" You'd mark that one and then measure how long you wanted that beat to go and that's the piece you'd use. And you'd chop it together. It was trial and error. You lust chop the tapes together and if it sounds good, you use it. If it doesn't, you take one section out and put a different one in.

Sometimes we'd put one in and it'd be backwards, because the diagonal cut on the tape, if you turn it around, is exactly the same. We'd stick that in and instead it would go "chung, dum, whoosh!" And it would still sound great. So we'd use that.

MUSICIAN: According to the credits on The Dark Side Of The Moon, you spent from June, 1972 to the following January recording, almost nine months.
GILMOUR: It was very, very split up. The actual recording time was probably two or three months. There was touring in the middle. In tact, we did five nights at the Rainbow Theater in London-there are bootlegs of us-doing The Dark Side Of The Moon a long time before we ever started recording it and the differences are unbelievable.

The whole "On The Run" section with the synthesizer was completely different. "Time" was, like, half the speed. I think the "Time" vocal was me and Rick singing in harmony, very low. It sounded terrible.

MUSICIAN: On The Dark Side Of The Moon, there are three guitar solos that really stand Out. There's one on "Time" that has a real Stratocaster bite to it but with a scrappy sound.... GILMOUR: Yeah, it's a Strat worked through a fuzz box and a DDL (digital delay line) for the echo effect. If you just have a fuzz directly through an amplifier, for me, it's usually too fuzzy. But if you put a bit of DDL on it, it smoothes it out a bit and makes it sound more natural..

MUSICIAN: There is also the instrumental segue "Any Color You Like." where your guitar has an organlike air to it, like putting it through a Leslie.
GILMOUR: I think that's through a Univibe. In those days, there were Univibes.

MUSICIAN: Yes, this was almost ten years ago. Equipment people take for granted now was still in the Dark Ages.
GILMOUR: I think.the people out there who are looking back think that the synthesizers and all this stuff came out a long time before it did. In studios, up until really the middle 70s, there weren't any effects units, no harmonizers. They didn't exist. The choices you had were to get the tape players to run tapes against each other. There was another jolly good one where you could take a track on a multi-track machine and play it off the sync-head, through another tape recorder and play with the speed of it with a van-speed. Now to van-speed a tape machine in those days, EMI (Floyd usually recorded at EMI's Abbey Road studio in London) had to wheel in an enormous box with oscillators and output bars and God-knows-what, with great big knobs on it, and you spent three hours plugging it into a tape machine and playing with the knob and the tape machine.

MUSICIAN: Were you making a conscious effort with The Dark Side Of The Moon to make a state-of-the-art, high-fidelity record?
GILMOUR: We always were. But that was the first time we actually got someone else in to give us an extra opinion on the mixing of it, Chris Thomas.

MUSICIAN: Were you surprised by the way the album took off commercially?
GILMOUR: The thing I remember most about the period after that was the incredible annoyance at these gigs. We were doing these places where all the young kids would be shouting "Money!" all the way through the show. We'd been used to all these reverent fans who would come and you could hear a pin drop. We'd try to get really quiet, especially at the beginning of "Echoes" or something that has tinkling notes, trying to create a beautiful atmosphere, and these kids would be there shouting "Money!"

MUSICIAN: Did that kind of acceptance affect you in trying to do a followup? The pressure must have been fantastic.
GILMOUR: The pressure was entirely our own, of knowing that we had to follow up that album. It was very difficult getting back in and working.

Poison in the Machine

Call it a severe reaction to commercial success. Call it kitchen sink psychedelia. Call it just good old weird. Whatever it was, for a brief series of sessions in October and November of 1973, Pink Floyd dared to make an album of music played on everything but instruments-rubber bands, aerosol spray cans, partially filled wine bottles. They completed three tracks (bootleggers, wherefore art thou?) before conceding defeat.

The actual Dark Side followup, Wish You Were Here, released in the fall of '75, suggests that the Floyd-and particularly Roger Waters as the lyricist-deeply resented having to best themselves on public demand. Waters' sarcastic blasts at the music business in the industrial synth-grinder "Welcome To The Machine" and the Roy Harper vocal "Have A Cigar" (the record company weasel in "Have A Cigar" asking in his malevolent ignorance, "Which one's Pink?" is drawn, Gilmour claims, from a real incident) may be hard to take from a band whose lifestyle, The Wall producer Bob Ezrin has said. "is interchangeable with the president of just about any bank in England." Yet the chilly air of pleading desperation blowing through the thirty-minute "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," not so much a tribute to Syd Barrett as a prayer that he bless them with a bit of the uncut genius in this their hardest hour, is compounded by the cold realization that success-however limited it was for the Floyd in ye olde '67- was Syd's poison as well. What the biz giveth, it had already taken away once

Just how deep Waters' bitterness ran is underlined by the fact that Wish You Were Here at one time featured "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" with the harshly vindictive "You Gotta Be Crazy" and "Raving And Drooling," a harrowing vision of brownshirt violence. The last two eventually became "Dogs" and "Sheep" respectively, pad of the grim Animals trilogy, Waters' barbed musical application of George Orwell's fascism-on-the-farm.

But even walls are made to be broken. During his recent New York stay on behalf of the Wall movie, Gilmour broke with rock's megastar tradition by registering at his hotel under his own name. When a Rolling Stone writer took the initiative to call him up directly for some interview time, bypassing the usual publicist channels, Gilmour graciously invited him up for a chat. And when I asked him what bethought of punk rock in general and in specific Johnny Rotten's infamous homern~de T-shirt with the legend "I Hate Pink Floyd," he laughed with a mixture of good nature and serious enthusiasm. "It frightened a lot of people, but it didn't frighten me. I like a good kick in the pants. It does you good."

It's like Roger Waters, for all his apparent cynicism, says at the tail end of The Wall: "And when they've given you their all," he sings, signing off in "Outside The Wall," "Some stagger and fall! After all it's not easy! Banging your head against some mad bugger's/Wall." Even he must admit-it works both ways.

MUSICIAN: Considering the anxieties of following up The Dark Side Of The Moon and the tenor of songs like "Have A Cigar" and the Animals album, is there a lot of bitterness on Roger's part about Pink Floyd becoming an industry in itself, no longer just a band?
GILMOUR: You'd have to ask him, really. He certainly holds a resentment of those figures and the "attempted" control, what they tried to take over. I mean, we met some people in the record industry. we couldn't believe how they could possibly have jobs in the industry. And we still do.

MUSICIAN: The world probably assumes that as the lyricist, Roger Waters speaks for the rest of Pink Floyd. Is Roger's point of view the Pink Floyd's point of view?
GILMOUR: Well, that's the world's assumption and that's what we have to put up with, I suppose. It's entirely possible that I might write a song that would get onto a Pink Floyd album, but it's also entirely possible that it wouldn't fit in with whatever overall idea we were working with. It's "he who comes up with the goods."

MUSICIAN: What was the rest of the band's reaction when Roger came up with The Wall concept?
GILMOUR: We all thought it was a very strong concept. I think there's a lot of it that's irrelevant to me. I don't feel the pressure of a wall between me and my audience. I don't ever think there's something that doesn't get through to them. I don't feel a lot of the things that happened to me in my earlier years, some of which weren't so wonderful, adversely affect my life to the extent Roger feels some of those things affected his life, Roger. for example. never knew his father. But that's his viewpoint and he's perfectly entitled to it. But I don't subscribe to it.

A lot of the other stuff. The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here. I am fairly in sympathy with. Animals, I could see the truth of. Though I don't paint people as black as that.

MUSICIAN: Is Pink Floyd's "reclusiveness" of the last several years a necessary function of your fame or just something the Floyd prefer?
GILMOUR: It's not a Pink Floyd thing. That is a case of any one individual at any one time doing whatever he wants to. That's exactly what we do and we've always done. There's never been a band policy where we do not do interviews. We have had difficult times with the press and we proved to ourselves that we didn't need 'em. They were constantly trying to prove to us that the measure of our success was done through the publicity we were given by them. But we absolutely proved that wasn't so.

MUSICIAN: Do you ever fear that, in spite of yourselves, Pink Floyd has been reduced by the business to a product, like a box of rock 'n' roll cereal?
GILMOUR: We still make records and tours but none of that is controlled by anyone else other than us. No one says we have to make a record. No one says we have to deliver a record by such and such a date. We have never accepted any of those restrictions.

Well, once we did, but no more than we had to When The Wall was running long overdue, the record company offered us a larger percentage .and a larger advance if we would deliver it by a certain date.