PINK FLOYD'S DARK SIDE OF THE MOON 3

PINK FLOYD'S DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (3)

"THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL, THAT WAS A WONDERFUL SHOW," says Gilmour, summoning up one image from their second North American tour of 1972. "We still didn't have any films to go with Dark Side Of The Moon and we couldn't sell the place out then, it's so enormous. They partitioned off the back half. But what made it was we hired a lot of those big searchlights they use at LA film premieres. We fanned them out backstage and pointed them up at the sky. It looked fantastic. There's a picture of us taken that night which I specially like. We're all pink and mauve."

Thinking back to those road-test gigs, Rick Wright's memories seem to be rather more fraught with the hazards of olde-tyme technology: "It was a bit scary. We'd always have problems with cue tracks to keep in sync with the sound effects and visuals - we were one of the first bands to use them, click tracks they're called now. It was a massive headache because the equipment was pretty unreliable. There were a lot of rhissed cues and struggles to get back in time, whereas today with everything digital it goes like clockwork."

Mter their holidays, Pink Floyd plunged back into the maelstrom of activity on which they professed to thrive. Fifteen concerts in North America through September.

Nine days on the album in October, but three more dropped so that they could play a benefit for War On Want at Wembley Empire Pool on October 21 - Sounds' reviewer noted that, "They gave the packed stadium a faultless demonstration of what psychedelic music is all about... Dark Side Of The Moon is an eerie title for an equally eerie piece of music that takes e the listener through a host of different moods." No sweat with regard to completing the album, although October 27 turned out to be their last day at Abbey Road until January 18. Throughout that period, between short bursts of gigging in Europe, they gave much of their attention to a grandiose and ultimately preposa terous project proposed by Roland Petit, eminent avant-garde choreographer of Les Ballets de Marseilles.

"It started off with discussions about us doing the music for an epic ballet and movie of Marcel Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu," says Gilmour. "Again, we were interested because we thought of it as one of the possible ways to extend the scope of what we could do in the future." Naturally, Pink Floyd were expected to read the source material. Legend has it that Gilmour waved the white flag on Proust Mter 118 pages, while Waters asserts he did plough through Swann's Way Volume 2 before concluding, "Fuck this, I can't handle it, it goes too slowly for me." When this critical judgment was conveyed to Petit, he resourcefully suggested realignment to Scheherezade's One Thousand And One Nights - which still sounded like a long job.

"There were long dinners with Petit, Rudolph Nureyev and Roman Polanski which came to nothing," Gilmour recalls. More coarsely, Waters is prone to suggesting that it all ended in "much poovery" among the ballet types, but little progress on the planning front. Eventually, says Gilmour caustically, the grand design crumbled to "a bit of old ballet danced to a bit of old music". Nonetheless, Pink Floyd did their bit, rehearsing the company through a programme comprising One Of These Days, Careful With That Axe Eugene, Obscured By Clouds, When You're In and Echoes, then backing the dancers live in Marseilles, November 20-26, then again in Paris, two shows a day, on January 13-14, 1973, and February 3-4. Although Sounds' ballet correspondent pronounced himself impressed with the denouement to Echoes when the leading male dancer dragged the prima ballerina "right across the width of the stage with her in the splits position", the band emerged rather disabused of their aspirations in this particular field of high art.

"In the end," reckons Gilmour, "the reality of all these people prancing around in tights in front of us didn't feel like what we wanted to do long term." Just as well, really. They still had an album to finish - accomplished, if the most trainspotterly accounts are accurate, in 11 more days at Abbey Road between January 18 and February 1: a total of 38 days in the studio spread over seven months. A diffuse process, then, but Waters's concept held strong through all the diversions and digressions. Whenever they were at Abbey Road, the album would quickly fall back into focus again and their mutual support was never in doubt. "We were stuck in a small room for days on end and we did work very well together as a band," says Gilmour. "If we weren't playing, Roger and I would be at the mixing desk usually and grabbing the talk-back to say our piece; Rick and Nick sat in throughout and gave us their thoughts if they wanted to. They still do, even though it takes so much longer to record a Pink Floyd album now."

At this apogee of co-operation, they brought out the best in each other. Waters felt free to explore with words and sounds, while Gilmour diligently rummaged through his extensive library of rockist ideas - he enjoys confessing to the theft of Eric Clapton's Leslie speaker sound from Badge for Any Colour You Like, and borrowing the alternation of echoey and dry sounds on Money from Elton John. Engineer Alan Parsons notes that Gilmour took several hours to prepare his guitar sounds for each track, but then recorded straightforwardly with one mic, very fast and at "wall-shaking" volume. It was important too that, despite their collective confidence, Pink Floyd were able to enlist and inspire spectacular contributions from outsiders who were recruited from beyond the usual session elite roster.

When, during the October sessions, they wondered whether a sax might do the trick for Money and/or Us And Them, they were uncertain, says Gilmour, because they had never used the instrument solo before. So he persuaded the band to try his old mate Dick Parry, who he had played with in a Sunday night jazz band at the Dorothy Ballroom in Cambridge. Although this was not necessarily a world-beating credential, Gilmour says, "It's nice to involve your friends, people you have empathy with. There were several big names we could have gone to, but it can be tedious bringing in these brisk, professional sessionmen. A bit intimidating."

Conversely, when Waters suggested that a drop of vocal might set the seal on The Great Gig In The Sky none of the band had heard of Clare Torry. They simply accepted a recommendation from P.arsons. "We'd been thinking Madeline Bell or Doris Troy, and we couldn't believe it when this housewifely white woman walked in," says Gilmour. "But when she opened her mouth, well, she wasn't too quick at finessing what we wanted, but out came that orgasmic sound we know and love." Pink Floyd were in their youthful prime. They stretched themselves, they stretched others, they stretched the technology. Curious about the latest gizmos, they made the VCS3 synthesizer a feature of Dark Side Of The Moon after Gilmour had visited the inventor, former BBC Radiophonic Workshop stMfer Peter Zinovieff, at his home in Putney: "He built this thing in his garden shed. He showed me the original machine, masses of wires and hundreds of components all around the walls, Hoor to ceiling, which he had miniaturised down to a briefcase model. I've still got one and we used it on the last album."

But they were also determined to improvise and try to achieve whatever they heard in their imagination, no matter how donkey-cart the equipment available to them then. Their click track was a miked-up metronome. An unorthodox vibrato effect could be created by a patient band member wiggling an oscillator with his finger throughout a track. To produce certain echoes or delays, tape could be spooled around a mikestand on the other side of the control room and hand-fed into the Studer recorder. "The Floyd were famous for using every machine in the studio, with wires trailing down the corridors and mangled tape strewn over the studio floor," says Parsons. Even so, perhaps the crucial factor that elevated Dark Side Of The Moon to the rock pantheon was the yearlong summer of love between Waters and Gilmour. Parsons watched them cheek-by-jowl in the control room and found it impossible to deduce which one was the leader. So relaxed were they that "they produced each other - Roger would produce Dave playing guitar and singing and Dave would produce Roger doing his vocals."

One of Gilmour's sweeter memories ofhis erstwhile colleague concern his lead vocals on Brain Damage and Eclipse: "He'd rarely sung leads before and he was very shy about his voice. I encouraged him. On occasions, he would try to persuade me to sing for him and I wouldn't. "The truth is that our working relationship remained very good even through making most of The Wall. , There were many moments when we were really talking well together and told each other so. We had huge rows, but they were about passionate beliefs in what we were doing. Roger is a very intelligent and creative person and I am very stubborn and pig-headed, but I think I have a good musical sense. Sometimes he would be willing to sacrifice all sorts of musical moments to get his message arross. Our roles were complementary, at least in theory. We recognised each other's strengths and weaknesses. We would prevent one another's worst excesses and indulgences."

Gilmour recognises the insight behind an oft-repeated Waters remark about Pink Floyd being divided between architects (himself and Mason) and musicians (Gilmour and Wright): "That's fair. Roger believed he could bring to bear on our work elements of what he had learnt about structure and dynamics." He's equally acquiescent when it comes to an apercu from another Pink Floyd sound engineer, Nick Griffiths, who said that "Dave made people enjoy it and Roger made them think". "I wouldn't argue with that," nods Gilmour. "A bit simplistic, but it'll do. It's a great combination if you can please both minds and hearts."

"THERE WAS A MOMENT WHEN IT ALL CAME TOGETHER," says Gilmour, insouciance quivering a little for once at the magnitude of this memory. "Eventually we'd finished mixing all the tracks, but until the very last day we'd never heard them as the continuous piece we'd been imagining for more than a year. We had to literally snip bits of tape, cut in the linking passages and stick the ends back together. Finally you sit back and listen all the way through at enormous volume. I can remember it. It was absolutely É"He teeters on the edge of some precipitous adjective, but at the last second Englishness tugs him back to safety -and bathos. "It was really exciting," he sighs. While Pink Floyd had chance to display their capacity for hauter when only Rick Wright turned up for Dark Side Of The Moon's press launch because EMI had failed to install a quadraphonic system for the play-back at London's Planetarium, they could not remain aloof when, on March 31, it topped the American album chart, boosted by Money reaching the singles Top 20 and a revived promotional shove from Capitol. As Mason succinctly put it, "That changed everything."

Andy Warhol came to see them at Radio City Music Hall, New York, on March 17; 20,000 came to see them at Earls Court on May 18-19 (where a plane swooped down from the roof to crash on stage and the band appeared to fire a barrage of rockets into the audience). Suddenly Pink Floyd were both chic and enormous. "I think we were underground until Dark Side Of The Moon," says Mason. "Before, we were seen as some form of intellectual rock'n'roll. But its success was our defining moment. You can draw a direct line from the release of that album to our current global scorched-earth policy."

"It was Money that made the difference rather than Dark Side Of The Moon," says Gilmour. "It gave us a much larger following, for which we should be thankful. But it included an element that wasn't versed in Pink Floyd's ways. It started from the first show in America [Madison, Wisconsin]. People at the front shouting, 'Play Money! Gimme something I can shake my ass to!' We had to get used to it, but previously we'd been playing to 10,000-seaters where, in the quiet passages, you could hear a pin drop. One always has a bit of nostalgia for the days when we could perform without compromise to that level of dynamics. "I think that tendency is what culminated for Roger in the famous Montreal incident at the end of the Animals tour when he spat at a fan. Something's lost and something's gained in living every day, you know - Joni Mitchell said that."

Additional information: Classic Albums ed. fohn Pidgeon, BBC; Pink Floyd: An Illustrated History by Patrick Humphries, Chameleon; Pink Floyd: ln The Flesh - The Complete Performance History by Glenn Povey/Ian Russell, Bloomsbury; Pink Floyd The Visual Documentary by Miles/Andy Mabbett, Omnibus; Pink Floyd lhrough The Eyes Of...

The Band, Its Fans, Friends And Foes ed. Bruno MacDonald, Sidgwick & Jackson; Saucerful Of Secrets: lhe Pink Floyd Odyssey by Nicholas Schagfner, Sidgwick & Jackson. Now turn the pagefor a trackby-track account of the making of Dark Side Of The Moon.

PINK FLOYD'S DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (4)