Sorrow and his wife was convinced he was having an affair.”Īs might be expected, The Pretty Things embraced the times. “He was a nine-to-five bloke and he started coming home at one or two in the morning because he was working on S.F. “At Norman’s funeral, one of the boffins came up to me and asked if I’d heard that one of his colleagues had nearly got divorced over S.F. Still, The Pretty Things’ unconventional working practises caused occasional problems. “There was a fantastic sense that we were doing something at all levels. Gradually, the EMI engineers – whom Taylor and May call “the boffins” – got onside, too: “They really got caught up in this pushing of the technological envelope,” May says. “It had to be improvisatory,” Taylor says, “and what was great about Norman was that he would take what might have been a small idea and turn it into something solid.” “My father and I made the little twangly instrument, kind of like a dulcimer, which is on Death and a couple other things,” Taylor says.Īll the while, Smith was cajoling them, encouraging them. When nothing in existence created the required sound, they invented it themselves. They used unusual instrumentation (“The Tibetan drum set the tone for Death,” May says, a remark so redolent of high psychedelia it sounds like a joke) they raided EMI’s stores for things to make music with: Mellotrons, Ringo Starr’s drum kit. Sorrow out of hours at Abbey Road, using downtime – which meant they had months to work, getting every element just so. It really did evolve on the studio floor.” When there was a gap in the narrative and a character was created – Baron Saturday – that drove the need for Baron Saturday Meets S.F. The music drove the story and the story drove the music, when it was necessary. And the story wasn’t complete when recording began. “I was writing the story as the songs were written. “We wanted to make a piece of music that hung together, so it was one piece of music made up of different elements,” May says. The band had decided they didn’t want to make a conventional album of 14 unrelated songs.
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