Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (17 page)

Even with their abbreviated time slot, Barrett behaved as if he’d rather be anywhere else. ‘He used to go off on these long walks and then arrive two minutes before he was due to go on stage,’ says The Nice’s singer and guitarist Davy O’List. ‘I’d seen this happen so I was aware that there was tension. Musically, I thought they were fabulous, and I used to watch them from the audience trying to work out what they were doing.’ O’List’s attention to detail would pay off. ‘One day, possibly in Liverpool, Syd didn’t turn up, so the band asked me if I’d stand in,’ he recalls. ‘I told them I knew “Interstellar Overdrive”, so they produced Syd’s hat and told me to put it on. I decided to play with my back to the crowd. The audience was full of fourteen-year-old girls who all started screaming, thinking I was Syd, so I decided not to turn around. Roger was smiling, thinking they’d got away with it. Which was the point at which I got a bit brave and turned around - and all the screaming stopped. As soon as Syd found out, he came back. I did notice that he wouldn’t even look at me when we were on the coach after that.’ Barrett’s performances remained unpredictable, although O’List never stood in again. ‘In the past I’ve exaggerated and told people I played more shows,’ he admits now. ‘But that’s only because I wished it had been true.’

In November, the tour pitched up at Cardiff’s Sophia Gardens. Nick Kent, the future
NME
writer, then a fifteen-year-old fan, was in the audience. ‘It was the moment psychedelia arrived in the suburbs,’ he recalls. ‘Previously, all this stuff was only happening in London. The Nice had ten minutes, Amen Corner, fifteen . . . So everyone was pulling out their most flamboyant stuff, going in for the kill. Except the Floyd. They came on and played, I think, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”. But I think they’d turned Syd’s amp down, because you could hear this cacophony in the background while the other three tried to hold the thing together. It looked like he was unravelling.’

Backstage, visitors encountered Barrett sitting in the corner of the dressing room in what appeared to be an acid torpor, tentatively playing with a toy steam engine he had acquired, and looking terrified whenever anyone struck up a conversation.

Considering Barrett’s condition, a stint of prodigious LSD use was perhaps not the best idea. During a rare few days off, a contingent of Cambridge and London hedonists set off in a rented Ford Zephyr for Blackhill Farm, Andrew King’s family cottage in the Brecon Beacons, notable for a large penis sculpture in the garden, rendered by Eric Clapton’s sometime pianist Ben Palmer.

The party included the Lesmoir-Gordons, Syd, Lindsay, Cromwell Road hipster Stash de Rola and a Cambridge fashion model known as Gai Caron, who would later marry Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell. Now the events of the trip have an absurd, cartoonish quality, but there’s a bleaker undercurrent. The noise and odd behaviour attracted a warning visit from the police, Nigel and Jenny became lost in a snowstorm while tripping, and Stash, whose favoured garb included a Victorian night gown and a velvet cape, attempted to sit in the cottage’s open fire, believing, according to Jenny, ‘that if we really believed in the love, he wouldn’t burn’.

The ridiculous antics took on a stranger hue where Syd was concerned. ‘The first night tripping, he spent most of it perched on a wine bottle,’ recalls Nigel. ‘He had his two feet on it and his hands on a beam overhead and he somehow managed to keep his balance. Later that week, when tripping again, he did a shit on the doorstep, which we thought most peculiar. Even on acid that wasn’t a terribly sane thing to do.’

Viewing his flatmates and neighbours as part of the problem, the Blackhill team had extricated Syd from Cromwell Road before the summer was over. Barrett and Lindsay had moved temporarily into Andrew King’s family-owned flat on Richmond Hill with Rick and Juliette. Disturbing rumours circulated of Syd’s pet cat being left at Cromwell Road where it was supposedly fed LSD and died. A second-floor property overlooking the River Thames, the Richmond Hill pad was supposed to provide a saner atmosphere. The pressing issue now, though, was to follow that up with another hit single, even if Syd didn’t share the rest of the band’s or their management’s sense of commitment.

‘Syd was beginning to feel deeply disappointed by what was happening with the Floyd,’ says Anthony Stern. ‘Around this time, he used to visit me in a flat I had in Norfolk Mansions in Battersea, and treat it as a sort of refuge. The thing about growing up in Cambridge was you never ever wanted to do what had been done before. Syd was innately revolutionary and creative, and he just didn’t get the idea of commerciality.’

Instead of writing another hit single, Barrett would spend hours with Stern plotting out their ideas for a film, to which they gave the working title of ‘The Rose-Tinted Monocle’. The pair had come across a book by the American author and inventor Buckminster Fuller, and had been especially taken with one passage referring to ‘inherently regenerative constellar energy association events’. ‘This was conceived as the basis for the film,’ explains Stern. ‘The energy association events would be episodes in a film. Syd and I wanted to make a film that had no linear structure but consisted of all these fragments which when viewed holistically would give you a sense of oneness - almost like something you might watch to aid you with meditation.’

While Barrett would never see the film through to completion, Stern would work with many of the ideas first devised for ‘The Rose-Tinted Monocle’, and create a movie of his own, which would later be offered to Pink Floyd. In the meantime, away from his fledgling film project, Syd was still being encouraged by others to think more like a pop star.

Syd’s next creation, ‘Apples and Oranges’, had been released as a single to coincide with the US tour and hopefully nudge Floyd back into the UK charts for Christmas. Where previously Syd had sung of transvestite underwear thieves and mysterious ‘hung-up chicks’, this was, apparently, inspired by a more mundane occurrence: a girl he’d seen shopping in Richmond that, according to some, may have been Lindsay Corner. Jaunty psychedelia-by-numbers, but with none of the hypnotic charm of ‘Arnold Layne’ or ‘See Emily Play’, it barely made a dent on the charts. Syd may have been perceived as Floyd’s resident songwriting genius, but it was Richard Wright’s B-side, ‘Paintbox’, that now seems the better song.

‘After “See Emily Play” there was that traditional music biz pressure of, “Where’s the next hit?” ’ says Andrew King. ‘Syd was the most likely person to come up with a hit single, so it was him we were pushing. I didn’t think “Apples and Oranges” was
that
bad, but I suspect at the time we were thinking: Oh dear . . . but if that’s the best they can come up with . . .’ Producer Norman Smith admits: ‘I chose it. But it was the best of a bad lot.’

Quizzed about the song’s lack of success, though, Barrett was unusually forthright. ‘Couldn’t care less,’ he shrugged. ‘All we can do is make records we like. The kids dig The Beatles and Mick Jagger not because of their music but because they always do what they want to do and to hell with everyone else.’

‘We put Syd under a lot of pressure,’ concedes Peter Jenner. ‘But then we were also under financial pressure and that made everything worse.’ Blackhill had moved out of the Edbrooke Street flat to a proper office in Alexander Street, Westbourne Grove, with some of the money from Floyd’s EMI deal. Yet the company was now inadvertently paying the band and crew on a first come, first served basis. Cheques were regularly bouncing, prompting employees to collect theirs earlier in the week to cash them first.

‘We hired an accountant, who started asking all these questions,’ says Jenner. ‘Like, “Can I see your books?” And we were like, “Books?” “Have you paid your National Insurance?”, and we were going, “National Insurance?” The live market was also drying up for the Floyd. We weren’t such an easy sell any more. We hadn’t had another hit, so we couldn’t play the pop clubs, [and] the blues clubs wouldn’t have us any more. Which just left the college gigs and there weren’t that many and we’d played them all.’

A disillusioned Peter Wynne-Willson quit his role as the band’s lighting tech at the end of the Hendrix tour. Tellingly, in the light of Blackhill’s financial insecurity, his successor John Marsh was willing to work for a lower wage. Instinctively, Wynne-Willson also allied himself with Syd, whose position in the band was growing shakier by the day. As 1967 wound to a close, the naivety and blind optimism of just twelve months earlier seemed to be dissolving.

‘By the end of 1967 the zeitgeist had changed,’ ventures Wynne-Willson. ‘And it wasn’t the cosy, hippie thing any more.’

Accompanying the so-called Summer of Love, the
News of the World
had run a weekend expose on UFO, dubbing it ‘a hippie vice den’. The police, who had turned a blind eye, informed Mr Gannon that if he opened the following Friday, his premises would be raided and his licence revoked. Joe Boyd moved UFO to the Roundhouse, but run-ins with local skinheads and the inflated rent took their toll. UFO effectively ended in October 1967. Meanwhile, its former house band and their star singer were in real danger of falling apart.

On 22 December, Floyd appeared on the bill alongside The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who and The Move at the ‘Christmas on Earth Continued’ show at Kensington Olympia. Inside the cavernous venue, 30ft lighting towers, fairground-style attractions and boutiques flanked the bands. But Syd was in no condition to perform. Bundled on stage by Jenner, King and June Child, he simply stood there, his arms hanging loosely by his side, his guitar draped around his neck but supposedly unplugged. As Nick Mason would later write, ‘We had tried to ignore the problems, and will them to go away, but it was time to come out of denial. We were reaching breaking point.’

‘It all happened so quickly,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘In just a few months Syd had gone from being a carefree student, living on his grant, having a smoke now and again, to having all these people wanting to be his best friend and relying on him to play the gig, do the interview, write the hit single, bring in the money . . . tell them the meaning of life.’

Asked for his thoughts by one pop magazine interviewer, Syd was already working up a new strategy. ‘All I know is I’m beginning to think less now,’ he said. ‘It’s getting better.’

CHAPTER FOUR

WAKING THE GRAPEVINE

‘I remember thinking I could knock Pink Floyd into shape.’

David Gilmour

T
he Olympia theatre on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris has a sort of ruined splendour. Deep below the stage, in the basement of the building, lies a ragged circular lounge and tiny bar, serving red wine and
pastis
to thirsty rock stars and loitering members of the press. The sofas are threadbare, overlooked by pictures of the jazz and blues giants that have performed here over the past half a century. Tucked away in a tiny room, seated on a leather sofa and sipping from a mug of herbal tea, is David Gilmour.

It is 16 March 2006, ten days after Gilmour’s sixtieth birthday, and almost a year since his truce with Roger Waters for Pink Floyd’s Live 8 performance. The guitarist’s third solo album,
On an Island
, has just reached number 1 in the UK. It’s an album steeped in themes of encroaching old age and mortality, much of it inspired by the deaths of two close friends, including Tony Howard, one of the entrepreneurs who coaxed the young Pink Floyd away from their first managers in what must now seem like a past life.

A black T-shirt, Gilmour’s uniform for the tour, disguises the extra weight acquired since hitting his thirties. But he’s lost much of the ballast that accompanied Pink Floyd’s comeback in the mid-1980s. Life is calmer now. In unfussy jeans, workman’s boots and with a dusting of snowy-white stubble, Gilmour looks less like a rock star and more like someone you might find restoring antique furniture in a picture-postcard English town.

The guitarist has submitted himself to considerable press scrutiny to promote this new record. But it wasn’t always this way. ‘In Pink Floyd, we got away with talking to as few people as possible,’ he admits. Today, he will answer questions about Roger Waters and Pink Floyd, after a brief quip - ‘If we
really
must’ - and the thinnest of smiles.

Understandably happier to talk about his own record, he bristles with boyish enthusiasm for the songs, before, unaccountably, slipping into some unprompted anecdote about Roger Waters and Pink Floyd. When he puts on his guitar to have his photograph taken, Gilmour visibly relaxes. The transformation is quite striking. Squinting at the framed posters overhead, and acknowledging Floyd’s numerous visits to the Continent, Gilmour is insistent that Floyd never played L’Olympia. ‘Absolutely not,’ he says firmly. Yet before Floyd, Gilmour had plenty of misadventures in France. During tonight’s show, he will address the audience in near-perfect French, a skill that once held him in good stead on an early trip to the Continent.

It is 30 July 1966, and for David Gilmour and friends, England’s victory over Germany in the World Cup has been overshadowed by their current predicament. He and the remnants of what had once been Jokers Wild are on a slow train to Malaga, trundling through a Spanish heat haze, when the score is announced. Passengers congratulate the four dishevelled English teenagers, but are confused by their lack of interest. Since beginning their journey at London’s Victoria Station days earlier, the group’s precious cargo of guitars, keyboards, drums and amps has been unceremoniously dumped in the hold of a ferry from Dover; lost en route from Calais to Paris; retrieved in Paris; then lost again en route to Madrid.

Gilmour’s fluent French has saved the day when dealing with railway officials, but each time their equipment has reappeared it is in more dilapidated condition than before. The human cargo hasn’t fared much better.