Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (24 page)

A trade name for the drug Methaqualone and prescribed as a sleeping tablet, Mandrax had become the favoured pill of London’s hip set. After fighting off the initial temptation to fall asleep, usually by consuming mugfuls of tea or coffee, users that could stay conscious during the first thirty minutes would then find themselves slipping into a blissful, waking trance.

‘Mandrax was everywhere,’ admits Fields. ‘Everyone was taking it. Dave Gilmour’s flatmate fell off the balcony at Richmond Mansions because he was on it. Amazingly, he escaped unhurt.’

‘There was,’ Emo points out, ‘a soft grass verge underneath.’

Jenny Fabian also visited Syd at the flat, and was shocked by his decline. She recalls him barely acknowledging her. She also took Mandrax with him. ‘You enter this weird, fuzzy twilight world where everything’s comfortable,’ she recalled. ‘It’s a great place to be and you could see why Syd wanted to be there, because he’d obviously bombarded the old brain cells with acid.’ However, like Duggie, she also witnessed plenty of moments of clarity amid all the drug-induced chaos. ‘Every so often he’d make an incredibly pertinent remark that made you realise he was probably saner than the rest of us.’

‘I knew people who took more drugs than Syd and were much bigger casualties than him,’ insists Fields. ‘Also, in the circles we moved in, madness was considered socially acceptable. There was almost a romance about mental disturbance, the same way there was about drugs. I still think that was part of it with Syd. It always felt to me as if he’d fallen into a depression more than anything. He was forever saying, “I have to get another band together . . .” but he just didn’t have the drive. Without any schedule, he could lie in bed thinking he could do anything in the world he wanted. But when he made a decision that limited his possibilities.’

Syd even started painting again, or talking about painting. ‘But he would never finish anything, never produced a final work,’ says Duggie. It was during these quieter spells that Syd would reveal a painful awareness of his circumstances. ‘I never had a conversation with Syd about being a pop star, when he
was
a pop star,’ says Fields. ‘But we had a significant conversation about it later. Syd would say to me, “I’m a failed pop star.” Then he’d turn on me. “But what are you? You’re twenty-three and you’re not even famous. I’m already a has-been.” ’

Considering his frame of mind, EMI’s decision to put Syd back in a recording studio seems like an incredible leap of faith. However,
The Madcap Laughs
had sold over 5,000 copies in just two months. Syd was recording again by February 1970, with David Gilmour producing and Jerry Shirley playing drums. The process would prove as arduous and disjointed as before. Gilmour tried recording the musicians first and getting Syd to sing along to the track later. When that proved difficult, he recorded Barrett first and put the other musicians on afterwards. The notion that Syd could work with musicians simultaneously seemed out of the question.

Pieced together over five months that year, some of the tracks to surface on the album, later titled
Barrett
, including ‘Baby Lemonade’, ‘Dominoes’ and ‘Gigolo Aunt’, showed traces of Syd’s former sparkle. Others, such as ‘Rats’ and ‘Wolfpack’, were compelling in their sheer mania. Richard Wright added welcome keyboards to the record, helping Gilmour to coax their old friend through the recording process. ‘By then, we were just trying to help Syd any way we could,’ Wright recalls. ‘We weren’t worrying about getting the best guitar sound. You could forget about that.’

A curious Duggie Fields dropped in on the sessions. ‘Syd was lost and having to be told what to do,’ he recalls. ‘He’d just zoned out. But you didn’t know if he was deliberately messing up, because he did play mind games with people.’

‘He rarely took any notice of what was said, or repeated what he’d done in the same way,’ explained Gilmour. ‘He never communicated whether he felt things were going well or badly.’ One night, the guitarist offered Syd a lift back to his flat. Barrett was silent throughout the journey. Dropped off outside his front door, he turned to Gilmour and showed a tiny flicker of gratitude. ‘He turned to me and said, “Thank you”, very quietly,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘That was the only moment that anything like that happened.’

Backing up Duggie Fields’s claims that Syd could be perfectly lucid at times, a BBC session for John Peel’s
Top Gear
show recorded at the start of the sessions had found Barrett on unusually good form. A brief return to live performance later that summer at The Music and Fashion Festival at Kensington’s Olympia found him stricken with nerves. ‘I can’t remember why we did it,’ admitted Gilmour, who played bass with Jerry Shirley on drums. Promoted by Bryan Morrison, the six-day event also included Syd acolytes Tyrannosaurus Rex and Barrett’s idol Bo Diddley. Syd acquitted himself well enough, but raced through his four-song set, dashing offstage as soon as the last chord was struck.

Sadly, for all Barrett’s moments of clarity, there were still many instances of great confusion. One evening, Syd showed up at the Wrights’ new home in Bayswater, thinking he was still in Pink Floyd and that they had a gig to play that night. One afternoon, bumping unexpectedly into Roger Waters in Harrods department store, Syd fled the shop, dropping his bag in a panic. Waters picked it up to discover it filled with children’s sweets. On a whim, Syd swapped his red Austin Mini for a 1950s Pontiac Parisienne Convertible, which T.Rex’s percussionist Mickey Finn had acquired in a raffle. The car would remain unused outside Wetherby Mansions, stickered with parking tickets, until Barrett gave it away to a passing stranger in exchange for a packet of cigarettes. In hindsight, it might have been for the best.

‘When he became distracted from reality, you would not want to be in a car with Syd,’ remembers Emo. ‘He’d suddenly lose all concentration, stop driving and just get out. One time while driving he just stopped in the middle of the road and started messing around with his shoelaces. Or else he’d get out of the car, just disappear, and leave you to deal with all the irate drivers backed up behind. It was as if he just forgot he was driving.’

Despairing of Syd’s behaviour, Duggie briefly moved out to stay with another friend, but came back when he found his new housemate’s behaviour even more erratic. Within months, Syd had disappeared back to Cambridge. Gala followed suit, returning to her parents’ home in Ely. It was left to Duggie to dismiss the various groupies and drug monkeys that had billeted themselves in the flat.

Barrett found himself back at 183 Hills Road. His mother had continued to let the vacant rooms to lodgers and Syd felt that his former practice space and dope-smoking retreat at the front of the house would bring him too close to the strangers occupying the family home. Instead, he moved into the cellar. Accessible only by a trap door positioned in the hallway, the L-shaped hidey-hole, with a tiny window that peeked out on the back garden lawn, was big enough for a mattress, Syd’s record collection and books.

‘Then Gala rang, to tell me the news,’ laughs Duggie. ‘She and Syd had gotten engaged and Syd was going to become a doctor.’ Nothing would come of it. Gala began working as a housekeeper for drummer Jerry Shirley. A jealous Syd accused her of having an affair. The engagement was over. Though not before the couple had amassed a number of engagement presents from well-wishers. One day, a crestfallen Syd led Gala down the stairs to the cellar, where the presents were laid out. ‘Gala told me it was like something out of
Great Expectations
,’ recalls Sue Kingsford. ‘Like Miss Havisham. I think it rather freaked her out.’

Libby Gausden, now married with a baby, visited Syd and Gala in the basement room. Libby’s mother was still in close contact with Win, and he had asked to see her new son. ‘Syd was gone, completely
gone
,’ remembers Libby sadly. ‘He even thought the baby was his. He was with this beautiful girl, Gala, and I remember the look on her face, as if to say, “Oh God”. . .’

Before long, Gala, too, would be gone.

When they weren’t nursing their estranged frontman, Waters and Gilmour still had their day jobs to attend to.
Ummagumma
’s sales had reassured EMI that there was a market for, as the group called it, ‘our weird shit’. In the meantime, the Morrison Agency had kept Floyd out on the road, plying their wares to the faithful, especially in Germany, France, The Netherlands and Belgium. Floyd’s gig sheet included repeat visits to the likes of Amsterdam’s Paradiso, a psychedelically painted theatre that modelled itself on America’s hip Fillmore West. ‘They seemed to pick up on what we were doing very quickly,’ said Nick Mason. ‘They made us feel very welcome.’

Back on home turf, they still played every university refectory, Top Rank ballroom and hippie hotspot that would take them. In September 1969, Floyd mucked in with Free, The Nice and Roy Harper at the Rugby Rag’s Blues Festival in Warwickshire. The event had been organised by The Rolling Stones’ old tour manager, Sam Jonas Cutler, who, a year earlier, had introduced Nick Mason to his friend, the musician, poet and composer Ron Geesin.

Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, Geesin learned to play the violin and the banjo, and began his musical career with a jazz band, The Downtown Syncopators, in 1961. Living in Notting Hill, he had recorded sessions for John Peel and had shared the bill with Pink Floyd at ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’ in 1967, by which time he’d made his own album,
A Raise of Eyebrows
. ‘I’d barely heard any of the Floyd’s music, though,’ he says now, ‘and when I did, I described it as “astral wandering”.’

By 1969, Ron and his wife, Frankie, had become friends with Nick and Lindy Mason. Geesin was now recording incidental music for TV advertisements and documentaries. In October, Mason introduced Geesin to Roger Waters. The two later booked a game of golf, with Waters demonstrating his keenly competitive edge on the course, though, as Geesin noted later, ‘I was slightly better than him at the time.’ From here on, Ron was drawn into the Floyd’s orbit, also spending time with Rick and Juliette. ‘Rick was particularly interested in modern jazz, and I was into the vintage jazz,’ recalls Ron. ‘We spent many an evening with him and Juliette, eating dinner, listening to music, but whenever any pot-smoking started, we stayed out of it. I was always a pint-of-beer man.’

Waters and Geesin collaborated for the first time at the end of the year on the soundtrack to a documentary,
The Body
. Based on writer Anthony Smith’s book of the same name, the film was a glorified biology lesson, narrated by actors Frank Finlay and Vanessa Redgrave. John Peel had recommended Geesin to the film’s producer Tony Garrett. Realising that Garrett required specific songs as well as background music, Geesin asked Waters to help. ‘Nicky Mason was a very nice chap and a good friend,’ said Ron, ‘but he didn’t have that manic flair to do something crazy and make it a piece of art. You could tell Roger was the creative force in Pink Floyd.’ The two worked on their music separately; Geesin in his ‘padded cell box’ in Notting Hill, Waters at home in Islington, and, later, in London’s Island Studios.

Geesin’s cello, violin and piano-led compositions shared space with four Waters-sung numbers and a couple of collaborative sound effects efforts. In the grand Floyd spirit of recycling, many ideas in
The Body
would reappear on their own albums, including the use of female backing vocalists and a repeat of the lyric ‘breathe, breathe in the air . . .’ on
Dark Side of the Moon
. Inevitably, the rest of Pink Floyd were bundled into the studio to give an uncredited performance on one track, ‘Give Birth to a Smile’.

It came as little surprise then when Waters asked Geesin to collaborate on Pink Floyd’s next studio album. After the previous year’s
The Massed Gadgets of the Auximines
, the band were still taken with the idea of a single lengthy composition, split into individual movements. Early in 1970, they premiered a piece then titled ‘The Amazing Pudding’, for which Gilmour had been the original catalyst, devising a chord sequence on the guitar that reminded him of Elmer Bernstein’s theme music to the 1960 Western movie
The Magnificent Seven
.

The presence of a choir and orchestral players during ‘The Final Lunacy’ at the Royal Albert Hall had triggered Waters’ interest in using the same on a Pink Floyd album. By 1970 many rock groups coveted the highbrow status of classical musicians, making the idea of performing with orchestras a fashionable pursuit. The Nice, The Moody Blues and Deep Purple (EMI Harvest’s other great white hopes) had all taken the plunge, with variable results. Now it would be Pink Floyd’s turn.

Gilmour’s movie theme intro now prefaced over twenty minutes of music. ‘It sounded like the theme to some awful Western,’ recalled Waters, interviewed in 1976. ‘Almost like a pastiche. Which is why we thought it would be a good idea to cover it with horns and strings and voices.’ Waters asked Ron Geesin to help out, before the band began another US tour.

‘They went off to the States and left me to get on with it,’ says Ron now. ‘They handed me this backing track, and I wrote out a score for a choir and brass players, sat in my studio, stripped to my underpants in the unbelievably hot summer of 1970. All I had was a rough mix of what they’d put down and edited together, but one of the problems was that the speeds didn’t always match up.’ Waters and Mason, never the most virtuoso of musicians, had recorded the backing track in just one take, hampered by a new EMI ruling which rationed supplies of tape, thereby prohibiting too many takes. As the piece was over twenty minutes long, this resulted in a wavering tempo. As Mason dryly explained, ‘It lacked the metronomic timekeeping that would have made life easier for everyone.’

Aside from Waters, the band had expressed only the sketchiest of ideas to Geesin before disappearing on tour. ‘As far as I can remember,’ says Geesin, ‘Rick came round to my studio one morning and we went through a few phrases, but that was it. I still have all the scraps of paper from those meetings with the band, and there are no notes at all from my meeting with Rick. With Dave, I still have a scrap on which I jotted down his suggestions for a theme, and on the other side the theme I came up with.’