Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (6 page)

By late 1962, David Gilmour had joined a local band called The Ramblers, which already included rhythm guitarist John Gordon and ex-Mottoes’ drummer Clive Welham. ‘We were a semi-pro band, playing and earning,’ says Welham now. ‘Dave had come on a hell of a lot. I’d seen him playing about a year before and he wasn’t up to it then, but you could tell he’d put a lot of work in since.’

‘Dave and Syd were two of those guys you couldn’t miss,’ remembers Rick Wills, who would play bass guitar in one of Gilmour’s later groups. ‘I used to run into Dave at Ken Stevens’ music shop. We’d both be trying out guitars and making a bloody nuisance of ourselves. Dave had an air about him, though - quite arrogant sometimes, an air of “I know it all”. Syd had a look that was all his own. To be frank, I never took him seriously. He was one of those arty types who walked around with a Bob Dylan LP under one arm. Not a proper rock ’n’ roller, I thought.’

However, others, including Mick Jagger, disagreed. Libby Gausden accompanied Syd to a Rolling Stones gig in a village hall in nearby Whittlesey. ‘It must have been something the Stones had been contracted to do before they became famous,’ says Libby. ‘After the show, Mick Jagger came straight up to us out of everybody in the crowd. I remember it because he had this awful, put-on voice, and being from Cambridge we all spoke properly. He was asking about my clothes but he was also fascinated by Syd. He thought Syd looked like a very young Bill Wyman - the same dark hair and very thin.’

At a Bob Dylan show at London’s Festival Hall, fashion designer Mary Quant, also in the audience, was, as Libby now puts it, ‘very taken with Syd’. Back in Cambridge, older women at the parties they attended would be enchanted by Barrett, and pass him their telephone numbers. ‘He used to ring them up,’ admits Libby. ‘But we’d both listen to what they said, and laugh ourselves silly when he arranged to meet them, then didn’t turn up.’

At the same time, Gilmour was also moonlighting with another local group, The Newcomers, previously Chris Ian and The Newcomers, until Chris Ian quit and vocalist Ken Waterson took over. ‘Dave had a poxy old Burns guitar and a crappy amp, but you could see he’d got it even then; he was bloody good,’ Waterson later recalled.

With Syd Barrett’s stint at the Cambridge School of Art coming to a close, his future plans still involved art rather than music. ‘But I always thought his art was something to do while he was waiting for something to happen with his music,’ says Libby Gausden.

In the summer of 1963, Syd travelled to London to attend an interview for Camberwell School of Art, even though it meant missing a Beatles gig. The sacrifice paid off and he was accepted. ‘Syd desperately wanted to go to Chelsea art school but he couldn’t get in,’ reveals Libby. ‘Then he found out that Camberwell was even trendier.’

That summer, he and Anthony Stern had staged an exhibition of their work above the Lion and Lamb pub in nearby Milton. Now studying at St John’s College, Stern had been granted the use of a studio space by the provost of the neighbouring Kings College. ‘They were friends of my parents, so I was immensely privileged,’ says Stern. ‘Having this room offered me another chance to escape from my parents and gave me the opportunity to meet girls.’

Unfortunately, the exhibition was less successful. ‘Syd’s paintings were wild abstracts and still lives in oil on canvas; mine were rather feeble attempts at psychotic surrealism. We didn’t sell anything.’

However, Stern’s makeshift studio would provide a bolthole for Barrett to escape to. ‘Syd and I would spend ages in there, having endless conversations about the nature of film and art and music. There was a man at Kings College called Reg Gadney, who made light boxes in his room. He showed us these things - they were like huge television screens behind which there were a series of mechanical gadgets and light projections. These were the sort of ideas that later became part of psychedelia, and which the Floyd used in their light shows. Syd and I were fascinated.’

Syd had previously experimented with home-made light shows with his art school friend John Gordon. When John moved into a flat in Clarendon Street, he and Syd would delight in projecting images on to the windows of the house opposite.

Through Anthony, Syd would make contact with another aspiring artist that year. Recently graduated from the university, Peter Whitehead was renting a studio in Cambridge’s Grange Road. Later, as a film-maker, he would shoot the defining footage of the Syd-era Pink Floyd. For now, though, Barrett and his musical friends were simply ‘the nameless group’ that rehearsed in the room next to his studio. ‘I think Syd was having an affair with the daughter of the owners of the house,’ says Peter now. ‘The louder his group rehearsed, the louder I put on my Bartók, Janáček and Wagner albums. I didn’t like pop music. When Syd discovered I was a painter, he used to drift in and chat and ask me what I was listening to. I had no idea our paths would cross again.’

In the autumn, Barrett moved to London and began his degree course at Camberwell, where he was remembered as an enthusiastic, if single-minded student, surprising his tutors and other pupils with his insistence on using the same-sized brush for all his paintings. Among his compositions from the summer of 1964 was a portrait of pop singer Sandie Shaw, which he lovingly sent to her record company, only to hear nothing in response. London was exciting, but regular trips back to Cambridge brought him into contact with his old sparring partners.

Back at home, Andrew Rawlinson had become involved in staging some ‘happenings’ at the Round Church. Integral to these events was the participation of the audience. In the same spirit, Rawlinson bought a large map of the world, traced the outlines of fifty countries onto sheets of paper and then sent them out to other like-minded individuals with the message, ‘Decorate this how you like and send back to me’.

Syd was sent Russia, which he duly painted blue and returned. He later sent Rawlinson a book he’d crafted called
Fart Enjoy
. Comprising seven sheets of cardboard taped together, its contents included snippets of poetry, doodles, pictures torn from magazines, a possible spoof letter entitled ‘Dear Roge’. (‘How did the group get on at Essex?’) A photo of a bare-breasted model is scrawled with the words ‘Fuk, Suk and Lik’. Rawlinson described it as ‘a mixture of austere bordering on the abstract and blazing whimsy’.

However committed Syd may have been to his art, he still found himself drawn back to his old musical haunts in Cambridge. During the summer holidays, he began playing guitar with The Hollerin’ Blues (sometimes known as Barney and The Hollerin’ Blues), during a return trip to Cambridge. Here, he came into contact with sixteen-year-old Matthew Scurfield, the half-brother of Ponji Robinson and a schoolfriend of The Hollerin’ Blues’ harmonica player, Pete Glass.

Scurfield would go on to become a theatre, TV and film actor. ‘My father was what you might call “a romantic socialist”, and sent me to a very rough secondary modern school in Cambridge,’ he says now. ‘I’d failed my 11-plus and ended up almost dropping out. My aunt was a very prominent psychiatrist in the area and I ended up at the Criterion, peddling pills that I’d taken from her medicine cabinet.’

Through what Matthew describes as ‘the trafficking of medical contraband’, he came into contact with Pip and Emo. They introduced him to Syd one evening in the Criterion. ‘We clicked straight away because we were both interested in theatres, and Syd and I discovered we’d both built our own model theatres. Ponji and I both became good friends with him. I didn’t even know he was a musician until I went to see The Hollerin’ Blues at somewhere like the Dorothy Ballroom and there was Syd on guitar. He wasn’t the best player in the world, but he certainly had an aura about him.’

By early 1965 The Hollerin’ Blues had turned into Those Without, and Syd was back, playing guitar during the holidays. ‘We played a couple of our best gigs ever with Syd, at the University Cellars and the Victoria Ballroom,’ recalls drummer Stephen Pyle. ‘He was on a visit from London and he’d got himself kitted out with a new Fender and a big Vox amp. The Kinks’ single “You Really Got Me” had come out and Syd was thrilled with that. He kept playing it over and over again during band practice.’

Meanwhile, David Gilmour was making his own plans. If he passed his A-levels, it would mean going to university, which would take him away from the local music scene. Gilmour chose to drop out halfway through his exams. By now, his parents had returned permanently to the US and he was living alone in a flat in Mill Road. He’d also helped form a new band, Jokers Wild, which had coalesced around Gilmour, John Gordon and Clive Welham.

While Syd upped sticks to London, Gilmour stayed put. Jokers Wild’s forte was five-part harmonies. ‘We came together in the first place because we could all sing,’ says Welham. Their set centred around songs by The Four Seasons, Sam and Dave, and The Beach Boys, performed in as many clubs, parties and neighbouring airforce bases as would take them, including a regular Wednesday night booking at Les Jeux Interdits, a club in Cambridge’s Victoria Ballroom, popular with foreign students from the neighbouring colleges. ‘I think at one time we all had foreign girlfriends,’ recalls Clive.

The line-up originally comprised Gordon, Welham, keyboard player and saxophonist Dave Altham, and bassist Tony Sainty, later replaced at odd times by either Rick Wills or David’s brother Peter.

Gilmour may have come across as shy and unassuming, but his appearance got him noticed. ‘Dave was always more clean-cut than Syd,’ remembers John Gordon. ‘He had a collegey look, a style of American dress - a bit preppy - with white Levi’s. It went down well with the women.’

‘All the girls absolutely drooled over him,’ says Christine Smith (formerly Bull), who first encountered the band as a seventeen-year-old in Cambridge. ‘We used to call him the Adonis.’ With Gilmour’s parents overseas, Christine’s family would welcome David and Peter into their home, including a Christmas Day evening ‘when they brought round their guitars and kept us entertained for hours’.

A personal ad in a mid-sixties issue of the pop magazine
Rave
offers a glimpse of Gilmour’s popularity at the time. Placed by Libby Gausden’s schoolfriend Vivien Brans (known by the nicknames Twig and Twiggy), it read: ‘Last June I met a boy called David Gilmour in Cambridge. He played in a group called Jokers Wild. He said he planned to go to London, and always wore blue jeans with patches on them. If anyone knows where he is, please tell him to write to the girl with long blonde hair who pushed his van up Guest Road to get it started. Tell him Vivien is anxious to hear from him, if he remembers her.’ (Vivien had previously gone out with Barrett, and would later meet up again with Gilmour.)

The guitarist’s growing reputation was also enough to attract the attention of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who sent a talent scout to the Victoria Ballroom. Epstein decided not to sign him, but, with his reputation preceding him, Gilmour was the obvious understudy for other players on the circuit. Hugh Fielder, now a music critic, but then singing with Cambridge band The Ramblin’ Blues, hired Gilmour when his own group’s guitarist dropped out at the last minute for a gig at a local girls’ school in 1965. ‘We’d had girls screaming at us before,’ recalls Fielder. ‘And we really didn’t want to miss out on it again. Gilmour was fantastic.’ There was, it transpires, only one problem: ‘Unfortunately, he charged us as much for his services as we were getting for the whole gig.’

For Roger Waters, the arrival of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had thawed his resistance to rock music. One evening, he and Barrett had travelled to London to see a package rock ’n’ roll show featuring The Rolling Stones, Helen Shapiro and Gene Vincent, at the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn. The brooding, leather-clad Vincent had none of Elvis’s pretty boy charm. An alcoholic who’d permanently damaged his left leg in a motorcycle crash and walked with a pronounced limp, stories circulated of Vincent being rolled up in a carpet by his bodyguard and forcibly carried on stage after he refused to perform. Maybe something about Vincent’s outsider image and damaged persona made its mark on Barrett and Waters. Whatever the catalyst, on the train back to Cambridge, the two sat together, sketching a picture of the amps they would need when they started their own rock ’n’ roll group. Yet by the time Syd arrived in London, Roger was already part of a band.

Without Barrett’s flair for painting or Gilmour’s for playing guitar, Waters found himself pondering his next move on leaving the County. When he saw Syd perform with The Mottoes, Waters would talk later of ‘wanting to be a bit further towards the centre of things’. After abandoning plans to study Mechanical Engineering at Manchester University, he submitted to a series of aptitude tests for the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, who suggested he might be cut out for a career in architecture.

As a precursor, Waters spent a few months working in an architectural office in neighbouring Swavesey, before enrolling on a degree course at Regent Street Polytechnic in London’s Little Titchfield Street, near Oxford Circus. Waters brought his guitar and billeted himself in a number of downmarket student houses, including a cold-water squat near the Kings Road. As one of his future bandmates would later explain, ‘Roger wanted to free himself but he didn’t know how to do it.’ By the spring of 1963, though, Waters had drifted into the orbit of a group of like-minded fellow students, which included a drummer, Nick Mason, and a keyboard player, Richard Wright.

Nicholas Berkeley Mason was born on 27 January 1944 in Edgbaston on the outskirts of Birmingham. His father, Bill, was a Communist Party member and former shop steward for the Association of Cinematographic Technicians. Accepting a job as a documentary film director, he moved with his wife Sally to Downshire Hill in Hampstead Garden Suburb, North London, when Nick was aged two. Three daughters, Sarah, Melanie and Serena, completed the family.

Bill collected vintage cars, and was a motor racing enthusiast who competed at an amateur level. On a similar theme, his early film-making credits included
Le Mans
, a 1955 documentary about the French sports car race. The Masons’ car collection wasn’t the only evidence of their wealth. Like the rest of his future bandmates, Nick’s upbringing was comfortable. Though, in his case, a little
more
comfortable. As Pink Floyd’s first manager Peter Jenner recalled, ‘I remember being amazingly impressed that Nick’s parents had a swimming pool.’