Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (11 page)

‘I remember the jelly,’ laughs Jeff Dexter, then a club DJ in London. ‘The Roundhouse gig was the first time I saw The Pink Floyd. I didn’t think much of the show but the
people
show was fantastic. I was intrigued by Floyd’s little entourage, mainly the girls around Syd.’

Glammed up in their best satin shirts and silk scarves, according to one eyewitness, the Floyd ‘honked and howled and tweeted’ while a primitive light show and projected slides blinked and dripped psychedelic colours around them.

‘Their music was almost entirely a very loud psychedelic jam that rarely seemed to relate to the playing of any introductory theme, be it “Road Runner” or some other R&B classic,’ wrote Miles in 2004. ‘After about thirty minutes, they would stop, look at each other, and start up again, pretty much where they’d left off, except with a new introductory tune.’

‘I think it was a stroke of good fortune that we couldn’t work out how to play covers,’ admitted Roger Waters. ‘It forced us to come up with our own direction, our own way of doing things.’

As Richard Wright elaborated: ‘Everything became more improvised around the guitar and the keyboards. Roger started to play the bass as a lead instrument.’

Whatever the group’s musical shortcomings, Peter Jenner was delighted with the outcome of the Roundhouse gig. ‘There was a great feeling that night,’ he recalls. ‘We’d made contact with lots of other like-minded souls; other bands, other people. There was this sense of, “Wow, this is our place.” ’

By Jenner’s own admission, he and Andrew King wanted to court ‘the posh papers’. For them, ‘this was a cultural thing, not just pop music’. A week later, The Pink Floyd (the Sound had been dropped at Peter Jenner’s suggestion) gained their first mention in the national press with a surprisingly sympathetic review in the
Sunday Times
, in which an interviewed Waters talked of ‘co-operative anarchy’ and of the band’s music ‘being a complete realisation of the aims of psychedelia’, a quote he later disowned as ‘obviously tongue-in-cheek’. ‘Co-operative anarchy’ aside, Floyd and their new management still understood the importance of a business deal.

At the end of the month, Jenner and King signed a six-way partnership with the four band members, establishing the company Blackhill Enterprises. (The name was taken from a cottage owned by King’s family in the Brecon Beacons.) Barrett, Waters, Wright and Mason finally gave up their studies. Though, as Bob Klose later recounted, ‘Syd had a real battle with himself over the decision to leave art college. He went through agonies over that.’ Not for the first time, those close to Syd wondered why this talented artist was giving it up for music.

‘I always thought it amazing that Syd and Roger’s mothers were both OK about them dropping out of art school and architecture,’ recalls Libby Gausden. ‘Especially Mary Waters, as Roger was on his way to becoming an architect.’

Blackhill Enterprises established a base in Jenner’s flat at 4 Edbrooke Road, Notting Hill, hiring June Child, who lived in the flat below, to answer the phone. For Jenner and King, the personalities of their new charges were becoming clearer. ‘Sometimes it felt like it was Syd and the three blokes he was playing with,’ admits King. ‘You could say, though, that initially Nick and Rick were along for the ride and Roger was lurking.’

‘Syd was a good-looking chap and the singer, so he was always the one you would focus on,’ elaborates Jenner. ‘Syd was the creative one, and, at first, very easy to get along with. But Rick was very pretty as well, so it wasn’t
just
Syd. Rick I liked a lot. He was very gentle and it’s a classic management situation: he wasn’t any trouble so you didn’t notice him. You were always more aware of the people that were high maintenance. Nick was easy to get along with and the one who could talk to all of the others. But he was Roger’s mate, so would always side with him if something was put to a vote. Roger was the organisation. He would be the one you went to for sorting out practical issues. He was very questioning and wanted to know exactly what was going on.’

‘Roger organised
everything
,’ recalls Libby Gausden. ‘Years later when I heard he was fighting for the name of Pink Floyd, I remember thinking, “You bloody well deserve it, you do”.’

Barrett and Waters had both begun to write songs while still in Cambridge. One of Syd’s earliest attempts, ‘Let’s Roll Another One’, would be retitled ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ - to deflect accusations of a pro-dope message - and end up as the B-side of the group’s first single. Waters had made his compositional debut with the still unrecorded ‘Walk With Me, Sydney’, a hokey duet intended to be sung by Barrett and Juliette Gale. By November 1966, the band’s repertoire would include such Barrett compositions as ‘Matilda Mother’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’, as well as Waters’ early effort, ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’. ‘They were all encouraged to write,’ says Jenner. ‘But it was Syd who came out with the great songs.’

The autumn of 1966 marked both a highly creative period for Barrett, and also, it seems, a time of personal contentment, in stark contrast to the mania that would ensue just months later. Towards the end of the previous year Syd had moved to a room in a narrow, three-storey house at 2 Earlham Street, near London’s Cambridge Circus.

Then ‘a typical 1966 hippie pad, from its purple front door to the psychedelic graffiti on the walls’, according to one visitor, 2 Earlham Street has long since been renovated, and a newsagents now trades on its ground floor. It was the first of several successors to 27 Clarendon Street, the Cambridge dope den from a couple of years earlier. The building’s prime tenant was the late Jean-Simone Kaminsky, an absconder from the French army who’d wound up in England, and, via a sympathetic MP, had first found lodgings in Cambridge, next door to Matthew Scurfield.

Kaminsky moved to London, and took over the rent at 2 Earlham Street. While holding down a job at the BBC, he also had a sideline producing so-called ‘intellectual sex books’ on a couple of printing presses at the flat.

Later, when one of the presses caught fire, the building had to be evacuated. When the blaze was stopped, the fire brigade discovered Kaminsky’s illegal literature, and called the police. The rest of the building’s tenants swiftly stashed the offending books in the back of a van and drove round London throwing the sodden remains into all available gardens.

With furniture fashioned from discarded crates found in neighbouring Covent Garden, conditions were Spartan. John Whiteley, a former guardsman from the north of England, then working as a handyman at Better Books (‘I was the only one among those intellectuals who could change a lightbulb’), was living there on and off with his girlfriend Anna Murray when the Cambridge contingent descended en masse. ‘That lot all seemed to arrive at the same time,’ recalls Whiteley now, ‘Ponji Robinson, Dave Gale, Seamus O’Connell, which is how I came to know Syd.’ With the help of his hip mother, the eminently sensible Seamus (‘I was into beer and jazz and blues’) organised a controlled rent for the whole place of five pounds five shillings and five pence a week.

Anna Murray and Barrett shared an interest in painting, and the two struck up an immediate friendship. ‘Anna painted as well,’ explains John Whiteley, ‘and she and Syd became great friends. They used to smoke a hell of a lot of dope together - as we all did back then.’

Syd commandeered the attic room at Earlham Street, becoming close friends with the house’s other prime tenant, Peter Wynne-Willson and his girlfriend, Suzie Gawler-Wright. Wynne-Willson had left his public school after taking part in the Aldermaston March and was then working as a lighting technician during the first run of the stage musical
Oliver
! Suzie would be accorded the nickname of the Psychedelic Debutante. Wynne-Willson once arranged a group trip during a performance of Handel’s
The Messiah
at the Royal Albert Hall. The pair would be quickly absorbed into the Floyd’s entourage, with Wynne-Willson taking over as the band’s lighting tech when Joe Gannon disappeared back to the United States. ‘When the theatres I was working in threw stuff out, I’d take them home and renovate them,’ explains Wynne-Willson, who was now in charge of the Jenners’ homemade lighting rig.

One of his earliest onstage lighting gimmicks would involve stretching a condom over a wire frame. He would then drip oil paint on to it, through which light would be shone, creating one of the first oil slide effects. This became a defining feature of Pink Floyd’s live shows. In another burst of creativity, he fashioned a pair of what became known as ‘cosmonocles’. These were a pair of welding goggles with the dark lenses removed and replaced by clear glass and two glass prisms, giving a distorting, disorientating view.

‘I can remember putting a pair on and walking down Charing Cross Road - or rather, trying to walk down Charing Cross Road,’ recalls Emo. ‘A copper asked me what I was doing, and I think we made him put them on as well. Of course, the view was even worse if you were stoned. Or tripping.’

‘1966 in London was fantastic,’ remembers Storm Thorgerson. ‘We were all full of hormones and life.’

At Earlham Street, Syd played guitar, wrote songs, smoked dope and hung out with new girlfriend Lindsay Corner, who’d moved from Cambridge to London to pursue a modelling career. Under the tutelage of Seamus O’Connell’s mother, he had become enamoured with
I-Ching
, the mystical Chinese
Book of Changes
, and the Chinese board game ‘Go’. Stoned sessions of each would be followed by restorative chocolate bars from Café Pollo in nearby Old Compton Street.

I-Ching
would be one of Syd’s many musical inspirations at that time, alongside tarot cards, Hilaire Belloc, The Beatles, Mothers of Invention, Aldous Huxley . . . As Roger Waters later explained, ‘Syd was never an intellectual, but he was a butterfly who would dip into all sorts of things.’

Cambridge boy John Davies was now in London training to become a veterinary surgeon and recalls that ‘the Earlham Street flat was a lovely place to hang out on a Saturday. It was all happening. Syd would play us records and new songs he’d just written. I can remember sitting there, incredibly stoned, listening to him strumming “Scarecrow” on an acoustic guitar.’

‘There was something that happened at Earlham Street that sums Syd up for me,’ says Po. ‘He had this little room - bedroll in one corner, guitar in the other, a rail with some velvet trousers and flowery shirts hanging off it. Nothing else. And I remember sitting there playing “Go” with him. There was a bare lightbulb overhead and it was a bit too bright. I was like, “Sydney, isn’t there something you can do about that light?” He said, “Yes, there is.” He had some oranges in a brown paper bag. He tipped them out, made a hole in the bag, screwed the light bulb in around it, and we now had a beautiful lampshade, giving this soft light on our game. He was always able to do these effortlessly artistic things that would have taken the rest of us ages to think about.’

Blackhill set about getting its new charges to record a demo tape that could be pitched to record companies, ‘despite the fact’, as Jenner admits, ‘that we didn’t really know anyone in the business apart from Joe Boyd’. At Thompson’s Recording Studio, Hemel Hempstead, Floyd recorded, among other things, ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ and a newer composition, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. The first was typical Carnaby Street acid-pop, the ideal soundtrack for mini-skirted podium dancers (‘Don’t touch me, child,’ declares Barrett camply in its chorus). But it was ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ that would become Floyd’s signature song, an instrumental ‘freak-out’, growing out of a guitar figure reputedly inspired by Love’s version of the Bacharach and David standard ‘My Little Red Book’, which Jenner is said to have hummed to Syd.

Anthony Stern was now living in Carlisle Street in London’s West End and working with film-maker Peter Whitehead, the artist Syd had encountered in his Cambridge studio some four years earlier. Running into Peter Jenner one day in Soho, the Floyd’s manager handed Anthony a copy of the band’s demo for ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. ‘I thought it was absolutely right for the sort of films I wanted to make,’ says Stern. On a trip to America the following year, Stern secured funding for his film,
San Francisco
, which featured the rough, early version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ set to abstract, flashing images of America in 1967, which, in Stern’s words, ‘attempted to duplicate the Pink Floyd’s light show’.

With management, a booking agent, and now a demo tape, a rejuvenated Pink Floyd went back to Cambridge in December 1966 to play the art school’s Christmas party.

In attendance that night was future photographer Mick Rock, then in his first year at Cambridge University. With a taste for dope and hallucinogenics, Rock had made a connection with Pip and Emo: ‘They kept talking about their friend Syd and his band Pink Floyd and how they were named after two bluesmen I’d never heard of. They raved about this guy Syd. I was completely blown away when I first saw Pink Floyd. But it was all Syd. You didn’t even notice the rest of the band. Pip and Emo took me to meet him, but first I met Lindsay Corner. We hung out, smoked a joint, and I remember being very taken with her. And when I found out after the show that she was Syd’s girlfriend, I was even more impressed.’

After the gig, Rock joined Barrett and friends back at Hills Road to smoke more dope and ponder the merits of Timothy Leary’s
Psychedelic Review
and that year’s hippest novel, Arthur C. Clarke’s
Childhood’s End
. A friendship began between Rock and Barrett that would endure into the next decade and some time after Syd’s departure from Pink Floyd.

Another of Syd’s former college friends was also in the audience. John Watkins had helped to organise the event. He recalls: ‘I went up to Syd afterwards, full of praise - “It’s fantastic what you’re doing.” And he looked at me and said, “Thanks, but I think I need to kick the drummer and the keyboard player up the arse.” But then, that was his way. It felt as if he started a new band every week at art school. I could never imagine him staying in one group, playing the same songs, night after night . . .’