Clare Torry, Sunday night, thirty pounds
On Sunday 21 January 1973, Clare Torry sang the wordless vocal on The Great Gig in the Sky at Abbey Road, for a session fee of £30. Alan Parsons, the engineer, had asked for a singer. The track in the studio was Rick Wright’s: a slow chord sequence, no lyric, no melody written out. Pink Floyd were finishing The Dark Side of the Moon. They produced the record. Parsons engineered it. Harvest released it in the United States on 1 March 1973 and in Britain on 16 March. Torry was a working session singer in London. She nearly did not take the booking.
David Gilmour was the one who talked to her. He asked for something emotional. She started with the oohs and yeahs she used on other sessions. The band stopped her. They said that if they had wanted that, they would have got Doris Troy. She tried longer notes, then decided to treat her voice as another instrument in the track. No words. She sang two full takes. Gilmour asked for the second to be more emotional still. Halfway through a third take she stopped and told them they had enough. The vocal on the record is edited from those takes, over Wright’s organ and piano.
In the control room nobody said much. She took the £30, went to dinner with her boyfriend, and assumed the performance would be thrown away. She had heard it back and thought it sounded like caterwauling. In March she bought the album and found her name on the sleeve. The song closes side one, after Time. Wright’s chords stay slow. Her voice goes up with nothing to hang a lyric on. Nick Mason and Roger Waters keep a plain pulse under it. There is no guitar solo of the kind Time has. The part is the vocal.
I said, ‘I think you’ve got enough.’ I thought it sounded like caterwauling.
(Clare Torry, interview with John Harris, 2005)
For years the writing credit was Wright’s alone. In 2005 Torry settled with the band, and the song has been credited to Wright and Torry since. She has said she was embarrassed by the sound of it, and surprised she could sing that high. On other sessions she usually took the low harmony. Parsons had called her because she was available and known, not because a top line had been written. The useful singing happened inside that Sunday evening. She stopped the third take herself, when it started to sound worked out rather than sung on the spot.
The chords were already in the live suite before she walked in, as Wright’s instrumental. What the record keeps is the melody she made up in the room, with no chart in front of her. Later remasters, including the 2011 edition that carries this same recording, do not replace the vocal. When the band played the song on stage afterwards, other singers took the part. The take on the album is the one from Abbey Road that Sunday.
