David Gilmour Pink Floyd at Earl’s Court in London during The Wall tour, 6th August 1980. (Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns)
askfloydpinkerton
There’s that old saw about how the real crazies don’t know they’ve crazy. As long as you’re worried about yourself, you’re fine.
Floyd Roger Pinkerton would like to submit – bullshit. He’s off his rocker, toys in the bloody attic. And he knows it. Maybe once, he’d been blissfully unaware. Given over fully to the thrall of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, traipsing through the streets of London happily mad. Missing months, his reputation and his career and his life in shambles at the end of it.
(He doesn’t remember being told about his mother’s death. Judy says he kept forgetting. After the third time, she stopped trying to tell him. It broke his heart just the same, every time.)
Anyway, the point is. Floyd Pinkerton – ‘Pink Floyd’ – is crazy. And he knows it.
He snaps and snarls at the most illogical things, and he cries as easily as a woman, and sometimes he doesn’t recognise the person he sees in the mirror. Every interview has to mention his breakdown in some way. Even his bandmates watch him carefully, waiting for the inevitable backslide.
But Pink refuses to give them the satisfaction. He takes care of it – all on his own, just like he has to do with everything else. He drinks to get to sleep and tokes up to settle his nerves and snorts coke to spur himself to action. And it all balances out. Doesn’t it?
(He thinks of balance. Thinks of being a little boy, wandering the Cambridge countryside, making his wobbling way across the tops of old stone walls held together more with moss than mortar.
He thinks of falling, sheer white stone slipping from beneath his feet.)
