Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (12 page)

Back in London, Hoppy and Joe Boyd had formed a partnership of their own. Boyd had seen Pink Floyd’s shows at All Saints Hall and was searching for a regular venue in which to stage similar events. Boyd found his ideal venue in the Blarney Club, an Irish showband ballroom beneath the Berkley and Continental Cinemas on Tottenham Court Road. Boyd struck a deal with the Irish owner, Mr Gannon, on a handshake and agreed to pay £15 a week for the use of the venue every Friday night. Originally billed as ‘UFO-Night Tripper’, before becoming known simply as UFO, the club opened its doors on 23 December 1966, with performances from Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine (in support). UFO would become a weekly event from the New Year, with Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine establishing themselves as its so-called ‘house bands’, the former securing 60 per cent of the gross takings for their first three appearances.

Unusually for the time, the club’s organisers found themselves making money, with much of the surplus being put towards paid advertisements in
International Times
, which helped keep the paper afloat. In return,
IT
’s staff, such as it was, would run the door at UFO. The club ran from ten o’clock at night until eight in the morning, its fashionable clientele, psychedelic soundtrack and then space-age lighting effects disguising the fact that the polished dancefloor and overhead mirror ball were firmly rooted in showbiz tradition. There was no alcohol licence, but a small stall dispensed macrobiotic food to hungry clubbers, while a German drug-dealer, known only as Marlon, was on hand to sell trips. UFO’s in-house lighting wizard, the late Mark Boyle, had been a regular at Mike Leonard’s sound and light workshop at Hornsey College of Art. Boyle worked on a makeshift platform, mixing together different substances between clear slides to be warmed by a projector lamp, before, effectively, melting and spreading across the band on stage.

‘Nowadays, UFO would make a 1970s disco look sophisticated,’ says Mick Farren, then writing for
International Times
and singing with his own band, The Social Deviants. ‘But at the time, the ambience was mind-blowing. ’

‘You’d drop acid and arrive blotto,’ says Jenny Fabian. ‘It was like descending into a subterranean world of dreams. There were people floating about with that beatific gaze in their eyes, or flat out on the wooden floor. I often lay there myself, absorbed in the old black-and-white films they showed between music. There was also something regressive about the whole thing. If you went to have a pee, beyond this hall of dreams lay a dark, winding corridor, brightly lit, but black and dripping with condensation, which led to a garish Ladies, and I’d look in the mirror and be amazed at what I saw . . . It was always a relief to get back into the womb of make-believe.’

As well as live music, the club staged performance art - jugglers and mime acts - as well as screening avant-garde film shows. But as time progressed, the live bands became an increasingly important part of UFO’s appeal. Despite the club’s womb-like ambience, an element of competition arose between the respective bands’ audiences, if not the groups themselves. ‘Floyd were very trippy, very druggy, but very white rock. They were for people who liked Tolkien and went looking for UFOs on Hampstead Heath,’ says one Soft Machine devotee. ‘The Soft Machine were more avant-garde in a European sense. They fitted the bill at jazz festivals in France. Their audience seemed more socially conscious - into black civil rights and the working-class revolution.’ For some, the merits were purely musical and visual. ‘There was always competition between my friends as to who was better,’ says John Leckie. ‘We always argued about who was most stretching the boundaries. Soft Machine could certainly play better. But Floyd were more abstract and, of course, they had Syd.’

Even among their own entourage, not everyone was convinced by the Floyd’s musical worth. ‘To be completely honest, I was never a fan,’ laughs John Whiteley. ‘I helped do the lights for them at UFO, but I can still recall Syd playing away and shouting out the chords to the others - telling them what to play.’

Yet The Soft Machine’s drummer Robert Wyatt remembered his rivals with affection: ‘There was an at-easeness about the Floyd, which I rather liked. Soft Machine’s equipment would always blow up and Floyd would let us use theirs, which didn’t usually happen between rock bands at the time. Most of them were in their cocoons. I was still listening to John Coltrane and not buying rock records. But I was amazed when I saw Floyd play, at their nerve in taking their time to get from one note to the other. I couldn’t do it, but Floyd were always in control.’

With both bands free to perform the music they wanted, for as long as they wanted, Floyd and Soft Machine had the advantage of playing to, as Wyatt puts it, ‘people who didn’t know what year it was, let alone what time it was.’

The distortion of time that accompanies an acid trip made Floyd the ideal soundtrack for the LSD experience. Prior to their performances at UFO, their crew would clear the crowd away from the area directly in front of the speakers. As Miles later wrote in
New Musical Express
, ‘This was originally designed to prevent stoned hippies from burning out their eardrums, but it soon assumed a curious, ritual significance, like a Zen ceremony, the emptying of the space into which the Floyd’s mysterious music was about to spurt.’

On stage, they performed with their homemade spotlights up close and projections slipping across the backdrop behind them, casting shadows over the band and adding to the mystique. Syd’s abstract guitar riffs battled with Richard Wright’s unearthly-sounding keyboards. Roger Waters, gangling and aloof, delivered a thudding bass to underpin the din, and some ungodly screaming when the mood demanded it. One night, Joe Boyd recalled seeing a tripping Pete Townshend crouched by the side of the stage, pointing at Waters and claiming the Floyd bassist was ‘going to swallow him’.

‘I tripped three times at UFO,’ recalls Townshend now. ‘I thought Roger was very handsome and very scary, and what I was really afraid of was that he was going to steal my girlfriend, whom he openly fancied, while I was weakened by acid.’ The girlfriend in question, Townshend’s future wife Karen Astley, was a beautiful art student who had already featured on the inaugural UFO club poster. She routinely attracted attention at UFO, according to The Who’s guitarist, on account of ‘dancing in a dress that looked like it had been made out of a cake wrapper’.

Trouble at UFO erupted rarely. Visiting mods sometimes took exception to the prevalent peace-and-love vibes, though many would end up dropping acid themselves and joining the party. On other occasions, tripping bikers became heavy-handed with the female clientele. A greater threat to public order came when some of the beautiful people broke free from the pack, hippie bells tinkling, kaftans askew, ending up on Tottenham Court Road in the small hours and attracting the interest of the passing constabulary.

Sam Hutt, London’s first ‘alternative doctor’, later to become country singer Hank Wangford, was a UFO regular and still marvels at how much the club’s clientele could get away with: ‘The Irishman who owned the place was incredibly pragmatic. He literally turned a blind eye to what was going on - very Irish. To him it was no different to the local pub staying open late.’

‘You have to remember that this was a rented Irish showband joint,’ adds Mick Farren: in those days the police had to be sweetened, ‘even in the normal run of things - without hippies all over the joint one night a week.’ A crate of whiskey at Christmas was the accepted sweetener.

In January 1967, Barrett’s path crossed again with Peter Whitehead, who was now making films, assisted by Syd’s art exhibition partner Anthony Stern.
Wholly Communion
, a movie of the 1965 Royal Albert Hall poetry reading, featuring Allen Ginsberg, and
Charlie is My Darling
, the following year’s documentary of a Rolling Stones tour, would establish Whitehead as a diarist of the so-called counter-culture. ‘Mr Trendy’, as Andrew King later described him, even if, as Peter insists, ‘I didn’t really like pop music and had never been to a pop concert before in my life.’

Whitehead was halfway through making another film,
Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London
, which spliced together interview snippets and footage of Mick Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, David Hockney and more, as a time-capsule document of the pop stars, movie stars and artists of the time. What it needed, though, was a suitably
now
soundtrack. ‘There was no way I wanted to put the bloody Rolling Stones on it,’ says Whitehead. ‘Anthony knew I liked The Soft Machine, and told me about how Syd was in The Pink Floyd, who were doing something similar.’

Peter ventured out to the UFO club and encountered Syd backstage - ‘He was already a little out of it’ - though his attention was more drawn to Barrett’s escort, a beautiful girl named Jenny Spires.

‘Jenny was the first girl who totally encapsulated the vibe at UFO,’ offers Anthony Stern. ‘She lived in my flat for a while, and I was sitting there one night, when I heard a door open and this lovely sound of bells jingling, like a reindeer. It was Jenny. She had these bells on her ankles, and she was the most wonderful vision of a new type of woman. I didn’t hear such a lovely sound again, until I went to a town called Herak in Afghanistan in 1972, where the horses had the exact same bells on, and I suddenly had this flashback of Jenny coming through the door of my flat again.’

In what would become a familiar pattern in Syd’s complicated love life, Jenny - yet another Cambridge girl - wasn’t alone in vying for his affections. Around the same time, Syd was linked to a Quorum boutique model and sometime 2 Earlham Street resident Kari-Ann Moller, who would go on to marry Mick Jagger’s brother, Chris.

‘I started seeing Jenny Spires as well,’ explains Peter Whitehead. ‘Back at my flat one night I showed her a lot of the images I’d cut for the film, and told her how I needed some music. She suggested the Floyd, but they didn’t have any proper recordings.’

Arranging the deal with Syd and Blackhill, Whitehead stumped up £85 for two hours of recording time at Rye Muse studios, later renamed Sound Technique, in Kensington, and filmed the group’s performance of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, the earlier demo of which had so impressed Anthony Stern. ‘I liked it because it was very dark, druggy, mysterious and semi-classical,’ says Whitehead. Like Stern, Peter believed the piece would be ideal for his film also.

In the ensuing footage, Barrett can be seen playing dissonant, freeform guitar, his baggy red-and-black T-shirt and spidery pencil moustache rendering him rather less stylish than his bandmates that day. Mason, in particular, looks, as one Floyd insider puts it, ‘very Carnaby Street’. With extra time to fill, the band jammed their way through another piece, entitled ‘Nick’s Boogie’, though only ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ would find its way into the finished film. Years later, Whitehead’s additional footage of the band performing at UFO and the Alexandra Palace would appear on the commercially released video and DVD,
Pink Floyd London 1966-1967
.

At Sound Technique, Pink Floyd cut more songs, including another new Barrett composition, ‘Arnold Layne’, under Joe Boyd’s guidance. The group filmed a promo clip for the song, featuring the four goofing around with a shop window dummy on a freezing Sussex beach. It now offers a rare snapshot of the band in light-hearted mode, even if Barrett seems strangely upstaged by a showboating Roger Waters, who hams it up unselfconsciously for the camera, gangling across the sand in slightly too short drainpipe trousers.

Peter Jenner blithely admits that ‘back then, we didn’t know what we were doing’, but the vague plan was for Boyd, in his capacity as an A&R man, to secure a deal for the band. According to Jenner, Boyd had brought over his boss, Jac Holzman, label manager of Elektra Records, who’d signed Peter Jenner’s new favourites Love, to see the band, ‘but he didn’t like it, and blew us out’. However, Nick Mason recalls that Holzman had offered ‘a rather grudging one and seven-eighths percentage’.

Yet Polydor Records pitched in with a better offer, which included Joe being retained as an independent producer. (He had now formed his own independent production company Witchseason, the name taken from Donovan’s ‘Season of the Witch’ single). A contract was drawn up. Within days, though, the deal would fall apart.

Bryan Morrison was one of the country’s shrewdest booking agents. Working out of an office on London’s Charing Cross Road, Morrison managed The Pretty Things, as well as handling publishing and agency bookings for a variety of acts, including all the bands that appeared at the fashionable Speakeasy. Jeff Dexter was among those who first invited Morrison to the UFO club to see Pink Floyd.

Speaking in 1982, Joe Boyd recalled that Morrison and two of his aides, Tony Howard and future Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke, visited him and the band while they were rehearsing. ‘There was an immediate, intense dislike between myself and those three,’ he said. Later, Boyd would recall ‘velvet jackets, scarves knotted around their throats, tight trousers . . . the dandyism only made them more sinister.’

This combination of old-school mores and elements of the prevalent ‘head culture’ made for a formidable mix. ‘Joe would have been intimidated by Morrie, Steve and Tony,’ concedes Jeff Dexter, ‘because they were a force to be reckoned with.’

It would prove a significant encounter. Morrison had already approached Blackhill with a view to representing the band, had looked over The Pink Floyd’s contract with Boyd and Polydor and told them they could do better. Before Joe could raise any objection, Blackhill had backed out of the Polydor deal and signed with Morrison, who would then fund an independent recording to be pitched to record companies.

‘The trouble was that Joe was the only person we knew in the industry,’ admits Jenner. ‘And, for us, he’d rather blotted his copybook with the Jac Holzman business. Along comes Bryan Morrison and he seemed to know everybody . . . In those days it was EMI or Pye or Decca. EMI were considered much hipper because they had The Beatles and they owned Abbey Road. Bryan told us, “You go with the company with the most money”, and that saves you from thinking.’ Bryan Morrison had hooked EMI after receiving a letter from EMI Parlophone’s new producer Norman Smith, who was scouting for bands.