Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (19 page)

Tim Renwick, then playing in a band called Wages of Sin, bumped into Gilmour on Denmark Street. ‘He started telling me how odd it was standing in for Syd and how unpredictable Syd was on stage. Some nights Syd tended not to play anything. He was out of his crust.’

‘I saw two of the gigs they did as a five-piece,’ says Emo, who was then enjoying another rare spell of gainful employment as a Floyd roadie (on £15 a week). ‘At the beginning Dave just played what was necessary. He’d learned the parts and just copied what Syd used to do. But you could tell Syd didn’t understand what was happening. He was standing so close to Dave he was almost an inch from his face. Dave wasn’t a physical person who’d have pushed him out the way, but you could see the look in his eyes, as if to say, “Help!” Syd stood like this in front of him, then started walking around him, almost checking that Dave was a three-dimensional object. That he was real. It was as if Syd was thinking: Am I dreaming this?’

As yet another compromise, the rest of the group hit on the idea of keeping Syd on board as a songwriter. ‘Our idea was to adopt The Beach Boys’ formula,’ said Nick Mason, ‘in which Brian Wilson got together with the band on stage when he wanted to. We absolutely wanted to preserve Syd in Pink Floyd one way or the other.’ By 1968, The Beach Boys’ similarly troubled composer had retired from live performances, while still writing many of the group’s songs. ‘There was no protest from Syd towards this idea,’ elaborates Peter Jenner. ‘But by that stage he’d become so detached that this was all going on around him. But I think that idea lasted about a week.’

‘I think Roger didn’t fancy that idea,’ insists Andrew King. ‘Because he fancied writing the songs instead.’

Barrett wasn’t the only one struggling. ‘I actually walked out of one of the first rehearsals,’ says Gilmour. ‘Roger had got so unbearably awful, in a way that I’d later get used to, that I stomped out of the room. I can’t remember how long I was gone for. I eventually came back. But I don’t think the band had fixed ideas of what I should do or how I should do it.’

It was on the way to a gig at Southampton University, on 26 January 1968, that the decision was taken not to call for Syd.

‘Somebody said, “Shall we collect Syd?” ’ remembered Gilmour. ‘And somebody, probably Roger, said, “No, let’s not bother.” ’

‘He was our friend, but most of the time we now wanted to strangle him,’ admitted Waters.

Experiencing a sense of relief at being able to perform live without worrying about what their frontman was or wasn’t going to do, the group decided to play the following night’s gig without Syd also.

Richard Wright, who was still living in Richmond Hill with Barrett, was faced with the unwelcome task of lying to his flatmate: ‘I had to say things like, “Syd, I’m going out to buy a packet of cigarettes”, and then come back the next day.’

‘Syd used to still turn up, even when they didn’t pick him up,’ says Emo. ‘He must have still had the itinerary, because there was one gig when he was there when we arrived to set up - just sat there on the stage waiting. Eventually it sunk in that there was some other guy playing his part.’

Years later, though, Richard Wright would claim that David Gilmour hadn’t been their only choice. ‘When Syd left we actually asked Jeff Beck to join,’ he said. ‘But he turned us down.’ Others claim the band were too shy ever to have asked Beck, and that he was even ‘rejected on the grounds that he couldn’t sing’.

Around the same time, Anthony Stern had run into Peter Jenner in Drum City, a music shop in London’s Piccadilly. ‘I played trumpet and had been into jazz, and while I could play the guitar, my playing wasn’t up to much,’ says Stern. ‘But Peter was like, “Look, Syd’s really falling behind, why can’t you be a second guitar player in Pink Floyd? . . . You come from Cambridge . . . You know them all.” Spontaneously, I just turned around and said, “Oh, no, I’m a film director” ’.

Gilmour’s self-confessed insecurity wasn’t helped by the management’s lack of faith. ‘We consciously fought to keep Syd in the band,’ agrees Peter Jenner. ‘The idea that Roger was going to become the main songwriter didn’t cross my mind. But I did think that Rick could have come into his own, and we did wonder if he and Syd would stick together.’

Wright shared the management’s misgivings. ‘Peter and Andrew thought that Syd and I were the musical brains of the group, and that we should form a break-away band,’ he later told
Mojo
. ‘And, believe me, I would have left with him, if I had thought Syd could do it.’

Despite the rest of the group’s scepticism, Jenner and King still believed that Barrett was the band’s golden goose, and aimed to establish him as a solo artist. Financially, Blackhill was still struggling, with Pink Floyd in debt to the tune of £17,000. At the end of 1967, the company had begun managing a young singer-songwriter, Marc Feld, now working under the name Marc Bolan, and his group Tyrannosaurus Rex. Feld had signed to Blackhill because they looked after his hero Syd Barrett, yet it would be another few years before he would become a bona fide pop star in his own right. An enterprising Jenner had also applied for a £50,000 grant from the Arts Council, supposedly to fund a hastily conceived rock opera featuring BBC underground rock DJ John Peel as narrator. When the tabloids got wind of the scam, they revived the previous year’s headlines, claiming that Pink Floyd’s ‘sound equivalent of LSD visions’ was reason enough to reject their application. The Arts Council agreed.

Unbeknown to Pink Floyd, the Morrison Agency was already circling. ‘Bryan was very wily,’ says Jenner. ‘He was the man who told us, “If a musician ever asks you for any money, say yes, provided they sign a publishing contract. You can give any musician twenty-five pounds for a publishing contract.” And Bryan acquired a lot of publishing contracts.’

In March 1968, Jenner and King formally dissolved their partnership with Pink Floyd, leaving the group free to secure a new management deal with Bryan Morrison. Morrison would eventually pass the job on to Steve O’Rourke, one of the ‘sinister dandies’ Joe Boyd had encountered the year before. Despite their previous misgivings, Boyd, Jenner and King had since warmed to both O’Rourke and Morrison’s booking agent Tony Howard. Says Jenner: ‘Knowing those two were involved was one of the reasons I felt confident that Floyd would get well looked after.’

Pink Floyd’s enterprising new manager, twenty-seven-year-old Steve O’Rourke, was the son of an Irish fisherman and had originally trained as an accountant. He moved into the music business in his late teens, later hired by Morrison after a stint as a pet food salesman. It was a job O’Rourke would cite as a badge of honour, telling the band that he would often sample his products to demonstrate their nutritious value to prospective clients, declaring, ‘If it’s good enough for me, it’s certainly good enough for Rover.’ O’Rourke had also made a small appearance in the Bob Dylan documentary,
Don’t Look Back
, which was deemed a point in his favour. However, later, O’Rourke’s commitment to the idea that you could sell anything would prove a major stumbling block in his relationship with the more questioning Roger Waters.

‘Steve was much harder than Peter and I,’ admits Andrew King. ‘And I was rather jealous of him. He sorted out some big mistakes we’d made in our contractual relationship with EMI. He had an eye for the main chance and used it to their advantage. Steve had one client - the band - and nothing would compromise him in what he would do for the band. They could not have had a better manager.’

‘It was always a verbal agreement between Floyd and Steve,’ says another of the group’s confidants. ‘The deal was done on a handshake. I always thought that was a clever move on the band’s part. Somehow, it made Steve work that bit harder.’

On 6 April, Syd’s departure was officially announced. A week later, Pink Floyd released a single, ‘It Would Be So Nice’, with Richard Wright on lead vocals, the first effort from their new line-up. A perky sub-Kinks affair (which Waters would later describe as ‘complete trash’), it included a reference in the lyrics to the
Evening Standard
newspaper, which fell foul of the BBC’s regulations. Happy to garner any publicity, the band contacted the newspaper, while agreeing to change the offending lyric. But even a little controversy couldn’t save the song from barely denting the charts.

In Cambridge, the news of Floyd’s line-up change was met with mixed emotions. Barrett’s sister Rosemary had been appalled by her brother’s rapid decline, and blamed the music industry for indulging his drug use. She would later claim that after ‘See Emily Play’ she found Syd’s music too painful to listen to.

Bob Klose, who’d concentrated on his studies after quitting the band, welcomed the change. ‘Syd was the rocket fuel, but Dave was the steady burn,’ he quips. ‘I know that Roger Waters had the creative impulse, but a great band needs a great musician. You need someone who can sing and play and do all the very musical stuff, aside from the grand concepts.’

For Gilmour’s former bandmates, the news of his recruitment came as no surprise.

‘I was at home recuperating after the French trip when I heard,’ says Rick Wills. ‘I was disappointed, but it was a logical step. Next time I saw Dave, he’d come back to Cambridge after doing some gigs, and he had eighty pounds in cash on him - and this was when eighty pounds was still a lot of money. He was in Ken Stevens’ music shop - long hair, velvet jacket, boots from Gohill’s in Camden Town - buying a very expensive pair of headphones that you plugged straight into your guitar - and he’d got himself a Fender Strat by then. I thought: Christ, you look the part!’

On stage, though, the flashily attired, Fender Strat-wielding Gilmour was still understudying his predecessor, gamely singing Barrett’s whimsical lyrics and replicating his guitar lines. A batch of mimed promo videos made by the band that year for Belgian TV captured the group’s muddled situation. Waters mimes Barrett’s vocals on ‘Apples and Oranges’ and ‘The Scarecrow’. Wright half-mimes on ‘See Emily Play’, looking mortally embarrassed, while Waters upstages him by playing imaginary cricket and wielding his bass like a machine-gun. On each of the clips, Gilmour hangs around on the sidelines, looking swish and handsome, but not yet part of the gang.

Following UFO’s closure, Middle Earth in Covent Garden had become the underground cognoscenti’s club of choice. Jeff Dexter was one of the club’s regular DJs. ‘We put Floyd on at Middle Earth,’ he recalls, ‘and I thought the new line-up was brilliant. In those days lots of people thought the idea of showing you were out to lunch was kind of cool. But I thought David was, dare I say it, so much more professional.’

As Storm Thorgerson explains, ‘You have to remember Syd couldn’t play guitar very well. David could. Syd had an attractive voice but David had a great voice.’

Gilmour’s professionalism certainly held him in good stead on the night Syd showed up at Middle Earth and spent the gig glowering at him from in front of the stage.

The real test for the group and their new recruit would come in the studio. EMI needed a second album. Pink Floyd reconvened with Norman Smith at Abbey Road. They’d already endured several recording sessions with Syd and had one Barrett-sung composition in the can, ‘Jugband Blues’, recorded just before Christmas. Syd had requested a Salvation Army band to play on the track and the redoubtable Smith knew just where to find one, though rumour has it that, on seeing the uniformed brass players, Barrett simply instructed them to play anything. Their contributions gave the song an even edgier quality. ‘I think the track might have been playing in their headphones,’ recalled Peter Jenner, ‘but the brass band chose to ignore it.’ It was agreed to include ‘Jugband Blues’ on the new album, but not Barrett’s ‘Vegetable Man’ or ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’. Waters vetoed their inclusion on the grounds that they were ‘just too dark’.

The bassist had been especially prolific, delivering three self-penned songs: ‘Let There Be More Light’, a broody psychedelic wig-out, all about aliens landing in the Fens, which name-checked the Floyd’s familiar Pip Carter; ‘Corporal Clegg’, the first of what would be many diatribes against the futility of war; and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, a shivery, languid piece of what critics would later christen, to the band’s despair, ‘Space Rock’. Wright wrote and sang lead vocals on ‘See-Saw’ and ‘Remember a Day’, the last a slight piece of psychedelic pop originally intended for
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
.

Still raw from his experiences with Syd, Norman Smith was impressed by Barrett’s replacement. ‘Dave Gilmour was a different story altogether,’ he recalls. ‘So much easier.’ But while Gilmour may have been a more willing workmate than Barrett, collectively the band were more dogged than ever in their pursuit of experimental ideas, an approach that flummoxed the producer.

‘I still didn’t understand the music,’ admits Smith. ‘But what I’d noticed is that they’d started developing their own tapes at home, so I encouraged this, as I always thought they should produce themselves in the long run.’

Smith backed off from the process, showing the band how to use the studio, while chipping in with advice, and, on ‘Remember a Day’, taking over the drums when Mason struggled to produce the required feel. But Smith’s attitude jarred. ‘Norman gave up on the second album,’ griped Richard Wright. ‘He was forever saying things like, “You can’t do twenty minutes of this ridiculous noise.” ’

Peter Jenner now believes that the band’s dissatisfaction stemmed from the fact that ‘Norman was becoming “Hurricane” Smith, a pop star in his own right, and perhaps didn’t feel he needed to be producing Pink Floyd.’

In fact, ‘Hurricane’ Smith’s pop career wouldn’t take off until the early seventies, but the noise in question probably referred to the album’s title track. Divided into three movements, and filled with a cacophony of hammering pianos and cluttering percussion leading to a final, tuneful coda, it was the first fruits of Waters’ decision to ‘stretch things out and be experimental’.

For Pink Floyd’s newest recruit, the experience was daunting and even alien: some versions of the songs had already been recorded with Syd; he barely contributed to the songwriting; and the harmony vocal skills that had been his forte in Jokers Wild weren’t required. ‘I didn’t feel like a full member,’ Gilmour said later. ‘I was a little on the outside of it all.’