Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake

Author:Mark Blake [Blake, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Composers & Musicians, Music, History & Criticism, Genres & Styles, Rock
ISBN: 9780306817526
Google: hKXhLoWCPQ8C
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2008-11-03T11:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

RIDING THE GRAVY TRAIN

‘That’s why I stay in the group. I’m worried about the others - what’s going to become of them.’

Roger Waters

In a private room at London’s exclusive members’ club, The Groucho, Richard Wright conveys the genteel manner of a retired public school teacher. He has that rather absent air you’d expect to find in one who has spent their adult lifetime in a higher seat of learning. You half expect to see chalk dust on his elbows. It is 1996 and Pink Floyd’s keyboard player is now fifty-four. The paisley-shirted psychedelic poster boy of 1967, second only in the ranks to Syd Barrett, is gone, as is the bearded hipster of 1972’s Live At Pompeii. Wright’s hair is now completely white, and, while his jeans and brogues are high street issue, you suspect that the overcoat hanging on the back of a nearby chair is from somewhere a little more up-market and outside your price range.

In conversation, he is nervous, obliging, reticent and precise. Wright is here to talk about his new solo album, a record that will disappear off the radar of all but the most dedicated of Pink Floyd fans within a few months. It is, nevertheless, an album full of aural tics and moments of familiarity that make you scrabble around in the back of your mind, trying to remember which Pink Floyd song it now reminds you of.

When you ask Wright about the Floyd albums he rates the most highly, you already know the answer. Now back in the group as a full-time member, he doesn’t bother subscribing to David Gilmour’s party line: that the new Floyd is on a par with the old Floyd. Wright’s tastes are strictly old school.

‘Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here,’ he answers. ‘But if I was forced to name one, Wish You Were Here.’

‘Or Wish You Weren’t Here,’ as Roger Waters once called it, balefully recalling the mood in the studio during its making. Pink Floyd had ended 1973 playing a benefit concert for Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt, who had broken his back after falling from a window, but before Christmas, they reconvened at Abbey Road, and began messing around again with the Household Objects project, on hold since 1971. Dark Side of the Moon’s number 1 chart position and the hit single ‘Money’ had been the start of what Nick Mason would later describe as ‘Floyd’s scorched earth policy’, but, contrarily, they had gone back to trying to make music with wine glasses, saws, rolls of sticky tape and buckets of water.

‘I remember a rubber band being stretched between two objects to make a bass sound, with matchsticks as frets,’ says engineer Alan Parsons. ‘Actually, I was always rather disappointed it never came to anything.’

In truth, it was a delaying tactic, a ruse to make the band feel they were doing something without actually having to write any new songs. Yet something was salvaged out of the aborted sessions: the high-pitched

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