Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (38 page)

In April 1974, Nick Kent had written an article about Barrett in
New Musical Express
, interviewing former associates, including David Gilmour, and drawing together the wealth of anecdotes about the former Floyd singer, many of which subsequently passed into legend: the Mandrax-in-the-hair tale; the meltdown on American TV . . .

‘Tony Secunda, who used to manage The Move, told me the story about Syd rubbing Mandrax into his hair,’ says Kent. ‘Then someone else told me the same story. As is the case with after-the-fact gossiping, it seemed to me that maybe 70 per cent of these stories were actually true.’ These stories also included the claims that ‘Barrett may or may not have worked in a factory, as a gardener, tried to enrol as an architecture student, grown mushrooms in his basement, been a tramp, spent two weeks in New York busking, tried to become a Pink Floyd roadie . . .’

Seven months before his scathing live review in
NME
, Kent found David Gilmour an obliging interviewee: ‘We met in a pub in Covent Garden and he was totally candid about the Syd situation and didn’t try and whitewash it. Gilmour had this everyman quality about him. Totally unpretentious. He was with an American girl then, Ginger, who kept bugging him throughout the interview to go to a restaurant with her. She kept fidgeting and saying, “How
long
is this going to go on, Dave?” And he was only there for forty-five minutes.’

As well as suggesting that some of Syd’s problems were attributable to his father’s death and that ‘his mother always pampered him - and made him out to be a genius of sorts’, Gilmour also wisely pinpricked the mystical aura already surrounding Barrett: ‘He functions on a totally different plane of logic, and some people will claim, “Well, yeah, man, he’s on a higher cosmic level”, but basically there’s something drastically wrong.’

In his article, Kent mentioned that Barrett was now living in Chelsea, and frequently visited the Morrison Agency. Bryan Morrison owned Lupus Music, Barrett’s publishing company, who took care of his royalties. Kent also mentioned that EMI were keen to get Barrett back into the studio. Between July and August that year, Syd returned on several occasions to Abbey Road, at Bryan Morrison’s behest.

Engineer John Leckie, then working with singer-songwriter Roy Harper, was present when Pete Jenner brought Syd in. ‘The plan was that Syd was going to make another album by himself,’ says Leckie. ‘He was going to make the album by doing different things every day - piano one day, drums the next, bass the next. I remember he came in with a load of new guitars. But we never got that far. I don’t think we made it to the piano.’

The idea was for Barrett to be recorded playing whatever he wanted, and for Jenner to listen through the tapes, and take anything worthwhile, onto which a bass and drums could be overdubbed. A handful of scraps emerged. But the sessions were a disaster. Syd hadn’t written any new songs, and, according to one observer, turned up one day without any strings on his guitar.

‘Bryan Morrison was there,’ continues Leckie. ‘Bryan always smoked a cigar and was in evening wear. He was a big guy who went on to play polo with Prince Charles. Morrison kept pushing Syd - “Come on, Syd, come on, Syd, get it together” - but it was no use. He didn’t have anything.’

Morrison’s anxiety may have been exacerbated by another incident involving Syd from around the same time. Barrett had turned up at Lupus Music and demanded a royalty cheque. When he was told that he’d been in a day before and had signed for his cheque then, Syd began shouting. Morrison came out of his office to reprimand him and Barrett bit Bryan’s outstretched finger, drawing blood.

At Chelsea Cloisters, Barrett installed a huge colour TV set, and splashed out on expensive hi-fi equipment and clothes, most of which were stashed in the sixth-floor apartment and rarely touched again. His frequent haunt became the neighbouring Marlborough Arms, where he’d sit alone, polishing off pints of Guinness. Over the course of a few months, he retreated back into himself, cutting off all his hair again, gaining a vast amount of weight, and donating his possessions randomly to the porters at Chelsea Cloisters. At least one eyewitness from the time remembered seeing Barrett in Sloane Square wearing a woman’s dress underneath his overcoat.

‘After my article came out, I kept encountering people who knew Syd from the Cambridge days,’ says Nick Kent. ‘There was always someone saying, “Oh, I was his girlfriend for two months” or “I used to roadie for one of his groups”, and they all spoke about how much he’d changed physically.’

John Whiteley, Syd’s occasional flatmate from Earlham Street nearly ten years before, was among those who spotted him in London that year. ‘I saw him on the Kings Road,’ says Whiteley. ‘It was shocking, because he’d been such a handsome boy. Now he was so overweight, and he’d shaved his head, but he was
still
walking on his tip-toes, in the way that he did. I stayed on the other side of the road. I couldn’t speak to him.’

Whiteley’s impressions were echoed by others. The sightings soon had a depressing familiarity: the bloated, bald man incongruously dressed in a Hawaiian shirt or huge overcoat, hanging around Earls Court or South Kensington, walking the same way, up on his toes.

Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell would also encounter Syd that year. A few weeks after the
NME
article, EMI reissued Barrett’s two solo LPs as a double album package. Storm and Po went to Chelsea Cloisters to try and take a new photograph of Syd for the album sleeve. They knocked on the door of his flat. ‘Finally, he called to us through the door, “Who’s there?” ’ remembers Po. ‘I said, “It’s Storm and Po. Can we come in and have a chat?” And he just said, “Go away!” That was the last time I ever spoke to him.’

‘Part of me was angry,’ admits Storm. ‘I thought: Screw you, I’ll be off. Here I was knocking on the door of someone I’d known since I was fourteen and he wouldn’t let me in.’

David Gilmour’s confession in
NME
that
Dark Side of the Moon
had left the band ‘creatively trapped’, was still pertinent when Pink Floyd gathered at Abbey Road in January 1975.

‘After
Dark Side
we were really floundering around,’ said Gilmour years later. ‘I wanted to make the next album more musical. I always thought that Roger’s emergence as a great lyric writer on the last album was such that he came to overshadow the music.’

Waters wanted to make another themed album, this time dealing with the idea of emotional absence; the concept of people being there but not
really
there, into which Waters’ reflections on the music industry and the band’s general state of mind could also be filtered. Gilmour simply wanted to record the tracks they’d already written and steer clear of another grand concept. Meanwhile Wright struggled with Waters’ ideas, as he simply didn’t share the bassist’s preoccupation with the evils of the music industry. ‘Roger’s view wasn’t necessarily my view,’ he said.

Nick Mason later summed up the group’s collective mindset: ‘Roger was getting crosser. We were all getting older, there was much more drama between us, people turning up at the studio late. There was more pressure on me to make the drumming more accurate and less flowery.’ At the time, he was more candid, telling Capital Radio DJ Nicky Horne, ‘I really did wish I wasn’t there. But it wasn’t specifically to do with what was going on in the band, as much as what was going on outside the band. I am very bad at closing off my mind to whatever is bothering me. But my alarm and despondency manifested itself in a complete rigor mortis.’ With marital problems, Mason’s mind simply wasn’t on the job.

‘Some of the lads needed to be jollied along a bit,’ joked Waters at the time. In reality, it was the closest Pink Floyd had yet come to splitting up. Later, Mason would claim that each of his bandmates had approached Steve O’Rourke individually to discuss leaving.

Despite the air of unease, some progress was made. Between January and the beginning of March, the album that would become
Wish You Were Here
began to take shape. ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ had now been expanded to around twenty minutes, and would incorporate longer instrumental passages, backing vocals from The Blackberries and a saxophone solo from Dick Parry. John Leckie ended up overseeing the first sessions on the song, until Floyd’s front-of-house engineer Brian Humphries took over. (Abbey Road agreed to the use of an outside engineer ‘but only because it was the Pink Floyd’.) Humphries’ job had originally been offered to Alan Parsons. ‘They offered me £10,000 a year to become their permanent sound engineer,’ says Parsons. ‘But I also wanted a royalty on the next album, and Steve O’Rourke said no.’ Parsons was also about to start work on his own music, as The Alan Parsons Project. ‘So I also had that going on. I still think that if they’d offered me the job a few months earlier I would have taken it.’

‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ had been inspired in some part by Waters’ frustration with the endless speculation about Barrett in the music press. ‘I’ve never read an intelligent piece on Syd Barrett in any magazine, never,’ he complained in 1976. ‘I wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote that lyric because I wanted it to be as close as possible to what I felt. There’s a truthful feeling in that piece. That sort of indefinable, inevitable melancholy about the disappearance of Syd. He’s withdrawn so far away that he’s no longer there.’

The initial plan had been to put the piece on one whole side of the album, like ‘Echoes’ on
Meddle
, with ‘Raving and Drooling’ and ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ on the other. This was Gilmour’s preferred option. But that would have been the easy option, and Waters was in no mood to make things easy. Instead, he suggested splitting ‘Shine On ...’ into two and having it bookend the album. ‘Raving and Drooling’ and ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ would now be put aside for a future Floyd album, with the bassist deciding to write songs more in keeping with the same theme of absence that had so inspired ‘Shine On ...’ He only had to look at some of his bandmates for subject matter. ‘No one was really looking anyone in the eye,’ he recalled. ‘It was all very mechanical.’

Waters wrote two new songs on his own, ‘Welcome to the Machine’, ‘Have a Cigar’ and, in partnership with Gilmour, ‘Wish You Were Here’. The songs would be worked up in stages now and later in a second burst of activity at Abbey Road that summer. ‘Welcome to the Machine’ was a unyieldingly bleak dissertation on the human condition, and, more personally, those - a rock ’n’ roll band, maybe - who spent their lives in search of a dream, only to find that the machine runs on dreams and very little else. ‘People are very vulnerable to their own blindness, their own greed, their own need to be loved,’ explained Waters. ‘Success has to be a real need. And the dream is that when you are successful, when you’re a star, you’ll be fine, everything will go wonderfully well. That’s the dream and everybody knows it’s an empty one. The song is about the business situation which I find myself in. One’s encouraged to be absent because one’s not encouraged to pay any attention to reality.’ The lyrics hardly disguised the autobiographical nature of the song. Making Gilmour take the lead vocal somehow accentuated rather than softened the message. But it is Wright’s VCS3 synth lines that now dominate, giving the song an unremitting bleakness.

‘Have a Cigar’ continued the theme, offering another sarcastic jibe against the air-headed nature of the music industry. Lighter than ‘Welcome to the Machine’, its jazzy lilt was broken up with plenty of spluttering guitar fills and an extended guitar solo. One lyric referred to the time the band had been asked by a record company minion: which of them was Pink? The only problem was that Gilmour felt uncomfortable singing Waters’ words, while Waters struggled with taking the lead vocal. The problem would be rectified in the summer recording sessions.

Finally, the Gilmour/Waters co-written title track assumed the same uplifting quality that had typified the best of
Dark Side of the Moon
. Its subject matter, though, was as self-questioning as the rest of the album. The line ‘two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl year after year’ could have referred to the sense of dislocation among the band members at the time, as much as to Waters’ crumbling relationship with his wife, which was at least part of its inspiration. ‘It’s about the sensations that accompany the state of not being
there
,’ offered Waters. ‘To work and to be with people whom you know aren’t there any more.’

Further sessions on the album throughout June were slipped in between a sold-out US tour. In keeping with their press-unfriendly image, the band’s sole advertising for the tour was a syndicated live Pink Floyd show, which was broadcast in each of the major cities in advance of the tour. Demand was such that the Los Angeles Sports Arena shifted all 67,000 tickets in a single day. ‘Raving and Drooling’ and ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ were still in the set, joined by the extended ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, ‘Have a Cigar’, ‘Echoes’ and
Dark Side of the Moon
. The band’s special effects had been extended even further and now included an arsenal of pyrotechnics, as well as a model aircraft, which zoomed over the audience and ‘crashed’ during
Dark Side of the Moon
, and which, without fail, would make soundman Brian Humphries duck as it hurtled overhead.

Meanwhile, the Floyd’s trademark circular screen flashed Gerald Scarfe’s images, created in many cases before he or his team of animators had heard any of the Floyd’s new music.

‘I said to Roger, “We can’t get them to do anything as there are no tracks,” ’ recalls Scarfe. ‘Roger was like, “Just get them to do
anything
; I’ll make it fit later on.” Sure enough, what we did do fitted in alongside certain passages. What was frustrating for the animators is that they knew it could have been better if they could have picked up an accent in the music now and again. But that gave it a disjointed feel that somehow complemented the music by not following it precisely.’

This flying-by-the seat-of-the-pants quality had been the norm since Scarfe began his relationship with Pink Floyd on the 1974 tour. ‘I’d produce new bits of film as and when I could, and just turn up at the gig with a can under my arm. Sometimes, because of the traffic, I wouldn’t get there until twenty minutes before showtime, and I’d find Roger in the dressing room, going, “Where the fuck have you
been
?” They’d lace up the film there and then and put it in anywhere.’