Clare Torry’s strained 1973 collaboration with Pink Floyd: “They had no idea”
For one of the most iconic pieces of the Pink Floyd canon, Clare Torry’s session with the progressive giants seemed neither electric nor noteworthy when she duly tipped up to EMI Studios as requested.
“If it had been The Kinks,” Torry once remarked, “I’d have been over the moon.”
At the time her singing services were sought, Pink Floyd had yet to reach their mammoth stature, dropping a series of respectable UK top ten albums but bogged down in cluttered conceptual jams and half-focused compositions that lacked the laser rigour to come.
After Meddle’s first flash of their future greatness, an early chord progression keyboardist Richard Wright was toying with would find experimental life on stage in early 1972, provisionally dubbed ‘The Mortality Sequence’ or ‘The Religion Song’ and typically collaged with Bible quotes or speeches from the conservative journalist Malcolm Muggeridge while Wright played an organ.
The instrumental would be fully fleshed out during The Dark Side of the Moon sessions. A swap from organ to piano would inspire a more jazzy direction and be imbued with further otherworldly dimension via David Gilmour’s double-neck steel guitar and the various snippets of their entourage’s audio responses to questions of mortality. What would become ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ was taking shape, but Pink Floyd knew they wanted a powerhouse female vocalist to anchor the whole piece together.
In came Torry. Right towards the end of the album sessions, engineer Alan Parsons remembered her impressive vocals from prior work on a Pickwick Top of the Pops budget LP, and arranged her booking in January 1973. “There was a bit of direction given: they said, ‘Sorry, we’ve got no words, no melody line, just a chord sequence – just see what you can do with it,’” Parsons recalled on 1995’s Making Music.
“She was only there for a couple of hours. As I remember, she did two or three tracks, from which we assembled the best bits for a master version.”
Pink Floyd were quietly wowed, although Torry never knew it at the time. According to Gilmour, Torry arrived at EMI “like a nice English housewife” and implied a slight underwhelment at the character they had anticipated. Did she have the killer lungs they needed? They needn’t have worried, with Torry being able to summon orgasmically electric bellows for their celestial prog number, despite the lack of direction.
“They had no idea what they wanted,” Torry revealed frankly, reflecting that the only orders given were “we don’t want any words.” In response, she thought to “pretend to be an instrument” and focus on the emotive release her intuitions saw fit.
Further strains would be had between the two parties. The Dark Side of the Moon would score their highest charting record yet, top the Billboard 200, and stand as one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. Yet, Torry only knew her takes had been used on ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ when spotting her credits on the liner notes not long after.
She seemed to put up with the questionable lack of royalties, considering the vocals cut were her own composition of sorts, and would perform ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ live with Pink Floyd in 1973 and 1990, as well as collaborate with Roger Waters’ solo efforts. Yet, later legal action in 2004 would see Torry added as a co-songwriter on The Dark Side of the Moon’s cosmic instrumental, over 30 years after the flat £30 fee she earned, marking her immortality in rock and pop history.
