The right side of the LP inner gatefold has all of them drawn in Scarfe’s well established style of grotesque political cartooning: The mother, the school teacher, the girl friend, the judge. While his immediate focus was the album cover, he knew from the onset that that this is a true multimedia project: “Roger said at that time, ‘We’re going to make a film, we’re going to make a record, and we’re going to make a show out of it.’ Which, to his credit, all three happened.” Finding the appropriate visuals to depict the main characters in the story line proved to be his biggest challenge. Scarfe was tasked with a visual project that would keep him busy for the next few years. And then there was a kind of awkward silence, and Roger says, ‘You know, I feel as though I’ve pulled my pants down and shit in front of you.'” And it was kind of an awkward moment when he finished, because, what do you say when someone just plays their whole life out to you? And I didn’t have anything adequate to say. So he found a synthesizer and put it all onto tape, and he came to my studio in Chelsea here in London and played them to me.
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Scarfe remembers the first time he listened to the songs from The Wall, very early in the life of that album: “Roger came and said, ‘I’ve just written this thing, The Wall,’ and he wanted to play me these raw tapes. Scarfe – Welcome to the Machine Animation I think what they were expecting from me was probably something a little more actual about the world itself in a more precise way.” That all changed with his next project with the band, one that continues to be staged and screened for decades later. I didn’t quite get that and I started to make them these surreal images of men tumbling through the stratosphere and crashing through the sky. I think that is what Roger and Nick needed from me at the time. Scarfe acknowledged the fact that his early work with Pink Floyd, while enhancing the music quite vividly with images and animations, did not represent what he does best: satire: “I was known in Britain and parts of America for making fun of society and poking fun at politicians. Not many rock stars would have approved of a portrait of them like the one below from the booklet, but by then Pink Floyd, and Waters in particular, started to develop their cynical view of the world, resulting from constant touring in front of large audiences.
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The band first hired him to add his cartoons to the comic tour book that accompanied their 1974 tour of the album. They invited me to The Rainbow in Finsbury Park where they were performing and I found it theatrically very thrilling.” The visual potential was as striking to him as the music, soon to be released as the band’s career-changing album The Dark Side of the Moon. It was Dark Side of the Moon at that time. Scarfe went to see the show and came out a converted man: “When I first worked with Pink Floyd I was puzzled by their music. They were working on a new album initially titled Eclipse, then renamed Dark Side of the Moon – A Piece for Assorted Lunatics. Scarfe admits that he was not a Pink Floyd fan at the time Mason and Waters contacted him, he just heard of them. Some of them were whistling, because to them it was just a job, they were whistling and doing a daily job, in their white coats spattered with blood.” Some were just like lumps of meat, and they were all being cleaned up by American medics. I went in there and I was just shocked by what I saw, because it hadn’t struck me that there’d be bits of bodies, heads without torsos and torsos without heads and torsos without limbs. Even for the extremely blunt cartoonist, Vietnam was more grotesque than any of his drawings: “I had great difficulty in Vietnam really, drawing it, I found it too much to stand, the blood and guts of it all, and the incompetence of it all and the sort of stupidity of it all.
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The paper, who had no idea what to do with Scarfe, thought “a cruel, grotesque artist, let’s send him to a cruel, grotesque situation.” Scarfe had only seen war on television up until then, and this was his first live experience of it. In 1966 Scarfe was sent by the Daily Mail to Vietnam.