Pink Floyd rebuilds the wall
After two acrimonious decades the band has reunited - at least for four songs
PETER HOWELL
TORONTO STAR
Pigs are flying, The Dark Side of the Moon is warming up and Pink Floyd is to perform live again.
Nobody could have guessed it, most of all Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright, the members of the legendary British rock band that is more popular today than ever, four decades on.
As far as they were concerned, their years as a four-man act were in the past tense. They\'ve had 24 years of feuding to prove their point. That all changes July 2, when they reunite for the Live 8 series of anti-poverty concerts.
The whimsical chronology at the back of Inside Out, drummer Mason\'s newly published personal history of Pink Floyd, lists three events for the spring and summer of 1981, a momentous year for the band.
April 12 was the inaugural launch of the U.S. space shuttle. July 29 was the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer.
In between, on June 13, was "the last live performance by David, Nick, Roger and Rick" — the first of five shows at Earls Court in London concluding the brief tour for The Wall album, released two years earlier.
At the time, the date meant nothing, to either the group members or their legions of fans. In the years since, however, it has become tinged with as much meaning and regret as Aug. 29, 1966, the day of the last official concert by the Beatles.
And all of sudden, the alignment of the stars looks positively cosmic. Earlier this week, on June 13, 2005, the four Floyds announced they are once again thinking Pink.
They have agreed to reunite July 2 in London\'s Hyde Park as part of the Live 8 concert series in cities around the world, Toronto or Barrie hopefully included, meant to raise awareness of global poverty as world leaders meet that weekend.
Pink Floyd joins an all-star line-up that also includes U2, Coldplay, Paul McCartney, Elton John, REM and Madonna, to name just a few — and that\'s just on the London stage.
Of all the big names that organizer Bob Geldof has sweet-talked, cajoled and bullied into participating, none top the coup of persuading guitarist/vocalist Gilmour, bassist/vocalist Waters, timekeeper Mason and keyboard player Wright to bury the hatchet and reform Pink Floyd, if only for a moment.
A bitter feud over proverbial artistic differences is what kept the group members at odds for nearly a quarter century. That\'s despite their continuing acclaim as one of the greatest rock bands of all time, the creators of such mega-selling discs as The Dark Side of the Moon (35 million copies sold, and counting) and Wish You Were Here. They\'ve also been hailed as innovators of rock spectaculars, complete with flying inflatable pigs, crashing planes and eyeball numbing lasers.
For 20 of those fractious years since 1981, de facto bandleaders Gilmour and Waters hadn\'t even spoken to each other, a silence broken only last weekend at Geldof\'s urging.
The bombastic Waters left the band to go solo in 1983, declaring that his departure meant Pink Floyd\'s demise. The soft-spoken Gilmour disagreed. He reassembled three-quarters of Floyd in 1987, successfully touring and recording with Mason and Wright under the band banner for the next two years and again in 1994, despite threats of legal action by an enraged Waters.
But lately, even Gilmour\'s version of Pink Floyd has seemed colder than the lunar backside. Following the conclusion of The Division Bell tour in October 1994, titled for the group\'s new studio album, band members retreated to their mansions, houseboats and aircraft hangars to count their many millions and live like wealthy British gentlemen.
Gilmour told Britain\'s Mojo magazine in a 2001 interview: "I feel no need to go out and do a big tour again — if ever, at my hugely advanced age." (He was 55 at the time.)
All that has come out of Pink Floyd in the past 11 years has been a greatest hits album or two, a couple of live albums from shows past, the odd solo album and Mason\'s new book remembrance Inside Out, which he purposefully subtitled A Personal History of Pink Floyd, to avoid collegial hassles.
As recently as April, when Mason spoke to the Toronto Star in New York during a one-man promotional tour for Inside Out, it seemed getting three Floyds to make music together would be difficult, let alone adding Waters to the mix.
"Maybe I\'m an optimist," Mason said of the chances of reforming the quartet.
"I wouldn\'t say `never.\' I\'d say `unlikely.\'"
Then he added an important qualifier to that statement:
"You know what? If Roger and David decided they wanted to do something together, it would happen tomorrow."
That\'s essentially what happened last weekend, during telephone-shuttle diplomacy by Irish rocker Geldof, who has a history with the band. He played the wastrel Pink in Alan Parker\'s 1982 movie version of The Wall, and knows all of the players personally.
He reportedly first persuaded Waters, rated the toughest sell of all. Waters in exile had heaped scorn upon his former mates, dismissing new Floyd creations as "clever forgeries."
In an interview with this paper in 1992, while promoting a solo album, he raged at being unable to put Pink Floyd to rest.
"I own 25 per cent of the shares (in Pink Floyd), so unfortunately I can be outvoted. I have no control over my past work, and that really bugs me," he said.
"If I could stop it, I would — but I can\'t. And that\'s so galling. I still haven\'t quite emotionally let go of the back catalogue, and I probably never will."
Whatever Geldof said to Waters, it worked. Geldof then worked his magic on Gilmour, Mason and Wright, with Gilmour being the last to agree to the Live 8 performance. But even he now seems excited by the reunion, if only for the attention it will draw to a worthy cause.
"Like most people, I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the Third World," Gilmour said in a posting on the band\'s website (http://www.pinkfloyd.co.uk).
"It\'s crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations. (Whatever) squabbles Roger and the band have had in the past are so petty in this context, and if re-forming for this concert will help focus attention then it\'s got to be worthwhile."
It\'s credible coming from Gilmour, 59. A recent story in Britain\'s The Guardian told of the many millions he has quietly given away to charities, including a homeless shelter.
It\'s expected the band will perform four songs at the Live 8 spectacular, including at least three from 1973\'s The Dark Side of the Moon, a study of paranoia and despair sparked in part by the 1968 ouster of band co-founder Syd Barrett, whose increasingly drug-addled state had become a major liability at live shows.
Barrett, a virtual hermit for three decades, isn\'t expected to attend the July 2 reunion. But it wouldn\'t be surprising if his former bandmates tip their hat to him by playing the title track to 1975\'s Wish You Were Here, an album inspired even more directly by their ex-leader\'s tragically damaged life.
Whatever the Floyds choose to play, they will be performing before an international audience that has only grown larger in their absence. Many of Pink Floyd\'s most eager fans weren\'t even born when the quartet wrapped in 1981, and many of today\'s biggest bands are disciples of Floyd, including Radiohead, Coldplay, Sigur Ros and The Secret Machines.
Some may argue the brief reunion show, which will be broadcast globally, is nothing but hype aimed at goosing sales of Pink Floyd\'s back catalogue, which can be expected to fly off store shelves with renewed fervour.
Waters has an answer for them. In his own statement on the Pink Floyd website, he discussed the reunion with typical directness.
"It\'s great to be asked to help Bob raise awareness about Third World debt and poverty. The cynics will scoff — screw \'em! Also, to be given the opportunity to put the band back together, even if it\'s only for a few numbers, is a big bonus."
That last statement is surprisingly enthusiastic, considering Waters\' long-held antipathy towards his former mates. Could it be he\'s realized that after years of trying to reinvent the wheel, it\'s time to just rebuild The Wall?
Could the July 2 show kick off yet another phase of the four-decade Pink Floyd saga?
Waters, 61, seems to be coming around. He made a surprise appearance in April at Mason\'s New York bookstore promotion, and the two have rekindled their friendship in recent years.
Mason, the band\'s unofficial historian and peacemaker, noted that Waters has always been reluctant to cut all ties with the group. With typical British reserve, Mason explained how the feud was bad, but maybe not all that bad.
"Roger wasn\'t in a bad state. We just didn\'t talk to each other, because we\'d fought each other and it looked like we were heading to the courts. We were pretty pissed off with the amount of money that each other had spent on lawyers. We had no interest in talking to each other."
Mason also spoke of how much work can still be accomplished, through faxes, notes and intermediaries, by people who aren\'t personally in touch.
"I would say we tend to work quite well together, even for people who aren\'t necessarily speaking to each other." He said the members, "even Roger," absolutely share "a great sense of responsibility towards the (band\'s) heritage.
"If we\'re doing a sort of best-of album or something like that, Roger will take an enormous interest in what\'s being done and whether he\'s happy with it and whether it should be modified or whatever. I think we all share that sentiment."
And so they\'ll finally share a stage together again in two weeks\' time, and possibly more often in the future.
A reformed and reinvigorated Pink Floyd would come as music to the ears of Mason, who has long wished his bandmates would settle their differences and get back to work. He\'s itching to get out and tour, especially this summer when the Floyd could face off against such other rock heavyweights as the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney.
He\'s confident Pink Floyd could "knock the socks" off fans with the new digital technology that wasn\'t available when the band last toured 11 years ago.
But Mason, 61, is also bracing for the thought of being swallowed up once again in the colossus known as Pink Floyd, which the band once celebrated with the tune "Welcome to the Machine."
"I can feel myself coming up with an analogy," he said, smiling.
"It\'s like a flying saucer that descends and I climb aboard it."
A flying saucer with pigs, wings and a whole bunch of other unbelievable things.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1119090700154&call_pageid=968867495754&col=969483191630i\'m sorry, but... four songs???
then again, i\'m pretty sure that\'s how Live Aid was set up, now that i\'m thinking about it.. bands didn\'t get full sets.. just played a few songs each..
so 4 songs.. if one is WYWH, and the other three are from DSotM as the article states, that really only leaves Brain Damage for Roger to sing. if that is the way the four songs go, then you could guess this would be the setlist:
Time
Us & Them
Brain Damage
WYWH
other possible from DS: Money
