The cult of Rachel Fury
The delicate sound of thunder and the distant sound of things falling apart
I’ve probably told this story before, but my gateway into Pink Floyd was the 1988 live album The Delicate Sound of Thunder. I arrived at college, and as was required of students by custom and law at that time, I acquired some drugs and a Pink Floyd record. I liked one of the two; fortunately it was the one that’s legal in all fifty states.
The album captured the Floyd at New York’s Nassau Coliseum in August 1988, halfway through the marathon tour promoting A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The band were limber, focussed, rejuvenated, and, because Momentary Lapse was their first record without Roger Waters, they had something to prove. Gilmour was on fire and Mason and Wright had their confidence back. Although it’s 1995’s PULSE concertfilm that gets the laurels for sheer spectacle, unmatched before or since, Delicate Sound has a special place in my heart. I started playing bass because of Guy Pratt’s playing on that record; I fell in love with the hammond organ because of Rick’s playing on that record; I bought a strat because of David’s tone (most outrageous of all, the liquid solos in The Dogs of War); the opening act of my second book was titled The sound of distant thunder, and that wasn’t a Ray Bradbury reference. I even own the tour program.
I also own the low-resolution but official CD-ROM release of the concertfilm, also shot during the Nassau residency. In 2019, the Floyd “reissued” the concertfilm, but that description doesn’t do it justice. That concertfilm was literally shot on film, so the reissue was in fact rebuilt from the ground up, rescanned in hi-def from the original film negatives and completely re-edited. Here’s a side-by-side comparison. The result was a glorious immortalization of the Floyd at their zenith. Compared to PULSE the show seems to belong to a prior era in its triumphant, perhaps cocaine-fuelled braggadocio, somehow being at once timeless and quintessentially of its time.
I mention all this because I just watched this recent interview with three members of the touring band, Machan Taylor and Durga McBroom (backing vocals) and Scott Page (sax). It has a number of interesting recollections, but I thought it was particularly interesting that no one knows what happened to the third backing singer, Rachel Fury, not even her erstwhile colleagues. (As Durga tells it, she, Durga, was literally put in the middle of Machan and Rachel who were sometimes frictive over what Machan calls “youthful egotism.”)
The world has more than a little interest in that question. As Machan says, there are people who still have a quixotic little crush on the Rachel Fury that the 2019 Delicate Sound… rescan captured in all her glory. That crush is exacerbated by the mystique of her apparent disappearance into thin air after the tour. She performed throughout the sprawling Momentary Lapse tour that concluded at Venice (July 15,1989) and Marseilles (July 18, 1989), and then she disappeared. Unlike most of the touring band, she did not return for Knebworth (June 30, 1990), nor for The Division Bell, nor for its subsequent tour.
William Shatner once remarked that the moment movies were shot in color, characters became immortal. One day I’ll regale you with my theory that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the best picture ever, but for now, only this matters: …Khan freezes in celluloid Shatner’s James T. Kirk (and, not for nothin’, my first celebrity crush, Kirstie Alley’s Saavik) at the moment it was shot. Shatner has gotten old, but no matter how many years go by, Kirk will always be there, accessible to us at that age. The same goes for, say, Michael Caine. Now he’s an elder statesman of cinema, but you put on The Battle of Britain, or Zulu, or Get Carter, or The Italian Job, and all the years are instantly gone, and there he is, forever in his prime. (“His final scene, the actor bows, and all those years are gone somehow; the crowd applauds, the curtain falls.”)
I don’t know where Rachel Brennock is. I hope she’s happy and fulfilled. But Rachel Fury, the stage name and professional persona Brennock adopted for the Floyd—that’s a different matter entirely. The Delicate Sound of Thunder concertfilm immortalizes that Rachel Fury alongside Machan, Scott, Durgan et al. As Machan says, it is of course barely even a real crush; just a schoolboy’s fantasy of a crush, really. It would have been unreal in 1988, let alone 35 years later. But I still paid money for a custom Rachel Fury Funko Pop. I still named her as a patron saint in a music project. I still find myself entranced watching her on the concertfilm, an alabaster statue in sultry, serpentine flow, poured into a black cocktail dress and black silk cocktail gloves, the image of the femme fatale, the Gilmour guitar lead sound incarnate.1
One bootnote to the interview. I knew that between Delicate Sound and The Division Bell, Durga did a project with Youth, Blue Pearl. What I didn’t know was that Gilmour and Wright played on their song Alive. As Durga says in the interview, it’s pure joy hearing that soft, undulating wash of Rick’s hammond organ. My favorite performance of High Hopes has long been this stripped-down, slightly ragged AOL live-in-studio performance by Gilmour’s solo band (which included Wright alongside Delicate Sound and PULSE alumni Guy Pratt and Jon Carin) as they prepared to go out on tour. I have few complaints about The Division Bell, but the one I’d register most strongly, and which both the AOL performance and PULSE lay bare, is the inexplicable choice to exclude Wright’s hammond organ from the mix as High Hopes lopes through the wistful melancholy of its adagietto con grazia. And you can argue until you’re blue in the face: It’s just a f—king hammond organ playing chords; so what? There’s a lot of “what.” Even aside from how singularly glorious and evocative that organ is to that moment in the song itself, even aside from how singularly fitting that organ is to what was the swan song to the band’s recording career, there’s magic in Wright’s playing, alchemy, perhaps what Larry Fast might have called synergy, lurking in the small details and articulations.
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I’m also going to assume, for sake of argument, that The Marvels is the best movie ever made, and its failure at the box office is entirely unfair. Nevertheless, at ComicBookMovie.com, we read that “The Marvels once again failed to crack the Top 5 during its third weekend in theaters, though it did perform slightly better than expected with a -37% drop to earn just $6.4 million. That takes its current domestic total to $76 million, meaning it will likely need a miracle to reach $100 million in the U.S. when all is said and done.” Deadline calls its performance “dismal” and even their most reliable shills are finally conceding—now there’s nothing to gain—that it’s bombed.
In signs of recriminations to come, the firing squad that was previously aimed outward at “toxic fans” is turning inward. Actress Iman Vellani took a swipe at Marvel, Disney boss Bog Iger took a swipe at director Nia DaCosta, in turn, DaCosta may be taking legal action against her removal from future Marvel projects, and actress Brie Larson is dropping heavy hints that she’s been blacklisted. To quote Billy Zane in Titanic: “It’s starting to fall apart.”
They (Marvel and Disney) can’t say no one warned them. They chose to ignore those warnings because they didn’t like the messengers. And I get that! I don’t like the messengers either! I have nothing against The Marvels and nothing would have pleased me more than to see The Marvels confound the expectations of the misogynist twits of Twitter and YouTube who had been rooting for it to fail for months. But I also don’t like being gaslit, and the fact is that all the way down ’til now, the only people who’ve been saying anything close to truth about this movie have been the misogynist twits, and I find it less important why they’ve said it, and less important that their truthtelling comes from an ignoble place, than I do that they have said aloud the things you’re not supposed to say. And perhaps it’s confirmation bias on my part. Perhaps I’m just cherry-picking the criticisms they advance with which I align and ignoring the rest. (There’s some evidence for that; I’ve thought that the Critical Drinker, for example, flirted with self-parody in attacking obviously decent projects that just coincidentally happened to be female-lead.) Nevertheless, when none of the nice, likable people are throwing straight dice, the honest asshole is going to look like a safe bet.
Anyway, enough of the soft speculation; let’s look at some hard numbers. At time of writing (get down, Saturday night), Box Office Mojo puts its US gross at $78,861,186. That’s versus the $76,853,446 I noted on Monday night, so that’s… math, math, carry the one… $2,007,740 in the course of the week, or about 170,726 tickets, divided among the 4000 or so theaters in which it’s showing and that’s… 8.53 tickets per theater per day. The average theater has 150 seats.
No wonder it’s stuck dead last in the top 30 movies released this year. Yes, yes, I hear you, Marvel shills: The year’s not over yet. Fine: What d’you think is going to change in the next 28 days? Its worldwide gross stands at a just-barely-less-anemic $110,270,161 but I’m going to ignore the international box office and focus on the American numbers. I know that non-Americans buy tickets, but the US box office is a more useful number because we know more about things for the US box office, like Average Selling Price and Split. Three weeks into its theatrical run, including the five-day Thanksgiving weekend, The Marvels had made $78,861,186. With a ticket ASP of $11.75, that equates to 6,711,590 tickets sold, though how many individual people watched it (for example, superfans going twice or more) is unknowable. By comparison, the average TV audience for one NFL game in 2023 is 17.5m.
True, 6.7 million tickets is more tickets than I’ve ever sold for anything I’ve created, and $78.8m is more money than I’ll ever see in my lifetime. So you or I might think that the movie is making respectable progress to recouping its ~$220m production budget. (That’s a conservative estimate. I’ve seen estimates closer to ~$270m.) That’s about a third, right?
But you and I would be forgetting that theaters take a cut of receipts. The studios take only half the box office, so in fact it has made for the studio not a third of its production budget but 17.9%. And you and I would have forgotten that marketing budgets are separate and superadd to production budgets. We have no idea what Disney has spent on marketing (even setting aside buying fake positive reviews and astroturf support on social media), but we read that “[t]he average movie marketing budget is at least 50% of the production costs.” So, we can speculate that on a $220m production budget, The Marvels actually cost $330m. That means it has to sell $660m of tickets to be profitable at the box office, and it drops the percentage it’s recouped (at the domestic box office) from a dismal 17.9% to a humiliating $11.9%.
Well, look, you might say, that’s artificial, because the international box office does, in fact, exist. So, let’s assume for sake of argument—it’s artificial, but what else can we do?—that the theaters’ cut holds throughout the world. Three weeks into its theatrical run worldwide, The Marvels has made $110m, so you or I might think that the movie is making respectable progress to recouping that ~$220m production budget. But for the reasons we’ve already seen, the real budget was $330m, and (we’re assuming) the box office is split 50/50 with the theaters so the studio has made only $55m. That means that on the cusp of leaving theaters, The Marvels is just 16% toward recouping its budget.
That means The Marvels must make 220 million dollars in what will likely be its last week in theaters and then on streaming, rentals, and DVD sales just to break even. Will it? Well, these numbers are a decade out of date, but a long, hard decade ago, the studios expected to make about $332m for every $100m in ticket sales over ten years. So, let’s assume The Marvels limps to $120m at the box office, which, remember, is only $60m in the studio’s pocket. That’s a little shy of $400m on the back end. So it’s possible that one day, years from now, The Marvels will finally break even. (Possible; do people even buy DVDs in 2023?) But not for years, and then only on paper; partial vindication years in the future won’t change the effect it will have had on industry decision-making and which it’s already had on audience engagement.
And anyway, in terms of the box office, it’s toast. It may be the worst bomb in the history of bombs. The studio may lose $270 million, which puts this in the top five worst bombs in box-office history, far worse than the losses on Cutthroat Island or Mortal Engines (call them $200m apiece, adjusted for inflation), blowing out the uncertain losses for The Thirteenth Warrior and The Lone Ranger (call them $220m apiece, adjusted for inflation), and beating even the worst of the lot, John Carter, which may have lost up to $255m (adjusted for inflation).
It’s not all bad news, though. John Carter did not end careers; Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed it, is still working (he wrote and directed Finding Dory), and although Rich Ross, the studio head, resigned over it, he failed upward to a senior position with Discovery. More to the point, The Marvels has demonstrated that there’s a market for a product like The Marvels, made for less money. If The Marvels had an audience of 7m paying punters, domestic, that’s $82m, which earns the studio $41m. If Marvel can make a movie that appeals to that audience for $41m—and perhaps they can—they’ll make money on it. Hell, Godzilla Minus One, currently riding high in theaters, was made for half that! But if you want to make a movie with a $280m production budget, that movie has to be able to sell $840m in tickets. Maybe six-to-seven million people loved The Marvels; fair enough. But you can’t sell $840m in tickets to that small an audience; those numbers are an order of magnitude apart. So if you want that a $280m picture, it’s got to be a picture with mass-market appeal, and The Marvels didn’t have it. That’s just the math.
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Notes & Queries.
Erratum. Last week’s newsletter remarked, “[w]hen I am asked to suppress one set of speech or another . . . it tends to involve one of three things” and then went on to name three but discuss only two. The third one, excised for concision, was the “Divine Mercy” devotion and the materials and people in its orbit. For reasons entirely to long and tedious to get into here (let alone there), DM is controversial in Tradworld.
Today’s cover image is a still from the 2019 rescan of the Delicate Sound of Thunder concertfilm. It’s used without permission, but in view of the nice things I’ve said about it and the non-affiliate link provided for readers to buy it, I shall beg forgiveness. Left to right: Machan, Durga, and Rachel, with David in the background.
Cornucopia.
Youtube brings us 1980s instructional videos from Craig Chaquico and Paul Jackson Jr.
The challenges of living on a nuclear submarine. This is, in a sense, the kind of thing that I was trying to capture in The Racetrack Chronicle. A battlestar functions like an aircraft carrier but experientially it’s more like a nuclear submarine. How does that isolation and pressure affect people? What’s it like to be stuck in one of these tin cans? That was one of the textures I wanted to convey.
I don’t understand how “republic not a democracy” talk could possibly be new to Leeja. It was common currency in Republican circles for at least the last 19 years, and I doubt it was new when I first heard it. Like our old friend “[t]he [tenth] amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered,” United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100, 124 (1941), “we’re a republic not a democracy” is simultaneously an annoying thought-terminating cliche when invoked as a simple way out of a complex question, but also an annoyingly obvious truth when denied. (The Darby court never reckoned with this: Something cannot be both a truism yet also false.) Arguments over labels (and argument by conclusory labels, cf. Radin, Rhetorical Capture,54 Ariz. L. Rev. 458 (2012)) are desultory. When people call the United States a democracy, they aren’t using the term in the restrictive, technical sense of the PoliSci department, they mean it in the normal sense, and that’s fine. Likewise, when people insist that the United States is a republic, they don’t mean to attack democracy but to highlight that there are procedural and substantive limits on what even majorities can do. Both lines of attack are meretricious rhetoric and should be abjured in favor of discussing the specifics.
Describing Gilmour’s live rig, Kit Rae provides a photo of Rachel on stage and quips, tongue not quite in cheek, “[a]nother essential piece of gear for the Delicate Sound of Thunder, but good luck finding a Rachel Fury for your rig.”