Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (13 page)

‘I’d sent out letters to all the managers and agents I could think of,’ says Norman Smith now. ‘I got one back from Bryan Morrison, who invited me to go and see Pink Floyd. I’d never heard of them and, to be honest, I had no real interest in psychedelia. But he took me to the UFO club, and, while the music did absolutely nothing for me, I could see that they did have one hell of a following even then. I figured I should put my business hat on, because it was obvious to me that we could sell some records.’ The proposed deal hit a snag when Jenner and King requested an advance. ‘They wanted some front money - £5,000,’ says Smith. ‘But EMI didn’t usually pay an advance. It was difficult to get it past the company’s management but eventually I did.’

According to Smith, EMI’s then head of A&R, Beecher Stevens, ‘rowed himself in on the deal’, and has since been wrongly credited with signing the group. Nevertheless, Jenner recalls that the label was ‘very excited to be seen as so hip and so groovy by landing the band’. Better still, The Pink Floyd had secured an album deal rather than one dependent on hit singles.

The spurned Joe Boyd had nobly produced the new versions of ‘Arnold Layne’ and its B-side ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ (with, as he later recalled, ‘Roger over my shoulder, extending his big index finger on one of the faders’). However, EMI’s regulations did not include using outside producers, while the Morrison Agency hiked up the band’s fee for playing the UFO club. Joe Boyd’s involvement with Pink Floyd was all but over. As he complained: ‘It was a case of, “Thanks a lot for doing ‘Arnold Layne’, Joe. See you around.” ’

‘There was always a little bit of needle between Joe and ourselves after that,’ says Jenner. ‘But we didn’t have time to be doing UFO every time they wanted us to. So now we’re having the conversation of, “Well, how much money are you going to pay?” Joe felt he’d been done over, which, it has to be said, he had been. I like to think we’ve all got over it now.’

Boyd wrote of the coup in his book,
White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s
: ‘Like me, Jenner and King were out of their depth. None of us imagined that decades later you could go to the remotest part of the globe and find cassettes of
Dark Side of the Moon
rattling around in the glove compartments of Third World taxis.’

A song about a fetishist whose ‘strange hobby’ involves stealing women’s underwear, Pink Floyd’s debut single, ‘Arnold Layne’, was released on 11 March 1967. The Kinks and The Who were already dabbling with more outlandish lyrical ideas as well as blazing a trail for quirkily English bands that were happy to sound quirkily English. ‘Arnold Layne’ was a creepier addition to the pack. The lyrics were supposedly inspired by a real incident in Cambridge, where an unidentified knicker-thief had raided Mary Waters’ washing line. Roger had regaled Syd with the story.

The music employed a woozy, merry-go-round rhythm, with Barrett’s vocals sounding defiantly English, bordering on the deadpan. It is Richard Wright’s Farfisa organ that provides the clearest link to psychedelia, splashing colour in place of a traditional guitar solo, and dominating the song. In the spring of 2006, touring as keyboard player in David Gilmour’s solo band, Wright would sing Syd’s lead vocals on a version of the song.

‘Arnold Layne’ is a reminder of just how integral the quiet, diffident Wright was to Pink Floyd’s earliest work. ‘Everyone, including me, underestimated Rick,’ admits Peter Jenner. ‘But he was so important to those early records. I remember him sorting out those harmonies and arrangements, telling people what to sing, tuning Roger’s bass . . . I also felt there was a lot more to the way Rick and Syd worked together than history allows for.’

With a little help from the management (‘We spent a couple of hundred quid trying to buy it into the charts,’ admitted Andrew King), ‘Arnold Layne’ reached number 20 in the UK, and was banned by Radio Caroline and Radio London, due to its supposedly risqué content. ‘We can’t think what they’re so perturbed about,’ protested Waters in
Disc and Music Echo
. ‘It’s a song about a clothes fetishist who’s obviously a bit kinked. A very simple, straightforward song about one sort of human predicament.’

UFO’s former house band had gone decidedly overground, even if a mooted appearance on the BBC’s flagship
Top of the Pops
was cancelled when the single began reversing down the charts. ‘We want to be pop stars,’ Waters told one interviewer. On the surface, the band seemed willing to jump through the requisite hoops: high-kicking in their best shirts and boots for a promotional photo outside EMI’s Manchester Square HQ; posing self-importantly with EMI bigwig Beecher Stevens in his office; and, above all, submitting to a punishing tour schedule, courtesy of the Morrison Agency, that found them zigzagging across country and frequently playing two gigs a night.

‘Arnold Layne’ aside, much of the group’s set still consisted of the less chart-friendly ‘freak-outs’ that wowed the mightily stoned in the UFO club. The reception was markedly different in the provinces: disgruntled punters poured beer on the band from the balconies, and Waters, who was unafraid to offer a withering aside to even the most hostile crowd, took a deep gash to the forehead one night from a thrown coin. Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell spent six months driving the band’s van to gigs, and saw how badly The Pink Floyd’s music could go down: ‘You’d play to a bunch of, say, twenty mods, who all stood around looking horrified by this psychedelic band that didn’t mean fuck all, when they just wanted to listen to Junior Walker.’

As The Pink Floyd became EMI’s trophy underground band, the scene that spawned them was changing. By the spring of 1967, Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones had been busted for drugs, and the music business’s preoccupation with illicit substances became perfect tabloid fodder. The
News of the World
splashed headlines such as ‘POP SONGS AND THE CULT OF LSD’, and The Pink Floyd were misquoted as describing themselves as ‘social deviants’. The paper had confused them with Mick Farren’s band, The Social Deviants. Lawyers were consulted and The Pink Floyd received an apology. Holding their nerve, they even managed to convince EMI that their music was in no way recreating the experience of tripping, as accused. (‘Quite how we managed that, I don’t know,’ admitted Nick Mason.)

While The Pink Floyd escaped, others were less fortunate. Caught up in the furore, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins was arrested for possession of marijuana and jailed for six months. (‘I was careless, incredibly careless,’ he says now.) Before going to Wormwood Scrubs prison, he arranged for Joe Boyd to take sole control of the UFO club. As an A&R man, Boyd understandably decided to focus on booking new bands rather than staging more mixed-media happenings.

In the following years Boyd would help orchestrate the careers of Fairport Convention and Nick Drake, among many others. But for some, this more commercial approach to UFO was indicative of the schism that existed in the underground scene - simply that it was no longer ‘underground’. The Pink Floyd’s move to EMI dovetailed with this change. ‘I thought it was a shame that the Floyd weren’t “ours” any more,’ says Jenny Fabian.

Mick Farren takes a more pragmatic approach. ‘It was pretty obvious to the more rational among us that the Floyd would end up on a major label, but some of the freaks saw it as a sell-out. I remember the words “Pink Finks” being painted on the wall of the UFO toilet. But it did bother me how they seemed to back off in major haste from the drug culture in which they’d made their name when the shit really started going down - the Stones being busted, Hoppy going to jail, major street harassment . . . That seemed like a cop-out.’

Yet for the group themselves, the scene had given them a launch pad for their music rather than a lifestyle philosophy. Having opted out of college and work to pursue a musical career, the pursuit of that career was more important than the fortunes of the London Free School or
International Times
.

‘There were elements of the “underground” that we did tune into,’ says Nick Mason now. ‘You supplied the music while people did creative dance, painted their faces, bathed in a giant jelly. But probably through being middle-class, reasonably well-educated people, we could talk our way through a certain amount of stuff, including making ourselves sound as if we were part of the current movement.’

Roger Waters felt an even greater distance. ‘To this day I still don’t know exactly what a lot of that stuff was about,’ he admitted. ‘You’d hear the odd thing about a revolution, but nothing specific. I read
International Times
a few times, but what was the Notting Hill Free School actually all about? What was it meant to do? I never gathered what it was, apart from a few “happenings”. The “happenings” that we put on were always a joke.’

EMI may have been persuaded to pay for the band’s new Ford Transit and a new Binson Echorec, the box of tricks that helped create those space-age sound effects, but splashing out for a hotel was unheard of. Gigs in the far north still meant a night drive back to London. The ramshackle crew mucked in together. Peter Wynne-Willson loaded gear and patched together Floyd’s homemade lighting rig between gigs. Peter had yet to pass his driving test, however, so Blackhill’s secretary, the late June Child, would often drive the van instead. The pretty, blonde-haired June would prove an integral part of Pink Floyd’s set-up, and a shoulder for Syd to cry on. June would later marry Barrett acolyte and Blackhill client Marc Bolan.

‘I would buy a lot of equipment and materials to experiment with for different lighting effects,’ recalls Peter Wynne-Willson, ‘and each month June would come to Earlham Street to go through the mass of receipts. To make this boring process more interesting we developed a system whereby, on either side of a little table under the high-level bed, we would sit with our feet in each other’s crotch. Such a delightful little ritual we had. June wore the shortest of skirts.’

Nevertheless, the whirlwind of gigs was soon taking its toll on Blackhill’s star player. ‘I saw Floyd’s touring schedule years later,’ said one Floyd confidant. ‘Whoever programmed them to run around England in the way they did in the condition they did? Sheer madness. It would have been debilitating for anyone, never mind someone on drugs.’

Matthew Scurfield was now about to start his acting career in theatre rep, but followed his brother Ponji to Earlham Street, and saw, up close, the effect of Syd’s new workload. ‘Syd was someone who wasn’t totally in the groove, like the other members of the group,’ he says. ‘He wasn’t ambitious in the way Roger was. I always thought Syd was like an outsider even within the Floyd. It was very obvious at times that a lot of their ambition thwarted his art. It was always, “Come on Syd. It’s time to go!” ’

Barrett’s drug use from the time remains the subject of much speculation. What was Syd taking, how much was he taking and how often? And what about the rest of the band? ‘Back then I don’t think Roger and Nick hardly ever took drugs,’ recalls Andrew King. ‘I always thought Roger was a “down the pub for a couple of pints” chap. Rick was smoking some dope. Syd was trying everything.’

‘Syd, Andrew and I smoked dope,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘Although I don’t recall Syd ever saying to me, “Let’s take a trip”, I knew he was doing LSD. How much, I don’t know. I’ve always been told that he had what you might call “religious acid friends”, yet I don’t remember Syd being evangelical about LSD. But I do think it was a trigger for his problems.’

‘Syd definitely wasn’t taking LSD every day in Earlham Street,’ insists Peter Wynne-Willson. ‘It may have been the dope rather than the acid that brought on problems. I know the dope is a lot stronger these days, but young men who smoke dope between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two are particularly susceptible to mental trouble if they are of a sensitive disposition. With Syd, I don’t remember a trip that was a turning point or anything like that. He sometimes had a hard time on dope, but not on acid. In England there was mostly hash available. Syd and I would generally smoke joints, sometimes chillums; we rarely smoked pipes of pure hash together.’

For Peter Jenner, Pink Floyd’s (at some point that year they seemed to lose the definitive article) appearance at ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’ at Alexandra Palace in April ‘coincided with the height of acid use that summer’. Staged as a fundraiser for
International Times
, which had just been raided and all but closed down by the police, it would be John Hopkins’ last organisational feat before going to prison.

‘I was the one that parlayed the rent of the hall,’ says Hoppy now, ‘and they were
still
looking for me years after. It was a gas. Ten thousand people must have gone through the doors at some time. Michael X’s friends were de facto security. What we didn’t realise till later was that they pocketed the money that people were paying. So very little made it back to central control.’

Pink Floyd were billed to play alongside The Pretty Things, The Soft Machine and the underground’s latest overground star, Arthur Brown, soon to enjoy his first hit single, ‘Fire’, and performing while wearing a burning head-dress. There were avant-garde film shows, beatnik poetry readings, a fairground helter-skelter and the opportunity to smoke banana skins in a fibreglass igloo. John Lennon was among those who turned up to watch the madness.

That same night the Floyd had played a Dutch TV show before catching a flight back to London and driving at breakneck speed to Alexandra Palace in Muswell Hill. Peter Jenner, eager to make the most of the event, had dropped a tab of LSD a little too early. ‘I was still driving the van while I was coming up,’ he says. Meanwhile, Peter’s old university pal, ‘the alternative doctor’ Sam Hutt was in a similar state. ‘I drove up with Rick Wright, and I was tripping,’ he recalls. ‘Driving on acid? Not something I would recommend to anyone. All I can remember is being transfixed by this shiny cape Rick was wearing - or at least I
think
he was wearing.’ Inside the venue, Hutt would become similarly transfixed by the helter-skelter. ‘I just kept going up and down, up and down, getting reborn every time,’ he laughs.