Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (14 page)

For The Soft Machine’s Robert Wyatt, Pink Floyd’s 4 a.m. performance ‘must have been one of the greatest gigs they ever did. It completely blew my mind.’ Others have wrongly claimed that Syd was too incapacitated to perform, yet photographs from the night also show Barrett with his hands on his guitar, clearly lucid enough to play, even if Richard Wright’s cape isn’t quite the shiny creation of Dr Sam Hutt’s memory.

For organiser John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Pink Floyd’s dawn performance, good or otherwise, took a back seat to other events happening at the same time. ‘One of our friends was a chemist,’ he recalls, with some relish, ‘and he came along with some stuff which we now think was a cousin of DMT [the hallucinogenic, diemethyltryptamine]. Whatever it was, my girlfriend and I had a nice warm glow and ended up outside Ally Pally in the dawn light looking down across London. I never saw Pink Floyd play that night. Or if I did, I can’t remember a thing.’

Peter Jenner’s reference to ‘Syd’s religious acid friends’ may well refer to some of his flatmates that year. In 1967, Syd left Earlham Street for a room in one of the flats at 101 Cromwell Road. The Lesmoir-Gordons had taken the first-floor flat some twelve months before, moving in with another Cambridge émigré, Bill Barlow, landlord of the notorious 27 Clarendon Street in Cambridge, home to numerous local hipsters. The Cambridge ‘scene’ now spread to this new party house in the capital, located in a now-demolished Victorian building close to the West London Air Terminal coach station in Earls Court.

Nevertheless, with Nigel studying at the London School of Film Technique and moving in the most fashionable circles, number 101 became a Mecca for the capital’s overlapping art, music, movie and drug crowds. The poet Allen Ginsberg, the film-maker Kenneth Anger, and singers Donovan and Mick Jagger were among those who dropped by.

From 1965 onwards, the building’s various rooms had offered a rehearsal space for Pink Floyd and, briefly, lodgings for Roger Waters. It would also play host to various exotic tenants. These would include, at various times, John Esam, the New Zealand-born beatnik and an early link in London’s LSD distribution chain, and Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, aka Stash de Rola, the son of the prominent French artist Balthus. Stash was a confidant of The Rolling Stones, who would later be arrested on drug charges with Brian Jones, and would also take a memorable acid trip with Syd Barrett - of which more later.

The artist Duggie Fields had briefly studied architecture at Regent Street Poly, where he met the Cambridge contingent through Juliette Gale. Sometime in 1965 he moved into 101 Cromwell Road. ‘Pink Floyd used to rehearse in one of the rooms,’ he recalls now. ‘And I used to go downstairs and put on an American R&B record as loud as I could because I thought they had no sense of rhythm and subtlety, and I rather hoped some of it might find its way into what they were doing.’

Duggie was still living at Cromwell Road, in a room papered with Marvel Comics, when Barrett took the room next to his.

‘The house had seven rooms on those two top floors, and there were nine or ten people living there,’ says Fields now. The living-room’s walls, ceilings and floor were painted white (an idea lifted from the 1965 movie
The Knack
. . .
and How to Get It
), and films were often projected on the walls - sometimes deliberately running backwards. The room was routinely occupied by the building’s lodgers, their friends and sometimes complete strangers.

‘I can remember coming home from college to find maybe twenty people sitting around. I wouldn’t know any of them and there’d be nobody there that actually lived at the flat,’ says Fields. ‘And this could be happening during the day as well as the night.’

On the floor below lived a lecturer (‘poor Mr Poliblanc’ as one of the residents now refers to him), who was totally unconnected with the group. ‘One of our number worked out a way of wiring up the meter so we were effectively stealing his electricity,’ admits Duggie. ‘The landing also became a rubbish dump, as it was several floors up and nobody could be bothered to take the rubbish out. To this day I have no idea where the rubbish at 101 actually went.’

As well as housing such doyens of the capital’s counter-culture, number 101 also offered shelter to Pip and Emo. There was a false ceiling installed in the hallway, with enough room above it to create a claustrophobic hidey-hole, big enough for a mattress.

‘Cromwell Road was always a last resort,’ groans Emo. ‘We went there when we’d been kicked out of everyone else’s flats. I still remember that platform suspended over the corridor. Girls were always terrified to get up there, and there was always a rush between me and Pip to get to that bed if it was the only one available.’

In the words of one of his acquaintances, ‘Duggie Fields was not into self-annihilation’, but while he stayed sane, many of the Cromwell Road regulars did not. Although stories about the house’s occupants may have been exaggerated, Mick Rock, another regular visitor, recalls a general air of drug-induced chaos: ‘Apart from Duggie’s room, the rest of the place was full of acid burn-outs.’

Communal trips at Cromwell Road were certainly commonplace, whether during Barrett’s residency or not, with one eyewitness recalling a bottle of LSD and pipette kept in the fridge of the Lesmoir-Gordons’ flat. On at least one occasion a party of trippers were said to have marched the wrong way down the perilous entrance to the coach station, convinced of their invincibility despite the risk of oncoming vehicles. The spiked iron railings surrounding 101 Cromwell Road proved an even greater hazard to anyone believing they were indestructible while under the influence. One night Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon found another of his old Cambridge drug buddies, Johnny Johnson, naked, disorientated and hanging on to the drainpipe outside 101’s bathroom window. Nigel managed to persuade him back in. Johnson had previously attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself out of a window, and would succeed the next time he tried.

In May that year, Joe Boyd claims to have come across Lindsay Corner and a ‘crazy-eyed’ Syd in London’s West End. Lindsay told him that Barrett had been taking acid every day for a week.

Barrett’s supposed daily acid use has long been the subject of wild speculation. Some think he
was
taking it every day; most claim he wasn’t. However, others in Pink Floyd’s entourage were concerned that his flatmates might be encouraging his drug use by ‘spiking’ his drinks with LSD. ‘Cromwell Road was full of heavy, loony, messianic acid freaks,’ said Peter Jenner.

Two of the occasional people around Syd at Cromwell Road were known as ‘Mad Sue’ and ‘Mad Jock’. In the real world, ‘Jock’ was Alistair Findlay. ‘Sue’, his then girlfriend, was Susan Kingsford, a model, who had first encountered Barrett and Gilmour while at the Cambridge Technical College. After appearing in a TV advert, as one of the first Cadbury’s Flake girls, she moved to London and paired up with another of 101 Cromwell Road’s residents, who had worked for Robert Fraser, the art gallery owner who got busted with some of The Rolling Stones. This friend ‘fell in with the druggies,’ says Sue now, ‘and I fell in with him.’ She also makes a fleeting appearance in Peter Whitehead’s film footage of ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’, wearing, in her own words, ‘a musquash coat and nothing else, holding a daffodil and beaming beatifically’.

‘I remember Sue and Jock floating about,’ says Mick Rock. ‘Sue was this incredibly beautiful girl who’d taken too much acid.’ But Duggie Fields recalls that ‘Sue really wasn’t mad at all, possibly just a little wacky.’

While asserting that her LSD use was prodigious - ‘We took it constantly - enormous quantities’ - Sue insists that they never spiked anyone. ‘Why would anyone do such a thing?’ she insists. ‘In those days, if you took acid it was all very serious. You did it and then listened to Bach, or watched Kenneth Anger’s latest film, or read the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
.’

‘Spiking was a heinous crime,’ Alistair Findlay told Syd Barrett biographer Tim Willis. ‘You just wouldn’t do it.’

‘If they were spiking everyone,’ asks Duggie Fields, ‘why didn’t they spike me? It never happened.’

Whatever his later problems, Syd was certainly
compos mentis
when he started work on Pink Floyd’s debut album. The group were quickly ensconced at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. Widely regarded as one of the best studios in the world, Abbey Road was run along strict lines: white-coated technicians were on hand to deal with any equipment malfunctions, and tape ops and engineers were taught every aspect of the trade, from how to wrap up cable properly to the correct positioning of microphones. Best of all was the inspiring mix of musicians passing through its doors on a daily basis. As Abbey Road tape op and later engineer Jeff Jarratt recalls, ‘You could come in one day and find the classical composer and conductor Otto Klemperer in Studio One, The Beatles in Studio Two, and Pink Floyd in Studio Three.’

In keeping with company policy, the Floyd’s designated producer was their A&R executive Norman Smith, a dapper ex-RAF man, experienced jazz musician and sometime studio engineer for The Beatles. ‘He was old-school with a very dry sense of humour,’ recalled Roger Waters, ‘and always gave the impression of being a retired song-and-dance man. I liked him enormously.’

Sessions for what would become
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
album began in Abbey Road’s Studio Three in January 1967. At various times during the next few months, The Beatles would be next door in Studio Two creating
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. Smith had staked his reputation on Pink Floyd, but, as he recalls now, ‘It was not the easiest of associations.’ To break the ice, the producer sat at the piano playing jazz and ‘bashing away while the band joined in’. These jamming sessions worked well, but Syd was less receptive to taking advice about his own music. ‘With Syd it was like talking to a brick wall,’ says Smith. ‘He would do a take, come back into the control room and have a listen. I’d make some suggestions, and he would just nod, not really saying anything, go back into the studio, do another take and it would be exactly the same as the one before. Roger was very helpful, and the others were fine, though I remember Rick was extremely laid-back, but with Syd I eventually realised I was wasting my time.’

Jeff Jarratt worked as a tape op during the sessions. ‘My memories are different from Norman’s,’ he says now. ‘Syd was clearly the band’s main creative force, and I thought he was fantastic. When I was asked to do the sessions I went to see Floyd play live, and I was absolutely amazed. It was so fresh and exciting; I hadn’t heard anything like it. Norman would have been directing them in the best way for that stuff to sound good on record. So perhaps there were things he said that challenged their way of thinking.’

Similarly, Waters remembers that ‘despite him [Syd] doing a lot of acid there were no real problems at that stage.’ Nevertheless, all agreed that the band’s more outlandish musical ideas jarred with the traditionally minded Smith.

‘I wasn’t that knowledgeable about the sort of music they were playing,’ admits Norman. ‘Psychedelia didn’t interest me. But I felt it was my job to get them to think more melodically.’ On that score, Smith succeeded in ‘discouraging the live ramble’, as Peter Jenner calls it. Instead, freeform live numbers such as ‘Pow R Toc H’ were hacked down to a more manageable length, though a ‘licensed ramble’ was permitted with the 9 minute 41 second version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. According to the late Abbey Road engineer Pete Bown, this was the song he heard Floyd rehearsing when he first checked in to begin working on the album. ‘I opened the door and nearly shit myself,’ he recalled years later. ‘By Christ it was loud. I had certainly never heard anything quite like it before.’

‘Peter Bown was an unbelievable character,’ remembers Jeff Jarratt. ‘A fun, extrovert guy. He was older than the band, but he was very receptive to new ideas.’ ‘Pete had a much more creative attitude than perhaps Norman did,’ offers Peter Jenner. ‘He was also extremely gay, ragingly gay, which seemed quite unusual back then.’ Andrew King recalled Bown seated at the mixing desk painting the tips of his fingers with a plastic skin compound used to repair cuts and grazes, as he was concerned that endless sessions working the desk would ‘wear them out through over-use’.

Stories of Pink Floyd meeting The Beatles during these sessions are steeped in apocrypha. They range from the fictitious - that Barrett secretly played on
Sgt Pepper
- to the simply mundane - that the Floyd were taken in to meet The Beatles, encountering a grumpy Lennon and a cheerier McCartney. Nick Mason wrote of ‘sitting humbly as they [The Beatles] worked on a mix’ of what would become ‘Lovely Rita’. Norman Smith now adds a new tale to the collection. He was in Studio Three, attempting to bond with Floyd at the start of the
Piper
sessions, when ‘the door opened and who should walk in but Paul McCartney. He introduced himself to them, though they obviously knew who he was, and then tapped me on the shoulder as he left and said, “You won’t go wrong with this chappie.” I think the boys were impressed.’

‘What you have to remember,’ says Jeff Jarratt, ‘is that bands were running into each other all the time at Abbey Road. Who knows how many times Floyd and The Beatles might have met?’

Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell also recalls a meeting between Barrett, Waters and Paul McCartney at the UFO club: ‘There was this little corridor by the side of the stage, and I was sat there when McCartney came in, smoking a joint. Paul was a very affable guy and he passed the joint around. After he’d gone Syd was like, “Wow, that was Paul McCartney and he’s come to see Pink Floyd.” I was surprised, because I was like, “Syd, you’re pretty cool as well now.” I also remember that Roger, who I’d never seen smoke before, took a huge hit off that joint. He knew when to play the game.’

The Beatles’ success at Abbey Road certainly enabled ‘the boys’ to make
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
. Following The Beatles’
Revolver
, the studio’s engineers had become used to phasing, multi-tracking, and all manner of what Jenner calls ‘weird shit’.