Clare Torry Sang No Words and Made a Pink Floyd Song Great
A session singer improvised a wordless vocal on The Great Gig in the Sky, and one account says the song went from pretty good to downright great.
One of the most famous voices on The Dark Side of the Moon never sings a single word. A session singer named Clare Torry improvised the wordless vocal on The Great Gig in the Sky — no lyrics, just a voice used like an instrument — and by one account of the album's history, that performance is what turned a pretty good song into a downright great one.
A voice with no words in it
Torry came in as a hired voice for a recording date, and what she contributed to the track was an improvised vocal: nothing written down, nothing sung in English or any other language. She carries the melody and the feeling with sound instead of sentences, the way a lead guitar might.
The album around her is full of actual talking. Roger Waters canvassed a series of people for their opinion on the meaning of life, and their answers ended up on the record — among them a roadie known as Roger the Hat and Chris Adamson, a band associate who had once tried to eat a stone of raw potatoes for a bet during the sessions for Obscured by Clouds. The most memorable voice on the finished album, though, is the one saying nothing at all.
What the band tried before she sang
The Great Gig in the Sky was not always the version listeners know. A large box set of the album, the Immersion edition, gathers ten different versions of the record — a 48m-selling album — and one disc holds demos and live tracks showing what the band tried before settling on that song, on Any Colour You Like and on the electronic burbling of On the Run. The reviewer's word for those earlier attempts is noodling: noodling, more noodling, and in one case noodling in a vaguely jazz-funk vein.
The set also includes a 1974 live performance first recorded for BBC radio, which the same review says roughs up the studio gloss of the original.
The version without her
An early version of the album included in the box set makes the difference plain. It is noticeably different from the finished record: it is missing the opening Speak to Me and missing the voices, and it includes David Gilmour scat singing — nonsense syllables instead of words — on Any Colour You Like. Hearing it, the reviewer was struck by the fact that every decision Pink Floyd later made about the album was right.
That verdict extends to Torry. Her vocal once spoke to listeners of terror beyond words, the review notes, though it has since become so familiar that it may have lost that power; it has even turned up on an advert for Nurofen. Even a listener who finds that association hard to shake, the review adds, may be forced to conclude that The Great Gig in the Sky is a lesser song without her. Perhaps that is how a record sells 48m copies: by knowing exactly what it is doing.