(Transcript thanks to Natalie Lyons)
PINK FLOYD -
LONDON: AUGUST 1980
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before: Rock’n’Roll
War Stories From The Editor’s Diary
I’m at home working my way through a pile of sulphate big
enough to keep Motorhead on their feet for a week when I get a call
telling me that Pink Floyd have just dedicated a song to me from
the stage of London’s Earls Court.
At
the time of which I’m writing, I’m not actually answering the phone
much, if at all. This is mainly because the heaving bulk of calls I’ve
most recently been betting are from someone I’m usually trying to avoid – namely,
safari-suited Melody Maker assistant editor Michael Watts, no stranger recently
to this page. As regular readers will already know, Mick has long since
been driven to distraction by what he has loftily – if not incorrectly – decided
is my helpless irresponsibility; a tendency to stumble into trouble even when
I’m not looking for it.
In
the light of slightly more sober reflection, I guess at the time he has a point. Looking
back, I can see that telling him, for instance, I am going to be out of the
office for the afternoon interviewing Nick Lowe over a few drinks might have
given him the impression that I would soon be back at my desk, typing out entries
for that week’s MM Gig Guide. I can also see more clearly in retrospect
the extent to which I may have rendered Mick utterly speechless by calling
him up several days later and phoning in my copy from a Travel Lodge just outside
Dumfries, having decided on a whim to accept Nick’s pissed-up invitation
to go on the road with Rockpile for no other reason than the headlong pursuit
of a fucking good time.
When
I start refusing to answer the phone in an attempt to avoid him, Mick starts
sending me telegrams, the most recent of which reads: “IF YOU VALUE YOUR
JOB, BE IN WITHIN THE HOUR”. I still have this somewhere, a guffaw
guaranteed whenever I come across it.
Not
for the first time, however, I digress. Back to the phone, which is
still ringing. I reluctantly answer it, and I’m glad I do. It’s
my good friend Jonathan Glinos, who works for Dr. Feelgood. He’s
just been to see Pink Floyd at Earls Court, where they are presenting the live
version of The Wall in all its grossly overblown pomp. I’ve just
reviewed the show unflatteringly for Melody Maker, paying a tout for tickets
in what turns out to be a successful attempt to breach the band’s opening
night press ban.
Apparently
the group have seen my write-up and reacted with the bilious rancour of the
easily-ruffled rock star whose millions are not enough apparently to soften
the blow of disgruntled critics. According to Jonathan, the highlight
of the concert he’s just seen comes when Dave Gilmour dedicates a song
to me!
“This
is for Allan Jones of Melody Maker,” Gilmour reportedly announces. “It’s
called ‘Run To Hell’[SIC], and we suggest he does!”
OUCH!!!
It
hasn’t always been like this between me and the Floyd. The first
time I see them is in September 1967, at the Sophia Gardens in Cardiff, supporting
Jimi Hendrix on a bill that also includes The Nice, The Move, Welsh soul band
Amen Corner and Eire Apparent. The Nice, on early, are mind-blowing,
the flashing strobe climax bringing gasps of teenage astonishment from the
audience, all of us new to this kind of psychedelic freak-out! The Floyd
appear after a thuggish turn from The Move, a bunch of Brummie hard-men in
kaftans. Syd Barrett’s still with the Floyd at this point – and
on stage he looks slender, beautiful and totally spaced-out. They play “Astonomy
Domine” and “Interstellar Overdrive” and it’s like
nothing anyone here has ever heard before.
I
see Pink Floyd a lot after this, several times at The Key Club in a small Welsh
ton called Bridgend. The Key Club is about as big as your front room
and I have an abiding memory of standing about two feet in front of Roger Waters
and being startled virtually senseless when he starts screaming his head off
during “Careful With That Axe, Eugene”. Dave Gilmour has
replaced Syd by now, of course, and by the summer of ’69 their experimental
tendencies are starting to grate. I remember seeing them at Bristol’s
Colston Hall, the first half of the show featuring the band sitting around
on stage, sawing logs and frying eggs – the basis, eventually, for “Alan’s
Psychedelic Breakfast” on Atom Heat Mother. When it comes out four
years after this, Dark Side Of The Moon doesn’t mean much to me. Listen
subsequently to Wish You Were Here, as I scribble in Melody Maker, it seems
time for a revolution, an end to all this bloated nonsense.
And
so to The Wall, a double album, two years or more in the making, and an impossibly
miserable psychodrama, four sides of groaning self-pity, morbid pessimism and
relentless musical hogwash which they have moved into Earls Court for a summer
season to perform live, with all manner of special effects. I have no
intention of going at first. It’s only when I discover they’re
actually trying to keep people out that I even begin to think about getting
in, beating, as I say, their typically heavy-handed press embargo.
Is
it worth the effort it takes to haggle with a tout for a couple of tickets? Not
really, as I go onto say at some length in the review I turn around for the
next morning’s hot-off-the-presses edition of Melody Maker that so upsets
Dave Gilmour he feels compelled to make an issue out of it. Live, The
Wall seems to me even more grossly self-indulgent, pompous and up its own ass
than it does on record, the much-vaunted special effects more properly belong
in some end-of-the-pier entertainment, and the whole thing is about as much
fun as having a hole bored into your head, a cosmic trepanning you wouldn’t
want to have to endure a second time.
I
sit in some horror as the show proceeds, funereal and grim, a turgid opera
of woe and witless posturing. As the band chug mournfully along, a massive
wall is in the process of being built in front of them. As far as I’m
concerned, the fucking thing can’t go up fast enough, so I’m relieved
that by the end of the first half it is almost complete, except for one final
space, through which Roger Waters now croons “Goodbye Cruel World”. As
the music fades and his voice drifts off, he places the final brick in the
wall. The rest is silence, ominous and cold.
Everyone
around me seems suitably awe-struck. Me? I’m just glad it’s
over. If it ha gone on a moment fucking longer, I would have been down
the front with a trowel and a bucket of cement, helping the bugger brick himself
up for all fucking eternity.
Run
to hell, my arse.
- Allan Jones