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"Is There Anybody Out There? The
Wall - Live"
(EMI,
Recorded 1980-1981, Released April 2000)
Disc One: In The Flesh?/The Thin Ice Of Modern Life/Another
Brick In The Wall (part i)/The Happiest Days Of Our Lives/Another Brick In The
Wall (part ii)/Mother/Goodbye Blue Sky/Empty Spaces/What Shall We Do Now?/Young
Lust/One Of My Turns/Don’t Leave Me Now/Another Brick In The Wall (Part iii)/Spare
Bricks/Goodbye Cruel World
Disc Two: Hey, You/Is There Anybody Out There?/Nobody
Home/Vera/Bring The Boys Back Home/ Comfortably Numb//The Show Must Go On/In
The Flesh/Run Like Hell/Waiting For The Worms/Stop!/The Trial/Outside The Wall
(Yelled at full pelt): "Pathetic!
THis is for all the weak people in the audience! Is there anyone here whose
weak? Let's all have a clap! Come On I cant hear you! Get your hands together!
Have a good time! *murderous scream*"
There's
something to be said about hearing what might well be the single most human
album delivered in concert with all the raw energy, emotion and mistakes of
your typical live album. It's not that the studio album of 'The Wall' was
detached - far from it with all those Roger Waters screams all over the place -
but it did too often sound like exactly what it was, which was a bunch of
session musicians trying to fit their parts around those recorded by the band
all on different days. This live document of two shows at Earl's Court in
August 1980 and June 1981 (one of the few arenas big enough to stage the full
gig and two of only four the Floyd ever performed of their greatest theatrical
work) lacks the visuals that made the shows so memorable, but it is a
particularly strong live album in terms of feeling like you were really there.
You can feel that the guitar solo played by David Gilmour on 'Comfortably Numb'
is straddled on top of a gigantic wall somehow, just as you can tell that Roger
as 'Pink' is getting more and more isolated in tinier and tinier bricks across
the middle of the piece. Perhaps the most surprising thing is how well the
Floyd are working together here despite all the dramas of the past few years. 'Run
Like Hell' particularly is played with real venom and sparring between Roger
and Dave, a million miles away from the rather pathetic live versions both men
will go on to make in the 1980s and 1990s. The world weary 'Hey You' is a
delight, Roger's mournful bass meeting David's hopeful guitar and Rick's timid,
tentative synth head on, a maelstrom of just-about-keeping-it-together that
collapses triumphantly under the crushing weight of depression. 'The Show Must
Go On' gets an extra verse cut from the album but in the lyrics booklet ('I
didn't mean to let them take away my soul, am I too old, is it too late?'
Gilmour sighs in front of a gorgeous spoof Beach Boys choir led by honorary member Bruce Johnstone just
like the record). Roger sings 'Nobody Home' with such power and directness you
half wonder whether Syd has just walked into his line of sight in the front
row. The band jams on the two songs exclusive to this set - 'What Shall We Do
Now?' which got replaced with the inferior 'Empty Spaces' and the time-filling
'The Last few Bricks', a clever cycle of past themes repeated until the
stage-hands got the last few bricks in place - prove that the Floyd could still
rock and still rock hard. Only 'Comfortably Numb' sorta collapses, but only
after the band have already reached so many peaks across the seven minutes that
they're exhausted by the time of the climax, while a happier 'skiffle' version
of 'Outside The Wall' works better for the audience in the arena than it does
for us. You can understand why Roger is giving his all and he's never been
better with his wicked gleeful manic laughter and a second half where he gets a
little too carried away 'discovering' that he's become a right-wing Nazi, but
the others' commitment is staggering too given how much they seemed to hate
this album. Gilmour's guitar grunt is gorgeous, Nick's drums inspired and Rick
- whose working on this tour on a wage, for goodness sake, having just been
kicked out of the band - is a little star all night, his keyboards twinkling
away with all the inner loss that the more abrasive Roger won't admit to.
What you
won't find on this album are the usual things you look for on a live LP.
There's precious little talking to the audience (the first words spoken don't
appear until after the 'Another Brick' round of songs near the end of the first
side when Roger finally bids 'Good Evening and Wilkommen') and the best mainly
consists of some delightful Waters ranting, spoofing what should be happening
at a rock concert (the start of 'Run Like Hell' has him madly screaming at an
audience that they're not having enough of a good time, screaming 'enjoy
yourselves!' with murderous intent). The interruptions by the emcee, who builds
up tension in a 1950s style before being drowned out by the band in the first
half and spoofs himself by speaking ...very...slowly in the second doesn't
quite work either (the audience clearly think it's a mistake when it first
happens). If you didn't understand the original album and came looking at this
one for answers, I'm not sure you'd grasp the concept any better either, with
Waters taking almost all the parts and the plot still getting very lost
somewhere around the middle. Oddly enough Roger was about the only one who
really didn't like this album and complained bitterly in the press when he was
outvoted 4-1 against releasing it (manager Steve O'Rourke being the extra
vote). His complaint that the show was meant to be seen as well and heard and
that the packaging was awful are both good points (although Storm Thorgerson's
use of the 'surrogate band' masks on the cover is fittingly eerie), but misses
the bigger picture. We have his son Harry to think for this album, as he
flipped over a test pressing and told his dad he'd never sounded so good, with
this a chance for young fans like him to get closer to experiencing the live
show they weren't born for! Actually the packaging too is ridiculous, bumping
the price of this double album set to something nearer a four disc box set by
virtue of a load of photographs taken from a distance and shots of the band so
far away they look like ants. No matter, though - it's the music that's what's
important here and it's never sounded so good. Is there anybody out there? Man,
I'm never going to leave...
Nick Mason "Fictitious
Sports"
(Harvest
'1981')
Can't
Get My Motor To Start/I Was Wrong/Siam/Hot River//Boo To You Too/Do
Ya?/Wervin'/I'm A Mineralist
"When you're tryin' something new
you're bound to have people boo-ing you!"
This is
the best album jazz singer/writer Carla Bley ever made. Which is all well and
good if you like Carla Bley's albums - not many people do to be frank (though
it's less painful than most modern jazz to listen to) and certainly it bears
almost nothing to do with Pink Floyd. Nick's contribution basically consists of
playing drums and offering a few ideas on a co-production rather than anything
astonishingly creative while you can still tell it's him playing (Nick has a
very distinctive sound after all), naming this album after the drummer is a bit
like crediting 'Dark Side Of The Moon' to 'The Nick Mason Band' or ignoring Syd
Barrett and plumping for 'Piper At The Gates Of Mason'. Only worse because at
least Nick got a few band co-credits on those records - on this album he
doesn't even get that. Clearly there's a bit of commercial shenanigans going on
here, with Nick trying to help an old friend out (he mentioned later he was
looking for something to do when old friend Carla sent a demo tape and he
decided they might as well struggle together than separately) and you can see
that this idea might have worked: Bley made sure all her fans knew this album
was out under a different name and Floyd fans got an unexpected entry into a
new musical landscape, not necessarily hated by everyone (although some of the
comments online do make it seem that way sometimes). Even so, it has to be said
that in the early 1980s when the Floyd were already alienating most of their
fanbase and a new career seemed to be on the cards for everybody, this sudden
switch of gears probably wasn't a wise move. Parts of this record suddenly make
'Several Species of Small Furry Animals...' sound completely normal.
There
are, however, a few reasons not to dismiss this record entirely out of hand.
Soft Machine's Robert Wyatt appears on backing vocals on many of the tracks and
should really have got a co-credit: the two bands had a long and involved
shared history after various tours and guest spots together (including Wyatt
taking the Waters part on David Gilmour's 'Remember That Night' gig version of 'Comfortably
Numb', but this is the longest two members of the two bands work together.
There's a case to be made that Nick's drumming is better than it's been in
years, as he's really challenged by the semi-improvised nature of the band, who
often shove in a squealing sax motif at just the point when you think the songs
are finally going to do something 'normal' (though Dave and Roger thrived under
the new professionalism and attention of the mid-70s period, Nick's and Rick's
talents got overlooked - it's nice to hear that Mason could do still keep on
his toes). The track 'Boo To You', an automatic knee-jerk to audiences who'll
dismiss this out of hand and getting the insults in first, is hilarious (and
very Roger Waters as it happens). The most 'normal' song here, 'Hot River', is
often cited as a Floyd pastiche too. To be honest it's more of a rock and roll
pastiche - anything with a tune or words would be the most Floydian moment on
this album you suspect - but Nick at least took it as a joke ('It has all my
favourite clichés of the past fourteen years' he joked, quoting the vocal,
guitarwork and production reminding him of various Floyd albums). Overall,
though, this album is closer to the feel of 'More' and 'Obscured By Clouds'
than an actual 'album' - it's a free-flowing record that plays to its own rules
and is out to surprise you throughout, usually in a bad way but sometimes for
good. In the world of Pink Floyd solo albums 'Fictitious Sports' doesn't quite
get the wooden spoon then, but it's not quite medal status either. Perhaps the
most disappointing thing is the cover, which as blocks of boring colour with a
few squiggles to make out a basketball and tennis court must rate as the least
imaginative Hipgnosis design ever (to be fair, they didn't have much to go on
from the music).
"A Collection Of Great Dance
Songs"
(Harvest/EMI,
November 1981)
One
Of These Days/Money (Re-Recording)/Sheep//Shine On You Crazy Diamond(Parts
1,2,3,5 and 7)/Wish You Were Here/Another Brick In The Wall Part Two
"Once of these days I'm going to
cut your songs into little pieces, re-record some others and sell them off in
some cheap and tacky cover at vast expense!"
Back in
1971 Pink Floyd heard that EMI wanted to release a retrospective and stepped in
to make sure that 'Relics' was made care, full of fan favourites and rarities
that offered a bit of everything. Ten years later however, with a new breed of
fan rushing in after 'The Wall', nobody cares anymore. Certainly Not Roger
Waters, who dumps the whole thing on Gilmour's shoulders and looks the other
way. Certainly not EMI, who come across a sticking point over the licensing
rights for 'Dark Side Of The Moon' (courtesy of the Floyd being licensed out to
a different record company in the States - although the Floyd were on EMI their
whole lives in Britain, they were swapped between two or three record labels in
the States, though oddly 'Meddle' was also on EMI, hence the album version of
'One Of These Days' at the start) and ask the band to re-record one of their
classics as quickly as possible. And most certainly not Hipgnosis who,
contracted to come up with a cover image, come up with one of their worst ideas
yet - a dancing couple held in place by ropes outside a barn (Gilmour wasn't
entirely joking when he said the cover was 'so awful I assumed we'd get it
cheap'). Tacky looking and tacky sounding, this record more than ever reminds
of the original line cut from 'Dogs' back in 1975 'Gotta keep people buying
this shit!'
Of
course, the curse of being a collector is that you kinda need to buy it anyway
if only to see how badly some old friends have been wounded in the process.
'Money' is as good a re-make as Gilmour and Dick Parry can make it, re-cycling
the rhythm track and the sound effects of the original whilst giving just a different
enough performance not to get sued (Gilmour's voice has deepened anyway with
the years and he gives a much rawer growl this time around). 'Sheep' and 'Wish
You Were Here' get little trims to take away some of the sound effects that
were used to segue into these tracks on the original albums. 'Another Brick'
features the unique ear-catching 'loop' of the drum beat at the beginning as
per the single version - but is otherwise the same as the album, complete with
Roger's demented teacher shrieks at the end. 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' fares best out of
all the six songs, cut down from twenty off minutes to ten and effectively
losing the end of 'part one' and the start of 'part two' with some deft editing
that sticks the two vocal parts together. The edit is rather deftly done,
actually and better than critics always say, going straight from 'Come on you
painter you prisoner and shine' to 'Nobody knows where you are how near or
far...' Unfortunately though by also
cutting out virtually the whole ending and keeping most of the lengthy opening,
the song feels very top-heavy, ending on a
unique fade of Gilmour's guitar chords while everything else dies away
(so you don't get the synth and bass jam session at all). Even so, it's a
rather poor affair, with Pink Floyd effectively laughing at the stupidty of
them having to release a compilation, giving it a stupid title, cover and track
listing and expecting us all to buy it like good little sheep anyway. Wrong
idea, wrong packaging, wrong band.
"Works"
(Capitol,
'1983')
One
Of These Days/Arnold Layne/Fearless/Brain Damage/Eclipse//Set The Controls For
The Heart Of The Sun/See Emily Play/Several Species Of Small Furry Animals
Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict/Free Four/Embryo
" ratiug ym kcab gnirb ratiug ym
kcab gnirb ratiug ym kcab gnirb ratiug ym kcab gnirb ...and the wind cried Mary!"
There are quite a few Floyd compilations out there,
but most of them tend to stick with the obvious. The American-only post-Wall
cash in 'The Works', though is worth mentioning because it's bonkers: I'm not
sure anyone in their right mind would ever have considered putting
ranting-Scotsman-meets-sound-effects 'Several Small Species' on a best-of where
it sounds even more out of place segueing in not from the fly with the rolled
up newspaper sounds of 'Grantchester Meadows' but the sunny pop of 'See Emily
Play'. The 'new' segue between 'Fearless' and 'Brain Damage' works rather well,
though, with the Liverpool football club crowd now egging the narrator on to
'insanity'. Equally few other Floyd compilations have room to adopt some of the
more overlooked Floyd classics like 'Free Four' or 'Fearless'. The inclusion of
two rare Syd Barrett singles, only previously made available on album on
'Relics', is also a bonus and frankly makes this set a whole lot more enjoyable
than the 'official' best of 'A Collection Of Great Dance Songs' released in a
few years' time. However the real reason you'll want to own this is because it
sports the only 'official' release of Pink Floyd's greatest unreleased song
'Embryo', a similar but more playful and much much shorter version of 'Echoes'
recorded during the 'Ummagumma' sessions but left unfinished, even though it
was a stronger composition than anything that actually made the studio album
half. Pink Floyd were horrified and tried to have the compilation pulled,
without success given that they were no longer on the Columbia label in the
States, though they've successfully blocked any re-release of the album in the
CD era (though that hasn't stopped bootleggers making their own from vinyl
copies). Back in the day this album was also worth buying for the quadrophonic
mixes of 'Brain Damage' and 'Eclipse', curiously the only songs from 'Dark Side
Of The Moon' here despite it being by far the best-selling album the Floyd
released on their American label, though this has since been re-released on the
Dark Side 'Immersion' box set. A shame about the rather ugly cover though, with
the band name and album title written in grey block capital letters supposedly
being but up by a builder and about as un-Floyd and commercial as you can get
(still beats the 'Dance Songs' dancers with holes in, though).
Roger
Waters "The Pros and Cons Of Hitch-Hiking"
(EMI, May 1984)
4.30 AM (Apparently They Were
Travelling Abroad)/4.33AM (Running Shoes)/4.37 AM (Arabs With Knives and West
German Skies)/4.39 AM (For The First Time Today Part Two)/4.41 AM (Sexual
Revolution)/4.47 AM (The Remains Of Our Love)//4.50AM (Go Fishing)/4.56 AM (For
The First Time Today Part One)/4.58 AM (Dunromain' Duncarin' Dunlivin')/5.01AM
(The Pros and Cons Of Hitch-Hiking Part Ten)/5.06 AM (Every Stranger's
Eyes)/5.11 AM (The Moment OF Clarity)
"Pease
hold my hand as we blunder through the maze and remember nothing can grow
without rain"
'There
were arabs with knives under West German knives, a murderous Yoko Ono telling
me to jump to my death and girls on motorbikes telling me to run away to the
country and, oh Aunty Em, it was such a strange dream!' 'Ssh Roger and go to
sleep - I'll read the rest of that A A Milne' book to you to get you to sleep...'
Somewhere
in a parallel universe, the rest of Pink Floyd heard Roger Waters' twin set of
demos for this album and 'The Wall' and plumped for the surrealist psychedelic of 'Hitch-Hikers' instead of their
future best-seller, a peculiar record that plays with concepts, time and
imagination in an even more unhinged way than it's big brother. While 'The
Wall' was also something of a gamble (a double album about barriers centred
around a cosseted rock star who turns into a Nazi?!), 'Hitch-Hiking' would have
been commercial suicide, a peculiar melody-less record that makes 'Atom Heart
Mother' and 'Ummagumma' seem like sensible ideas (though oddly enough it's the
one Floyd manager Steve O'Rourke pushed for the band to record and even Gilmour
added that he thought many of the songs were 'better'). Ostensibly it's a dream
told across forty minutes where rules are bent and time is non-linear so we
move suddenly and jarring from one scene into another. Officially it's the
made-up tale of a man who goes hitch-hiking across California after a mid-life
crisis and all his dreams of what he's going to do with the pretty hitch-hiker
he picks up at the side of the road. In truth, it's Roger's sub-conscious
having a field day, as he's hit by guilt about the break-up of his band and his
first marriage, desperately trying to find logic and reason in a world where
everything concrete he's ever relied upon is suddenly turning to quicksand.
Though the two projects have more in common than is usually supposed (the whole
album could easily take place in Pink's mind, in the part of 'The Wall' where
he loses touch with reality in between the self-realisation of 'Nobody's Home'
and the medical interruption of 'Comfortably Numb'; indeed 'Sexual Revolution'
originally appeared as part of 'The Wall' demo tape), the biggest difference is
that Pink is a passive character, a Syd-style character who withdraws into
himself the more that people get at him; 'Hitch-Hiking' is much more
aggressive, with Roger's narrators determined to find his own way out of his
mess, with several songs dreaming of escape even if every new direction seems
uglier than the first.
So
what are the pros and cons of 'Hitch-Hiking'? Well, it's an album quite unlike
anything else ever made, which is always a better result than a poor copy of
something else. Roger is in great scream and occasionally great voice
throughout. Some of the more 'normal' songs - 'Every Stranger's Eyes' and 'For
The First Time Today' (a two-part song, typically for this album, told to us
backwards) - are rightly heralded by fans as lost gems amongst his catalogue.
The decision to name every song after the time of deep sleep dreaming (the
album takes place between 4.30AM and 5.11 am, so for 'us' they take place in
real time, although the album seems to take years to play out in Roger's head)
is a clever one. It's the only place where you can hear Roger laughing his way
through a cod-operatic German folk song and the only album to contain a song
where Yoko Ono tells all male listeners to leap from a tall building in the
name of feminism ('Why prolong the agony? All men must die!') It's a record
that deserved to make a far bigger splash than it did when released as the
long-delayed second Roger Waters solo album - simply for breaking so many rules
if nothing else.
But
sometimes rules are there for a reason. Compared to other similar Roger Waters
concepts this one sounds self-indulgent, full of personal references that are
harder to grasp and identify with than Waters' other big concepts like 'Moon's
life pressures or The Wall's sense of alienation (those are his real children
frequently heard across the album, following on from their cameo on 'The Final
Cut' and all the events that happen - surreal as they may be - feel even more
autobiographical than 'The Wall'). Even the best tunes on this album sound
unmemorable compared to Roger's best work, while most of the melodies more or
less sound the same anyway, sung in a similar whisper that makes this album
more of a close cousin of 'The Final Cut' (though without the warmth). Though
fans like to quote the impressive array of guest parts, including a rare 1980s
role for Eric Clapton (well if you've got to replace David Gilmour with someone
you might as well go for the best...) and singer Madeline Bell as the 'biker
chick' (Roger is simply credited as 'man'), in truth they distract rather than
enhance this album which might have been better sung by Roger alone rather than
as yet another 'pop' album. This record also starts the trend of Roger
smothering his small smouldering songs in a mass choir of backing singers,
something that will damage all his solo work from this point on. The front
cover, the rear view of nude model Linzi Drew across a torn split in a block of
colour, is needlessly distracting given that it has nothing to do with the
music and though probably meant 'ironically' as a comment on commercialism just
makes Roger look as bad as everyone he's trying to poke fun at.
The
end result is an album that's heavy going, but rewarding - at least in part - if you're prepared to
invest the time and effort to look past the repetition and all the shouting.
This is a tougher journey even than 'The Wall', without the added lift from
'Another Brick' or 'Comfortably Numb' to keep things moving and needs perhaps
an extra couple of excellent songs to be truly ranked as an important part of
Roger's writing. However few writers have ever been quite as brave or as
revealing as Roger is here, who is effectively creating the soundtrack to a
mid-life crisis, his characters wobbling between the security of the last few
years and the promise of the new and unknown, torn between fading love and
growing lust. The single biggest problem with this album is that, unlike every
other Waters concept which ends definitively with either the blown up or aliens
finding us dead or the simple tearing down of the wall, this album doesn't ever
seem to reach a conclusion. Roger's as lost and muddled as he was when he
started the album - though he promises us a 'Moment Of Clarity', for all we
know the comfort of the familiar could be just another trap, another dream
sequence. There's also an awful lot of shouting, even for those like me who
loved 'The Final Cut' and hearing the full album in one go is a tiring
experience. However unlike some reviews out there, this album is neither
pointless nor worthless and is something every Roger Waters fan should at least
(perhaps only) once, just to get to grips with what makes its creator tick. An
album without any real veneer to hide things from us or to tidy ideas up, it's
as close as we're likely to get to the 'real' Roger.
4.30AM ('Apparently They Were Travelling
Abroad)' starts innocently enough, with Beth Porter as the 'wife' trying
to wake Roger up from his slumber and seemingly giving up as he's under too
deep. A far too perfect sequence of two new lovers driving away to a new life
in a show of solidarity, the twist at the end of the song seems to be that
Roger is watching the events unfold to somebody else and wishing it was
happening to him ('The sun shone down on her lovely young limbs, and I thought
to myself she's too good for him'). The melody plays 'Final Cut' style
keyboards over all this ('Your Possible Pasts' especially) while Roger is at
his lascivious best, making the line 'is anyone...hungry?' sound like the
creepiest question ever asked on record.
4.33 AM ('Running Shoes') is a noisy four minute rock song with bleating saxes and manic
drums as Roger throws in some bizarre metaphors as he stands at the side of the
pavement watching events unfold ('She had the kind of a smile that only a dull
child would have drawn while attempting a graveyard in the moonlight'). Her
head is turned by his Green Lamborghini though and Roger plays the line 'she could feel the
power in my engine' for all he's worth. Again, not much of a song with largely
the same tune as the last song.
4.37 AM ('Arabs With Knives') rudely wakes him into another dream, one where arabs with knives
have invaded this safety while Roger's response, weirdly but in keeping with
dreamland, not fear but outrage that he can't even be safe at home in bed in
England these days. More alarming to him is his new lover telling him 'what we
did was wrong' at which point he has 'one of his turns' and throws her out of
his house. Roger ends the song by ordering breakfast - this one's less
psychedelic than the 'Atom Heart Mother' days although it's good to hear he
still liked marmalade...
At
4.39AM ('For The First Time
Today') Roger finally gets what
he wants, holding his lover in his arms, and immediately regrets it. A
torturous cry of 'ooh babe' straight from 'Mother' leads into Roger
caterwauling 'Stay With Me' like Rod Stewart on steroids. This is the least
musical 'song' here and is more of a narrative between the other songs,
highlighted by some nice keyboard work by Michael Kamen and an eerie string arrangement.
By
4.41AM ('Sexual Revolution')
Roger has forgotten his doubts and got horny instead. Originally intended for
the part of 'The Wall' following 'Young Lust', this song has Roger trying to
get his girlfriend to conform to what he's been taught, urging her to paint her
lips ('Not what the Good Lord made, but what he intended!') and - more like
Pink than the rest of this album - sounds so up himself you want to slap him.
Roger is human enough to plead with her that 'I'm only a rat in a maze like you',
though. Waking up in a sweat in 'our' world, his wife puts him to sleep again
with more sexual innuendos than a Carry On film.
At
4.47 AM ('The Remains Of Our
Love') Roger has an epiphany which sounds like a more muted repeat of
the happier half of 'Comfortably Numb'. He doesn't want to leave his wife and
she isn't mad at him anymore, telling him 'come here you silly boy - I was only
joking!' The pair try to start a new life in the country while Clapton plays
some pretty country licks on a slide guitar (sounding not unlike his pal George
Harrison in the process), but things soon go wrong: the pair are arguing as
early as the car ride there over what directions to use.
Over
on side two it's 4.50 AM ('Go
Fishing') - at least on early copies, later CDs skip the ten second
pause that makes this second side start spot on time - Roger is remembering
past car journeys when his family were safely together and every journey meant
taking a mini-house full of 'books about everything, from solar panels to how
nice natural childbirth is' (Roger has very intellectual parents!) A pretty
opening quickly goes wrong, though, with a 'Final Cut' style loud section which
disturbs the peace even though lyrically this is still an idyllic picture.
Roger gets to write, read 'Winnie The Pooh' to his children in between puffs on
a cigarette and 'only occasionally go into town' while his wife works away at a
loom. The family even adopt a fox cub and give him a new lease of life after
his mother becomes 'somebody's coat'. But, of course it all goes wrong: the
children catch Bronchitis, the car runs out of diesel petrol, 'the crops turned
brown, the leaves fell down - it was over'.
A distraught Roger snarls 'Fuck it then - maybe I'll see you around?!'
At
4.56AM ('For The First Time
Today' Part One') Roger is back at the same place but sinking down not
going up, convinced his marriage is over and realising he no longer has the
excuse of his wife being 'Tommy',
'playing dumb, deaf and blind' to his infidelities. Al Roger is left
with is a lonesome road.
At 4.58AM 'Dunroamin' Duncarin'
Dunlivin') Roger is the one waiting for a lift and the one being taken
for a ride. Roger plays along with his latest groupies' pleas for a new life
and even buys them old ducks on the wall but both of them are playing, her
'waiting for Mr Right to come along' and Roger hiding from having to make a
decision. Unfortunately the longest song on the album doesn't have much of a
tune, instead repeating the earlier refrain from 'Running Shoes' et al at a
slower speed.
The
most singalong, memorable musical moment on the album is 5.01 AM ('The Pros and Cons Of
Hitch-Hiking'), an upbeat uptempo rock song which finally gives Clapton
the space to play his trademark sounds. Unfortunately lyrically it's about the
weakest song here, a clichéd track about a female biker and Roger a 'fish
taking a hook'. The second half of the song is the part with the Yoko Ono
references and are downright peculiar - if any artist knew how precious life
was (especially in the mid 1980s) its Yoko Ono, who campaigned so hard for
peace and ending wars. However it does give Roger the chance for some belated
humour: 'Jump' she says, 'No -I'm too young and good looking!' I cry.
The
best song on the album without a doubt is 5.06AM ('Every Stranger's Eyes'), in truth the only
moment here that sounds like a 'proper' song. Stopping off at a diner, Roger
gets asked by a waitress if he wants a cup of coffee and he falls in love - for
about the fifth time today. Roger's back to his listing ways in the lyrics but
at least he does so poetically here, discovering that he can fall in love with
strangers from all round the world if he sees a special spark of character and
kindness in their eyes (('In transit camps, under arc lamps, on unloading
ramps, in faces blurred by rubber stamps'). In one sense this is a song of
solidarity for the lost and homeless, a Roger without a home seeing 'himself'
in 'every stranger's eyes. He ends the song by remembering that he once saw
himself in his wife's eyes too and longs for her to 'rekindle the hope' he once
saw in her eyes. Like 'Nobody Home' on 'The Wall' it's the moment of humanity
the album badly needs and one of Roger's best songs for the dispossessed and
downtrodden.
By
5.11AM ('The Moment Of
Clarity') Roger has reached a decision - for now anyway, goodness knows
what he thinks the next time he wakes up. Though its fading the longer he wakes
up, Roger realises that he's fated to live the rest of his life with his wife
and that the grass really isn't greener anywhere else. A little bit afraid that
he really is alone when he first stirs, he's relieved to see her sleeping body
next to his - for now anyway - realising that his problems stem from one
profound thought: 'I couldn't take another moment alone'.
In
real life Roger stayed with his second wife Carolyne Christie - the Third
Marquiss Of Zetland - for another eight years, the pair divorcing in 1992 after
sixteen years together (Roger recently divorced his fourth, suggesting that
he's still darting between the glory of security and the thrill of the unknown
even today). 'Pros and Cons' sounds like his romantic and realist sides
fighting each other out for where his life and those of the people around him
might be better off - together or apart - but it doesn't really come to an
answer. Like Eeyore, the grumpy A A Milne character who stares at his
reflection and calls himself 'pathetic', Roger is trying to face up to who he
is and what he stands for across this album and still can't decide what
decision is best. With 'Hitch-Hiking' a metaphor for affairs and liaisons,
compared to the planned shared long-haul journey of marriage, Roger tries to
enjoy both and come badly unstuck. So too does the music at times, but there's
a bravery about this album's bravado and a chance to revel in the revelations
that makes 'Hitch-Hiking' a worthy album in the canon. A confused, heavy going,
repetitive, slow-burning, downright peculiar mixture of surrealist imagery and
sub-conscious thought admittedly, but a worthy album all the same. Though a Floyd
version of this album would never have been as loved or respected as 'The
Wall', it could yet have been a 'fan favourite', with more Roger Waters per
square inch than any other album he's yet made.
David Gilmour "About Face"
(EMI,
March 1984)
Until
We Sleep/Murder/Love On The Air/Blue Light/Out Of The Blue//All Lovers Are
Deranged/You Know I'm Right/Cruise/Let's Get Metaphysical/Near The End
"I don't want this anger that's
burning in me!"
'About
Face' has gone down in Floyd history as the 'one where Gilmour gets angry'.
Recorded in a pique of pure Gilmourness in the wake of 'The Final Cut's pure
Watersness, this is the record with the front cover that looks as if it's
caught David unprepared mid-argument, his nostrils flaring, his lips pursed,
his eyebrows half-raising into a frown while her jerks back his thumb as if to
say 'don't blame me - blame him!' at an imaginary Waters whose ghost hangs
heavy across this album. It's a record full of songs named 'Murder' and 'All
Lovers Are Deranged' and a pointed 'You Know I'm Right' and has a reputation
for being a bit, well...noisy. The Bob Ezrin producer's credit doesn't bode
well for this being a quiet melodic album either given both 'The Wall' and
'Momentary Lapse'. Given that the songs that worked least well on the
Gilmour-led Floyd albums were full of similar bombast and aggression ('The Dogs
Of War' 'What Do You Want From Me?') I wasn't exactly looking forward to this
record and put it off until I both couldn't find any more other Floyd records
worth buying and at a cheap enough price to allow my conscience to rest easy
that it was worth it for a 'collection completer'.
I should
have discovered this album earlier. Though there are moments of high-tempo rock
and more than a little frustration coming over in the lyrics, people have got
this album all wrong. This is a sweet little record, one that's humble and
small but is so tired of not being heard that it occasionally has to grow from
a mouse into a monster to make it's points, before apologising and getting hung
about it. The songs tend to be Gilmour at his most sympathetic, struggling to
work out other people's motives and trying to make peace with things that
bother him - even if he struggles at times, as in the case of a murderer
interviewed on the news or, of course, Roger (though 'You Know I'm Right' is
about the most low key 'how dare you' song you'll ever hear). The only two
songs that really go for the jugular, fascinatingly, are the products of
David's all-too-brief working relationship with The Who's Pete Townshend. Both
men were at a loose end, their bands having seemingly fallen apart between them
and at the end of difficult periods in their respective love lives.
Interestingly Townshend and Gilmour together seem to equal a mixture that's
more like both their respective 'Rogers' (Daltrey and Waters) - angry,
sarcastic and bitter (the pair met when 'The Final Cut' over-ran and had to be
finished off at Townshend's Eel Pie Studios. he probably got on well with Dave
as both shared houseboat studios and a passion for guitars, though oddly Pete
doesn't seem to have got on well with Roger, one of the few writers who could
go toe to toe with him in terms of big ideas and concepts; a third
Gilmour/Townshend song 'White City Fighting' will end up as the title track of
Pete's album in 1985). 'All Lovers Are Deranged' is a spiteful vengeful
anti-love songs that tells us that there's no such things as love and we're all
suffering some wicked delusion which we need to snap out from right now. 'Love
On The Air' is calmer, but still harks back to the inner turmoil both men
suffered in the 1970s, part 'Wish You Were Here' ice detachedness, part 'Who By
Numbers' depression. Elsewhere Gilmour - in between having Roger and Polly
Samson as his main creative partner - writes seven lyrics himself, more than
any other project he'd ever been involved in. Perhaps that's why 'About Face'
feels more personal, with the stakes higher and the confessions more plentiful.
Left to
his own devices, Gilmour seems more keen on returning to the pastoral
tranquillity that marked out his first Floyd songs and will be especially felt
on his next two solo records (delayed for twenty and thirty years
respectively). Most of these songs are pretty - prettier than on 'David
Gilmour' - and thoughtful, as concerned with life and people as any lyric from
'Animals' or 'The Wall' but without the irony or bitter excuses of Waters'
work. The trouble with this album is, David also wants to play out the
frustrations of the past few years so many of these songs get big epic
productions and steaming fat guitar solos, which in themselves are as great as
ever but over-topple this fragile, brittle collection of songs. With Roger
still quiet over the idea of the Floyd making another album (before his
proposed court case brings out the fighter in Gilmour) Dave clearly worries
that this is the start of a new lifetime of making records like this, rather
than a one-off the way his debut had been, so also throws in every last mid-80s
gimmick he can think of. Sometimes that backfires as it does on every 1980s
album that's written from the heart: everything's kept at a distance, with
thudding booming repetitive drums the antithesis of soul-searching. But at
times it works - well, more than it will on 'Momentary Lapse' anyway - with the
new direction bringing out a new side to Gilmour. Though cobbled together from
two separate abandoned versions and edited into something new and also long
hated by fans 'Blue Light' is a great song, Gilmour stamping his mark over
'his' parts of 'Run Like Hell' with a chopping guitar part that fits oddly well
in period sounds the way the original is one of only a handful of disco songs
that make sense. The sudden switch of gears from low key singer songwriter pop
to tormented 1980s heavy metaller on 'Murder' is also a delight, as if Gilmour
is so incensed at the suffering that he tries out some of his own. 'Until We
Sleep' is also a 1980s song in every way, with doomy effect-laden vocals,
booming drums, a shimmering digital backing track and a sense of not much
happening, but because it sports a decent slow-burning tune and is so different
to what Gilmour usually gives us it works - sort of. You wouldn't want another
album of this stuff, but 'About Face' is better than both the time period and reputation
suggests.
Still,
though, the album's true inner beauty shines most on the thoughtful ballads.
'Out Of The Blue' is one of Gilmour's loveliest, purest songs and sounds more
like Rick's usual style - a melancholy song about suffering being put right played
on a piano, with an orchestral part that beats any on 'The Final Cut'. 'You
Know I'm Right' is more of a plea than an argument, Gilmour trying so hard to
be the face of reason while admitting that he's so moved to anger he can barely
keep his emotions in check. 'Cruise' is Gilmour's one and only solo political
comment, a pretty ballad that sounds on first hearing like a love song but
turns out to be a love song from Britain to America when studied, a 'thankyou'
note for being burdened with a set of nuclear missiles for spare change while
Britain massages the bigger power's ego. And best of all closer 'Near The End'
is glorious and features a trick Gilmour will return to again: the record a
metaphor for his career. Will we, the fans, turn it over and start again? Or
have Pink Floyd gone through too many changes, leaving their supporters behind?
Will he lose our affections and support as well as Roger's? Not content with
that, Gilmour turns it into a song about death wondering what he'd be left with
if he died tomorrow - what his life was all for. It's an astonishing song so
Gilmour in so many ways, touching on the miscommunication themes of 'Division
Bell' and the fear of the unknown of 'Rattle That Lock' and 'The Endless River'
with a self-realisation of what's happening to him that borders on Barrett
levels. All that lot leaves only the rather anonymous instrumental 'Let's Get
Metaphysical' in the 'you really don't want to hear that' box - the other nine
songs though are all valid and varied entries into Gilmour's canon. Though his
other three solo albums all contain individual songs up to this record's level,
this is easily Gilmour's most rounded work and one of the best Floyd solo
albums out there, up with 'The Madcap Laughs' 'Wet Dream' and 'Amused To
Death', great company indeed.
'Until We Sleep' almost comes with Roger's 'Wall' cry 'Are there any paranoids in
the audience - anyone here who worries about things?!' The single most 80s pop
song any of the Floyd released, it ought to be awful but instead it works
rather well, with Gilmour a lone vocodered voice in an uncaring unfeeling
soul-less world that seems to have gone mad. Only Gilmour's stinging guitar
brings any warmth. 'Play and blow your cares away' Gilmour sings at one point,
but not as if he means it - instead this song is a plea for calmness and
stability in a world so shaken to the core he half-fears the stars won't be in
the sky next time he wakes up.
'Murder' starts
off as a pretty ballad, a faster 'Wish You Were Here'. People find solidarity
after a tragedy, none of them quite comprehending it 'with eyes that just
stare'. Gilmour is more interested in the murderer though, ashamed that someone
though this was 'the only way of making his mark', even comparing himself to
the murderer as his anger rises up and spills forth in an electric ending
that's as emotional as we've ever heard the most reserved member in this most
reserved of bands. Gilmour revealed later that he had John Lennon's assassin
Mark Chapman in mind when he wrote it (a shame, actually, that he wasn't still
collaborating with Waters, who'd surely have blamed Lennon's death on a
Government conspiracy and mass hypnotism: Gilmour's pure feeling would have
worked well in tandem), although the lyrics are vague enough to be about anyone.
Goodness knows there are enough similar cases out there sadly, as Gilmour knows
all too well. A gloriously unhinged guitar break at the end is the icing on the
cake, Gilmour spitting feathers at the stupidity and aggression in the world.
'Love On The Air' sounds more like Townshend's work than Gilmour's, with its
metaphorical lyric about love beaming out like a radio wave (is this where
Roger got his inspiration for 'Radio KAOS' from?) and twinkling synths more
like his 'Let My Love Open The Door' single three years earlier. The chord
changes are very Gilmour though, reaching out a hand in the darkness and trying
to take the sting out of the song's tale with soothing reflection while the
pure lyrics pleading to be left alone sound like common ground for both men.
'No one will hurt me again - no one will cause me to cry' sighs Gilmour, more
in hope than certainty, wondering why he's getting no reply for all the
messages for 'love' that he's 'transmitting'. By the time the song comes round
again the final time round it's grown in size and sounds like it's found a
resolution of sorts.
'Blue Light'
was reportedly hard work to get right. First recorded as a sort of manic
extended funky jam to have words added on top, Gilmour realised it wasn't
working and tightened the song up in the editing suite. ASs a result the
compressed riff turned out remarkably like 'Run Like Hell' (which can, surely,
only be a good thing), while over the top he added heavy percussion emphasising
the off-beats and a busy horn section that's more like jazz. The result is an
intriguing hybrid, what the Floyd would sound like if they ever made a Mariachi
marching band version of a Santana covers album. The lyrics, long dismissed by
most reviewers as pop nonsense, are actually quite revealing for Gilmour, who
never did write many lyrics. Another song of longing for the perfect woman, he
passes on looks and riches in favour of someone who can bring comfort and
support to him. He imagines a 'blue light' around them - symbolic of both
prostitutes but also 'help' - it's the colour of police car, ambulance and fire
engine sirens. Gilmour is, as it happens, only another couple of years away
from meeting Polly, the love of his life.
'Out The Blue' continues the colourful theme with one of the loveliest ballads
in the Gilmour canon. The guitarist pours out his heart to us as he gets on his
high horse about the future of his and our children. Everyone, he says,
deserves to 'live in the light, be safe from the storm', but knows that the
world doesn't play ball, with too many innocent victims 'their blood spilled
like wine'. Gilmour is tired of pretending that the 'thunder' of oppression he
feels in the air all around him will just go away, but equally he feels
powerless to stop it. Interestingly, this song shares a certain feeling and
melody to 'Paranoid Eyes', while recycling the orchestra and sudden surging
synths of that album and the 'we fall' echoed voice of 'Hey You' from 'The
Wall'. Nowhere does this track feel like a 'Gilmour' song, though that's rather
fitting for a song about being taken out of your comfort zone. A delight.
Over on
side two 'All Lovers Are
Deranged'. Written by Pete and Dave feeling more than a little sorry for
themselves, it's a snarling stomping rocker about how love makes us do the
stupid things and should be listed as a mental aberration. In time lovers both
moan about rules they themselves created, 'disembodied souls' that 'fall in
fits and starts' and are always moving away from each other and that love is
born out of an intoxicating fire that is always going to burn itself out in
time. 'You never really fall in love unless you're seventeen!' Gilmour sneers
Roger-style as he admits that all future love affairs are coated with the
realisation that things will never be perfect. The best song on the album for
those who like the noisy stomping side of Gilmour's work, his playing on this
song is incredible, ending with a 'crunch' of which even Townshend would have
been proud.
'You Know I'm Right' is a clever song from someone bright enough to know that the
other side is as stubborn as he is, but equally determined not to give way.
'That's absurd!' Gilmour splutters, wondering about the cause 'is it you or me?
Why do we always have to disagree?' Gilmour takes the higher ground by stating
that he always tries to at least understand the 'other side's point of view and
would never 'turn his back' as his enemy has done, but that doesn't help him
win the argument. Though you could make the case for this being a late-period
song about the divorce with Ginger, it 'fits' the on-going battle with Roger
better, with 'recriminations all around' not just between the pair. Typically,
Gilmour uses his song as both reflection of the stalemate, with a main riff
stuck in a groove unmoving, and a solution, with a happier chorus that he has
to pluck out of the air and sing in falsetto. The song ends where it began,
with a truce of sorts, both sides thinking that they've 'won'. A highly
revealing track.
'Cruise' sounds
like an ordinary period pop song, a little Dire Straits in the finger-picking
style and organ accompaniment. But lyrically this may well be the best song on
the album, Gilmour sarcastically praising those who brought nuclear missiles to
Britain to 'save ius from things we just don't understand', innocently
believing that owning the bigger weapons will keep us safe, rather than simply
make us the next target when a superpower makes one even bigger. 'You've really
taken me in' sings Gilmour, bluffing - his innocent narrator simply referring
to being an immigrant in a new land of hope. 'Close friends should never fall
out' he sings rather pointedly -in fact Roger would surely have appreciated
this song, so close to his own style and jam-packed with 'Wall' style organ
parts.
Only 'Let's Get Metaphysical'
palls and even this is a more substantial instrumental than any from Gilmour's
first album. Most of the track features piano and sleepy strings until
Gilmour's slightly over-loud guitar comes in to disrupt the hypnotic spell. It
sounds like a great opening for a song that never comes, building up to a
climax two-thirds of the way through before ebbing and flowing away again.
'Near The End' though is a great closer. Gilmour is referring to the record at
first when he asks the listener if they like it enough to 'turn over and start
all over again', adding that he hopes we've felt a 'stirring in our heart'. But
the rest of the song is more long-term: Gilmour knows a big change and a major
break is coming, he can feel it all around him and it saddens him. All these
years he thought the Floyd (for the song is surely about them, perhaps with
Gilmour's first marriage in there too) were building to something - and it's
not happened, with Gilmour once 'convinced we were getting older and wiser' now
alarmed to find 'we were just getting old'. A gorgeously creepy main melody
leads neatly to a sweeter chorus,
willing for there to be something there to hold on to when he wakes
though he knows it's slipping away. Gilmour then imagines himself on his
deathbed, when 'what once was bright is growing dim', trying to be proud of
what he's achieved but a little afraid, too, that he's got it wrong - that all
this time he's been deceiving himself. A terrific little song, full of very
Floydian touches (such as being woefully dark and depressing, and yet somehow
slightly uplifting too thanks to Gilmour's music forever at least trying to
reach up to the sun) and much under-rated.
What a tragedy that there's no song that even
attempts to dare to be this good on 'Momentary Lapse' and that very few tracks
on that album will live up to the standards of this. With its Roger-like gloom
and drama it's 'About Face' that's the better 'fair forgery' of the Floyd song,
the absence of Nick and Rick not withstanding and this record might well be the
most overlooked album in the Floyd canon of them all (along perhaps with 'Wet
Dream' and 'Amused To Death). Selling a mere 500,000 copies - compared to the
millions of the Floyd's last run of records and even Gilmour's own, sadly few
people ever got to hear this album the first time around and even less seemed
to understand and like it. Surely, then, it's time for an about face of their
own: this is a worthy Floyd record, the deepest and most resonant to date in
the Gilmour collection, marred only by a 1980s production framework it uses
better than most albums anyway.
Richard Wright in Zee
"Identity"
(Harvest,
April 1984)
Confusion/Voices/Private
Person/Strange Rhythm//Cuts Like A Diamond/By Touching/How Do You Do It?/Seems
We Were Dreaming
Cassette
and CD bonus track: Eyes Of A Gypsy
"Although you have to play you
find parity by listening to the voices inside you"
Rick
must have looked over at what was happening on 'The Final Cut' and felt
relieved not to be a part of the Floyd anymore. However, by the same token,
Dave and Nick must have looked over to see how far and desperate Rick had
fallen - joining up with ex-Fashion synth player Dave Harris for a ridiculously
of its time album - as a warning for what might have happened if they left the
Floyd. It's often been said that the biggest problem with 'Identity' is that it
doesn't have one, being a faceless crib of every other period synth album
around. The only other album like it in the Floyd canon is Nick's 'Profiles'
and at least that collection of jingles had the decency to be short (for the
most part) and memorable (at least while the song was playing. 'Identity' just
sounds like a typical 1980s pop album with Harris' croaky gruff vocals and
already dated sounding pop sensibilities drowning our Rick's softer, more
melancholic side. You'd be hard to pressed to know that this album had any link
with the 1970s Floyd sound - after all,
his name no longer a commercial draw, EMI didn't exactly flag up Rick's past
and instead marketed this as a new act. repeated listenings does reveal a few
touches of the old Rick here and there though on the better tracks.
'Voices'
for example features a 'Marooned' style keyboard opening, electronically treated vocals (actually by
Harris but sounding more like Rick) and the overpowering sense of melancholy
and paranoia in the lyrics. The long drifting 'Crazy Diamond' style opening to,
erm, 'Cuts Like A Diamond' (was this deliberate?) which does what Rick used to
do effortlessly on 70s technology now updated for, gulp, 80s synths and pan
pipes (though it's a more suitable backing and a far better song than anything
on 'Momentary Lapse'). The Dire Straits-style finale 'Seems We Were Dreaming'
which as far as I can tell is the only one with Rick's vocals which sounds like
an outtake from 'Wet Dream' (although all the voices on this album are so
electronically-treated and the two vocalists relatively similar, so it's hard
to tell), with lyrics about the thin line between reality and fantasy. The rest
of the album, sadly, sounds more like Fashion than anything by Pink Floyd and
if you've never heard of them then that's probably for good reason - they were
as much a part of their decade as The Spice Girls were in the 1990s and are
hard to take now even for the most bandana-wearing, shoulder-padded,
smash-eating 80s retro yuppies out there. Still, a record long dismissed as one
of the worst ever in the Floyd canon isn't actually that bad, merely misguided,
and deserves half a sympathy point at least for being so relentlessly of its
time - something of an oddity and quite a brave idea for an ex-member of a band
who were always so consciously removed from time. There's very little Rick here
though in truth and its own creator dismissed it as 'an experiment that should
never have been released' years later, while the lack of anything memorable
doesn't exactly make this 'Ee-Zee' listening for fans (we're here all week
folks...)
Nick Mason/Rick Fenn
"Profiles"
(Harvest,
October 1985)
Malta/Lie
For A Lie/Rhoda/Profiles Parts 1 and 2/Israel//And The Address/Mumbo Jumbo/Zip
Code/Black Ice/At The End Of The Day/Profiles Part 3
"A game's a game I hear you say,
enough emotion in a day, we'll never live enough to play I hear you say"
Like
Gilmour, Nick spent the few years after 'The Final Cut' assuming his day job
was all but over and he'd have to find a night one. Unlike his colleague,
though, Nick wasn't a natural candidate for a solo album - he'd never written a
full song (sound effect collages yes, songs no) and was a better speaker than a
singer, while despite the star billing his previous album had effectively just
featured him playing the drums in a jazz band. Mason always had a love of
films, however, and as setting up your own film company was a very mid-80s
thing for a musician to do (this is the era of George Harrison's Handmade Films
and several others) he decided to have a go at that instead. The project never
really got off the ground, though Nick did make a rarely documentary about
himself (''Life Could Be A Dream', which is indeed what it seems until you
realise that there's no mentions of the other Floyd members and that the rest
of his life at the time was more like a nightmare). Along the way he met a
likeminded soul in Rick Fenn (a fellow AAA artists by virtue of his three year
stint in 10cc between 1978-1981 and at a similar loose end after the loss of
his band) who proposed that instead of making films outright they could provide
the soundtracks to them instead. Nick was game so 'Bamboo Films' came into
being, a production company with high hopes of scoring the biggest film
soundtracks but instead only ever really got going on a few other low budget
documentaries and advertising jingles. Most Floyd critics scratch their head
over the whole enterprise, figure that Nick just wanted a new Porsche for his
growing music collection and put it down to having too much time on his hands.
However I've always felt there was more to it than this: the Floyd had only
just dug themselves out of a very deep financial pit with 'The Wall' (Roger
teasing the others with bankruptcy by with-holding the tapes for a time) and
were already approaching another one as across 1985 Roger decided to seek his
way out of the band via a costly legal battle. Though 'Profiles' sold little
and probably cost more to make than it made (that's a nice glossy cover it uses
after all, a very Hipgnosis design of shadows blowing a megaphone,
very-much-there-but-not-there, that's very Floyd despite not being by them at
all but Paul McCartney's old designer Clive Arrowsmith) it also sounds as if
Nick could have made an alternative career for himself at this point, happy
just to be making music and a little money with friends rather than millions
with the warring Floyds.
'Profiles'
is a sort of hodge podge of the best of these, a 'Relics' style combination of
bizarre oddities, rarities, antiques and curios that includes something old
('At The End Of The Day' is one of the more substantial moments from 'Life
Could Be A Dream'), something new ('Lie For A Lie', an actual song mainly by
Fenn and given to a guesting David Gilmour to sing) and something borrowed
('Mumbo Jumbo' is so like everything else around in the mid 1980s it hurts).
However there's nothing here that's 'blue', which if you've come to these
albums in order is something of a shock: 'Profiles' may well be the chirpiest
album in the Floyd canon, with no gloomy Roger Waters lyrics, no Rick Wright
melancholy keyboards, no morose David Gilmour solos ('Lie For A Lie' is a
happygolucky kind of a song) and not even a Carla Blay jazz lick in sight.
Perhaps because of its status as a collection of ear-catching jingles,
'Profiles' doesn't have any reason to be anything but jolly, which makes it a
more appealing solo album than some in the Pink Floyd universe straight away.
The handling of period technology, too, sounds much better in Mason and his
pal's hands than it ever seemed to on the later Pink Floyd, with these chirpy
synths used the way chirpy synths should be, not as ponderous atmospherics as
so often happened on 'Momentary Lapse'.
The
downside to all this is that 'Profiles' is also the most shallow of Floyd
albums. Most of the songs are instrumentals and unlike, say, 'The Great Gig In
The Sky' there's no real hook or meaning behind them. I've played this record a
few times over the years and despite the immediate-catchyness of the jingles I
can't remember how any of them goes now that the album's finished. Though most
are undeniably pretty (barring a noisy ten minute title track, though the
shorter 'Profiles 3' is rather lovely with its pinging guitars and shuffled
percussion), they're also pretty pointless unless mid 1980s jingles are your
thing (and if they are then I'd see a doctor about that quick). Mason again
gets precious little to so, although you feel that he was at least in the room
when these songs were getting bashed into shape, unlike 'Fictitious Sports' -
and Rick Fenn, a highly under-rated talent, is probably a more capable partner
of shouldering a whole album than Carla Bley had been. There are, thank
goodness, two songs that make the whole record seem a little more substantial
and both are up to the standard of most Floyd solo releases, if not the band
albums - there's certainly enough skills displayed here to make you wish Mason
and Fenn had written a whole album like this. As it turns out Rick wrote 'Lie
For A Lie' (a poppy song about matching like for like and playing games in
relationships, which is very like his 10cc reggae style) almost by accident,
the pair deciding to write 'Israel' (an oddly aggressive protest song with a
great synth hook) as a way of 'balancing' the two sides of the record with a
song each. Both feature guest stars from the men's past: Denny Peyronel turns
'Israel' from a serious song with a message to say about crumbling
civilisations into a cartoon, while Gilmour excels on 'Lie For A Lie', a
welcome chance to actually sound happy without the baggage of the last few
years of Floyd). Both are well worth hearing and so is the whole album in a
funny sort of way, if only to hear what a 'happy' Floyd album sounds like -
just beware that in Floyd terms this is a snack rather than the usual banquet.
Roger Waters/Various Artists "When
The Wind Blows" (Original Soundtrack)
(Virgin, October 1986)
When
The Wind Blows (David Bowie)/Facts and Figures (Hugh Cornwall)/The Brazilian
(Genesis)/What Have They Done? (Squeeze)/The Shuffle (Paul Hardcastle)/The
Russian Missile/Towers Of Faith/Hilda's Dream/The American Bomber/The Andersen
Shelter/The British Submarine/The Attack/The Fallout/Hilda's Hair/Folded Flags
"The sea of battle rages round the
ancient tombs, while mother nature licks her wounds"
Roger's
first act, post-Floyd, was to revive the old band passion for matching visuals
and audio with the first film soundtrack since 1972's 'Obscured By Clouds'
(with the obvious exception of the band's own 'Wall' film). By Roger's recent
standards this was an easy project and Waters seems to have enjoyed not having
the pressure of having to write a full-on concept album or a work that had to
live up to the Floyd name/ Unfortunately it's also the start of a fleeting love
of 1980s technology that will mar the next few Waters projects and on which the
old Floyd hallmarks of silence, thought and depth are sacrificed for booming
linn drums and noisy synthesisers. Roger was an obvious choice to provide the
music for Raymond Briggs' deeply frightening cartoon, which is to the 1980s
what 'Dark Side Of The Moon' was to the 1970s: a collection of a generation's
doubts and fears about how the world was turning out and what might be in store
in the future. A harrowing cartoon about nuclear annihilation as seen through
the eyes of an innocent elderly couple, who trust their Government to do the
best thing and believe in their ridiculous 'warning' booklet about what to do
in the event of a nuclear attack to the letter, it's deliberately made to be as
shocking as it can be. Briggs, a writer of children's books including 'The
Snowman' and 'Fungus The Bogeyman', is never a stranger to tackling big themes
for young audiences (the first is about death, the second prejudice via scary
monsters) and so is a natural sparring partner for Roger. However Briggs excels
himself here with his masterwork which appears to all intents to be for a
family audience but is instead the most grisly cartoon ever made, a world away
from the usual fare (most reviewers compared it to Disney, though it only works
for contemporary Disney stuck in the mire of 'My Little Technicolour Mermaid' -
'Pinocchio' and 'Bambi' especially are also two highly grisly cartoons about
death and betrayal).
Sadly,
though, Waters doesn't quite raise his game enough with the soundtrack album.
Admittedly like most soundtrack albums Roger is limited with how much mood and
meaning he can pack into an album that's effectively a group of instrumentals
and a title and closing song. However the likes of 'More' and 'Obscured By Clouds'
had proved how well Roger and co could cope with drawing up feeling through
nothing except music - here the melodies get a little left behind in a sea of
period technology. In some ways it works - better than on the sequel 'Radio
KAOS' anyway - by virtue of making out that what's really responsible for the
cold war is a feeling of disconnection and emotional coldness that was always
heading towards the digital sound of the 1980s so short on love. However heard
across a whole album, it's awfully wearing on the ears - and given that the
film is already wearing on the eyes, deliberately so, it's a shame that it
isn't just a little bit softer.
As a
sign of just how mired i the mid-1980s this project is, though, Roger comes out
of the film sounding much better than his contemporaries. The film's theme song
- provided by David Bowie - is hideous, lacking any of the film's directness or
subtlety and falling into loud-mouthed cliché, while Hugh Cornwall's 'Facts and
Figures' and Genesis' The Brazilian' are pretty gormless too, more about making
noise than making music. Only Squeeze's retro 'What Have They Done?' feels as
if it belongs on this album. That leaves Roger with a mere twenty-five minutes
to make his mark via a collection of pieces that range from a few seconds to
seven minutes. The best of these are 'Towers Of Faith', a first reunion with
'Great Gig' singer Clare Torry, which is less moving than back in 1973 but
better than Torry's contributions to 'Kaos'. A combination of biblical tales of
destruction and modern greed and avarice, it's a song that peaks too soon but
features Roger's wrath at its most scathing and features the best line of the
album: 'The Pope rode up in his armoured vehicle...and said something I did not
understand. Well, it was in Polish...' 'Hilda's Dream' features some pretty
acoustic guitar 'n' synth noodling not too far removed from 'Unknown Song', the
outtake from 'Zabriskie Point' but a little slower. 'The Andersen Shelter' is a
pretty orchestral piece that uses the clever technique of fading the film
dialogue under the music so you can just hear it - in the film of course the
music does the same for the speech. 'The Attack' is a scary synth battle that
few fans would be hard pressed to recognise as Waters' work. although you can hear
shades of 'On The Run' and 'Welcome To The machine' in the digital world's
relentless anarchy and oppression. 'The Fall Out' is all new though, a snaking
eerie landscape where very little exists except an echoing murmur of what once
was. 'Hilda' Hair' is an unexpected burst of jazz, the poorly OAP hallucinating
that she's back in her first plume of youth, with those familiar synths
knocking on the door trying to get in. The soundtrack album then concludes with
the epic 'Folding Flags', a sequel of sorts to 'Brain Damage' with the same
mixture of depression and singalong hope. A re-telling of 'Rock A Bye Baby'
that damns the world powers who caused the destruction ('You can prove all you
want but your people will still be dead'), it's a worthy finale full of pathos
and hope until a godawful sax solo turns up and takes over the second half of
the song. Just my luck - a nuclear bomb's gone off and yet all the saxophones
seem to have survived...
Overall,
then, 'When The Wind Blows' is a minor item in the Waters canon, but a worthy
album nonetheless. If you can see past the generic pop provided by other people
at the start, the ten second nuggets of sound effects (not counted as actual
songs in our review) and the fact that Roger is adapting his sound to another
creator's vision then there's much to enjoy here, with two strong songs and a
few bits of inventive experimentation making this a worthier Waters album than
'Kaos' to come. At the time it was quite a brave and uncompromising soundtrack
for what must surely be one of the bleakest films ever produced. Then
post-Berlin Wall - an event marked by Waters himself in three years' time - it
seemed like an intriguing time capsule from a time when the events of the film
looked not only possible but probable, one day eventually. Heard again nowadays
in a slightly scarier and more evil world it seems ever more prescient. In the
words of another Waters song it's 'a warning to anyone still in command of our
future - to take care'.
Roger Waters "Radio K.A.O.S"
(Harvest,
June 1987)
Radio
Waves/Who Needs Information?/Me Or Him/The Powers That Be/Sunset
Strip/Home/Four Minutes/The Tide Is Turning (After Live Aid)
"Give me some confirmation there's
a way out of here!"
Roger
had seemed so confident when he left the Floyd for dead in the mid-1980s that
everyone assumed he had a grand masterplan up his sleeve, a solo album concept
that was sure to blow anything the rest of the band could do out of the, err,
Waters. But actually this is the time when Roger began to falter. The stakes
were higher than they had been for 'The Body' or 'Pros and Cons' - this time
Roger really was launching a solo career and wanted people to come along with
him for the ride. Figuring that he needed to make something greatly commercial,
he put his trust into period synths and sounds for an album that given Roger's
usual speed at making albums sounded dated before it even reached the shops.
Many fans have commented that if only Roger could get round to re-mixing this
record and stripping the excesses back (in the same manner as John Lennon's
'Double Fantasy' a few years ago) there might be a great LP in here somewhere.
However, I doubt it because worse than the sound of this album is the
substance, Roger's usually spot-on ideas about how much of a story his fans can
take seemingly deserting him.
The plot
revolves around a simple-minded
paraplegic named Billy, who grows up in an impoverished family hit by the coal
miner's strike. Billy a computer whizz, starts a false computer simulated
nuclear attack that brings the world's superpowers to question whether they
really would push the big red button, while Billy confesses to a local radio
that actually it was him what did it. Goodness knows that plot alone is
complicated enough for a 40 minute album, but hidden in there somewhere is
Billy's twin brother Benny whose also a coal miner and has lost his job and is
unable to feed his family. Annoyed by a condescending Thatcher TV broadcast
about how miners should be 'looking harder' for other work he stages a protest,
which goes horribly wrong when a bridge is damaged so badly a car flies off it
killing the people inside. Molly, their mum, is distraught when both brothers
are questioned and although Billy is left off he's sent to America to live in
America (at least, if you count the album's B-sides as 'canon') Billy, of
course, doesn't know this yet but picks all this up through 'radio waves',
although that sense of every bit of information intertwined that Roger sings
about sounds more like what will become the internet in another decade or so. That's
a lot for any album to pack in and to do so you really need to understand the
characters if you can't always understand the plot. The trouble is, Roger's
other characters tend to be defined by what happen to them across a plot -
Pink, for example, is a nothing and no-one character at the start of 'The Wall'
but by the end you at least have some sympathies for him, even if you think he
does go on moaning just a bit. Billy, though, is under-written with no similar
songs told from his point of view, merely songs about him and trying to
short-circuit our empathy with his disabilities never quite comes off either
because there's no background to it (if Billy had been injured in a war, or had
an operation cancelled because Margaret Thatcher the Milk Snatcher took his
dad's job away then this record would make more sense, but it feels like
something's missing from the storyline somehow, eve with the three period
B-sides that are also linked to the plot taken into account. Billy's synthetic
voice too is impossibly hard to hear, though to be honest the broad American
radio DJ Jim Ladd isn't a lot clearer and his attempts at humour sound woefully
forced and out of place.
You can
forgive a lot about a concept album if
the songs are good enough, but again Roger's usual knack of writing big
concepts in with small human details seems to have deserted him. Most of these
songs are mere pop songs and rather bland ones at that, more memorable for the
repetitive beats than the words or melodies. There are, at least, a small
handful of songs that stick out across the mire, usually the ones that use the
production values the least: 'Who Needs Information?' is the one song here with
a heart to match it's rhetoric, 'Me Or Him' adds some Japanese style
instrumentation and haiku-style lyrics although none of this seems to have
anything to do with the plot, 'The Powers That Be' is a sweet ballad with
Roger's usual humanism in play at last and the album's most famous moment, the
finale 'The Tide Is Turning', at least sports a decent tune and some long
belated hope. However even these songs lack Roger's usual wordplay and sound
pretty dispassionate too, with Roger taking a back seat to ill-fitting guest
stars such as Paul Carrack and even old Floyd session singer Clare Torry, who
struggles with 'Home', a song a million miles less expressive than 'Great Gig'
despite this being one of the few songs to actually feature words. There is, in
fact, a lot of interesting ideas thrown into this mix - it just needs
developing across a wider space and with more interesting songs to keep our
attention. Many fans will back Roger when he says that his passing love for the
new period technology got in the way of the ideas - the bank of synths was,
after all, an obvious means of replacing a whole missing band on Roger's first
'real' solo album. But even if you'd taken the technology away this would still
be a messy and hard-to-follow album, with that usual Waters insight and
poetic-ness reduced to a few sound-bites and characters who are never more than
shadows.
'Radio Waves'
is noisy pop that seems to spend an awful lot of the song repeating the title
mindlessly, like a spruced up big budget commercial, which is a brave and
dangerous move for an album with so much plot to convey. Roger seems to be
discussing the idea of the social media early here, though, with the FM
channels full of a world of people who all have opinions to express. The lyrics
though are crude and unworthy: 'Magic Billy is in his wheelchair is picking all
thisstuff up in the air...' Weirdly, and post-modernly, the song ends with the
DJ announcement of a song named 'Radio Waves' that makes several reference to
the plot.
Suddenly
we're introduced to Billy's brother Benny on a tale of the two dispossessed
brothers walking down town and wondering who buys all the stuff they see on
sale and feeling jealous ('How do you make a have out of a have not?') 'Who Needs Information?' is
one of the least memorable tracks in terms of song, but it's probably the best
lyric on the album as Roger's 'Final Cut' style sneer sticks up for the
anti-Thatcher protest voices that the society of the time was simply dismissing
without thought. Heard here, in a well-we've got-nothing-to-lose-have-we?
demonstration , the Brothers' anti-austerity protest sounds like the most
natural thing in the world, although in truth it fits the 2010 London riots
better than any event that happened at the time (until the Poll Tax riots that
led to her downfall in 1990 there were surprisingly little grass-roots marches
against Thatcher in Britain). For now, Billy's sense of 'Radio Waves' passing
to him from other people is claustrophobic: 'Who needs information' he sighs
'When you're living in constant fear?'
'Me Or Him' is
Radio Kaos' problem in a nutshell - what starts as a sweet ballad about Benny
worrying about his brother turns into a much bigger song trying to cover the
whole of human evolution inside four minutes as well, with this the album song
that most points the way towards 'Amused To Death'. Figuring that life was
better off before someone invented the wheel, Benny sighs (the brothers do a
lot of sighing across this album) that life now a dog-eat-dog world where he
sees to spend most of it competing for a 'parking spot'. Benny physically uses
a radio so he can talk to 'ordinary people' again, but all he can hear is the
scene of the protest/'accident replaying in his head. A period news clip then
has sound-bites of an interview with a right-wing paper asking whether the
Russians would dare to be so bold if Ronald Reagan were president (Clue: oh yes
they would!)
'The Powers That Be' is the most needlessly noisy and 'modern' (in as much as any
1980s album now sounds modern) song on the album, with Paul Carrack's grunting
shout a pale compensation for the loss of David Gilmour. A typical Roger Waters
'list' song, full of all the pressures of modern life one after another, with
only a 'you better run out home' chorus to tie them all together, it's hard to
know what this song is saying: stay home and don't protest? Or that this life
is scarier than you know and full of forces you don't understand, with loss of
human lives 'attrition'? The song ends with Billy bidding goodnight to the DJ
with a dog barking mysteriously in the background.
It turns
out that the dog belongs to Billy's uncle David and he's now been moved out to
Sunset Strip, though good luck working that out just from the lyrics! 'Sunset Strip' has Billy
feeling as if he's just entered a different world to the bleak futureless
monochrome Britain he's left behind - this American way of life is garish and
full of twinkling artificial lights. Billy feels 'alien and strange, outta
range', but he enjoys the nature around him and the beach where life is quiet
enough for him to 'tune in' with the Welsh valleys of home. Here the only thing
people seem to talk about on the air is what sort of fish they don't like (!)
The DJ interrupts with a shout of 'shut up and play the next record!' The
listeners at home quite agree...
'Home' is one
of the more intriguing tracks. Though the song starts as a geography lesson
with another of Roger's 'lists', Waters does quite a bit of fortune telling
here, asking us if we're prepared to believe that other cultures hate us so
much that we're willing to give up so many of our freedoms (the way we did post
9/11). Giving the power of us and them to the powers that be turns us all into
'second class citizens', longing for the old days of cowboys shooting out in
duels rather than the uneven battles between those with power and those without
it. Billy feels 'a lion within him that roars' as he picks up on all the
frustration around the world. Alas the song is soon ruined by the mother of all
Roger lists as he describes just about every human being on the planet like a
musical game of guess who ('Could be a foreigner, could be a Turk, could be a
cyclist out looking for work...') and some hideous linn drums that make what
should be a moving song lifeless and distant.
'Four Minutes' is where the plot really kicks in, with Billy deciding that what
the world secretly wants is an end to their misery. Roger's clearly been
watching the period film 'War Games' here as he has Billy's keen brain
infiltrate the nuclear missiles of America and Russia and somehow makes them
look as if both isees are in imminent danger. Billy's bluff works, with both
sides aborting just in time (though it's unclear whether the missiles really
would have blown or whether Billy just made them look that way). Typically,
though, the DJ thinks he's joking and rings off before realising Billy meant it
and trying to get him to ring back. Billy, though, is too busy singing one of
the most plot-driven songs on the album, a song about never taking second best.
Trying to make the human race remember 'every time you vowed never to step back
on the plane' and every time we felt the lion roar before giving up and resting
on our laurels, Billy urges us all to remember this moment and that we have
power over our aggressors. Alas the song itself is rather less easy to remember.
This song seems to have been left over from both 'The Wall' and 'The Final Cut'
- while it might not have settled well on the former, it would have made a
better ending on the latter than 'Two Suns In The Sunset', at least had it been
recorded with that album's orchestral feel rather than the 1980s pop.
That
was, apparently, the original ending, which would have made 'Kaos' even bleaker
than 'The Final Cut'. However in the middle of writing the album Roger was sat
at home watching his old pal Bob Geldof's 'Live Aid' concert happening all over
the world and feeling that there might be a future for the human race after
all. With the most memorable melody on the album, 'The Tide Is Turning (After Live Aid)' works well in
context as an 'Outside The Wall' style soothing balm, although it's a much
'purer' song than that, without any hint of Roger's usual cynicism. It's maybe
a little too sickly, actual, with the threat of a 'charity single' hanging over
it all, while the rhymes of 'children burning' and 'yearning' for the title are
a bit of a stretch. A good song even so, though and the only comfortable ending
this work could have had: nothing's really changed, with Benny still in prison
and Billy half a world away, and yet everything's changed.
Overall,
then, 'Radio KAOS' suffers from Roger simply thinking of too much. He's always
loved pushing his audience as hard as he can, through a series of hard-thinking
works, but this one is perhaps the heaviest going for fans in terms of plot
with no equivalent of 'Another Brick In The Wall' or 'Comfortably Numb' to keep
us going. It is easily the weakest of Roger's solo albums and in truth is a
less 'fair forgery' of a Pink Floyd album than 'A Momentary Lapse Of Reason',
with Roger trying even harder than Dave to sound like Pink Floyd without
knowing how to do that without the others there. Still, though, if these two
albums are the lowest between them across the whole book, it's not really that
low a standard: 'Kaos' especially suffers from too much thought rather than too
little.
Nick
Mason/Rick Fenn "White Of The Eye" (Film Soundtrack)
(**, **1987)
Intro/Jam/Murder Number One/Vesti La
Giubba/Customized Stereo/In Bed At Day's End/You Sexy Thing/Slim Jenkins'
Joint/Do You Still Hunt?/You Sexy Thing Two/I Call That Hotel Home/The Grand
Tour/Why Me?/Peanut Butter Two/A Country Boy Can Survive-Murder Number
Two/Joanie/Want Some Soup Mom?/I Can't Believe You've Done That/Puke/You Can't
Kill What's Already Dead/Don't You Fuckin' Move Bitch/Mommy?/Danielle Gets The
Key-Carchase/Psycho Killer/Malher's Second Symphony/Ten Years Gone
"You
can't change the channel, man. Future or past!"
'White
Of The Eye' was, perhaps, Mason and Fenn's highest profile film commission. A
middle-selling box office hit, the last y artist turned director Donald Cammell
(who started his career in 1970 directing Mick Jagger in 'Performance'), this
was a 1987 spy drama based on the novel 'Mrs White' about a stereo installer turned
murderer tracked down by a detective who risks life and limb in the closing
scene confrontation. I'm not sure it really deserved a soundtrack album and
most of Mason and Fenn's contributions are mood-enhancing seconds rather than
properly structured instrumentals, but you can see why the pair released it in
the hope of picking up some extra work. Sadly this never came and instead Mason
will unexpectedly find himself back in the studio as one half of Pink Floyd
anyway before he could have done much more. The resulting album sold badly - so
badly people still aren't quite convinced whether this is a 'proper' album or
just a bootleg - but while no long lost classic it deserved better than that
sharing 'Profiles' knack of a catchy tune and more of Fenn's excellent
Gilmour-style guitar work. 'Profiles' still wins, though by virtue of its two
actual songs of which there's no equivalent here.
"Delicate
Sound Of Thunder"
(EMI, November 1988)
Shine On You Crazy Diamond/Learning To
Fly/Yet Another Movie/Around and Around/Sorrow/ The Dogs Of War/On The Turning
Away//One Of These Days/Time/Wish You Were Here/Us and Them/Money/Another Brick
In The Wall Part Two/Comfortably Numb/Run Like Hell
"What
have we found? Ther same old fears, with you were here"
Pink
Floyd had never needed to release a live album before this one. They'd always
been a studio band, out for perfection and though they were a great live band
in the 1969-1972 era especially (which you can see in the 'Live At Pompeii'
film) they didn't necessary want to be seen as a great live band - their
driving force was making their albums as pristine as they could be and using
the gigs to knock out the rough edges for them. By the late 1980s, though,
times had changed. Part of the Gilmour band's drive to prove that they 'were'
Pink Floyd was being able to sell enough tickets to draw a huge crowd and
re-creating their back catalogue close enough to the originals for people not
to notice. On this level they were successful: Gilmour had sang lead on most of
the songs anyway and unlike 'A Momentary Lapse' both Rick and Nick were fully
functioning members adding their own distinctive sound to the pot. Gilmour spent
a long time perfecting the 'spectacle' of the show especially, so that the
audios are accompanied by one of rock's first giant screens featuring animation
and specially shot videos, a giant bed that flies across the stage, a blow up
pig (which had to change genders after Roger tried to claim copyright on it), a
spitfire and a laser light show that made most professional new year's firework
displays look cheap and nasty. Most of the fans who went to the first 'normal'
(ie non-Wall) live show since as long ago as 1975 really enjoyed it and still
rave about it today - with good reason if the slightly fuzzy video is anything
to go by.
However
as a tour souvenir this album is slightly less enjoyable, with a sense of the
band going 'look, see, we are Pink Floyd really we are!' without the first clue
as to what the real Floyd really are. There are no experiments here and even
the bits that may have started as experiments in rehearsals have by now been
repeated note for note so many nights in a row that they're simply lifeless.
'Money' for example, noodles along for several extra minutes even though both
band and crowd have stopped enjoying it long ago, while Gilmour so clearly
hates 'Another Brick In The Wall' it comes over all too loud and clear on the
soundtrack. At least the old songs used to have some life about them once
however, which is more than you can say for the - gulp - six songs from 'A
Momentary Lapse' heard in a row at the start, after only a truncated 'Crazy
Diamond' to get the crowd going. So bad are some of these songs, which have
even less life than they did in the studio, you wonder how many fans even
bothered to come back at half-time. There's certainly no excuse to put them all
together, although it does conjure up images of Roger dementedly screaming 'how
can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?!' There's a moment on this album, strangely left in by the
editors, which rather says it all: before the song starts an engineer
accidentally lets loose the opening clocks of 'Time'. The audience cheers, the
clocks stop mid-note and everyone goes 'awww' in unison as the band start up
yet another interminable new song. Everything sounds so 1980s too, hence
Roger's famous saying as he slammed the shows at the time: 'Those are my songs
and my pig up there night after night. It's their dry ice though!'
That
said there are highlights here. 'Sorrow', played for real through a pa system
this time, sounds majestic and is a song that seems to have gained new
resonance for Gilmour since he wrote it, as he turns in a far better vocal all
round. 'One Of These Days' - bizarrely missing from the CD version though heard
on the double vinyl and double cassette copies - is no match for the original
but does as good a job as any band can thirty years on. When it finally does
appear 'Time' is the best mixture of the old and new this era Floyd managed,
Nick and fellow drummer Gary Wallis criss-crossing digital drum patterns with
(on the video) neon-glow drumsticks. 'Wish You Were Here' is also impressively
stark and simple after the preceding hour or so of noise. Sadly, though, it's
all a bit ordinary for a band of the Floyd's calibre, proof only that the
Gilmour lineup can appeal to the old crowd, not that they can give the fans
something worthy of their loyalty. The similar 'Pulse' from six years later -
which replicates no less than nine of the songs here - is by far your better
best, played with more care and pizzazz. That band is one playing for fun -
this is one playing for money, prestige and duty and is a far harder slog. Eben
the Hipgnosis packaging is their weakest, a man with an overcoat full of light
bulbs and bird's wings (meant, apparently, to symbolise the sight and sound of
a Floyd gig) lacking their usual sense of imagination and scope.
Syd Barrett "Opel"
(EMI,
Recorded 1969-71, Released April 1989
Opel/Clowns
and Jugglers/Rats/Golden Hair/Dolly Rocker/Word Song/Wined and Dined/Swan Lee
(Silas Lang)/Birdie Hop/Let's Split!/Lanky (Part One)/Wouldn't You Miss Me?
(Dark Globe)/Milky Way/Golden Hair (Outtake)
CD
Bonus Tracks: Octopus (Alternate Take)/It Is Obvious (Alternate Take)
"A dream in a mist of gray, on a
far distant shore, the pebble that stood alone"
An
unexpected release nearly twenty years after the last word from Barrett, this
outtakes set proved that EMI had been lying all those years they said there was
nothing worth excavating in the Syd Barrett vaults. A testament to just how
creative Syd had been, especially in 1970, despite being so emotionally lost,
'Opel' is as the title suggests a precious stone, a further missive from an old
friend we never thought we'd hear of again. Of course, it needs to be
remembered that this is an outtakes set and many of these tracks were passed
over for good reason: lengthy drum solo 'Lanky' and twee short originals
'Birdie Hop' and 'Let's Split!' are easily Syd's most embarrassing works,
sensibly passed over at the time in favour of better material while none of the
alternate versions add much: 'Dark Globe', for instance, is awful. But the best
of this set is a revelation: 'Clowns and Jugglers', the first take of what became
'Octopus', is perhaps even better than the finished product with the backing
musicians grimly holding on across Syd's twisty-turny chord and temp changes,
doing its best to buck and throw them off throughout. The James Joyce inspired
'Golden Hair' is prettier than ever. 'Swan Lee' is a take away from pure
greatness but is a charming psychedelic American Indian tale that's the closest
of any of Syd's solo works to the manic greatness of 'Piper At The gates Of
Dawn'. Title track 'Opel' too may well be Syd's most beautiful song outside
'Chapter 24', as well as the most 'knowing' song since 'Jugband Blues', a man
trapped on a desert island after searching for shiny jewels but unable to find
his way back to shore (many people have wondered how one of Syd's best songs
could ever have been overlooked - sadly it's probably the off-key agonising
finale 'I'm tryyyyying' that did it, though in context at the end of a painful
song it's a moving moment, Syd trying hard to move his song along and get it to
resolve on a final chord that's just out of reach). Though not quite up there
with 'The Madcap Laughs' and 'Barrett' as so many fans rushed to proclaim on
release, 'Opel' is far better than most outtake sets and like the best of these
rarities compilations reveals even more about our lost pioneer than we knew
already. Sadly plans to include the first official release of Syd's Floyd
outtakes 'Scream Thy Last Scream' and 'vegetable Man' were vetoed by the rest
of the band at the eleventh hour, leaving this compilation - like Syd's career
it has to be said - tantalisingly limited and just short of greatness.
Nick Mason/Rick Fenn "Tank
Malling"
(EMI,
Unreleased Soundtrack Album 1989)
Piccadilly
Circus/Helicopter Ride/Old Flame/Submission/Hide Me/Stranger In Paradise/24 Hours/Flashback/They're
Getting Close/Thinking/Tease/Attack Of The Killer Pimp/Phone A Friend/Yet
Another Nightclub/Poof/Office Party/Mr Smooth/Stealth Mode/Bible Study/Break
In/Trinket Boomerang/Shower Scene/Goodbye Cashman/Moral Revival Campaign/See
You In Paradise
The
third and - perhaps mercifully - last of the Mason/Fenn collaborative projects
is even weirder than the first two. By now the idea of wacky jingles
masquerading as instrumentals and songs was beginning to pall a little and the
pair were starting to realising that their side project wasn't the big hit
they'd hoped for. This second film soundtrack is not a very good or fitting
project, a typically unfunny late 1980s comedy about a journalist sent to
report undercover on a Moral Revival Campaign, who unwittingly upsets everyone
with his brash ways but stumbles upon a giant paedophile ring (if only people
had actually heeded these sort of 'clues' before Jimmy Saville's death eh?) Until
the day they turn 'Radio KAOS' into a film (as inevitably they will) this
stands as the most misguided Floyd film project, although it does star a young
Ray Winstone in the title role and the last appearance by Jason King's Peter Wyngarde (who should have known better)
so you could credit the Floyd drummer as a talent spotter of sorts, I suppose.
After flopping at the box office the film was re-released as 'Beyond Soho' but
didn't exactly fare much better. Like many film scores but especially 'White Of
The Eye', the music is bitty, listenable only in the context of the film and
even competent rather than memorable. The highlight: the 'boss' of the ring is
compared to Hitler, followed by a burst of German military-sounding drums! With
the film dying a slow death the expected soundtrack album got cancelled, though
it appears to have got quite far through the process before being abandoned -
Mason and Fenn even had time to name their songs and work out a running order
(not always the same one as the film), providing an impressively lengthy
twenty-five songs' worth, some of which last just a few seconds (though only
twenty three feature the duo, with a song each by George Forrest/Robert Wright
(no relation) and Chris Thompson). There even seems to have been an album cover
made, although that could just have been the invention of a bootlegger with far
too much time on his hands. As even Nick
himself said after hearing the playback 'If you sit down to listen to this
material I think you will realise, rather suddenly, that you have other things
to do!' Alas this project also brought an end to Nick's work with Rick Fenn,
who drifted into commercials and session work (including his old pal Graham
Gouldman's band Wax).
A Now Complete List Of Pink Floyd and Related Articles To
Read At Alan’s Album Archives:
'The Final Cut' (1983) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/pink-floyd-final-cut-1983.html
The Best Unreleased Pink
Floyd Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/the-best-unreleased-pink-floyd-songs.html
Surviving TV
Clips 1965-2014 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/10/pink-floyd-surviving-tv-clipsfilm.html
Non-Album Songs
1966-2000 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/10/pink-floyd-non-album-songs-1966-2009.html
Live/Solo/Compilation
Albums Part One 1965-1978 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/10/pink-floyd-livesolocompilation-albums.html
Live/Solo/Compilation
Albums Part Two 1980-1989 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/10/pink-floyd-livesolocompilation-albums_31.html
Essay:
Why Absence Makes The Sales Grow Stronger http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/05/pink-floyd-essay-why-absence-makes.html
