Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (16 page)

Photographer Vic Singh, hired to shoot the band for the album’s cover, was similarly unsure. ‘Their music seemed alien and quite surreal,’ he says now. ‘When I first heard it, I thought: This is never going to work.’ Then sharing a studio with, among others, David Bailey, Singh was an up-and-coming society photographer and friends with George Harrison. ‘George had been given a prism lens. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he passed it to me.’ Singh told Jenner and King to raid whatever boutiques they could to get the brightest clothes in which to dress the band. This time, even Syd seemed happy to play by the rules. Vic relaxed the band ‘with a few joints and a couple of shots of Scotch in the coffee - and then snapped away’. The Quiet Beatle’s prism lens split the finished image, rendering the Floyd in duplicate. ‘It was unusual and different, and they were delighted with it,’ says Singh. ‘And Syd did his own little drawing on the back cover.’
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
would be one of the few Pink Floyd studio album sleeves actually to feature the group on its front cover.

Vic Singh’s experiences with Syd that year contrasted with those of Andrew Whittuck. A freelance photographer, shadowing the likes of The Beatles and the Maharishi in London that summer, Whittuck photographed Pink Floyd at Abbey Road and at his parents’ house. ‘I’d actually been to primary school in Hampstead with Nick Mason,’ he says now. ‘Though of course we were both too cool to mention it.’ The band and a roadie arrived with their lighting rig and set up in Whittuck’s bedroom: ‘They played me the album, which was quite unlike anything I’d ever heard, and there was lots of talk about the composer Stockhausen, which was where it was at, apparently. They all crashed out in my brother’s room and Syd was practically asleep after wedging himself into a corner between the door and the bed. Eventually, my mother came in, took one look at him and announced, “That chap looks like he needs a strong cup of tea.” She went off and brought him a cup. Of course, I was embarrassed, but, to be fair, Syd did actually perk up a bit after that.’

Pink Floyd were now attracting the attention of the music press, and interviews from the time see both Waters and Mason more forthcoming than their singer. ‘I lie and I’m rather aggressive,’ announced Roger to
Disc and Music Echo
. ‘I want to be successful and loved in everything I turn my hand to,’ Nick told the same interviewer. In contrast, Barrett is shyer and far less verbose. ‘Our music is like an abstract painting,’ he offered in a brief moment of insight. ‘It should suggest something to each person.’

Back from Formentera, Syd and the band reconvened at Sound Technique Studios, as EMI were already looking for another single. Among the new songs on offer was Barrett’s horribly prophetic creation ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’. Abbreviated from its original title, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream Old Woman with a Casket’, the song featured Nick Mason on vocals shadowed by insidious, creepy Pinky and Perky-style vocals, the music swaying and lurching. ‘Vegetable Man’ was hardly any brighter, with a desperate Syd declaring, ‘I’ve been looking all over the place for a place for me’ against a tuneless oompah rhythm. ‘He was singing about himself. It was an extraordinary document of serious mental disturbance,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘A song of amazing mad grandeur,’ counters a more sympathetic Andrew King. Dr Sam Hutt dropped in while the band was recording the track. Unfortunately, he was tripping: ‘All I can remember thinking was: Uh-oh, here come the demons!’

‘We were probably the only people in Los Angeles that had a copy of
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
,’ insists Alice Cooper. Pink Floyd’s debut was released in the US at the end of October 1967, when Alice was still just plain Vincent Furnier, the nineteen-year-old singer in a band called The Nazz and ‘utterly fixated by all British bands’. Alice’s and Pink Floyd’s paths would cross within weeks of the album’s release.

Andrew King, in his capacity as tour manager, flew to the States in advance of Floyd’s inaugural US tour. As he now explains, ‘Everything went wrong from day one.’

In San Francisco, King discovered that the group’s work visas had not yet arrived. Under union rules, a visiting British band had effectively to swap with an American group visiting the UK, in this case Sam the Sham and The Pharoahs. ‘I had to explain the situation to our promoter Bill Graham,’ says King. ‘Which made me feel like a complete prick.’ Graham, a formidable figure on the American West Coast, was not a man to be trifled with. He had arranged for Pink Floyd to play club dates and theatre shows alongside Janis Joplin’s band, Big Brother and The Holding Company. The absent visas meant the first six West Coast dates had to be cancelled. ‘An irate Bill ended up getting the American ambassador out of his bed in London at 4 a.m. to sort out the visas,’ continues King. ‘The band were on the next plane out. If there was one consolation, I got to see the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, whom Bill booked to play the first night instead of the Floyd.’

Arriving in the US with only their guitars, the band were confronted with two major problems. Their US label Capitol (‘who hadn’t a fucking clue about us or our music’, according to Peter Jenner) hadn’t organised any instruments and the band were forced to hustle the local music shops into lending replacements. Arriving at the 5,500-seater Winterland Auditorium, where they were due to open for Janis Joplin and Richie Havens, King realised that the group’s homemade light show, which they’d brought with them, ‘would be absolutely fucking useless and more suited to a primary school play’. The headliners graciously allowed them to use their own.

In the UK, the West Coast music scene was romantically perceived as a counterpart to London’s underground music clique. In the wake of The Beatles, any visiting British band intrigued the American music press. The just-launched
Rolling Stone
magazine sent photographer Baron Wolman down to Sausalito where Pink Floyd were staying. The band willingly played up for the camera. ‘They were obviously pleased to be in San Francisco,’ recalls Wolman now. ‘At one time Syd grabbed a couple of sugar cubes and put them in his mouth, an obvious reference to his fondness for LSD and one of the more popular ways of ingesting that particular drug.’

However, as Waters would later protest, many of the West Coast’s flagship groups were essentially country-blues bands. They might be given to lengthy jams and dope-smoking, but musically they were surprisingly conservative in their sound and influences. Pink Floyd’s mind-bending mix of jazz, beat pop and electronic noodling was far removed from Janis Joplin. The contrast wasn’t lost on the music press. As
Rolling Stone
’s star critic Ralph Gleason wrote: ‘On the West Coast we have recently seen The Cream, The Who, Procol Harum, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. Three groups are winners. The other two just do not make it. In person, Pink Floyd, for all its electronic interest, is simply dull in a dance hall following Big Brother and Janis Joplin.’

The band found their smaller club shows, in which they could use their bijou lighting system, were better received - some of the time. Prior to flying out from London, Syd had had his hair permed at Vidal Sassoon’s, and the resultant frizz was not to his liking. Lighting tech Peter Wynne-Willson had had his own hair permed at the same time. ‘Syd, myself and a few others went to Vidal Sassoon’s in London and had our hair permed. I wonder if Syd had an adverse reaction to the perm? I do remember that the horror look came into his eyes soon after.’

Before going on stage at the Cheetah Club in Santa Monica some reports claim Barrett, in a fit of pique, poured the contents of a tub of Brylcreem over his hair, into which he crushed a handful of (the barbiturate) Mandrax capsules. Wynne-Willson claims no memory of this. In the great spirit of rock myth and hearsay, others, including Sam Hutt, are adamant they’d seen him perform this trick on stage previously at the UFO club (‘I remember being terribly impressed, and thinking: This is a man who has his finger on some kind of pulse.’) Nevertheless, Nick Mason’s memory of the show extends to Syd applying the hair gel but not the drugs. Once asked to comment on the likeliness of the story, David Gilmour quipped that he ‘couldn’t believe Syd would waste good Mandies’. Once on stage Barrett is said to have detuned his guitar, provoking Roger Waters to cut his own hand while hitting his bass in anger.

Cheetah Club regulars The Nazz approached the band after the show. ‘The Floyd had run out of money in Los Angeles and ended up staying with us for a couple of nights,’ claims Alice Cooper. ‘We had a place on Beethoven Street in Venice. I remember getting up one morning and there was Syd staring at a box of cornflakes the way you or I would watch television. It was obvious that there was already something very, very wrong.’

‘I don’t think we’d run out of money,’ corrects Andrew King. ‘But we were feeling very lonely and dispirited. The Nazz invited us round to theirs to smoke some pot. They were incredibly kind to us when we most needed it. Though we did watch them play that club and they cleared the place.’

Offstage, Syd was also a liability: uncommunicative with reps from the band’s American record company and appearing monosyllabic during an interview with Dick Clark on the popular US TV show
American Bandstand
. Tellingly, during a mimed performance of the Floyd’s new song ‘Apples and Oranges’, Syd seems barely bothered to mouth the words beneath his bird’s nest hair-do, the camera frequently cutting to a rather aggrieved-looking Roger Waters and an unflappable Nick Mason. It was, at least, an improvement on the day before on
The Pat Boone Show
, when Syd spent most of the time cutting his interviewer dead with a silent stare and a single-word answer to the question, ‘What do you like?’ Barrett: ‘America.’

No one is entirely sure whether Syd took LSD while in the US (most think not), but there were other narcotic distractions.

‘When we went to the States, the dope consumption went up,’ says Peter Wynne-Willson. ‘In California it was all grass, very strong and different, as it was always smoked without tobacco. So smoking straight grass in the States may have been that extra notch on the ratchet . . . Two young women took Syd and I off to some hillside . . . mountain . . . I couldn’t call it a retreat, because it was phenomenal, a beautiful house. They plied us with prodigious amounts of dope, which wasn’t so critical for me, as I only had to operate lighting equipment, but for Syd . . . to my memory that was the first time I saw Syd standing on the stage unable to play the guitar.’

Despite their singer’s unpredictability, there had been some pleasant distractions on the tour for the others, with Waters and Mason initiated into the delights of Southern Comfort, courtesy of Janis Joplin, and several members of the travelling party enjoying the ministrations of obliging female fans, while kicking back at a groupie-friendly motel on Santa Monica Boulevard. One eyewitness claims that some individuals were obliged to book themselves appointments at the Middlesex Hospital’s venereal disease clinic on returning to the UK.

Nevertheless, with their singer in freefall, Andrew King pulled the plug on the remaining East Coast gigs, and the dejected party flew back to Europe.

‘There were a lot of criss-crossing emotions and feelings running about the place,’ remembers King. ‘We all had a number of conversations with Syd.’ These included Waters demanding that Barrett be fired on the spot. Stopping off to play a festival in The Netherlands before continuing to the UK, the band tried to communicate with Syd backstage via handwritten notes. King found himself considering the possibility that ‘we were all mad and Syd was the sane one.’

‘I never really got a coherent story of what happened in America,’ claims Peter Jenner. ‘But I remember Andrew was shell-shocked when he got back . . . The trouble is I probably would have considered some of Syd’s behaviour fine. It was avant-garde, and I thought avant-garde was cool.’

For some in the camp, the split was partly attributable to a division between those who smoked dope and those who didn’t. Waters, with his drive and tenacity, was seen as ‘not being cool’. ‘A ridiculous thing when you think about it now,’ says one of their associates, ‘but in the hippie mindset of the time, we all thought that was the case.’

There was another, less tangible, division between Syd and his bandmates, according to Libby Gausden. In October, just back from the US tour, Syd visited Libby at her new job, working as a translator at the university. She was also just about to get married. ‘Syd told me that everyone else in the band was being very sensible and wanting to buy flats with the money they’d made on the tour, but that he had spent every single penny he’d earned on a bright pink car which he was now having shipped over. He was doubled up with laughter at this and the thought of the others all putting their money towards flats and houses. He thought pop music was for fun and that he should spend everything.’

Libby’s boss also walked into the office and saw Barrett. Unaware of who he was, but knowing that Libby was about to get married, her boss took her aside afterwards to offer some sage advice: ‘He said, “Ooh, don’t get tempted by that one. He’s
very
peculiar”.’

For Jenner, the ‘Syd problem’, as Waters was now calling it, escalated on the band’s next run of dates. With barely twenty-four hours’ respite after returning from the US, Pink Floyd were due to play the Royal Albert Hall, on the opening date of a tour supporting Jimi Hendrix. The rest of the bill included pop’s latest movers and shakers: Amen Corner, The Move and The Nice. Each band was allotted an exact number of minutes for their set, with many venues requiring a matinée and evening performance. While Hendrix usually travelled alone, the support groups journeyed by coach, picked up from outside the London Planetarium in Baker Street. ‘All these groups on one coach; it was rather like the Cliff Richard film
Summer Holiday
,’ says Nick Mason, drolly, but Andy Fairweather-Low, then the teenage singer with Amen Corner, recalled the Floyd ‘as unsociable buggers, who never spoke to anybody’. Fairweather-Low would go on to become a guitarist in Roger Waters’ solo band, though at some point on that Hendrix tour there was an altercation between his manager and Waters. For Nick Mason, the Hendrix shows offered both good and bad experiences. ‘We’d led a very solitary existence as a band before that tour,’ he recalls. ‘Mainly because we were playing our own strange music. So, on one level, it was wonderful to hang out with Hendrix and other musicians. But by the end of it, we were frazzled - and that was because of Syd.’