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. 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. 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.