Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (20 page)

Syd Barrett’s presence on the album - eventually called
A Saucerful of Secrets
- remains the subject of speculation. He’s supposedly playing guitar on ‘See-Saw’, ‘Remember a Day’ and ‘Jugband Blues’, and Gilmour believes he’s somewhere in the background on ‘Set the Controls . . .’ The final track, ‘Jugband Blues’, with its eerie, lurching brass arrangement, is the only song to feature Barrett’s lead vocals. Sounding like a ghost, he utters the final prescient line, ‘What exactly is a dream . . . and what exactly is a joke?’

‘We could never write like Syd,’ says Wright. ‘We never had the imagination to come up with the kind of lyrics he did. I cringe at some of my songs, like “Remember a Day”. But something like “Corporal Clegg”, which was one of Roger’s, is just as bad.’

‘ “Corporal Clegg” is a good piece of work,’ insisted Waters later. ‘We had to keep going. Once you’re in a rock ’n’ roll band, you weren’t going to stop. That would have meant going back to architecture.’

Waters’ doggedness is apparent throughout the album. Plotting the movements in the title track but unable to read music, he and Nick Mason scored the piece by inventing their own symbols, prompting Gilmour’s comment that the song was mapped out ‘like an architectural diagram’.

The album misses Barrett and, rather tellingly, one of its weaker tracks, ‘See-Saw’, was originally titled by the band ‘The Most Boring Song I’ve Ever Heard Bar Two’. The record’s true legacy now is the creeping influence of ‘Let There Be More Light’ and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ on all those cerebral seventies rock bands that followed in the Floyd’s wake.

Released in June that year, reactions to the band’s latest creation were mixed. ‘Forget it as background music to a party,’ warned
Record Mirror
in an otherwise upbeat appraisal, while
New Musical Express
dismissed the title track as ‘long and boring, and has little to warrant its monotonous direction’.

‘I was surprised when
Saucerful
was criticised harshly in the press,’ admitted Mason. ‘I thought it had some very new ideas.’

But not everyone was so harsh about the new Floyd. DJ John Peel was moved to reverie by the group’s performance of the title track at the Midsummer High Weekend festival in London’s Hyde Park the day after the album’s release. Having experienced the performance from a boat floating on the Serpentine, Peel announced in
Disc
magazine that ‘it was like a religious experience . . . they just seemed to fill the sky and everything. ’ His lengthy ramblings earned him a place in the Pseuds Corner column of
Private Eye
.

The Midsummer High Weekend was the first free festival ever staged in Hyde Park, paving the way for free shows in the park from The Rolling Stones and Blind Faith. Its organisers were the ever-resourceful team at Blackhill Enterprises, who fared better with the Royal Parks Commission than they had with the Arts Council earlier in the year. Floyd performed alongside Roy Harper, Jethro Tull and Blackhill’s great white hopes Tyrannosaurus Rex. ‘Hyde Park in ’68 was wonderful because it reminded us of our roots,’ ventured Nick Mason. ‘However spurious they may have been. It was a reminder that we were still part of this thing, which was by then a fairly commercial venture. So it gave us credibility.’ An unofficial launch for the Syd-less Floyd, both of the group’s hits, ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’, were conspicuously absent from the setlist that day.

While Pink Floyd road-tested a new sound, their former singer was in professional limbo. Peter Jenner had booked sessions for Syd at Abbey Road, but they’d proved difficult. Barrett’s odd behaviour in the past had all but made him persona non grata at the studio. The King family’s flat at Richmond Hill had provided a saner environment after Cromwell Road, but in his unwanted role as the freaks’ pied piper, Barrett soon had disciples beating a path to its door.

By the autumn of 1967, the Lesmoir-Gordons had moved some 400 yards from Cromwell Road into Egerton Court, a rambling mansion block opposite South Kensington tube station near Brompton Road. Film director Roman Polanski had been so taken with the building’s imposing décor and 1930s-era spiral staircase that he’d featured both in his 1965 movie
Repulsion
. David Gale, Dave Henderson, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, Ponji Robinson and Storm Thorgerson would soon occupy rooms at Egerton Court, its location being ideal for the Royal College of Art, where some of their number were now studying.

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon was now working as an editor for the future film director Hugh Hudson, then directing commercials, but already responsible for the opening credits to the James Bond films. ‘The flat became a focal point for a very arty set,’ remembers Po. ‘Mick and Marianne used to come round to drop acid with Nigel - all of them watching the reflection of crystals spinning on the walls. Donovan would drop round, and everyone was wearing Granny Takes a Trip clothes and looking terribly groovy. We were the original Kings Road hippies.’

‘Nigel and Jenny took the biggest room at Egerton Court,’ remembers frequent house guest Emo. ‘David Gale had the smallest. It was so small, in fact, that he had to have a bed on stilts, so that there was somewhere for him to work. Storm was in a room that was about twenty-five feet long with an incredibly high ceiling. And he painted the walls bright orange and the window frames with red gloss paint. It was a complete horror-show, but he was like, “It’s over the top, which is how I like it.” ’

‘I was a student, negotiating everything from love affairs to illicit deals to supposedly working at college,’ recalls Storm. ‘I was not in the best emotional state personally.’ Matthew Scurfield, another resident, says that ‘For Storm, there was a lot of talking and dissecting of the cosmos and the universe.’

Throughout the remainder of 1967 and the early months of 1968, the occupants of Egerton Court continued their stoic consumption of narcotics. But, perhaps inevitably, something had to give.

‘I spent three years sleeping on my brother’s floor there,’ recalls Matthew Scurfield, who took his first LSD trip at the flat. ‘That was where I got to know Nigel and Jenny. A lot of the things that have been said about Egerton Court
are
true. It’s not bending the truth to say there was a lot of acid-guzzling going on there. We took it in huge doses because no one knew what they were doing. But it wasn’t just a load of people lying around doing it. We were all very existential people. So the front part of the brain and the intellect were very much to the fore of what was going on.’

‘We often had great times on acid,’ says Po. ‘I can remember laughing myself silly for eight hours and wandering into pubs when I was on it and drinking pints of beer. But one of the cumulative effects of acid is that it opens your mind up to a lot of sensitive issues, and, after a while, those sensitive issues don’t go away. What people refer to as “acid flashbacks” are really your mind and nervous system being opened up to sensitivities that wouldn’t be opened up under normal circumstances. We all started to feel very raw. Whereas we used to smoke dope every day, now the dope was starting to open up those sensitivities as well. So suddenly you’re smoking a joint, and that’s making you feel paranoid as well. So the effects were kicking in for everybody. The joke was gone, and we were all feeling very edgy.’

When Nigel and Jenny left Egerton Court for a trip abroad, Syd and Lindsay took over their room. ‘That was the start of a complete nightmare for the rest of the flat,’ says Po. ‘Because by that time Syd was not functioning very well. He could be charming, but he could also be anxious, withdrawn and aggressive.’

‘I used to hear thumping noises and screams coming from their room. I knew what was happening,’ recalls David Gale. ‘Syd would start off tickling Lindsay and then it would quickly get much darker.’

‘There are all these stories about him hitting her,’ elaborates Po. ‘He’s supposed to have smashed his guitar and burnt her with cigarette ends, but I never actually saw that happen. I’d hear these furious rows, though, and I’d bang on the door. One night Syd opened it and came out, wearing a pair of red velvet trousers and nothing else. I thought he was going to hit me. I told him he had to stop as he was freaking the rest of us out. There’d be all these discussions in the kitchen the next morning, and I started locking my door at night, which I’d never done before.’

Emo and Matthew Scurfield were both there one night when they heard screams coming from Syd and Lindsay’s bedroom. ‘Matthew went in, as we could hear Syd banging Lindsay’s head off the floor, and Syd nutted him,’ says Emo. ‘Matthew came out bleeding so I went in, picked Lindsay up, and Syd saw the look in my eyes and backed off. It was awful to see someone behaving like that. I don’t think he knew what he was doing.’

‘Lindsay would lock herself in the loo and Syd would tell you to fuck off when you tried to intervene,’ says Matthew. ‘In the end I thought: Fuck it! I don’t want to be your mate any more. But it was odd, because sometimes he could be completely normal. It was like when you were kids at school and you saw a fight in the playground at lunchtime, and then, twenty minutes later, you’d see the same kid sitting in class, quite normal, as if nothing had happened. Syd was still thinking about his music at this time. I can remember seeing him at Egerton Court experimenting with a clock by putting it in a bath of water and recording the sound it made. But then the next minute it would all change again.’

Interviewed in 1988, the future critic and broadcaster Jonathan Meades talked of visiting a friend, Harry Dodson, at the flat, as a teenager. ‘Syd was this weird, exotic and mildly famous creature by that time, who happened to be living in this flat with these people who were, to some extent, pimping off him both professionally and privately,’ he recalled. ‘I went in there and there was this terrible noise. It sounded like heating pipes shaking. I said, “What’s that?” and he [Po] sort of giggled and said, “That’s Syd having a bad trip. We put him in the linen cupboard”.’

Meades says now that ‘I must have gone to Egerton Court about three times. I’m always reminded of that Martin Amis book,
Dead Babies
, in which he describes this reckless group of drug-takers. That Cambridge lot made me think of them, especially extraordinary characters like Emo. They were all much more gung-ho in what they’d do than I was. Any sense of self-survival seemed pretty absent in that crowd.’

‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ insists Po. ‘I don’t think Syd was still taking acid but he was smoking a lot of dope, and he used to get paranoid. What Jonty Meades called the laundry cupboard was, in fact, the toilet. There was no laundry cupboard. The toilet was like a cupboard - no window and one bare bulb. One day Syd was walking down the corridor, then the next thing I hear is him shouting, “Let me out! Let me out!” Somehow he’d locked himself in the toilet with the light off and had become very disorientated. He was probably very stoned and he began panicking. It took me twenty minutes to explain to him how to open the catch on the door. Jonty had walked into the flat and asked what happened. I think I said he’d locked himself in. When Syd came out he was hyperventilating, running in sweat.’

Meades’ friend Harry Dodson now recalls meeting Syd only a few times, and that he ‘seemed beyond all normal communication’.

Pop stardom, drug use and romantic entanglements would all become an issue.

‘There’s some suggestion that the women were as much of a problem as the drugs,’ offers David Gale. ‘Apart from the girlfriends, Syd would have lots of strange groupie girls coming round the house. Some of them specialised in making exotic shirts for rock stars and then shagging them - nice work if you can get it.’

‘At one point he was wearing lipstick, dressing in high heels and believing he had homosexual tendencies,’ David Gilmour told one writer years later. ‘I remember all sorts of strange things happening.’

As Jenny Fabian attests, Syd’s attitude towards sex seemed to be as distracted as it was for most other areas of his life. ‘By the time I had my liaison with Syd, he was very far gone,’ she told writer Mark Paytress in 2004. ‘Everyone was
liaisoning
all over the place in those days. But Syd wasn’t the sort of guy to flirt. I’d never seen him flirt. I wouldn’t say he was madly sexual, he certainly wasn’t predatory. If you were there and you were cool, there’d just be the smile or the indication that you were a friend enough to stay. It wasn’t anything more than that.’

For those that had known Syd at art school in Cambridge, the change in his behaviour was especially troubling. The happy-go-lucky Barrett of three years earlier was now absent. John Watkins had last seen his friend playing at the art school’s 1966 Christmas party. One evening, two years later, he ran into David Gilmour backstage at a Floyd show. ‘I asked how Syd was and Dave said, “A bit weird.” I got both their numbers and I phoned Syd up a week later, but he’d completely disappeared into himself. He probably knew who I was, but I couldn’t get anywhere with him.’

Yet by the summer of 1968, Syd wasn’t the only one experiencing the aftermath of the previous year’s LSD use.

‘Our group had split right down the middle,’ says David Gale. ‘With half of us going spiritual and half of us going to shrinks, myself in the latter half.’

That year, the Lesmoir-Gordons followed the lead of other Cantabrigians before them, disappearing to India to follow the Sant Mat path. Meanwhile, Matthew Scurfield and David Gale began attending sessions with colleagues of the celebrated R.D. Laing.

Earlier that year, Roger Waters claims to have driven Syd to an appointment with Laing, but says that Barrett refused to get out of the car. David Gale tried to engineer a repeat visit some months later. He remembers: ‘I called Ronnie Laing from Egerton Court at the behest of everyone there, because we’d all said, “Enough”, in spite of our absurd sixties coolness about “interrupting somebody else’s trip, man”. I told Laing that I was a friend of Syd Barrett’s and that I thought he would benefit from some psychotherapy. Laing said he wasn’t going to see anybody that didn’t come of their own accord.’ Promising Laing that Syd would attend, Gale booked a taxi. ‘When it arrived, we said, “Oh, Syd, we’ve arranged an appointment for you with R.D. Laing” - who was considered the Elvis of psychotherapy - and Syd just said no and that was it.’