Who sang lead vocals on the Pink Floyd song ‘Have a Cigar’?
Bringing in outside help was never an issue for Pink Floyd. The four-man progressive rock outfit had plenty of self-sufficiency during their biggest years, with three singers at their disposal in the form of David Gilmour, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright. But every once in a while, the band needed someone else to take over the vocals. Clare Torre did a fantastic job in that regard on ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ from The Dark Side of the Moon. And in 1975, the band once again needed a ringer.
It was during the sessions for Wish You Were Here that work stalled on ‘Have a Cigar’. The sarcastic and poison-tipped ode to music executives who were more than happy to make big bucks off the band’s music, ‘Have a Cigar’, needed a certain panache that none of the band members could seem to get right. Waters was initially the song’s vocalist, but his takes proved to be insufficient.
“Roger had a go at singing it, and one or two people were unkind about his singing,” David Gilmour recalled to Mojo in 2011. “One or two people then asked me to have a go at it. I did, but I wasn’t comfortable. I had nothing against the lyrics. Maybe the range and intensity wasn’t right for my voice.”
With neither of the band’s two main vocalists doing the song justice, it was up to someone else to bring the greedy executive who narrated the song to life. The answer came in the form of Roy Harper, the eccentric English folk singer who had previously shared a label with Pink Floyd. Harper was at EMI Studios simultaneously and hovering around the recording, looking for his chance to contribute.
“I can distinctly remember Roy leaning on the wall outside Abbey Road while we were nattering away and (growls) ‘Go on, lemme have a go, lemme have a go.’ We all went, ‘Shut up, Roy,'” Gilmour added. “But eventually we said, ‘Go on then, Roy, have your bloody go.’ Most of us enjoyed his version, though I don’t think Roger ever liked it.”
“A lot of people think I can’t sing, including me a bit,” Waters claimed in 1975. “I’m very unclear about what singing is. I know I find it hard to pitch, and I know the sound of my voice isn’t very good in purely aesthetic terms, and Roy Harper was recording his own album in another EMI studio at the time; he’s a mate, and we thought he could probably do a job on it.”
Harper took on a flamboyant affectation while singing the track, milking the song’s bitter sentiments for all it was worth. Rogers wasn’t always comfortable with the theatric way Harper spit out the lyrics, with the bassist feeling that Harper had almost turned the song into a parody. On the other side, Gilmour believed that Harper’s clownish performance accurately represented some of the figures that floated around the band at the time.
“We did have people who would say to us ‘Which one’s Pink?’ and stuff like that,” Gilmour claimed in 1992. “There were an awful lot of people who thought Pink Floyd was the name of the lead singer, and that was Pink himself and the band. That’s how it all came about, it was quite genuine.”
Check out ‘Have a Cigar’ down below.