Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (10 page)

‘Good sounds, good poetry, a lovely event,’ offers Stollman. ‘I swear the Floyd played for nearly three hours. Nobody wanted to stop them, as it was so much in the spirit of what was going on at the time.’

‘Floyd’s music was new but it wasn’t completely foreign to what was happening elsewhere,’ elaborates Hoppy. ‘We were all listening to avant-garde jazz, and my girlfriend at the time had brought back tapes of The Velvet Underground from New York. John Cage had also given a concert at the Saville Theatre in 1964 or 1965, and that had made a dent on people’s musical consciousness. Floyd were different, but they fitted right into all that.’

Further Sunday afternoon happenings ensued, with the future David Bowie - then still just plain David Jones - among those who encountered the group and was impressed by the ‘strange presence with his white face and black eyeliner singing in front of the band’.

But Stollman’s interest in staging such happenings quickly waned when the Marquee’s management proposed opening a bar during the events. ‘I thought fights would break out,’ he laughs. ‘A lot of people were stoned, so I didn’t think there should be alcohol available with all this stuff happening. So my interest faded.’

Stollman would later end up having to leave the country after being named in a tabloid newspaper exposé, following his involvement in a BBC-funded documentary about LSD: ‘There I was, on the front page, with my eyes blacked out. A scandal!’

For Floyd, though, a vital connection had already been made. One Sunday in June, weary of marking LSE exam papers, Peter Jenner headed to the Marquee. ‘I knew who Steve Stollman was, and I think I’d seen an ad for this thing in the
Melody Maker
,’ he recalls. After observing ‘various people sliming around in jelly’, Peter encountered The Pink Floyd Sound: ‘The Floyd were mostly doing blues songs, but instead of having howling guitar solos with the guitarist leaning back, like all guitarists did back then, they were doing cosmic shit. They weren’t doing interesting blues songs. But it was what they did with them that was interesting. I think what Syd was doing was a way of being distinctive and filling in the gaps where you should have had a howling Clapton or Peter Green guitar solo. I was very intrigued.’

Peter’s interest was driven by something more prosaic than just the music. ‘By this time I’d added up the figures at DNA and, unless we sold a lot of records, it was never going to survive. Basically, we needed a pop group.’ A year before, Peter had even approached The Velvet Underground, having heard Hoppy’s tapes of the band, only to be told by the group that artist Andy Warhol already had the job of managing them.

Realising that the Floyd were without management, Jenner made an approach. ‘I got their number from Steve Stollman, and I went up to Highgate where they were living with Mike Leonard. I didn’t know Mike so I didn’t know what was going on there, but it all sounded a bit arty - and that was part of the appeal. The first person I talked to seriously was Roger. I said, “Do you want to be on our label?” And Roger said they were all going off on holiday and to come back in September.’

Jenner’s impression then was that the group were ‘quite serious in a semi-pro way’, but that their future was far from certain. ‘They’d bought a van and some gear with their grant money, but they were on the verge of splitting up,’ he claimed in 1972. Certainly, without any bookings on the immediate horizon and with college work and career choices to be made, the band had plenty to contemplate when they went their separate ways for the summer.

Mason was the first to leave, following girlfriend Lindy to New York where she was now working with the Martha Graham Dance Company. Here, Mason would experience the US jazz scene beyond just hearing the music on record, catching celebrated pianists Thelonious Monk and Mose Allison on the same bill, before he and Lindy headed off to the West Coast. If Mason was experiencing serious doubts about the future of the band, he was buoyed by the discovery of an article in the New York underground magazine,
East Village Other
, name-checking The Pink Floyd Sound. As he later recalled: ‘It made me realise that the band had the potential to be more than simply a vehicle for my own amusement.’

Juliette Gale had also disappeared to the States that summer, leaving boyfriend Richard Wright at a loose end. Some of the Cambridge set had spent the past three summers in the Greek and Balearic Islands, hopping between Mykonos, Ibiza and Formentera, working on their tans, puffing strong weed and setting the world to rights. Richard and Juliette had also been to Lindos, Rhodes. In the summer of 1966, Wright joined Roger Waters for another Greek excursion.

‘There was Nigel and me, Russell Page, David Gale, Rick, Roger and Judy,’ recalls Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon. The Judy in question was Judy Trim, a former pupil of the Cambridge County School for Girls and the daughter of a research scientist at the university. She and Roger had been together since their teens. ‘Rog, Andrew Rawlinson and me were all after Judy,’ recalls Storm Thorgerson. ‘And Rog got her.’

‘It was on that holiday that Roger took his first acid trip,’ continues Jenny. ‘We set off across Europe in this old American car and in the middle of the night woke up to discover that it would only go backwards. The mechanic we took it to actually used the word, “
Kaput
”. So we caught a slow train across Yugoslavia to Greece. Eventually, we found this villa and we let Rog and Ju-Ju - as they called each other then - have the best room in the house. Roger insisted on it, though I do believe they found a scorpion under the bed. Roger was a very forceful character but in other ways he could be rather shy. I remember he and I being alone on the beach one day, and he seemed terribly nervous. He was with Judy but he seemed rather shy around women.’

Unlike most of the party, Waters had never tried LSD. On the Greek island of Patmos, he decided to take a drop from Nigel’s bottle and pipette. ‘It was an extraordinary experience,’ recalled Waters. ‘And it lasted about forty-eight hours.’ He would later say that he only took acid once after that.

Regrettably, the Greek sojourn also revealed the first indication of Waters’ fraught relationship with Richard Wright, a rift that would have a significant implication for Pink Floyd years later. ‘Rick was a shy, sweet chap,’ remembers Jenny. ‘He had a girlfriend who was in America at the time, whom he seemed to think an awful lot of. But Roger was always putting him down. It was as if he was using Rick as his punchbag.’

Reconvening at Stanhope Gardens after their respective holidays, the band members found Peter Jenner still keen to get involved. When Waters informed him that what the band really needed was a manager, Peter shelved his plans to sign them to DNA and enlisted an old friend and fellow London Free School colleague, Andrew King. ‘Pete and Joe Boyd were going to run DNA together, and I was going to manage,’ recalls Andrew King. ‘But when the label didn’t work out, Pete suggested he and I manage Floyd together.’ Jenner arranged for a twelve-month leave of absence from his LSE post, with an option to return if his pop management career failed to take off.

Andrew King and Peter Jenner had been at school together and had spent time travelling in the United States after leaving university. They were, as King explains, ‘middle-class, liberal intellectuals involved in the London avant-garde scene’.

‘I didn’t listen much to pop music,’ admits Jenner. ‘I just about got into Bob Dylan and The Byrds. But I didn’t think that white men could sing the blues.’

At the time, King was working in public relations for British European Airways, but, crucially, had some family money to invest. Pleading poverty, Waters persuaded the new management to splash out on a band PA, which they did, only for the equipment to go missing immediately. King and Jenner dug into their wallets again. Later, Waters would reveal that he initially thought the pair were high-class drug-dealers on the make.

Meanwhile, the Free School needed money. ‘One of the things we did was put out a newsletter,’ says Hoppy. ‘I was paying the production costs, and although I’d been doing rather well in Fleet Street as a photographer in the early sixties, by this time I was doing other things and getting poorer and poorer, so to keep the school and the newsletter going we decided to hold a benefit, which turned into a series of benefits.’ Peter Jenner booked The Pink Floyd Sound to play these benefits at the All Saints Church Hall, just off nearby Westbourne Park Road. A significant venue in the area, the hall would later stage musicals and plays, and provide a general meeting place for the Notting Hill community. At the time, it also hosted one of London’s first pre-school playgroups.

John Leckie, who would go on to engineer sessions for Pink Floyd, later producing such luminaries as The Stone Roses and Radiohead, grew up in nearby Ladbroke Grove: ‘I saw Floyd a few times at the All Saints Hall. Fantastic. The only thing was that it
was
a school hall. There were all these tiny kids’ tables and chairs set up, which always seemed very funny every time someone suddenly jumped up, freaking out and idiot-dancing to this far-out music.’

It was at the All Saints Hall that Andrew King had his first Pink Floyd experience. ‘I think that’s where I first saw them,’ he says now. ‘They were still doing fifteen-minute versions of “Louie Louie” and I remember thinking how weird it all sounded. I knew about the blues and the roots of rock ’n’ roll and this wasn’t right. But those musical inconsistencies were what worked. I also thought Syd exuded a certain magnetism.’

Also in attendance was fledgling author Jenny Fabian, who would go on to write the 1969 music biz novel
Groupie
. ‘I had just run away from my first husband, and was living in Powis Square,’ she says now. ‘I was always on the lookout for something extraordinary, and was drawn into All Saints Hall by the people I saw going in. The music was interesting, the guys on stage looked interesting, and the lead singer looked more than interesting.’ Recognising Jenner and King ‘as a couple of public schoolboys I’d known in a past life’, Jenny said she ‘allowed Andrew to seduce me’, before befriending the real object of her affections, Barrett, who would later appear in her novel in the thinnest of disguises as Ben, while the band were recast as Satin Odyssey.

Adding to Syd’s magnetic performance during these gigs was a then exotic light show, courtesy of Joel and Toni Brown, an American couple on a visit from Haight-Ashbury, the hippie district of San Francisco. Though rudimentary by today’s standards, the couple’s use of coloured slides and a projector was a far cry from the standard overhead lights of most theatre venues. When the Browns returned to the US, Peter Jenner and his wife, Sumi, set about fashioning a copycat set from ‘half-inch-thick timber shelving, domestic fixed spotlights from Woolworths, drawing pins and plastic gel’. Joe Gannon, a seventeen-year-old American from the All Saints Hall gigs, was co-opted into becoming the group’s first lighting tech.

While the Jenners’ lighting rig might seem hopelessly primitive by today’s standards, at the time it gave Pink Floyd a distinct visual edge over their competitors, as well as tapping into what Peter Jenner describes as the ‘mixed-media world’. The band members were receptive to the idea, having been used to providing musical accompaniment to Mike Leonard’s light and sound workshop at the Hornsey College of Art. In March, they had played the University of Essex’s rag ball to a projected backdrop of footage filmed by a student in a wheelchair, as he was pushed around London.

With their avant-garde lightshow and back projections, word gradually spread of the All Saints Hall’s shows, even if one early gig was so sparsely attended that Syd ended up jokily reciting a speech from
Hamlet
to the handful of punters. ‘There were about twenty people there when we first played,’ admitted Roger Waters. ‘The second week one hundred, and then three to four hundred, and then, after that, many couldn’t get in.’

In keeping with both their own and their management’s left-leaning politics, the band would soon find themselves playing an Oxfam benefit gig (on the same bill as comedians Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Barry Humphries) and a Majority Rule for Rhodesia show at the Camden Roundhouse. Yet with the Free School floundering, Hoppy’s tireless campaigning began again in earnest. Inspired by New York’s
Village Voice
, Hopkins enrolled Barry Miles (later just Miles), among others, into the idea of launching a free newspaper for the alternative community. Miles had started the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, both respective Meccas for the hip community and a popular stopover for visiting American beatniks. He was also friends with Paul McCartney. The paper,
International Times
, was created, in the words of Miles, to ‘link London to New York and Paris and Amsterdam . . . to unite the painters, the music people, the dance people . . .’

On 15 October 1966,
International Times
was set up in the basement at Indica and launched with a party at London’s Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, a one-time turning station for steam locomotives and a former gin distillery. Hoppy and Miles charged ten shillings on the door and punters were given a free sugar cube, which they were told may or may not have been spiked with LSD (in truth, none of them was spiked). Inside, amid the treacherous ruins of the distillery, its missing floorboards and abandoned horse-drawn carts, around two thousand people, some tripping, some
thinking
they were tripping, marvelled at the sight of mini-skirted actress Monica Vitti, Marianne Faithfull in a bum-length nun’s habit, Paul McCartney and Jane Asher dressed as Arabs, and, as
New Society
magazine later reported, ‘trendy people, beatniks, beards, dollies and gold lamé cavemen’. The Pink Floyd Sound were booked to headline, with support from The Soft Machine, an experimentally inclined jazz-rock band, who used the sound of a revving motorcycle in their performance that night. Before the Floyd’s performance, there was an accident, in which Syd and roadie Pip Carter are supposed to have destroyed a 6ft jelly art installation, either by backing the group’s van into it, or removing a plank of wood vital in keeping the mould upright.