Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (8 page)

Subsequently, the band have claimed that Dennis’s jokey stage banter, including announcing his own made-up song titles for the likes of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’, became a problem. Dennis takes a different view. ‘They didn’t have much of a sense of humour,’ he insists. ‘But a lot of those old blues songs are funny. They used to tell me not to make up song titles, that we should tell people exactly what they were. And I used to say, “Why? They don’t know what it is anyway.” To be honest, I don’t think audiences then were ready for stomping blues with weird lyrics.’

It was during Chris Dennis’s tenure in the group that they assumed a variation on what would be their lasting name. Syd had spliced together the monikers of two North Carolina bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, also utilised as the names of his two pet cats, Pink and Floyd. At various points during 1965 and early ’66 the group were said to have been called The Pink Floyd Blues Band, The Pink Floyd Sound and The Tea Set, sometimes spelled T-Set.

‘I don’t
ever
remember us being called The Tea Set,’ insists Chris Dennis. ‘But I do remember Syd coming down to rehearsals and telling us he’d come up with a name - Pink Floyd. I didn’t like it at first. I got used to it later, but to start with, I didn’t think it rang true.’

It’s widely believed that the first gig performed by the band under the Pink Floyd name, in whatever variation, was at the Count Down, in Palace Gate, Kensington in February 1965. The band performed three ninety-minute sets and landed a pitiful £15 fee. To cloud the issue of the band’s name still further, Barrett’s Cambridge art school friend, Richard Jacobs, is adamant that Syd had coined the name as early as 1963. ‘I distinctly recall him coming into the common room one afternoon and telling me he had a name for the band he was going to start - Pink Floyd. He said it as if he’d had some revelation in his lunch hour.’ By 1967 the story had changed again and Syd was spinning yarns to gullible interviewers that the name had been transmitted to him from a flying saucer while he was meditating on a leyline.

Yet there were further changes afoot. Unhappy with the spoof song titles Chris Dennis created for their blues standards, Waters insisted that Bob Klose fire him. Before he had the chance, the singer announced that the RAF had posted him to Bahrain. ‘I wouldn’t have stuck with them for much longer anyway,’ he claims. ‘When I came back from Bahrain, there was a Pink Floyd LP in the shops. When I heard it, I didn’t relate to it at all. The kind of music Syd would end up doing came as a complete surprise to me.’

With Dennis gone, Barrett was reluctantly pushed into the role of frontman. Through a contact of Richard Wright’s the band scrounged some free time at a West Hampstead recording studio to record a demo. Alongside Slim Harpo’s ‘I’m A King Bee’ were Barrett’s own ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Double O Bo’ (a barely disguised tribute to Bo Diddley) and ‘Lucy Leave’, which, with its stolid Rolling Stones groove, gave little indication of the fanciful wordplay and
outré
musicality that lay ahead.

Then again, the wider musical competition was daunting. ‘I can remember seeing The Who on
Top of the Pops
doing “My Generation”, and thinking: Yes! Now that’s what I want to do,’ recalls Mason. ‘That would have been in 1964, but I couldn’t have imagined that it would have been possible with what we were doing.’

Chris Dennis wouldn’t be Pink Floyd’s only casualty that year. By the summer of 1965, Bob Klose was gone. ‘Bob was a far better musician than any of us,’ said Richard Wright. ‘But I think he had some exam problems and felt he ought to apply himself to work, whereas the rest of us weren’t so conscientious.’

‘Bob heard those dreaded words from his mother and father: “Finish your exams and then do it”,’ recalls Libby Gausden.

‘I felt adrift and I needed to get to grips with things,’ says Klose now. ‘Syd had just begun to write and was coming through with these songs of his own. At the time, though, it was like, “Oh, Syd’s written a song.” But it was only later on that I was able to hear the originality of it. Roger would lay these fantastic concepts before us - and later he would make them happen. The grandness of his vision was extraordinary then. But the music we were playing before was influenced by the fact that I was such a facile guitar player - always whizzing around. Syd writing gave them the push to stop doing R&B covers and go off in a more original direction.’

‘It was a major switch when Bob left the band,’ said Mason. ‘That sent us spiralling into another direction. Syd and Roger were listening to John Mayall and Alexis Korner, but, somewhere along the line, Syd had discovered writing songs, and his songs were not in that vein at all.’

‘Bob Klose was a man with a great wealth of blues runs in his head,’ explained Waters. ‘And when he left we hadn’t anyone who had any blues knowledge, so we had to start doing something else. Syd took over on lead guitar, and I’m sure it was the noises that Pete Townshend was making then, squeaks and feedback, that influenced Syd. So we started making strange noises instead of the blues.’

Later, claims would be made that Klose was uncomfortable with the psychedelic direction the band’s music was starting to take. ‘That’s way too glib,’ he insists. ‘Also the idea that Syd and the Floyd were a drug-sodden shambles is an absolute nonsense. Syd didn’t have to be stoned to play the music he did.’

The summer holidays found Barrett back in Cambridge and hooking up with his old friends. While the Floyd were far from ‘drug-sodden’, the cliques along the River Cam had found a new obsession: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, known as LSD, the then still legal hallucinogenic, whose greatest advocate was the American writer and psychologist Dr Timothy Leary. The co-author of
The Psychedelic Experience
, published in 1964, Leary expounded the merits of the drug as offering ‘a journey to new realms of consciousness’.

By 1965, dope had been smoked by some in the circle for at least two years, and one of the crowd had also acquired a subscription to a medical journal, unavailable to the general public, which listed various legal pharmaceuticals and outlined their effects when taken in excess. The exact circumstances of LSD’s arrival in Cambridge in the sixties are still the subject of speculation. Anthony Stern first took LSD in 1963, with an acquaintance then studying at Cambridge who had acquired the drug through contacts in America. ‘He sat with me in our house in Fisher Street and prepared me for what was going to happen, and, boy, when it happened . . . Cambridge was a wonderful place to take LSD, as there were loads of fascinating places you could go. We used to wander through the Fitzwilliam Museum, staring at the exhibits, and many an acid trip culminated in the Kings College chapel, which had this extraordinary medieval ceiling.’

‘At that time, we’d all begun to read about Timothy Leary and the emergence of this wonder drug, and all wondered how we could get hold of it,’ adds David Gale. ‘Without very much effort, people simply brought it down from London. It was usually on blotting paper, and each blot had 500 micrograms, which was quite a whack back then.’

In truth, it was a British scientist, Michael Hollingshead, who had first turned Timothy Leary onto the drug in 1961. Four years later, Hollingshead opened the World Psychedelic Centre in a plush Mayfair flat, attracting a networked set of old Etonians, Oxbridge alumni and well-connected musicians and poets, including William Burroughs and Paul McCartney, eager to discuss the merits of the new drug.

It was through the Hollingshead connection that Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, now studying at the London School of Film Technique, took his first trip. ‘I first tried LSD in London in March 1965,’ he recalls. ‘My first trip was absolutely ghastly, my second one much better. After that I started selling it on to other people, I was evangelical about it - selling it for a quid a trip and not making very much money.’

As well as LSD, it was discovered that the seeds of the Morning Glory flower contained a rough strain of the hallucinogenic drug when taken in sufficient quantities, and chewed to a pulp. Florists in Cambridge reported a boom in the seeds’ sales, though the plant had its drawbacks. As Emo explains: ‘You had to endure two hours of the most excruciating stomach cramps and nausea before you started tripping.’

That summer, David Gale’s parents disappeared to Australia for six months, leaving him free run of the family home. Among those to take full advantage was Emo, who had, in Gale’s words, ‘become the working-class jester in a group of largely middle-class dopeheads’. Emo promptly commandeered a room in his friend’s house, from which, according to Gale, ‘he used to go down the Mill, bring a girl back, shag her, then go back and get another one.’

One afternoon, Emo, Barrett, Storm Thorgerson and another friend, Paul Charrier, convened in Gale’s parents’ garden. Emo is convinced that, on this occasion, both he and Syd had taken Morning Glory. David Gale maintains that some of them were tripping on liquid LSD that they’d taken in droplets on a row of sugar cubes. In a previous experiment with phials of the drug, Emo had made the discovery that LSD could be absorbed through the skin, when he accidentally handled impregnated sugar cubes, resulting in ‘hours of fucking chaos and us not having a clue which cubes you could trip on and which ones you couldn’t’.

Whatever he’d ingested that day, Barrett’s imagination was gripped by a matchbox, a plum and an orange, which he’d found in David Gale’s kitchen, and spent the next four hours contemplating, until, depending on who’s telling the story, Charrier stamped on the fruit or Emo ate it.

‘That was when Paul and Syd then went into the house, and started jumping up and down in Dave Gale’s bath shouting, “No rules, no rules!” ’ recalls Emo. ‘Syd always had this thing about breaking free of rules. He thought that when he joined a group and made it, there’d be no rules and he could come and go as he pleased. But, of course, once he got there, he found it was the same as anywhere else - one of the things that probably screwed him up.’

In the meantime, Syd’s frequently on-off relationship with Libby now seemed to be permanently off, though they remained friends. She began seeing artist Pablo Picasso’s son Claude (‘He loved Syd, and would often suggest we go and visit him on a Sunday’), and went to Germany that summer to study. Barrett continued to visit Cambridge at weekends. His hometown was still full of interesting distractions, some of which were evident when he returned to London.

‘I never touched acid, scared stiff of it,’ says Seamus O’Connell. ‘But I remember when we were in Tottenham Street, Syd had been back to Cambridge for a weekend and had some strange drug experience there at the Arts Theatre with one of his mates. When he came back to London, one of his eyes looked dead. He had very lively eyes, normally, very bright, but one of them wasn’t quite right. We all remarked on it, and he came out with some fanciful explanation.’

That same summer, with Libby gone, Syd began seeing Lindsay Corner, another ex-pupil of Ely Grammar School for Girls, whose father had been a friend of Dr Barrett’s. Their mutual friend Po had introduced the pair at the Dorothy Ballroom. Lindsay was also more sympathetic to Syd’s ‘consciousness-expanding’ adventures. At this time Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon filmed Syd purportedly tripping on magic mushrooms. Nigel had borrowed an 8mm camera from college and headed for a disused quarry near Cambridge’s Gog Magog Hills, with his wife Jenny, Syd, Roger Waters’ friend Andrew Rawlinson, David Gale, Rawlinson’s girlfriend Lucy Pryor and future Floyd lighting tech Russell Page.

The footage is grainy, the camera angles sometimes unsteady, but a surprisingly dapper-looking Barrett, in white shirt and blue raincoat, is clearly visible, striding purposefully around the quarry one moment, before slipping into quiet contemplation the next. Later, he’s seen pondering the leaf of a plant, bawling silently at the camera and appearing, rather self-consciously it seems, with mushrooms placed over his eye sockets and mouth. The film concludes with footage of a bonfire started in the quarry and some shaky footage of his co-conspirators. Now widely bootlegged and freely available to view on the Internet, the film was misleadingly given the name
Syd’s First Trip
.

‘We were just fucking around with a camera,’ says David Gale. ‘That film has a certain nostalgic charm. But we really were making it up as we went along. It certainly wasn’t the first time Syd took a trip, and I’m not convinced that his first time was in my parents’ back garden, either. Legend has moved in on that one. But it’s quite possible that he’d taken it before in London. I wouldn’t be surprised.’

David Gilmour would also try LSD that year. ‘There were a lot of people experimenting with it as a way of finding a greater consciousness,’ he said. ‘The intention was to have a quasi-religious-cum-scientific experience, and I rather concurred with that. I’m an atheist, and I didn’t start suddenly believing in God, but the claims were that it accessed parts of your brain that were not normally accessible, and the first couple of times I took it, I found it to be a very
deep
experience.’

For some of the Cambridge set, taking LSD would lead to that quasi-religious experience. ‘Everyone seemed exciting at that time,’ recalls Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘There were several very charismatic characters around, not just Syd, but people like Andrew Rawlinson and Paul Charrier. Syd was just one of them.’

It was Charrier that would engineer a sudden, dramatic split in the group, and one that had a significant impact on Barrett. ‘Paul was an energetic, bombastic, fat, loveable fellow,’ says David Gale. ‘But something happened to him while he was on that trip in my parents’ garden. He went into the toilet and found a book called
Yoga and the Bible
, and, while having a shit, had this revelation that this book was where it was at. He came out of the toilet and announced that he was now going to India to find this guru. We thought it was the acid talking, but in his case it transformed his life. Within a few weeks he was off to Delhi, and came back after six weeks, having been initiated into this guru’s outfit and given a series of spiritual tasks. He cut off his hair, bought a suit off the peg at Burton’s, became depressingly ordinary-looking, and began proselytising like mad, at which point Andrew Rawlinson, Ponji Robinson and other key figures converted and fucked off to Delhi as well. Then they all came back, proselytising again, and converted a whole load more people. But the other half of us - me, Storm, Seamus - were all going, “This is bollocks!” ’