Inside Out (17 page)

This audience was not a laid-back UFO crowd, but a much more pepped up New York audience. Among the crowd were other musicians
and performers from the local Broadway shows. I do remember staggering back to our hotel after the show accompanied by one
of the girls then appearing in
Hair,
which had recently opened on Broadway. Enormously proud of my conquest, it was many years later that I discovered that her
reputation as a singer was somewhat eclipsed by her super-groupie status…

In New York, we stayed for a while at the Chelsea Hotel. For such a legendary hotel it really was remarkably run-down. Famous
for featuring in songs by inhabitants such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen as well as for its rock’n’roll and bohemian clientele,
it enjoyed a collection of permanent residents, an understanding credit control, who would let an artist hand over a painting
in lieu of rent, and a menagerie on the top floor with a selection of wild animals. We had two rooms for all the band, crew
and any visitors or friends we might make en route. Such squalor
had not been seen since our flat in Stanhope Gardens. On this particular tour, Roger travelled with just one carry-on bag.
Dirty laundry went into the lower compartment and was then recycled into the top section when that was empty. The system proved
to be fairly hygienic since a bottle of scotch had got broken in the bag on the flight out.

Clubs like the Scene formed a solid backbone for the tour, but everything was still being run on a shoestring. At one point,
we were stuck in the Camlin Hotel in Seattle, living on room service, until some cash arrived from our American agency and
we could settle up and move on.

This was our first major tour, and was enlivened by spending time with two other British bands that were on the road with
us during the same period, the Soft Machine and the Who. The Soft Machine was a group we had always felt considerable affinity
towards. They had initially experienced trouble gaining greater public acceptance because of their more esoteric jazz-inspired
music. The Who embodied most of the qualities that we aspired to as a working band – heading the bill, playing 5,000-seater
venues and displaying a convincingly professional attitude. We played with them at a show designated ‘The English Invasion’
in Philadelphia (the bill also featured the Troggs and Herman’s Hermits) and we got lucky when a sudden rainstorm broke during
our set. This meant that the Who couldn’t go on next and eclipse our performance. We gained points for appearing at all, as
well as topping the bill by default, and then headed off with Keith Moon and various courtiers to do some live radio.

This was in the days when FM radio in the States was very freeform indeed, but that night things got freer than ever. We all
had plenty of adrenalin still flowing around our systems, and the DJ and most of his guests were chemically relaxed. Rick,
not normally a wild man, picked up the stylus while one record was
playing on air, announced that he didn’t care for the song, and demanded something else. Keith Moon kept up a barrage of comment
throughout the broadcast to enliven the occasion further. Now, over twenty-five years later, when we go back to Philadelphia,
people still talk of that night’s radio show in hushed tones.

In a nearby bar, later that night, Pete Townshend impressed me with the firm way he dealt with a drunk who approached us to
discuss loud music and pansy clothes. When he started being aggressive, Pete, rather than continue the discussion, calmly
asked the barman to throw him out. This, Pete pointed out, proved two matters. First the power of money (we were spending
more and therefore we controlled the bar) and secondly that drunks, particularly in the States, enjoy discussion for a short
while but as soon as they start losing an argument, have a tendency to resort to physical violence or draw a gun – yet another
useful rule for the book of touring hints and tips.

As on the first tour, we had almost no equipment, once again victims of empty promises from agents and record companies. It
was Jimi Hendrix who saved us. Hearing of our problems (his managers also handled the Soft Machine) he sent us down to Electric
Lady, his recording studio and storage facility on West 8th Street, and told us to help ourselves to what we needed. There
are some real rock’n’roll heroes.

Contact with the local record company was erratic, and sometimes nigh on impossible. Steve O’Rourke, desperate to have a meeting
with some marketing executive who was not returning any of his calls, tracked down this individual’s favourite shoeshine stall
and sat waiting patiently – his shoes so beautifully buffed a regimental sergeant-major would have been impressed – until
the elusive gentleman showed up.

Around this time the British Customs and Excise took
exception to bands that were on tour in America returning with large quantities of very cheap musical instruments. They were
particularly concerned about drum kits and classic electric guitars that could be bought new from Manny’s in New York for
less than half the price back home or picked up in the pawn shops for a snip. Eventually a mammoth raid was carried out in
which it seemed every working band was visited. There was some fining and general ticking off, rather than executions, but
for months afterwards a Mr Snuggs from the Excise would call up guitar players to say he’d seen them on
Top Of The Pops
and could they explain exactly how they had come by that rather nice 1953 sunburst Gibson Les Paul.

On our return to the UK we settled back into the routine of touring, working extensively on the university circuit and in
Europe, including an outdoor show in Germany where some students, inspired by a year that had seen the Paris é
vènements
and radical activity throughout Europe and the US, decided entry should be free to all and that it would be appropriate to
gatecrash the event. Using VW camper vans, they substituted the Californian surf ethic with a battering ram strapped to the
roof.

Just before Christmas 1968 we had one last crack at the singles market: ‘Point Me At The Sky’ was our third attempt since
‘Emily’ and our third consecutive failure. The light dawned, we decided to treat the single-buying public with disdain, and
duly ordained ourselves an ‘albums only’ band for the following eleven years.

Our next album was a score for the film
More,
directed by Barbet Schroeder. We had appeared in Peter Whitehead’s 1967 documentary
Tonite! Let’s All Make Love In London,
and in 1968 we had provided a score for a film called
The Committee
by Peter Sykes with Paul Jones in the lead role, although our contribution had been more of a collection of sound effects
than music.

This film, however, promised to be a more serious project.
Barbet, a protégé of Jean-Luc Godard, approached us with the film virtually complete and edited. Despite these constraints
and a fairly desperate deadline, Barbet was an easy man to work with – we were paid £600 each, a substantial amount in 1968,
for eight days’ work around Christmas – and there was little pressure to provide Oscar-winning songs or a Hollywood-style
soundtrack. In fact, complementing the various mood sequences, Roger came up with a number of songs for the film that became
part of our live shows for some time after.

A lot of the moods in the film – a slow-moving, fairly frank and moralistic tale of a German student who travels to Ibiza
and finds himself on a fatal descent into hard drugs – were ideally suited to some of the rumblings, squeaks and sound textures
we produced on a regular basis night after night. There was no budget for a dubbing studio with a frame-count facility, so
we sat in a viewing theatre, timed the sequences carefully (it’s amazing how accurate a stopwatch can be), and then went into
Pye Studios in Marble Arch, where we worked with the experienced in-house engineer Brian Humphries.

A major tour of the UK in spring 1969 ended at the Royal Festival Hall in July, at an event we called ‘More Furious Madness
From The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes’. This was another landmark show – and one of my personal favourites in the same way
that ‘Games For May’ remains. It is possibly less so for David who, courtesy of some bad earthing, received a bolt of electricity
sufficient to hurl him across the stage and leave him vibrating mildly for the rest of the show. We decided to enhance this
event with some performance art from an old Hornsey College of Art friend and one-time Stanhope Gardens inhabitant called
Peter Dockley. He had created a monster costume involving a gas mask and some enormous genitalia rigged up with a reservoir
to enable him to urinate on the front row of the audience. This proved very
effective indeed as during ‘The Labyrinth’, a gloomy, rather eerie piece of music, Peter crept around the audience while we
used dripping sound effects in the quad system. One unfortunate girl, possibly under chemical influences, turned to find this
horrific creature sitting next to her. She screamed and rushed from the auditorium never to be heard from again, not even
via her lawyer.

Part of the show also involved a piece called ‘Work’ using percussive noises as we built a table. We manufactured this piece
of furniture on stage, using wood, a saw, hammer and nails, timed to segue into the next section by the sound of the whistling
kettle on the portable stove (smoking was strictly prohibited on stage, but a stove seemed perfectly acceptable). Much of
this was subsequently reused in the studio either on ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ or in the abandoned
Household Objects
album. There was a plan to link with John Peel’s radio show as we relaxed with the tea, although I can’t recall how successful
this was. The idea later resurfaced on
Wish You Were Here,
where the sound of a radio playing a song is eventually cross-faded with the recorded music. Perhaps this underlines the
fact that tenacity has always been a group quality – if we like an idea we rarely give it up and then only if it has been
declared clinically dead.

Over the summer we worked on
Ummagumma,
a double album. The first two sides captured our live sound at the time with a set – ‘Astronomy’, ‘Careful With That Axe’,
‘Set The Controls’ and ‘Saucer’ – recorded in June at Mother’s in Birmingham (a kind of Midlands version of Middle Earth,
and a club we were very fond of) and Manchester College of Commerce. On our later live albums, we would record up to twenty
separate nights. For
Ummagumma
the choice was limited to the better of the two versions, and there was very little repair or overdub work. The second album
on
Ummagumma
was made up of half a side from each of us. On its release in October 1969, the record got generally
enthusiastic reviews, although I don’t think we were that taken with it. It was fun to make, however, and a useful exercise,
the individual sections proving, to my mind, that the parts were not as great as the sum.

To create my section, ‘The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party’, I drew on available resources, recruiting my wife Lindy, an accomplished
flute player, to add some woodwind. For my own part, I attempted to do a variation on the obligatory drum solo – I have never
been a fan of gymnastic workouts at the kit, by myself or anyone else. Norman Smith was particularly helpful on the flute
arrangements, the studio manager less so by reprimanding me for editing my own tapes.

Rick was perhaps the most enthusiastic of all for the format of the record, embracing the concept of a more classical approach
to his part, while both David’s and Roger’s sections included songs that ended up as band repertoire. I think that both ‘The
Narrow Way’ and ‘Grantchester Meadows’ were played in the ‘Massed Gadgets’ show while Roger’s ‘Several Species…’ indicated
the influence of his budding friendship with Ron Geesin, whose arranging skills we later called on to assist us in completing
‘Atom Heart Mother’.

Roger and David had also been working with Syd, helping him put together his first solo album,
The Madcap Laughs
with input from Robert Wyatt and other members of the Soft Machine. There was still a belief that Syd’s creative flow could
be restimulated, but it proved extremely difficult to marshal his songs into any kind of order, or to realise their potential.
Syd released a second solo album,
Barrett,
later the same year. This proved to be his last recording, despite further attempts to encourage him back into the studio.
From then on, Syd became increasingly reclusive, eventually returning to Cambridge and rarely venturing out. There is something
particularly sad about
such a gifted songwriter producing so much good work and then being unable or unwilling to continue.

We rounded off 1969 with a bizarre experience in December working for the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni on his film
Zabriskie Point.
After our happy encounter with Barbet Schroeder we liked the idea of working with film – it fitted with our desire to work
outside the normal round of records and gigs. Antonioni’s project – a movie mixing together student radicals, West Coast psychedelia
and the destruction of society as we then knew it – was part of the death throes of MGM studios, who in a final desperate
bid to survive had offered Antonioni a hefty budget, hoping that the success of his film
Blow Up
heralded a new era of European cinema.

Suddenly we were in Rome, staying at the palatial Hotel Massimo D’Azeglio. What we took a short time to adjust to was that
the studio was paying a fixed daily rate for accommodation and food. If you didn’t use it you lost it. Due to the short notice
of the project, and Michelangelo’s work schedule, we could only get time in the studio between midnight and nine in the morning.
This meant a routine of trying to sleep during the day, cocktails from seven to nine, and dinner until eleven – relying on
the help of the sommelier to use up the $40 per head allowance – before we rolled down the Via Cavour, exchanging banter with
the hookers on the street corners, to the studios where we would do battle with the director and his film.