The Rise and Fall of Pink Floyd

monument in the history of rock, Pink Floyd have become the sort of band around which legends are built up by the press with or without their complicity. Their career has been punctuated by internal quarrels sometimes leading to court cases. Usually such conflicts would destroy the group’s creativity once they have reached the three goals of any budding rock stars : Fame, Fortune and Glory. They were first turned into a museum piece in 2003 only to be consecrated once again at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2017. After retaining rare or unpublished documents over the years, they have now decided to issue new records which trace their own vision of their musical history. This partial and ‘objectively biassed’ study does not set out to glorify or condemn them. Instead it offers a reading of their careers, not only underlining their successes but also their mistakes and the concessions they have made to the music business.

Lecturer at the University of Burgundy, composer and arranger, he centres his work on the analysis of popular music. He has authored books on Pink Floyd, Magma and The Cure, and has edited Prog Rock in Europe: Overview of a persistent musical style (EUD, 2016).

The Rise and Fall of Pink Floyd

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By Philippe Gonin

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The Rise and Fall of Pink Floyd By Philippe Gonin

Essais Essais

ISBN 978-2-36441-222-4 ISSN 2491-0570 10 e Éditions Universitaires de Dijon

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Collection Essais Derniers ouvrages parus Sartre hors du purgatoire, de Roland QUILLIOT Voltaire et Charlie, de Benoît GARNOT La confusion des territoires : essai sur une réforme baroque, de Pierre BODINEAU À en perdre son latin, de Stéphane RATTI Le pouvoir : nature, genèse et enjeux, de JeanPierre SYLVESTRE Rock à papa, de Philippe GONIN

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La main sous le fer rouge, de Bruno LEMESLE Une déesse à Dijon, de Lucile CHAMPION-VALLOT La parité, de Maud NAVARRE et Matthieu GATEAU

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Michel Tournier ou « l’anti-Narcisse », de Fui Lee LUK Les métamorphoses du climat, de Denis LAMARRE Flaubert, un regard contemporain, de Jeanne BEM Un autre souci de soi : le sens de la subjectivité dans la philosophie chinoise antique, de Kuan-Min HUANG François Mitterrand, la Nièvre et le Morvan, de Jean VIGREUX

Sur Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse d’Arnaud Desplechin : un voyage en Arcadie, de Marie-Anne LIEB Éditions Universitaires de Dijon [email protected] http://www.u-bourgogne.fr/EUD

Tous droits réservés ISBN 978-2-36441-222-4 ISSN 2491-0570


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The Rise and Fall of Pink Floyd By Philippe Gonin

Éditions Universitaires de Dijon Collection Essais Dijon, 2017

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The author would like to thank Thomas Désarménien for translating into English the book as well as the interviews and extracts in the French edition.

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Foreword

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I owe my first encounter with Pink Floyd to a French teacher. Untypically in 1977 at the rather staid Conservatoire National de Région in Lyon, she gave us an essay based on a musical theme. We may have listened to the track three or four times. I am not quite sure. Yet I do remember that I immediately fell under its spell. I also clearly remember what I wrote on that day. With my naïve thirteen-year-old mind, that of a child steeped in TV, I imagined a story with bluecoats, slaughtered Indians, fierce and cruel fighting on a battlefield over which hovered an ominous silence. The piece Françoise B. played for us on that day was entitled ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’. No doubt the drums rolling throughout the piece conjured up for me this scene in the Far West, with the desert and the gloomy plain. I have a vivid memory of the album cover; it was Ummagumma, my first encounter with the Floyd. What a wonderful discovery for a young violinist who had been taught the technicalities of music since the age of seven in this protected environment where everything was possible except learning to love music!


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Added to that, I had been brought up with the records my mother loved above all, those of Luis Mariano. Even more important was my second encounter with Pink Floyd’s music. In those days, I lived in a suburban area of Lyon surrounded by concrete high rise buildings. Yet, in the neighbourhood, there was a small shop selling electrical appliances and a few records, a mere twenty in all... Desirous to listen to the music played by this mysterious band, I hit on the only Floyd album available. A dull-looking cow featured on the cover with no additional information. The dirty grey inside cover evoked a mournful countryside. It was entitled Atom Heart Mother and, besides the cow, the grey colour called to mind a postnuclear landscape, probably because of the title. I had to have it. I do remember using this tune to illustrate a presentation I made on nuclear energy. In those days, extracting a vinyl from its cover required very careful handling so as not to scratch or leave a mark on it... My small orange record player (I think it was a Thomson machine, a gift from my grandmother) was a far cry from hi-fi equipment. Yet it was the machine on which I played ‘Atom Heart Mother’ for the first time. I did not know then that it was to change my life for ever. Even today ‘Atom Heart Mother’ remains a special treat for me. On the B-side ‘Fat Old Sun’ was to become my favourite Pink Floyd song, my own Proustian ‘madeleine’ which carries me back to this far distant time when a whole new universe was revealed to me. Over the following years, with each new purchase, I gradually discovered more Pink Floyd albums: Wish You Were Here, then The Wall, More, Animals and finally Ummagumma, with The Dark Side of the Moon coming later. Yet my hopes of seeing my new


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heroes live were shattered as they split up, though their music kept on consuming my life. But then, when Pink Floyd came to Grenoble for a concert in 1988, the opportunity was too good to be missed. Of course, I knew that the performers I was going to see were not exactly the original ones who had filled my dreams but this did not matter. They were there, particularly David Gilmour who, the first time I heard him play ‘Fat Old Sun’, convinced me to abandon my damn violin and opt for the guitar. The Floyd’s music only became my research subject fifteen years later. In 2001, while teaching in a secondary school, in a meeting to prepare the yearend concert, instead of the usual ‘Misa Criolla’ or Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria’, I suggested ‘Atom Heart Mother’ by Pink Floyd. To my great surprise my proposal was adopted and on 3rd and 4th April 2002 three hundred secondary school pupils with brass instruments and a rock band, in which I played lead guitar, performed at the Transbordeur in Lyon. In the attendance, soon to join me on stage, was Ron Geesin, the man who worked with the Floyd on this piece and wrote the brass, choir and cello sections. From that moment on, everything fell into place. I was asked to orchestrate two hours of Pink Floyd music for a show called Hommage Symphonique à Pink Floyd (A Symphonic Tribute to Pink Floyd), which went through about fifteen performances. Then followed a book for the Baccalauréat music exam to which the General Inspector had just added ‘Atom Heart Mother’. Several concerts were also organized, a few with Ron Geesin (who had by then become a friend) playing the piano. I recorded a 45-minute film interview with Nick Mason. An original tribute to Pink Floyd and their music was commissioned by the


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Orchestre Régional de Basse-Normandie and in 2014 my Floyd Chamber Concerto was performed for the first time in Caen. Since then it has been played many times and recently released on record.1 For the past forty years, I have been mesmerised, transcended by this music. Nonetheless today the scholar must leave the fan behind and look back on what seems to be a complete and finished opus. Thanks to this long familiarity with them I will now attempt to trace what I see as the rise and fall of Pink Floyd.

1. Please contact Philippe Gonin on his Facebook page.


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I don’t think any one of us in rock ‘n’ roll is solely motivated by the noble desire to share our wisdom with the rest of mankind. Roger Waters, 2003.

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‘I Sentence You to Be Exposed Before Your Peers’. Pink Floyd Exhibited ‘A giant inflated pig was seen flying over London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in September 2016. There could be only one logical explanation: a Pink Floyd exhibition was coming’, a recent issue of Mojo magazine said. Their Mortal Remains exhibition, ‘a decently gothic title for a retrospective’, Mason noted, which opens in May 2017, sounds like a curtain call, as if, from now on, Pink Floyd were part of history. No more albums, no more tours, as David Gilmour and Nick Mason like to state it as one or individually, the only depositaries of a name which once shone through Syd Barrett then Roger Waters, notwithstanding the late great Rick Wright who has left an indelible mark.


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‘I Sentence You to Be Exposed Before Your Peers’…

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Has the story really come to an end? In 2014, the Floyd made a new release dedicated to Rick Wright, an album made of recycled parts and forgotten tapes mixed into a coherent whole. Recently archives have resurfaced, unheard material or tapes which had been lost or might have been carefully preserved in some secret safes. The Floyd seem desirous to settle accounts, perhaps just temporarily… Their Mortal Remains was due to open in Italy but the venue was cancelled for various reasons. The London exhibition is not the first one dedicated to Pink Floyd. From 10th October 2003 to 25th January 2004, the Cité de la Musique in Paris hosted Pink Floyd Interstellar, which featured what seemed to be at the time the full life story of the band (almost ten years after The Division Bell, the last studio recording of the band. David Gilmour had just started his one-man show on stage). One of the greatest pop-rock bands of the second half of the twentieth century was now confined to a museum. The exhibition was divided up into several periods tracing the life of a band which still had some unfinished business. According to the Cité de la Musique, ‘the visitor who enters a corridor with red neon lights is meant to be transported into the heart of Pink Floyd’s universe, a voyage through time. Different sounds (gongs, cash drawers, clocks, etc.) symbolize the band’s experiments’. In the various rooms the visitors travelled from the beginnings of the band to their experimental period as well as to albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here. It then focused on the Waters led-era, then the Gilmour led-era prior to getting into psychedelic and progressive rock. Emma Lavigne, the curator, relied on a team led by Storm Thorgerson who had been the major graphic designer



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of the Floyd’s album covers from A Saucerful of Secrets to Wish You Were Here, then again during the era when Gilmour was a central figure. Another angle was chosen for the London exhibition:

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The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains, with sonic experience by Sennheiser, will celebrate the band’s era-defining work in composition, staging, design, film, music technology, graphic design and photography. It will feature more than 350 objects and artifacts including never-before-seen material, presented alongside works from the V&A’s outstanding collections of art, design, architecture and performance. Highlights will include spectacular set and construction pieces from some of Pink Floyd’s most innovative and legendary album covers and stage performances including The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and The Division Bell, instruments, music technology, original designs, architectural drawings, handwritten lyrics and psychedelic prints and posters. At the exhibition, visitors will have the unique opportunity to experience never-before-seen classic Pink Floyd concert footage and a custom-designed laser light show.

Storm Thorgerson, who died in 2013, could not participate in the organisation of this venue. Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, his old pal back in the days of Hipgnosis, replaced him for the exhibition, which was put up by Victoria Broackes, working closely with David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Rick Wright’s beneficiaries. Strangely enough, Syd Barrett’s beneficiaries were not involved. The whole exhibition was ‘designed by Stufish, the world leading entertainment architects and longtime stage designers for Pink Floyd’, as is indicated on the official website. The coming exhibition and the release of the anthology box set, The Early Years 1965-1972, were a major incentive for me to write a book which


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does not pretend to be yet another history of the band. Enough excellent works in French, English, Italian or German are available. Many fan websites are also dedicated to the band with a plethora of details depicting fifty years of Pink Floyd. My study is not meant to be a year-after-year analysis of the eighteen individual albums – not to mention the live versions and the various best-of – produced by the band all along their career. Pink Floyd have been a major influence on pop music in the second half of the twentieth century despite the fact that one may consider this cultural, commercial and media celebration as a form of beatification or even canonization. It seems essential to examine with a critical eye the way Pink Floyd’s works have been exploited. The remaining members of the band have seized the opportunity of anniversaries, remastered albums whose sales could already be counted in millions, released archival material in expensive box sets such as Immersion in 2011 or the monumental and nonetheless expensive The Early Years 1965-1972, to keep the legend alive… After all, money is money. Roger Waters will certainly not deny this, he who spent his time denouncing the system while protecting his interests, which is understandable considering the millions at stake. One must also focus on the Floyd’s relationship with the music industry from the very beginning and the way it influenced some of their decisions. Our point of view does not pretend to be exhaustive but ‘objectively partial’ towards a band whose trajectory frequently wanders in unexpected directions, at times making concessions to the music business. We do not aim to glorify or condemn the work of a group of men gathered around one



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common goal: getting to the top. Throughout their long and illustrious career, Pink Floyd have had their share of internal feuds and court cases. They fell out with one another. All these threatened the band’s creativity and their dreams of achieving what any budding rock star aims for: fame, fortune and glory. From their emotional beginnings to the signature of their first record contract, an occasion for them to discover the inescapable pressure of business, we follow a hard-working band experimenting, thriving, and later on becoming a cash cow, a band which, once on top, had no other choice but to keep on moving forward. In 1973, The Dark Side of the Moon album saw Pink Floyd skyrocket, a reward after seven sometimes very bumpy years for these intensely involved musicians who aimed for success (in 1972, Gilmour, who was being interviewed by Pop 2, complained of not having had a break for many months). What followed was a long decline, not in terms of music – at least not yet – but in terms of human relationships. These slowly deteriorated soon to reach a point of no return. Until the renaissance, after twenty years of dormant creativity, when, phoenix-like, the few remaining members of the band rose up again, took a last breath, gently whispering, and went ‘endlessly’ flowing on the River Cam1. Most of this book examines the Floyd’s major achievements. A section deals with the evolution of what was once a human adventure but later turned into some sort of multinational company with its financial obsessions, focussing on how best to exploit the years when creativity remained their central 1. The river flows through Cambridge, hometown of Pink Floyd’s members.


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preoccupation. Money, with its undeniable power of both motivation and destruction will loom large. Even when creativity seemed to have dried up, the members of the Floyd, past and present, knew how to handle their assets and capitalize, forgetting all internal feuds. If there is indeed no dark side on the moon,1 the music business certainly has one, similar to that portrayed in a famous movie saga, a dark side named profit and whose gods are Sony, Warner and Universal. No doubt rock and pop depend on a mass music industry which dictates its choices, thus leading to major artistic and human consequences. As an industry, it aims to produce dividends. Pop rock music has become a mass cultural commodity, which does not detract from the quality of some of its productions. Still its value is affected by the vagaries of the market. But then the same is also true of art. Nevertheless, mass consumption art somehow makes history. When I asked Nick Mason whether the Floyd were conscious that they were part of the history of popular music, he answered candidly: Oh definitely! I think we’re part of the story, a rather peculiar part of the story but looking at it from a distance, there are elements with people we’ve affected heavily. I feel we’ve influenced people just as we’ve been influenced and changed by the people around us. And I think that, in the business, there were various aspects that we have influenced including the use of film, the use of staging and a lot of people have since taken up and now probably do better than we ever did. I think that, from that point of view, we were an influence.

1. ‘There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark’, are the words ending The Dark Side of the Moon.



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Although we ignore what lies in wait for the future, we may at least attempt to answer the question: what is left of the Floyd?

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Chapter 1: The Lunatic Is On the Grass

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The ‘Obligatory Hendrix Perm’

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On 1st February 1967, a young psychedelic band famous on the London underground music scene signed their first record contract with EMI. Their charismatic leader, Roger Barrett, a.k.a. ‘Syd’ Barrett, decided to call his band Pink Floyd by joining together two barely known bluesmen’s first names Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The band really started around 1965 and included Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright, with Bob Klose on lead guitar. According to Nick Mason and Roger Waters, Pink Floyd were nothing more at the time than a bad rhythm & blues band, yet another among hundreds of short-lived groups in London. The destiny of the band would nonetheless be great and one can wonder what propelled such a mediocre group towards the pinnacle of underground music, then into the stratosphere of rock. Around Christmas 1964, according to Mason, the band, which was still called The Tea Set1, recorded 1. The name Pink Floyd Sound was adopted in 1965.


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The Lunatic Is On the Grass

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their first tracks, six songs, at the DECCA studios in London. Juliette Gale, Wright’s future wife joined the band as an occasional backing vocal. Those songs revealed their love for Bo Diddley1 and for quite ordinary rhythm and blues slightly reminiscent of The Rolling Stones. For a long time, only two of those tracks stood out: ‘I’m a King Bee’, a Slim Harpo standard2 notably covered by The Rolling Stones, and ‘Lucy Leave’, written by Syd Barrett. Among the four remaining songs, released only in 2015, three were also by Barrett while ‘Walk with Me Sydney’ was composed by Waters. The acetate pressing of ‘Lucy Leave’ and ‘I’m A King Bee’ – one copy of which was miraculously unearthed in a second-hand shop in the 1980s – enabled them to work in clubs and get their first gigs. They also used them to try and participate in Ready Steady Go!, one of the first broadcasts dedicated to pop on British television, but to no avail. However, that recording led them to take part in ‘Ninth Heat’ of the National Beat Contest set by Melody Maker in June 1965 and won by St Louis Union, a Manchester band. A line in the press indicated the presence of the Pink Floyd among other participants, nothing much really. The Floyd had not yet found their own original sound. At the time, psychedelic rock reigned and the band was soon to include only four members after Bob Klose had left them to go back to his studies. Those four musicians were good though they lacked in pure instrumental technique. However, London 1. Bo Diddley (1928-2008), American bluesman, creator of the diddley beat considered one of the fundamentals of early rock (circa 1955). 2. Slim Harpo (1924-1970), American bluesman born in Louisiana, was one of the post-war traditional bluesmen.



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was the place to be and, on the flourishing underground music scene, they had a chance. 1966 was a turning point. What was to change, within a few months, that band, meant to stay in the shadow, into a top name in British psychedelic? One can of course put it had something to do with Barrett’s undeniable charisma. A teenager at the time, Nick Kent saw the Floyd on stage in 1967 and was enthralled: ‘The sense of mystery he [Barrett] projected from that stage was something I felt an overwhelming compulsion to solve. His story – however it developed – was mine to tell’. Yet Barrett’s charisma, though undeniable, cannot be the only explanation for the Pink Floyd phenomenon. Klose’s leaving was an opportunity, as the guitarist admitted it so himself, a chance to leave their rhythm & blues roots behind and develop a completely new and different sound. Those changes can be attributed both to their willpower and paradoxically to their inability to play better. Waters, quoted by Blake, agreed: Bob Klose was a man with a great wealth of blues runs in his head. And when he left we hadn’t anyone who had any blues knowledge, so we had to start doing something else. Syd took over on lead guitar, and I’m sure it was the noises that Pete Townshend was making then, squeaks and feedback, that influenced Syd. So we started making strange noises instead of blues.

Storm Thorgerson recalled: When they were playing at the Marquee, they were booked in for longer than they had a set. In order to get paid properly, they had to play longer. They extended their songs in a rambling kind of fashion and it turned out very popular and got more people! […] They stopped doing blues and Syd was instrumental, literally, in turning them around.


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Through sheer willpower, luck or opportunism, the Floyd in 1966, the year of the Beatles’ Revolver, definitely left their mark on an expanding underground movement. Their pictures at the time in which ‘[they] thought [they] had to wear a group uniform with assorted jackets’ (as Mason remembered) show four boys obviously following fashion in terms of clothes and hairstyles. Barrett and Wright were the first to adopt the ‘obligatory Hendrix perm’ as Waters sang in ‘Nobody Home’ on The Wall. So many musicians had done so before them including Eric Clapton. Colourful psychedelic outfits and satin shirts, with or without frills, contrasted with sober suits. Five years later in the inside cover of Meddle, it was a world of difference, the four discrete musicians wearing dark T-shirts. Ron Geesin who met them in the late 1960s said: ‘They wanted success. They wanted to be a famous rock group’. Nick Mason confirmed this while noting that only Syd seemed impervious to commercial success. Talking about the 1967 tour, which included The Move, The Nice, and Hendrix, Mason recalled: ‘The tour was really our first exposure to the world of rock ‘n’ roll as we had always imagined it. Pop stars with tight trousers and loose morals accompanied by screaming girls with tight dresses and even looser morals’. Perhaps Richard Wright remained critical of this if one reads between the lines of ‘Summer 68’, the B-side of Atom Heart Mother.1 In any case, Pink Floyd wanted to succeed despite their reluctant leader. Already at the end of 1966 they had enough original compositions to dispense with almost all the cover versions previously included in their repertoire. The concert at the London Free School on 14th October whose set list was reproduced in the book 1. See http://www.seedfloyd.fr/chanson/summer-68.



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Pink Floyd by Glenn Povey proved that titles such as ‘The Gnome’, ‘Matilda Mother’, ‘Pow R Toc H’ or ‘Astronomy Domine’ – all meant to be featured on the future first album – filled a strong repertoire in which only two Bo Diddley covers remained. ‘Lucy Leave’ was still on the list but, most of all, ‘Interstellar Overdrive.’ The recording of this title which took place two weeks later on 31st October remains the only testimony of how the Floyd played it then. Anthony Stern used it in his 1969 movie San Francisco (strangely enough this does not figure in the Early Years box set). John Hopkins, one of the main figures in the London underground scene, wrote in International Times that the Floyd essentially played instrumental pieces and titles which could last for half-an-hour each. It took them slightly more than a year to shape their new image, putting R&B aside and becoming an underground sensation. London underground music scene was also defined by the UFO Club1 founded late 1966 by Hopkins and Joe Boyd, the Floyd’s first single producer. Once an Irish dancing basement, the Barney Club, 31 Tottenham Court Road, it quickly turned into a hip place. Pink Floyd inaugurated the club, became one of its cornerstones and turned it into their ‘Cavern’ while developing their light show one of the most original features of their art. In December 1967, Barrett declared to Melody Maker: Really, we have only just started to scrape the surface of effects and ideas of lights and music combined; we think that the music and the lights are part of the same scene; one 1. ithin the context of the club, the acronym UFO can mean either Unidentified Flying Object or Underground Freak Out.


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enhances and adds to the other. But we feel that in the future, groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show. They’ll have to offer a well-presented theatre show.

Boyd also recalled: They liked playing in front of moving lights so much they made it a central feature of their shows. The most enduring images of the Free School events, the International Times launch party, UFO and the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace, are of the four Floyds bent over their instruments in concentration while purple and turquoise bubbles of light play over them.

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The key man behind those light shows was Mike Leonard who appeared in a black and white report, unfortunately for us not in colour, on Tomorrow’s World where he presented his light projectors surrounded by the Floyd. The effects were created using wheels, optical effects placed in front of or behind lenses, slide permutations, changing and moving colours. John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins also remembered: One time, fairly soon after we started, a couple of Americans came along and had been at Timothy Leary’s place, in upstate New York, in Millbrook. And they brought a projector and some slides and made a light show where slides were liquid slides; some liquid projections. The Floyd were playing and, one of the people in this light show said, ‘because it’s a light show, why not point it to the band?’ So they did and everybody was turned on by this. […] What really was going on with light shows was an attempt to create an atmosphere which was rather like what you get when you’re on acid, with your different senses interacting with each other, synæsthesia is the word, and that general approach went very well with the audience.

Numerous photos and a few films made at the time show the musicians completely disappearing in a flow of changing colours, literally fading way in this



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colourful deluge. This was a good opportunity for them to remain anonymous since, if one relies on Wright’s assertion, none of them was impatient to become a pop star. The whole situation might sound paradoxical with Nick Mason still claiming that their goal was to become a pop band selling records… This is only one of the paradoxes of the Floyd who throughout their career hesitated between becoming pop stars and remaining anonymous, invisible, staying on top of the underground music scene but not falling into drugs or ‘freaks’, if one excepts Syd, who paid dearly for this. Then again, light shows, DIY or pure inventions were the order of the day as Boyd said: ‘UFO introduced London to Pink Floyd, the Soft Machine, and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, light shows, tripping en masse and silk-screened psychedelic fly-posters’. Does this mean that the Floyd flirted with the avant-garde or were they simply a slightly unconventional rock ‘n’ roll band? ‘This is Pretty Avant-Garde, isn’t it?’

The musical mutation, impulsed by Barrett, undeniably left more room to free improvisation around the guitar and the keyboards. That mutation, essentially on stage, towards more experimental music, may have had two sources. Psychedelic rock musicians are renowned for the unlimited use they made of LSD. Barrett was introduced to this by his friends in Cambridge as early as 1965 and it was largely responsible for his downfall. However, from a purely aesthetic and musical point of view, one must not forget the influence of an important band, AMM, whose use of improvisation no doubt had a major impact on


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Barrett. In 1966 Barrett used a Zippo and various other objects to test different ways of generating new sounds on his guitar. As a musician, Keith Rowe, who became one of its key figures, gravitated around AMM, an experimental band from the jazz scene, which, despite staying underground, was particularly interesting. The band used collective improvisation and composed their music creating waves of sounds, sound textures. Their first album, AMMUSIC 1966, was released under a small label, DNA, in which Hopkins worked. There was also the Floyd’s future co-manager, Peter Jenner. The album was produced by Joe Boyd. This influence was confirmed by Barry Miles who, in his book London Calling, wrote about one of the concerts entitled Spontaneous Underground at the Marquee club: ‘The main reason people remember the Marquee events is because it was here that […] Syd Barrett first saw Keith Rowe play. It was sometime in June 1966, and both the Pink Floyd and AMM were booked to perform’. ‘AMM would play guitars, pianos, but also radios and saws,’ Hoppy recalled, ‘they were working on the boundary between music and sound.’ Besides the non-traditional use of the guitar, mostly put on a table and treated as a mere sound generator by strumming the chords with different objects as if it were a custom piano, Rowe would use the radio by randomly scanning the frequencies… Barrett later took the idea of using the guitar as a sound generator. Peter Whitehead shot a few sequences on it for Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. As for the use of the radio, the Floyd would remember it when recording ‘Wish You Were Here’. The band’s popularity grew exponentially with its performances, notably after the ten concerts



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organized by the London Free School between September and November 1966. Duggie Fields, a London painter and one of Barrett’s roommates, remarked: ‘A group of friends was their audience first, and then suddenly they got an enormous following within a very short space of time, shorter than it took for The Rolling Stones’. Even so, it would be misleading to absolutely link the Floyd to any trendy influence stemming from contemporary music. Regarding a ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’, Cage or Stockhausen are often quoted. Mason did briefly talk about Cage who did appear at the Saville Theatre of London in the mid-1960s. Hoppy claimed that they ‘were all listening to avantgarde jazz’ and that Pink Floyd’s music was ‘different, but they fitted right into all that’. Still Waters has always rejected the idea of strong avant-gardism while subtly slipping the sentence ‘This is pretty avantgarde, isn’t it?’ carefully hidden within the mix and sped up in the middle of ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ featuring on the studio record Ummagumma. For Ron Geesin, an avant-garde musician who worked with the Floyd on Atom Heart Mother, ‘they weren’t really exploring the avantgarde. I would suggest that showmanship was more important to them’. In a 2003 interview with Éric Aeschimann for Libération, Waters insisted: People thought we were listening to John Cage or Stockhausen. Actually, I never cared for it. I would listen to B.B King, Mingus, and Armstrong. We were simply finding out about new sound effects such as a voice echoing in a room and we really liked it.

Though this statement may sound reassuring to an aesthete or a musicologist, one must refrain from


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too much intellectualization. No doubt the members of the Floyd, at least Waters and Mason, and to a certain extent Wright, wanted to be pop stars and did not wish to be stuck in pure experimental rock. Yet their position and situation within the underground music scene forced them to have a go at it. Mason confirmed this paradox in an interview for Rolling Stone:

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I think there was an intellectual level to it. There was a love of poetry. There was a connection to the Beat poets from the early fifties, the Kerouac thing that was going on because a lot of people who were involved in setting up UFO, the club, were attached to that. And early on, we were suddenly becoming the commercial arm of it. We weren’t going to poetry readings, because we were touring or in Abbey Road recording our first album, but we were in a curious part of that particular movement.

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He did acknowledge the fact that it was their interest to do so within that psychedelic world: We were riding on a bandwagon to some extent. I certainly had never done an acid trip at that time. But we recognized it was to our advantage to be seen as the house band of the psychedelic revolution. Syd was possibly more involved with the scene, and there were elements that we bonded with.

Gilmour, who was first recruited to support Barrett, then to replace him, pretended that he was hired to extricate the band from its musical chaos and put it back onto the right track: ‘It was too anarchic. I was all for musicking things up a bit. I definitely considered myself a superior musician and I remember thinking that I could knock them into some sort of shape’. Was this one more step towards a necessary form of normalization? Maybe so. Certainly, Gilmour brought them back into the core of their ‘blues



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competence’ which they had lost when Klose left. ‘I think David reignited it’, as Mason said, although it took Gilmour at least two years before he could leave his mark on the band. While acknowledging the influence of both AMM and the underground music scene, one cannot deny the fact that Barrett was one of the best songwriters of his generation. As Jenner remarked, ‘Things like AMM had an influence and, just generally, improvised music, whether it was jazz or whatever, but in songwriting, the influence was much more pop songs’. It was precisely this facet of his talent that Jenner and the record industry wanted to exploit, always urging Barrett to produce more new singles, until he was completely exhausted… The same Jenner encouraged Syd to compose songs mixing melodies reminiscent of the Beatles and the Floyd’ sonic experiments. Even if the Machine started to control the band early in 1967 and streamlined them to produce presentable products, Barrett’s reluctance to give in to the music industry’ standards was ‘just another brick in the wall’ of his fall. ‘Welcome to the Machine’

The limits of the underground music scene soon became evident. They had to move on to another level if they wanted to reach their goal. At the end of 1966 they became shareholders of Blackhill Entreprise, managed by Peter Jenner and Andrew King, who also became the Floyd’s managers. The members of the band also gave up their studies. Yet despite the success of the concerts at the London Free School and at the UFO, the situation was not as favourable outside the London microcosm. Mason said: You must never underestimate how unpopular we were around the rest of England. They hated it. They would throw


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things, pour beer over us. And we were terrible, though we didn’t quite know it. Promoters were always coming up to us saying, ‘I don’t know why you boys won’t do proper songs.’

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Adapting songs to a radio format was essential to aim for coverage and potential success including radio and television broadcasts and of course a record contract. On 9th and 10th January,1 the band went to the Polydor studios for an audition with a view to obtaining their first record contract. On 11th and 12th January, the band recorded a new version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, which came after their 1966 recording, a slightly slower version than the previous one and to which ‘Nick’s Boogie’ was added. In these recordings the members’ particular stage style is still recognizable. At the end of the month (from 29th January to 1st February) the band returned to the Sound Techniques studio with a different objective, that of recording a single which might correspond more closely to what radio decision-makers wanted. Produced by Joe Boyd, the Floyd recorded what was to become a few months later their first single ‘Arnold Layne’ with ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ on the B-side. Boyd, who, thanks to the position he used to occupy with Elektra, was not a newcomer in the music industry, failed to introduce the Floyd to his label. After he had become independent, he tried a second time with Polydor: Polydor was the joker in the British deck in 1966. EMI and Decca had dominated the business for decades with only desultory competition. Warner Brothers had not yet ventured out of California, Dutch Philips was beginning a challenge and CBS had just opened a London office […] 1. All dates given are to be found in Glenn Povey’s very thorough study. His latest book is entitled The Complete Pink Floyd (Carlton Books Ltd, 2016).



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The label had been set up to become the pop division of Deutsche Grammophon. Polydor sent Horst Schmolzi to London with a view to exploring the British market. ‘Horst was a German cartoon – vulgar, loud and monumentally pleased with himself – but I liked him’ (Boyd). When he first auditioned them, Horst was convinced and a contract draft was written with Witchseason Productions, Boyd’s new company. Though Boyd knew all about the music business, he was double-crossed by Peter Jenner and Andrew King who signed the Floyd with EMI. Looking for concert promoters, Jenner and King made a deal with Bryan Morrison, Steve O’Rourke – whose involvement with the Floyd was only just beginning – and Tony Howard. About to sign the Polydor/Witchseason contract, Jenner called Boyd to let him know that Morrison was not impressed with the terms, as Boyd recalled: [Morrison] proposed a Plan B. His agency would put the money to record a single, and then shop it to EMI or Decca as a finished master. Based on what he had heard in the studio, he was certain they could get a £5,000 advance for it. They wanted me to produce it, but as the Floyd’s employee, rather than the other way around.

Despite his initial reservations, Boyd eventually accepted the deal, requesting to be the producer of the first album, a situation in contravention of the usage prevalent with EMI who insisted on imposing their home producer. On 1st February 1967, the Floyd officially turned pro. However, signing with EMI meant making concessions, the first one being to get rid of Joe Boyd. ‘I was talking recently with Joe and I’d forgotten, but we completely stitched him up and fucked him terribly’, Jenner said. There is no business like show business and the man who produced the Floyd’s first single saw the


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band slip away. Ironically, because of this turnkey recording, the band did not have to wait for the audition results, even though they had had to go through it. Plus, while EMI chose Norman Smith, their home producer, the band did not record their second single at Abbey Road but at the Sound Techniques studio. ‘See Emily Play’ used the sound that Boyd and sound engineer John Wood shaped for ‘Arnold Layne’. ‘Arnold Layne’, an excellent pop song formatted to fit radio standards, fully satisfied Boyd when it was ranked within the top 20 in the UK even though it was banned on British radios due to indecent lyrics telling the story of a man stealing women’s underwear on clotheslines. The anecdote was true and did not please either censors or pirate radios including the famous Radio Caroline. The B-side had its rather explicit title ‘Let’s Roll Another One’ changed into a more metaphorical ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’. Distributed by EMI, the single was released in March in the UK. A promotional film directed by Derek Nice was shot in black and white on a beach in Wittering (between Brighton and Portsmouth). Norman Smith, who was in charge of producing the Floyd’s first albums, came from jazz. He had worked on some of the Beatles’ albums and had a brief career as a singer in the early 1970s. He saw himself as the new George Martin and was bent on turning the Floyd into his Beatles. His first job was to help the band meet EMI standards by entrusting ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ – now reduced to nine minutes – and ‘Pow R Toc H’ with the task of representing what the group could do on stage, favouring their leader Syd Barrett and his song writing talent. According to Mason, Norman was able to bring his production skills to bear, adding arrangements and harmonies and making use of



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effects that could be engineered through the mixing desk and outboard equipment. He also helped to reveal all possibilities contained in Abbey Road’s collection of instruments and sound effects. Once we realised their potential we quickly started introducing all kinds of extraneous elements.

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Concessions to the music business, mandatory path to success, Smith admitted that psychedelic rock was far from being his thing and that he ‘felt it was [his] job to get them to think more melodically discouraging the ramble’. Once produced, the album was a collection of songs evoking science-fiction, nursery rhymes and children’s literature (the title itself was taken from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows) and the I Ching, for which Barrett had become a keen reader and whose influence is perceptible in ‘Chapter 24’. Peter Jenner was thrilled with the result: ‘Norman was great. He managed to make a fantastic, very commercial record, condensing what Pink Floyd was doing into three minutes, without destroying the weird musicality, or the quirky nature of Syd’s writing’. Pressure was about to be heavy on Barrett. A second hit single was chiefly needed to be on Top of the Pops… In 1974, Jenner said to Nick Kent in a late but strong mea culpa: I think, though… one thing I regret now was that I made demands on Syd. He’d written ‘See Emily Play’, and suddenly everything had to be seen in commercial terms. I think we may have pressured him into a state of paranoia about having to come up with another hit single.

Barrett’s health quickly declined. All testimonies depicted a flamboyant young man who became dark and literally faded away. Boyd wrote:


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His sparkling eyes had always been is most attractive feature but that night [in May 1967] they were vacant, as if someone had reached inside his head and turned off a switch.

‘Little by little’, the Floyd members were losing their leader. ‘Got to Keep the Loonies on the Path’

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Barrett’s erratic behaviour had become a serious problem for the other members. Because he had lost his power to lead, Pink Floyd could not go on like this. Keeping Barrett meant chaos and a decision had to be taken. Barrett had to leave the band even if a solution à la Beach Boys had been once imagined in which Barrett, like Brian Wilson, would stay home and write while the others toured. They briefly tried a five-member band with Gilmour. Many anecdotes have been reported such as his refusal to appear on Top of the Pops under the pretext that John Lennon did not need to do so, or the infamous rehearsal during which Syd kept on changing the arrangements so that his fellow members had no idea where they stood. He started not turning up for concerts (David O’List from The Nice had to replace him on one occasion). One evening in February 1968, the decision was taken not to pick him up before a show in Southampton. Mason recalls: To recount it as badly as it sounds hardhearted to the point of being cruel – it’s true. The decision was, and we were, completely callous. In the blinkered sense of what we were doing, I thought Syd was simply being bloody-minded and was so exasperated with him, that I could only see the short-term impact he was having on our desire to be a successful band.



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In the spring of 1968 it was decided that Barrett was no longer part of Pink Floyd. In 1971 Waters admitted to Melody Makers (27th March) ‘When he was still in the band in the later stages, we got to the point where anyone was likely to tear his throat out at any minute because he was so impossible…’ Would Syd’s eviction mean the end of the band? This was pretty close. Jenner and King still believed in their protégé’s capacities to get his act together. The idea of splitting the band into two factions was even imagined as Wright said to Mojo in 1994:

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Peter [Jenner] and Andrew [King] thought Syd and I were the musical brains of the group, and that we should form a breakaway band. […] And believe me; I would have left with him like a shot if I had thought Syd could do it.

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To make things worse, Jenner had no trust in Waters’ capacity to lead the band as he admitted to Mojo in 1994: ‘The idea that Roger was going to write the songs and sing them would have made me collapse with laughter, though I might have put money on Rick as the leader’. Happy to have been wrong, Jenner admitted: ‘[Waters and his] giant ego striding across the landscape had the courage to drive Syd out, because he realised that as long as Syd was in the band they wouldn’t keep it together. The chaos factor was too great’. Yet Syd’s departure did not seem to have affected Nick Mason. In the interview the drummer gave me in 2011, he claimed that the decision was not hard to accept both musically and humanly: Although it should have been because we lost our lead guitar-player, we lost our songwriter; we lost our friend, just like that [snapping his fingers]. But because it had been so difficult working with Syd for the previous three, four, five


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months, it was a delight when he went because we couldn’t go back to the attitude we had when we first started which was we wanted to be in this band and we wanted to make this band work.

Yet he admitted that, looking back, it was rather sad because they ‘had no idea how to look after him.’ ‘The Madcap Laughs’

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Trying to get Barrett back on track was not an easy task. In the two years following his eviction, his legend grew. Successively helped by Gilmour, Waters and Wright as well as by the members of Soft Machine – if one excepts Kevin Ayers – and most of all by Malcolm Jones – the young manager of Harvest, the new avant-garde label created by EMI – Barrett produced two albums in a row, which where both beautiful and pathetic, wonderful and yet tainted by the stigmata of his insanity. The Madcap Laughs just like Barrett had both gems and titles for which one could feel he was off his rocker. In 1996, in an interview given to Mark Blake, Richard Wright, who co-produced with Gilmour Barrett, remembers: Doing Syd’s record was interesting, but extremely difficult. Dave and Roger did the first one (The Madcap Laughs) and Dave and myself did the second one. But by then it was just trying to help Syd any way we could, rather than worrying about getting the best guitar sound. You could forget about that! It was just going into the studio and trying to get him to sing. However, I think both of Syd’s albums are an interesting part of history.

Barrett gave a few interviews here and there. Mick Rock’s article in Rolling Stone (December 1971) was pretty straightforward:



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If you tend to believe what you hear, rather than what is, Syd Barrett is either dead, behind bars, or a vegetable. He is in fact alive and as confusing as ever, in the town where he was born, Cambridge. ‘I’m disappearing’, he says, ‘avoiding most things.’ He seems very tense, ill at ease. Hollow-cheeked and pale, his eyes reflect a permanent state of shock. He has a ghostly beauty which one normally associates with poets of old. His hair is short, uncombed, the wavy locks gone. […] ‘I’m sorry I can’t speak very coherently,’ he says, […] occasionally, Syd responds directly to a question. Mostly his answers are fragmented, a stream of consciousness.

A few months earlier, he told Michael Watts of Melody Maker:

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Well, I’m a painter. I was trained as a painter… I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might’ve done… you know, it might have been a tremendous release getting absorbed in painting. Anyway, I’ve been sitting about and writing. The fine arts thing at college was always too much for me to think about. What I was more involved in was being successful at arts school. But it didn’t transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sorts of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger.

His judgement on his departure from the band was also significantly biassed: ‘Why did you leave them?’ Watts asked. To which Barrett answered: It wasn’t really a war. I suppose it was really just a matter of being a little offhand about things. We didn’t feel there was one thing which was going to make the decision at the minute. I mean, we did split up, and there was a lot of trouble. I don’t think The Pink Floyd had any trouble, but I had an awful scene, probably self-inflicted, having a mini and going all over England and things. Still…

Barrett, who had just written two uneven yet touching albums, was now a lost soul. The myth could begin.


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‘Who’s the Fool Who Wears the Crown?’ It’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here And I’m much obliged to you for making it clear That I’m not here. And I never knew we could be so big And I never knew the moon could be so blue And I’m grateful that you threw away my old shoes And brought me here instead dressed in red And I’m wondering who could be writing this song.

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So begins the title on which Syd last sang for the Floyd. Was it a sign that he was partly conscious or ironical or wanted to address a direct message to his fellow members? More significant is the fact that the track was featured at the end of the B-side of the band’s second album. A Saucerful of Secrets was released when Syd had left, taking the form of some sort of adieu, the end of an era since the survival of Pink Floyd was now at stake. Since that, we had at the time a six-way partnership [Waters, Wright, Mason, Barrett, Jenner and King], Roger, Rick and I didn’t even have a majority to claim the band name, and with Syd’s added importance as the main songwriter, his claim was probably stronger. The matter would have to be resolved. (Mason)

On top of that Syd’s departure had, according to Mason, seriously damaged their credibility on the underground music scene. A new chapter was beginning, a dark period filled with uncertainty and forays into various musical directions which were quickly abandoned. Psychedelic music, which had been their hallmark, could not last for ever. Barrett’s problems linked with his drug addiction had a strong impact on the three other members who did trip at least once on acid but, as the 1960s were



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coming to an end, the Floyd returned to a more ‘spacey’ atmosphere than in their psychedelic years. Even though Waters claimed in an interview with Philippe Constantin that talking about Space Rock was just bullshit, the piece of music commissioned by the BBC to illustrate the moon landing of Apollo 11, the one featuring Neil Armstrong and his ‘giant leap for mankind’, gave them that other direction they needed. The period between Barrett’s eviction and the dawn of The Dark Side of the Moon was ultra-creative; their quest took them into various directions, producing music for films, ballet and generally experimenting, taking part in various collaborations. Yet one question remained: which one of them would be crazy enough to wear the crown of the deposed king? Andrew King described Waters as ‘invisible’, in Syd’ shadow – Nick and Rick suffered from this too – while Waters remained the one everybody could rely on when it came to logistics as King said, ‘Roger was always the “organisation”. He would be the one you went to for sorting out practical issues’. One can therefore understand Waters’ sometimes extreme reactions expressed in the 1970s: ‘You see, I’m fed up with Syd. The Floyd started working when I took care of it’, said Waters in 1980. Fed up with Barrett? If Waters was the one who assumed their songwriter’s eviction, Jenner indicated that Waters always felt guilty about it, a guilt which affected him and his work deeply. Barrett’s shadow continued to loom large over the Floyd in the 1970s, culminating in the apparition of a fat bald man both real and ghostly, who carried a plastic bag, and came to haunt the recording sessions of Wish You Were Here.


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Should one give credit to such reports? In 1976, Waters, interviewed by Philippe Constantin on Europe 1, answered the question of why he had described Barrett as an ‘ugly, empty man, unable to create’: ‘I’m fed up with all that, the fact that everyone has an opinion on Syd which would have never been the case if he hadn’t had success or if we hadn’t’. This ambivalent feeling, which is characteristic of Waters, shows how hard the break-up really was. If one can wonder how the band survived with Barrett beyond London psychedelic underground, one cannot deny the fact that Barrett’s fall was Waters’ rise, an unexpected opportunity for him, who might well have been waiting for that one moment when his talent would be revealed. ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’, the first song he wrote, was released on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and is generally considered as the weakest on the album. Nonetheless it signalled towards future developments for Waters, with his propensity for sarcasm and even cynicism, which became evident as early as 1968 in ‘Caporal Clegg’. Easy for him to claim that the Floyd started working once he had taken over. If he was indeed Mister Organisation, with Barrett gone, Waters found himself in direct creative competition with Richard Wright. Perhaps each one’s contribution balanced the other’s. Still the balance is broken when one examines the set-lists of the concerts. There Waters clearly comes out best. ‘Paint Box’, the B-side of the single ‘Apples and Oranges’ and the last one in the Barrett-led era, was not well received. ‘It Would Be So Nice’, also released as a single – with ‘Julia Dream’, another Waters title on the B side – was another failure. Mason was incapable of playing



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‘Remember a Day’, leaving Norman Smith to be the drummer during the recording sessions. ‘See Saw’ was long rehearsed under the unflattering name ‘The Most Boring Song I’ve Ever Heard Bar Two’. None of them was played live. However, if ‘Let There Be More Light’ was only played for a few months, ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, composed and even played live during the Barrett-led era, became a signature which the band took up again and again until the success of Dark Side. The live record Ummagumma did not include any music signed by Wright. It featured two collective works, ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ and ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’, a Barrett title, ‘Astronomy Domine’, and Waters’ piece ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’. All this is dominated by Wright’s omnipresent organ. In 1987, Waters answered Chris Salewicz: I’m sure you would get arguments about that from the other ‘boys’, but I simply took responsibility, largely because no-one else seemed to want to do it, and that is graphically illustrated by the fact that I started to write most of the material from then on.

This statement needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. To this Waters added: ‘I’m perfectly happy being a leader. In fact, I know I can be an oppressive personality because I bubble with ideas and schemes, and in a way, it was easier for the others simply to go along with me’. So, by sheer luck or because none of the others questioned his position, he became the leader of the band. The Pink Floyd’s discography between 1968 and 1970 shows a band at its peak in terms of experimentation. On The Piper at the Gates of


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Dawn, Norman Smith took great care to round out all the rough edges, which was his job. On A Saucerful of Secrets however, the producer gave up while recording the eponymous title. If More featured a few songs such as ‘Green Is the Color’ or ‘Cymbaline’, one must admit that the studio project of Ummagumma advanced one step further. In 1970, Atom Heart Mother, though perhaps less excessive, was an opportunity for the band to test the limits of experimentation. One could of course view the situation from another angle and claim that the music industry let the Floyd do whatever they wanted. These albums show that a band could both experiment and sell records at the same time. Even though the Pink Floyd members call them transition albums and might pretend that the key step leading to Meddle then Dark Side was first and foremost A Saucerful of Secrets, the sales show that the music industry almost gave them a free hand because there was both an audience and a market. Ummagumma, which was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros in France, was ranked number five in the British charts. It became the band’s first album to make it to the US Top 100 (ranked 74th), where it remained for twenty-seven weeks in a row. As for Atom Heart Mother, which was unfairly denigrated by most of the Floyd members, it became number one in the UK and was ranked number fifty-five in the US charts. These albums made the Floyd’s reputation and naturally led to Meddle and Dark Side in which the pure experimental aspect is more strictly controlled and better integrated. As Mason remembered, between 1968 and 1972, there was always an insatiable appetite for new material. Through all of ‘69, what we were trying to do was build a



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repertoire that didn’t include Syd’s stuff, so we weren’t reliant on it. What’s interesting is how much work we managed to get through in that period, because both Barbet Schroeder film soundtracks [More and Obscured by Clouds] were albums in their own right. And one of them [Obscured] was done more or less at the same time as Dark Side. So you look back at it and think, ‘Not only did we put out all this work, but we were also touring.’ I think we had a real appetite for getting on with things.

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All the documents available for consultation show that Waters was a real conductor during that key period, giving instructions during rehearsals, so to speak ‘directing’ the improvised sequences while on stage. He asserted his leadership and was recognized in this role by his partners. Even Gilmour in an interview in 2001 with Télérama admitted that, when Syd left, ‘It changed him [Waters] completely. Roger used to be in Syd’s shadow and then he had to step in. He was a brilliant and quite determined man: he took upon himself to save the band’. This was a responsibility that Gilmour, as a newcomer, could not yet undertake. Did Wright miss his chance? Mason seemed to think so too. The successive failures met by the singles in which Wright’s songs were prominent partly account for Wright’s decision to step down, though, as Waters did for ‘Apples and Oranges’, Mason blamed Norman Smith’s production work rather than the songs. He noted: Rick was writing, but he’d been responsible for a couple of failed singles; there was nothing wrong with the songs but they’d been very Norman Smith-treated with harmony and backing vocals on them. They certainly weren’t the direction we felt comfortable going in. And so I think Roger seized the bit and got on with it. He knocked out ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, which, for me, 50-odd years later,


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is still one of my favourite Pink Floyd songs. It’s still a great song to play.

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Whether his decision not to become the leader was voluntary or not, Wright’s contribution was a major one. With the 1970s beginning, the Floyd’ sound was changing, leaning towards Gilmour’s guitar now interacting with Wright’s keyboards, which would create a strong atmosphere until Animals. Robert Wyatt remarked on this: ‘The way Rick created a sort of aurora borealis of harmonies around the Floyd was a very underestimated feature in what made them so distinct. He gave this wonderful backdrop to play on’. With the advent of the new decade, Pink Floyd moved into a different dimension.


Chapter 2: Riding the Gravy Train

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The world success of Dark Side, two years after Meddle, released in November 1971, may have eclipsed the latter. Even if Meddle did not have the perfect balance of its successor and was still playing on the duality already present in Atom Heart Mother, the record’s B-side included only one title, ‘Echoes’, while the A-side was a collection of songs. From Meddle to Dark Side, the Floyd forged their sound for the seventies. According to Gilmour, ‘After two years we had become excellent on stage but we had to wait for the album Meddle and the title “Echoes” to see the Floyd master the work done in studio’. Though the members of the band consider Meddle as the real key album, it only ranked 3rd in Britain and 70th in the US charts, thus doing worse than its predecessor. Obscured by Clouds was the original soundtrack of the French movie La Vallée by Barbet Schroeder, who had already asked the Floyd to work on More three years earlier. It was more successful in America, where it was ranked forty-sixth on the Billboard while only sixth in the UK. Pink Floyd were now regularly


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Riding the Gravy Train

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in the British top 10 and the American top 100. They had to try to be as good in the US as they were in the UK and dreamt of being number one. At the time, Waters’ favourite era, the Floyd were still a united band. ‘We still had a common goal which was to become rich and famous’, as Waters said, and the goal was soon to be reached. The concept underlying Dark Side was initiated at the end of 1971. Meddle had just been released and the band, buoyant with creative energy, was already back to work writing an album which would be, as Roger Waters put it, ‘an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out’. The album was built around recycled titles: ‘Us and Them’ was a remastered version of Wright’s ‘The Violent Sequence’, which was initially composed for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point though later refused. ‘Brain Damage’ was born during the recording sessions of Meddle. The central section of ‘Money’ was probably the result of jam sessions which also gave birth to ‘Moonhead’, a title composed on the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The album is also based on two major chords, Em and A, in ‘Breathe’ thus creating a sort of harmonic unity which probably emerged from jam sessions. They are transposed in the middle of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. ‘Any Color You Like’ is just another reading of ‘Breathe’, without lyrics and played one tone lower. Minimal new material and recycled titles form the basis of The Dark Side of the Moon. The album is a model in terms of construction, balance and dynamic. The sequence of titles is close to perfection. On the B-side, ‘Us and Them’, with its alternation of soft verses and dynamic refrains, is almost like an inverted mirror of ‘Time’ with its


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dynamic verses and soft refrains. The album flowed on so naturally and continuously that Benoît Feller of Rock & Folk could write: ‘the music flows so fast that sometimes one can wonder if it’s not a 45 rpm’. How can one explain such a success? It can probably be attributed to the music itself, the quality of the production – back in the 1970s when vinyl was still king, the Floyd were seen as the perfect band to test hi-fi stereos – and to the choice in timbre. The integration of female backing vocals, with their soul vibe, might have been a decisive factor in conquering America. The other key element was the universality of the concept which is still appreciated today, some forty-five years later. However, making good music is not enough to sell millions of copies. Mass consumption implies astute business and that role was played by Bhaskar Menon, the man directly responsible for Pink Floyd’s conquest of the American market. Since the British Invasion led by The Beatles, the conquest of America had been the supreme goal. The Floyd and their entourage complained that their American label, Capitol, was not trying hard enough to promote the band. Bhaskar Menon had just taken over as the head of Capitol in the US and for once the company launched a huge promotional campaign. Menon also decided to release a shorter version of ‘Money’ with ‘Any Colour You Like’ on the B-side despite the band’s reluctance to do 45 rpms. ‘Us and Them’, with ‘Time’ on the B-side, was later released as a second single. Nick Mason has long credited Menon for the success of the Dark Side of the Moon: The story in America was a disaster, in that we really hadn’t sold records… And so they [Capitol Records]


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brought in a man called Bhaskar Menon who was absolutely terrific. He decided he was going to make this work, and make the American company sell [Dark Side]. […] Without Bhaskar, the record would have done better than the others, but certainly wouldn’t have picked up the momentum it did.

Menon admitted he did all he could for the record to be a success in America:

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The one thing that, I, myself, personally concentrated on most was to ensure that during those heady post-release weeks and months, no one working for the record company, including myself, had any other priority in life – personal or professional – which matched the objectives we had set for the triumph of The Dark Side of the Moon. […] Our relationships with the performers were excellent as it was with the highly talented manager, the late Steve O’Rourke. Without their cooperation, Capitol/EMI could never have done what it took to satisfy the adulation for the talent of Pink Floyd whose personalities, sensibilities and principles were as consummate as the music. I cannot recall any differences in opinion.

Not only was Menon the Floyd’s efficient promoter in America, he was the saviour of Capitol/EMI. In an article published in 1978 the New Musical Express noted: ‘Within a year he had turned Capitol’s $15 million loss into a profit. His motto for his employees was simple: “Uncompromising excellence in what you do goes without saying. We expect more than that”’. Despite the effort, the Floyd transferred their interests to Columbia. Money came flowing in for the Floyd and their record company. For Waters, however, being a left-wing man who was about to denounce the system even more, the question was raised: what could he do with all that money coming in? In 1987, he said to Chris Salewicz: ‘You go


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‘Bitter Love’

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through this thing where you think of all the good you could do with it by giving it away. But, in the end, you decide to keep it!’ In 2003, he declared to Libération: ‘I remember the week the album entered the charts. It was an important moment when I had to decide if I was to keep the money or not, if I was to become a capitalist…’ In Libération, Etienne Roda-Gil wrote: ‘Roger has a cold look on society. He knows that once you reach a certain stage, making money in the music industry is the best way to become a jerk. He protects himself’. 25% of his gains went to a charity. As for the rest. Waters said: ‘Dark Side finished the Pink Floyd off once and for all. To be that successful is the aim of every group. And once you’ve cracked it, it’s all over. In hindsight, I think the Pink Floyd was finished as long ago as that’.

Money attracts money. In 1974, enjoying their international success, the Floyd’s members were slightly lazy creatively speaking. A brief tour through France was an occasion for the public to hear a few new titles leading to Wish You Were Here and Animals. There was, however, an incident, which today would not shock anyone. Contacted by the drink company Gini to appear on their advertising campaign, the deal seemed simple enough: the Floyd would be photographed in the Moroccan desert. The band’s image would be associated with the brand and, in exchange, Gini would become the sponsor of the tour. The fans, however, did not see it that way. They saw their band, once symbolising the underground scene with the members singing raging verses against the world of finance, now selling their souls to the devil for silly money contracts. The Floyd found itself


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trapped by that ‘fucking drink’, as Gilmour would have put it. That deal, supposedly a win-win situation, was a fiasco. The Floyd had probably forgotten to read the fine print on the contract specifying they would be surrounded by a bunch of girls and boys, ‘strangely dressed […] on their choppers Easy Rider style’. This was a far cry from the unobtrusive image favoured by the members. Even if Waters had insisted that the money was to be given to charity, the band’s aura was tainted. The Floyd did their best to justify the whole operation and apologized to try to smooth things down as Wright explained:

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Gini almost forced us to do it, threatening us, contract and all. But you’ve got to go back to the beginning to understand it. Steve (our manager) was sitting on the beach when a guy came and asked for a picture of the Floyd for advertising for Gini. Steve said: ‘Ok, that’ll be £50,000.’ And with one thing leading to another we ended up with an advertising contract without being aware of it because we weren’t there. Steve was our manager and was taking care of the financial aspect of the band. Did he make a mistake? Sure. Soon afterward, we realized it had tarnished our image and got people frustrated. So we decided to give the money to handicapped children, a matter we had come to really care for. So, in the end, we didn’t earn any money out of the tour but the issue of the contract remained. We were supposed to give a series of concerts in France but only according to our schedule. And then, those guys from Gini came and insisted the tour had to take place in spring. Nothing was ready; our next record would only be released six months later and was being made. The result? A dull show with no originality because we were just playing old tracks and only two new ones…

To which Waters sarcastically added: We’re no heroes and we’re no saints. The only good thing with that stupid advertising is that the ridiculous image we had of being respectable monks spreading pieces of music


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here and there was destroyed. Today, people have realized we are but men who can be mean, greedy, egoist and that what we were doing was music.

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The incident inspired Waters to write a song, ‘Bitter Love’, also known as ‘How Do You Feel?’ The French tour took place in June and the band visited Colmar, Poitiers, Toulouse and Dijon. It had three nights in Paris. Benoît Feller wrote in Rock & Folk: ‘Three times, The Palais des Sports [in Paris] will be packed and, with such a show, no one in attendance will care if there are Gini signs hence annihilating the band’s secret fears’. Much ado about nothing. Burning Bridges

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The rivalry between Gilmour – who ended up imposing himself against Wright as the second in command in the band – and Waters was already latent very early on. Gilmour evoked this in the film interviews shot by Adrian Maben for the second version of Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii. Mason summed up this rivalry which was only in the domain of art saying that ‘It was Dave’s desire to make music versus Roger’s desire to make a show’. ‘Up to that point’, Gilmour agreed, ‘there was some sort of democracy’, while the mix of The Dark Side of the Moon had already led the group to call for a third man, Chris Thomas, who was to arbitrate between the options defended by the different musicians. Gilmour’s dissatisfaction, despite the huge success of the album, had been clearly expressed by the guitarist. Considering that the Floyd had been creatively trapped with Dark Side and that music should now prevail, Gilmour said: ‘I wanted to make the next


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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’. Music was going to be given more importance in Wish You Were Here than in Dark Side. Gilmour felt that he was being left behind by Waters who led the band with his lyrics, a situation which caused several clashes. Blake revealed that in 1974 Nick Sedgwick, born in Cambridge and Waters’ friend, and Storm Thorgerson were writing a book on the Floyd and submitted the first chapters to the band. Waters recalls:

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It was fascinating. Dave read it and said, ‘Yeah’, and then, a couple of days later, he just exploded […] because it didn’t fit with how he thought of himself and his role in the band. It described me as the leader. So the whole book was suppressed.

Even if, according to Thorgerson, pretending that Gilmour was responsible for the suppression of this book is an exaggeration, it was never published. The tensions were taking their toll on the band and Waters would have preferred to see them breaking out into the open. He even suggested that, using the model of Dark Side which featured spoken texts scattered in various places, they might record their quarrels and include them in their new album. ‘For me, I would have liked to hear tracks on which we shouted at each other, parts of conversations during studio recordings’, Waters told Philippe Constantin while paradoxically refuting any leadership within the band. ‘It’s irrelevant’, he said, ‘you know the answer anyway as everybody does. We’re against leaders under any circumstances’. The Floyd tried to reactivate a project named Household Objects on which they had worked for


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three or four years. The instruments would have been plain everyday objects such as rubber bands, shoes or ‘singing glasses’. This did not work. Motivation seemed at a record low. Wish You Were Here was hard to deliver and some of the members’ capabilities were even questioned. And, as ‘Time’ (on Dark Side) expresses it so aptly, ‘then one day you find ten years have got behind you …’ Mason recalled that ‘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’. Waters was frustrated by what he considered as lack of motivation on the part of the other members, except perhaps in the case of Gilmour. According to him,

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We were there, four poor old guys, left with no soul; waiting for God knew what [...]. I was the only one coming with new tracks, including one that Dave should have liked considering he added to it a few nice chords: ‘You’ve Got to Be Crazy’; but Nick and Rick disliked them: too violent, too personal according to them... Ok then, why are we here together if two of us want to play music and the other two not so much?

The crisis had reached a point where a break-up had been evoked but not quite envisaged. In 1974, Waters remarked: I was for radical measures: either we would stop right away, while we were on top so to speak, or find a decent solution and work hard. Then, some sort of fear and pettiness came: how could we break up while money was coming in like crazy! That explains the tensions, the compromises. We would go on yes, but with no pleasure and deeply hurt inside [...] It was just plain sad. I would have liked a fight, that’s the way I am...


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This time, greed prevented a disaster for the band. It only took a few years before Waters had to face this major conflict which he had long expected and perhaps wished for. According to Gilmour, up until The Wall, the conflicts within the band had positive effects on their creation. The situation grew more acrimonious during the shooting of The Wall and the making of The Final Cut. At that stage, the tensions alone held Pink Floyd together; there remained no feeling of brotherhood or friendship between them; their only reason for staying together was this entity called Pink Floyd. This appears clearly in the lyrics of Wish You Were Here. Dark Side was no doubt the beginning of the end. In which direction could they move on to once all their goals had been reached? When he brought out his first solo album, Gilmour did not hesitate to declare ‘The best time of my life is without the Floyd’. Yet he added: ‘It is obvious we loved playing together. But we had been doing it for years, over ten years, and by then we didn’t want to spend all our time working together. We all have personal interests we want to pursue’. For Waters though, the situation left a far more bitter taste in his mouth: I realised that sometimes we were just there physically. Our bodies were there but our minds were elsewhere. And we were only there because this music made us live and live well or because it had become a habit to be in Pink Floyd and work that way.

Waters had expressed this lassitude before; in 1970, he declared to Melody Maker that he was ‘bored with most of the stuff we’ve done. I’m bored with most of the stuff we play!’, which did not prevent him from establishing himself as the only alternative.


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Wish You Were Here was an excellent album, arguably the Floyd’s best production in the 1970s, though rougher than Dark Side and slightly different in terms of construction. Music is given more importance and the lyrics, which appear to be deeper than in the previous album, express the void experienced by the musicians, while tracks such as ‘Welcome to the Machine’ or ‘Have a Cigar’ are full of sarcasm and even cynicism. Musically speaking, Gilmour reached his pinnacle, definitely leaving his mark on the Floyd’s music with ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’, one of the four or five most popular Pink Floyd solos among guitarists, along with ‘Money’, ‘Comfortably Numb’ and ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)’. Released in 1977, Animals included titles dating back to 1974. It had no backing vocals or guests, just the four members of the band, as if to confirm Waters’ authority on the group. While the punk movement had brought rock back to more basic and straightforward compositions, Animals, which still retained what formed the essence of the Floyd’s music – that is to say their long musical parts and Gilmour’s guitar solos – made it possible for Waters to express his rage in ‘Sheep’ and ‘Pigs (Three different ones)’ through the way he sang ‘Sheep’ as well as through the lyrics. Gilmour played a major part in the composition; he was the author of the music for ‘Dogs’, which almost takes up the whole of the A-side. Yet the entire B-side is signed by Waters. As for Wright, who gave here one of his most brilliant performances with the introduction to ‘Sheep’, he is not credited with any composition. Waters’ supremacy was now more and more evident. ‘To disagree, one must have an


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alternative to offer and I don’t have Waters’ writing talent’, Gilmour admitted. Animals, which is even rougher than Wish You Were Here though equally brilliant, was easier to make than the previous album. Yet the tensions remained. The following tour, perhaps one of the band’s best if one considers the number of bootlegs, ended in a sad way. Frustrated by the spectators in the stadiums who were unwilling to sit down and listen with devotion, Waters spat in the face of a fan during the last show in Montreal and Gilmour refused to go back on stage for the encore. The Floyd were yet again on the verge of breaking up. When in 1978 the band met to start a new project, only Waters came with two more or less finished pieces, one of them being The Wall.1 Though Gilmour declared in 1978 that ‘individually, we can all make it without Pink Floyd’, none of the Floyd’s members could do without the others – certainly not Gilmour – or without the now convenient name Pink Floyd. The rest of their adventures confirmed the fact that it was difficult for these musicians who treasured their near anonymous status to abandon a name which guaranteed a comfortable situation. The Wall had a mixed reception. Waters’ work was considered megalomaniac by some and a real masterpiece by others. This album is only superficially that of a group. Richard Wright was fired before the end of the recording and unlike in Animals, many guests and guitarists contributed. The Wall remains the album of a band which was only considered by 1. For the story of The Wall you may refer to Philippe Gonin, The Wall, Le Mot et le Reste, 2015.


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the press as a greedy and almost empty monster. Yesterday’s heroes are today’s villains. By the end of the 1970s, it was common practice within the musical press to bash veteran stars since punk rock had swept away almost everything and progressive rock was no longer the order of the day. Lionel Rotcage concluded his article on the Floyd’s concerts in London on a harsh yet sadly appropriate tone:

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And what about Pink Floyd in all that? Who? What? You mean the shareholders of a record company under EMI licence in the UK and CBS in the US? The conglomerate? Oh, no! I get it now! You mean the band we used to listen in the 1970s, right? I don’t know! And I sure don’t wanna know…

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Chapter 3: Pink Isn’t Well…

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The Wall: All in All It’s Just Ego in the Wall

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The tour In the Flesh ended in July 1977 on this sad note. Undoubtedly, the band needed a break and, for the fellow members, 1978 meant going solo. Gilmour and Wright each produced solo albums which showed what impact they had individually made on the group. The critical reception was good for David Gilmour while Wright’s Wet Dream had a few unjustified and unfair criticisms. As for Mason, he too worked on a solo album which turned out to be a disguised Carla Bley album, all a question of money again as he explained: Fictitious Sports was really made as a Nick Mason solo album because the record company was prepared to fund a Nick Mason solo album but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s really songs of Carla Bley played by Nick Mason and Carla Bley, and it was a really good way of making a record I wanted to make.

These solo experiences, which had become more and more frequent since 1974, highlight the fact that


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Pink Isn’t Well…

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the atmosphere within the band was suffocating. Mason produced Rock Bottom for Robert Wyatt, Green by Steve Hillage and… Music for Pleasure by punk band The Damned. Gilmour produced the band Unicorn, helped to get Kate Bush started and participated in various other albums… Waters kept himself busy too. He composed part of the original soundtrack for a documentary on René Magritte by Adrian Maben. The Floyd’s image ‘a united band never showing individualities’, as a Best journalist wrote, was crumbling. A rather laconic Gilmour answered: ‘It’s your conception of the band and the public’s conception. We’re not concerned with it. We’re just four people who sometimes get together to work while doing whatever we want the rest of the time’. The Floyd now appeared as an empty shell, just a financial enterprise with no artistic future. However, an unforeseen financial event took place. Since Dark Side the band had earned an enormous amount of money which needed to be managed in order to make a profit even though some members reserved a portion of it for charity. By the end of the 1970s, 83% of all the band’s income was taxed by the Labour government. To try and avoid this they decided to invest some of their money in various funds and they resorted to the services of Norton Warburg, a financial consulting company which turned out to be crooks. The investments made were catastrophic and the band members almost went bankrupt. They needed to get back on a sound financial footing and at the same time to avoid paying huge taxes on money they did not own any more. Tax exile – the same that pushed The Rolling Stones to settle on the French Riviera – was the only solution


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and this partly explains why the Floyd came to France to record The Wall and, according to Waters, to try to get some cash to pay their tax bill. Must one then come to the conclusion that The Wall was labelled Pink Floyd and not Roger Waters for financial reasons, the only way for the band to get some financial balance and clear their debts? Things might not be as simple as that and, to this day, the members have different opinions. There may be another reason which also has to do with financial preoccupations. It is not so much linked with their personal situation as bankrupt musicians as with the cost of a project whose ambition was unequalled in the world of rock: The Wall, a gigantic scenic enterprise, involved building a wall made of cardboard bricks for forty-five minutes, playing behind it for yet another forty-five minutes and eventually destroying it. It was to be released as an album and a film. Without the Pink Floyd label, Waters could not have found the funds for this enormous project. It took a year for the album to come out and EMI had to pressure the band to get it before Christmas time 1979, urging the band by talking… money. Waters finally obtained Wright’s departure, accusing him of being too lax. Global success followed with the release of a single (they had regularly refused to produce a single since ‘Point Me at the Sky’) named ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)’. On top of that, both the single and the album were banned on radios in South Africa, which pleased Waters. The album became one of the best sales for the Floyd, just behind The Dark Side of the Moon. After repeatedly calling them a dying band (a Best article was entitled ‘The End of a Legend’) the press was proved wrong.


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The Machine was still working, at least on the surface. The Wall remains a key album within the Floyd’s discography. It also demonstrates how far Waters’ ego propelled the band. Almost everything was signed by Waters and if Bob Ezrin had not come into play as a producer, it would not have featured a few of Gilmour’s titles including the amazing ‘Comfortably Numb’. The Canadian producer put some order in Waters’ muddled ideas, in his obsessions with castrating mothers and wives, oppressive systems, the war, his dad, Syd Barrett, himself, etc... Gilmour tried to keep an eye on the production but Waters maintained his total control on the raw piece. Were they still a band considering the number of guests and additional musicians? Even the rhythm guitars were sometimes played by other musicians than Gilmour. What the Floyd were recording was just signed Waters, a far cry from the tight group in Animals. With The Wall, Waters was putting on a show like never before. The Final Cut

The Floyd reached a point of no return with The Final Cut, Waters’ last album with the band. Looking back on it, this album was, even more than The Wall, Waters’ creation played by Pink Floyd. Waters composed every single piece. Once Wright had been fired, Mason did not finish the album and Gilmour was nothing but a sidekick and refused to be credited as a producer, without however giving up his royalties. In the meantime, Gilmour released a second solo album, About Face, produced by Ezrin in a format suitable for FM radios. The album only reached the twenty-first position in the British charts and the


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thirty-second in the US. Though this was honourable, it could not be counted as a success, which might have marked the end of the Floyd. Despite Gilmour’s denial, one cannot help thinking that About Face was some kind of a test, considering the enormous logistics involved in the production and the organisation of a world tour. In 2006, he claimed in Mojo ‘I’d always made clear to them, Roger included, that it was my intention to carry on’. One may not be totally convinced imagining Gilmour, who made a fool of himself in the grotesque promotional video for the single ‘Blue Light’, with an alternative plan just in case of failure. Waters did a bit better with The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, a project he had around the time of The Wall. It was ranked 13th in the UK and number 31st in America. Still it remained a mixed success by comparison with The Final Cut, which, despite not being Pink Floyd’s best, was number one almost everywhere in Europe and number six on the Billboard. The cover of The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, designed by Scarfe, showed a back view of a naked woman hitch hiking. This was censured in some countries with the addition of a large black square covering her behind. According to Waters, The record sold six hundred thousand copies. But the Hitchhiker tour sold appallingly in Europe. Even in London I had to use almost all the money in advertising to get people to buy tickets. I cancelled loads of shows. And my budget was based on selling out loads of shows. So I was about four hundred grand down at the end.

Though the reception varied depending on the country visited, Waters’ and Gilmour’s tours did not meet with the success they expected. Their 1984 confrontation was a tie.


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What were they missing? Because they deliberately refused to communicate, shunned the press and stayed comfortably hidden behind the Floyd label (during The Wall concerts, they had stage doubles wearing masks to represent the band’s members in the opening part) the names Waters and Gilmour remained relatively unknown and did not attract a large public. Despite the success of The Wall, Waters was deeply frustrated. Though he had been behind the concepts underlying The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, the public remained unenthusiastic. Philippe Constantin, a friend of Waters’, summed this up:

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In people’s eyes, in France, Pink Floyd were Gilmour and Mason. In the USA, it was Wright. Nowhere and never Waters! […] Waters took credit for the Floyd’ success. That was the time of Animals and the time he had a new wife. She was a sort of Linda McCartney, without the money, and was very much attracted to power. She immediately knew that the genius behind the band was Waters.

The Yoko One syndrome (even though Constantin is referring to Linda here) also affected Gilmour twenty years later when his wife, Polly Samson, became his songwriter. This phenomenon turned Waters into an inaccessible rock star as Constantin recalled: In New York, he was the only one with a police escort twenty-four seven while he had said over and over again that he would never be like Jagger, within a star system, but after the amazing success of The Dark Side of the Moon, he drowned into it…

Gilmour steered away from the Floyd’s characteristics to offer an album with a sound which was soon outdated while Waters brought out an album tailor-made for the


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Floyd which probably suffered from Gilmour’s absence – his voice, his sound. In the end, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, which was not all that different from The Wall or The Final Cut, seemed to be a Pink Floyd album without Pink Floyd. Even Clapton, an amazing guest star on Waters’ album, could not replace Gilmour. Waters had taken his decision and resigned from the band in 1985. Without their leader, Pink Floyd had ceased to exist and Roger Waters could now show to the music world that Pink Floyd was him and him alone. Meanwhile, Wright had joined Dave Harris, a former member of a band called Fashion, and released, under the name Zee, an album called Identity, full of Fairlight CMI, which he was soon to reject saying that ‘Zee was a disaster. That was an experimental mistake but at the time I was completely lost!’ The single ‘Confusion’, an extract from the album, was a complete failure and that was the end of it. At the same time, Gilmour was playing as guest guitarist alongside with Grace Jones, Kate Bush, Brian Ferry or The Dream Academy… but had not given up yet. ‘A Momentary Lapse of Reason?’ In the mid-1980s, Waters had left for good yet Gilmour did not think the Floyd was over. As he said to Télérama, ‘when Roger Waters took off for good, before claiming that the band was over, I became the unfortunate leader. But it was never my goal; I just resented the fact that the Floyd was down to just Roger’s own persona and ideas’. Gilmour, who in 2008 said to Mojo, ‘Yes I’m pig-headed, but often your best characteristics can also be your worst’, recalled Waters


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telling him: ‘“You’ll never fucking get it together!” Possibly not the sort of thing you say to me. I can get determined and stubborn at times’. Furthermore, Gilmour pretended to Télérama that perpetuating the Floyd without Waters was a way for Wright to have his own back: What he [Richard Wright] brought to the table was fundamental and little by little he was pushed out. Without him, Pink Floyd wasn’t the same. I missed him. That’s why I continued in 1986, after having parted ways with Waters. Nick Mason too. He could not play as he used to. A Momentary Lapse of Reason was meant to boost those two broken men.

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Easy for him to say considering that Wright had been fired from the recording sessions of The Wall and simply paid as an employee for the concerts. Wright was not even on the picture alongside Gilmour and Mason due to contractual reasons linked to his past eviction and his name was written in smaller print. A sarcastic Waters told Penthouse that Gilmour had confessed he needed Wright to gain the public’s trust and feel like Pink Floyd. Mason did not really play on an album filled with drum machine and produced by studio sharks such as Jim Keltner and Carmine Appice mentioned in the credits. One might believe in Gilmour’s kindness but resurrecting the Floyd was, besides its effect on Gilmour’s ego, a matter of money again. A specific clause in the CBS contract stated that the band had to deliver a new album before a specific deadline. Beyond that point, the music label could freeze any royalties indefinitely. Such a situation could not suit the band and the 1978 financial disaster kept on haunting them. In an interview for the magazine Uncut in 2004, he declared: ‘They forced me to


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resign from the band because, if I hadn’t, the financial repercussions would have wiped me out completely’. Needless to say that Gilmour and Mason, the other members, were not comfortable with this clause and were ready to sue Waters, stating that his refusal to produce a new album with the band would result in financial losses. The media, of course, chose their side and both Gilmour and Waters bore the cost, as Gilmour admitted to Télérama in 2001:

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I would lie to you if I told you I’m ok with what was said and printed. They called me greedy, abusing the poor Nick Mason and Rick Wright. […] A Momentary Lapse of Reason, in 1987, at least helped rebuild them. Just for that, I don’t like when someone attacks me on keeping the Floyd alive. I did it alone, by duty, not for money.

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Can one call Gilmour a philanthropist? Admittedly in other circumstances he proved he could be generous. His merits were recognized when Queen Elisabeth II made him Commander of the British Empire. Still one may doubt the fact that financial considerations played no part in his decision. Waters was very unhappy with the circumstances of the divorce: I don’t think I was that megalomaniac tyrant people have so many times accused me of being […]. I feel I was more a victim of insidious propaganda meant to comfort the people I was working with. It’s never easy being part of a band with such a creative and dominant persona like mine. Objectively, I was doing the two-thirds of the work. Undeniably, the others had to feel a bit humiliated.

Initially justice ruled in favour of Waters but he lost in the appeal. There was no reason why Gilmour could not keep the Floyd alive. Gilmour/Floyd: 1 – Waters: 0.


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To get the Machine started again, Gilmour could not claim he was alone. Joining forces with Mason meant that a majority of the members were ready to revive what Waters thought he had extinguished when he resigned. In fact, Mason had to admit that A Momentary Lapse of Reason was not really a band album: ‘A Momentary Lapse of Reason was made under juris […] I think to give us confidence we brought a lot of musicians in but it’s not the best way of doing a band record…’ And if the rumour was true, in case the record did not sell, one could always pretend it was one of Gilmour’ solo albums. Just as for About Face, the producer was Ezrin and the result is an illusion of Pink Floyd. As he had done for his previous solo album, Gilmour had resorted to a number of collaborators not only for the recording but also for the writing of an album which bears the signature of Ezrin (who never forgot to insert his name in the credits), Phil Manzanera (who used to be with Roxy Music and composed ‘One Slip’, which was supposed to be the hit in the album) and Pat Leonard. Gilmour composed ‘Sorrow’, which later became a standard on stage. In an interview with Mojo, Gilmour insisted: Both Nick and Rick were catatonic in terms of their playing ability. […] Neither of them played on this at all really […]. Nick played a few tom-toms on one track, but for the rest I had to get in other drummers. Rick played some tiny little parts. For a lot of it, I played the keyboards and pretended it was him. The record was basically made by me, and other people and God knows what.

Mason enjoyed the recording sessions on Gilmour’s houseboat close to London but the American sessions with so many guests led him to question his future with the Floyd. Wright was just on


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payroll, $11,000 a week, as Waters revealed, but got his royalties, although ‘not as many as Dave and Nick’, according to Wright. Bringing in Wright as an employee and paying him a comfortable amount of money was not motivated by stringent contractual terms or just lack of musical competence. Financial considerations were too important for Gilmour and Mason to welcome the return of their former pal. As Gilmour said, ‘To be honest, Nick and I didn’t particularly want to get in extra partners – we had put up all the money and taken the biggest risks, and so we wanted to take the largest cut’. Mason even had to sell his 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO. Whether they liked it or not, with The Wall, Waters had led the Floyd almost as high as with Dark Side. The double album reached the first place on the Billboard and so did ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)’, the Floyd’s only single to reach that ranking. According to Gilmour, ‘there was some lack of confidence within the record company’, Gilmour said, but it seemed that the spies sent to the Astoria, Gilmour’s floating studio, came back reassured for want of being fully convinced. What was expected of them now was to produce Floyd music regardless of leadership or anything else. Now Waters had started referring to his former mates as ‘the muffins’ and he called this album ‘quite a clever forgery’. One is tempted to agree with him there. However, forgery or not, the album was a success and ranked number three, both in the UK and in the US, just as Animals had done, better than The Final Cut while on the other hand the single ‘Learning to Fly’ hardly reached the seventieth place in America. A Momentary Lapse of Reason was in fact an honest album, no matter whether it was real Floyd or


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not. The Floyd’s signature and their label were enough for it to be successful. However today, like About Face, it seems very dated, which Gilmour admitted to Mojo: ‘Like most people, we got trapped in this 80s thing. We were a bit too thrilled with all this technology that was being thrown at us’. In the end, the name Pink Floyd served Gilmour well. Waters produced two new albums even though he was entangled in judicial procedures which he eventually lost. The first one was When the Wind Blows, a soundtrack for an animated film, is a minor work. The other titles were borrowed from Bowie’s repertoire (Bowie had been approached but he eventually decided not to write an original score), from Genesis, Squeeze, Hugh Cornwell and Paul Hardcastle. It was followed shortly after by Waters’ first real solo album outside the Floyd, Radio K.A.O.S. This nicely composed album may appear today outdated when one considers its production techniques. Waters admitted, just as the Floyd did, that he was suffering from some sort of unfortunate has-been syndrome. In 1987, they had all reached forty, survived the punk movement and had to prove that they were still with it. Pictures taken at the time show them dressed as fashionable gentlemen, with Waters never appearing without his Ray-Ban sunglasses. Despite the difficulties encountered during the Pros and Cons tour, Waters decided to promote the album. But he played unlucky. Though A Momentary Lapse of Reason was highly ranked, Radio K.A.O.S. only reached fiftieth place. The worst was yet to come. His K.A.O.S. tour more or less coincided with that of A Momentary Lapse of Reason and the fight proved to be uneven. Leaving aside all legal matters


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concerning copyright infringements and the use of footage and flying pigs, both Waters and the Floyd had in their repertoire some titles going back to their heyday – Waters’ defeat was near. For the Floyd, the live album following the tour (this had become a tradition in the industry: an album, a tour, a live album) entitled Delicate Sound of Thunder was, in terms of quality, arguably the worst the Floyd had ever made, perhaps because of its production and because the band seemed to be playing like retired citizens trying to recapture their past glory while surrounded by production sharks. ‘I got Jon Carin to play keyboards. He can do a better Rick Wright than Rick can’, Gilmour said.1 Rock & Folk, a magazine which, in the late 1980s, was a mere shadow of its proper self, passed some harsh but understandable comments: If twenty-years ago Ummagumma was the example of an experimental process of a visionary band, Delicate Sound of Thunder is the one of a bunch of old men trying to resurrect, without any soul, an obsolete music […]. The moment the band got in motion was an endless version of ‘Money’ which is the only title suddenly reminding everyone why the tour was taking place and why they were on stage, one of the most popular and lucrative tours in the history of rock. Sad, isn’t it?

Knocked out, Waters, who had lost in court against the Floyd, hit rock bottom. In his last stand with the Berlin wall falling in 1989, he imagined rebuilding his own. Where? On Postdamer Platz. Musicians? A plethora of them: Scorpions, The Band, Sinéad O’Connor, etc... Even if he had lost against his former band, he kept the right to use his own 1. In 2008, he finally said, ‘Jon is brilliant, but Jon is not Rick’. (Mojo, 179)


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Wall. Despite that one shining moment, by the end of the 1980s, he had lost the battle. Pink Floyd: 2 Waters: 0. Beyond the Horizon

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Despite the numerous guest performers, The Division Bell looks like a rejuvenated Floyd album with Wright reinstated and even singing one of his own compositions, ‘Wearing the Inside Out’, and Guy Pratt, a paid bass guitarist and constant additional musician. ‘High Hopes’, a key piece in the album, proves once again that Gilmour can still shine and produce titles whose texture meets everybody’s expectations, an echo of the glorious Floyd of the 1970s. Unlike its predecessor, this album does not make any trendy concessions except perhaps in ‘Take It Back’, a rehash of ‘One Slip’ in A Momentary Lapse of Reason or ‘Blue Light’ in About Face. The band then started on a gigantic tour sponsored by Volkswagen, leading the carmaker to produce the Golf Pink Floyd, which, unlike the Gini incident, did not shock anyone. The tour was followed by the traditional live album, also released as a video, a far more superior production than Delicate Sound of Thunder. This made a strong impression on a new generation of fans and generated numerous tribute bands of various qualities, ranging from mediocre to excellent. This was to be the Floyd’s last tour. Waters could now hope to regain control. Waters’ latest album, Amused to Death, was released in 1992 and was probably the best of his three solo albums in terms of production. Though it reached number twenty-first on the Billboard, this


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was not enough to lead to a new tour. Waters wanted to complete a more ambitious project, finishing his opera Ça Ira, which was based on a libretto written by Étienne and Nadine Roda-Gil, who had suggested the idea to Waters back in 1987. President François Mitterrand was so impressed by the work that he suggested that the Paris Opera should produce it for 1989, the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Pierre Bergé, who was at the time director of the Opera, refused. Waters had to wait until 2004 to see the first performance organized in Malta. Two CD versions were recorded, one in French, the other in English. Somewhere on the Internet, there is a stage version recorded in Poland by Polish television. Ça Ira cannot pretend to compete with Waters’ rock pieces even though he immediately became number one in the charts for classical music and stayed for several weeks in the British classical top ten. The album was in the Billboard classical charts for fourteen weeks in a row and reached number five. More important, at this century’s end, Waters went back on the road and his concert halls were filled with enthusiastic audiences. Pink Floyd’s absence undeniably made this easier. In next to no time, Waters had found himself on the right track again and was proving that he too was Floyd’s legitimate heir.

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Chapter 4: The Heroes’ Return

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No doubt seizing the opportunity offered by the band, which was no longer active, and by Gilmour whose visibility remained almost non-existent, Waters found himself on top again, playing titles such as ‘Dogs’, ‘Mother’, ‘In the Flesh’, ‘Pigs on the Wing’ and extracts from The Final Cut, which the Floyd, led by Gilmour, had left aside. Waters went on a successful tour called In the Flesh, a title which had acquired an infamous reputation after the 1977 spitting incident in Montreal. This new tour led to the publication of an excellent double live album which largely contributed to Waters’ reputation. Soon after in 2002 Flickering Flame, a compilation album of Waters’ solo years, was released including a barely decent rework of Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ and an unreleased demo version of ‘Lost Boy Calling’ sung by Waters for Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Legend of 1900 with a music by Ennio Morricone. Gilmour made a solo comeback in 2001 for a few concerts and a DVD and, in 2006, released his third solo album On an Island followed by a new and triumphal tour. The heroes were back.


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The Heroes’ Return

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In 2005, Waters reclaimed The Dark Side of the Moon which he considered as one of his major achievements (after the Floyd version in 1994). He then embarked on a very ambitious project, rebuilding his wall, which was now feasible thanks to new technical advances. The show toured major arenas (in France it was put up in Bercy), then stadiums. The Wall finally ended up in the Stade de France. After four years of touring round the world, Waters had had his revenge. The tour grossed around $459 million, as estimated by Billboard, more than Madonna’s best ($407 million in 2008-2009), yet far from the records set by The Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang tour ($558 million in 2005-2007) and U2’s massive 360° Tour ($736 million in 2009-2011). In 2016, at the Desert Trip music festival, none of his solo titles was on the set list; the Floyd was also Waters. In the last fifteen years, the heroes have returned, each finding his place in the Floydian landscape. As long as Waters and Gilmour are able to tour, Pink Floyd’ stage legacy will be protected, which was Mason’s opinion when he declared in an interview with Kory Grow of Rolling Stone with his typical sense of humour: I would have loved to [see them on stage]. It’s very nice because Roger’s out and doing great and David’s out doing beautifully. So as long as they’re still ahead of the Australian Pink Floyd, that’s good. The worrying thing is when someone went, ‘Oh, yeah, I saw the Australian Pink Floyd – or the Brit Floyd – they’re so much better than you guys’…

The Post-war Dream London, 2nd July 2005. A heartbeat… a signal. After almost twenty years of fighting, hatred, rises and falls, court cases won by some and lost by others, Pink


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Floyd, the originals, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Richard Wright were back together on stage for twenty-five minutes of magic. There had been persistent rumours for a long time and the development of social networks had exacerbated the fantasy of seeing these four musicians playing together again. Due to legal disputes, the Floyd had missed Live Aid, organised in 1985 by Bob Geldof who had just starred as ‘Pink’ in Parker’s Pink Floyd – The Wall. Geldof knew that it would be a historical moment and a huge boost for his humanitarian concerts if he could get those four men, who had barely talked to one other in more than twenty years, and he managed it. In 2006, Waters said to Guitar World:

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Here’s what happened. I get an email from Nick Mason saying he’s had Bob Geldof on the phone bending his ear about reforming Pink Floyd to play at Live 8. Apparently, Bob had already approached Dave Gilmour and got a no.

Tenacious Geldof contacted Mason to ask him to convince Gilmour. Mason thought he could not, and suggested to contact Waters instead. Waters then contacted Geldof to know what he wanted from him, which was to contact and convince Gilmour. ‘It all sounds cool to me, so I get Dave’s telephone numbers from Bob and make the call. Dave answers the phone. Notwithstanding his surprise, which is palpable, we have a cordial conversation’. After having thought about it, Gilmour finally agreed. Approximately three million people attended the concert and so many more throughout the world watched it on television. After the concert, the sales exploded. HMV announced a growth of 1,343% for Echoes while Amazon reported 3,600% for The


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Wall, 2,000% for Wish You Were Here, 1,400% for The Dark Side of the Moon and 1,000% for Animals. Gilmour is reported to have said that he wanted to give away the portion of the profits due to this sales explosion to charity. The intense emotion aroused by this unexpected comeback showed what the real Pink Floyd were like. Only the future will tell but the post-Waters Floyd, despite their successful tours following the albums A Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987 and The Division Bell in 1994, were just a substitute for one of the 1970s rock masters. No doubt what Gilmour offered between 1987 and 1995 was not really Pink Floyd but an avatar of their glory days (as was in many ways the 2005 concert), a sort of paradoxical tribute band which delivered two albums, maybe three if one counts The Endless River, out of which only one or two titles of each survive. Despite juicy offers, there was never any question of going back on tour. Why would they? The Floyd had lived and practically buried their third and last life. Their leader in the 1970s had started a major solo career which was at last moving in the right direction after difficult beginnings. Turning 60, their lead guitarist was crowned with success under his own name and with the accompaniment of Richard Wright. It was preferable to leave it there, maybe come together on stage occasionally – as they did on 10th July 2010 when Gilmour joined Waters to play two titles at a charity concert for the Hoping Foundation and on 12th May 2011 for ‘Comfortably Numb’ on top of a wall rebuilt by Waters. The two men then met at the bottom of the torn down wall – can this be interpreted as a symbol – to play ‘Outside the Wall’ with Nick Mason on the tambourine.


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It was probably now time to think about how to manage their legacy. Mason, a sort of Floydian Ringo Starr, had been one of the few who remained friends with both Gilmour and Waters despite a few years of tension following The Final Cut. When asked about the difficulty of being friends with both, he answered in an interview with Rolling Stone:

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It’s not that it’s hard, really; it’s just sometimes it’s a shame. There’s a friendship element to the whole thing, and it’s great when Roger and I had a rapprochement after not speaking for about seven years. It means a lot to me actually, that particular friendship. I met Roger long before the band, so I’ve known him for well over 50 years and it’s a shame in a way. It’s not even that I need to get together and go back on the road. It’s just unnecessary sometimes to think that they can still irritate each other.

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The sad news at the beginning of the new millennium was the successive deaths of Barrett and Wright. Erratic Roger Barrett died in July 2006. Nobody had ever thought that Syd could rejoin his former fellow members. This particular Floyd had long been part of the past, especially after the triumph of The Dark Side of the Moon. Yet the hopes raised after the 2005 reunion were annihilated in September 2008 when Richard Wright passed away prematurely. Get your Hands off my Stack! Dear Friends Some people have been asking Laurie, my wife, about a new album I have coming out in November. Errhh? I don’t have an album coming out, they are probably confused. David Gilmour and Nick Mason have an album coming out. It’s called The Endless River. David and Nick constitute the group Pink Floyd. I on the other hand, am not part of


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Pink Floyd. I left Pink Floyd in 1985, that’s 29 years ago. I had nothing to do with either of the Pink Floyd studio albums, A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell, nor the Pink Floyd tours of 1987 and 1994, and I have nothing to do with The Endless River. Phew! This is not rocket science people, get a grip!

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Waters posted this message in September 2014 on his Facebook page and could not have been clearer. Roger Waters was no longer concerned with the Floyd and what they were producing. As for their legacy… How can a band which is no longer able to produce, keep the business rolling? Either by plunging into its archives – Now that he is dead, Hendrix has never brought out so many records – or by remastering, taking the opportunity of anniversaries or vinyl re-publications. In this domain, the Floyd have become all time champions. The cow on the cover of Atom Heart Mother has become a symbol which it was not meant to be: that of the consumer, the fan whose money is now an inexhaustible source of income, a consumerist cash cow. On top of that, there is a new generation of fans who were too young to know the band’s glorious period and worship the new Floyd represented by the live record Pulse. The Floydian business is no doubt a flourishing one. Since the dawn of the CD, The Dark Side of the Moon has been re-edited at least four times from simple transferring to remastering, 5.1 surround, remastering again, and the release of an expensive box set which included a few rare recordings – pre-mix, live pre and post studio recordings – and useless goodies such as marbles, scarves and beer coasters. One would have preferred more unreleased musical material instead. There were also a number of reissues of Pink Floyd’s complete works in expensive box sets such as


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Why Pink Floyd? in 2011 (though Delicate Sound of Thunder, Pulse or The Wall Live are not included). These feature numerous editions (Discovery, Experience and Immersion, for the three main albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall) making it possible for each Pink Floyd fan to reach their own Grail. Yet Why Pink Floyd? closely followed another reissue/box set released in 2007, Oh, by the Way, with all fourteen albums on mini-LP replica CD. Neither the Floyd nor EMI – and today Warner – are known to be philanthropic entities therefore all this has clearly one single objective: ‘Grab that cash’. The first box set was released in 1978 with EMI publishing the first eleven vinyl records from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to Animals. In 1992, to celebrate the Floyd’s twenty-fifth anniversary, a box set called Shine On came out but with many titles missing (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Atom Heart Mother, More, Ummagumma, Obscured by Clouds and The Final Cut). Yet it included a CD which could not be obtained without this exclusive box bringing together all of the first singles including the very rare ‘Point Me at the Sky’, which had never been reissued before. Gilmour at the time justified the missing records by pretexting pure financial reasons. An exhaustive set would have been too costly to produce and might not have sold so easily. All of these beautiful items rapidly turned into collectables. One only needs to consult on-line auction websites to realise how large the market really is as soon as box sets or records are no longer edited. Nearly three anthologies over a twenty-year period, including two in less than five years, proves that the cow does not lack milk. So why keep on doing it? Each remastering


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generates a copyright bearing the date of the reissue. Copyrights are therefore automatically renewed. With the previous versions now unavailable (except on the second-hand market), all the benefits go to the record company, hence to the musicians. Of course, an artist has every right to revisit his work and bring out new versions. At the time, Zappa had remixed some of his albums and Hot Rats for example significantly differed from the original (to which people have reverted since then). The system proves even more perverse when tapes reputed to have been lost or others that were jealously kept secret by the musicians suddenly resurface. Thus in 2000, The Wall Live recorded in 1980-1981 suddenly came out of the archives. A so-called unreleased ‘The Last Few Bricks’ – in actual fact it had already figured in Waters’ The Wall Live in Berlin – and a nice packaging for a limited edition enabled the fans to listen to new tracks. In 2015, for a Record Store Day, the Floyd’s first six recordings were released on vinyl under the label Parlophone for a limited version of one thousand copies and fifty more for the media. Only available in Europe and quickly sold out, it once again boosted second-hand dealers and expensive online auctions because downloading, whether illegal or not, could not satisfy the ultimate fans who need this collectable to worship in their own private museums. Yet, there again, it was all a matter of recording copyright renewal to avoid the title falling into the public domain. Can one blame the Floyd? Not at all. Universal did the same for the Beatles. The record industry, which is severely affected by illegal downloading, must defend its business. Once this nice marketing ploy had succeeded, those six titles could be part of the enormous box set


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The Early Years miraculously released before Christmas. It took many years to bring together all the documents contained in the box, to remaster them all including the videos. No doubt this represents the essential Floyd. One may well wonder what convinced this group of musicians who resented delving into archives to change their minds. In an interview with Éric Delsart of Rock & Folk, Mason declared:

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Since the Why Pink Floyd? campaign, there has been some sort of awareness. Back then, it would have been unconceivable to publish imperfect material but we realized that people liked that. We knew there were some interesting things that people had never heard before and so we tried to gather them in a coherent pack.

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No doubt the archives featured here are precious and have been remastered with care. Yet Mason is not naïve, nor are we... He knew very well that many of these archival sources – some of excellent quality – were available on the bootleg network and most notably the BBC Sessions of 1970-1971 whose release the Floyd refused to allow as Mason noted: ‘They were not good enough. We didn’t like our way of playing […]. The BBC was recording rather well, not very well. Strangely, they were old school. Everything was too loud for them. That was a shame’. An excellent copy of The Man and The Journey was also available through the bootlegging network. Admittedly not everybody explores the Recording of Indeterminate/Independent Origin network, a.k.a. ROIO. The Floyd’s goal is not so much to counter this network which offers free archives on the Web but to generate copyrights on documents which are not all beyond reproach. Even though The Early Years features far more interesting pieces than marbles and other goodies, and in spite of the care with which


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documents, both audio and video, were remastered, the box set is not exempt from criticism. Some choices made are questionable (the mono version of A Saucerful of Secrets is missing) but, even more important, some archives were manipulated. The most shocking example is the so-called first performance of ‘Atom Heart Mother’ at the Bath Festival in 1970. The demanding fan has a right to expect more quality than the poor version available on the Web. Indeed the pictures are illustrated by a perfect audio track. Yet this is in no way the interpretation given at the Bath festival (more likely this was recorded in Montreux). The musicians’ movements are not in sync with the sound track and though the pictures seem to have been shot in Bath, the result is misleading. The famous ‘Nick’s Boogie’, which had already appeared on different materials (the most recent being on a 2007 DVD entitled London ’66–’67), is featured here with five minutes missing and a different video editing – the 2007 DVD focused on the footage of the musicians filmed by Whitehead at the Sound Techniques studio while the box set version includes footage shot at the UFO in January 1967. The video of ‘Chapter 24’ is not the original but a mix between the audio of its studio recording and the famous Syd Barrett’s First Trip. Various documents have more complete bootleg versions. Different audio tracks are substituted for the originals (Initially the video of ‘Caporal Clegg’ recorded for Belgian television had a different mix from the one on the album. The latter is nonetheless reintroduced here). Other examples could be cited but the point is that the Floyd are willing to release their archives, to build their own legend, to go down in history but


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under their own supervision only and to do so, they are ready to modify documents here and there. One may therefore doubt the quality of such archives. Why is Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii included in the DVD/Blu-ray section while it is still available in its director’s cut version? The same applies for the DVDs of More (also on Blu-ray) or La Vallée. The Committee too can easily be found. Despite their merits (the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii DVD is essential for a real Floydian fan), there was no real need to reissue these documents except for financial reasons. Even though the original tapes were nicely remastered, it would have been better to include other video documents such as the version of Roland Petit’s ballets filmed for French television, a pirate version of which was recently available on the Web. Even if the Floyd did not play on stage and the audio was taped, the choreography was worth seeing. Was this omitted because of copyrights? The only pictures left of these ballets are frustrating extracts drawn from various sources. Several pieces were remixed under different names: in Devi/ation, ‘The Riot Scene’ is nothing more than a shorter and slightly different version of ‘The Violent Sequence’ published in the box set Immersion of The Dark Side of the Moon, under the title of ‘Us and Them (Richard Wright demo)’. ‘On the Highway’ is a truncated version of ‘Crumbling Land’. Much more interesting, ‘Aeroplane’, a true unreleased official version, brings novelty to the original soundtrack of Zabriskie Point considering the fact that Antonioni rejected many of the titles offered by the Floyd. Lastly, and besides numerous complaints regarding the numerous bugs of unreadable Blu-rays or unreadable


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CDs due to glue stains and scratches, there was this mishap, too big to be true: the remix of Obscured by Clouds was mistakenly replaced by the audio of Live at Pompeii. Thus, the box sets sold received an extra CD on which was written: ‘Replacement for CD disc for Obfusc/ation PFREY6 – CD, stereo 2016 mix of Pink Floyd ‘Live at Pompeii’ CD supplied in error’. Leaving aside the occasional manipulations, the surprising choices and mistakes, even considering the fact that many of them, audio for the most part, were already easily available (with their copyrights slipping away from their true and rightful owners, the musicians, which was not really fair), these archives remain fascinating. Gathering all this documentation required an enormous amount of work yet this shows once again to what extent the music industry creates a need to satisfy its own interests. The box set is offered at a very high price and, even though each volume is due to come out separately, one of them will only be available in the box set and will not be issued on its own. One can easily understand the reaction of a consumer on the internet who gave only one star to the box set and commented: Those gems which will probably be released at a cheaper price once ‘voluntary scarcity’ and the ‘collectable aspect’ are gone; the most naive will compulsively buy this limited edition as they would for a pirate version. It’s a marketing effect well-known by the big record companies, some sort of common teasing. Too expensive, no one is rushing in to buy it, so be patient. Let’s wait for the equivalent mainstream edition with all Blu-ray videos and 4K when everybody reaches it. We will then buy it at a fair price.

Mocking the Floyd members and turning them into greedy record dealers is excessive. These late re-issues


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witness to a desire not to let other people publish their works without any consideration for the quality of the documents offered. The choices made also reveal the band’s criteria. One must admit that despite the numerous re-editions, no bonus track was ever truly added to existing albums. A piece must remain untouched and must be respected as a whole. A limited edition can be released, at a fair price but not a bargain, featuring two or three CDs like it was done for one the re-editions of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Why would anyone add on Wish You Were Here let’s say, a sung version of ‘Have a Cigar’ by Waters or this almost legendary version of ‘Wish You Were Here’ with Stéphane Grappelli’s violin solo. Let’s release a box set with these versions without adding them to the original album. The only exception, and quite a disappointing one, was ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’ which was adjoined to a recent issue of The Final Cut. The single was released at the same time as the film Pink Floyd – The Wall and was supposed to be a preview of an album entitled The Final Cut, a soundtrack which turned out to be completely different. The same desire not to accept the practices of new digital distribution networks such as iTunes, Spotify or Deezer led the Floyd to sue EMI who sold on the Web truncated versions of their albums which had been conceived as integrated units. The High Court of Justice in London ruled in favour of the musicians. Sir Andrew Morritt, the Chancellor of the High Court, based his decision on a contract clause signed by both parties back in 1998-1999 before on-line music developed. This stipulated that EMI had to sell the albums, particularly the concept albums issued in the 1970s, in their entirety and not as fragments. Though EMI tried to argue that


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the clause concerned only the ‘physical reproductions’ of the works, Sir Morritt’s decision prevailed in the end. The Floyd may have presented themselves as honest artists trying to preserve their work yet their attitude was largely motivated by financial preoccupations. Incidentally the record company, which was not in the best of financial shape, was condemned to pay €66,000 for the Floyd’s procedure expenses. There was more to come, as The Guardian revealed on 4th January 2011:

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After years of arguments over the sanctity of the concept album, Pink Floyd and EMI appear to be comfortably at one. A mere 10 months after hauling their record company to the high court to teach it a lesson about preserving ‘the artistic integrity’ of their albums by not selling individual songs, the veteran prog rockers have signed a deal allowing the sale of single digital downloads […]. The band’s decision to offer fragments of their famous concept albums for 99 p each on iTunes is likely to disappoint prog rock purists who applauded their stand against EMI.

‘Money, get back!’

A €10,000 Octopus

Barrett was also affected by cult items and rock ‘n’ roll myths. A veil of mystery started to hang around him quite early on. As a member of the Floyd, he was already considered as an underground icon deeply rooted in the London psychedelic counterculture. Yet his departure from Pink Floyd, his two solo albums recorded in difficult conditions and his degraded mental health turned him into a myth, a rather paradoxical one considering he was still alive. The musician had reappeared on stage under his own name and tried to launch a new band named Stars. All these attempts were failures except for the


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BBC Sessions. Glenn Povey recalls that, in June 1970, though he had Gilmour to support him, Barrett left the stage before the end of the first title with very few people in the audience applauding. The legend was slowly dying. The audience and the industry had moved on to something else. Late in 1972 the fanzine Terrapin came out. Like many other fan magazines at the time, this medley of photocopied typescripts and manuscripts was mailed to the fans. Its January 1973 issue contains a review of a concert given the previous year by Stars on 24th February 1972:

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He did versions of ‘Octopus’ and ‘No Man’s Land’ from the Madcap album; ‘Waving my arms in the Air’ and ‘Baby Lemonade’ from Barrett; and ‘Lucifer Sam’ from the legendary first Floyd album. […] The lyrics were, for the most part, inaudible due to the terrible P.A., and Syd did no talking between the numbers, which were sadly under-rehearsed.

A video entitled Syd Barrett’s First Trip circulated for years on the bootleg market, supposedly showcasing Syd Barrett’s first acid trip. The Floyd were worried, Gilmour in particular, and, to protect his friend, he bought back the rights from a man called Nigel LesmoirGordon in order to stop its distribution – a very difficult task now with the Internet. ‘I sold them the film via Steve O’Rourke. If they got it, it’s just because I needed the money. Syd loved taking acid and he loved being filmed’. If such was the initial intent, why do we find pictures of this first trip mixed with shots showing the band outside Abbey Road with Andrew King on the first DVD/Blu-ray contained in the box set The Early Years and illustrating the song ‘Chapter 24’? Apparently, it was Nick Kent who revived the myth associated with Barrett in the mid-1970s in an article on


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the fallen angel in New Musical Express. In March 1974 Kent embarked on a personal quest he had dreamed of ever since the famous 1967 concert. In his own words, he wanted ‘to research and then write an article that would finally explain to the world what had actually happened to Syd Barrett’. The New Musical Express had strong reservations; ‘Barrett is a has-been and has-beens have no place in the pages of the NME’ they said to the journalist. The Floyd were on top of the charts worldwide with The Dark Side of the Moon and Kent believed it was time to focus on their first leader. Kent thought he would go and meet his idol first but Barrett was unreachable. The journalist then tried to interview Syd’s entourage. Gilmour even contacted him to correct false information broadcast since Barrett had retired. To this day, Kent has been very grateful for Gilmour’s judgement when he said that ‘to him, his friend’s breakdown wasn’t simply triggered by drug abuse; the roots of it stretched back to Barrett’s pampered childhood and his doting mother’. Despite his hierarchy’s initial reticence, Kent was allowed to write an unusually long article which ended up being printed on the four central pages on 13th April. Kent subsequently argued his article helped put Barrett’s legend back into the limelight. His article had a mixed reception particularly with the Floyd who were the first to be concerned. Gilmour informed the journalist that he generally liked the text despite some of its sensational aspects. Yet Waters disliked it. Kent thought that ‘still, it must have left an impact because – partly as a response – he wrote the song “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” soon afterwards’. Waters remarked to Constantin: Never a smart remark on Syd Barrett – never – in any paper. No one knows what they’re talking about. Only us, […] we know the facts […]. That makes me laugh, those


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journalists writing shit. Actually, I first and foremost wrote that song, ‘Shine on You’, to see the reactions of those who pretend to know Syd Barrett. I spent time writing and re-writing those lyrics because I wanted them to truly reflect what I was really feeling.

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The Floyd lost all contact with Syd in the early 1970s. According to Gilmour, ‘his mother asked us to stay away a few years ago’. Gilmour was always ready to try and give his friend a hand. After all, playing ‘Astronomy Domine’ on The Division Bell Tour, including it on the live album, playing and recording ‘Terrapin’, ‘Dominoes’ or ‘Arnold Layne’ as a solo artist were no doubt meant to provide significant royalties for Barrett. Perhaps the only contact they all had with Syd was the strange encounter, previously mentioned in this book, and for which only a sad picture remains. Kent’s article was very timely. It was a bonus for the music business, especially for EMI. Having just struck off The Madcap Laughs and Barrett from their catalogue, they seized the occasion to reissue both of them in one single volume, a marketing coup which echoes what happened when A Nice Pair brought together the Floyd’s first two albums whose sales were boosted by the dynamic of Dark Side. Barrett’s popularity has remained constant ever since. Syd was a model for Bowie – who interpreted ‘See Emily Play’ on Pin-ups. He was also a major influence on French pop with singers such as Daho successively reinterpreting ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘Late Night’, a superb song ending The Madcap Laughs. Multiple covers would be done by Placebo, The Smashing Pumpkins, Minimal Compact, This Mortal Coil, etc... In his obituary published in The Guardian, Nick Kent summed up the impact that Barrett has made on pop since the 1970s:


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David Bowie rechannelled Barrett’s dislocated, quintessential English style of vocal projection into songs such as ‘The Bewlay Brothers’. In early 1976, just before John Lydon joined the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren tried (unsuccessfully) to convince the band to perform a couple of Syd’s songs in their repertoire. The Damned, meanwhile, attempted – in vain – to get Barrett to produce their second album. Then came the new-wave bands such as The Soft Boys who feverishly appropriated the Madcap’s surreal take on the modern pop-song aesthetic. He became a spiritual pied piper of 80s indie rock and by the 90s his madly spellbinding music was being referenced by everyone from Blur to The Brian Jonestown Massacre. In the new millennium, one needs to look no further than the recorded works of The Libertines and Babyshambles to hear that Syd’s crazy diamond music is still bewitching and informing the creative choices of rock’s latest generation of bohemian spirits.

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An icon for the punk movement too (The Damned finally had to be content with Nick Mason), Barrett deeply influenced Michael Stipe, REM’s leader. Mark Blake recalled a rather cold encounter between Roger Waters and Stipe at a concert: ‘In the band-room afterwards, Michael Stipe wouldn’t speak to me. When he went back on stage, he sang a cappela Syd’s ‘Dark Globe’ as though to signify: ‘Wanker! Syd was the true genius.’ In 1988, using CD technology, EMI released a record entitled Opel composed of rare and up to that point unavailable titles. Then in 1993, a box set called Crazy Diamond gathered the two original albums plus Opel. In 2002, a best-of was released, Wouldn’t You Miss Me?, featuring an exclusive title ‘Bob Dylan Blues’. In 2010, another compilation, An Introduction to Syd Barrett, was composed of remastered titles which had been recorded with the Floyd as well as in solo. Since Syd’s final retirement, journalists, fans and paparazzi kept on trying to catch a glimpse of him. It


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became a sort of a game. Kent, who was tempted to join the movement, finally changed his mind. Michka Assayas, a music critic and editor of the Dictionnaire du Rock, in the foreword of the French edition of Madcap: The Half-Life of Syd Barrett, ‘Pink Floyd’s’ Lost Genius by Tom Willis, told a rather significant story of the kind of harassment Barrett and his family must have faced by people who were just interested in the sensational:

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I don’t remember how I convinced Jean-François Bizot, the then-editor of Actuel, to let me go on Syd Barrett’s trail […]. Thinking clearly, Bizot had me team with Thomas Johnson, a Franco-Australian reporter older than me […]. Thomas Johnson had one goal: bringing back to Actuel a scoop, an interview or even a picture of Syd Barrett, last seen ten years before.

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Using all sorts of tricks, such as bringing back forgotten laundry left in London, Johnson got what he wanted after Assayas had failed, only hearing a ‘dark icy voice, pronouncing a sinister “NO”…’ Gilmour agreed to meet Assayas and Johnson. Yet, once he was there, he refused to talk to them only delivering the message: ‘What happened to Syd is all but romantic. It’s a sad story. There’s nothing to say. I hope your article will be the last’. Assayas and Johnson did write an article for Actuel but it was not published in the form they had intended. According to Assayas, ‘Re-written by JeanPierre Lentin, and most probably by Patrick Rambaud, the article […] was lengthened by multiple interventions by Jean-François Bizot who wanted to add his own comments to the story’. The year was 1982 and Bizot’s idea was simple: he would rewrite the story by drawing a parallel with Parker’s movie Pink Floyd – The Wall which had just been released. This appears rather futile yet it shows that Syd’s myth still fascinated people and


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that the movie remained rather ambiguous on this point. Was it Roger or was it Syd? ‘Which one’s Pink?’1 The music industry, always on the lookout for opportunities, had not given up either. It was even rumoured that, in 1992, Atlantic Records offered Barrett’s family £750,000 to have Syd record a new piece… Today, Barrett’s cult is still intact. At an auction organised by Radio-France, a rare 45 rpm of ‘Octopus’ was sold. Supposedly only seventy copies had been produced at the time of its release. According to Éric Delsart (in Rock & Folk 588, August 2016), this figure is ‘completely absurd considering a label would have never pressed so few records’. However, only fifteen copies are known to exist today. The first auction was set at €5,000 but the record went for €10,500. ‘Some invest their money in estates, I do it in records. My children will benefit from it later on’, the buyer said laconically. Delsart added: ‘At €10,500 ‘Octopus’ has become the most expensive record ever sold in France while Popsike, the reference website on rare record sales, adds that in 2015, the same record was sold €507 on eBay’. The record sold at that auction was definitely the property of Radio-France and had the letters ORTF engraved on it (Plus the label had erasures). One may wonder what Barrett’s rating will be in ten, fifteen, twenty or fifty years’ time. Over the last twenty years, several books have appeared on Barrett. His death in July 2006 was the occasion for many tributes. They mostly paid homage to the man.

1. Verse from ‘Have a Cigar’ by Waters on the album Wish You Were Here.


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Louder than Words

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In 2001, EMI released what seemed to be the ultimate Floydian collection: Echoes was composed of material from different periods with no attempt to build a hierarchy (which Waters resented). The press stressed the fact that the title suggested the end of an era. The Floyd members themselves argued that this would be the last album because the procedure was too long, too complicated. In 2006, while doing the promotion for his new solo album, On an Island, Gilmour kept on repeating that the Floyd was dead. However, in 2012 EMI exploded. Universal bought half of it and Warner the other half. In 2013, Capitol Records reactivated Harvest in America as a semi-independent label. For the rest of the world, Harvest would be owned by both Universal, for new productions, and Warner, for catalogue operations. A lot of money was involved. On 30th September 2012, Le Monde explained: Universal has acquired the recording division of EMI after both the European and American competition authorities approved it on September 21. Sony Music, the second biggest company of the industry, has been authorized by the European Union to take over the publishing division of EMI for €1.6 billion. To do so and at the same time not exceed 40% of the market share, UMG must sell some of the companies formerly owned by EMI.

In this very complex environment with high financial stakes, it seemed that Warner wanted to benefit from artists like the Floyd. The problem was that, in 2011, a remastering campaign, with the box set Discovery, had just ended and had closely followed Oh, by the Way. Plus, the live albums, especially Pulse, seemed to be sufficient and Gilmour and Mason, the only remaining members, did not seemed so thrilled about going back


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to work. It was time to see what the archives could offer. On 5th July 2014, after a simple tweet by Polly Samson, Gilmour’s wife, the Floydian community erupted. She wrote: ‘Btw Pink Floyd album out in October is called The Endless River. Based on 1994 sessions is Rick Wright’s swan song and very beautiful’. A new album was due to be released at the end of 2014. The musicians had decided to use twenty-year-old tapes, reshape and remaster them to produce a coherent result. The pretext was to pay tribute to the late Rick Wright, which was a nice gesture. Gilmour told Télérama that it was a symbol of what the Floyd were ‘until Water’s madness for dominance exploded’, the Floyd with whom musical complementarity existed between Syd and Rick Wright then to be replaced ‘by another, a new form of complicity’ between Wright and himself. He added: Along with Nick Mason, I wanted to listen to long hours of music again, music that we played the three of us with Rick Wright in 1993 while working on The Division Bell. With Rick gone, that all process was very emotional and a new source of motivation because what we were listening to was special […]. We could find that old instrumental bond and smoothness we had in the early 1970s.

Almost completely instrumental with only the last title sung, the album featured four tracks, about fifteen minute-long each. ‘[It] was made the way Ummagumma was or tracks like “Echoes” and “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”,’ Gilmour said. The album was meant to tell the different paths the band had followed throughout their career with, here and there, echoes of past work such as evident allusions to ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ or ‘Us and Them’. Wright could be heard playing the organ at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969. Entitled The Endless River, the piece was slightly insipid. Did this sound like


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the end then? Nothing was certain but Gilmour declared to Zac Dionne of Billboard: I’m pretty certain there will not be any follow up to this. And Polly, my wife, thought that [the final song ‘Louder than Words’] would be a very good lyrical idea to go out on. A way of describing the symbiosis that we have. Or had.

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The album was immediately ranked third on the Billboard equalling Animals and A Momentary Lapse of Reason, selling 170,000 copies (a figure given by Nielsen Music) the first week in America. Gilmour released his album, Rattle That Lock, inspired by the SNCF (the French railway company) jingle. He toured France in exceptional places such as the Arènes de Nîmes or the Royal saltworks at Arcet-Senans. Though his voice sounded a little weak, the magic was still there. What about Waters? He participated in the Desert Trip alongside with The Who, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Paul McCartney. According to the spectators, his show was exceptional. Waters is at present working on a new album, the first in more than twenty-five years (and Amused to Death) and is starting on a tour called Us & Them. Besides Syd Barrett, he is the only Floyd member to have had a book dedicated to his work. Written by Dave Thompson, Roger Waters: The Man Behind The Wall appeared in 2013. Gilmour is still waiting. The Early Years appears to be the ultimate and official box set of the years 1965-1972 while the Immersion box set covers the main albums of the 1970s. However, neither Warner nor the Floyd have quite finished yet. Even though Mason argued that The Early Years box set was so big because they were short of time, other archives might just resurface


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in the years to come. After all, many more anniversaries are due to come, including the fortieth of Animals or The Wall. Other documents are still missing such as the 1989 concert in Venice, the filmed concerts of The Wall – for which only some frustrating footage was shown on Immersion – or unheard demos – the one of Wish You Were Here has already circulated on the Web – etc... Today the Floyd’s work appears to be finished. Who knows? Mason seems to have a different opinion: ‘I think it’s possible, if there’s a better reason to play together other than making money, I think the others might accept. And I hope it’s still possible’. ‘Money, get away?’ When one thinks about it, why reignite the flame? Wright is dead, Mason admits that Gilmour – who has finally been able to make a name for himself – is reluctant and, as for Waters, in theory, he is no longer a member of the Floyd. All in all, the Floyd’s impressive production has impacted the history of music and their mortal remains are still kicking. The flame is often reignited by its own creators and as Mason remarked, as long as the Floyd are able to do it better than their Tribute Bands, they will.


Selective Bibliography

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Blake, Mark, Pigs Might Fly, the inside story of Pink Floyd (Aurum Press, 2007, 2013). Boyd, Joe, White Bicycles, making music in the 1960s (Serpent’s Tail, 2006). Cavanagh, John, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Continuum, 2003). Fitch, Vernon, The Pink Floyd Encyclopedia (Collector’s Guide Publishing, 2005, 3rd edition). Gonin, Philippe, Pink Floyd The Wall (Le Mot et Le Reste, 2014). Gonin, Philippe, Pink Floyd The Dark Side of the Moon (Le Mot et Le Reste, 2017). Gonin, Philippe, « Entretien avec Nick Mason », ProgRésiste, n° 83, 1er trimestre 2016. Gonin, Philippe, Le Rock à Papa ou « le rock n’est pas mort, il est vieux ! Nuance ! » (EUD, 2016). Kent, Nick, Apathy for The Devil, a 1970s memoir (Faber and Faber, 2010). Mason, Nick, Inside Out, a personal history of Pink Floyd (Chronicle Books, 2005).


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Miles, Barry, London Calling, a countercultural history of London since 1945 (Atlantic Books, 2010). Povey, Glenn, The Complete Pink Floyd (Carlton Books Ltd, 2016). Schaffner, Nicholas, Saucerful of Secrets: the Pink Floyd Odyssey (Helter Skelter, 1991, 2005). Thompson, Roger Waters: The Mind Behind The Wall (Backbeat Books, 2013). Willis, Tim, Syd Barrett, Le Génie Perdu de Pink Floyd (Le Castor Astral, 2004, foreword by Michka Assayas).

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Magazines (non-exhaustive list including online articles)

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Rock & Folk, 89, 108, 122, 165, 468, 591, 592, 593. Mojo, 6, 52, 73, 167, 179, 181, 215, 232. Uncut, 120, 198. Les Inrocks 2, « Pink Floyd, la grande odyssée », sd. Vibrations collector, Pink Floyd, May 2011. Télérama, 3383, (12/11/2014). The following newspaper and magazines were also consulted: Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Best, Les Inrockuptibles, Guitar Magazine, Guitar World, Rolling Stone (American and French editions). U.S. rankings are from the Billboard web site: http://www.billboard.com/ Some articles were consulted on their on-line versions such as this interview of Mason given to Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features


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/pink-floyds-nick-mason-talks-early-years-syd-barrettw449581 A number of articles from magazines are reproduced on the following web sites: http://sydbarrett.net/syd-barrett-articles/ http://www.pinkfloydz.com/interviews/

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Table of contents 7

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Foreword

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‘I sentence you to be exposed before your peers’. Pink Floyd Exhibited.

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Chapter 1: The lunatic Is On the Grass

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Chapter 2: Riding the Gravy Train

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Chapter 3: Pink Isn’t Well…

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Chapter 4: The Heroes’ Return

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Selective bibliography

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Achevé d’imprimer le 28 avril 2017 sur les presses de La Manufacture - Imprimeur – 52200 Langres Tél. : (33) 325 845 892

N° imprimeur : 170420 - Dépôt légal : mai 2017 Imprimé en France

Composition : Catherine CAPUTO 1er semestre 2017 ISBN 978-2-36441-222-4

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