Floydian Women

compiled by Mike McInnis

Alan Parsons: "I had worked on a session before with Clare and suggested that we tried her out on this track. I think one has to give Clare credit; she was just told to go in and 'do your thing', so effectively, she wrote what she did. She wailed over a nice chord sequence. There was no melodic guidance at all apart from 'a bit more waily here' or 'a bit more sombre there'. The vocal was done in one session--three hours--no time at all, then a couple of tracks were compiled for the final version." - MOJO, March 1998

Clare Torry: "When I arrived they explained the concept of the album to me and played me Rick Wright's chord sequence. They said 'We want some singing on it.' But they didn't know what they wanted, so I suggested going into the studio and trying a few things. I started off using words but they said, "Oh no, we don't want any words." So the only thing I could think of was to make myself sound like an instrument, a guitar or whatever, and not to think like a vocalist. I did that and they loved it." - MOJO, March 1998

Clare Torry: "When I left [the recording session], I said to Mike, my boyfriend, 'Well, I don't suppose that will see the light of day.' And I honestly didn't give it another thought. It was only when I was coming home from work one day, in King's Road, that I passed a record shop, and there was a big picture of the now-famous cover of Dark Side of the Moon in the window, and I thought, "I wonder if that's what I did? I wonder if it's on there?" So I took it home and listened to it, and found that it was virtually the whole thing. And then about 1976, I think, a very well-known songwriter in this country that I was working with said, 'You ought to do something about it,' but I couldn't afford it." - radio interview on "The World", April 13, 2005

Gilmour [on Clare Torry]: "We'd been thinking Madeline Bell or Doris Troy, and we couldn't believe it when this housewifely white woman walked in. But when she opened her mouth, well, she wasn't too quick at finessing what we wanted, but out came that orgasmic sound we know and love." - MOJO, March 1998

Clare Torry [on Kate Bush]: "[The lawsuit] was not really fueled by a monetary thing. It was a moral issue, a principle, and a little bit of justice, in so many words. It was a co-composition, that the melody, if any, was created by me." - radio interview on "The World", April 13, 2005

Kate Bush: "He was looking around for struggling young artists at the time, and I happened to be one. He paid for a demo of two songs and took it round to Capitol and got it sold for me." - Circus Magazine, 1978

Gilmour [on Kate Bush]: "I met her through a friend of mine whose name was Ricky Hopper. I dunno, I think he lives in Canterbury, so I'm told. I haven't seen him for very many years, but he was friendly with Kate's brother, and he said, 'You must listen to this tape of this girl. She's brilliant.' So I listened to the tape of the girl and she was brilliant. We spent a bit of time working on what the best way of moving her forward, or getting her what she wanted, which was to make records, and made some demos--proper ones. I mean,

we didn't make them as demos. We made proper master recordings of three tracks which we then played to EMI who said they would like to sign her, and did." - "Pop On The Line", BBC, November 22, 1998

Gilmour: "To a certain extent, if you see something that you think is brilliant, and particularly if that thing is being presented in such a way that most people wouldn't notice if it hit them falling of the top of a truck, then I sometimes feel a certain sense of responsibility to bring out what I think is good and 'then' bring it to their attention, which is what I did with Kate. Her home demos were of her sitting at an horrible piano, recorded with an very ancient tape-recorder, and her squeaking away. I listened to them and could hear the talent but wouldn't have dreamt of taking them to a record company. I knew the only real way to do it was to tart them up, if you like. We recorded her properly, with a proper producer and the best engineer, Geoff Emerick, arranger, and chose three or four songs out of about 50, and made a proper record and presented it to EMI. And of course they said, 'Yes, great, we'll take it.'" - Q Magazine, September 1990

Waters: "It was very, very hard work organizing that Wall concert but everyone was fabulous to work with--Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, bloody brilliant. All brilliant. Except for Sinead O'Connor. Oh, God! I have never ever met anybody who is so self-involved and unprofessional and big-headed and unpleasant. She is so far up her own bum it's scary. With The Wall, she was so worried that there weren't any other (adopts Irish brogue) 'young people on the show'. I and everybody else were old farts in her opinion so she was worried that she was doing something that wasn't 'street' enough. And because it wasn't 'street' enough, she came up with this brilliant idea: she said that I should employ Ice-T or one of those people to re-work one of my songs as a rap number! I am not joking! And neither was she fucking joking! That's the sad thing--she was serious! And then a couple of months after the show, when the record was out, she did an interview on American television, millions of viewers, and she rubbished the whole thing, said the Wall concert was a load of wank. I don't give a fuck what she though about it but she should have kept her fucking mouth shut because it could only hurt the charity, the memorial fund and everything that Leonard [Cheshire] had done. She doesn't understand anything. She's just a silly little girl. You can't just lie in the corner and shave your bloody head and stick up your arse and occasionally pull it out to go (brogue) 'Oh, I tink this is wrong and dat is wrong' and burst into tears." - Q Magazine, November 1992

Wright [on Broken China]: "While I was composing the songs, I knew that two of them had to be performed by a female, and preferably one who knows what's a nervous breakdown. Instinctively, I thought of Sinead. I didn't think it was going to work out, but I called her, and after she heard the songs, she came to the studio and we recorded." - Israeli newspaper "Seven Days", November 8, 1996

Wright [on Sinead O'Connor]: "When she heard the music she obviously was sympathetic to the album and the ideas. She has often stated out her problems in childhood. But the reason I asked was not because of that--the reason was simply the quality of her voice: tremendous, unique, different." - The Globe, January 3, 1997

interviewer: "Who is your best male friend and your best female friend?"
Mason: "I haven't really had one 'best' male friend since Roger left the band. My best female friend is my wife. I enjoy her company... and if I said anyone else she'd kill me." - Q Magazine, August 1995