A Conversation with Documentarian John Edginton – HuffPost 6.29.12

Mike Ragogna: John Edginton, director of the documentary Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here, how are you doing?

John Edginton: I’m doing well, Mike.

MR: Can you tell the story of the making of The Story of Wish You Were Here?

JE: The story of the making of the story started for me in July of last year. I got a call from producers in London that I know pretty well for a company called Eagle Rock, which is a music documentary maker of DVDs. They do that series Classic Albums, which a lot of people have seen one of at some point. They called me (saying) that they had this project to make the story of Wish You Were Here, and they were negotiating with the band and the artists and their management. They got to the point where they were thinking about getting someone to direct it and they asked me. I said, “Absolutely, I’d love to,” and it so happened that I was actually in London about to go back to New York where I am semi-permanently based. So I canceled a lot of plans and stayed in London for six or seven weeks and then came to New York with a load of footage and then edited it in New York.

MR: There must have been some footage you discovered that was really endearing as you were putting this together?

JE: Yes, it’s a mixture of stuff. The story itself, the bones of the story, the record Wish You Were Here, was influenced by what had happened to Syd Barret, the founder of Pink Floyd, and it’s a tragic story. He’d left the band after making one brilliant record in 1968 and privately gazed the dawn. Syd was a lovely guy by all accounts but he took too much acid and literally burned his brains out. These guys were haunted by Syd and that was one of the main threads of the music, it was driven by these emotions, so “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” is really “Shine On You, Syd,” you know? I knew all that because I’d made a documentary about Syd Barrett ten years before, which is available on DVD, called Pink Floyd: Syd Barret’s Story. You might have seen it.

MR: If we haven’t, we will now.

JE: Yes, or else I’ll hunt you down.

MR: Keep going, this is great. When you were looking at the footage, I’ll bet everybody was very emotional when they were talking about Syd.

JE: I’m a bit of Syd obsessive myself. I actually love Syd’s solo albums, not a lot of people do. He wrote a lot of these great, quirky, very English songs between leaving Pink Floyd and leaving the earth, in a sense, before his mind completely went. They’re bittersweet, great stuff. Anyway, putting the DVD together, the film, I obviously interviewed and met all of the band. But my feeling about it was, also, I didn’t want to have a classic album format for the film, which typically is that you interview the band, you go through the story of the record and you lob in a lot of music journalists saying how great it is. To me, actually, that’s a little bit of a dead format. It doesn’t engage you that much, I don’t think, unless you were a total fan of the band. So I said to the producer guys, “Look, why don’t we set about literally finding everybody we can that took part in this? There’s a story about a whole range of this record, it’s such an amazing record. Look at the cover, it’s like a comic, there’s a guy on fire on the cover. Who’s that guy? Let’s go find him. How did they choose that? How did they decide that? Let’s talk to the guy who took the photograph, let’s talk to the designers.” There are lovely voice music in the background, soul sounds in the backgrounds, especially in “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” Who are the background singers, where are they, what happened to them, what was their experience? They had these fantastic animations that they used when they took this thing on the road and there’s virtually no footage of them playing live, at all. There was some weird deal that a manager had that they wouldn’t allow anyone to shoot anything. As a result, there’s nothing to show them playing live except thirty years later.

MR: That’s right, amazing.

JE: Yeah, but the animation that they actually had on these stage shows is done by a guy called Gerald Scarfe, and it’s absolutely brilliant. For instance, for the song “Welcome To The Machines,” he created this mechanical monster that climbs out and spews out and chews up everybody in his path, like this sort of massive, corporate machine.

MR: There also were a lot of statements simultaneously going on in this album. It was about Syd, but weren’t they also tying in implied reasons why things were spinning out?

JE: Yeah. They were like the indie band of their time in the 1970s. They played the soundtrack in the Michelangelo Antonioni films. They played in concert halls for quiet audiences who listened. They weren’t a stadium band, weren’t that big. Then, suddenly,Dark Side Of The Moon amazed everybody by just taking off like a rocket and becoming one of the biggest selling records of all time. Suddenly, they’re absolutely huge and they didn’t know how to deal with it and they didn’t really trust or like a lot of the music business people who didn’t seem that interested in music. They were product. So there’s this whole theme and Roger Waters’ the guy who articulates it because he wrote the words “Have a Cigar, come in dear boy, have a cigar and we’ll give you the world.” Just make another record, just make another pop song.

MR: Exactly. Now, of course, their live shows became some of the biggest stage productions ever. When you look at Animals and then The Wall, what massive productions they were.

JE: Absolutely. The early Dark Side Of The Moon shows were, by all accounts, pretty drab. They had a lighting system but it was fairly low-key and not brilliant. They were trying to use lights in the sixties, but then they used simple lighting systems that were pretty good in a way. By the time they were playing some of the songs like “Wish You Were Here” live, before the record came out, the shows were pretty much in shambles. The lighting was not good and music journalists were complaining that they had lost their audience in a way. I think it was the taking-off point, in a way, when Gerald Scarfe came on board. He was a brilliant political cartoonist in the UK, but he also started doing animation. He was the guy who did all that animation on The Wall, which we are all so familiar with–the marching boots and iconic pictures of monstrous figures that Roger Waters is using to this day on his …Wallshow.

MR: It was also that they worked-in psychology. Most people don’t give them credit for this but they’re dealing with a lot of the id. It’s something you’re not very conscious of when you’re listening to the music, but there are depths and layers beyond the music.

JE: Yeah, that’s one of the great things. We went into Abbey Road with the sound engineer who worked on the album, Brian Humphreys. He’s a great guy, but he’s retired. He hadn’t been back to Abbey Road for thirty years. He had never worked on a digital mixing desk, they did all this stuff very simply with tape spools and very simple-numbered tracks. They made these amazing sounds. There was one thing they had on which was this sound, you know, when you run your finger on the top of a wine glass. They had a whole wine glass orchestra where they had hundreds of glasses with different levels of water in them.

MR: You’ve done some other documentaries, some even award-winning, haven’t you John?

JE: If you say so, Mike!

MR: (laughs) Can you go into some of your other favorites? You mentioned Syd Barrett, but I know you’ve also created one on Robyn Hitchcock?

JE: Ten years ago, I did a film on Syd Barrett, which was called Pink Floyd and Sid Barrett’s Story. During the making of that, I met Robyn Hitchcock who is a huge Syd Barrett fan. I didn’t really know him very well at all, I didn’t know his music very well. I discovered a lot of his albums were in second-hand record shops in London, and that’s about the only place you could find him. I listened to some and he’s fascinating. He writes beautiful songs, actually. He’s written hundreds of songs. I subsequently learned he’s made twenty-five albums. I met Robyn and he’s absolutely charming. We sat in his garden, which is a tiny little garden in West London. It started to rain and with an acoustic guitar, he sang a load of Syd songs absolutely beautifully. He just knew them…he’s got this great facility. As a result, I kept in touch with Robyn and because I’m in New York most of the time, when he came here one weekend, he played in two different venues and I went to both shows. At each show, he played an entirely different set, no song was the same. I just fell in love with the guy’s music. I just think he’s brilliant, very underrated. So it all started there that weekend in New York, and I just decided that I was going to make a project about it. I went to the Sundance channel. Fortunately, one of the producers of the Sundance channel happened to be a massive Robyn Hitchcock fan, and she managed to persuade somebody to come up with the amount of money to get us going. That was the start of it.

MR: You worked on Who Killed Martin Luther King?

JE: Yes, that was really my first major documentary in 1989. It was really a fantastic experience–lots of investigative stuff, going all over the place. I think we filmed in fifteen American cities in about thirty days, racing from airport to airport, digging out all these people. It was extraordinary, the witnesses that hadn’t spoken about the assassination, FBI guys who always had suspicions that maybe the FBI was involved with it. I interviewed James Earl Ray, the guy who was accused of the assassination. The film really questions whether he did it or did it alone. That was an Emmy-nominated film and a terrific experience, actually. It came out on DVD not long ago in the States. Somebody discovered it from the BBC and they put it out. We had a screening in New York about two years ago to a packed house. I couldn’t leave because the Q&A just went on and on. But it was very fun.

MR: What is your final theory on that?

JE: My final theory on that is that James Earl Ray was really a patsy, that he was the fall guy, and that it was engineered and arranged, a kind of inside job, I think. I think the FBI, in collusion with the local cops…we have a lot of evidence of how Martin Luther King’s security that the police were providing was pulled back several blocks about an hour before the assassination. There are all sorts of weird things where you go, “Oh, my God!” It’s one of those stories. Mind-boggling.

MR: Of course, with the John F. Kennedy story we’re never going to know who did that either.

JE: Yes.

MR: What a strange period that was! Going full circle, the same world stage that gave us Pink Floyd, birthed the music and the experiences of the day through events like these.

JE: That’s a pretty good circle to draw.

MR: Because you’ve done so much with musical acts, what advice might you have for new artists?

JE: I think Robyn Hitchcock is a huge role model. This is a guy who is in his late fifties now. First time I saw him playing live in Brooklyn, the queue around the block was twenty-year-olds, twenty-five-year-olds. The conversation inside, people knew every single word of his most obscure songs. It amazed me. These were young people who would normally, on the whole, be listening to Arcade Fire or something like that. So my advice is to just pick up that guitar and go and do it. Robyn takes a suitcase with him. He goes on the subway to the gig, he takes his guitar, and in the suitcase, he’s got all these records. He hangs around afterwards and meets everyone there. He’ll stay ’til midnight and sign records and chat with everyone. He’s the original low-fi guy who did it before the internet killed records. He was out there doing his “let’s just meet the fans and give them what they want.”

MR: He was social networking.

JE: Yes, social networking. You have to do that. Right now, basically, there is no real record industry strategy at all. The music business companies are all in crisis and they don’t know how to deal with it.

MR: They’re not making the kind of money they were making before, and artists really have no need for them except for their marketing connections. But a good publicist will get you there as well.

JE: Yeah. So unless you’re a huge breakthrough person like Adele and you win Grammys or whatever, you just gotta go and work your trade. But the best place to do it is with people, live. If you go to SXSW, it’s the most amazing event.

MR: I went this year and last year as well, and attendance and the number of acts performing keep growing exponentially. The amazing amount of recording artists and musicians that are playing at all times, every minute of the day for that week, is unreal.

JE: I had no idea it was so big, actually.

MR: Was this your first one this past year?

JE: No, for the Robyn Hitchcock film, we had a screening at SXSW. But as an aside, I’ll tell you, it was at this amazing cinema where you can sit and eat a meal and have a beer. Unfortunately, it was at 11 o’clock in the morning because it was a festival. Robyn did a Q&A. I went there, but people don’t realize it’s also a film festival at the same time as a music festival. It’s ridiculous!

MR: Yeah, the overlap is ridiculous. And then, of course, there’s the technical expo that happens right before and it bleeds into the music and film festivals.

JE: There is far too much going on and it’s a mind-boggling place to go. Anyone who loves music has to go there at least once in their life.

MR: Any last thoughts or words of wisdom on Pink Floyd? Anything that we missed that people should know about Pink Floyd: The Story of Wish You Were Here?

JE: There’s a lot of humor in it. I would say it’s not a standard music doc in a sense. It really digs deep. But there are also some great characters in there–the guy who was set on fire for the cover is a fantastic, old stuntman who rides around on a massive motorbike in the middle of the Missouri backroads.

MR: Does the story also cover how that was the day he wasn’t protecting himself and he’s recovering from his burns all these years?

JE: (laughs) That’s not true!

MR: Oh, I’m sorry, I’m mixing that up. (laughs)

JE: He says, “Look, if you want to set me on fire and give me money, I’ll do it!”

MR: How often I’ve said that. John, thank you for joining us, I really appreciate your time.

JE: It’s great to talk to you, Mike.

Transcribed by Narayana Windenberger