Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (23 page)

Yet the grand vision of the solo pieces worked less well. ‘Someone suggested - probably Roger - that we should all do a solo ten minutes on the other record,’ said Gilmour. ‘So we all went in to try and do our things, whatever they were.’

Engineer Peter Mew remembers the decision-making process: ‘My recollection is that everybody assembled in the studio on the first day with Norman Smith, who asked, “Have you got any songs?” To which Floyd replied, “No.” After which, it was decided that each of them would have a quarter of the album. There was no grand plan. I think that was pretty much decided on the first day.’

Richard Wright’s contribution was a four-part piano concerto entitled ‘Sysyphus’ [sic]. Later dismissed by its composer as ‘pretentious’, the heady piano rumblings identified Wright as the source of much of Pink Floyd’s gothic musical tendencies. The title was taken from the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a poor soul sent to Hades and condemned forever to push a giant rock up a hill only for it to roll back down again as soon as it reached the top. An analogy, some might suggest, for the browbeaten keyboard player.

‘To annoy an audience beyond all reason is not my idea of a good night out,’ said Nick Mason when asked about the perils of playing with Syd Barrett. With this in mind, perhaps, Mason lightened the percussive noodling on his own ‘The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party’ with some soothing flute played by his new wife Lindy. Gilmour’s composition, ‘The Narrow Way’, was a part acoustic, part electric guitar odyssey split into three segments on which he played all the instruments, including drums. Some of it had already been performed on John Peel’s BBC show
Top Gear
under the title ‘Baby Shuffle in D Major’. Yet Gilmour struggled with the lyrics. ‘I remember ringing Roger to beg him to write me some words,’ he admitted. ‘And he just said, “No, do it yourself”, and put the phone down, which was probably his way of helping me find my feet. It sort of makes me cringe now.’

Waters suffered no such insecurity, and managed two solo pieces, ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ and ‘Grantchester Meadows’. The last was a gentle elegy to a picturesque stretch of the River Cam, and the album’s most convincing track. The former has Waters spouting gibberish in a Scottish accent over various sound effects, as if The Goons had been allowed to run riot through Abbey Road.

What all of the pieces had in common was a section where each Floyd member sounds as if they’ve been left to fool around in the studio unsupervised.

‘It would have been better if we’d gone away, done the things, come back together, discussed them, and people could have come in and made comments,’ Waters admitted to
Disc and Music Echo
. ‘I don’t think it’s good to work in total isolation.’

‘All those tracks ended up being realised to their full potential,’ believes Peter Mew. ‘If you start from the point of view that you don’t quite know what you’re doing and you’re making it up as you go along, it’s difficult to know where it’s going to end up. “Grantchester Meadows” is probably the most tuneful, but even that ends with a fly being swatted - so it’s all rather tongue in cheek. I think they were exploring the boundaries of the technology on that album. There’s lots of cute little sound effects - double speed, reverb - good stuff, bearing in mind the state of the technology at the time.’

Ummagumma
was recorded on the hoof, with sessions fitted in around the band’s gigging schedule. And, in hindsight, it shows. Nevertheless, two solid years of playing every hippie dive in the country had paid off.
Ummagumma
gave Floyd and EMI’s Harvest label a number 5 album and the best reviews of their career so far: ‘A truly great progressive rock album,’ claimed
Record Mirror
.

The title itself prompted much speculation. Routinely described as ‘Cambridge slang’, Emo claims, ‘It was a word I made up about shagging. As in, “I’m off home for some
Ummagumma
.” Floyd thought I’d heard it somewhere before, but it was off the top of my head.’

The front cover shot was taken at the house of Libby January’s parents, the scene of the Jokers Wild and Tea Set double-bill years earlier. It is the band’s last attempt at traditional front cover pop star posing, with a barefoot Gilmour positioned at the front, alongside the images disappearing into infinity in the mirror to his right. Chief roadies, Alan Styles and Pete Watts, appeared on the back cover with the band’s equipment arranged, at Nick Mason’s suggestion, in the shape of a military aircraft carrier, a proper boys’ toys collection of kit.

The inside sleeve contained the biggest surprise of all. While each band member had an individual portrait, Roger shared his with his new wife Judy, pictured cradling a glass of white wine, while Roger looked on dotingly.

In years to come, while remaining faithful to some of their earlier efforts,
Ummagumma
was rated less highly by the band themselves.

‘My own view is that
A Saucerful of Secrets
had pointed the way ahead, but we studiously ignored the signposts and headed off making
Ummagumma
,’ admitted Mason, ‘which proved that we did rather better when everyone worked together rather than as individuals.’

‘We were very good at jamming,’ offered Gilmour. ‘But we couldn’t quite translate that onto a record.’

The next move, then, would be yet more jamming, not in London’s Pye or Abbey Road Studios but in the more exotic locale of Rome. Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni had first seen Pink Floyd playing the launch party for
International Times
at the Roundhouse in 1966. In late 1969 he approached them to compose the music for his next film,
Zabriskie Point
. Reflecting the political mood of the time, the movie followed the exploits of a student rioter who steals a plane, flies it to Death Valley, California, and proceeds to have lots of sex with the obligatory hippie chick encountered along the way. He gets shot dead by the police; she blows up a mansion, as a protest, presumably, against ‘straight’ America’s bourgeois values. So far, so good . . .

Antonioni paid for the band to stay at the opulent Hotel Massimo D’Azeglio in Rome, so the Floyd were at his beck and call. ‘It was sheer hell,’ claimed Waters. Work would begin at a nearby studio in the evening, after the band had consumed as much gratis food and wine as they could stomach, with Antonioni on hand but often nodding off in the studio as the night wore on. The next day, Roger would take the director the finished tapes for approval. ‘It was always wrong, consistently, ’ explained Waters. ‘There was always something that stopped it being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong and he’d still be unhappy.’

The movie bombed, and the finished soundtrack, released the following year, included just three Floyd tracks, ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat’ - which used the sound of a heartbeat, an idea later revisited on
Dark Side of the Moon
- a slight country-rock number called ‘Crumbling Land’, and a reworking of ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, entitled ‘Come in Number 51, Your Time is Up’. The rest of the soundtrack was bumped up with contributions from The Grateful Dead and The Kaleidoscope, among others. Of the Floyd pieces overlooked by Antonioni for inclusion was Richard Wright’s haunting piano-led ‘Violent Sequence’, recorded to accompany footage of real-life student riots, which would later reappear as ‘Us and Them’ on
Dark Side of the Moon
. As Nick Mason would ruefully admit, ‘We were now following a band policy of never throwing anything away.’

CHAPTER FIVE

THE SPACES BETWEEN FRIENDS

‘I’ve always thought of going back to a place where you can drink tea and sit on the carpet.’

Syd Barrett

S
yd had painted the floorboards orange and purple. In his muddled state of mind, he’d started near the door and had, literally, painted himself into a corner. He had also neglected to clean the floor first, simply slapping the paint over discarded bus tickets, matchsticks and cigarette butts. But these were minor setbacks. Syd was waiting to be photographed for the cover of his first solo album by his friend Mick Rock. The two had taken an acid trip a fortnight before. They’d drawn pictures, listened to music and, as Rock recalls, spent most of the time laughing.

Syd had certainly made an effort. As well as a spot of interior decorating, he’d cleared the furniture out of his room at Wetherby Mansions, dressed himself in a yellow shirt and his polka dot Hung On You trousers - changing later into his Granny Takes a Trip velvet pair - with flatmate Duggie Fields’ 1940s demob coat for added vagrant chic, and positioned a vase of flowers on the bare boards beside him. As a finishing touch, he’d enlisted latest flatmate and sometime bed partner Iggy to smear his eyelids with kohl and appear naked behind him.

The Madcap Laughs
was released in January 1970, with its snapshot of domestic life chez Barrett on the cover, and a glimpse of what
Melody Maker
deemed the ‘mayhem and madness representing the Barrett mind spilling out of the music inside’.

For those used to the intergalactic rock of
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
, this was an oddly earthbound experience: just Syd’s sometimes faltering voice, his often desultory guitar-strumming and the sound of a drummer and bassist bluffing it out in the background. Barrett sounded familiar and whimsical on ‘Terrapin’ but psychologically wounded on ‘Dark Globe’. On ‘She Took a Long Cold Look’, he could be heard turning the pages of his songbook halfway through, and on ‘If It’s In You’ he even stopped the song and started it again.

Listening now, it all sounds as if it’s held together with tape and string. Original producer Malcolm Jones winced at the finished album, especially those mistakes: ‘I thought it was unnecessary and unkind to include those.’ At first, Waters and Gilmour stuck by their decision to include everything. ‘We wanted to inject some honesty into it,’ explained the guitarist. ‘We wanted to explain what was going on.’ In truth, perhaps they’d wanted to shock both Syd and his audience after the experience of those tortuous recording sessions. As Gilmour said later, ‘We got that very frustrated feeling of, “Look, it’s your fucking career, mate. Why don’t you get your finger out and do something?” ’

By the time
The Madcap Laughs
was released, Syd’s life at Wetherby Mansions was sometimes as deranged as his music suggested. The mysterious Iggy’s bare behind would be for ever immortalised on the cover of the record. But, even today, nobody seems able to shed any light on who she was or where she came from. Known as ‘Iggy the Eskimo’, the striking, dark-haired model had been photographed in a 1966 issue of
New Musical Express
with a gang of similarly hip, beautiful people demonstrating the dance craze ‘The Bend’. She had previously been an acquaintance of Anthony Stern’s before, according to Duggie Fields, she arrived penniless at Wetherby Mansions, needing somewhere to stay.

Anthony Stern still has a piece of film of Iggy dancing in London’s Russell Square ‘and she’s wearing clothes that could have been made yesterday’. DJ Jeff Dexter recalls that some years before she hooked up with Barrett, Iggy was a familiar figure at his club nights at the Orchid Ballroom in Purley, South London. A mercurial figure, Iggy’s real name and current whereabouts seem destined to remain unknown.

‘I have no idea who Iggy was or even what her real name was,’ claims Duggie now. ‘She was never Syd’s girlfriend. They just got together from time to time. She was an extraordinary-looking girl, though. I once saw her getting off the number 31 bus in a gold lame, forties-era dress in the middle of the day. The dress had a train which rode up as she came down the stairs, exposing the fact that she wasn’t wearing any knickers . . . I saw her not long after Syd left the flat and she was looking more like a Sloane Ranger. I heard she’d become involved with one of the voguish religious cults at the time.’

Some months after moving into Wetherby Mansions, and following on from his time with Quorum model Gilly Staples, Syd had begun a relationship with another would-be model, Gala Pinion. Gala had moved down to London with Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, and landed a job at the Chelsea Drug Store. To complicate matters, she was one of Lindsay Corner’s closest friends. When Syd and Duggie’s original flatmate moved out, Gala moved in.

‘I’d known Gala since she was fourteen,’ says Po. ‘Her and Lindsay were best friends, so I was surprised when that happened, and I suspect it caused a lot of upset. I think Gala thought she could take Syd on. Gala wanted to look after him, but Syd actually needed professional help.’

Like David Gale, Emo and others before him, Duggie witnessed Syd’s violent mood swings. ‘There was lots of melodrama,’ he says. ‘I had seen him being violent to Gilly, and it happened again with Gala. They would have these dramatic explosions and physical fights. Then, of course, Syd could change in an instant and be completely charming again.’

Over a period of a few months, Syd’s behaviour began to deteriorate once more. To avoid him, Fields began staying in his room, painting. Left unsupervised, Syd’s bedroom became increasingly fetid as he refused to open the windows or even the curtains. He allowed a couple of speed freaks, Greta and Rusty, to move into the flat’s communal living room, having previously let them sleep in the hallway.

Sue Kingsford dropped by the flat regularly. ‘At Duggie’s, Syd just got odder and odder,’ she recalls. ‘He wouldn’t speak for hours. We all watched the moon landings there [in July 1969]. I think we all thought it was a conspiracy by the Americans. Syd, of course, never said a word.’

Sue was among those that Syd routinely hustled for drugs. ‘I’d found a chemist in Cambridge that would write me a prescription for sixty Mandrax a month,’ she admits. ‘Syd used to pester me for them. I’d say, “OK, I’ll give you one”, but he’d be like, “Come on, come on, I know you’ve got more than that.” He was taking things so indiscriminately. He wasn’t taking one of anything, he was doing six. It was like Syd was always trying to get out of it, to get out of himself.’