The Languid Wallop

David Gilmour : Raise My Rent

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Coming off Pink Floyd's "In The Flesh" Tour which ended with an increasingly agitated Roger Waters spitting at a fan, the usually reclusive David Gilmour had helped secure Kate Bush a record deal and was now ready to make his own statement, a solo album released May 25,  1978. 

 Fans, reading between the lines of songs like "There's No Way Out of Here", could sense Gilmour's state of mind.

 “This album [David Gilmour] was important to me in terms of self respect.," Gilmour told Circus Magazine. "At first I didn’t think my name was big enough to carry it. Being in a group for so long can be a bit claustrophobic, and I needed to step out from behind Pink Floyd’s shadow.” 

Michael Bloom, writing for Rolling Stone, was not all that impressed with the album, which went gold

In his work with Pink Floyd, David Gilmour's exact, blues-based guitar solos function as tense pivotal points that set the stage for the next revelation. On his first solo album, however, Gilmour simply flirts with his own crystalline perfection. Drummer Willie Wilson (from the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver) and bassist Rick Wills (a ubiquitous hack from Frampton's Camel, Roxy Music and the reconstituted Small Faces) are constrained to the sluggish tempos favored by Floyd, and Gilmour dives in like a duck to water. But the alien overview, the philosophical paradoxes that make Pink Floyd's lazy playing so poignant and pregnant, are sorely missed here. Gilmour affects a bland innocence in the face of earthly perversity in lyrics barely worthy of Samuel Beckett's shoeshine boy. 

 One cut stands out: "Short and Sweet," coauthored by muckraker Roy Harper. A longtime Floyd ally -- he sang the biting "Have a Cigar" on Wish You Were Here -- Harper is widely regarded as the most uncompromisingly honest songwriter in England. Here, he articulates the existential riddle of David Gilmour better than Gilmour himself can. 

 There's nothing amiss with David Gilmour as an immaculate guitar sampler, but as far as providing genuine ideas -- forget it.

Future Rolling Stone Album Guides would mostly share the sentiment, although I swear there was a four star review in the second edition.

Let Me In Through Your Window

Kate Bush : Wuthering Heights

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On January 20, 1978 Kate Bush released her debut single, "Wuthering Heights". Disco, punk and "Mull of Kintyre" may have reigned at the time, but this teenager's voice and ear for melody arrived like a visitor from another world,  eventually topping the U.K. charts for four weeks to become the best selling song of the year there and in Australia.

She is not from another world. The daughter of a British physician , Kate began playing piano at age 11, writing songs at 13, and making a demo tape with Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour at age 16. EMI signed her and gave her two years to develop her songwriting, dancing ( inspired perhaps by her martial arts teachers) and four octave range voice.

The lyrics are sung from the point of view of Catherine Earnshaw, the female protagonist of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. SPOILER ALERT! She is dead, a spirit, who hopes to enter her lover's home through a window. Thus the chorus : 

Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy 

I've come home, I'm so cold 

Let me in through your window

It could be argued that Bush's high pitched voice takes some time to get used to ( especially that opening line "Out on the wiley, windy moors / We'd roll and fall in green")  and that Meatloaf and Bonnie Tyler had already opened the door for bombastic melodrama. 

But Kate Bush's career would be far more interesting. Because she would always be far more weird.

Though it would not make any year end lists from the music mags, "Wuthering Heights" is the top rated single of 1978 from the collaborative online music database site RateYourMusic.com

5 Fun Facts about Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here

    What I'm about to write will probably upset a lot of Pink Floyd fans:  I recorded my first copy of Wish You Were Here on one side of a 60 minute tape. I edited out all the atmospheric stuff and went straight to the vocals and David Gilmour guitar solos. How punk rock of me right? In any case here are 5 fun facts about Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here.

1. Intimidated by the massive success of Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd originally considered making an album called Household Objects, using rubber bands, wine glasses and cake mixers as instruments. Now while that sounds like it would have been a bigger "Fuck You" to the music industry than even Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, what I've heard sounds pretty cool.

2. Instead the suddenly rich and always miserable Roger Waters said "Fuck You" to the music industry with lyrics like the ones Roy Harper sings in "Have A Cigar" : 

   "The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think 

Oh by the way, which one's Pink? 

 And did we tell you the name of the game, boy? 

We call it Riding the Gravy Train. 

3. A great bit of the album is dedicated to the old Pink Floyd leader Syd Barrett, who through drug abuse and/or mental illness had become one of rock's tragic figures. He is the "Crazy Diamond" addressed in the two epic tracks that begin and end the album : 

 You were caught in the crossfire of childhood and stardom,

 blown on the steel breeze.

 Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, 

you legend, you martyr, and shine!

 An unrecognizable Barrett, fat, bald, shorn of eyebrows, visited the studio during the session. Listening to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", he apparently never realized he was the subject of the song.

4. The burning man on the Hipgnosis designed album cover was stunt man Ronnie Rondell ( "Spartacus", "Thelma and Louise"). It took photo retouching specialist Richard Manning quite a bit of work in 1975 to "photo shop" his casual appearance:

   He was covered in petrol that glistened dramatically in the blazing sun. I had to remove all the evidence of the petrol. By using Photo dyes, a mixture of dark grey with touches of magenta and cyan applied delicately to the shiny areas, I was able to gradually build up to match the darkness of the unaffected suit.

He was wearing a flame proof wig and neck protector which I had to remove. First, with a weak solution of bleach, lighten the dark areas on the side of his neck then blend the bleached area with photo dye to match the neck tone. The tarmac round the drain in the foreground needed some tidying up and then some general spotting overall. The scorch mark on the right hand side was a separate Dye Transfer. The background to this print was bleached to white and then put together at the printing stage.

5. Considered a classic album today, with sales over 13 million,  Wish You Were Here was originally met with mixed reviews including one nasty appraisal from Rolling Stone's Ben Edmonds:

"Shine on You Crazy Diamond" is initially credible because it purports to confront the subject of Syd Barrett, the long and probably forever lost guiding light of the original Floyd. But the potential of the idea goes unrealized; they give such a matter-of-fact reading of the goddamn thing that they might as well be singing about Roger Water's brother-in-law getting a parking ticket. This lackadaisical demeanor forces, among other things, a reevaluation of their relationship to all the space cadet orchestras they unconsciously sired. The one thing those bands have going for them, in their cacophonously inept way, is a sincere passion for their "art." And passion is everything of which Pink Floyd is devoid.

  

  Maybe he should have heard my thirty minute version.