Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (18 page)

The nineteen-year-old Gilmour and his bandmates, drummer Willie Wilson, bassist Rick Wills and keyboard player and saxophonist Dave Altham, have shared their train carriages with donkeys and chickens, and been harassed by gun-toting border guards who, in the era of General Franco’s Spain, have taken great exception to the length of their hair.

A year before, Jokers Wild had financed their own five-track album of Chuck Berry, Four Seasons and Frankie Lymon covers, but a record deal eluded them. By mid-1966, as Pink Floyd were signing their management deal with Blackhill, Jokers Wild were on their last legs. Since joining the band, Gilmour had supplemented his wages delivering wine, running a hot dog stall, loading sheet metal, and landing the very occasional £50-a-day gig as a photographer’s model for the likes of
Varsity
, the Cambridge University magazine.

The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein hadn’t offered the band a deal, but future DJ and musician Jonathan King, then a student at Cambridge University, saw them and invited Gilmour to London. The band recorded a cover of Sam and Dave’s ‘You Don’t Know What I Know’, but when the original was re-released, the Jokers Wild version was shelved. ‘Dave always told us that they wanted to sign him but not the rest of us,’ says Willie Wilson. ‘So he told us he told them to stuff it.’

‘Jonathan King noticed Dave at this club,’ recalls Rick Wills now. ‘He hung out where there were good-looking boys, but he was also on the lookout for musical talent. I went to Jonathan’s flat in London with Dave. He was on the phone talking to someone about getting a song played on Radio Caroline, and it happened right while we were there. We were like, wow! We knew someone in the music business that had real power.’

Through King, Gilmour was introduced to The Rolling Stones’ former mentor Alexis Korner, who formed a partnership with another aspiring entrepreneur, Jean-Paul Salvatori, to manage the young guitarist. Salvatori offered him a six-week residency at the Los Monteros hotel and beach club just outside Marbella.

‘Dave came back to Jokers Wild and said he’d been offered this gig,’ says Willie Wilson. ‘Who wants to do it? Are we all up for it? And most of the band said no. They all had day jobs. But Dave Altham and I both said yes. So we needed a bass player and Rick Wills was a mate who used to come to our gigs and was absolutely raring to go.’

Dave Altham had been playing keyboards, sax and guitar in Jokers Wild since 1964. John ‘Willie’ Wilson had first played in The Newcomers with Gilmour, and had, through Gilmour, landed a gig playing in another Cambridge outfit, The Swinging Hi-Fis, before taking over as drummer in Jokers Wild. Rick Wills played bass in another local band, The Soul Committee.

Before Marbella, though, Gilmour, Wills and Wilson would spend some time in London. ‘We left in Willie’s old Austin Cambridge,’ remembers Rick Wills. ‘Dave had got himself a flat in Moscow Road, near Queensway, but there wasn’t room for all of us. So Willie and I ended up living in that car. It was terrible. We survived on bread and milk.’ Nevertheless, under Salvatori’s guidance, the band were whisked down the Kings Road, kitted out in bell-bottomed, sailor’s trousers and blue Shetland jumpers, and put on stage at a Sybillas nightclub in Swallow Street, where they immediately attracted attention. ‘We were tasty young boys in tight trousers, so we were prime fodder,’ says Rick. ‘The chef took a particular shine to me, chasing us round the kitchen with a meat cleaver.’

But if male attention was forthcoming, a record deal was not.

‘I don’t think Jean-Paul Salvatori had the slightest idea what he was doing when he sent us to Spain,’ says Willie Wilson. ‘He saw Dave as a good-looking guy who sang and played guitar, and he just saw money. His brother-in-law was Tony Secunda, who was doing well managing The Move, and I think he fancied the same.’

Recruiting Dave Altham, the four-piece set off on their gruelling trek through France and Spain. When the band eventually arrived in Marbella, they discovered the promised beach accommodation was a concrete bunker that had acted as a bomb shelter during the Second World War.

‘We also discovered that the club we were supposed to be playing hadn’t been built yet,’ says Willie, ‘so they threw a party up at the golf club nearby and got us to play to people like Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and Monica Vitti. They were all part of that Marbella set.’

Despite their parlous living conditions, the band, later toying with the name Bullitt (‘fast and flash-sounding, like the Steve McQueen movie’), began their residency at the soon-to-be-completed Los Monteros beach club, playing next to the open swimming pool and enduring the inevitable electric shocks.

‘On one hand our situation was desperate, as we were sleeping in a bomb shelter,’ says Rick. ‘But we were young, and there were lots of extremely good-looking women around, so we were having the time of our lives.’

When the season was over, the band returned to Cambridge, where a frazzled Dave Altham chose to remain. ‘Then we got another gig in Holland, playing a coming-out ball for Princess Beatrice, now Queen Beatrice,’ says Willie. ‘Next thing, Dave landed this two-month residency at a club called Jean Jacques in St Etienne, so Rick and I went with him. The gig was supposed to finish at Christmas, but in January we got a gig at Le Bilbouquet in Paris, and spent the next six months there.’

In between, the group played on demos for Johnny Halliday, the ‘French Elvis’, and at a party in Deauville, attended by sex symbol starlet Brigitte Bardot. ‘I didn’t meet her,’ insists Willie, ‘but Dave did. I think he went up to her and said, “Hello, I’m David”, because that’s exactly the sort of thing Dave would have done.’

It was in Paris that Gilmour also met Jimi Hendrix and was entrusted with squiring him around town. ‘I was an Englishman in Paris,’ Gilmour explained, ‘and I could speak reasonable French.’ Gilmour had seen Hendrix jamming at Blaises nightclub in London the year before and had raved about him.

‘We became a different band in 1967,’ explains Rick. ‘We’d started to do Hendrix and Cream covers, and Dave had also started writing songs. His parents came over to France for his twenty-first birthday and bought him a cream-white Fender Telecaster. I don’t think he ever took it out of his hands.’

When the band’s van was broken into and their microphones stolen, Gilmour realised it would be cheaper for him to go back to London and pick up replacements than buy them in France. It was on this flying visit that he encountered Pink Floyd and a debilitated Syd recording ‘See Emily Play’.

‘Dave came back and told us these stories about the bizarre songs Syd was writing,’ remembers Willie. ‘I remember him singing them to us, and telling us, “You won’t believe it, but Syd’s written a song about his bike.” ’

‘That summer we had
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
and
Sgt Pepper
to listen to in France,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘When we’d left Cambridge in the summer of ’66, Floyd hadn’t got a record deal. Then I heard through friends that they had. Then I heard the album. I thought it sounded terrific and, yes, I was sick with jealousy.’

By the time Floyd’s debut was released in August 1967, Bullitt had become Flowers, to capture the peace-and-love mood of the time. It was all to no avail. ‘That was when it got really hand to mouth - sometimes our hands didn’t even reach our mouths,’ says Willie. To save money, the three shared a single hotel room. Then Gilmour became sick. ‘Dave very rarely gets ill,’ says Willie. ‘But at the end he was so ill we couldn’t do any work.’

‘We hung on for as long as we could, but we had to come back when we were destitute,’ says Rick. The crunch came when Gilmour was admitted to hospital. ‘Dave had malnutrition and pneumonia, because he wasn’t eating. We couldn’t afford to. I weighed eight stone and Dave not much more.’

‘We left the hotel we were staying in without paying as Dave was so sick,’ says Willie. ‘To his credit, Dave went back there five years later after he’d made money with Pink Floyd, found the hotel and the couple who’d looked after him when he was ill, and paid them.’

In a final twist, the dispirited band was forced to push their broken-down van off the ferry at Dover. Rick and Willie headed straight back to Cambridge; the dogged Gilmour chose to stay in London: ‘To go back to Cambridge would have been admitting defeat.’

Instead Gilmour wound up sharing a flat in Calverton Road, Fulham, with Emo, before the pair commandeered another, more up-market pad in Victoria. Gilmour took a job driving a van for designers Ossie Clarke and Alice Pollock’s Quorum fashion boutique. Emo submitted to a short spell of gainful employment, studding leather belts at the boutique’s shop on the Kings Road. ‘Dave Gilmour never really said very much,’ Clarke’s wife the designer Celia Birtwell later recalled. ‘He just used to stand around. It was a bit unnerving.’

Gilmour’s experiences in France had only toughened his resolve. He was still looking to start another band. In November, he headed to the Royal Albert Hall for Pink Floyd’s opening slot for Jimi Hendrix. A few weeks later he showed up at the Royal College of Art where the band were playing alongside the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. With various Cambridge refugees then enrolled at the college, it had almost become a home-from-home gig. But it was obvious to all concerned that something was wrong. ‘They were awfully bad,’ admitted Gilmour. ‘Incredibly undisciplined.’

‘I remember seeing Syd play, or rather not play, or rather play something inappropriate at that gig,’ recalls Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘I said to Susie Gawler-Wright, “What’s going on?” and she said, “We don’t know. Syd is very strange.” ’

In what would soon become a familiar pattern of confused and even non-communication, Nick Mason recalls approaching Gilmour after the art college gig, along the lines of: ‘If we said we were looking for another guitarist, would you be interested?’ Yet Nigel is certain he was asked by the group to telephone Gilmour about the job but that ‘Dave apparently doesn’t remember this.’ Emo, however, reckons it was Waters that phoned Gilmour at their flat in Victoria. Interviewed in 1973, Gilmour explained, ‘I knew all the guys in the band and they wanted to get rid of Syd. I was approached, discreetly, beforehand. It was put about in a very strange way.’

The final straw had been the ‘Christmas on Earth Continued’ show at Kensington Olympia. Barrett was there in body alone, appearing completely disconnected from his surroundings.

Long before his decline, Syd had struggled with the role of the traditional guitar hero. But it was the fact that he wasn’t another Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton clone that had made him appealing to Peter Jenner and Andrew King. Those close to Barrett at the time believe he was well aware of his shortcomings. Syd had expressed some insecurity about his playing in a letter to his old girlfriend Libby Gausden three years earlier, even mentioning a desire to recruit David Gilmour - referred to in the letter by his nickname of ‘Fred’ - but bemoaning the fact that Gilmour had his own band.

However, since Bob Klose’s departure, the idea of Floyd hiring another guitarist had never been mentioned. At a university gig in 1967, the late Tony Joliffe, a contemporary from Cambridge who’d played guitar in The Swinging Hi-Fis and sometimes drove Pink Floyd’s van, was coaxed on stage to perform. ‘Tony was an amazing blues guitarist, and everyone was asking Syd to let him have a go,’ remembers Emo. ‘Roger, Nick and Rick wanted to see what he was like. Tony got up and he was amazing. But I don’t think Syd wanted him up there, as he was aware that Tony was a better player.’

Nevertheless, whatever Syd’s wishes may have been, Gilmour was recruited as an additional guitarist, on a promised £30 a week. An introductory jam was arranged at Abbey Road’s Studio Two.

‘Andrew [King] and I had never met Dave before,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘So we wanted to see if he could cut the mustard. He did this amazing impression of Jimi Hendrix, so it was clear he was an incredible mimic. Which was what they wanted at the time - someone who could cover for Syd onstage.’
New Musical Express
sent a photographer to the Victoria flat to take a picture of the Floyd’s new guitarist.

Gilmour insisted on another change. ‘Dave finally realised that as he was paying the rent, perhaps he should be the one sleeping in the bed and I should be sleeping on the sofa,’ laughs Emo. ‘It took him three months to realise, though.’

Bizarrely, Barrett had already proposed a change to the Floyd line-up. In a meeting at Blackhill’s office, he had suggested hiring, in Roger Waters’ words, ‘two freaks he’d met somewhere. One of them played the banjo, the other the saxophone.’ To this mix he also wanted to add ‘a couple of chick singers’. Nick Mason would later write that Barrett viewed Gilmour ‘as an interloper’, but Syd’s unpredictable behaviour during an early week of rehearsals in a West London school hall convinced them all that Gilmour’s presence was necessary. Barrett spent a couple of hours attempting to teach the band a new song entitled ‘Have You Got It Yet’. Each time the others reached the title in the chorus, Syd would change the song, turning it into the musical equivalent of an Escher staircase on which none of them would ever reach the top. ‘I actually thought there was something rather brilliant about it, like some clever kind of comedy,’ said Roger Waters. ‘But eventually I just said, “Oh, I’ve got it now”, and walked away.’

Publicity pictures were taken of the five-piece Floyd. In one, Syd is almost visibly fading into the background. In another, while the rest line up in suede jackets and dapper neck scarves, looking every inch the sixties rock group, a black-eyed, ghost-faced Barrett stares ahead beneath a mop of matted hair, as if he’d just surfaced from one of the Lesmoir-Gordons’ acid benders.

‘The light in his eyes was slowly going,’ remembers Emo. ‘He got those black circles underneath them, and you didn’t know whether it was mascara or not sleeping or both.’

A handful of gigs were booked for January 1968, commencing with a show at Birmingham’s Aston University. ‘Sometimes Syd sang a bit, sometimes he didn’t,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘My brief was also to play the rhythm parts and let Syd play what he wanted.’