Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (28 page)

Relics
could be blamed for taking some of the wind out of the next Floyd album’s sales. Nevertheless,
Meddle
was released some six months later in November. Its abstract sleeve shot, a close-up of a human ear under water, would remain Storm Thorgerson’s least favourite Floyd album sleeve. Some of the blame for this could be attributed to the band phoning through the roughest of ideas while on tour in Japan. ‘The band always say that
Atom Heart Mother
was a better cover than it was an album,’ says Thorgerson, ‘but I think
Meddle
is a much better album than its cover.’ The band photograph in the inside gatefold sleeve would be the last group photo to appear on any original Floyd album until 1987’s
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
. The parade of facial fungus, centre partings and scoop-neck T-shirts proved that the band were now utterly indistinguishable from their audience, which, of course, was just the way they liked it.

Despite completing their strongest album since
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
, the band’s restless nature ensured they were easily distracted by other projects. Adrian Maben, a young French film director, had made his approach to David Gilmour and Steve O’Rourke earlier in the year, proposing a film in which Pink Floyd provided the music to images of paintings by René Magritte, Jean Tinguely and Giorgio de Chirico, among others. ‘I naively thought that it would be possible to combine good art with Pink Floyd music,’ said Maben. The band politely turned him down.

That summer Maben, holidaying in Italy, took a sightseeing trip to the 2,000-year-old amphitheatre in Pompeii, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. After losing his passport during the visit, Maben persuaded the security guards to let him back into the amphitheatre to look for it. Alone in the deserted arena in the dwindling light, he was struck by the ghostliness of the setting, and the fabulous natural acoustics amplifying the sound of buzzing insects and flying bats flitting among the ruins.

Maben secured some funding from a German producer, Reiner Moritz, and arranged another meeting with the band, this time proposing the idea of a rock movie that could be, in his words, an ‘anti-Woodstock’; a reaction to director Michael Wadleigh’s celebratory film of the 1969 rock festival.
Help!
, Richard Lester’s film of The Beatles, and D.A. Pennebaker’s Dylan vehicle,
Don’t Look Back
, had followed in the same vein. Instead, Maben wanted Pink Floyd playing an empty amphitheatre to a film crew and a handful of roadies.

‘There had to be a vast audience, the band had to be seen as being hugely successful - rock films had already become a cliché,’ explained Maben. ‘What was the point of doing the same kind of film with the Floyd?’

The band warmed to the idea, agreeing to pay 50 per cent of the costs, but leaving control of the final product to the producer, a decision they would come to rue.

At the beginning of October, Pink Floyd flew to Pompeii to commence filming, with a skeleton crew headed up by Pete Watts and Alan Styles. With more dates booked back in the UK, they were working to a tight schedule. There were, as Nick Mason later grumbled, ‘No leisurely nights out sampling the local cuisine and wine list.’ Instead, the band spent the first three days unable to do anything, due to the lack of electricity. When the power was finally switched on, it was insufficient to run both the band’s sound equipment and lighting. Eventually a cable was connected to the town hall, snaking through the streets to the amphitheatre, with a roadie on guard to make sure it wasn’t disconnected.

One of Floyd’s stipulations was that Maben had to film and record them playing live. There would be no miming. The band performed live versions of their newest tracks ‘Echoes’ and ‘One of These Days’ alongside a resurrected ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’.

Performing beneath the baking Mediterranean sun, and to an audience of cameramen, assorted roadies and a few local kids that had talked their way in, the footage offers a revealing glimpse of the post-Syd, pre-superstar Pink Floyd. The newborn ‘Echoes’ matches its surroundings perfectly: a languid, unhurried performance intercut with snaps of the surrounding sculptures and gargoyles for added drama. Later, as the song rumbles on, the band are shot loping across the bubbling lava pools and steaming, sulphurous rocks on Mount Vesuvius - all tie-dyed T-shirts and stovepipe hats - like four Kings Road hippies transplanted to a prehistoric landscape.

The band had played ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ at Adrian Maben’s request, as he wanted to film Waters reprising his old party trick of attacking a gong midway through the piece. Filmed in the morning sunlight, a barefoot Gilmour hunkers down in the sand, playing unearthly slides on his Stratocaster, while Mason beats a tribal pattern on the kit, and Wright plays cartwheeling figures on a keyboard in a homage to his late-sixties hero Stockhausen. Meanwhile, master of ceremonies Waters thrashes a rack of cymbals, before loping over to the gong and gleefully battering it with a mallet. He looks less like a musician and more like a sportsman, heading in for the final match point, wicket or goal. It remains the finest snapshot of each individual during the early 1970s.

After just three days of filming, the band returned to England for a gig at Bradford University. When the film’s German producer Reiner Moritz was unable to settle their hotel bill, Maben remained a prisoner in the hotel until the funds could be sent to him. He also had another pressing worry: there were still gaps in the movie, which he hoped Floyd would agree to fill at a later date.

In December, the band joined Maben in Paris at the Studio Europasinor to mix the Pompeii film and shoot some more footage. They were filmed on an empty soundstage in Paris, performing ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ and a version of
Meddle
’s novelty track, ‘Seamus’, this time named ‘Mademoiselle Nobs’ in homage to the Afghan hound, Nobs, coaxed into howling along to Gilmour’s harmonica.

Maben also shot fly-on-the-wall interview footage in Paris, which was left out of the original edit but surfaced on the director’s cut in 2002. The group’s knockabout humour is in full flow, as an off-camera Maben attempts to conduct an interview. The Floyd, scooping out oysters and swigging from bottles of beer, deflect each enquiry. Waters, his eyes little beads of mischief, is the most evasive of the lot.

‘Are you happy with the filming?’ asks Maben at one point.

‘What do you mean,
happy
?’ hisses the bass player, blowing smoke rings.

‘Well, do you think it’s interesting?’

There’s an excruciatingly long pause.

‘What do you mean,
interesting
?’ replies Roger, almost sneering.

‘They took the mickey out of me all the time of course,’ admitted Maben. ‘Roger was perhaps the most unsettling of the four. Although Peter Watts, the roadie, mentioned to me that Syd Barrett was a hundred times worse.’

Watching now, it offers a candid glimpse of the band dynamic. The group had developed a telepathic sense of humour and penchant for in-jokes and one-upmanship, as would any gang of young males who had spent far too much time in each other’s company over the last three years. Nevertheless, their respective roles are neatly encapsulated. Waters is the ringleader and chief tormentor; Gilmour backs him up without rising to his levels of outright sarcasm; Mason makes some attempt at conciliation (‘Adrian . . . Adrian . . . this attempt to elicit conversation out of the chaps is doomed to failure’) but can’t help goading Waters on; Wright grins wearily and tries to give straight answers to the questions. In the background, a laughing Floyd roadie, Chris Adamson, enjoys the all-too-familiar display of feathers. When Maben attempts to involve Adamson in the interview, Mason jumps in, quick as a flash: ‘He’s not very important; don’t waste any film on him. What’s the French for “He is only a roadie”?’ Beneath loud guffaws, it sounds as if Gilmour attempts to answer.

A sixty-minute version of
Live At Pompeii
would eventually premiere at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival to mixed reviews. Yet it was not quite the finished article. Maben would meet up with the band again the following year to shoot some more footage, which, unbeknown to all of them, would give the film even greater importance.

In the meantime, while not matching
Atom Heart Mother
’s number 1 placing,
Meddle
still reached a healthy number 3. Frustratingly, it fared less well in the US at number 70, later prompting a serious review of the band’s relationship with their American label, Capitol.

Despite its poorer showing in the US,
Meddle
’s streamlined approach won over the group’s toughest critics, with
Rolling Stone
applauding ‘David Gilmour’s emergence as a real shaping force in the group’. On home turf, the music press were divided.
Sounds
praised ‘Echoes’ as ‘one of the most complete pieces of music Pink Floyd have ever done’. The magazine’s rival,
Melody Maker
, was less impressed. Deputy editor Michael Watts, a long-time fan of the band, berated ‘Pink’s Muddled
Meddle
’ and ‘vocals that verged on the drippy and instrumental workouts that are decidedly old hat’.

A month later, Watts took delivery of a parcel at the
Melody Maker
offices. Unwrapping what he presumed was a Christmas gift from some grateful record company PR, he found himself confronted with a bright red hardwood box, the lid held in place with a catch. Watts flipped the catch and jumped back as a spring-loaded boxing glove shot out, narrowly missing his face. It was a Yuletide present from Pink Floyd.

For Syd Barrett, the start of a new decade would mark the beginning of his slow withdrawal from the music business. His second solo album,
Barrett
, appeared at the tail end of 1970, in a sleeve drawing of insects that Syd himself had created during his art school days. ‘Syd Barrett is capable of much greater things than this,’ carped
Disc and Music Echo
. Syd half-heartedly agreed to promote the album, appearing in photographs in the
Melody Maker
sporting a drastic crop. He made for a reluctant, distracted interviewee: ‘I’ve never really proved myself wrong, I just need to prove myself right.’

In the summer of 1971, Mick Rock was granted an audience, taking photographs and interviewing Syd in the garden at Hills Road for
Rolling Stone
magazine, while Syd’s doting mother kept them fuelled with tea and cakes. In the pictures, Barrett appeared smiling and relaxed, looking closer to his previous pop star self with his hair grown out again. Yet the interview is loaded with telling phrases, betraying both his muddled mind (‘I’ve got a very irregular head’) and a sense of uncertainty about what the future might hold. ‘I’m treading the backwards path,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘Mostly, I just waste my time.’

Syd would show up in London that summer to visit Mick and his then wife Sheila at their flat in Shepherds Bush. He would appear on the doorstep unannounced, smoke a joint and then disappear again, reappearing months later.

In January that year, Syd had been among the guests at his old flatmate Seamus O’Connell’s wedding in Cambridge. He turned up with Roger Waters, behaved impeccably and even disappeared to the pub after the ceremony with Seamus’s mother. Back in Cambridge, Peter Wynne-Willson, who had now become a
satsangi
, picked Syd up at his mother’s house and took him to a local Sant Mat meeting. ‘There were going to be a few people there that he knew, and we thought that he might like it,’ remembers Peter. ‘But he became edgy very quickly and left. That was the last time I ever saw Syd. I rather got the impression that he really wasn’t very keen on seeing people that reminded him of
those
days.’

While Barrett may have been keen to distance himself from his contemporaries in Pink Floyd, by the end of the year he’d made a welcome reacquaintance with an old girlfriend. Jenny Spires was now back in Cambridge and living with her new partner, a musician named Jack Monck. Syd felt safe around Jenny, and, in January 1972, she brought him to watch a gig at the local King’s College Cellars. Monck was playing bass for American bluesman Eddie ‘Guitar’ Burns. Playing drums was John Alder, aka Twink, who’d previously drummed for UFO club regulars Tomorrow. He and Barrett had met before on numerous occasions in London. ‘I thought he was very together,’ recalled Twink. ‘It was a warm relationship, no bad vibes at all.’

That night at the King’s College Cellars, Barrett borrowed a guitar, climbed on stage with Monck and Twink, and ran through a handful of improvised twelve-bar numbers as a warm-up to the headliner’s set.

The following night, Barrett joined the pair for an ad-hoc support slot to Hawkwind at the Cambridge Corn Exchange. They used the name The Last Minute Put Together Boogie Band, and had even rehearsed a handful of Syd’s own songs earlier in the day. The trio were joined that night by American guitarist Bruce Paine and Fred Frith, guitarist with English jazz-rockers Henry Cow. Unfortunately, Barrett was unable to remember the chord changes to his old songs, choosing instead to repeatedly thrash out the riff to the Yardbirds’ version of ‘Smokestack Lightnin’.

Undeterred, Twink and Monck persevered, showing up at Hills Road a few days later to talk to Syd about putting a band together. Barrett agreed and the three began rehearsing, even working up his own songs ‘Octopus’ and ‘Golden Hair’, before being offered a gig at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, supported by MC5, the late-sixties protest rockers of ‘Kick Out the Jams’ fame.

On 5 February 1972, Barrett, Twink and Monck adopted the name Stars and made their debut, an off-the-cuff afternoon gig at the local health food eaterie, the Dandelion. Some eyewitnesses recalled the show as being a little chaotic and that Barrett’s musicianship trailed behind that of his bandmates, but the group were pleased with their performance.

Stars played again at the Dandelion, and also performed a similarly spur-of-the-moment open-air gig just off the Market Square in Cambridge. The only known photograph of Barrett at these gigs shows his hair grown out to shoulder length and his face obscured by a heavy, dark beard; unrecognisable from the pop star of five years earlier, and indistinguishable from any of the bearded, long-haired ‘heads’ for whom he was performing. Drugs, however, were noticeable by their absence. None of his bandmates even recall Syd smoking a joint, never mind taking anything stronger. While his general manner was distracted and he appeared a little fragile, he was, in the words of one eyewitness, ‘no more peculiar than a lot of people around, but you had to be on your toes to keep up with the odd tangents he would hit in conversation.’