How Pink Floyd used screams to elevate their music
From the psychedelic oddity of Syd Barrett’s ‘Arnold Layne’ to the expansive ether of David Gilmour’s ‘Louder Than Words’, Pink Floyd led a voyage like no other, characterised only by eclecticism. As an early proponent of London’s psychedelic rock wave, the band emerged from its rhythm and blues roots to embrace Barrett’s eccentric whim.
Early signs of psychedelia were most notably expressed in drawn-out instrumental excursions during live performances. Gigs were often accompanied by rudimentary light shows comprised of colour slides and domestic light bulbs to match the four-piece’s colourful paisley-clad attire. “At the launching of the new magazine IT the other night, a pop group called the Pink Floyd played throbbing music while a series of bizarre coloured shapes flashed on a huge screen behind them … apparently very psychedelic,” read a 1967 gig review in the Sunday Times.
Over time, fuelled by Barrett’s eventual replacement with guitar hero David Gilmour, Pink Floyd developed their sound. Maintaining psychedelic sensibilities, the band helped establish the so-called prog-rock movement approaching the 1970s. In a sense, they had always been both psychedelic and progressive, but the latter label can be distinguished by a thirst for complex composition and production, often employing cutting-edge sound effects.
During their most experimental phase in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Pink Floyd was known to draw out compositions such as ‘Atom Heart Mother Suite’ and ‘Echoes’. This indicated the band’s tendency to compose in drawn-out, improvisational sessions. These laid the instrumental and often lyrical groundwork for each song, but post-production was paramount.
Pink Floyd always knew how to flavour their music with accentuating motifs, from the bell chimes in ‘Flaming’ to the pig snorting at the beginning of ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’. Most memorably and successfully, Roger Waters used recurring sound effects to bring his The Dark Side of the Moon concept together.
Alongside the clock ticking, alarm bells, laughter, money counting and heartbeats were the arresting vocals of Clare Torry. When recording ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, a piano-led piece conceived by Richard Wright, Pink Floyd directed Torry, on engineer Alan Parson’s recommendation, to sing improvised lyricless vocals over the music.
The final recording featured improvised vocals taken from three different takes that built into hair-erecting climaxes of all-out screaming. Far from modern screamo music, the vocals supplied the song with due intensity while maintaining a crisp, tuneful resonance. At the time, Torry was only paid £30 for her vocal takes on the assumption they probably wouldn’t end up on the record. She only became aware her vocals were included upon purchasing the record. In 2005, she obtained her due reimbursement following an out-of-court settlement with the band.
Torry’s haunting screams, also used at the beginning of ‘Breathe (In The Air)’, were by far the most popular in the Pink Floyd canon, but they weren’t without company. Notably, Waters was quite the screamer himself. In ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, a song from the 1969 album Ummagumma, the bassist and songwriter can be heard screaming uncontrollably in an unsettling overdub. Waters’ scream sample was used again at the beginning of ‘Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)’ and throughout ‘Run Like Hell’, both appearing on 1979’s The Wall.
Listen to Roger Waters’ iconic scream below. The scream at three minutes and nine seconds in ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’ can be heard in the opening seconds of ‘Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)’.
