The tremendous commercial breakthrough enjoyed by Pink Floyd in the last year can be traced to any number of factors, but the springboard for it all has unquestionably been the pomp and spectacle of their live performances. The photos in this spread, taken during Pink Floyd’s most recent stateside tour, should give the uninitiated some measure of insight into the nature of that presentation.

But Pink Floyd was the first English multi-media band to leap out of the split skull of psychedelia, and big production numbers are nothing new to these boys. Their forays into areas of extra-musical integration were always news in the conceptual stages, but several of their most heralded projects failed to reach the public in the manner they were originally intended.

The interview with Roger Waters and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd which follows chronicles the fate of four such projects. They are 1) a ballet, which was front page news in the British press. 2) A cartoon series called Rollo, done by Alan Aldridge. 3) The music for the film Zabriske Point, which was chopped to pieces by Antonioni and finally replaced by Grateful Dead tracks. 4) The movie Pink Floyd at Pompeii, which the Rank Organization (a British morals protection agency) had banned from London’s Rainbow Theatre last year. Conducting the interview was Conner McKnight, Editor of ZigZag, an excellent British monthly who kindly allowed us to excerpt this text from its pages. - B.E.

What happened to the ballet? It Was based on Proust, wasn’t it?

RW: It never happened. First of all it was Proust, then it was Aladdin, then it was something else. We had this great lunch one day, me, Nick and Steve (Pink Floyd’s manager — ed.) We went to have lunch with Rudolph Nureyev, Roman Polanski, Roland Petit and some film producer or other. What a laugh. It was to talk about the projected idea for us doing the music, and Roland choreo-. graphing it, and Rudy being the star, and Roman Polanski directing the film, and maiking this fantastic ballet film. It was all a complete joke because nobody had any idea of what they wanted to do.

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“Somebody suggested Frankenstein and Nureyev started getting a bit worried.”

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But you said at the time that you’d just bought the entire works of Proust to study them.

RW: I did.

NM: But nobody read anything. David did worst, he only read the first eighteen pages.

RW: I read the second volume of Swan’s Way, and when I got to the end of it I thought, “Oh what, I’m not reading any more, I can’t handle it.” It just went too slowly for me.

NM: It just went on for two years, this idea of doing a ballet, with no one coming up with any ideas, us not setting aside any time because there was nothing specific. Until, in a desperate moment, Roland devised a ballet to some existing music, which I think was a good idea. It’s looked upon a bit sourly now. RW: We all sat around this table until someone thumped the table and said, “What’s the idea then?” and everyone just sat there drinking this wine and getting more and more drunk, with more and more poovery going on around the table. Somebody suggested Frankenstein, and Nureyev started getting a bit worried. They just talked about Frankenstein for a bit — I was just sitting there enjoying the meal'and the vibes, saying nothing, keeping well schtuck.

NM: Yes, with Roland’s hand upon your knee.

RW: And when Polanski was drunk enough, he started to suggest that we make the blue movie to end all blue movies, and then it all petered out into cognac and coffee and then we jumped into our cars and split. God knows what happened after we left.

And Rollo?

RW: They wouldn’t pay for it. We stuck some old stuff on a pilot that they made, but when they figured out the way that they were going to animate it, they realized that the cost would be very high. The only people with the money to back something like that is the Americans. But the Americans can sell Johnny Wonder going at ten frames a second or something, real rubbish, and people will sit and watch it. And the sponsors will buy it, so why should they pay for Rollo when they can sell their cornflakes with Johnny Wonder.

NM: It made us aware of what crap there is — what we’ll accept as cartoons now. Compared to Felix the Cat, or Mickey Mouse even, it’s all such crap: RW: The same bit of.background going by; terrible. Alan Aldridge did most of the initial work and a team of Dutch animators did the work on the pilot, which was very beautiful.

NM: The coloring was excellent and the animations were very complicated, with a lot of perspective in it.

RW: It was a great story. The basic idea was that this boy Rollo is lying in bed and he starts to dream (or maybe it really happens) and suddenly his bed wakes up and these two eyes pop out of the bedpost and start looking around, and the legs grow and the bed bounces Rollo round, waking. And then the bed leaps out of the house and goes out down the street, all in beautiful movements, and the bed leaps into the sky and goes flying off. And when he gets up there the moon is smoking a big cigar, which turns out to be an optical illusion — it’s really a spaceship. And then a little plane, like a bird, comes out of this spaceship and scoops the bed up with its mouth, and Rollo is taken by a robot dog to Professor Creator, who runs the spaceship and turns out to be a collector of animals for an intergalactic zoo. The series was about their adventures going on these journeys to collect the rare animals. One of the preliminary examples was about these giants who lived underground in a complex series of tunnels and corridors; one of the weird things about this planet was that gravity was different for them than it was for Professor Creator and Rollo. They got into the planet using this machine called the Mole which bored through, and in this chase scene, where the giants are trying to get them, the giants are all running along the floor and the others are running along the wall. Things like that looked fantastic. Finally they get into the borer and they come out to the surface of the planet, and as they come out it starts going down like a balloon. Then the ship goes into orbit around the planet, and the giants are crawling across the surface, taking great swipes at the rocket ship. It really could have been so'good.

What about Zabriske Point?

RW: We went to Rome and stayed in this posh hotel. Every day we would get up at about 4:30 in the afternoon, pop into the bar, and sit there until about seven. Then we’d stagger into the restaurant, where we’d eat and drink for two hours, we’d start work about nine; the studio was a few minutes’ walk down the road, so we’d stagger down the road. We could’ve finished the whole thing in about five days because there wasn’t too much to do. Antonioni was there , and we did some great stuff, but he’d listen and go — I remember he had this terrible twitch — he’d go, “Eets very beautiful, but eet’s too sad” or “Eet’s too strong,” It was always wrong, consistently. There was always something that stopped its being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong and he’d still be unhappy. It was hell, sheer hell. He’d sit there and fall asleep every so often, and we’d go on working till about seven or eight _in the morning, go back and have breakfast, go to bed, get up and then back into the bar.

A nd the Pompeii film ?

NM: That’s had a history nearly as long as the ballet. Whenever it s aoout to De premiered, Adrian Markham the director rings up and says, “Listen, I must just have a bit more film.” We’ve been adding little bits to it for ages.

RW: It’s not a bad film. I saw the final version in New York.

What did you think of that business at the Rainbow?

RW: Rank. That is my answer. It think it’s quite witty.

NM: I like Peter Bowyer’s comment. He was waiting for the wounds in his back to heal before he took on any more such assignments.

RW: What it is, is just us playing a load of tunes in the amphitheatre at Pompeii, interspersed with rather Top Of The Popsy shots of us walking around the top of Vesuvius and things like that and it was a bit of an elbow. Since then, he came to London and shot us in the studio for a couple of days, which made it much more lively and it’s quite an entertaining film. I think Pink Floyd freaks would enjoy it. I don’t know if anyone else would. I liked it because it’s just like a big home movie.