Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (9 page)

The Sant Mat sect that so enraptured Charrier and friends was an offshoot of the Sikh religion, and dated back to thirteenth-century India. The guru in question was Maharaj Charan Singh, referred to as ‘Master’ by his followers, who were known as
satsangi
. The peace-and-love ethos of Sant Mat was perfectly pitched for the times. There were four main principles: abstinence from sex outside of marriage; a strict vegetarian diet; no drugs or alcohol; and a general catch-all instruction to lead a moral life. Initiates were also expected to undertake at least two hours of meditation a day. Over the course of the next twelve months, various members of the Cambridge set would find themselves drawn to Sant Mat.

‘We’d all gone so far into ourselves with LSD that we wanted the journey to continue without drugs,’ explains Emo. ‘Paul Charrier went off to India, and when he came back and told us about the Master he was absolutely amazing. Then Ponji went, and when he came back, he had a sit-in in Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon’s room when he was living in London, where he also told us what it was like. Dave Gilmour was there and said if he had the money he would have got on an aeroplane and flown out there and then. Syd also wanted to follow the path.’

‘Syd would have read the book and have been forced to do so by Paul Charrier,’ believes David Gale. ‘Paul was insufferably full of it: “This guru is God. What are we waiting for?” According to Storm, Syd was quite impressed and wanted to meet the Master, who used to come to London now and again to meet his British followers, some of whom were quite ancient and were coming from the back end of the Raj era. The Master would check into a Bloomsbury hotel and give an audience - this pleasant enough bloke in his sixties with a big beard and wearing a turban. And Syd went along, met the Master to see if he could be initiated, and the Master told him he wasn’t ready for it. So did the Master see in Syd something we were not yet seeing? Storm thinks that Syd was quite upset at not being considered spiritually ready.’

‘To some extent I think it may have been a problem,’ says Storm Thorgerson. ‘In hindsight, you think all sorts of things about his fragile personality. But Syd’s character was very mercurial. He tended to go into things with great gusto and then drop them.’

While the path being taken by his peers may have intrigued Barrett and Gilmour, their future Pink Floyd colleague was less enchanted. Still on the fringes of the hipster group and unimpressed by LSD or Indian mysticism, Roger Waters was, as Andrew Rawlinson recalls, ‘a committed atheist, who took no interest in it at all’.

Whatever spiritual setbacks Syd may have been experiencing, 1965 also brought him back into contact with David Gilmour. That summer, in a break from Jokers Wild, Gilmour had hitchhiked through France to stay with friends near St Tropez. Syd and a contingent from Cambridge showed up in a Land Rover and set up home on a nearby campsite. During the two-week sojourn, Barrett and Gilmour got drunk, had fun, played their guitars and were arrested for busking.

That October, their paths would cross again when Jokers Wild and The Tea Set were booked on the same bill, performing at the twenty-first birthday party of Storm Thorgerson’s girlfriend, Libby January, and her twin sister Rosie, at a country house in Great Shelford. Arranged by their father, Douglas January, a prominent local estate agent, the bands performed on two stages at either end of a marquee. Also playing that night was an unknown American singer-songwriter called Paul Simon.

‘Paul Simon sang in the living room,’ remembers Jokers Wild’s new drummer (and Clive Welham’s replacement) Willie Wilson. ‘Nobody knew who he was, and he was a pain in the arse. He came up and said, “Can I play with you?” And we were like, “You’re an acoustic folk singer; we’re a rock ’n’ roll band.” He said, “I can do ‘Johnny B. Goode’.” So we eventually let him get up and have a go.’

Dope was smoked surreptitiously, as the partygoers inevitably fell into two camps. ‘There were the young farmers and all those with money up one end of the marquee and us lot up the other end,’ says Emo. ‘Then Syd tried to pull a tablecloth off, and you’ve never seen so many expensive crystal glasses going everywhere.’ Emo’s sidekick, Pip Carter, jumped on stage to accompany Jokers Wild on the bongos. Not wishing to be left out, Emo followed suit. ‘I actually got up with The Tea Set and did a Bo Diddley song, but I didn’t know the words, so I sung them after Syd had sung them, until I fell off the stage, drunk, and came to, with Mr January standing over me.’

‘It was the night I realised that everything was changing,’ offers John Davies. ‘I remember being very stoned, but very aware that we were all now heading off on our own personal journeys. I’m not sure we were such a unique group, but sometimes it felt as if we had to wait until 1967 for the rest of the world to catch up with us.’

As Cambridge’s ‘gang of very hip boys’ undertook their own personal journeys, Barrett and Waters would have to wait another two and a half years before Gilmour came back into their lives. Four years later, the Januarys’ country house would reappear in the Pink Floyd story, its lawn and French windows immortalised on the cover of the band’s album,
Ummagumma
. By then, unknown to all at the time, Pink Floyd’s charismatic and beguiling frontman would be replaced by one of his best friends.

CHAPTER THREE

A STRANGE HOBBY

‘Turn up, tune in, fuck off!’

Roger Waters

‘
What a rave! A man crawling naked through jelly. Girls stripped to the waist. Offbeat poetry. Weird music . . .’ Sixties gossip magazine
Titbits
was quick to recount the ‘Spontaneous Underground Happening’ in February 1966. The event took place at the Marquee club on Wardour Street, in the heart of London’s Soho. Within weeks, one of the bands providing the music would be The Pink Floyd Sound, as they were now commonly billing themselves.

The year of 1966 would be a causal one for rock music and popular culture as a whole. The Beatles released
Revolver
- an album filled with exotic sounds that reflected the group’s LSD experiences - Cream, rock’s first so-called super-group, began inventing heavy metal; while Jimi Hendrix wowed London’s clubland with his dazzling, pyrotechnic approach to playing the electric guitar. In London, a collision of fashion, art and music was slowly taking effect, and would peak during the following year’s so-called Summer of Love.

The arrival of both Hendrix and Cream made an impact on Pink Floyd. ‘I remember seeing them as a callow youth,’ recalled Roger Waters. ‘They both played the Regent Street Poly as part of our end-of-term hop, and it was astonishing to see and hear these long improvisations.’

Whatever their place might be in this new world, the band’s personal situation was far from glamorous. Money was in perilously short supply, and the dilemma of juggling work and college commitments with gigs remained. Mason was slogging on at the Regent Street Poly but had arranged to work for Lindy’s architect father, and Waters had put his studies on hold while he gained more practical experience at a firm of city architects. Wright and Barrett were both still ensconced at their respective colleges.

Pink Floyd’s appearance at certain ‘happenings’ around the capital in early 1966 sprang from the activities of a group of London ‘scenesters’. John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins was a Cambridge graduate and one-time physicist for the Atomic Energy Authority. He took an unscheduled trip to Moscow, was subsequently interrogated by the security services, and ended up quitting his job. By the early sixties he was working as a freelance photographer for Fleet Street and
Melody Maker
.

‘Hoppy got into outraging the bourgeoisie, smoking dope, and had an overall sense of anarchism,’ claimed one contemporary. But, as another explains, ‘Hoppy was also a natural organiser at a time when everybody else was just fooling around.’ After a visit to the US in 1964, Hopkins returned to the capital with the idea of establishing an underground newspaper and what would become known as the London Free School. The school was the first to come to fruition. Set up in the basement of 26 Powis Terrace in Notting Hill, it was, as he explained in October 1966, ‘a non-organisation, existing in name only, with no elected officers and no responsibilities’.

One of Hopkins’ acquaintances, black activist Michael de Freitas, known as Michael X, arranged the loan of the building from its owner. First to move into the basement were squatters, who immediately gave the place a back-to-nature vibe. ‘It was so wet and cold there that they ripped up the floorboards and put them on the fire,’ remembers Hoppy. ‘So one of the things the school was well known for was its earth floor.’

With its walls painted in psychedelic colours, it swiftly attracted musicians, poets, beatniks, liberal intellectuals, and the general flotsam and jetsam of London’s artistic underground. Acting as an ad-hoc community centre, those involved were also available to offer practical advice to tenants on housing law, and even teach rudimentary English to local immigrants. Years on, some of those involved with the school would be instrumental in organising the first Notting Hill Carnival, while Michael X arranged for boxing legend Muhammad Ali to visit the area in 1966.

As Hoppy insists now, ‘The Free School was an open-ended idea and the people that populated it filled it with whatever they wanted to.’

Among those involved were Joe Boyd, a twenty-five-year-old American who ran the UK office of Elektra Records, and Peter Jenner, a twenty-four-year-old who had graduated from Cambridge University with a first-class honours degree in Economics, and was currently lecturing at the London School of Economics. Jenner was a former flatmate of Eric Clapton’s, and something of ‘an avant-garde music nut’.

Hopkins, Jenner, Felix de Mendelsohn (another of the Free School alumni) and Hoppy’s flatmate, the jazz critic Ron Atkins, had founded a production company called DNA, and recorded the free jazz group AMM. In what Jenner now describes as ‘a spectacularly shit deal’, they arranged with Boyd to release AMM’s album,
Music from a Continuous Performance
, through Elektra.

‘AMM would play guitars, pianos, but also radios and saws,’ recalls Hoppy. ‘They were working on the boundary between music and noise. After an hour of listening to them, you’d walk out into the street and it was as if it was all still carrying on. There was an improvised movie called
Shadows
made by John Cassavetes in the late fifties, and AMM was the musical equivalent of that. Absolutely hypnotic.’

AMM guitarist Keith Rowe’s atonal approach, and his use of random objects to coax noises out of his guitar, would have a marked influence on Syd Barrett, who would later watch an AMM recording session. Yet by avoiding any recognisable semblance of melody, the group was unlikely to challenge The Beatles for commercial appeal, a drawback not lost on Jenner.

AMM would appear at one of the first of these happenings at the Marquee. English folkie Donovan, daubed in red and black eye make-up, and jazz organist Graham Bond were among those making up the entertainment at the inaugural event on 30 January 1966. The happening had been organised by Steve Stollman, whose brother Bernard ran the experimental music label ESP Records in New York.

‘I was a twenty-two-year-old American let loose in London,’ says Steve Stollman now. ‘One of the first places I went to was Better Books, as they sold my brother’s records. There, I got to know Hoppy and all these other interesting people. I wanted to help my brother get some visibility for his label. ESP put out records by Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and The Fugs - unusual stuff. Somebody, maybe me, said it would make sense to take this club that was unused on a Sunday afternoon. So I spoke to the Marquee’s owners. The alleged rationale was to raise some money for Kingsley Hall [the community project of psychoanalyst R.D. Laing], as we had all read Laing’s book
Knots
. I still think a few bucks we made went to the place.’

The event began at 4.30 p.m., admission was six shillings and sixpence, there was no official advertising to support the event, and the audience were individually invited: musicians, writers, poets, the underground cognoscenti. A promotional statement from the organisers suggested a dress code of ‘costume, masque, ethnic, space, Edwardian, Victorian and hipness generally . . .’ The dividing line between performer and audience was deliberately blurred.

‘Halfway through, I was called to the front door as Robert Shelton, the
New York Times
critic, had showed up in a suit and tie,’ recalls Stollman of one of the early happenings. ‘We’d insisted everyone dress up bizarrely - even if it was just having a handkerchief hanging out your ear. As Robert was the guy who famously discovered Bob Dylan, I told him he had the best costume in the joint and let him in.’

It’s since been widely reported that The Pink Floyd Sound performed at both the first Marquee happening in January and again on 27 February. However, other eyewitness accounts claim that the group actually made their Marquee debut at the third event on 13 March.

As Stollman readily admits now, ‘I didn’t know The Pink Floyd Sound from The Green Floyd Sound. I hadn’t a clue who they were, but someone suggested them.’

‘I knew Steve Stollman,’ explains Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘He was looking for experimental music, and nobody else wanted to play those Sunday afternoon sessions. That’s how they got the Floyd.’

Stollman nevertheless maintains that the band’s performance that night was recorded. ‘I remember seeing a guy called Ian Somerville, who was a friend of William Burroughs, sat in the booth at the Marquee with headphones on the whole time. Nobody knows what became of that tape.’ The band’s set of blues standards and their own compositions, all delivered with Barrett’s abstract guitar playing and extended instrumental jamming, was the ideal soundtrack for the occasion.