When you started writing Inside Out, did you realize how big of a job you were getting yourself into? How complex did the project turn out to be for you?
It was much bigger than I anticipated. If I had perhaps thought long and hard about it, I probably wouldn't have started it anyway. So, it's a good thing not to think too hard about what might be ahead. I certainly changed horses in midstream a bit from when I started, which was going to be the ultimate, official biography of the band with every detail in it, and perhaps long sections from every recording session and gig we'd ever done. As time went on, it just became more and more obvious that it was more interesting to simply do my version of events and let it sort of spin on a particular speed, than try to cover every different version of everyone else's version of what happened when.
Do you have any early memories of recording at Sound Techniques in 1967, before you went to Abbey Road? I'm thinking of the singles "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play." The drums and bass were so tight and there was such a great bottom end.
I think we recorded on 4-track. The drums and bass were laid down on two of the tracks, guitar on the third and then all bumped down to the remaining track to free up three tracks for overdubbing vocals and Farfisa keyboard. The Sound Techniques sessions were much more to do with John Wood and Joe Boyd producing and coming up with the sounds rather than us. During the Sound Techniques sessions, we didn't have the time that we later found at Abbey Road. We were actually in there to get the single made.
In your book, you cover a lot of the creative experimentation that went on in the late sixties. Take "Saucerful of Secrets," for example. Can you talk about how this piece evolved structurally and compositionally?
Well, as far as I remember, we didn't actually try to notate what we were going to do, but we did try and draw up some sort of chart of what was going to happen. So, there was some sort of graphic representation. I think it was based loosely on having a sort of classical piece in terms of having three different movements. Then the movements were worked on as individual pieces. The whole thing was assembled further down the line. I can't actually remember how we worked out the middle section, which is basically a drum pattern double tracked and then looped — why we chose that particular pattern or how we ended up with it. I think the three ideas were that there was this grand finale, the Hammond organ section. Once we played it live on the Albert Hall organ and it sounded fantastic.
There are a lot of interesting dynamics in that song, especially when it comes to the drums. You start with soft accent cymbals, then comes the hard crashing, including Roger [Waters] with the gong, then the repetitive pattern and then the mellow finale.
That was the thing that perhaps made it different and where we found a niche for ourselves, doing pieces that weren't actually full volume from beginning to end. That was the beginning of finding new sounds or new tones — particularly that business of taking the microphone to the very edge of the cymbal on that first section. It was very much something that we discovered in the process.
I know the Atom Heart Mother sessions were challenging for you because you had to play the entire track straight through with Roger without stopping because you couldn't splice?
Well, yes. EMI had a sort of house rule that because these 8-tracks were new and no one had worked with them, nobody could splice the tape. Frankly, everyone was scared of trying to splice it! Looking at it now, after the event, it was really daft. It would have made life a hell of a lot easier for everyone if we could have spliced it. It was a directive from Abbey Road that splicing 2" tape was not to be done.
What were some of the challenges in recording Atom Heart Mother and how rewarding was it to have finally completed it?
I think it was difficult because we were doing something we didn't know very much about, which was this rather overextended sort of piece, and it involved the orchestra as well. It was difficult for Ron [Geesin], who I don't think had done much work with orchestras. I think most of us feel, listening back to it, that it's a rather flawed album. We could have done a lot better if we had known how to tackle it.
Given the fact that Atom Heart Mother was mixed in quad right after its original release, wouldn't this be a great candidate for a 5.1 surround mix? Has anyone at the Floyd camp considered this, or are things focused on the later catalog?
I think we've tended to focus on the later catalog. It's an interesting idea. I don't know what condition the original masters would be in, and I don't know to what extent we could clean them up. It would be an interesting project if one could clean up the masters and actually improve things like the drum sound. The drums are very much subject to spill. Actually, what's happened is that they've spilled onto the orchestral sections.
The mics picked up not only the orchestral players, but also the monitors playing in the live room?
Yeah, and they had to play them loud because of the slightly erratic timing and all of the rest of it. One tends to assume that the purpose of re-mastering is to improve the sound quality, but there might be a case to be made to improve the balance at the same time.
Was Atom Heart Mother rewarding to take out on the road?
It was bloody difficult. I think traveling with anything like that — I mean, you've got a whole bunch of people who really are delightful, but not committed. The whole logistics of traveling them and recording them and mic'ing them up — frankly, I would have said we were pretty relieved when we got back to being a four piece.
In your live performances during that time, you played things like The Man Sequence, which included tracks like "Beset by Creatures of the Deep" and other songs. Did this framework ever come to fruition like you wanted it to? Clearly they were early efforts at a more conceptual musical piece.
It was the forerunner of Dark Side in many ways. There were a couple of elements to it. But the main thing was the idea of a band really doing the whole show. In the late '60s and early '70s there were support acts, and if it was America, there would be two support acts. The idea of this was that we would do our own show and it was a seated "concert", not a gig, if you like. The Man, the whole evening, was called something like The Massed Gadgets of Auximenies. The first section was called "The Man", and the second section was called "The Journey". But basically, it was a mixture of songs, bits of music and just sort of odd things that were done onstage. For instance, "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" was performed live with actual cooking going on onstage.
Can you talk about the Azimuth Coordinator that was built on specification for you by Abbey Road? During this time, were you increasingly using sound effects in the studio and on the road?
Well, we were probably just beginning to mess about with sound effects in the studio, and we met this engineer at Abbey Road — he was a maintenance engineer called Bernard Speight. It was absolutely his concept, I think. It probably existed as an idea, but he said, "Look, I can build you this thing." He built the original quadraphonic pan pot, a pair of them, and worked out how we'd use them, what speakers we'd need and all the rest of it. Of course once we started messing about with it, we realized the potential for running tape and running sound effects, particularly in live shows, around the concert hall.
Do you think that your education in architecture gave you a predisposition towards the technology? It seems like you were pushing the engineers ahead just as much as they were pushing you in terms of technology.
I don't know. What I would say is that it was a very useful grounding. There's a very real mixture of technology and art, so it certainly gave us an idea of how to make things, how to plan things and how to make graphic representations of what one wanted to do.
Of all the people that you worked with throughout your career, can you think of any that stand out as bright stars, who helped you get to the next level either technically or creatively?
I think most of the people we worked with were terrific — it mostly has to do with the timing. Joe [Boyd] was fantastic for the early singles. Norman [Smith] was good news because he taught us a lot and gave us a pretty free hand in the studios. This was a period where producers were expected to control the band, save money and save time.
Norman played a lot of instruments, right?
