Pigs Might Fly by Mark Blake

Author:Mark Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781845137489
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2011-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

David Gilmour’s confession in NME that Dark Side of the Moon had left the band ‘creatively trapped’, was still pertinent when Pink Floyd gathered at Abbey Road in January 1975.

‘After Dark Side we were really floundering around,’ said Gilmour years later. ‘I wanted to make the next album more musical. I always thought that Roger’s emergence as a great lyric writer on the last album was such that he came to overshadow the music.’

Waters wanted to make another themed album, this time dealing with the idea of emotional absence; the concept of people being there but not really there, into which Waters’ reflections on the music industry and the band’s general state of mind could also be filtered. Gilmour simply wanted to record the tracks they’d already written and steer clear of another grand concept. Meanwhile Wright struggled with Waters’ ideas, as he simply didn’t share the bassist’s preoccupation with the evils of the music industry. ‘Roger’s view wasn’t necessarily my view,’ he said.

Nick Mason later summed up the group’s collective mindset: ‘Roger was getting crosser. We were all getting older, there was much more drama between us, people turning up at the studio late. There was more pressure on me to make the drumming more accurate and less flowery.’ At the time, he was more candid, telling Capital Radio DJ Nicky Horne, ‘I really did wish I wasn’t there. But it wasn’t specifically to do with what was going on in the band, as much as what was going on outside the band. I am very bad at closing off my mind to whatever is bothering me. But my alarm and despondency manifested itself in a complete rigor mortis.’ With marital problems, Mason’s mind simply wasn’t on the job.

‘Some of the lads needed to be jollied along a bit,’ joked Waters at the time. In reality, it was the closest Pink Floyd had yet come to splitting up. Later, Mason would claim that each of his bandmates had approached Steve O’Rourke individually to discuss leaving.

Despite the air of unease, some progress was made. Between January and the beginning of March, the album that would become Wish You Were Here began to take shape. ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ had now been expanded to around twenty minutes, and would incorporate longer instrumental passages, backing vocals from The Blackberries and a saxophone solo from Dick Parry. John Leckie ended up overseeing the first sessions on the song, until Floyd’s front-of-house engineer Brian Humphries took over. (Abbey Road agreed to the use of an outside engineer ‘but only because it was the Pink Floyd’.) Humphries’ job had originally been offered to Alan Parsons. ‘They offered me £10,000 a year to become their permanent sound engineer,’ says Parsons. ‘But I also wanted a royalty on the next album, and Steve O’Rourke said no.’ Parsons was also about to start work on his own music, as The Alan Parsons Project. ‘So I also had that going on. I still think that if they’d offered me the job a few months earlier I would have taken it.

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