I've always had what you might call "more than a passing interest" in Pink Floyd, ever since I found myself buying a copy of Dark Side of the Moon -- along with the rest of the world. Statistically, they say, one in five households owns a copy, but a recent tally in my own humble dwelling totalled at least four copies. So much for statistics!
I remained fairly interested until The Final Cut was released in 1983 -- I didn't buy it, taking for granted that this was merely the barely glowing embers of a dying band.
I also managed to ignore the next few albums, and was only mildly amused to find that the cover shoot for The Division Bell album took place just down the road from the Guitarist offices in Ely.
Later that year -- 1994 -- the phone rang. At the other end of a trans-global telephone link was Phil Taylor, head of Pink Floyd's backline. He was on tour with the band in Spain and was wondering why we'd never done an article on Dave Gilmour's rack system. I didn't have much of an answer, but we got talking and the next thing I knew, EMI were on the phone summoning me to join the Floyd invasion of Europe. It seemed churlish to refuse...
So, I found myself checking in at Heathrow for a flight to Strasbourg to witness The Pink's "wholly rolling empire" as it worked its way ever nearer to the UK. At this point, I was still playing hard to get as far as the band's charms were concerned -- but all that changed at the end of the night's stadium gig.
I met Dave Gilmour for the first time, backstage at the gig, but he declined my requests for anything other than a quick informal chat, and so I made an appointment to talk to his right-hand guitar man, Tim Renwick, on my way to the airport the following day.
I started off by asking Tim just how one gets a gig, playing with Pink Floyd.
"I go way back with Floyd because I was at school in Cambridge
with Storm Thorgerson, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters. In actual
fact, Syd was my troop leader in the scouts!"
I don't know about you, but I can't imagine the founding-father of the '60s psychedelic movement in the scouts... but there we are.
"I knew of Dave as a guitarist very early on," Tim continued. "He was in a band called Jokers Wild; they used to do all the university functions, May Balls and stuff like that. He was a hero of mine, in fact."
"We kept in touch over the years, and I jammed with him a couple of times, but I've never really worked with him until now. When they re-recorded a couple of songs for the film of The Wall, Dave asked me to play a couple of acoustic things."
And things snowballed from there?
"Well, Dave mentioned a tour to me, but at the time I didn't really believe that Floyd would be going back on the road because there was all this legal stuff pending. So, I didn't think I should take it too seriously, but, when the tickets went on sale, three nights in Toronto sold out in a matter of hours..."
This was the 1988 tour, celebrated by the Delicate Sound of Thunder live album. The tour was big, but nothing like the dimensions of the 1994 outing. In fact, backstage banter between the Division Bell road crew centred upon the rumours that The Stones were about to embark on a tour that was even bigger, in terms of staging and effects, than Floyd's.
The Division Bell tour certainly put many aspects of touring to the test -- the stage was huge, and covered with "no tread" areas that would burst into life during a night's performance with lights and lasers... Some of it proved a little too much, sometimes. Tim Renwick:
"I suffer from vertigo a bit," he laughs. "I'm perched on the edge of the stage and it's a 20-foot drop. The actual shape of the stage is like a car bonnet, you can't actually see too much. It's a very strange feeling."
During the afternoon, I was able to stand on the stage and was surprised to find how little space there was; it looks enormous from a distance, but...
"I'm confined to my riser on which there are pedal boards, monitors and stuff. I suppose I've got about six feet to move around in! I've got just the one rig. It's fairly basic -- I've got two Musicman 150-watt heads and two Marshall 4x12s. One of the cabs has got chorus on it to give some movement. I've got one of Dave's old pedal boards which has been revamped by Pete Cornish. It's got a load of old analogue stuff on it; fuzz boxes, a vibrato pedal for Money, compressors -- mainly MXRs -- and a Coloursound treble and bass boost... things like that."
Tim's main guitar is a Fender Custom Shop Strat.
"It turned out that there are a lot of similarities between my Strat and the Eric Clapton model," he says. "I've got a mid-boost circuit on the middle control, too. But apart from that it's got a Wilkinson bridge and Sperzel machine heads."
Later that year I met up with Floyd again when I went to their
warehouse to take a look at Gilmour's rig. The results of that
particular day featured in a Face The Rack article in GT last
year. A couple of days later, the flying circus was rolling again
in the direction of Earl's Court, where the band sat in residence
for a record-breaking 14 nights, shattering attendance records
with an audience of 225,000.
At one of the Earl's Court gigs, I went along to find out a bit more about what it takes to put a show on this scale together. I talked to Phil Taylor as he was stringing Dave's guitars for that evening's show.
"In my workstation I have drawers of strings, spares and all sorts of exciting things," he says. "I had the tuner unit custom-made for this tour, and it includes a Peterson 19" strobe tuner and a BOSS TU-12, with some lights and a dimmer so I can see what I'm doing, and a switching system so I can send the signal either to a Fender Super Champ or to a headphone amplifier. So, if I'm tuning an acoustic guitar and I can't hear it, I can just put on a set of headphones, turn the volume up and get on with it. I also have the ability to monitor Dave's instrument and radio system through the workstation while he's performing, which is my first checkpoint for troubleshooting any problems which crop up."
What sort of problems do crop up?
"On this tour we've had to deal with a lot of temperature changes, and we've had to set up in the rain a lot because of the number of outdoor venues we've been doing. You set up in the morning and it may be cold and raining and then, by the afternoon, the sun's come out and it's got so hot you have to put Space Blankets on the equipment to keep the sun off. The pyro on stage contributes a lot of dust and filth every night which gets into everything!"
"I've had a few failures; nothing went wrong on the first part of the tour but, gradually, some of the pedals failed and I had two or three of those go down. Apart from that, the only other thing was one of the radio transmitters failing."
Light casualties indeed, when you consider the scale of the tour!
A little while later, Dave Gilmour finally gave in to my pleas for an interview, and I headed up to a small Soho club for a screening of the PULSE video and a chat with the man himself.
When I got to the screening room, Dave was fussing about the sound.
"Is this the best they can do?" he asked despairingly and stomped off to find someone to fix things. A short while later, everything increased in volume and the stereo separation seemed to improve, too.
"The trouble is, they're using a central speaker as well as an outer pair and so a lot of the stereo effect is lost," he explained and sat down behind me to watch the show. I realised that here was a man who had been to every Floyd gig since about 1968, but hadn't, until now, actually witnessed the full effect of the lighting system, lasers and effects.
"That's true," he nodded. "I've tried playing out by the mixing desk at soundchecks, but with the large arenas you have problems with delay and so it's never really been possible."
Eventually, we moved to a quiet room downstairs and continued our conversation. It turns out that Dave's own personal favorite Floyd album is Wish You Were Here...
"I'm very fond of that album. I think it's better in some ways than Dark Side of the Moon. My problem with Dark Side... I've said it before and I'll no doubt say it again, was that I thought Roger's emergence on that album as a great lyric writer was such that he came to overshadow the music in places, and there were moments where we didn't concentrate on the music side of it as much as we should have done -- which is what I voiced to all the band afterwards. That was absorbed into an effort to try and make the balance between the music and the words better on Wish You Were Here."
The album is probably best known for the epic Shine On You Crazy Diamond, which was featured in GT last year, and which all sprang from the famous four-note, bell-like phrase during the song's extended intro.
"All that opening stuff comes from that guitar phrase. We were rehearsing in a room in King's Cross and that sort of fell out of my guitar somehow, and fell out several more times because I liked it, and Roger sort of went, 'Hmmm... yes...'. He said it was highly evocative and maybe that's what got him thinking about Syd."
Dave Gilmour could probably be nominated as one of the principal Strat stylists on the planet. What first turned him on to the instrument?
"Hank Marvin had a Strat, and it was all I always wanted but I couldn't afford one. When I was young, I had a Hofner Club 60, which was a very nice guitar, and my parents gave me a Telecaster for my 21st birthday. That got stolen in transit to America, and I took the opportunity to go and buy a Stratocaster. I've played other guitars, but the Strat is my number one choice for versatility."
"I've tried them all," he continues. "I just don't like the other guitars as much."
But despite a Strat being Dave's main stage guitar, various others have cropped up in the studio...
"The guitar on Money wasn't a Strat: it was a guitar made by a guy called Bill Lewis, from Vancouver. It's got a two octave neck -- I needed a high E for the second solo and so I used that guitar.
"I used a Steinberger for some of Momentary Lapse of Reason -- I think all of Sorrow was done on that. It had one of those trems on it which stays in tune and so when I do it live I have to fake it a bit."
What about the live spectacle of a Floyd gig? Can things get any bigger?
"They said you couldn't get bigger or better than when we did Dark Side of the Moon in 1973," he laughs. " You just do the next thing: the terms 'bigger' or 'better' don't really mean anything. You just do the best you can at any given moment."
