Inside Out (15 page)

After the final details had been sorted out, a formal announcement about Syd’s departure and David’s arrival was made in early
April. It still surprises me that any trepidation we should have felt at losing our creative mainspring was eclipsed by feelings
of relief.

Fortuitously, we had managed to avoid Syd becoming a dominant figurehead, despite his stage presence and looks. Our official
publicity shots always featured the whole band, not just
Syd, which may have helped. It may also be that the strength of a group without an acknowledged leader provides greater input
from all the members – it was a time when So-and-so and the Whatsits had been superseded by The Whatsit.

This should have been a difficult time for us, since we were a band who’d not had a single in the charts for nearly a year,
the follow-ups to ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’ having not fulfilled any early promise. By rights we should have been
forced to start over again, but somehow we had clung onto our particular rung within the music industry. We were about to
enter a period I remember as particularly happy. We were now once more committed to the same goals and musical ideas, and
to playing together in a more structured way. There was again that sense of being a complete band.

Without doubt David had the toughest task. He had the unenviable job of continuing to be Syd. Clearly he could add his own
interpretation to any live performance, but our recent recordings included an awful lot of Syd pieces that would take a year
or so to replace. Apart from anything else David was required to mime Syd’s singing on all sorts of European TV shows. Looking
back at some of those early shows I realise that what probably made it bearable for him was that even if the rest of us had
actually played on the records, when it came to remembering the parts, David was much better at miming.

David brought new strengths to the band. Already an able guitarist – though never to my knowledge ‘A Able Accordionist’ –
his singing voice was strong and distinctive. He was as interested as the rest of us in experimenting with new sounds and
effects, but alongside his inventiveness he also added a more thoughtful, structured approach, with the patience to develop
a musical idea to its full potential. He also looked good, and had managed to leapfrog the phase when a hair perm was considered
the height of
tonsorial fashion. Meanwhile, Rick was supplying texture and melody, and Roger drive, discipline and musical forethought.
As drummers are a law unto themselves, I fortunately have never had to justify my existence in quite the same way.

Although he had initially felt uncomfortable with the five-piece, David certainly was never perceived as ‘the new boy’. People
who perform as a lead guitarist and singer are rarely shy and retiring. Norman Smith remembers that on first meeting David
as part of the band, he thought ‘This guy’s going to take over the group’. (Norman had obviously failed to register the rather
tall bass player standing at the back.)

If David lacked anything, it was an inheritance to pay off our debts, which were then running at the substantial amount of
around £17,000. One of the side effects of our deal with Blackhill to acquire the rights to the name Pink Floyd was that we
had to take on sole responsibility for the hire purchase loans on the van, our lighting equipment and sound system.

Before David’s arrival, Syd had effectively been the musical director because he was the main songwriter. Norman Smith remembers
being extremely concerned when he heard the news about Syd, because he had no knowledge of the rest of us writing songs. However,
Roger and Rick started writing new material, and Roger in particular – who had written ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk’
on
Piper
– attacked the task resolutely, but it was a slow process, and for the foreseeable future we would be playing essentially
the same sets we had done with Syd in the band.

Gradually a new collection of initially improvised, and then more structured pieces, was developing. ‘Careful With That Axe,
Eugene’ is a good example. In its original version it was a B-side instrumental, for ‘Point Me At The Sky’, which had been
constructed and executed in a single three-hour session at Abbey Road with the final track lasting about two-and-a-half minutes.
In
time it extended into a lengthy piece of up to ten minutes with a more complex dynamic form. That complexity may only have
been ‘quiet, loud, quiet, loud again’, but at a time when most rock bands only had two volume settings – painfully loud and
really, really painfully loud – this was groundbreaking stuff.

We were still doing a considerable amount of touring, but there were important differences between the kind of gigs we’d been
taking on the previous year and what we were doing now. The original underground scene was fragmenting and we’d exhausted
the Top Rank circuit. Under Tony Howard’s guidance we landed unexpectedly in a purpose-built environment: the university circuit.
New universities were mushrooming in the major provincial cities, and student unions quickly discovered that gigs were an
excellent way of raising money, and even turning a profit. Most of these places had sufficient funds to attract name bands,
a captive audience, suitable venues and frequently a social secretary with a manic desire to prove himself as a businessman
– many went on to be the promoters of the Seventies and beyond: Harvey Goldsmith is a classic example, and Richard Branson
emerged from the same kind of environment.

We did not, however, completely abandon the London scene, although when Syd left the band we did lose some of our credibility
with ‘the underground’ (there was, and still is, a school of thought that Syd’s departure marked the end of the ‘real’ Pink
Floyd, a point of view I can understand, even if I don’t concede it). Things were changing in any case as new clubs cashed
in on the original idealistic intentions of UFO.

Middle Earth, for example, which had started as an outgrowth of UFO in 1967, was a more commercial music venue rather than
a forum for mixed-media artistic experiences, a sort of psychedelic Marquee Club featuring bands that could loosely be described
as underground. Loosely, because most of them were R&B bands who
had cheerfully swapped their Cecil Gee suits for loon pants, acquired crops of permed hair and adopted a flower power name,
but still carried on playing the same old Chuck Berry riffs.

Playing at Middle Earth allowed us to maintain our own reputation as an underground band, at least enough to get us invited
to play at parties like the one Vanessa Redgrave threw to celebrate the end of shooting for her film
Isadora.
This was definitely an entrée to a world we were happy to rub shoulders with, but it was something of a rarity at the time.
None of the band seems to have retained any memories of this Bohemian soirée, but some did retain a number of rather elegant
silk cushions as souvenirs.

We were acquiring a more professional attitude, and now even had a proper crew. Peter Watts was our first genuinely experienced
road manager. He had joined us, through an introduction by Tony Howard, after working for the Pretty Things. Any disagreements
among that particular group had been sorted out by a demand for the car to be stopped at the side of the road. The doors were
then opened, the passengers disembarked from the car and a fight took place before the journey recommenced. Peter said he
was happy to take care of our equipment but that following his Pretty Things experience, he didn’t want anything to do with
the band.

Peter later reconsidered his decision. This was fortunate, since we only had the one vehicle. Starting with a WEM four-channel
mixer at the side of the stage, Peter oversaw an explosion of tour technology. Within three years we were using multi-channel
mixer boards positioned in the centre of the auditorium, requiring multi-core cables, connectors and a proliferation of microphones
on stage. With the responsibility for handling the sound, carrying all the equipment in and out, repairing it on the hoof,
and driving us around, the road manager’s job demanded a combination of skills: electrical engineer, weightlifter and long-distance
lorry driver.

Occasionally even these skills were insufficient. Peter was the advance party for one visit to Dunoon west of Glasgow in Scotland.
He had driven the equipment all the way there, but due to delays on a flight up, the band had to rent a fishing boat and corkscrew
across a loch in pitch darkness during a force eight gale. We landed on the beach and staggered queasily up to the hotel where
a restive audience was considering taking the place, and our equipment, apart. At the end of the gig the grateful promoter
announced that as we had arrived late he would, with regret, be unable to pay us. After a brief argument where it was made
clear that he was within his rights as exercised by his six-foot frame and even larger Highland friends, and with no flights
till the next day, we climbed aboard the van for the endless journey south.

Or it would have been endless if the by now exhausted Peter had spotted the sign saying ‘Road Works’ before we hit them. The
van was damaged beyond immediate repair and we spent the rest of the night in the police cells of the local village, which
were kindly made available to us until we could catch an early morning ferry. Our fellow passengers, a hardy bunch of local
farmers, marvelled at our exotic snakeskin boots, Afghan jackets and beads: we looked more like itinerant goatherds than the
natives. Eventually we made it to Glasgow airport and the comparative safety of London.

This was not touring, but gigging. There was no attempt to construct rational and logistically sensible journey cycles. We
simply took any available paying job. And if that meant a gig near London followed by a one-off performance at the other end
of Britain, before heading back to appear in, say, Hull the following night, that was the way it was.

In due course, Peter Watts acquired an assistant, Alan Styles, an ex-army physical training instructor with very long hair
and a flamboyant wardrobe featuring seriously tight trousers: after his
appearance on stage to do the mike checks, our own arrival was often something of an anticlimax. Alan was yet another native
of Cambridge, where he had enjoyed minor celebrity as the man who looked after the punts for rent on the Cam, as well as playing
the saxophone in his own inimitable manner (he carried a flute on the road). He was not generally a violent man, but if pushed
sufficiently by the ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ brigade, could respond accordingly. One favourite incident was the time Alan
had tried to get past some yobs on a stairway shouldering some heavy PA columns. After some banter Alan sighed, and then in
slapstick fashion, neatly swung around with the columns, sending his antagonists flying.

Both Peter and Alan accompanied us on a growing number of trips to the Continent – we were certainly paying our dues now –
which was proving to be surprisingly receptive to our music. This may have been because we hadn’t damaged our reputation by
playing at our most crazed, or with Syd at maximum altitude in the ozone layer. Whatever the reason, these tours had one important
side effect: they gave us space away from the UK to develop ourselves as a band, which helped immensely. Europe had not figured
strongly in our 1967 schedules, but in 1968 we spent time in France, the Netherlands and Belgium – and we loved it.

The Dutch and Belgian venues were regular destinations at the time, France less so, although it later became one of our strongest
markets. There were plenty of towns geographically close together, which made the logistics of playing four towns in four
days much easier. And there was already an existing rock culture that embraced us all the more readily. A couple of well-known
clubs – the Paradiso and Fantasia in Amsterdam– were modelled on the Fillmore, small ornately decorated theatres now dedicated
to music entirely, which was still quite rare in Europe at the time.
Throughout it all wafted the aroma of patchouli oil and Indonesian chicken wings.

Playing further south in Europe was more of a problem. A festival in May at the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome was a remarkable
introduction to working in Italy. At Leonardo da Vinci airport the Italian customs confiscated an axe belonging to the Move,
who were also on the bill; it was an essential stage prop that they used to destroy a TV set. The customs officers were able
to identify the hatchet as an offensive weapon, but perhaps the language barrier prevented them spotting the danger contained
in boxes marked ‘Explosive: fireworks’. The show rapidly moved from art to violence. As the pyro was let off, the police responded
with the only contribution they could make – tear gas. Over the years, the forces of law and order have frequently joined
in, battling outside the stadium with the people who, for reasons political or financial, have come along for a good scrap.
To this day, preparations for the Italian leg of any tour include the provision of buckets of eyewash at the side of the stage
to alleviate the effects of gas wafting across the stage.

Leuven in Belgium was one of the – thankfully – rare times that we were forced off stage. It was at a university where the
two rival factions of young academics – Flemish and Walloon – preferred to express their dislike for each other physically.
The Flemish had clearly booked the band for the evening, whereas the Walloons had bought the beer and wanted to sing drinking
songs. About ten minutes into the set I saw what I took to be an ancient student tradition: the fountain of glass. A few seconds
later I realised this was not the case. It was the students hurling glasses at each other, and we looked like being the next
natural target. With indecent and craven haste we finished and were off the stage, escaping to the waiting Transit with only
superficial damage to the equipment and a few battle scars. We cheered ourselves up with the
knowledge that since we had been paid in advance, it was by far the most we had ever earned per minute played.

Our promoter in the Netherlands was Cyril van den Hemel. His tours took place with the bare minimum of crew and where possible
three gigs a day. ‘We got the money, we go now,’ was Cyril’s line hissed from the side of the stage: we would finish the song
we were playing, say goodnight and split for the next show. On one bank holiday, we told the management we were taking a two-day
holiday, but actually extended the tour by two days and divvied up the extra cash between us. This was particularly welcome
as band account cheques at the time were a little on the rubbery side. The cash may have alleviated the lack of comfort on
tour. Some
frites
from a roadside vendor and a claustrophobic bunk on the ferry out of Dunkirk was our usual taste of Continental nightlife.