Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (22 page)

Dedicated to making albums rather than chasing hit singles, Harvest would become synonymous with the progressive rock music of the next decade. More importantly, Jones was a Syd Barrett fan. Norman Smith was committed to Pink Floyd, so Syd asked Jones to produce some sessions, intending to revisit the songs he’d recorded with Peter Jenner (of which only ‘Golden Hair’ and ‘Late Night’ would appear on the finished album,
The Madcap Laughs
) and record new songs he claimed to have written.

‘Initially, it was just to see if Syd had anything worth recording,’ recalls Peter Mew, who engineered those first sessions at Olympic Studios. ‘He would sit down, sing a couple of verses, then stop and have a wander around and then start something else. You could see there was the essence of some really interesting stuff there, but he didn’t seem to be able to get it together enough to finish anything. Even stoned, musicians have some inkling of what they are going to be doing, even if it’s very bad and they do it badly, but Syd didn’t seem to have it together enough to sing a song from beginning to end, and he didn’t seem to be able to analyse critically what he’d done and then maybe do another take.’

Later, Barrett roped in David Gilmour’s former bandmate, Willie Wilson, and drummer Jerry Shirley, later of Humble Pie, to play on ‘Here I Go’ and ‘No Man’s Land’.

‘Syd started playing these songs and I drummed along,’ says Willie, who was now playing in a band called Bitter Sweet. ‘The trouble was, the song was never the same twice. Then Jerry Shirley tried to dub a bass on top of it, but he couldn’t follow it at all, as no two versions were the same.’

Jones booked more studio time, working on ‘Terrapin’ and ‘It’s No Good Trying’. From here on, the sessions became more problematic. Barrett showed up in the studio with an unusable recording of a revving motorcycle engine, which he wanted to dub onto a track. Later, he invited his old friends The Soft Machine to play on a song, but ignored their requests to know what key it was in, before walking out of the studio.

Jeff Jarratt was hired to engineer some of the sessions, but was stunned by the change in Syd since
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
. ‘It was tragic,’ says Jeff now. ‘One minute there was this guy who was this creative force and next he was like a vegetable.’

According to Malcolm Jones, EMI never called a halt to the
Madcap
sessions, but Barrett told the producer that he wanted his former bandmates to help out with the final sessions. Despite his attitude towards Gilmour at Floyd’s Middle Earth gig the previous year, Syd was now in close contact with his successor. Gilmour had moved into a new flat at Richmond Mansions, also on Earls Court Square. He was hard to ignore, as Syd and Duggie’s kitchen window afforded a perfect view into the guitarist’s new pad.

‘My memory is that EMI were going to shut the album down and shelve it,’ said Gilmour. ‘And I think Roger and I volunteered to rescue the project if they gave us more time. They gave us three days and it was very tricky to get anything done. Syd was in a very poor state in the studio, falling over, knocking mikes over. We put it out as best we could.’

‘That was around the last time Syd and I communicated,’ recalls Po. ‘It was either just before or after his first solo album, I can’t remember, but we all went down to Olympic Studios. There was Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason, Syd, myself and one or two others. I can’t recall who was on bass but it wasn’t Roger. But we played “Back Door Man”, endlessly, for something like four hours. I was even playing guitar. It was being done to try and get Syd into a creative place, but it was obvious after several hours that it wasn’t going to happen. He was dropping his plectrum, not knowing what was going on . . .’

With his album almost completed, Syd suddenly quit London and trailed a group of Cambridge friends to Ibiza. ‘We saw him from a distance in the town square in San Fernando,’ recalls Emo. ‘Nobody knew he was coming. Someone said, “Hang on, isn’t that Syd?” He was stood there in his rock star clothes and Gohill boots in the blazing sunshine. He had two bags with him - one was stuffed full of all these filthy, unwashed clothes, and the other had about five thousand pounds in English banknotes spilling out the top.’ When the gang moved on to Formentera, Syd followed: ‘One moment he’d be giggling and smiling, the next he wouldn’t speak to anyone.’

Photographs remain from the trip: Barrett, beaming beneath curtains of unkempt hair, looking oddly incongruous against the Mediterranean landscape in his tight trousers and satin shirt. Later, having sustained bad sunburn after refusing to use any protective lotion, Syd returned to London, burnt and disorientated, while Gilmour and Waters did their best to patch his album together.

Adding to the pressure of completing their friend’s record, Pink Floyd’s trouble-shooters had already begun work on what would become the band’s next album. Somehow, during a hectic 1969, Mason, Waters and Wright would find the time to get married to Lindy Rutter, Judy Trim and Juliette Gale, respectively.

Nevertheless, in March 1969, as Barrett prepared to start
The Madcap Laughs
, Pink Floyd had already recorded an immediate follow-up to
A Saucerful of Secrets
in a frantic nine-day burst. French film director Barbet Schroeder had commissioned the group to compose the soundtrack to his new movie,
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. EMI agreed to release the record, but, as it was a private commission, Floyd were denied use of Abbey Road, booking into Pye Studios instead.

EMI’s willingness to let the band make a film soundtrack, rather than ‘a proper record’, after their last three singles had flopped seems surprising in the twenty-first century. Yet the concept of Floyd as film soundtrack composers was no great leap. In their days in Stanhope Gardens, Floyd had performed music to accompany landlord Mike Leonard’s light experiments and in December 1967 had appeared playing along to Leonard’s light shows in an edition of the BBC’s
Tomorrow’s World
. In 1968, soon after Syd’s departure, they’d supplied some incidental noodling for a low-budget British film entitled
The Committee
, featuring Manfred Mann’s singer Paul Jones, though the film was never officially released.

‘Doing film music was a path we thought we could follow in the future,’ said Gilmour. ‘It wasn’t that we wanted to stop being a rock ’n’ roll group, it was more of an exercise.’ Not to mention a potential safety net, should being a rock ’n’ roll group not work out.

Barbet Schroeder, the son of a Swiss diplomat, was a left-wing film-maker who had begun his movie career assisting the director Jean-Luc Godard.
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’s plot centred around the misadventures of a male hitch-hiker who succumbs to heroin addiction after encountering a beautiful female junkie. With scenes of drug use, wild bongo playing and the frequently bared breasts of its blonde star Mimsi Farmer, it is a film that perhaps could only have been made in the 1960s.

‘I was a big fan of the first two Floyd records,’ says Barbet Schroeder now. ‘I thought they were the most extraordinary things I’d ever heard, and just wanted to work with them. I went to London and took a print of the movie
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, and showed it to them. I didn’t want typical film music - made to the minute and recorded with the image on the big screen. I didn’t believe in film music. I wanted this to be the music the characters were listening to. At a party, the music came out of the loud speaker in a room, so we recorded it to sound as if it was playing in the room.’

‘He didn’t want a soundtrack to go behind the movie,’ remembered Waters. ‘He wanted it literally. So if the radio was switched on in the car for example, he wanted something to come out of the car. He wanted it to relate to exactly what was happening in the movie. I was sitting at the side of the studio writing lyrics while we were putting down the backing tracks. It was just a question of writing eight or nine songs with instrumentals.’

‘Roger was the big creative force,’ says Schroeder. ‘I remember this incredibly hectic two weeks. The sound engineer couldn’t believe the speed and the creativity of the enterprise.’

Of the instrumental tracks, ‘Quicksilver’ and ‘Main Theme’ explored the same ‘abstract music’ that had so enthralled fan Phil Manzanera on
A Saucerful of Secrets
. ‘Green is the Colour’ is a dainty acoustic reverie; the cosmic organ fills in ‘Cirrus Minor’ place it squarely in the box marked ‘Space Rock’; while the Gilmour-sung ‘Cymbaline’ is very nearly a straightforward pop song. The biggest break with tradition came with ‘The Nile Song’ and ‘Ibiza Bar’, where Gilmour is finally let off his leash, and Mason clatters around the kit in the manner of his idols Ginger Baker and Keith Moon.

Hipgnosis chose a film still for the cover. No cosmic collage this time, just the movie’s protagonists cavorting in front of an Ibizan windmill. The image was tarted up with a dark-room treatment that gave it the fuzzy edge experienced during the coming-up moments of an LSD trip.

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premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1969, but sank without a trace, its copious sex and drugs denying it a proper UK release. Unexpectedly, for what the group considered ‘a stop-gap album’, the soundtrack made it into the Top 10 in June. Nevertheless, as David Gilmour later explained, ‘EMI now thought we should cut out all the weird nonsense and get on with it.’

Weird nonsense had nevertheless become Pink Floyd’s stock in trade during their live shows, as much as on record. Oddly, where Syd’s reluctance ever to play the same thing twice had infuriated his bandmates, they in turn were now exploring a kind of controlled chaos, as well as realising Roger’s vision to make Pink Floyd concerts an event. ‘It was about more than watching a band stand in front of 600 watts of Marshall speakers,’ said Richard Wright later. ‘It was about an entertaining show.’

In June 1969, Waters’ desire for a spectacle peaked with ‘The Final Lunacy’ at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Whereas smaller haunts, such as North London’s Fishmonger’s Arms, were still mainstays on the Floyd gig sheet, the Albert Hall was roomy enough to accommodate their most grandiose ideas yet. For some time now the group had been performing segments from
The Massed Gadgets of the Auximines
, a suite divided into two main sections known as ‘The Man’ and ‘The Journey’. The piece would never be recorded in its entirety, but many of the individual parts would be reworked for the
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,
Ummagumma
and
Relics
albums.

The suite was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in April 1969 and then expanded two months later for ‘The Final Lunacy’. Taped sound effects, as well as the band’s own performance, were panned 270 degrees around the venue by their personalised sound gadget, the Azimuth Coordinator. In a grand piece of performance art, a table was constructed on stage during the show, at which the crew sat and drank tea while listening to a transistor radio randomly tuned in and amplified through the speakers. Roger Waters would revive the same trick on later solo tours, playing cards with some of his band during a long instrumental passage.

Putting aside any misgivings he may have had about the album, producer Norman Smith was wheeled out on a mobile podium at the Albert Hall to conduct players from the Ealing Central Amateur Choir and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra during
A Saucerful of Secrets
. Richard Wright played the Albert Hall’s church-style organ (‘Fraught with difficulties, as there’s a huge delay between pressing the keys and the noise coming out,’ recalled Waters), one of the band’s crew roamed the stage in a gorilla suit, a pair of cannons were fired (Waters: ‘the same ones they used for
1812 Overture
- fucking great’) and a smoke bomb exploded, prompting a life-long ban from the hall, something David Gilmour delightedly recalled when playing there again as a solo act in 2006.

Guitarist and Floyd friend Tim Renwick watched the performance from the audience. ‘What you have to remember is that there was a lot of humour there. It was all very “art school” but very lighthearted. But talking to him, even back then, Roger always had this thing about wanting to do something more than just a rock show. He wanted a big presentation.’

‘There was a period in the sixties where fame and fortune were irrelevant to people’s lives,’ explains Duggie Fields. ‘It was all about the creativity.’ For Pink Floyd, that period had ended. Their ‘far-out sounds’, to quote one review of the time, may have excluded them from the singles charts, but, with a new breed of discerning album buyer to pitch to, EMI viewed the group as a potential money-spinner.

‘I remember once seeing Mick Jagger and Keith Richards plotting and talking about money,’ says Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘Which was something I never did in the sixties. Jenny asked Roger if he wanted to be rich and famous, and he turned round straight away and said, “Oh yeah!” ’

‘I had no idea that I would ever write anything,’ Waters said years later. ‘I’d always been told at school that I was absolutely bloody hopeless at everything. I took responsibility in the Floyd because nobody else seemed to want to do it. I know I can be an oppressive personality because I bubble with ideas and schemes, and in a way it was easier for the others to go along with me.’

Yet becoming rich and famous while staying true to their grand vision would prove trickier. Released in November 1969, Floyd’s promised double album,
Ummagumma
, seemed like another stop-gap rather than a concerted move forward. The first record was given over to live recordings taken from two shows at Manchester College of Commerce and Mother’s, the Midlands’ answer to London’s Middle Earth. The second record contained five solo compositions; two from Waters, one each from his bandmates. The live recordings of ‘Astronomy Domine’, a now fleshed-out ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, and ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ offer a time-capsule of Pink Floyd in the late sixties. By then, they had become, as Nick Mason said, ‘a proper working rock ’n’ roll band’. And it showed.