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If this aspect of Pink Floyd’s life hardly suggested any kind of glamour, they could take heart from the fact that they were – for the moment at least – accredited pop stars. The week they arrived in Aberdeen, their second single had climbed to number six in the UK singles charts, nestling just below The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ and Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’. As with their first effort, ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘See Emily Play’ was a perfect exemplar of the influences wafting into Britain from the American West Coast being rewired into a very English sense of fairy-tale innocence, an impression only furthered by the Old World elegance of its lyrics, established in the opening line: ‘Emily tries/But misunderstands …’
The single’s success had been boosted by a run of appearances in the kind of magazines that treated their subject matter with a breathless superficiality – like Disc and Music Echo, a weekly that tended to portray musicians as short-lived items on an accelerated production line. The day Pink Floyd were in Aberdeen, it honoured them with its cover, accompanied by a set of pen-portraits, doubtless bashed out in a matter of minutes.
Roger Waters, said the magazine, ‘likes to think he is a hard man, and in fact he can be very evil … He only listens to pop music because he has to.’ Maintaining the sense of a kind of withering demystification, Nick Mason was accused of getting ‘a kick out of being nasty to people – he likes people to be frightened of him, because he is someone of whom you could never be frightened.’ Rick Wright, meanwhile, was ‘the musician of the group, and also very moody. He has written hundreds of songs that will never be heard because he thinks they are not worthy.’
The most lengthy character sketch was given over to Syd Barrett. Pink Floyd’s singer, guitarist, and chief songwriter was described as ‘the mystery man of the group – a gypsy at heart … he loves music, painting and talking to people … totally artistic … believes in total freedom – he hates to impede or criticise others, and hates others to criticise others or impede him.’ Barrett, it was claimed, ‘doesn’t care about money and isn’t worried about the future.’
If such words suggested a blithe kind of contentment, the reality of Barrett’s life was rather different. His London home was shared with people reputed to be ‘messianic acid freaks’, fond of introducing their acquaintances to LSD on the slightest pretext. Barrett’s familiarity with the drug long predated his arrival in their company, but his housemates were hardly ideal companions: by now, Barrett’s acid use was beginning to manifest itself in chronic mood swings that could lead to either raging anger – and occasional violence – or spells of near-catatonia.
Inevitably, all this was starting to have an impact on the group’s working lives. Seven days after the Aberdeen show, Pink Floyd played at a huge London event grandly titled The International Love-In. Mere minutes before stage-time, Barrett had gone AWOL; an associate of the band eventually found him, ‘absolutely gaga, just totally switched off, sitting rigid, like a stone.’ Pushed onto the stage, Barrett remained pretty much silent, apart from the odd moment when he decided to pull flurries of discordant notes from his guitar. Though his three colleagues did their best to somehow cover up for him, it was clear that something was wrong: in the wake of the show, reports in the music press made mention of ‘nervous exhaustion’.
Nonetheless, Pink Floyd’s work-rate hardly slowed down. By September, they were in Scandinavia. Six weeks later, after another run of British shows, they took off for their first tour of the United States, during which Barrett’s problems would worsen: the most-documented episodes from this period are an appearance on the Pat Boone Show that saw Barrett reacting to his host’s questions with a glassy-eyed stare and large-scale silence, and a three-minute spot on American Bandstand in which Barrett reacted to the instruction that he should mime to ‘See Emily Play’ by keeping his mouth resolutely shut.
It is some token of the band’s frenetic schedule that two days after they returned to the UK, they were back on tour, this time in the company of Jimi Hendrix. ‘There was a bit of “Syd’ll pass out of it, it’s only a phase,”’ says Nick Mason. ‘And I think we were anxious to make Syd fit in with what we wanted, rather than giving all our efforts to seeing if we could make him better. We probably said, “Oh well – let’s try and keep working.”
‘Even now,’ says Mason, ‘I’m astonished. How could we have been so blinkered, or so silly, or so stupid?’
When talking to those who once shared Barrett’s company, one facet of his story becomes clear: rather than the astral, saucer-eyed waif of legend, he was initially a gregarious, enthusiastic presence. ‘He was a very friendly soul,’ says Nick Mason. ‘At my first meeting, I can remember him bounding up and saying, “Hello, I’m Syd” – at a time when everyone else would have been cool, staring around the room in a rather studied way, rather than introducing themselves.’
‘Syd was good fun,’ says Peter Jenner, half of Pink Floyd’s initial management team. ‘He and I would sit around and smoke dope, listen to records, talk about things. Sharp? Absolutely. I had no idea that he was going to go loopy; there was no indication. I had enormous respect for him, to the point of being overwhelmed: he did these paintings, and he wrote all these songs, and he played the guitar … he was full of ideas.’
Barrett was born Roger Keith Barrett on 6 January 1946, and grew up in Cambridge. His father, Dr Arthur Barrett, was a hospital pathologist; his mother, Winifred, was a housewife, who shared with her husband a love of classical music, and a wish to encourage their children’s creative side via regular family ‘music evenings’. Dr Barrett died when Syd was fifteen; by that point, he had given his youngest son (Syd had two brothers and two sisters) a guitar, and Syd had begun to make contact with like minds. By 1962, he was the guitarist with a Cambridge band – in thrall to the standard beat-group archetype of the day – called Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, whose rehearsals tended to take place in the front-room of the Barrett family home. Among their circle of intimates was Roger Waters: two years older than Syd, but happy, for now, to leave the slippery art of musicianship to his younger friend. ‘Syd was a little ahead of me,’ says Waters. ‘I was very much on the periphery. I can remember designing posters for Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, quietly wanting to be a bit further towards the centre of things.’
Barrett’s musical activities, along with a talent for painting that led him to enrol at Cambridge’s College of Art and Technology, soon drew him to the city’s young in-crowd: a coterie of late-adolescent bohemians who would gather at the Criterion, a shabby pub located in Cambridge’s centre. He and Waters were soon among the regulars, sharing the company of a guitarist and teenage language student named David Gilmour, and Storm Thorgeson and Aubrey Powell, whose immediate ambitions lay, slightly vaguely, in film and photography.
‘The thing that really struck me about Syd was that he was a kind of elfin character,’ says Aubrey Powell. ‘He walked slightly on his tiptoes all the time, and he used to sort of spring along. He always had a wry smile on his face, as if he was laughing at the world, somehow. And he was always something of a loner: you could be with a group of people and suddenly Syd would be gone. He’d just evaporate, and then two days later he’d return. He was very much his own person.
‘What I really liked about him was this weird attention to detail. One day I went into his room, and he said, “Look at these.” There were these three dodecahedrons hanging from the ceiling, all immaculately made from balsa wood: absolutely perfectly done. They were big, too. And I remember thinking, “God, the patience to do that …”’
In the view of outsiders, Cambridge has a strong self-contained identity, forever bound up with the university that attracts thousands of tourists to the city – but also cleaves the local population into Town and Gown. Indeed, for most young people born and raised in Cambridge, the colleges are irrelevant, strangely distant institutions; far more important is the close proximity of London.
Back in the 1960s, Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and their friends were a perfect case in point. By the summer of 1964, the crowd centred on the Criterion was fast dissipating: Barrett had taken a place at Camberwell Art School, while Waters was readying himself for studying architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic. The latter took very little time to make the move that, back in Cambridge, had always eluded him: drawing on his circle of newfound London friends, he formed a group called Sigma 6 and appointed himself its lead guitar player.
Waters’s colleagues included a bass player named Clive Metcalf, vocalists Keith and Sheila Noble – and a drummer and rhythm guitarist who numbered among Waters’s fellow architecture students. So it was that Nick Mason and Rick Wright entered the picture; to be joined – after Waters had been nudged from lead guitar to bass, Wright had decided to play keyboards, and the band’s more peripheral members had been pushed out – by Syd Barrett. He advised his new band that, having already passed through such ill-advised names as the T-Set, the Megadeaths, and the Abdabs – they should call themselves the Pink Floyd Sound, in partial tribute to two of his favourite blues singers, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.
The group played their first show in late 1965 and began moving along the musical trajectory that would define their first career chapter. Like most groups of their era, they were partial to beat-group standards like ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Road-runner’, but they would use such songs as book-ends to extended passages when, led by Barrett, they would step away from three-chord orthodoxy and begin to improvise. It is not hard to draw a line between such flights of musical fancy and Barrett’s drug habits: certainly, though his colleagues were not nearly as quick to ingest illicit substances, it’s a matter of record that by the time of the Pink Floyd Sound’s first manoeuvres, Barrett was well acquainted with both cannabis and LSD.
In the summer of 1966, Peter Jenner, then a young economics graduate, chanced upon a Pink Floyd Sound performance at the Marquee, the London club where The Who had cut their teeth. ‘I was very into the idea of the young, groovy avant-garde,’ he recalls. ‘And I thought this would be a young, groovy, avant-garde show. I got there and I saw the Floyd, and I thought they were remarkable, because I couldn’t work out where each noise was coming from. The Marquee had a stage that kind of stuck out, and I was endlessly walking around it, just trying to figure it out.
‘They were playing these really lame old tunes, like “Louie Louie” and all these hackneyed blues songs – not much of Syd’s stuff. But in the middle, there were all these weird bits going on: what I subsequently discovered were one-chord jams. Instead of there being a blues solo, there was a weird solo. And I liked that. I couldn’t work out where the noise was coming from: whether it was guitar, or organ, or what. I just thought, “Christ, this is interesting.”’
By 1966, a close-knit crowd of Londoners was beginning to coalesce into what would become known as the Underground. They formed a network of young creative people, plugged into a variety of cultural currents: the thrilling sense of possibility embodied by the recent – and unprecedented – success of English rock groups, led by the Beatles and Stones; a burgeoning drug culture; a thawing of social strictures that would soon be embodied in the legalization of abortion and homosexuality; and an economic climate that had given rise to full employment. Of no less importance were a slew of influences taken from the United States: the Beats, Bob Dylan, and most importantly of all, the freshly-born West Coast counterculture – news of which had recently crossed the Atlantic.
Suitably inspired, those at the centre of London’s bohemian milieux were starting to set up their own equivalent. The first issue of a weekly countercultural newspaper, International Times (aka IT), would be published in October 1966. Soon after, a late-night weekly event called UFO began in the unlikely environs of an Irish-themed London establishment called the Blarney Club. Elsewhere, art galleries, bookshops and music events were adding to the sense of a slow-building cultural upsurge.
The philosophical threads that held it all together were as varied as its constituent elements, but the Underground was unquestionably characterized by a shared agenda. Whereas previous radical movements had focused on the wish for change enacted on a grand scale – this being Great Britain, social class remained integral to most critiques of society – the sixties generation placed a new emphasis on the freeing of the individual, who would be liberated, according to the Underground’s louder voices, by embracing the kind of multi-coloured hedonism that defined London’s hipper social circles.
According to Richard Neville, the Australian émigré who contributed to London’s counterculture by editing the magazine Oz, ‘The aim of the alternative culture was to shake up the existing situation, to break down barriers not only between sexes and races and God knows what else, and it was also to have a good time … to enlarge the element of fun that one had occasionally in one’s own life and to make that more pervasive – not just for you but for everyone. I was quite keen to abolish this work/play distinction. There was something incredibly oppressed about the mass of grey people out there. I just thought that people on the whole looked unhappy: they seemed to be pinched and grey and silly and caught up with trivia, and I felt that what was going on in London would bring colour into those grey cheeks and those grey bedrooms. With a bit of sexuality and exciting music and flowers … somehow the direction of society could be altered.’
If Syd Barrett’s lifestyle implicitly allied him with the Underground’s thinking, Peter Jenner was closely tied to some of its most crucial players. Together with John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, a co-founder of International Times, he had established a record label called DNA – and, thrilled by what he had seen at the Marquee, Jenner initially approached the Pink Floyd Sound with a view to releasing their records. Led by Roger Waters, they persuaded him to take on the role of manager. In partnership with his longstanding friend and sometime employee of British Airways, Andrew King, Jenner thus founded the grandly-named Blackhill Enterprises and began to assist his new clients. His first move was inspired: suspecting that the Pink Floyd Sound lent them an unbecoming air of vaudevillian corniness, he convinced them to trade as The Pink Floyd.
Via Jenner’s connections, the group were rapidly placed at the heart of the Underground. In September 1966, they played the first of several fundraising shows for the Notting Hill Free School – a countercultural educational experiment in which Peter Jenner was integrally involved – which took place at the Tabernacle, a church hall in West London. The next month, they appeared at the launch party for International Times. Two days before Christmas, they were the headliners at the first night of UFO, inaugurating a relationship whereby The Pink Floyd were the club’s house band, soundtracking its perfumed murk with music that seemed custom-made for that purpose.
Indeed, The Pink Floyd’s outward aesthetic seemed designed to achieve a perfect fit between the band and their new audience. As strait-laced cover versions were supplanted by Syd Barrett originals, the wildly improvisational element of their show had been built up to the point where it begged the voguish word ‘psychedelic’ (indeed, ads for the Free School shows were straplined with Dr Timothy Leary’s maxim ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’). And inspired by what little they knew of cutting-edge rock shows in the United States, the group now played their shows on stages flooded with the projections from home-made lighting equipment.
The result, according to those who had followed their progress from the start, was little short of revelatory. ‘They’d start a song like “Astronomy Domine”,’ says Aubrey Powell, ‘and work themselves up into a frenzy, and then it would all die down, and there’d be these long, almost embarrassing moments: you really wouldn’t know what was happening. Syd would be playing weird sounds – there were real moments of tension in there. Then suddenly they’d get back to the song, and it would be concluded. It was amazing what Syd was able to do. There was something very unsettling about it. It really wasn’t like watching any other band.’
Outwardly, Pink Floyd seemed to number among the Underground’s aristocracy. Aside from Barrett, however, they cautiously kept their distance – happy to play the shows, but surprisingly indifferent to either the substances or beliefs that tended to go with them. ‘The gigs that we played thanks to all that were great,’ says Roger Waters. ‘It was tremendous fun – going on at the Tabernacle and playing “Louie Louie” for fifteen minutes. There were some of Syd’s early songs in there, but a lot of what we did then came from the length of time we were expected to be onstage: sometimes, we’d play three sets in a night.
‘But I never really knew any of those people that well. And to this day, I still don’t know exactly what a lot of that stuff was actually about. You’d hear the odd thing about revolution, but it was never terribly specific. I don’t know … I read International Times a few times. But, you know – what was the Notting Hill Free School actually all about? What was it meant to do?’
‘There’s a great quote from that period: “They were all stoned, and we were drunk,”’ says Nick Mason. ‘I think the association with the Underground was certainly a Flag of Convenience. I think we’d all concede that. But as usual with these things, there was good stuff there, interwoven with an enormous amount of absolute guff. There were some good ideas, and some very forthright liberal views – but the period was full of an equal number of people with tarot cards and crystals. The number of love beads that one accumulated … I never really thought it was a good way of designing one’s future.’
In February 1967, The Pink Floyd signed a contract with EMI, receiving an advance of £5000. Their first single, released on 11 March, had been recorded early in the new year under the supervision of Joe Boyd, the émigré American who was responsible for the musical aspects of UFO.
‘Arnold Layne’, the embodiment of a pop-minded economy that lay in polar opposition to the band’s approach to performance, nonetheless managed to fill its three minutes with the sense that its authors were pushing their music into uncharted territory. The combination of Barrett’s droning, distracted vocal, the song’s subtle denial of a strict verse/chorus structure and its subject matter – the lifestyle of a kleptomaniac transvestite, placed at the centre of a very English picaresque – lent it the sense of the pop form being very cleverly subverted. When it crept onto the charts, sitting alongside singles by the Monkees, the Turtles and the Dave Clark Five, the point was made explicit.
In the meantime, the group was the subject of a flurry of press attention, focused chiefly on the single’s subject matter (‘Meet the Pinky Kinkies!’ ran one headline) and the allegedly mould-breaking nature of their shows. ‘The Pink Floyd offer a total show consisting of 700 watts of amplification, weird droning music (largely improvised) and lighting and slide projections using melting oil paints,’ said Disc and Music Echo. ‘On stage, the Floyd themselves become completely lost in their music and they aim to absorb the minds of their audience too, which isn’t easy with the usual cool atmospheres around London.’
Crowds in the capital, however, were soon proving to be the least of their worries. With the muted success of ‘Arnold Layne’ – it eventually rose to twenty-one in the UK singles chart, despite being excised from radio playlists on account of its risqué lyrics – Pink Floyd were inducted onto the circuit of regional British ballrooms that would define much of their lives for the next six months. Here, the group’s pushing of the musical envelope counted for nothing: thought the habitués of UFO and the Tabernacle might have thrilled to the band’s extended experiments, outside London, people expected an altogether more orthodox kind of entertainment – music to dance to, and the simple pleasure of hearing the same hits that had recently blared from their radios.
‘The industry was fundamentally different back then,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘Basically, you made your money gigging. That was your job: being a band meant you did six gigs a week – or if you were lucky nine, with double headers at the weekend. It was all about getting in the van, going off with your gear, and doing a gig. And then you would do a record – maybe if you did well, you did a single. And if you were lucky, that was a hit, and your fee went up.’
‘We’d do anything; we’d go anywhere,’ says Roger Waters. ‘You’d get in the van and look forward to the fifty quid. And it was hard work. I can remember a run of gigs that started in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, and then went on to Norfolk, and the next day we were playing Elgin in Scotland. That is a lot. They could be vicious gigs, too: balconies that overlooked the stage, and people dropping pints of beer on us. And, of course, they’d all want to hear the hits. We often refused to play them.’
‘The one that really sticks in my mind is the Queen’s Hall in Barnstaple: an old-fashioned ballroom that would have pop bands on,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘This place had a balcony around the top – and people were pouring beer on them. We needed the money, but there was a real conflict between the market they were playing into – a Top Twenty market – and what the band were playing: this really avant-garde stuff. We got the same problems every time they went out of London. It was all right when they were in the colleges: everyone would turn up with bells around their necks, carrying incense. But when you went elsewhere, it was difficult for them. They got a very hard time.’
For now, the group’s momentum was maintained, though the pressures of the band’s schedule, exacerbated by his drug use, were beginning to exact their toll on Syd Barrett. In March 1967, they entered the hallowed environs of EMI’s Abbey Road studios to work on their first album. According to the terms of their contract, they were to work with a staff producer named Norman Smith, whose résumé at least contained one implicit recommendation: he had been chief engineer on every Beatles album up to Rubber Soul. Thanks chiefly to Barrett, however, his relationship with his new charges quickly proved to be rather fraught. ‘It was sheer hell,’ he later recalled. ‘There are no pleasant memories. I always left with a headache. Syd was undisciplined: he would never sing the same thing twice. Trying to talk to him was like talking to a brick wall, because his face was so expressionless … he was a child in many ways: up one minute, down the next.’
For all Smith’s trials, in Peter Jenner’s estimation, he pulled off a commendable artistic feat: teasing out Barrett’s sense of pop aesthetics from the instrumental tangle that defined Pink Floyd’s performances. ‘What he did,’ says Jenner, ‘was to say, “Well, you’ve written these jolly good pop songs – so let’s have those, and some weird instrumental breaks.” So instead of being blues songs with weird instrumental breaks, it became pop songs with weird instrumental breaks.’
Notice of the abiding idea was served by the opening track, ‘Astronomy Domine’: from Barrett’s supremely sinister opening growl of guitar, it is obvious that havoc is about to be played with the period’s standard musical norms, but the song’s exploratory, improvisational core is book-ended by passages that betray both a tight sense of musical control, and an intuitive grasp of the melodic demands of pop. Even ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, the instrumental mission-statement that found the spirit of their live shows being poured on to tape, is ultimately a showcase for the group’s ability, having let loose chaos, to purposefully rein it back in. For all the lysergic abandon that takes root inside its first minute – punctuated by the kind of musical tension that Aubrey Powell found so compelling in the band’s live shows – its central riff is the essence of both control and streamlined strength: certainly, when it gloriously re-enters the picture after eight and a half minutes, one gets a sense of the band single-mindedly returning to earth.
