Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (21 page)

‘When you’re young and your friend goes off the rails it’s hard to cope with,’ says Thorgerson. ‘We were not experts in analytical issues. Half of us were semi-crazy anyway, and, if not semi-crazy, had serious emotional defects and our own problems to bear.’

As well as Syd, John ‘Ponji’ Robinson would be among those who fell by the wayside. Ponji would go on to undertake an extraordinary form of therapy, which involved him taking LSD with his psychiatrist. Sadly, he eventually committed suicide.

In July 1968, as Pink Floyd embarked on their second US tour, Barrett left Egerton Court. Lindsay had already departed, finding a safe haven at Storm Thorgerson’s new place in Hampstead after one especially violent outburst. In years to come, on the rare occasions she has been interviewed, Lindsay would play down the suggestion of Barrett’s violence towards her. She would drop out of Syd’s life completely by the end of the sixties, eventually marrying and raising a family.

Barrett, in turn, drove his Austin Mini back to Cambridge, reportedly taking a whistle-stop tour around Britain during which he may have shown up unannounced at various Floyd gigs. He would return to London sporadically, sleeping on old friends’ floors, including Anthony Stern’s Battersea flat, where rumours surfaced that he was experimenting with heroin. ‘You’d see his mood declining as the evening wore on,’ recalls Stern. ‘Then he’d disappear into the lavatory and come back and his mood had changed. I don’t think it was cocaine, which was completely absent at that time. The issue of whether Syd tried heroin has become a delicate one, but at the time
everything
was being tried.’

With Syd gone, the Lesmoir-Gordons returned to their old room at Egerton Court and made a discovery. ‘I found a colour drawing Syd had left in our room,’ recalls Jenny. ‘It was a picture of a human head with a train going in one side and coming out the other, and at the top it had the words “That’s Weird” written across it.’

During the ensuing months, Syd would occasionally show up at Blackhill’s new offices in Princedale Road, Holland Park. Juliette Gale was now working in the same building, managing a modelling agency, Black Boy (later Black Boy And Blondelle), the first agency to represent black catwalk models.
Time Out
, London’s new hip underground magazine, also rented an office in the house. ‘I was at
Time Out
, which launched in the summer of ’68,’ says future BBC DJ Bob Harris. ‘We had an office in the same building as Blackhill and Richard Wright’s girlfriend Juliette. I’d seen Syd with Floyd at the UFO club many times, but the only times I saw him now he was comatose in reception, slumped in a corner with Juliette shrugging her shoulders as you wandered through. It seemed terribly sad.’

Jenner and King strived to keep a closer eye on their charge, but even they met with his suspicion.

‘When he first left the band we had a rota of people who gave Syd supper one night a week,’ recalls Andrew King. ‘So he’d come and eat with us, as he’d known my wife since they were at art college in Cambridge together. I actually think he felt safer with her than me. I expect Syd saw me as part of “the business”. The last time he came to ours for supper was one of the last times I ever saw him.’

Syd’s former band were adjusting gingerly to their new handlers. Prior to undertaking their second US tour, Bryan Morrison sent Steve O’Rourke to see the band, claiming they needed to sign another agency contract as a formality for touring overseas. Waters was especially reluctant and suggested they sign a contract that lasted for the duration of the tour only. A day later, Morrison sold the agency to Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises. Steve O’Rourke was effectively sold to NEMS as part of the deal and, according to Waters, ‘never got a penny out of it’.

Floyd’s second US tour began almost as ignominiously as their first, with delayed work visas leading to the postponement of shows. Gigs alternated between underground hot spots such as Steve Paul’s The Scene club in New York and the Detroit Grande Ballroom. Bussed into the backstage areas of these outdoor events, Floyd would catch the last moments of sets from fellow Brits such as The Troggs before being bundled on stage themselves. Elsewhere, they’d fight for the audience’s attention between performances by homegrown heavies Blue Cheer and Steppenwolf. Midway through the dates, the money ran out, leaving the group stuck in Seattle until their US agency could settle their hotel bill.

‘It also felt as if we could only get gigs at weekends,’ said Roger Waters. ‘So when it wasn’t a weekend, we were stuck somewhere like the Mohawk Motor Inn on the outskirts of Detroit where you could get a room for eight dollars a night. Hour after hour spent sat by some crappy swimming pool with no money to go anywhere.’

Nevertheless, in New York, where the band stayed at the notorious Chelsea Hotel, Waters was tempted to try LSD again for the first time since his Greek holiday in 1966. While tripping, he ventured out to buy some food, and found himself frozen in the middle of Eighth Avenue, seemingly unable to move. Waters later claimed it was his last experience with the drug.

Even with Syd gone, Waters still felt moved to vent his ire on stage, developing his party piece of attacking the gong suspended behind Mason’s drum kit with great gusto during ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’. ‘Roger would do some very strange things on stage,’ recalls one eyewitness from the time. ‘He was so very tall that he cut a very strong figure. And there was also the way he dressed . . .’

Roger had already had a slightly too-short pair of fashionably snug red trousers customised with gold braid tassels on the hems. In the US, he acquired a cowboy-style holster fixed to his belt and, with a piece of twine, to his thigh, in which he took to carrying around his cigarettes. ‘The hippie clothes thing had a fairly narrow border,’ recalls one friend of the band. ‘But I guess we felt that Roger sometimes stepped outside it.’

Whatever his sartorial mishaps, Waters clearly helped to drive the band. Witnessing the group’s performance at the 100,000-seater JFK Stadium in Philadelphia was future
Rolling Stone
writer David Fricke. A freak thunderstorm later that day would lead to the cancellation of headliners The Who, but the upstart English band lower down the bill grabbed his attention. ‘From where I sat the Floyds were tiny moving matchsticks,’ he recalled. ‘Yet the music was big enough to move the air. For the forty or so minutes the Floyd were on stage they
were
the air.’

David Fricke’s enthusiasm had yet to translate to his future paymasters. Struggling with the live gigs,
Rolling Stone
also felt confused by the new album. ‘The Pink Floyd are firmly anchored in the diatonic world, with any deviations from that norm a matter of effect rather than musical conviction,’ complained reviewer Jim Miller.

By September, the band were back performing before more partisan crowds, revisiting Gilmour’s old haunt, Le Bilbouquet in Paris, and their new home from home, the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden.

Slowly but surely Pink Floyd were changing, but not just musically. Earlier that year, they’d played the First International European Pop Festival in Rome alongside The Move and The Nice from the previous year’s Hendrix tour. The Nice’s Davy O’List, who’d understudied Syd on that tour, dropped into Floyd’s hotel suite.

‘I was rather shocked to see Dave Gilmour luxuriating on a double bed and holding a bottle of Scotch,’ O’List laughs, ‘because that was the first time I’d ever seen a member of Pink Floyd with a drink. Despite what was going on with Syd and the drugs, the rest of them had seemed so straight on that Hendrix tour.’

Faced with the challenge of filling Syd’s shoes and standing up to the bass player, David Gilmour was similarly partial to a smoke. Later, when asked by a Canadian student newspaper whether they used drugs while they performed, the guitarist’s answer was wonderfully obtuse: ‘Sometimes. Usually. But not much.’

The Gypsy Moth and the First World War flying ace outfits certainly looked authentic. Standing alongside the biplane, Pink Floyd had swapped their Kings Road threads for grease-spattered flying suits and goggles, their collective plumage of hair the only reminder that this was 1968 rather than 1916. It was October and Pink Floyd were being filmed for a very literal promo clip to accompany their new single, ‘Point Me at the Sky’. Unknown to them and EMI it would be their last UK-released single for eleven years. Unfortunately, like ‘Apples and Oranges’ and ‘It Would Be So Nice’, the Norman Smith-produced song showcased the group’s insurmountable struggle to write a hit single. Worse still, the chorus sounded troublingly like that of The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.

Undeterred by the song’s lack of performance on the charts, Pink Floyd simply savoured their chance to dress up like Biggles and fly in a Gypsy Moth.

‘I never felt the band was finished when those singles flopped,’ Nick Mason says. ‘Blind optimism, I suppose. I think we just believed that we were right and everybody else was wrong. We were one of the first bands to benefit from the freedom that The Beatles had provided. After
Sgt Pepper
, we all had a lot more freedom.’

If EMI were happy to overlook Pink Floyd’s failure in the singles charts, the band still had to consider the label’s attitude towards
A Saucerful of Secrets
, an album that had hardly matched
Sgt Pepper
for sales. Roger Waters summed up EMI’s approach as being, ‘Yes, that’s very nice . . . but now you have to get back to making some proper records.’

By the start of the New Year, they were already talking to
Melody Maker
about a planned double album, made up of individual compositions and group tracks. Yet an indication of where they were heading was already buried on the B-side of ‘Point Me at the Sky’ in an early version of a piece entitled ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’. Gradually expanded beyond its original two-and-a-half minutes, it would join ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ as another trial run for the wildly ambitious Floyd of the seventies: a slow-building melody, eerie effects, and complete avoidance of a conventional pop song structure.

‘It was abstract music, not so song-orientated,’ recalled Phil Manzanera, the future Roxy Music guitarist, then an avid Floyd fan. ‘They were doing things with sounds, having fun with the traditions of
musique concrète
and the Radiophonic Workshop. You have to remember a lot of people were lying down to listen to this stuff. It was a chill-out experience.’

To complement this abstract experience,
A Saucerful of Secrets
had been packaged in a suitably far-out sleeve. Just as the band’s Royal College of Art pals had been on hand to design flyers and posters, they now contributed the sleeve design for the group’s second album. Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell had formed a design partnership, though more by accident than design.

‘Storm had a friend who worked in a publishing company,’ recalls Po, ‘and she introduced us to the people who did Penguin book covers, and they wanted to be part of a new, hip scene. We’d just discovered a thing called infra-red film and Storm said we should do them in infra-red. They were for cowboy book covers, so we photographed David Gale, Dave Henderson, Nigel and Jenny - everyone from Egerton Court - in Richmond Park, dressed up in western wear. It looked like
Stagecoach
on acid. We presented them to Penguin, who loved them and gave us £40 a cover - which was enough for us to live on for the whole summer. We ended up doing about ten covers. I think it was Roger Waters, who was very friendly with Storm, who suggested we do the cover for
A Saucerful of Secrets
. We’d been experimenting in dark rooms and had a few sketches and rough pages.’ The suggested design - a tiny photograph of the band in Richmond Park surrounded by cosmic swirls - was intended to ‘give the album a surreal, acidy feel’.

‘At that point we were going to call ourselves Consciousness Incorporated, a very groovy name for the times,’ explains Po, ‘but you couldn’t call yourself Incorporated as it was an American term for a limited company. Going up to Egerton Court one day we saw written on the outside of the door in biro the word ‘Hipgnosis’. We were a bit pissed off about it as someone had graffitied on our nice clean door. But we both thought it was a great name - hip and gnostic. We never found out who wrote that on the door, but we always thought it was Syd. We called ourselves Hipgnosis and had a little card made, which said, “Photos, designs, artworks etc” and finished with the words “far outs, groovies, weasels and stoats”. Don’t ask me why.’

The duo were paid £110 for their efforts, and
A Saucerful of Secrets
would herald the start of their working relationship with Pink Floyd.

Yet before Floyd could head off into their own musical universe, there was the gravitational pull of their old singer to be negotiated. By January 1969, Syd was back in London, seemingly calmer, and settled in a new three-bedroom flat at Wetherby Mansions, a large block on Earls Court Square, just off the Old Brompton Road. His latest flatmates were a mutual friend by the name of Jules, who would soon move out, and the artist Duggie Fields, the former Regent Street Poly student and ex-Cromwell Road resident, viewed by those close to Syd as a calming influence.

‘He seemed much happier having left the band, which is why I agreed to get a flat with him,’ says Fields. ‘Syd still had money coming in from the Floyd. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it removed the pressure to get up in the morning and go to work. He seemed to be confused about what he should be doing.’

With Lindsay gone, Syd was now involved with Gilly Staples, another model from the Quorum boutique. He was also talking about making another record and contacted Malcolm Jones, head of EMI’s newly launched subsidiary, Harvest. Jones had devised the idea of an imprint label dedicated to hip, underground music. With Floyd’s success as its benchmark, Harvest would go on to enjoy success with Deep Purple and Roy Harper, alongside less successful waifs and strays from the Blackhill stable, including the Edgar Broughton Band.