If there’s one thing worse than completely and utterly missing the bus, it’s reaching the bus stop just in time to see the bus driving away.
Which is pretty much how this writer feels about psychedelia in general and the psych-era Pink Floyd in particular. As a precocious (ie, irritating) nine-year-old in the pre-Dark Side 1971, with a keen, if undifferentiated, interest in radio static and Tomorrow’s World, it was overhearing a chance remark at the local sports centre by a much older kid – 13, or something equally venerable – that cast the initial spell when he bumptiously declared: “Pink Floyd are just a noise.”
Whatever that meant, it sounded enticingly experimental, insurgent and a bit threatening. Shortly thereafter, coincidentally, my dear brother bought (and instantly dismissed) EMI Starline’s cheap-but-perfectly-serviceable Relics compilation, literally throwing it aside after reaching a similar conclusion to that other unenlightened, surly sage.
This confluence of circumstances was enough to ensure the formative Floyd – inscrutable, penumbral, freighted with psychedelic mystery – became my thing. Their music was seeded with allusions to all manner of good stuff – fecund and capricious nature, chilly planets, dusty books – and besides, their leading light, Syd Barrett, played a mirror-bedecked Fender Esquire that looked and sounded like a retro-futurist rocket. Nothing not to revere.
In 1976, this besotted 14-year-old was sufficiently moved by Barrett’s widely (mis)reported plight as to even write a supportive letter to him, moronically addressed to “Syd Barrett, Cambridge,” with touchingly surreal consequences (see sidebar). And four years later, when applying to a handful of further education institutions, the enchantment was still strong enough that a secret factor in my selection process was ascertaining whether or not the nascent Floyd had played anywhere nearby (they had, as it happens: Weymouth Pavilion) when their gig itinerary caused them to pinwheel haphazardly across the country in 1967. That’s rather a mortifying admission, I know, but we’re all friends here.
By the time Pink Floyd performed in Weymouth Pavilion on Friday, 13 October 1967 – exactly one week after inexplicably appearing at (and presumably destabilising) the “Miss Teenage Brighton” contest in that town’s Top Rank Suite – the wheels were well and truly coming off the cart. Given the testing nature of the Floyd’s position over that period, it’s perhaps unsurprising that reliably personable drummer Nick Mason has no recollection whatsoever of the Pavilion gig. “To all my fans in Weymouth, I apologise,” he grins wryly. “But I can’t for the life of me remember, any more than I can remember, you know, the Colston Hall in Bristol… It’s a bit of a porridge, all that, unless someone did something really violent.”
This is a telling remark. Dismayingly – as was habitually the case when the fledgling Floyd played anywhere beyond a 30-mile radius of London’s UFO Club in Tottenham Court Road – the broad consensus among unconvinced Pavilion eyewitnesses straw-polled by RC was that the band were too atonal/too loud/too weird/too remote/too truculent. And this outcome was pretty much the best the band could hope for at the time: at least no one threw anything, started brawling or poured keg bitter over them. (To add insult to injury, the incompatible main support in this instance – Freddy Mack And The Mack Sound, a steaming soul revue – allegedly blew them clean off the end of the pier.) But what was it about psychedelia that so alienated entire swathes of the gig-going populace? And why did Syd Barrett – Pink Floyd’s guitarist, lead singer, chief songwriter and enigmatic figurehead – suddenly appear so adamantly opposed to knuckling down, playing the game and all those other quiescent duties which readily lent themselves to gormless epithets? Only a few short months earlier, the future had seemed so roseate, so promising.
Pink Floyd’s metamorphosis from have-a-go R&B journeymen to delirious electronic provocateurs in pop-star finery is entrenched in legend: the fable of how they became the avatars of London’s pulsating, globular underground, gnawing through their 12-bar leg irons and embracing the high-risk stratagem of improvisatory happenstance. This transformation was partly fuelled by an epochal nexus of musical, artistic and cultural influences – it was the mid-60s, after all – and partly expedient. In his indispensable Floyd memoir Inside Out, Mason dates the origin of their extempore tendencies all the way back to a 1965 residency in the Countdown Club at 1a Palace Gate, Kensington, during which a paucity of material impelled the band to pad out their three sets a night with tentatively meandering solos.
At this juncture, the line-up consisted of Mason, guitarist Roger Keith ‘Syd’ Barrett, fellow guitarist Rado ‘Bob’ Klose, bassist Roger Waters and keyboardist Rick Wright. Cambridge émigrés Barrett and Waters had moved to London within two years of each other – the former in 1964 to pursue an art diploma at Camberwell College of Arts, the latter in 1962 to study architecture and glower at his intellectual subordinates at Regent Street Polytechnic – while Mason and Wright, apathetic fellow architecture students at the poly, had fallen in with Waters and joined him in a fitful series of musical ventures. Personnel came and went, as did band names – Sigma 6, The Megadeaths, The Abdabs – until The Tea Set was arrived at, a knowingly modish moniker that piggybacked a then-current advertising campaign and discreetly implied an offhand familiarity with hip argot and pot paraphernalia. (“Pot” as in “marijuana”, not “teapot”.)
Klose, another architecture student, had also moved to London from Cambridge in 1964 and, along with Waters, fortuitously bumped into an old acquaintance named Chris Dennis, formerly a skiffle band vocalist, in a West End music shop. Dennis was promptly coerced into becoming The Tea Set’s sorely-needed front man, but his jocose stage demeanour and reflexive Hitler impersonations were evidently deemed a poor fit. So, when Dennis jumped before he could be pushed – accepting a posting to Bahrain by his day-job paymasters, the RAF – it was new-boy Barrett who philosophically ended up fronting the outfit. However, any nominal avant-garde leanings were still some way off.
“Really, we were so inept at playing,” muses Mason. “Our ability then was at the level where we could play something that was in the Top 20 at the time. We did have a very good guitar player in the shape of Bob Klose, but actually, for the rest of it… I remember, we used to do things like Long Tall Texan.” Mason chuckles at the thought. “Avant-garde music, though, that was a bridge too far. It’s a bit like asking if we saw ourselves as playing jazz, and we absolutely didn’t – because again, the technique required ruled that one out.”
Klose himself left the band in the summer of 1965. An uncommonly adept player, he was also savvy enough to understand that his departure – taking all that proficiency and expertise with him – would be a key factor in the delivery of Pink Floyd’s signature style.
As for the band’s new moniker, The Pink Floyd Sound, Barrett famously arrived at this by conflating the names of Carolina bluesmen Pinkney “Pink” Anderson and Floyd “Dipper Boy” Council – wisely opting for Pink Floyd because “Anderson Council sounded like a bus shelter”, as several observers have incontrovertibly pointed out. This painterly initiative rivals “The Who” as one of the most perfectly abstract band names of its era: in A Very Irregular Head, Barrett biographer Rob Chapman notes that “Syd merely adapted the collaging of images and textures and applied it to text. It was as simple as that.” While on this topic, Mason is quick to dismiss the notion that the group were ever known as The Pink Floyd Blues Band: “It’s one of those things that might have been on a poster somewhere that got it wrong. I don’t think we ever called ourselves The Pink Floyd Blues Band because I don’t think we ever played that kind of repertoire. We definitely played some blues tracks, but we would have interspersed them with, probably, Beatles tracks. I’d have to look at the Top 20 from ’65, ’66: I could probably find five or six songs that we learned.”
A noteworthy figure at this stage of the group’s development was part-time poly lecturer Mike Leonard, who also taught at Hornsey College of Art. At various times, Waters, Wright, Mason, Barrett and Klose had all been tenants in Leonard’s house at 39 Stanhope Gardens, Highgate – hence another short-lived band name, the say-what-you-see “Leonard’s Lodgers”. An inadvisably benign landlord, Leonard let his young householders noisily rehearse on the premises, and even briefly became a peripheral band member while Wright was holidaying in Greece – though, in a significant pre-echo of the ensemble’s passive-aggressive pragmatism at the tail end of Barrett’s tenure, the others were apparently wont to slip out for gigs without informing him. (Unpardonably, Leonard’s sin was to be older by some degree than his theoretical bandmates, average age 21.)
Leonard’s hands-on interest in light projections, as captured in a wonderful, if characteristically sniffy, 1968 Pathé featurette called Light Fantastic, represented a vital contribution to the band’s eager embrace of mixed-media incentives. This definitively 60s trickle-down phenomenon began to manifest itself as movers and shakers networked at sexy parties, and the cultural streams of art, music, literature, theatre, fashion, film and television began to converge, overlap and cross-pollinate. Pink Floyd’s dealings with Leonard’s Sound and Light Workshop at Hornsey College Of Art culminated in an appearance at the college on 18 November 1966 for an evening obliquely advertised as “Psychodilia” on the contemporary poster. (Little is currently known about the “Porrage” also mentioned on the poster, who either supported the Floyd or represented the evening’s hearty sustenance.)
The band’s destiny as ethereal wraiths, dimly perceived in a giddy vortex of immersive light and thudding sound, was written in the runes. As early as March 1966, at a rag ball in Essex University, a student’s film and assorted slides were projected behind them as they played (having fleetingly reverted, in a dither, to billing themselves as The Tea Set). “I can’t remember the order of events,” ponders Mason, “but I would have thought that the thing in Hornsey would have been, like… I won’t say a club gig, but it was in a room where we were providing the sound for the light show, whereas at Essex University the lighting was probably provided as a secondary element to augment our show.”
March 1966 also saw the band become the resident noise at the Sunday afternoon Spontaneous Underground/Trip “happenings” in London’s Marquee Club, organised by New Yorker Steve Stollman. “Spontaneity” was another counter-culture identifier of the day – not merely a buzzword, but a heavily symbolic mindset in itself – and if Stollman’s original intention was to provide an outlet for some of the outré jazzbo dissidents on his brother Bernard’s forbiddingly cool ESP-Disk record label, the Floyd were encouraged by degrees in such a liberal, radical milieu to play more unconventionally. Less Bo Diddley, more bohemian.
“Our improvisation was still very rock-based,” remembers Mason, “very simple, we never played anything outside of 4/4. No, actually, that’s not true, we did. It was free, but it was based on a rock concept rather than ripping into either a jazz or modern classical concept. The improvisation was interspersed with songs written by Syd as they came up, which initially meant that we’d probably play 70 per cent improvised, 20 per cent Syd’s songs, and 10 per cent someone else’s songs that we particularly liked.”
The same momentous month saw the formation of the scattershot but impeccably well-intentioned London Free School, set up by photographer/scenester/galvanic presence John “Hoppy” Hopkins and community activist Rhaune Laslett, with the added involvement of, among others, economics lecturer Peter Jenner and Elektra Records A&R man Joe Boyd. The pieces were starting to fall into place: Hopkins and Jenner had collaborated in the set-up of an independent label called DNA, touchingly throwing in their lot with the rigorously intellectual, pathologically uncommercial avant-gardists AMM – but when Jenner swung by the Marquee to check out one of the Spontaneous Underground/Trip events one pivotal Sunday afternoon, his first encounter with the germinal Floyd would set both parties on a mutually beneficial course.
Intrigued, impressed and keen to sign the band to DNA, Jenner was nonplussed when their non-sequitur response was to sod off on holiday: but on their return, his persistence saw them pressed into service on 30 September 1966 at a fundraiser for the London Free School and the forthcoming International Times newspaper – the first of several “Sound and Light Workshop” appearances at All Saints Church Hall in Powis Square, at which slides and “liquid film” were projected over them. One month later, on 31 October 1966, Jenner and his like-minded associate Andrew King launched Blackhill Enterprises in partnership with Pink Floyd, and became the band’s managers – a covenant reportedly sealed with genteel English handshakes.
Jenner and King had already addressed the band’s appetite for mesmeric visuals by swiftly assembling an endearingly rudimentary lighting rig for them, which was deployed at the International Times launch in the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm on 15 October 1966. Because of their meagre throw, the lights were mounted directly in front of the band and angled upwards in such a way that the parsimonious weediness of the wattage was compensated for by the casting of looming, monsters-from-the-id shadows – an arresting image which was further refined by the Floyd’s subsequent light show operatives. (Some idea of the impressionistic result can be gleaned from the band’s performance of Astronomy Domine and several bars of Pow R Toc H for the BBC’s The Look Of The Week programme, broadcast in May 1967, during which Barrett and Waters were memorably savaged by the uncomprehending and haughtily contemptuous musicologist Hans Keller.)
In no time at all, Pink Floyd and innovative light shows had become synonymous, so curious punters and sensation-seeking journalists alike were attracted to them like, well, moths to lights. Visiting American couple Joel and Toni Brown – Timothy Leary affiliates and friends of Hoppy’s – projected slides over the band at All Saints Church Hall, while the teenage Joe Gannon became closely involved with overhauling and operating the Floyd’s larval lighting rig. Showing a marked predilection for landlords who consorted with light, Syd Barrett moved into 2 Earlham Street in Covent Garden, owned by lighting technician Peter Wynne Willson. With his girlfriend, Susie Gawler-Wright, and assistant John Marsh, Wynne Willson took on the design and stewardship of the Floyd’s lights – and was, along with Hornsey workshop alumnus Mark Boyle, one of the figures invited to create light displays for the paradigmatic UFO club. (Another such figure was the naturist and former Wiccan priest Jack L Bracelin, later to open his own Happening 44 club in Gerrard Street, Soho. Pink Floyd fulfilled a thought-provoking engagement at Bracelin’s Watford nudist colony on Guy Fawkes Night 1966.)
UFO was initially and antithetically housed in the Blarney Club, a cheerfully insalubrious basement establishment under the Berkeley and Continentale cinemas in Tottenham Court Road. In his revelatory book White Bicycles, Joe Boyd bluntly states that he and Hoppy started the club “because we were both broke”. Nevertheless, UFO – which, for initiates, was a covert acronym for “Underground Freak Out” – was to become the Syd-era Floyd’s spiritual home, a venue where they could count on a positive reception from switched-on (or turned-on) peers. “There were plaudits on offer,” Mason fondly reflects, “rather than the lack of understanding we tended to find outside the capital.”
It’s a measure of the enduring potency of the Floyd-at-UFO combination that one can’t contemplate the club without an accompanying mental image of Barrett with his 1962 Fender Esquire wrapped in silver Melinex film and dressed with reflective discs, or the assertive Waters roughly handling his Rickenbacker 4001S bass. “Roger’s prominent nose and big oval head were sometimes the only human features perceptible in the gloom of the light show,” remembered Boyd. The Floyd first appeared at UFO, or Night Tripper as it was almost called (both names were printed on the initial fliers), on 23 December 1966, the club’s opening night – and it wasn’t long before television crews were tripping over their cables in the rush to film the mysterious psychedelic emissaries in situ. Granada TV pitched up on 27 January 1967 to film them for Scene Special, while a team from Germany’s Bayerischer Rundfunk TV arrived a month later to shoot a segment for Die Jungen Nachtwandler – London Unter 21.
In the meantime, moves were afoot to land a recording contract. Boyd had touted them to his soon-to-be-ex-boss, an impassive Jac Holzman at Elektra, with limited success – but a promising agreement with Polydor, brokered by Boyd with the company’s garrulous representative Horst Schmolzi, was on the table until fate intervened in the swaggering shape of agent Bryan Morrison. Jenner and King had just signed the Floyd to Morrison’s agency, and when the latter met the band at a rehearsal – ironically, in a Polydor studio – he asked to see the Polydor contract and confidently claimed that a more propitious deal could be struck with EMI or Decca. Under the terms of the Polydor contract, the band were due to be signed via Joe Boyd’s new company, Witchseason Productions; but Morrison indicated that if his agency were to fund the recording of a single, they’d be able to extort an unthinkable £5,000 advance from EMI off the back of it. Boyd bridled at the imposition – “they wanted me to produce it, but as the Floyd’s employee, not the other way round” – but, browbeaten by Morrison’s “barrow boy” astuteness, he grudgingly acquiesced, with the proviso that he would produce the Floyd’s debut album.
January 1967 therefore saw the Floyd installed in Sound Techniques – previously a dairy, and still sporting a plaster cow’s head on its frontage – in Chelsea’s Old Church Street, with Boyd in the production chair and redoubtable engineer John Wood optimising the mic placement. Priceless visual evidence of the band hammering through a resolute version of Interstellar Overdrive in the studio in question was captured by filmmaker Peter Whitehead for his compelling period piece Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London – and the two tracks recorded as a potential single, Arnold Layne and Candy And A Currant Bun, made for a failsafe bargaining chip.
Here was unequivocal proof that not only were the Floyd already able to condense their freak-out sections into digestible 30-second vignettes, but also that Barrett had suddenly effloresced as a songwriter of rare distinction, conveying an enticingly idiosyncratic worldview with his patient, precise diction. EMI wasted no time in snapping them up – and the company’s then-inflexible policy of utilising staff producers meant that Boyd was unceremoniously sidelined, and erstwhile Beatles engineer Norman Smith installed in his place. The Floyd signed on the dotted line on 28 February 1967, and celebrated with a high-kicking Folies Bergère photo session on the pavement outside the EMI building in Manchester Square – conduct most unbecoming for supposedly aloof representatives of the emergent counter-culture. (“An embarrassing example of how high spirits can affect you,” Mason grimaces.)
EMI released the Arnold/Candy single on 10 March 1967, after a re-recording failed to improve upon the airy, sparkling vibe imparted by Boyd’s production on the Sound Techniques original. Promo copies came in a sleeve proclaiming “The next projected sound of ’67” in the same lovely Stymie Bold Italic typeface ubiquitously displayed on British shop signs in the 60s. Barrett’s deftly minimalist tale of a knicker thief remembered from Cambridge days was summarily banned by BBC Radio London, but still achieved a Top 20 chart placing.
In the meantime, recording for the band’s debut album began at Abbey Road’s Studio Three in March 1967, with The Beatles finessing Sgt Pepper down the hall. The Floyd’s album title, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, was taken from a “strange, unsettling chapter” in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows, dearly loved by Barrett – and a book insightfully described in a 2009 Guardian article by Rosemary Hill as “saturated in longing”. Given the nature of Barrett’s eventual withdrawal from society, and his reported discomfort in later life with any mention of Pink Floyd, the poignant resonances of Hill’s observations are inescapable: “Pan’s parting gift… is ‘forgetfulness’. They will not remember the pure happiness of their vision because if they did the memory would grow until it… spoiled the rest of their lives with the knowledge that it could never be regained.”
In Inside Out, Mason explains how he remembers the album recording sessions proceeding “pretty smoothly, with general enthusiasm from everybody”, but that producer Norman Smith had an altogether different recollection. Indeed, when interviewed for Guitar World magazine in 2007, Smith claimed that Barrett seemed largely oblivious to the producer’s exhortations. “I would suggest perhaps a little phrasing alteration in what Syd was singing… So they went back in the studio and Syd did exactly the same thing he’d done on the previous take. I said to myself, ‘I think I’m wasting my time here.’ ”
It could simply be that Barrett’s purported intransigence was a quietly petulant reaction: the golden boy, used to being affectionately indulged, now being brought to book with headmasterly gravitas. Or, it could have been that the gulf between Barrett’s pure artistic impulses and the workaday demands of commerce was already beginning to gape and beckon. It would also be disingenuous to underestimate the inferable effect of acid on Barrett’s decision-making: with the best will in the world, a prodigious LSD intake is unlikely to engender rationality.
Whatever the circumstances, it remains abundantly apparent that the Floyd, Smith and engineer Peter Bown created something of everlasting worth with The Piper… For the hard-psych epicure, pouring rocket fuel all over the band’s strenuous denial that they ever perpetrated “space rock”, there was the dauntless Astronomy Domine with its steeply-banked chord structure, introduced by a multi-tracked Jenner’s robotic recitations from The Observer Book Of Planets: and there was also the sturm-und-clang of Interstellar Overdrive, a startling benchmark of improvised rock music, achieved herein by layering one version over another.
The latter track is a virtual showcase for the Binson Echorec – a beautiful, if hot-tempered, Italian tape-echo device which, at the time, was the most fundamental signal processor in establishing the, ah, Pink Floyd sound. (When Mike Leonard’s Highgate house, steeped in Floyd lore, was put up for sale following his death in 2012, a dormant Echorec – patinated with dust – was among the evocative chattels still on the premises.) In tandem with the slowly devolving nebulas of Rick Wright’s Farfisa Compact Duo organ – an unrivalled instrument for weirding out – Barrett’s fearless guitar betrays the arcs and traces of a Pete Townshend influence, boosted by the deconstructivist, guitar-as-workbench approach pursued by Keith Rowe from AMM. However, Barrett’s technique is less a deconstruction, and more like staring so closely at a painting that it reconfigures itself into infinite universes of neural sensation. Jenner has often indicated that the riff’s inexorable downward pull was arrived at by Barrett interpreting the Floyd co-manager’s risible attempt to sing Love’s version of Bacharach & David’s My Little Red Book – but the phrasing is manifestly closer to Old Ned, Ron Grainer’s theme for Steptoe & Son. This doesn’t render it any less impressive.
On the other side of the coin, The Piper is weighted most heavily towards Syd’s songs of bucolic simplicity or guileless, unaffected wonder. The oft-derided The Gnome expresses existential joy with the subtlest of strokes: “Look at the sky, look at the river: isn’t it good?” Four syllables shy of a haiku, but every bit as elegant and disproportionately evocative. Mason’s percussion pattern, on two different-sized wood blocks, is hilariously stoical. The Scarecrow, meanwhile, is as starkly pretty as a traditional folk air, gravid with symbolism for suggestible Barrett-watchers (“his head did no thinking, his arms didn’t move”), and was used to soundtrack a charming Pathé clip of the band capering gamely in their most lurid psychedelic appurtenances at Brereton Heath in Northwich, Cheshire on the sunny morning of Saturday 8 July 1967.
A pattern emerges: Mason has no recollection of the filming, far less the 200-odd -mile schlep the band presumably undertook in the small hours to get to the location from the previous night’s gig in the Birdcage Club in Portsmouth. “I look at it and think, oh, that’s good, but I have no memory of where we did it, or whether we did it to sound, or what. This is a bit like The Bourne Supremacy, like I can’t remember who I am. Suddenly there’s a man telling me that I was an assassin for the CIA…”
Matilda Mother, which initially borrowed heavily from the poem Jim by Hilaire Belloc until the family estate objected, became an atmospheric and fantastical childhood reverie once Barrett focused his lens inwards. “Doll’s house darkness” could function as a serviceable umbrella term for his entire recorded oeuvre, while his exact and imaginative rhythm guitar phrasing under the third verse betokens a man who was clearly firing on all cylinders. And if Lucifer Sam’s edgy noir riff implies a witty subversion of Johnny Rivers’ Secret Agent Man, the Gnostic, eerily suspended Chapter 24 draws its inspiration from the Chinese divination text, the I Ching. In his 33⅓ book about The Piper, John Cavanagh observes: “As number 24 concerns turning back, the phases of time and finding your true path, it’s easy to see it as adumbrative of Syd’s future.”
Over the years, it has become customary to rate the mono version of The Piper over the stereo variant – but both have their plus points. Rick Wright’s organ over the intro to Interstellar Overdrive on the mono mix is heroically dissonant, while the state-of-the-art cross-channel panning over the coda on the stereo mix leaves huge, sucking voids in either ear, if you listen on headphones, as it cannonades back and forth. Fathoms of reverb are advantageously applied to the whispers in The Gnome on the stereo version, while the mono Flaming has flanger over everything – and the exultant carillon of bells on the line “watching buttercups cup the light” is outrageously, beautifully high in the mix.
Of course, all this stuff had to be taken to the masses – and there was the rub. The Top 10 success of the unimpeachable single See Emily Play (written by Barrett as an adjunct to the Floyd’s Games For May concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 12 May 1967, and either inspired by London Free School habitué Emily Young or Syd’s friend Anna Murray, depending on which story you believe) gave the band a pop-star cachet, with attendant perks and pitfalls – including appearances on Top Of The Pops. “We hadn’t got the direction that we had later,” reasons Mason. “We were as excited to be on Top Of The Pops as anyone. We bought into the idea that you needed the single, and that this would be the launch pad for everything else. That’s quite important: it took a while for us to work out that what we wanted was to run our own show. Things like the Queen Elizabeth Hall event: that was the first time we did it as just us, no support band, not supporting anyone. That was significant in terms of beginning to turn us a different way.”
It rapidly transpired that for a shock-of-the-new band with the Floyd’s ambitions, the touring circuit and a hit single represented a brace of poisoned chalices. Entrenched modes of staging and presentation threw up incongruities that could only have been purest torture for the heralds who had to forge a new path, as Mason recalls. “The problem was that when we played, for example, the Tulip Bulb Auction Hall in Spalding, we were supporting Cream and Jimi Hendrix, but the top of the bill was Geno Washington. Consequently, most people who paid to come and see bands expected something they could dance to. We absolutely weren’t what they expected or wanted, so it was not good. The only reason we eventually got away with it was that the other circuit opening up at the time was the redbrick university circuit, and in fact what was happening was that our fan base would come there, rather than going into town.”
Patently, booking the Floyd for, say, the Gwent Constabulary (“A” Division) Spring Holiday Barn Dance on 25 May 1967 was never going to wash; nor indeed the General Post Office North West Regional Dance in Blackpool the next night. And everywhere they turned, it appeared that people were queuing up to have a figurative or literal pop at them – even peers like Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker, who castigated their “horrible organ sound” in the Melody Maker’s Blind Date feature and ostensibly cultivated analysts like the aforementioned Hans Keller on The Look Of The Week. (In fairness, his summation that the Floyd’s music was “a little bit of a regression to childhood” merits no complaints from the jury.) “I thought Roger dealt with him quite well, really,” states Mason. “The curious thing with that was that it probably helped to give us more of a push, in a way. I remember Alan Price being particularly mean about us at some charity event in the Albert Hall, dropping his Hammond B3 and going, ‘that’s psychedelic music for you’. It was 50 years ago now; I’ve nearly forgiven him. I’m getting over it.”
Everyone knows the dreadful tales about the audience pouring beer over the group from the balcony of the Vista Bar above the stage at Dunstable’s California Ballroom, and Waters being struck on the forehead by a copper penny hurled by an enraged punter at The Feathers in Ealing. However resigned the band claimed to have been about their embattled status on the road, the accumulation of adversarial elements plus the pressure to create another hit can only have weighed heavily on the Floyd frontman’s slender shoulders. It’s not our intention to add to the speculative noise over the source or extent of Barrett’s condition as that fateful year progressed (any action, or inaction, can be bent to cleave to one’s pet interpretation of events) but it’s undeniable that the goalposts were moving.
“Syd underwent a change in the summer of ’67,” Mason sighs. “At Games For May he was absolutely on side, and at the first Top Of The Pops for See Emily Play he was on side. It was by the time we did the second Top Of The Pops: he’d seen John Lennon say something about not bothering with it. And it was around that time that Syd was probably not getting on terribly well with LSD, and consequently, instead of going, ‘no, this isn’t for me’, it was ‘I’ll try some more.’
“Everything was suddenly… I was going to say ‘breaking down’, but it was more a thing whereby Syd was realising that he didn’t want to be a commercial musician, he wanted to be an artist, whether it was in music or painting. It suddenly all began to not work for him. So, Syd coming to some sort of realisation is sometimes seen as unravelling. Some of the time he was unravelling but it’s a combination. It wasn’t just that ‘Syd went mad’, which he didn’t necessarily. There is a belief that he didn’t go mad at all, that he saw the light: that it was not to be a pop star in tight trousers.”
And so, as the autumn and winter approached and the Floyd’s imperilled touring schedule widened to include dates in Scandinavia and the US, Barrett alternated periods of perfect lucidity with interludes of what appeared to be an almost confrontational spontaneity – the “random precision” alluded to in Shine On You Crazy Diamond eight years down the line. You all know those stories too: the string-detuning, catatonic episodes, all admissible as evidence of self-sabotage… or explainable as artfully provocative acts in the anti-tradition of AMM. Likewise, November 1967’s Apples And Oranges may have been too prickly a misshape for radio playlists, but Barrett’s outside-the-box tightrope-walk guitar part is a masterful display of directed anarchy, holding off feedback until the track’s finale.
Food for thought: in the Early Years 1965- 72 box set, Barrett’s playing is bold, focused and committed on the immaculately cleaned-up live recording of the band in Stockholm in September 1967. Further in, at the conclusion of the decidedly concrète soundtrack session recorded at De Lane Lea Studios in October 1967 for conceptual artist John Latham’s short film Speak, Syd cavalierly detunes his strings. And it sounds entirely in keeping.
Barrett’s awareness of his predicament, if that’s what it was, seemed acutely perceptive and already, somehow, beyond it all. From the unreleased-at-the-time Vegetable Man (a punky and pitiless description of his clothing) “In my paisley shirt, I look a jerk” could be a pithily comedic aside rather than an intimation of self-loathing. The last line he sings on a Floyd record, from Jugband Blues on 1968’s A Saucerful Of Secrets (“And what exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke?”), has one’s synapses sparking and fizzing with its layers of potential significance – but then, Barrett seemed predestined to keep everyone guessing. Even after retreating from the melee, he kept everyone guessing for the rest of his life.
By the time the Floyd embarked on a laughably inapposite winter ’67 UK tour alongside such package-unfriendly entities as The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Nice and The Move, it was excruciatingly obvious that the old ways had worn through to the bone, and everything had to change. “We were carving two paths,” Mason says. “The problem was that we, all of us, were still obsessed with the idea that you had to have a single to promote an LP. There’d been an enormous change with Sgt Pepper, which suddenly indicated a new world which was about albums. Record labels embraced it, and understood it would make them a lot more money and that it was terribly important.
“So the culture of Abbey Road and recording studios changed, not overnight, but over the next year or two. But, it still didn’t answer the question of how to promote the album. This was a world with no internet, so the only way you got heard was primarily the BBC and Top Of The Pops. So even if it was an album, it was sort of assumed that you needed a single off the LP to kick the album into play. Someone asked me, ‘Were the record company forcing you to make singles?’ Well, the answer is, they weren’t, but it was made clear this was how you sold your album – so we were looking to make singles as well. No one threatens Roger and tells him what to do! They didn’t in ’67, they wouldn’t now.”
Pink Floyd saw in the new year by recruiting Barrett’s childhood friend, David Gilmour, to augment the band. “It’s funny,” notes Mason, “we thought it would work, and it was even funnier that it did work. I look back on it and think, why didn’t we knock it on the head when Syd went, but we’d had such a tough time that we just wanted to play music. It was almost like it didn’t really matter: it was such a release, and a relief.” On 26 January 1968, heading to a gig in Southampton, the others decided not to collect Syd en route. The rest, quite literally, is history.
You can draw your own arbitrary line in the sand as to where the Floyd’s psychedelic era ended, or didn’t. (For this writer, the disturbing serenity of Cirrus Minor from 1969’s Soundtrack From The Film More – while clearly indebted to Barrett’s dualistic adoration of nature – is as psychedelic as they ever got.) Oddly, when you listen again now to the ’67-’69 Floyd recordings, it’s often Roger Waters that seems the “furthest out”, the most committed to a boundary-breaching sonic ideal, the most in touch with the swarming shapes of his subconscious. Consider the forest canopy of dream-demon vocal sounds in Pow R Toc H, the whispered invocations of Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, the horribly convincing screams of Careful With That Axe, Eugene and the rhythmic, absurdist tape loop which unfathomably plants itself in the very middle of Several Species Of Small Furry Animals etc etc. The shadowy planes of his young face, in the flickering lights, even looked like those early Floyd records sounded.
Asked whether the Floyd’s nominally psychedelic phase would be strictly related to Syd’s tenure, Nick Mason replies: “No, it wouldn’t. The business of labels is to be avoided, because actually, a lot of Syd’s writing wasn’t psychedelic at all, it was sort of English, whimsical, the countryside. You think about something like Scarecrow, or Bike, or whatever, it’s pixie whimsy, not wild tripping. You get that aspect of it: and then something like Saucerful Of Secrets, the title track, was post- Syd, and in some ways would be seen as psychedelic because it’s far less structured than the pop songs we’d worked on until then.”
This is a valid point, well made: but, of course, for any self-medicating psych-head, the quaint, childlike, heightened familiarity of British psychedelia is the whole point. Most of it takes place in the garden, or the park, down at the shops, or up in the attic, or inside the paintbox. None of this precludes the presence of an entire screed of sinister undertones.
In the celebrated rhyming couplet devised by Humphrey Osmond, the psychiatrist observed: “To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic” – and it’s vividly apparent that the Floyd experienced both in the volatile first flush of their career. With the release of the deeply covetable Early Years 1965-1972 box set, and the announcement of 2017’s Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, it’s blindingly obvious the Pink Floyd brand is as adored as ever. This prompts RC to ask Mason whether the public’s ongoing obsession makes him feel vindicated after the soul-sapping struggle of dragging all but the most open-minded audiences into their camp when the band lurched from ballroom pillar to function suite post in 1967.
“I think, frankly, if I’d gone to some of our early shows and had been expecting to see Geno Washington or the equivalent, I’d have been bitterly disappointed. I don’t think vindicated is the right word, it makes it sound as though we knew we were right, and I don’t think we did. It was more that we liked what we were doing, we thought it was good, but we didn’t necessarily think it was the answer. And we looked on the bands who could really do it properly with some envy; bands like, I don’t know, Amen Corner, or The Herd…”
IF YOU SEE SYD…
Even as an irredeemably callow 14-year-old in the inert summer of 1976, I found it unpardonably insensitive that Syd Barrett fanatics and grimy journos were doorstepping the abdicated Pink Floyd princeling, agitating for more recordings or ghoulishly truffling for evidence of supposedly aberrant behaviour. I couldn’t for the young life of me understand why everyone wouldn’t leave him alone – and the fact that there was precious little distinction between the intrusions just described and writing a letter to him was a “subtlety” I was simply too thick to comprehend at that age.
Nevertheless, that’s exactly what I did. I loved Arnold, Emily, Apples, The Piper and that brace of arcane, beguiling solo albums with an equivalent fervour, and would have welcomed more songs in that inimitable vein – but emphatically not at the expense of Barrett’s wellbeing. Consequently, I wrote a polite note to thank him for his music, that I sincerely hoped he was well and happy, and reassure him that he shouldn’t feel coerced, by anyone, into re-entering the arena unless he absolutely wanted to. Sigh. None of my business, but that’s the beauty of being 14 and catastrophically bereft of social mores. I sealed the envelope, addressed it to “Syd Barrett, Cambridge” – spluh! – and popped it in the post.
Several weeks later, astonishingly, a letter turned up on notepaper from Sid “The Beat” Barrett – the Cambridge-based trad jazz bassist whose name, claims one theory, attached to the young Roger Barrett after he saw a gig by Sid’s outfit, The Riverside Seven, in the Cambridge YMCA. “In spite of the inadequate address on the letter you sent me, you can see that it arrived quite safely,” he wrote, “but I regret to tell you I am not THE Syd Barrett! However, I am pretty well known locally because besides running my own band I am also the local secretary of the Musician’s Union.”
Sid added: “I also play bass guitar, as does the other Syd” – a seemingly odd but forgivable assertion, given that Syd played bass on occasion around Cambridge with a band called The Hollerin’ Blues – “but there the similarity ends.
“I wish I knew his present whereabouts because I am continually getting letters and phone calls – four from America at the time of writing – and another letter arrived the same day as yours, also with the barest minimum of address! Anyway, thanks for writing, and I hope you find the REAL Syd some day.”
What a sweetheart. To take the time to bother indulging the whim of a teenage dummkopf betokens a level of decency that superheats the spirit. Sid’s letter might not boast the cachet of an artefact related to the other Syd – but for this writer, 40 years down the line, it still means a great deal. Oregano Rathbone
