Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (5 page)

In the classroom, Syd was known for his high jinks. One lecturer regularly had his slide show art history lessons disrupted, as Syd led the class out through the rear windows of the darkened room and back in through the door, ensuring a constant stream of reappearing pupils. On other occasions, he would hide his guitar under his desk and begin strumming it with his feet, infuriating the lecturer, who couldn’t understand where the noise was coming from.

‘I remember Syd as being obstinate and rebellious with tutors,’ says Richard Jacobs. ‘He liked to make a scene and would storm out of a lecture hall. He just had this thing where he didn’t want to be told what to do. We were all going on a field trip one day and for some reason Syd refused to get on the coach. No idea why. He wouldn’t say. He’d just have these tantrums. It was quite feminine in a way.’

John Watkins also observed the unconventional dynamic in the Barrett household: ‘Syd had become the man of the house after his dad died. He loved his mum, but he was very funny and very rude to her. I think he was challenging her and seeing how far he could go. His bedroom at home was his domain, and if his mother brought in a cup of tea, he’d start shouting, “Get out of the room, woman!” ’

‘Syd’s mother, Win, was a hearty, wonderful woman,’ recalls Libby Gausden. ‘She only saw the good in people which is why Syd was allowed to get away with murder. She was also older than all our mothers. She had had Syd’s brothers, Don and Alan, very early on. Don was in the RAF and Alan was an academic. They were both bald by thirty! Completely different from Syd. But he was just different from the rest of the family. But Syd had been the same before his father died. Syd’s dad was
always
in his study. So Syd had always been left alone to do as he pleased.’

Away from the lunchtime music sessions, Syd’s approach to his art was frequently erratic but often yielded results. To the frustration of others, Syd spent more time painting in his back garden than in the college, but, with an assessment looming, would show up at the last possible moment with a masterpiece. ‘One minute his pictures would be figurative, the next abstract,’ recalls John Gordon. ‘He was always experimenting, trying out different styles. Somewhere I have a black-and-white photo I took in his back garden of Syd holding a canvas that’s nearly as big as him, and it’s an abstract, in dark ochre colours, of a bit of fabric - possibly a shirt - slapped on the canvas with paint thrown all over it.’

Syd’s behaviour was still, at this point, viewed as nothing more than mildly eccentric, and his drug use was far from public.

‘Syd loved his cannabis,’ says Libby Gausden. ‘He was certainly smoking it at a time when you could still get away with smoking it on the top deck of the bus, which he did. I never smoked it. None of the Cambridge girls did at the time, though I think that changed when some of them went to London.’

‘I never saw Syd smoke dope but we knew it was around,’ says John Gordon. ‘I moved out of home when I went to art school and although I never got into dope, my flat in Clarendon Street was a crash pad, where people used to drop by to smoke. It was one of those places where you’d wake up in the middle of the night and find people baking banana skins in the oven and trying to smoke them. There was a bunch that used to come round that included two local guys, Pip and Emo, who both ended up working for Pink Floyd. They could show up any time of the day or night.’

Ian Carter, known as Pip, was, in the words of one acquaintance, ‘a wild boy from the Fens’, with a broad East Anglian accent that sometimes rendered him incomprehensible to those outside his immediate circle. Like others in Pink Floyd’s network of associates, Carter would make up the numbers in the road crew, employed as a lighting tech (though he would later be described by Nick Mason as ‘one of the world’s most spectacularly inept roadies’).

Iain ‘Emo’ Moore is remembered by another of his contemporaries as ‘a gurning, gesticulating, knob-crazed guy, with most of his teeth missing’. Like his friend, Pip, Emo would become a close confidant of both Syd Barrett and David Gilmour. Emo would spend the seventies and early eighties working as a live-in housekeeper for Gilmour and his first wife Ginger. An occasional actor, he later appeared in numerous pop videos, and had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the film of Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
, playing best man at the wedding of the character played by Bob Geldof. No longer part of Gilmour’s inner circle, he now lives a much quieter life on the English south coast.

‘Pip and Emo nurtured Syd and, later, David,’ explains one of their peers. ‘They looked after both of them, but also enjoyed the benefits of that friendship, especially with Dave Gilmour.’ In Pip’s case, this would mean various drug rehab courses paid for by the Floyd guitarist, while Emo enjoyed the expert ministrations of Gilmour’s dentist.

‘Everybody in town knew Pip and Emo,’ laughs John Gordon. ‘Back then, they were mods, always haring around on scooters and hanging around outside Miller’s music shop. If you’ve seen the film
Quadrophenia
, they were both like the character played by Phil Daniels, while Dave and Syd were like the character played by Sting - the cool guy.’

‘I met Syd when he was sixteen and I started to get to know Dave when he was seventeen,’ says Emo, who was then working in a Cambridge coal yard. ‘I used to go round to Syd’s and smoke dope all day. Dave knew all these people from school but he didn’t know any working-class people like me. I went to a terrible school and didn’t learn anything. But we got on well, because I would have liked to have been more like Dave, and there was a part of Dave that I think would have liked to have been more like me. His parents were always pushing him, and he wanted to be free of all that. Whereas I wanted to be pushed and given all the stuff he had been given.’

Among Emo’s other well-heeled acquaintances was Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, a former pupil of Oundle public school, a couple of years older than Emo, and then living in Cambridge with his divorced mother. At Oundle, Lesmoir-Gordon had staged concerts, including a coveted appearance from jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton. In Cambridge he would arrange a series of poetry readings above the Horse and Groom pub, and was, in the words of one of the Cambridge set, ‘terribly hip, with the benefit of looking like a young Alain Delon’.

Syd Barrett intrigued Nigel. ‘I went round to some of those Sunday afternoon sessions at Syd’s house,’ he recalls. ‘Syd was younger than us. But we were all very interested in him on account of his extraordinary looks and the fact that he had this strange, charismatic quality.’

Among Lesmoir-Gordon’s associates were ‘a gang of very hip boys’, largely comprising pupils from the County and the Perse, including, among others, Andrew Rawlinson, Paul Charrier, David Gale, Seamus O’Connell, Dave Henderson, John Davies, John ‘Ponji’ Robinson, Anthony Stern, future Pink Floyd sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson and the writer Nick Sedgwick, whose 1989 novel,
Light Blue with Bulges
, would offer a thinly disguised account of the author and his friends’ experiences in Cambridge at the time.

‘Syd always thought Dave Gale was a bit of a lad, and he worshipped Nigel Gordon,’ recalls Libby Gausden. ‘I think that lot all thought we were a bit of a teenybopper crowd because we were a bit younger. But they were all very taken with Syd.’

The group’s favoured haunts included Miller’s music shop, the El Patio and the Guild coffee bars, the Criterion pub (known locally as ‘the Cri’), the Dorothy Ballroom and varying spots along the River Cam. Between 1963 and 1965, as John Davies recalls, ‘we made the transformation from schoolboys to aspiring beatniks’, swapping school uniforms for black polo necks and leather jackets, listening to Miles Davis, riding Vespas and smoking dope purchased from American GIs on the neighbouring airforce bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall.

‘The El Patio was one of the first expresso bars,’ explains Anthony Stern. ‘I bunked off school at the Perse to do a washing-up job there, as I wanted to rebel. The idea of growing up normally was off the case. So we would spend a lot of time doing things that were likely to annoy one’s parents. That’s how we developed this fascination with the blues. It was the rebellious aspect that appealed. Ah, good! Another way to twist the knife into our parents.’

‘In 1962 we were all into Jimmy Smith,’ explained Storm Thorgerson. ‘Then 1963 brought dope and rock. Syd was one of the first to get into The Beatles and The Stones. Syd used to take his guitar and busk at parties.’

‘I was a couple of years older than Syd and at the Perse,’ recalls David Gale. ‘By the time I was sixteen, Syd and I were on nodding acquaintance. The thing to be in those days was to look bohemian - which Syd did very well. There were two or three cliques that went down to the river during the school holidays. Each clique would have their favoured spots, but there would be commerce between the camps. We’d be on the green near the Mill Pond, next to two pubs - the Mill and the Anchor. Storm’s crowd used to go further up near the men’s bathing sheds on Sheep’s Green where there were some banks and willow trees. The thing to do was hire a punt at one of the boatyards at the Mill and take it down to Grantchester Meadows.’

Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell would go on to form the Hipgnosis design company with Storm Thorgerson. He had been educated at King’s School in neighbouring Ely, and had first encountered County and Perse boys Storm and David Gale during inter-school cricket and rugby matches.

‘Later we had a mutual friend in Cambridge, a Liverpudlian drug-dealer named Nod,’ recalls Po now. ‘Which is how I got to know those guys again.’ On leaving school, he took a tiny room in the same Clarendon Street house where John Gordon had been living. ‘There were loads of people in and out of there,’ he remembers. ‘The comedian Peter Cook’s sister, Sarah, had the basement flat, so we used to hang out with her. Storm’s mother’s house was next door in Earl Street, so there was a little enclave where we used to congregate.’

Storm Thorgerson’s mother, Evangeline, was a potter and schoolteacher at Ely Grammar School for Girls, and a friend of Mary Waters. She was separated from Storm’s father, and, like Syd, Storm enjoyed the run of the family home. He had spent the early part of his life in the highly liberal Summerhill Free School in Suffolk, an establishment later dubbed by the media ‘The Do What You Please School’. ‘This meant that Storm always seemed terribly advanced for his years,’ recalls one of his peers.

‘Storm used to make films, using his friends as actors,’ recalls Anthony Stern. ‘He made one called
The Meal
which he shot at my parents’ house. It was a surreal fantasy, and at one point Nick Sedgwick got “eaten”. So there was Nick’s semi-naked body lying on my parents’ table, which raised a lot of tut tuts from my father and lots of “For God’s sake, Anthony, what are you doing?” ’

As well as coming from highly academic families, many of the group had another thing in common. Storm’s father, like Nigel’s, was separated from his mother. Meanwhile, Syd, Roger Waters and John ‘Ponji’ Robinson had lost their fathers. ‘There was,’ as John Davies explains, ‘a lot of us with fathers that were physically or emotionally absent. Or both.’

‘Almost all of us had parents that had gone through World War Two,’ elaborates Anthony Stern. ‘My father suffered from a complete inability to talk about his experiences in the war. Added to this was the fact that in Cambridge you were surrounded by this enormous weight of history and all these brilliant people. My parents were also academics at St John’s College. So as the children of academic parents, as was Syd, we grew up feeling as if nothing we did was ever going to be considered good enough. I think many of us suffered from what I now call “The Cambridge Syndrome”.’

Left to his own devices, Storm Thorgerson’s bedroom at Earl Street became, as one of the crowd described it, ‘a fuelling station’ for the aspirant beatniks. ‘The main event of the evening was to go to Storm’s place,’ explains Emo. ‘You could just about fit ten people in his bedroom, and we’d all be sitting on the floor, smoking, trying not to wake his mother - asleep next door.’

‘Storm had this amazing room,’ recalls Po. ‘It was covered in graffiti and montages of surreal pictures cut out of magazines, and that sort of thing was absolutely unheard of back then. But then Syd’s room was amazing, too. Syd’s was full of paintings and little model cars and model aeroplanes, and all sorts of things you might associate with a typical art student. But then I went there one day and there was this dodecahedron, quite big, about eighteen inches across, made out of balsa wood, and then another one, nine inches across, and another smaller, all just hanging from the ceiling. He’d made them himself - these absolutely perfect models.’

Po was similarly intrigued by Syd’s appearance and manner. ‘I always have this memory of him in his room, walking around barefoot, but standing in this weird way of his on his tip-toes, sort of hovering, with his hair hanging down and a cigarette in his hand. Almost elf-like in a way. He had this style of dressing, terribly arty. He’d turn up in the pub wearing some blue and white matelot shirt, looking as though he’d just walked out of Montparnasse in the 1920s.’

Yet Barrett could be as elusive with his old schoolfriends as he was with his newer art school companions.

‘He could be with a crowd of people and then suddenly disappear - gone,’ says Po. ‘He wouldn’t tell you where he was going, and then you’d be with a crowd of people later on and he would suddenly appear. I don’t think it was deliberate. I think he got easily bored and liked to go off and do his own thing. He had a great sense of humour but he could also suddenly withdraw from everything. One minute you’d be sitting in a room, getting stoned, and then the next minute he’d disappear.’

Libby Gausden recalls Barrett’s disappearing acts: ‘Instead of going to all the things we’d been invited to, he’d drive off and just sit in the Gog Magog hills. As soon as he bought his first car, he was always taking me to look at rivers and hills, which at the time I thought was all terribly boring. But Syd was into nature, when all the trendy people weren’t.’