Syd Barrett and British Psychedelia

Faber Forty-Fives: 1966–1967

Rob Chapman

from Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head

Table of Contents

Title Page

About This Book

One: Flicker Flicker Flicker Blam Pow!

Two: Distorted View – See Through Baby Blue

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About This Book

Faber Forty-Fives is a series of six short ebooks that between them tell the story of British pop music from the birth of psychedelia in the late sixties, through electric folk, glam, seventies rock and punk, to the eclecticism of post-punk in the late seventies and early eighties. Each book is drawn from a larger work on Faber’s acclaimed music list.

Syd Barrett and British Psychedelia is an intimate snapshot of the years 1966–7, when the underground’s house band, Pink Floyd, were cast blinking into the light of mainstream success. Nurtured in the progressive Cambridge scene and the bohemian hangouts of the Notting Hill Free School and UFO club, Pink Floyd pioneered a distinctly British mix of Victoriana, LSD-inflected mysticism, the avant-garde and pop. And at their heart was the gifted and complex songwriter, singer and guitarist Syd Barrett, who personified the psychedelic revolution in both its exoticism and its tragic impermanence.

Faber Forty-Fives: 

Rob Chapman, Syd Barrett and British Psychedelia from Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head 

Click here to buy

Rob Young, Fairport Convention and Electric Folk from Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music 

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Michael Bracewell, Roxy Music and Art-Rock Glamour from Roxy: The Band That Invented an Era 

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Nick Kent, The New Music Journalism from Apathy for the Devil 

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Jon Savage, Sex Pistols and Punk from England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock 

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Simon Reynolds, UK Post-Punk from Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–1984 

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One

Flicker Flicker Flicker Blam Pow!

As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver’s seat: as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway, and as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended … He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone, the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.

THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS KENNETH GRAHAME

At the beginning of 1966 the English underground was still an amorphous collection of creative tendencies and unrealised possibilities. Ideologically, the counter-culture continued to be informed, on the one hand by various flavourings of old and new left politics that had grown out of the CND movement, and on the other by a distinctly apolitical or anti-political strand of radicalism based on an increasing disenchantment with parliamentary democracy and its attendant institutions. Musically the underground was still marching to the tune of CND. Jazz (in both its trad and modernist guises) and folk (revered for its ‘authenticity’ and the militancy of its protest wing) remained the music of choice for those who had walked to Aldermaston.

Pop music came late to the party – and in 1966 it was still referred to as pop music; the demarcation between pop groups and rock bands had not yet emerged. The Beatles were referred to as a pop group, and pop singles were the dominant currency. It is important to remember this when analysing the evolution of the English counter-culture. The underground was not spawned by the rock culture of the late 1960s – if anything the opposite is true. The term ‘underground’ was not even associated with music until 1967. Before then the term, in Britain at least, was chiefly applied to the film-makers who were influenced by the New York underground cinema of the early 1960s, and to the New Departure and Liverpool poets who had shed their beat influences or met them head on at the Wholly Communion poetry festival.

Much of this activity was going on completely outside the mainstream of British cultural life. What little attention it received tended to be either dismissive on the part of the arts establishment – what Michael Horovitz called ‘the stock-in-trade clichés and categories of literary urban sniping’ – or sensationalist on the part of the tabloid press. More often than not the counter-culture was simply mocked, covered merely for its novelty value. This patronising tone pervaded even the most quasi-liberal arts coverage in the quality press. In the face of such universal dismissal or indifference the underground thrived, as undergrounds usually do.

Meanwhile the UK music industry went obliviously about its business, and its drinking, in London’s Soho. The old money and the trust-fund libertarianism that had floated Mary Quant’s first boutique and Britain’s first offshore pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, were in Chelsea, but by 1966 the counter-culture was gravitating towards W11, that geographic sprawl, rich in socio-political resonance that encompassed Notting Hill Gate, Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park.

In her book Borderlands/La Frontera, the feminist poet and fiction writer Gloria E. Anzaldúa memorably depicted the US–Mexico border as a place ‘where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds’. The same could be said of London’s W11 in the 1950s and early 1960s. W11, then as now, masked great diversities in circumstance, aspiration and wealth. The fragmented urban geography of the area reflected its social history. An inharmonious mix of grand Victorian mansion blocks and half-completed stucco terraces, the result of successive generations of speculation and bankruptcy, sat side by side with rat-infested tenements and dereliction. Inequality was always highly visible in the urban landscape of W11, and became more pronounced the further north you ventured. This remained the case even when London began to swing in the 1960s. At the Notting Hill end of Portobello Road tourists flocked to the antique stalls and shops. At the Goldhawk Road end the poor sifted through second-hand clothes on old wooden barrows and rag-and-bone merchants still plied their trade on horse and cart. It was at this end, the Ladbroke Grove end, where the cultural action would be in the latter half of the decade. This is where the English underground took root, and this, owing to a mixture of happenstance and cultural convergence, is where Pink Floyd would find themselves by the autumn of 1966.

At the beginning of the year they were mainly performing their repertoire of R&B and blues covers at private functions and parties. According to Nick Mason the group had no more than five or six original compositions in its set at this time; these presumably would have been ‘Let’s Roll Another One’, ‘Lucy Leave’, ‘Butterfly’, ‘Remember Me’ and ‘Walk With Me Sydney’. By the end of 1966 Pink Floyd would be the underground’s house band. At the beginning of the year they were occasionally billed as ‘The Pink Floyd Sound’. By the end of the year they would have one.

W11 was as far removed from the ambience and architecture of Cambridge as it was possible to get, a perfect example of what the Chicago School of Urban Sociologists called ‘a zone of transition’. Dickens had called the area ‘a plague spot, scarcely equalled for insalubrity by any other in London’. The Times had called the area ‘a social dustbin’ and ‘a square mile of squalor’. The Kensington Post dubbed it ‘Rotting Hill’. The black underground paper Hustler called it ‘a transit area for vagrants, gypsies, and casual workers’.

This was where many of the Empire Windrush migrants headed from 1948 onwards, in many cases exchanging one shanty-town for another. This was where the mass murderer John Reginald Christie lived and carried out his crimes during the same period, promising back-street abortions to the desperate and dispossessed, knowing that most of them would not be traceable or even missed in this square mile of flotsam and flux. This was where Peter Rachman did most of his business, a slum landlord so notorious for his ruthless and exploitative methods that he gave his name to an -ism. Rachmanism continued to thrive long after the man himself died in 1962. This was where the Fascist leader Oswald Mosley enjoyed his last hurrah, exploiting the racial tensions that existed in the area and which spilled over into full-scale racially motivated riots during the summer of 1958.

W11 has always been characterised by division, dislocation and displacement. Its grid-lines and boundaries have been shaped historically by the transport routes that have been carved through it. In 1801 the Paddington branch of the Grand Union (at that time the Grand Junction) Canal was opened. In 1864 the western extension of the Metropolitan Railway opened, cutting another swathe through Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park. Exactly one hundred years later work began on the Westway, the controversial extension of the M40 route out of London, which displaced residents and turned the area into a huge building site for much of the decade.

In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa describes the particular hybrid psychology that develops among those who inhabit territories that are subdivided by such arbitrarily imposed intersections. She defines the borderland as ‘a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.’ Anzaldúa traces the cultural diversity specific to the Tex/Mex region she was familiar with. But in her evocation of annexation, alienation and unrest she could just as easily have been talking about the economic refugees and cultural renegades who gravitated towards W11.

Even the most liberal of inhabitants or cultural commentators admits that there was not much racial integration in the area during the early 1960s. What little interaction there was appeared to be confined to dope-scoring and visits to the numerous shebeens (illicit bars) that thrived after dark. It was here that Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler used to come to score, and where Keeler’s fractious relationship with dealer Lucky Gordon would bring unwelcome police attention to the area. In his autobiography, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, Mick Farren writes of the subtle behavioural codes that had to be learned in order for the visitor to be adopted, or at least tolerated, in cafes like the Rio where dope could be scored. Even here things were demarcated along racial lines: white dealers sold hash, black dealers dealt in grass. The terminology people used to define the area also denoted their ethnic background. The white population tended to refer to ‘The Gate’. Afro-Caribbeans spoke of ‘The Grove’.

It was partly as a way of counteracting this divide and galvanising the disparate strands of social activism and cultural energy in the area that the Notting Hill Free School was set up. The Free School is crucial to any account of the Pink Floyd story. This brief and uneasy liaison between pragmatically politicised housing activists and hippie utopians was a key convergence point for counter-cultural energy in the mid-1960s, and some of the movement’s most important and influential initiatives were spawned in its wake. The underground’s first newspaper, International Times, the appropriation of the Chalk Farm Roundhouse as a venue, the UFO club and the Notting Hill carnival all owe their existence to Free School thinking.

W11 had a history of philanthropic activity, motivated by slum housing and government indifference stretching back to the nineteenth century. This mixture of noblesse oblige and autonomous community action was part of the political fabric of the area long before the Free School was talked of. The most recent antecedents for the Free School were to be found in Alexander Trocchi’s The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds and Sigma, a Tactical Blueprint which called for a rejection of conventional politics and, according to Jeff Nuttall in his book Bomb Culture, ‘a kind of cultural jam session: out of which will evolve the prototype of our spontaneous university’. The roots (and routes) of the Free School could also be traced to the free university movement in the USA, and the initiatives of Joseph Berke and the radical psychiatry movement that was centred on Kingsley Hall in London. Indeed, one of the early participants in the activities of the Free School was pioneering psychoanalyst R. D. Laing. Jeff Nuttall was also an early participant, as were black activist and former Rachman henchman Michael De Freitas (later Michael X), Beatles manager Brian Epstein and poet Michael Horovitz.

The inaugural public meeting of the Free School on 8 March 1966 was attended by Warhol actress and Wholly Communion participant Kate Heliczer, who had also brought to England the first demo tapes of the Velvet Underground, jazz writer Ron Atkins, Alan Beckett of The New Left Review, and ufologist and ley-line expert John Michell. Also in attendance were four people who would play an integral part in the Pink Floyd story: John Hopkins, Peter Jenner, Andrew King and Joe Boyd.

John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins had left Cambridge University with a third-class degree in 1958. In order to avoid national service he took a job with the atomic energy authority at Harwell, near Oxford. ‘There I was with a questionable science degree, dodging the draft, and enjoying all the benefits of student life without having to be a student.’ Poet Mike Horovitz put him in touch with what he calls ‘grassroots avant-garde culture, the new left review people, people into film, poets and musicians’.

Hoppy’s ‘anti-career’ simultaneously mirrored and informed the wider development of the English underground. He was the counter-culture’s enabler, the man who talked schemes into existence and got things done. ‘He was the catalyst and the energiser. He was unbelievably active,’ says Barry Miles, who would also play no small part in the future scheme of things. ‘It was ridiculous the things he had a hand in, in getting going. I was absolutely in awe of Hoppy.’

Hopkins had moved to London at the end of 1960 to become a photographer, ‘working both for the straight press, like the Sunday Times, the Observer and Melody Maker, and with one foot in the alternative camp, including a lot of work for Peace News. By 1964 I was organising photo-coverage of the Aldermaston march for CND.’ He also worked for the Labour Party in the run-up to their 1964 election victory, and describes Harold Wilson’s subsequent u-turn from anti-nuclear weapons to pro-nuclear deterrent as a seminal moment. ‘The biggest political lesson I’ve ever learned. It left me with a disillusion with conventional politics which has lasted to this day.’

Hoppy’s Westbourne Grove flat soon became a drop-in centre and crash-pad for kindred spirits. Everyone who would eventually play a part in the English counter-culture seemed to pass within Hoppy’s orbit. Barry Miles was one of those who used to stay at Hoppy’s when in London, eventually moving up to the city from Cirencester in 1962. Miles initially worked at Better Books, which was in effect a drop-in centre itself for writers, poets, artists and other like-minded souls.

Peter Jenner was the son of a vicar. His grandfather was a Labour MP. ‘Very left-wing family,’ he says, describing his background and social milieu as ‘that middle-class group of people, as it were children of the Bloomsbury Set, children of the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front and the ISP. We’d all gone to posh universities with grants, for free. I was anti-hanging, pro-CND, went on all the early Aldermaston marches, and the anti-Suez demo where Nye Bevan spoke. Big jazz fan. Got into smoking dope at Cambridge.’

Hoppy describes W11 at that time as being littered with bomb sites, boarded-up shop-fronts that were just facades for waste ground that children played on, ‘and land clearance for building future motorways including the Westway. Whether you were politicised or not, sooner or later you came into contact with the problems that bad housing caused. Does the name Rachman mean anything to you?’

Peter Jenner remembers the area as being characterised by ‘big old dilapidated houses with ten rooms and maybe ten families and two bathrooms. Mainly immigrants who didn’t know how to protect themselves. A lot of the more decent accommodation was for whites only. The gap was being filled by Rachman and people like that, these horrible landlords were buying up old houses for three, four, five thousand pounds and letting rooms for six pounds a week when people were only earning ten pounds a week and if you didn’t pay they sent round people who broke your legs or threw you out on the streets. We had an awareness of all that. We’d all been bought up in post-war austerity and we were questioning what was going on. In a way what was carried over into the Fifties was a good version of the Thirties, i.e. no unemployment, but it was still a bit drab and dreary. By the Sixties we were saying, come on, there’s more to life than this.’

Joe Boyd had grown up in New Jersey, immersed in music. As a young, Princeton-educated promoter he had organised gigs for Sleepy John Estes, Jesse Fuller, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Skip James, Muddy Waters and the Reverend Gary Davis. He’d seen the American folk and jug band scene evolve and go electric and the folk record labels, Elektra and Vanguard, follow likewise. He had also been involved with the Newport folk and jazz festivals, where he had witnessed that watershed moment on the night of 25 July 1965 when Bob Dylan outraged the folk movement by inserting a jack plug into an electric guitar and kick-starting the second half of the Sixties.

Boyd had previously visited England in 1964 and 1965, managing the Blues and Gospel Caravan, and touring Europe with Coleman Hawkins and Roland Kirk. It was on the former tour that he first met John Hopkins when Hoppy was still a freelance photographer. By September 1965 Boyd was running the London office for Jac Holzman’s Elektra label and ideally positioned to witness the gathering momentum of the English counter-culture.

The first meeting of the Free School was held in the basement of a house in Powis Terrace. ‘The house belonged to John Michell. He had some sort of partnership with Michael De Freitas,’ says Hoppy. ‘Michael and John made the basement of this run-down terraced house available. Most of the activity of the Free School was not actually at the basement, but in informal classes elsewhere. There were lots of different groups of people doing different things. Some of it was to do with the political side of being a housing activist. Other stuff was to do with arts and crafts and photography. That was the crucible out of which the carnival was re-invented. The carnival had existed in some form before the free school, but it had gone dormant.’

‘The Free School was to do with the fact that the education system was very old-fashioned and teaching us in a locked-door way,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘I was a sociologist and economist and at the LSE I was getting involved in social work and psychology. The more I, and a lot of others, got involved, the links between the subjects were becoming more interesting than the subjects. In social terms there were a lot more West Indians around and there was an interesting cultural mix for me to live in, and a lot more interesting music around. In that sense the Free School was like a Workers’ Education [al] Association idea but in a more progressive way.’

In Courtney Tulloch’s The Grove newsletter of 23 May 1966 Hoppy defined the Free School’s ongoing mission as ‘a way in which people could get together to discuss questions which were vital to their everyday life. For instance how can one find out more about the school system, facilities for young children, legal matters, housing groups, consumer associations, sports groups, nursery groups, etc. How can people make their own entertainment? How can one try one’s hand at dramatics, or music, or painting?’

‘The only way it would have differed from any other kind of community project was that it was supposed to be a two-way thing,’ says Barry Miles. ‘Everybody who had a skill that they could teach was encouraged to go to the Free School and make themselves available. The idea was you would learn from the people who were coming to you. This is why Michael X was interested. He taught basic English. He knew a lot of people in the area who were basically illiterate but were too proud to ever have gone to an evening class. He thought this would be a good two-way movement, a situation where people were passing on their life skills to the person who was teaching them in a way they wouldn’t have done if it was being run by the council.’

One early convert to the Free School was Emily Young, the free-spirited daughter of the distinguished writer and politician Wayland Young (Lord Kennet). Young hung out at the Free School with her school friend Anjelica Huston (daughter of the film-maker John Huston) and was destined to play a pivotal role in the Pink Floyd story as the inspiration for Syd Barrett’s wayward muse in his song ‘See Emily Play’. ‘I was quite a serious girl, quite grumpy really. I was very bright but quite frustrated intellectually at school, so I didn’t go to school. I used to hang out with all these mad people and bohos at the Free School instead, and loved it. I was so hungry for interesting things. My resources were very good in my family life. There were a lot of books and amazing people coming through the house, upperclass, faintly bohemian, academic intellectual people, so I was well informed about the possibilities in life. Then John Hopkins, this ex-physicist, came to the morning assembly in school and said, “We’ve got this thing going. Everyone’s welcome to come. It’s a local resource. We’re here for the community. We do all these classes in music and dancing, and what’s going on in science and what’s going on in the arts. Come along. Join in.” So I went. I was that hungry and curious. I was a kid. I was fourteen–fifteen years old during that eighteen months, however long it was. Every one else was much older. I don’t know what they thought of me. I used to pretend I’d gone to bed and then creep out of the house and go off and have this much more interesting life. Most nights I was down there. Then in the morning I’d creep in and say I’d been staying with a school friend over night, then pretend I was going to school and then go back to the Free School and sleep.’

‘A lot of people were turned off by the basement in Powis Terrace because all the walls were covered with psychedelic paintings,’ remembers Barry Miles. ‘And you’d have Michael De Freitas lurking around with his silver-top cane. Most people still regarded him as a pretty shifty character. Up until a few weeks before the Free School that room had still been a gambling club and he’d run a brothel in another part of the same building.’

‘It was pretty grungy. It wasn’t a nice place,’ admits Emily Young. ‘Earth floors, filthy stairs. You’d go down there and have interesting conversations and interesting drugs. I’d be sitting there, ears flapping, eyes wide, you know, with that adolescent self-consciousness. I didn’t say much, but I loved it. There were conversations about what was going on in cosmology. Plate tectonics, that was really new. Geologists were very resistant to it but it was making sense. And the age of the universe, they were just starting to tie those things in, nuclear decay times and half-lifes, and dating the age of the earth. Nowadays people think the Sixties was very modern and progressive. In fact there were all kinds of assumptions about the state of the universe that were wrong. And all this was taking place in a Dickensian slum. It was cold so we’d go and find old railway sleepers. There were lots of demolitions and we’d find lots of wood there. There was a coldwater tap at the back. And that’s how you’d make tea. Put the kettle over the fire. But on these huge swathes of demolition where everything was being ripped out for the motorway we’d go and have happenings. People playing saxophones and huge bonfires and drinking and dancing and poets doing their mad stuff. There were paupers, street people with absolutely no money. God knows how they lived. Really quite extreme some of them. Then there were these Americans coming over with their acid. They were wonderful, visionary, clean, healthy people talking about the way forward and the golden future and all the dreams of the hippy world and global consciousness.’

The Free School, for all its subsequent failings, can be seen as a microcosm of the wider questioning of society that was going on at the time, just one of many crucial convergence points for the radical ideas, philosophies and initiatives that were being articulated in the 1960s. It is important to place the early blossoming of Pink Floyd in this context. In the early autumn of 1966 their presence at the Free School was no more significant than many other factors. Emily Young acknowledges this when recalling the benefit gigs they played. ‘The Free School was going to do a fund-raising dance on a Saturday night at the old Church hall in All Saints Road. That’s where the Pink Floyd Sound was brought in to be a soundtrack. From my point of view that wasn’t the reason I was there. I was there because of all this other stuff that was going on which was much more to do with sociology and life philosophy. You know? How do you find a way through life?’

‘My impression was that many people were open to lots of different influences,’ says Hoppy. ‘There was a great deal of crossover. Musicians of one sort listening to what musicians of another sort were doing; black soul music, white rock and pop music, classical and serious avant-garde stuff, the Cornelius Cardew end of things. There were American jazz musicians visiting like Ornette Coleman and Steve Lacy. There was also the British jazz of course and there was AMM. Their music was so far out it was on the border between music and noise and street sound. Of all the music and groups and ideas from that era, the ones that have stayed closest to the original concept are AMM, who are still around today. They have a very strong ideological basis for what they do. Try talking to Eddie Prévost or Keith Rowe about what they do. They’ll whack you over the head with their critical understanding. They’re tough people.’

He’s not wrong. AMM are a crucial component in the evolution of the English underground. The rigour and longevity of their intellectual quest remains unparalleled, and the nature of their artistic development offers a revealing counterpoint to that of Pink Floyd, indicating how the avant-garde wing of the English rock scene might have evolved in a parallel universe if it hadn’t been co-opted and commercialised so swiftly.

AMM’s musical performances placed great emphasis on spontaneity, improvisation, collectivity and the strategic importance of silence. ‘For me, AMM wasn’t really about playing music,’ says founder member Lawrence Sheaff. ‘It was an examination of, a revelling in, a fathoming of, the nature of sound and silence itself and the relationship between the two. AMM, its performances and its discussions, helped bring the “where does it all come from” into sharper focus for me.’

Resisting commodification and complacency at every turn AMM adopted a strenuously analytical approach to their music, involving regular discussion sessions and performances that critiqued the very nature of music itself. Keith Rowe’s deconstructionist approach to the guitar in particular would have considerable impact on Syd Barrett. Rowe liberated the guitar from functionality and conventional tuning, often laying it flat, in ‘table top position’ as he called it, and manipulating the sound in the same way that John Cage had done with the prepared piano.

‘Steel rulers and ball bearings were the first thing I used, and coins, very English coins from the period with the serrated edge,’ says the AMM guitarist. ‘Knives over the pickup was quite a breakthrough for me too, because it perfectly matched this kind of “Duchampian” thing, and cubism too, which had already interested me in the sense that an object could have lots of different utilisations.’

As Rowe’s nod to Duchamp and cubism indicates, AMM’s theorising about practice and process was predominantly informed by painting. The members of AMM had all been to art school and it was the intellectual rigour of that environment which initially guided the group’s strategy.

‘The American painters had centre stage: Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Kline, Newman, Kelly, Stella, Oldenburg, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns. They covered everything,’ remembers Lawrence Sheaff. ‘But it didn’t tell us where it all comes from. On this the world of art was mute. Still is. I guess I wanted to know where it all comes from. All the surface possibilities had been laid out. In painting, in music, what was left? Only subdivisions of the subdivisions. If you got that picture, where to go from there? “In” was where to go. “In” not “out”. For me AMM was a way to go “in”: to cut beneath the surface of things. For me, a great, silent whisper of a question was hanging behind every performance, “Where does it all come from?”’

Keith Rowe’s own search, although equally philosophical, was more informed by pragmatic responses to material problems. ‘It was a straightforward contradiction between my day life and my night life,’ he explains. ‘When I was studying at art school during the day, the artistic agenda was, who are you, what do you have to say, and was about developing your language. In the evenings we’d play jazz where I was just imitating Americans. Well, that’s just a basic contradiction – what I was doing on the canvas was contrary to what I was doing on the guitar. On the guitar I was not finding my own language. I was basically hijacking someone else’s language like Jim Hall or Wes Montgomery and emulating what they did. In the world of painting you don’t have permission to paint other people’s painting. You only have permission to do your own work, whereas in the world of jazz you could do someone else’s work. You could just rip off Coltrane, and play just like Coltrane – and that was fine. There was nothing wrong in doing that. I just didn’t like that relationship. I wanted to develop my own language. So I took this instrument and looked at it more like an art project of what can I do with this, rather than coming with a whole load of baggage about what it is you do with it. And I think I very simply just applied the agenda of painting to the guitar. But what does that actually mean in practice? For the Americans to develop an American school of painting, they somehow had to ditch or lose European easel painting techniques. They had to make a break with the past. What did that possibly mean if you were a jazz guitar player? For me, symbolically, it was Pollock laying the canvas on the floor, which immediately abandons European easel technique. I could see that by laying the canvas down, it became inappropriate to apply easel techniques. I thought if I did that with a guitar, then I would just lose all those techniques, because they would be physically impossible to do. So if it meant laying it on the table, I would lay it on the table.’

AMM’s modus operandi, and in particular Keith Rowe’s ideas about how to break with tradition and transcend technique, provided the context in which Syd Barrett was able to validate his own instinctive approach to music-making, and gave him the confidence to press ahead with his own style of experimentation. It was Rowe’s attempt to apply art-school thinking to the mechanics of guitar playing which finally liberated Syd from his own shackles of tradition and technique. He had been incorporating radical and untutored slide techniques into his playing for some time – David Gale maintains that in a spirit of ‘Hey, listen to this!’ he saw Syd running a Zippo lighter up and down his guitar as early as 1963 – now he had added conceptual justification for what he was doing.

AMM played several significant gigs with Pink Floyd between March 1966 and February 1967 including the Spontaneous Underground events at the Marquee club that took place between March and June 1966, gigs at All Saints Hall in Notting Hill, and the International Times launch party at the Roundhouse in October of that year. Syd also attended the recording session for AMM’s debut album in June 1966.

‘It wasn’t “underground” at that point,’ says Keith Rowe. ‘At the time it just felt like we were doing the things which were interesting for us to do. It just happened to become something called “the underground” afterwards, but at the time I don’t think I was aware of it in that way. John Hopkins probably was aware of it. But I think we were just fighting for a new piece of territory, like everyone else.’

‘I first heard the Pink Floyd at the Spontaneous Underground in the spring of 1966 at the Marquee club on a Sunday afternoon,’ says Hoppy. ‘They were a series of Sunday afternoon gigs put on by Steve Stollman, the brother of Bernard Stollman who started up the ESP label in New York.’ Hoppy describes his first encounter with Pink Floyd as ‘like walking into a wall of sound, not unmusical, but certainly something like I’d never heard before. They had quite a lot of amplification for those days, all improvising over a theme, and some of the improvisations seemed to be pretty wild, but it all seemed coherent if you stood back and listened to it. They may well have played some more conventional rock ’n’ roll numbers but what I remember is their wall of sound.’

The now legendary Spontaneous Underground gigs were essentially a series of invitation-only events organised by Steve Stollman as a way of galvanising the creative energies that had become apparent at the previous year’s Wholly Communion poetry reading. A mimeographed flyer for the first one read:

Spontaneous Underground at the Marquee this Sunday January 30th organised by Steve Stollman of ESP Disk with the aid of everybody. Among those taking part will be Donovan/Mose Allison/Graham Bond/Pop/Mime/Kinetic Sculpture/Discotheque/Boutique. THIS TRIP begins at 4.30 and goes on. Liquor licence applied for: Costume, masque, ethnic, space, Edwardian, Victorian and hipness generally … face and body makeup – certainly. This is a spontaneous party, any profit to be held in trust by Louis Diamond, Solicitor, that such spontaneities may continue. Invitation only, donation at door 6/6.

The iconography and hip argot of the flyer was a thinly codified calling card to initiates, those few hundred people who constituted the counter-culture at that time. Stollman’s flyers for the Marquee events were works of art in themselves, stream of consciousness signifiers and cut-up poetry for the in-crowd. Only the first of these events was actually called Spontaneous Underground. The others were simply, and unambiguously, known as the Trip. The flyer for the second event, held on 27 February, read:

In memoriam. King Charles. Marquee de Sade. Superman. Supergirl. Ulysses. Charlie Chaplin. All tripping lightly looning Phoenician moon mad sailors – in character as IN characters – characterised in costume at the Marquee this Sunday at 5 o’clock

The third event two weeks later was the first to feature the Pink Floyd Sound, although in keeping with the anti-star ethos of the Underground the flyer mentioned no bands at all.

TRIP bring furniture toy prop paper rug pant balloon jumble costume mask robot candle incense ladder wheel light self all others march 13th 5pm

One Trip event was advertised with cut-ups of Alexander Trocchi’s Sigma. Another arrived on thick card advertising forthcoming ESP disk releases by the New York Art Quartet, Ran Blake, the Giuseppi Logan Quartet, the Albert Ayler Trio, Sun Ra, and Pharoah Sanders. The card had a very faint two-coloured Roneo overlay with the virtually indecipherable details of the gig.

‘It was an entirely conceptual idea,’ says Barry Miles. ‘Cut up a bunch of stuff. Tip it in an envelope, send it off and you know that something is happening. On one of them I don’t think it even said where it was or anything. They just arrived in the post and that meant there was one on.’

Aside from Donovan, Mose Allison and Graham Bond, other participants in those early Trip gigs were Soft Machine, members of what would become Spontaneous Musical Ensemble and poets Johnny Byrne and Spike Hawkins, who were billed as the Poison Bellows and took to the stage with a wind-up gramophone in an old pram and proceeded to shock or annoy the audience out of their stoned reverie with deliberately bad conjuring tricks and Dadaist polemic.

‘They were quite unorganised. It was quite random,’ remembers Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘We painted our faces and took acid whenever we went there.’

‘It was a very social thing, and it was a very small world,’ says Peter Jenner, who also attended the Marquee events. ‘There was an awareness that something was going on in America and we didn’t quite know what it was. We knew more about New York than we did about LA and San Francisco. We read about hippies and the few who came over from America found us. We knew the people who managed the Fugs and that’s how I first got to know the Floyd.’

Inspired by the set-up at ESP Peter Jenner decided to launch his own record label. ‘The four of us, Ron Atkins, Felix Mendelsohn, myself and Hoppy, were going to have this label called DNA. It was going to be an avant-garde label. Delia Derbyshire and all those people, the Radiophonic Workshop, were just up the road. We could see what was happening in music. It was all going in a similar direction, avant-garde folk, avant-garde jazz, avant-garde classical, avant-garde pop. It was all about crossing over boundaries, which was also what the London Free School was all about. It was all the same general, I won’t say, philosophy, that would be too grand, but the same general mindset, certainly; the same way of thinking, or the same way of getting stoned, at any rate.’

DNA’s first, and, as it transpired, only release was AMM’s AMMMusic. Recorded at Sound Technique Studios in June 1966 and produced by Hoppy, Peter Jenner, Ron Atkins and Alan Beckett, the album was a boundary-crossing amalgam of noise, which although alluding to classical, jazz and avant-garde influences defied easy categorisation.

AMMMusic featured Cornelius Cardew, whom Hoppy had known in Oxford, playing piano and cello, Lou Gare on tenor sax and violin, Eddie Prévost on percussion, Keith Rowe on electric guitar and Lawrence Sheaff on cello, accordion and clarinet. Cardew, Rowe and Sheaff also manipulated transistor radios, adding a textural layer of audio-concrete to the sound.

It says much about the sheer Utopian spirit of the time that an album like AMMMusic could ever be considered a viable venture, let alone launched as the showcase debut LP on a new record label. ‘The producers of our first album were all connected with the Pink Floyd,’ noted Eddie Prévost. ‘I suspect they thought it just possible that AMM might be marketable in the heady days of the Sixties.’

‘In fairness to them [Jenner and King], I don’t suppose they knew at the time that the Pink Floyd would become as big as they did,’ says Keith Rowe. ‘I don’t think they were thinking commercially at all. I think they actually, genuinely, appreciated it, and understood the music as something they knew about, and felt deserved a wider audience.’

At this particular juncture artistic boundaries remained fluid and undefined; everything was still up for grabs. ‘I’ve often mischievously said that I think a whole load of us could’ve been in the Rolling Stones, or it was very possible for some of us to be in the Pink Floyd or one of your best mates to be in the Beatles. It was still like that at that point,’ says Rowe. ‘It wasn’t ossified. It wasn’t set in stone already – it was flexible. People were moving round and it was just one huge scene. The divisions had not been set up.’

Unfortunately for DNA little of the label’s energy and AMM’s idealism translated into record sales. ‘We’d made this one record with AMM,’ recalls Peter Jenner. ‘Great record, very seminal, seriously avant-garde, but I’d started adding up and I’d worked out that [with] the deal we had, we got 2 per cent of retail, out of which we, the label, had to pay for recording costs and pay ourselves. I came to the conclusion that we were going to have to sell a hell of a lot of records just to pay the recording costs, let alone pay ourselves any money and build a label, so I realised we had to have a pop band because pop bands sold a lot of records. It was as simple as that and I was as naive as that. I saw the Floyd and thought, hey, that looks fun. They’re definitely avant-garde. Why were they avant-garde? Because I couldn’t work out who was making the noise. You couldn’t distinguish between the guitar and the keyboards. There was lots of sustained reverb and Binson Echorec going like mad. These walls of sound – well, more like little fences of sound … but it was enough to get me confused. However, I wasn’t impressed with the material they were playing.’

At the Marquee Trip gigs the band were still playing the R&B and blues repertoire that had sustained them through the previous couple of years; the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’, Elmore James’s ‘Dust My Broom’, Bo Diddley’s ‘You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover’, etc., but by now it had become noticeable that their crude extemporisations had developed into something altogether more innovative.

‘Instead of having wailing Eric Clapton [and] Pete Green guitar solos, they were having these free-form jams,’ says Jenner. ‘I thought that was the interesting part. But I thought they needed to play their own material and when I met them I discovered they did have their own material: Syd had songs. But I guess it was easier then to play familiar songs on stage. I could see why they did it. The blues boom was big so if you played “Dust My Broom” everyone knew where they were and you didn’t have to get to grips with all this weird shit. It was a pretty sensible way to get through your gigs and get booked again. And Syd wasn’t this great wailing player, he was a very inventive musician, but he wasn’t a practise-five-hours-a-day type. He was an inspirational guitar player rather than a technical one.’

Somewhere between Bob Klose leaving the band in the summer of 1965 and the first real flowering of the English under ground in the spring of 1966, Pink Floyd had, almost imperceptibly and largely outside of the public gaze, made their major conceptual breakthrough. The reasons for this were three-fold: the light show, the Binson Echorec and the influence of AMM.

Anthony Stern remains convinced that the light show was the chief catalyst for the band’s change of direction. ‘The reason their music changed into what it became is because that was the way to go with the light show, the mixture of light and music, painting with light and sound, and sound that becomes music. Which comes originally from the psychedelic experience, ’cos when you take acid, you may well have an experience where a sound heard will produce a flurry of images. It’s almost like you’ve had two hearts, two sensory systems in our brains are wired across to each other, someone had patched them through together so that when you see something, you hear something, when you hear something you see something.’

A second key factor was the introduction of the Binson Echorec. The Echorec was essentially the fifth member of Pink Floyd at this stage of their development. Introduced in the late 1950s the device was a pre-pedal echo unit powered by valves and driven by tape-heads. Used, with restraint, on some of the Shadows’ early recordings it enabled tape delay, echo, reverb and vari-speed. Used by Pink Floyd it greatly enhanced Syd’s ringing Telecaster tones and Rick Wright’s unorthodox phrasing and ethereal tone.

‘If you just have a jazz guitar and an amplifier there’s not that much you can do. You just have that sound and that’s it folks,’ says Bob Klose of his role in the band. ‘But once you have some echo units and so on you can start to get into repeat and that sort of pushes you in a certain direction. It’s not a negative thing, it’s a creative thing. You’ve got this other dimension you can use. And there was a kind of movement of music at that time that just wanted to deal with sound and not to think so much about traditional musicological harmonic logic. You didn’t need to have an orthodox technique at all.’

As Bob Klose indicates, Syd was now firmly aligned to a movement in music which eschewed convention and orthodoxy. Inspired by AMM, Syd’s musical thinking had finally caught up with his art-school thinking and he increasingly began to approach the guitar in terms of texture rather than technique. He stopped worrying about his competence and began to fly. The band still wasn’t confident enough at this stage to drop the cover versions altogether, in fact they would continue to include R&B standards in the set right up to the end of 1966, but Syd and Rick Wright in particular were beginning to construct their sound pictures from a whole new sonic palette.

When Peter Jenner approached the band with a view to putting them on his record label, the university term was just coming to an end. Roger Waters told Jenner to come back in September and everyone went off on their holidays. Waters and Mason in particular still had one foot provisionally planted in the academic camp and readily assumed that they would be continuing their architectural studies in the autumn.

‘That summer we went to Greece with Roger Waters and Rick Wright, and I gave them their first and only acid trip on the island of Patmos, where St John had the Revelation,’ says Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘They both had such an appalling time I don’t think they ever took it again. Roger had a really bad time on it and I was trying to help him. I had this Bible and I thought I was this black leopard. I just lay on the ground with this Bible, a long sleek cat. And there was Roger on the bed going “Argh!” Rick’s back got sunburnt. I remember the pink of his back being the colour of the wall and he just disappeared and merged into the wall. The sea looked like scales and I remember a boat came chugging in puffing black smoke. I thought, “The dragon’s coming. Oh, God help us.”’

David Gale remained wary of the more Utopian claims being made by acid users but he recognised both the drug’s ubiquity and its role as a catalyst during 1966. ‘There was an enormous, almost like an occult, revival sweeping through, in as much as hitherto abandoned outposts of interest in Eastern mysticism suddenly became mainstream. Kids convinced themselves that some kind of eclectic amalgam of bits and pieces of largely Eastern mystical or occult stuff could be assembled into some kind of guidance system. It was very cool to be thought of as spiritual. And accordingly, if that’s what you pressingly want to be, then your LSD experiences tend to confirm that. It may be possible to have a completely secular LSD experience – but not then – because one was surrounded by a belief in coincidence and synchronicity and the value of it, the significance of it. The density of it was actually overwhelming – it was everywhere.’

For some of the Cambridge crowd the soul-searching would lead to religious conversion in the form of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, referred to by its followers as Sant Mat, literally ‘Path of the Saints’. Sant Mat, a branch cut from the same tree as Sikhism, was led by a guru called Maharaj Charan Singh Ji, known by devotees, the satsangis, as ‘the Master’. The Cambridge exodus to Sant Mat began innocuously enough early in 1966 when Paul Charrier, who until then had been a fully paid-up hedonist, chanced upon a book about the movement.

‘That’s an interesting story in itself,’ says Andrew Rawlinson, ‘because all the books were privately published. You couldn’t buy them in bookshops. But there was one satsangi, Joseph Leeming, who was a professional writer. He used to go to publishers and say, “What do you need?” and they’d say, “We need a book on boating for boys,” or “stamp collecting in Ethiopia,” and he’d say, “I’ll have it for you in three months.” He went to them at one point and said, “How would you like a book on yoga and the Bible?” and they said, “Yeah, that might sell.” So here was a book by an established publisher that you could buy in any bookshop. A friend of ours bought it and [was reading] it. Paul picked it up and said “What’s this?” They said, “You don’t want to read that, Paul. You can’t do it without a master.” Paul read it and thought, “This is it.” The address of the master was in the back so Paul borrowed £200 off his girlfriend Bridget and flew to Delhi. He had no idea where Beas was. It’s a tiny village. Population of 500. So he rolls up out of the blue in an air force great coat with a toothbrush and his big wild hair and I would say he was the first Western youngster ever to do that.’

Rawlinson maintains that the whole subsequent hippie trail from Western Europe to mystical East began with those initial impulsive footsteps taken by Paul Charrier. ‘People of our age started to appear out of the hills a bit later but he’d actually gone there with an address. And he was totally bowled over. There was an ashram with self-contained buildings next to the river. India is chaotic. It’s like being in a cross-current of waves all the time and he gets to this place and it’s ordered and clean. No one is trying to get any money off you and you’re fed for nothing and for big meetings they were providing one million chapattis a day free. Paul sent some ecstatic letters back. He got initiated by a maharaji and came back a changed man. He said, “My aim is to work in the same office as my parents.” His parents worked for the local council!’

Charrier’s conversion had a massive impact on his Cambridge friends, as Andrew Rawlinson acknowledges. ‘He went out in March ’66 and came back in April and by coincidence the Master came to London in July. More or less all of us went to see him because of Paul.’

Over the next two years several of Syd’s friends converted to Sant Mat: Andrew Rawlinson and his girlfriend Lucy Prior, Paul Charrier and his girlfriend Bridget, Nigel and Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon, William Pryor and ‘Ponji’ Robinson among them.

‘What you had in no time at all was satsangis who were young,’ notes Rawlinson. ‘All the people who had been before were over fifty. They would all have come through theosophy and Rosicrucianism and tarot. They were old-time esotericists, whereas we were LSD hipsters.’

‘We were very spiritually influenced by LSD,’ agrees Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, ‘because we suddenly saw that there was maybe eternal life. It’s not a physical universe. It’s a consciousness universe and the human body is just a result of consciousness. Consciousness comes first. Other people became more interested in the mind and a lot of people ended the 1960s going to shrinks to find out more about their psychological make-up. Some people got seriously into their spiritual side, some people got seriously into psychiatry and some people just carried on drinking alcohol.’

David Gale was one of those who got into radical psychiatry and remained sceptical about Sant Mat and the satsangis. ‘A lot of people of Syd’s acquaintance were drawn quite hysterically, with massive enthusiasm, into it. And the Master, the Maharaj Charan Singh Ji – he of the audible life-stream – was successful in recruiting some of the best minds of my generation, including Andrew Rawlinson, probably the cleverest person in that whole group, and countless others. One by one, starting with Paul Charrier, they went to India, got initiated [and] saw the white light explode before them. [They] came back home, cut their hair off, threw away their hippie clothes, got suits, got a job, became vegetarians, stopped drinking, smoking and taking drugs, married women of the same persuasion as them, only had sex for procreative purposes, were advised to be ‘ordinary’ and to keep their heads down. Every morning when they got up they would meditate for two hours in an attempt to leave this earthly level of consciousness and get on to higher levels. It was slightly crazed. There was something hysterical about it. But a lot of hedonistic young men and women plumped for a lifestyle of utter asceticism and drew strength from denial. It may be that some of them on LSD went to the edge of the abyss and looked down, and backed off in horror and settled for something very strict. It may be there was guilt there. Or it may be that they weren’t that radical when the chips were down. But what happened was [that] this perfectly healthy riotous group of promiscuous, drug-taking, largely cheerful young men and women were split right down the middle. Half of them went to India, half of us stayed home.’

‘It went right down the middle, fifty–fifty,’ agrees Andrew Rawlinson, ‘if you count the Cambridge scene and all its London extensions. Half of us went into it and half of us didn’t. Syd would have gone into it. He asked the Master and the Master said, “I will not take an emotional request.” At that time it was very unusual for the Master to turn anybody down, but he did turn Syd down. Syd told me that he told him that his request to be initiated was emotional and not based on genuine spiritual research. But, of course, it’s typical of Syd that he would have done that because he didn’t look over his shoulder – that was the thing about Syd. He just thought, “I’m going to give this a go.”’

Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon, who was yet to convert, gives a slightly different account of Syd’s rejection. ‘Syd asked if he could have initiation and the Master said, “Not yet, go and finish your studies.” Syd was really disappointed because Paul Charrier was already following this path. I remember Syd coming round to Cromwell Road and saying, “I’m not going to smoke any more. I’m going to be a vegetarian and I’m going to follow this path.” I said, “Oh no, you can’t give up smoking dope, come and have a joint.” But he was very upset that the Master had turned him down.’

While some of his friends thought that Syd was merely dabbling, Andrew Rawlinson has no doubt about his sincerity. ‘I have a volume which Syd bought, which was one of the books produced by Maharaj Charan Singh Ji which is on the nature of love and Syd had underlined several sentences. So he clearly was influenced. He was interested in it before I was actually, despite the fact that I was two years older. Syd was in there right at the beginning.’

‘Syd was more than mildly interested,’ agrees David Gale. ‘He went along for an audience with the Master when he took over a suite of rooms in the Russell Hotel. And the Master said Syd wasn’t ready for the spiritual life. Now Storm thinks this was very disappointing for Syd because he’d been told he wasn’t spiritually mature, or had no spiritual potential. Or was on the road to becoming fucked up big time. Quite what the Master saw, nobody will ever know. So Syd couldn’t go to India and do that stuff. But he did take it a lot more seriously than Storm and me, who remain to this day the sceptics of that crew. And whether it depressed him and made him react in some way is debatable. I couldn’t say, but the moment when he was turned off the spiritual is certainly significant. Whether that made him determined to prove himself in other quarters – I don’t know.’

During the summer of 1966 Syd moved out of Tottenham Street and with his new girlfriend, fashion model Lindsay Corner, took up residence in the top-floor flat at 2 Earlham Street, just off Shaftesbury Avenue. The house was part of a block of run-down buildings, since demolished and rebuilt, next to the Marquis of Granby pub, conveniently close to the Indica Bookshop and the old vegetable market in Covent Garden. David Gale and Seamus O’Connell lived downstairs, along with artist John Whitely, who would later design the marbling effect on the second Pink Floyd LP A Saucerful of Secrets. The building was rented from the Church of England by light-show operator and Sant Mat convert Peter Wynne Wilson and his girlfriend and fellow satsangi, Susie Gawler-Wright. Both came from extremely privileged backgrounds, Wynne Wilson’s uncle was the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Also living at Earlham Street at the time were ‘Ponji’ Robinson and Jean-Simone Kaminsky, an absconder from the French Foreign Legion who ran a nice sideline in ‘adult literature’ from the house until one of his printing presses caught fire and the tenants had to dispose of the hardcore evidence hastily before the police were alerted.

It was here, in the top-floor flat at Earlham Street, surrounded by Indian prints, beads and bells that Syd to all intents and purposes shrugged off his Sant Mat rejection and wrote most of the songs that would make up the bulk of the first Pink Floyd album. Peter Jenner had asked the rest of the band to contribute songs as well but initially it was Syd who seized the initiative. Drawing upon all the experiences he had absorbed and assimilated in his late teens, and working, as Andrew Rawlinson observed, ‘quick, in the immediate context and with original juice’, he found the lyrics pouring out of him. Songs about scarecrows and transvestites, songs about bicycles and Siamese cats, songs about gnomes and getting stoned, songs about the I Ching and sci-fi, songs about Cambridge and childhood.

While Syd wrote, Nick Mason toured America by Greyhound bus. In New York he read a review in the East Village Other of up-and-coming London bands which mentioned the ‘Pink Floyd Sound’. In fact, it was Barry Miles, in his capacity as the East Village Other’s London correspondent, who had penned the review, the first the band had received outside of the student press. As Mason stated in his autobiography, he had fully assumed that in September he would be back on the academic treadmill. Peter Jenner and Andrew King had other ideas.

‘We decided in the spring of 1966 that we’d quite like to manage them,’ says King, ‘but we didn’t talk about it seriously with them until the start of the next academic year in September 1966 when they played the gigs at the All Saints Church Hall. We said to them we’d like to be your managers, and they said, “Well, no one else wants to be, so you might as well be.”’

By the autumn of 1966 the initial energy and focus of the Notting Hill Free School had dissipated somewhat, and the physical spaces set aside for a broad range of cultural activity had now become little more than rehearsal rooms for local musicians. More importantly the venture was running low on funds.

‘Andrew King and myself were both vicar’s sons,’ says Peter Jenner, ‘and we knew that when you want to raise money for the parish you have to have a social. So in a very old-fashioned way we said, “Let’s put on a social.” Like in the Just William books, like a whist drive. We thought, “You can’t have a whist drive. That’s not cool. Let’s have a band. That would be cool.” And the only band we knew was the band I was starting to get involved with.’

The first Free School benefit ran on Friday, 30 September. Nine further benefit gigs would be held throughout October, November and December. These gigs would do more than any others to cement Pink Floyd’s growing reputation. A surviving set list from the second of these gigs on 14 October reveals that Syd’s intense bout of creativity during the summer had borne fruit. The band performed seven of the tracks that would appear on their debut album: ‘The Gnome’, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’, ‘Snowing [aka ‘Flaming’], ‘Matilda Mother’, ‘Pow R. Toc H.’, and ‘Astronomy Domine’, as well as Barrett compositions ‘Let’s Roll Another One’ (aka ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’), ‘Lucy Leave’ and ‘Stoned Alone’. They also performed the instrumental ‘Flapdoodle Dealing’, and three Bo Diddley compositions, ‘Gimme A Break’, ‘I Can Tell’ and ‘Piggy Bank Surfers’.

Artist Duggie Fields had first heard the Floyd when he was living at 101 Cromwell Road, where the band sometimes rehearsed. Raised on Mose Allison, James Brown and the Motown and Stax Revues, he wasn’t initially impressed. ‘I used to put on whatever I had that had a better rhythm, hoping they might get it, but they never did.’ However, he was captivated by what he saw in a live environment. ‘They were totally new. There was a sound you hadn’t heard anywhere else. It was free-form experimental pop,’ he says. ‘And they were pop,’ he emphasises.

‘Either at the first benefit or the second one, someone came from Millbrook, Leary’s estate in upper New York State, with a   projector and some slides,’ says Hoppy. ‘The happy coincidence was the light show and the band combined.’

Inspired by Joel and Tony Brown, the two visitors from Timothy Leary’s League of Spiritual Discovery in New York who had rigged up their light show at the Free School benefits, Jenner and King now had a go.

‘Hoppy was a bit of a magnet and he’d brought in these people who were draft dodgers and they’d done this light show,’ says Jenner. ‘We thought, that’s great, we want to have lights like that. We just got some oil paint and put them in a projector between two slides. Subsequently they got more sophisticated. You got a hairdryer to blow them and make them move faster, or to cool them down. That was more sophistication! Me and Andrew just got home domestic sealed spotlights and mounted them on bits of wood on the wall and then we got some gels and stapled them to the bits of wood and that was your lights, just close spots. And, of course, they didn’t throw very far and weren’t very strong, so we had to have them very close to the band. And when you did that you got these incredible shadows and colours moving within the shadows. It was just an accident but it enhanced the mystery of the band. Who were these people? Whoo! You can’t really see their faces. They didn’t come on and say, “Hi.” It was all very moody.’

King remembers ‘this absurd system put together with domestic lights which I operated by flicking the on–off switch very fast. None of us knew anything about theatrical lighting. We could have wasted a lot of time and resources and money if we’d had any contact with the world of theatrical lighting. It was a complete Heath Robinson job.’

‘It took off like a house on fire,’ says Hoppy. ‘By the third or fourth benefit there were queues round the block. We’d stumbled on some sort of cultural nexus which obviously had a lot of energy in it. Joe Boyd looked at me and said, “Look, why don’t we try and find a premises in the West End and run it as a club?”

‘A lot of the people we ended up doing business with for years afterwards were coming down to those gigs. That was a big focal point,’ agrees Andrew King. ‘Then the whole thing morphed into UFO.’

One day in December 1966 Boyd and Hopkins set off on a reconnaissance mission around central London in Hoppy’s purple Mini, scouting for, as Boyd put it, ‘derelict cinemas and nightclubs fallen on hard times’. They eventually found what was to become the epicentre of psychedelia at the Blarney Club, an Irish ballroom underneath the Berkeley and Continentale cinemas at 31 Tottenham Court Road. It had a genial owner, Mr Gannon, and as Hoppy noted ‘a basement dance floor with a beautiful polished sprung floor’.

‘You couldn’t have bought what happened in a way. It was so sudden,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘Within four weeks they had to move it to the Blarney Club in Tottenham Court Road. Within weeks we’d sold out the Roundhouse, which was a venue no one knew and which was a complete shit pit. It all went off at an incredible speed. We started doing gigs with the Floyd in September. By December we had the centre-page spread in the Christmas edition of the Melody Maker, saying this was the most important band of the year. All the record companies wanted to sign us. All the publishers wanted to sign us. All the agents wanted to sign us.’

‘By the early winter of ’66 it was all starting to take off,’ agrees King. ‘But it didn’t surprise me. It was the first time I’d ever been involved in group management so I assumed that what was happening was normal. Y’know. You manage a band. You end up in the papers and then all these curious geezers come round and offer you funny deals. And then you get rich and famous and have sex with thousands of flower children.’

This was the high point for the English underground, the moment when Ken Kesey’s ‘century flower’ came into full bloom. ‘The summer of love was ’66 in Britain, rather than ’67,’ maintains Barry Miles. ‘Most of the things we think of as the Underground were happening by 1966. That was the time that people first started to hang out and smoke dope and dress in nice ways and parade around the King’s Road. Hung on You and Granny Takes a Trip [King’s Road boutiques] were late ’66, although even at the Albert Hall reading Kate Heliczer and all her friends had face paint on and were wearing granny dresses and psychedelic clothing. But it seems to me that ’66 was the great year. Indica had started in late ’65. That was another centre where everyone met. The newly emerging rock ’n’ roll aristocrats who used to go to the Scotch of St James, which was virtually next door – they were starting to come in and mix up with the artists who had been doing happenings since the early 1960s. And Better Books, instead of folding like we thought it would, carried on with Bob Cobbing as manager. Hoppy and I did a test run for International Times for the Aldermaston march in April, and by late ’66 International Times was up and running. By then, boy, everyone was around.’

International Times was launched with an all-night rave at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in north London on 15 October 1966. The building had been constructed in 1847 as a turning shed for steam engines but had not served its original function for nearly a century. Latterly it had been used as a bonded store by Gilbey’s, the gin distillers, and as the base for playwright Arnold Wesker’s theatre group, Project 43. When the IT founders commandeered the Roundhouse for their launch party it was in a filthy state, a dark dank circular shell of a building with a leaky conical roof. Undaunted, the flyer for the launch night was promising:

Pop/Op/Costume/Masque/Fantasy-loon/Blowout Drag Ball. All night rave to launch International Times with the Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, steel bands, strips, trips, happenings, movies. Bring your own poison and flowers & gas filled balloons & submarines & rocket ships & candy & striped boxes & ladders & paint & flutes & feet & ladders & locomotives & madness & autumn & blow lamps.

The organisers draped the filthy soot-covered building in psychedelic finery and handed out placebo acid on the door. An estimated 2,500 people turned up. Soft Machine played to the occasional accompaniment of an amplified motorcycle. Performance artist Yoko Ono got up on stage halfway through their set and invited the audience to ‘touch the person next to you’. Three weeks later she would meet John Lennon for the first time at the Indica gallery. Bob Cobbing and the newly formed London Film-Makers’ Co-operative projected Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and William Burroughs’ Towers Open Fire on to the wall. The toilets flooded and the huge sculpted jelly laid on for the guests was reduced to squidgy mess when Syd and Pip Carter took away the wooden supports that were holding up its makeshift mould and used them for Pink Floyd’s light show.

The band ran their entire equipment and Jenner and King’s hand-built light unit through a single thirteen-amp lead, thus ensuring that the sound tripped out – appropriately enough – at regular intervals. The power blew completely during ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, bringing the night’s proceedings to an inglorious end. But the underground had felt its strength and found its momentum. The second edition of IT unsurprisingly gave its own opening night a glowing review, stating that ‘The Pink Floyd, psychedelic pop group, did weird things to the feel of the event with their scary feedback sounds, slide projections playing on their skin.’

Despite being embraced by the underground the band weren’t so well received within the wider musical community. Here they were seen as outsiders, gimmick-ridden arrivistes who had ponced around at private parties instead of paying their dues in the correct manner by schlepping up and down the dual carriageways of Britain in a battered Transit van.

‘They didn’t play the blues properly. That upset people for a start,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘So what the fuck was this all about? It was all about a light show. That’s what they thought.’

The first live review to appear in the mainstream music press seemed to confirm this perception of the band. The NME in December 1966 reported ‘the slides were excellent, colourful, frightening grotesque, beautiful, and the group’s trips into outer-space sounds promised very interesting things to come. Unfortunately all fell a bit flat in the cold reality of All Saints Hall.’ Presciently the review added, ‘Psychedelic versions of “Louie Louie” won’t come off but if they can incorporate their electronic prowess with some lyrical and melodic songs – getting away from R&B things – they could well score in the near future.’

‘There was some resentment towards them because they weren’t rock musicians,’ says Chris Welch of Melody Maker. ‘They’d all come from an educated background – architects, Cambridge, and all that – and there was a perception of them as elitist metropolitan kind of people, certainly among other musicians. When they were playing at the Marquee the support bands thought they were a bit snooty. They appealed to people who liked music as an adventure, as an ongoing experiment, that’s what they brought that was new and fresh. They weren’t yet another blues band playing in the style of the Yardbirds.’

When Pink Floyd returned to the Marquee club in December for the first time since Steve Stollman’s private parties, they played before the regular Marquee crowd and found themselves disliked by support acts, punters and proprietor John Gee alike. At UFO, however, the band were in their element.

A club is just bricks and mortars. A venue. A name. A location. A licensing deal. What makes a club is the creative energy that is unleashed there. The Cavern in Liverpool was just a dank cellar where you could get soup and a bun, but it gave birth to the Mersey sound. CBGB was a piss-pit on New York’s less than salubrious Bowery. The acronym stood, unironically, for Country, Bluegrass and Blues, but the thirty or so musicians who gathered there during the mid-1970s were responsible for punk rock. During the day Manchester’s Haçienda looked just like what it had once been, a yacht salesroom. At night it witnessed acid-house frenzy.

And so it was at UFO. You walked downstairs on faded and frayed beer-stained carpet tacked crudely to the concrete steps into a low-ceilinged ballroom with standard Gaelic pub decor, shamrocks and suchlike, on the walls. The small nondescript stage, which normally hosted ceilidhs, show bands and floor singers, had makeshift curtains draped unceremoniously across the front. However, between 23 December 1966 and its enforced closure at the end of September 1967 it hosted the revolution. The bouncers on the door sold, or gave away, acid. The best of the era’s light show exponents – Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, Jack Bracelin, Jo Gannon, Peter Wynne Wilson, Dermot Harvey, etc. – projected and perfected their art, experimenting on the hoof with oils and inks until their colours ran dry or their equipment overheated.

This was Syd’s creative zenith. Immersed in liquid projections and riding the crest of that final pure wave of Sandoz acid before the supply lines were shut down, Syd dissolved his ego in dappled shades of lime and limpid green, turquoise, violet and indigo. Hunched over his guitar he threw spontaneous improvised shapes and patterns on his Telecaster to match the improvised shapes and patterns that were being projected on to him. Shimmering blobs and bubbles and multilayered constellations of colours washed over him as he choreographed his own sonic abstractions which seemed to synchronise with the pulsating stimuli that emerged from the slides and celluloid wheels of the light shows. Visuals and sounds merged in one amorphous amoebic squall. Each enhanced and intensified the other.

‘Synchronising, that’s a very important part of it,’ says Anthony Stern. ‘It was like the early days of the silent screen, where you have the screen and you have musicians or the pianist down to the left-or right-hand side. I think that’s how they conceived of it. They didn’t want to be up there and in your face.’ The light show allowed Syd and his fellow band members to indulge in a minimalist kinetic ballet where the merest gesture and genuflection could be transformed into an infinitesimal array of projected possibilities. Equally importantly, it allowed them to sidestep the conventions and trappings of stagecraft completely.

‘The whole thing was a form of pop art,’ maintains Pete Brown, who witnessed the synergy of sound and light at UFO many times. ‘Mark Boyle was a terrific light-show guy; when he was down at the UFO, he did some beautiful things. It was very inventive. People responded to it, and the band played as part of that whole kind of space. They became creatures that existed in a visual environment. It was exciting to watch. Syd wasn’t just a rock star in the spotlight.’

Keith Rowe draws parallels between the disengaging possibilities of the table-top guitar and the ego-free environment of the light show. ‘If you think of laying the guitar down, it’s almost the equivalent of that light show. You’re actually putting it one step away from yourself. The attention’s not on you so much. When the guitar’s on the table, the attention’s on the table. When people are looking, they’re not looking at you any more, they’re looking at that. And so it’s this distance thing. I wasn’t at the centre of it. It had all those things, which Syd was feeling too. I can understand that act of “reclusement” with Syd. In a sense it’s already beginning there isn’t it? There’s a sign there of not wanting that gaze.’

Meanwhile the benevolent Mr Gannon averted his gaze too, turning a blind eye when ‘art-house’ movies were projected on to its walls, stating, ‘I’ve seen far worse than that in the navy.’ An occasional crate of whisky found its way to the police station just up the road so that the constabulary might also turn a blind eye to the licensing violations going on inside (a situation, it should be remembered, that also applied to the Blarney Club’s regular Irish clientele who were known to enjoy the occasional lock-in).

Almost everyone who was there agrees that this was the golden era, the paradise moment before the trappings of fame and career began to assert themselves, before the Sunday newspapers came sniffing for sensationalism and sin, before the gangsters who ran clubland came asking for protection money and before the councils, constabulary and judiciary began applying their draconian measures.

On Saturday, 31 December 1966, an all-night rave – Psychedelicamania – took place at the Roundhouse, featuring the Who, the Move and Pink Floyd. The event ran from 10 p.m. till dawn. The publicity posters promised ‘Central Heating and Improved Entrance Facilities’. The UK underground’s growing East Coast connections and avant-garde credentials were confirmed by mentions of ‘Psychedelic Psounds from the Mothers of Invention, the Fugs, Brain Police, Radiophonic Workshop, etc.’ Tickets were available from radical bookshops, such as Indica Books, Housmans and Better Books, and boutiques, including Biba and I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, and Hampstead Record Centre – an indication of how tightly bound and self-supportive the underground still was at this stage. ‘Come and Watch the Pretty Lights’ cajoled the flyers, with the customary knowing nod to the lysergic faithful.

Mark Boyle, who had been working with light shows since 1963, was a purist in such matters and prided himself on creating new effects every week at UFO. He was dismissive of bandwagon-jumpers with their crudely assembled kits and badly executed visuals. ‘To get the real quality you had to have these things going Pow!! Right across the screen in three colours, lightning effects, turbulence.’

As the Roundhouse ravers, freak dancing the night away, saw in 1967, the whole scene was about to go POW.

Two

Distorted View – See Through Baby Blue

A capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses, and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion.

THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS KENNETH GRAHAME

On 11 and 12 January 1967 Pink Floyd went into the Sound Techniques studios in Chelsea and recorded two tracks, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Nick’s Boogie’. The sessions, produced by Joe Boyd, were paid for by film-maker Peter Whitehead who wanted some contemporary soundtrack music for his film, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. In the end only a brief segment of the Floyd’s contribution was used in the film, and the complete footage of the thirty-minute performance only resurfaced on a commercial VHS release in 1994. As an audio and visual document the footage is seminal, being the earliest complete live performance by Pink Floyd in existence. In it Syd Barrett can be seen seated and hunched over his guitar, gouging out shards of dischordancy. He is wearing a red-and-black-hooped T-shirt and an ill-advised and thankfully short-lived pencil moustache. His hair, curly and unkempt, is not particularly long by East Coast beat and West Coast hippie standards, but it is about the same length as that worn by most English groups at the time including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who. Nick Mason, neatly coiffured and wearing a luminous purple turtleneck, looks stiff and self-conscious as he plays his Premier kit, with sticks on ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and mallets on ‘Nick’s Boogie’. Roger Waters, wearing tinted shades and a malevolent pout, actively plays to the cameras whenever he is in close-up. His is the most physically imposing presence throughout. In contrast Rick Wright is mostly dwarfed by his Farfisa Combo Compact organ and the Binson Echorec unit that sits on top of it.

‘Interstellar Overdrive’ was a zeitgeist moment in the development of English pop music, the moment when pop liberated itself from its blues roots. With an opening theme, a lengthy passage of group improvisation, a minor key variation on the theme and a conclusion that restates the introductory theme, it is closer in structure to jazz than pop, but, if anything, the interplay between Syd Barrett’s atonal abstractions and Rick Wright’s Morse stabs and eerie vibrato squalls were closer in spirit to the European avant-garde than anything else. ‘It’s a magnificent piece of contemporary music. It stands up against The Rite of Spring. I’m not being hysterical about that,’ says Anthony Stern, who was assistant director on Peter Whitehead’s Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London.

Any one of a number of R&B combos could have annihilated Pink Floyd musically during this period. Many contained an abundance of gifted and technically proficient musicians steeped in the legacy and tradition of the blues and jazz. Pink Floyd carried no such baggage. Suddenly, their lack of conventional musical skills, the very factor that had previously counted against them and had consigned them to failed auditions and occasional gigs at private functions, became a prime asset in the newly exploratory sound-world of psychedelia. ‘That sudden switch from Bo Diddley to John Cage – it’s a much more abstract style of music,’ says Anthony Stern of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. ‘And that was really the most exciting part about Syd’s growth, ’cos I think he really was a forerunner of all kinds of stuff. That ability to capture a real rhythmic pulse in ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, having that drive which comes from rock music – you can say the one thing he kept from Bo Diddley is that relentless pulse. And then there’s the fragmentation of the melody line in the most beautiful jazzy kind of way, but you’d never say “Interstellar Overdrive” was a piece of jazz. It’s just this wonderful, hybrid thing where rock ’n’ roll just lets go of itself and lets its hair down.’

‘Interstellar Overdrive’ may have been partly inspired by ‘The New Thing’ in jazz but unlike most modern jazz pieces (or indeed the club acts of most R&B groups) it contains no solos. The band simply didn’t have the chops to venture into extravagant extemporisation with any degree of conviction. Indeed there are moments in Peter Whitehead’s footage, as there were many times at UFO, where Syd and Rick’s sonic voyaging simply runs out of impetus and begins to strain both credulity and patience. But ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ isn’t about proficiency and technique. Instead, what Pink Floyd do with the resources available to them is create something entirely new out of ensemble playing. Like the Velvet Underground’s ‘European Son’ or ‘Sister Ray’, ‘Inter stellar Overdrive’ functions as a kind of antimusic. Individually the members of Pink Floyd have none of the abrasive presence or musical pedigree of the Velvets, but collectively they lock into exactly the same kind of primal empathy. It was this very lack of proficiency that gave Pink Floyd’s extended pieces their unique edge. That careful counterbalancing of Syd and Rick’s abstractions, enhanced by the Binson Echorec, and underpinned by Nick and Roger’s basic and uncomplicated rhythm section brought into play a whole new dynamic previously unheard in English pop music.

Peter Jenner has always claimed that Syd Barrett’s descending opening theme to ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ was based on Jenner’s tone-deaf rendition of Love’s version of Bacharach and David’s ‘My Little Red Book’, which they covered on their debut album released on Elektra in the early summer of 1966. A conflicting school of thought, one championed by Roger Waters among others, is that the theme is Syd’s pastiche of ‘Old Ned’, Ron Goodwin’s opening theme to Galton and Simpson’s Steptoe and Son, which was firmly established by 1966 as the most successful comedy show of the era. It never seems to have occurred to anyone that both theories are equally plausible, and that by working in the immediate context with the tools available at his disposal Syd, as he had done with the words ‘Pink’ and ‘Floyd’, simply forged a hybrid out of these disparate sources and created something entirely new in the process.

One thing the Whitehead footage does confirm is the extent to which Syd had absorbed and adapted the techniques he had seen used by Keith Rowe and AMM. Three minutes into ‘Nick’s Boogie’ he lays his guitar in his lap and begins to play ‘table-top’ style. ‘When the guitar is against your stomach it becomes very much an expression of what you’re about, who you are, your thoughts. It’s about you,’ says Keith Rowe. ‘When you lay the guitar on the table, there’s a kind of a distancing. It tends to reflect issues rather than express you. Environment is reflected rather than you expressing something about the environment.’

This is precisely what Syd was doing in the midst of the light shows at the Free School and UFO, acting as an ego-free conduit for musical exploration, distancing and decentring himself, reflecting as much as expressing. Early in 1967 he took a bunch of small circular polished metal discs, of the kind that were beginning to appear on girls’ belts and op-art mini dresses, and glued them to his Fender Esquire, making the instrument literally reflective (and refractive.) Throughout the Whitehead footage he can be seen constantly challenging the gestural lexicon of the rock guitar, whether by radically detuning his instrument or adopting unconventional and untutored slide techniques.

‘Syd was an incredible performer,’ says Peter Brown, who saw Pink Floyd play several times during this period. ‘Miles had invited me down to Powis Square. “You’ve gotta hear this band.” I didn’t think that much of them actually, but I liked Syd. And then because I was kind of persona grata at UFO I used to go down there a lot – partly chasing girls, but partly because it was a kind of a loose community at the time, and we all had certain aims in common. Syd was incredibly charismatic, and within his limitations he could do things on guitar that were very, very interesting. Some of them were textural things and others were definitely kind of linear improvisational type things. I mean, when he was on, when he was happening, he was really happening, y’know?’

‘I have to admit that he never struck me as special as everyone now thinks he was,’ says Barry Miles. ‘But to me he was the most sympathetic one out of the Pink Floyd. He was the one that was most in tune with what was going on at the UFO club and avant-garde music in general. He was very interested in electronic music, like Luciano Berio, who was very important at that time with his recordings of speeded-up and slowed-down collages of tape. Syd was very interested in this sort of thing, which is why he was so interested in AMM. And he certainly knew a lot about art. He was fascinated by the subject. He genuinely cared about what was going on in America. He would talk about De Kooning and Rothko and all the stuff that was being shown at the Whitechapel Gallery. I was never a close friend of Syd’s, but the few conversations we had were usually on that kind of level, because we had the same art school background and the same influences.’

Syd’s fascination with the Dutch abstract expressionist Willem De Kooning reveals another line of contact. Chaim Soutine’s ‘thick squidgy excited paint’, as Robert Hughes put it, had a big influence on De Kooning, the originator of what became known as action painting, and influenced Syd further on down the line. Indeed Robert Hughes’ description of De Kooning as ‘a creature of Protean vitality who subsumes the history of art in his own person, becomes a touchstone of the culture, and so transcends all questions of originality’ echoes Andrew Rawlinson’s early assessment of Syd, and like so many comments on his influences might just as easily have been applied to Syd himself.

Co-manager Andrew King agrees that, for all his apparent spontaneity and improvisation, it was clear that Syd had thought things through conceptually. ‘Someone once said to Picasso, “I could do that in five minutes”, and Picasso replied, “Well, it took me seventy years and five minutes.” Syd’s guitar explorations were like that. They didn’t come out of nowhere.’

‘I think that’s a quote from Whistler, actually,’ says Anthony Stern. ‘I think Whistler was sued by somebody for fraud, because he’d painted in a very abstract kind of way. And someone said, “You could do that in twenty minutes.” And he replied in the same spirit, “I’ve been doing this for a lifetime. So, it’s twenty minutes plus a lifetime.” But yes, Syd definitely did put in the hours and he put in the persistence.’

Andrew Rawlinson also draws a comparison with the modus operandi of the twentieth century’s greatest artist. ‘Just as Picasso is said to have said, “I don’t seek, I find”, I think it’s true of Syd. And I think Syd is quite Picasso-like. I mean in his method of working. I’m not comparing him with Picasso, but we all know Picasso would try anything. And whatever you want to say about him as a self-promoter and making himself out to be the genius artist, which is probably all true, it’s clearly the case that he thought, “Oh, I think I’ll have a go at that. Why not?” And he did it all his life. Syd was the same. It’s just that Syd’s creative life didn’t last very long.’

In January 1967 a German film crew from Bavarian Rundfunk came to London and made a one-hour documentary entitled Die Jungen Nachtwandler (The Young Nightcrawler) directed by Edmund Wolf, who also provided the commentary. Much of the footage was shot at UFO. As with Peter Whitehead’s film, it captures the raw innovation of Pink Floyd’s music in their early days. Wolf ’s footage allows us to hear approximately four and a half minutes of an astounding live version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, which is immeasurably more free-form and abstract than the version that would eventually appear on the Floyd’s debut album.

Of course, as with any truly exploratory music, the Floyd’s sonic journeys could be notoriously variable in quality. By its very definition, genuine experimentation does not always have a tangible outcome. Even Coltrane had his off nights, flailing away in the outer reaches of the cosmos, and there were certainly nights at UFO when the individual components weren’t gelling and when chemically induced voyaging among audience and performers alike gave way to uninspired noodling and musical cul-de-sacs.

‘There was very little finesse in the early days,’ concedes Barry Miles. ‘Syd was never a brilliant guitar virtuoso. He was much better at exploring ideas. There were often, particularly at the UFO club where they’d play for hours, long periods where it would get really boring to be quite honest. I’m sure that sounds sacrilegious but you’d be thinking “Jesus, God, please” as Syd went up and down the keys with his bloody lighter or marbles or steel ball bearings. And Roger was barely competent on bass. Nick would be the only person who would keep it going some nights. The leapers at the front were often dancing to him because the rest would be way off the beat.’

Nick Mason’s role in the architecture of things is often underplayed. Like Mo Tucker in the Velvet Underground he leaned more towards primitivism than proficiency, but his contribution was essential. Pink Floyd simply would not have worked with an Elvin Jones, a Mitch Mitchell or a Ginger Baker. A tyro like Keith Moon would have unbalanced them irrevocably. Mason’s very lack of combustibility, coupled with that uncomplicated repertoire of mallet touches and simple rhythms, was an essential chemical ingredient. Syd Barrett is normally credited with bringing the Bo Diddley influence to Pink Floyd’s music, but it is noticeably Nick Mason in the Peter Whitehead footage who introduces ‘Nick’s Boogie’ with that tell-tale Bo Diddley shuffle beat.

It was once unkindly said of Ringo Starr that not only was he not the best drummer in the world but he probably wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles. Hearing David Gilmour’s perfectly functional contribution to some of Syd Barrett’s later solo tracks, the same might be said of Nick Mason. But in the same way that Ringo’s languid technique came into its own during the Beatles’ psychedelic phase (on ‘Rain’, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, for instance) Nick Mason had exactly the right aesthetic temperament for what was required in Pink Floyd.

More audio evidence of the Floyd’s raw power can be heard on the thirty-minute Granada TV documentary Underground: Scene Special which, like Whitehead’s and Wolf ’s footage, was filmed in January 1967. In the programme the staff of IT can be seen working on issue number seven. ‘Arrest the Home Secretary’ reads the front-page headline. Under the wary eye of the local constabulary and to the general bemusement of passers-by, Hoppy and placard-carrying friends embark upon a Happening around the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus. ‘Pot Is Fun’ reads Hoppy’s banner. ‘Legagise It’ [sic!] reads another. Bus passengers stare out of their rain-spattered windows with impeccably English bemusement. Jeff Nuttall and the People Show are filmed performing one of their provocative theatre pieces, and Miles is interviewed at Indica talking optimistically about what he describes as ‘an embryonic scene’. Paul McCartney adds stoned gravitas to proceedings with his plea for common sense and tolerance. Pink Floyd are filmed in an untypically well-lit UFO, performing a full-tilt version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, while a smattering of freaky dancers gallivant about the dance floor with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Early in the programme, as Hoppy and friends perform their Eros Happening, a brief snippet of an early version of the Floyd’s ‘Matilda Mother’ can be heard. The lyrics are mostly inaudible but they appear to be completely different from the ones eventually recorded for the band’s debut album. In one of the few intelligible snippets Syd sneers sardonically ‘Oh what a drag | caught in a bag’, while on the recorded version he implores ‘Oh mother | tell me more’. Musically it is considerably less refined than the polished studio effort that would appear on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn LP. It sounds more like a prototype for the Stooges or the MC5 than a template for English psychedelia, and provides a salutary reminder that the band had been performing mutated versions of ‘Louie Louie’ only a couple of months earlier.

Although their musical activity still lay completely outside the mainstream of English pop taste, Pink Floyd and their R&B mutations were in the vanguard of a peculiar development during the latter half of 1966 and the early part of 1967. Something odd and unforeseen was going on, the evolution of which is clearly evident in the music of the period. Mod beat went a bit blurred at the edges. Jerky dexedrine-driven riffs got slacker. The increased use of reverb, echo, distortion and compression on recordings only added to this sense of auditory disorientation. Simultaneously, it seems, arrangements became more ornate, decorative, pastoral. Groups began embroidering their songs with plain chant, piccolos, harpsichords, zithers or sitars.

On ‘My Minds Eye’, the Small Faces Christmas hit of 1966, the band shed their R&B reference points in favour of descant singing and the Hosanna in excelsis refrain from a sixteenth-century French children’s carol. When Southend-based R&B band the Paramounts, who had scored a minor hit with their version of Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Poison Ivy’ in 1964, were relaunched as Procol Harum, they unveiled their brand of Bach-influenced ‘baroque and roll’ with ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. The Pretty Things, Eric Burdon and the Animals and Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band made similarly rapid transformations from rhythm-and-blues stalwarts to psychedelic voyagers. Hendrix sniffed the air and caught the mood immediately when he arrived in England. His first single was a cover of the revenge blues ballad ‘Hey Joe’. His second was called ‘Purple Haze’.

Presiding over this entire cultural shift, of course, were the Beatles. The ‘four stately kings of EMI’, as the Monkees would dub them on ‘Alternate Title’, had already fanfared the future with the Revolver album, an album that Syd Barrett played constantly during the summer of 1966. Although no one knew it at the time, they were about to write the next chapter in pop history.

Meanwhile on 29 January 1967 Pink Floyd returned to Sound Techniques studio with Joe Boyd producing, and recorded ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’, the two tracks that would become their debut single. It was Boyd’s intention that the tracks should be recorded and presented to potential record companies as finished items rather than hawked around as demos. Boyd had initially used his connections to secure the band an audition with a distinctly unimpressed Jac Holzman at Elektra who offered the band a derisory deal. Polydor Records came up with a marginally better offer and it was envisaged that the single would be released on the label’s new subsidiary, Track Records, which would also sign the Who, Cream and Jimi Hendrix, but Polydor was effectively gazumped at the eleventh hour when agent Bryan Morrison secured the Floyd a better deal with EMI. This had immediate ramifications for Joe Boyd, as it was EMI policy to use in-house producers only, so the band were forced to dispense with his services. Despite being so comprehensively shafted, Boyd’s legacy was a quirky little pop song about a clothes fetishist that would propel Pink Floyd into the pop charts.

‘Arnold Layne’ contained many of the trademark elements of Syd Barrett’s writing style: subject matter drawn from his immediate context (there was an actual clothes-line thief in Cambridge at the time); concise and economical form (the song consists of just three four-line verses of fifteen to eighteen words); ellipsis of syntax and narrative (‘doors bang | chain gang’); an instinctive sense of phrasing; a clever balancing of regular and irregular metre, assonance, imperfect and internal rhyme (Layne/strange; Wall/tall; caught/sort) and subtle rhythmic shifts and elongations of syllables and vowels which, although ‘Arnold Layne’ contains no drug references, replicated the disorientation of an acid trip (straaange/hobby; taaaall/mirror.)

‘Arnold Layne’ doesn’t celebrate or sensationalise its subject matter: indeed, lurking beneath the freak-show facade lies a curiously old-fashioned morality tale whose tone ranges from the gently admonishing (‘Oh Arnold Layne | it’s not the same’) to the anguished pay-off ‘Why can’t you see’, where Syd’s constricted larynx sounds just like it did on ‘Lucy Leave’.

‘Arnold Layne’ was in the vanguard of a peculiarly English type of character vignette that would become synonymous with psych-pop but it was by no means the first. The Who’s ‘Happy Jack’, a paean to retarded innocence and simmering cruelty, and Cat Stevens’ ‘Matthew and Son’, a story of a beleaguered and down-trodden office clerk, were both in the charts the week ‘Arnold Layne’ was recorded. And in among the mod anthems and soul covers on the Who’s A Quick One LP, released in December 1966, were curios like John Entwistle’s ‘Boris the Spider’ and Keith Moon’s ‘Cobwebs and Strange’, while Pete Townshend had signposted the lyrical territory for gender crisis and dysfunction several months earlier with the Who’s previous single, ‘I’m A Boy’.

If ‘Arnold Layne’ was somewhat understated, its B-side, ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’, bristles with untamed energy. From Rick Wright’s opening drone and Syd’s initial over-amplified chord to the wild Echorec loop at the end, the song perfectly captures the band in transition from raw R&B to full-tilt psychedelia. Essentially a minimally adapted version of the Floyd’s live staple ‘Let’s Roll Another One’, there is still a trace element of the original’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’ riff in the melody, but the reworked lyric drips with innuendo and suggestiveness (‘I’d like to see you | lick that’) and manages to sound more subversive, more sensuous and paradoxically enough, more drug-tinged than the original’s unabashed tribute to the joys of pot-smoking. Syd’s singing alternates between arch (he slips a cleverly disguised ‘fock’ into the chorus and makes it sound like ‘walk’) and eerie. No other pop song of the time would have contained an ego-disintegrating refrain like ‘Ooh, you know, I’m feeling frail’, while a hastily added middle eight, ‘Don’t try another cat tonight | Don’t go a lot on that’, previously absent from ‘Let’s Roll Another One’, undercuts the playfulness of the song with jealousy and menace.

Three weeks after Pink Floyd recorded their debut single, the Beatles released the double-A-sided single ‘Penny Lane/ once famously said that when the Beatles took acid they discovered their inner Scouser, and here was the evidence. Both tracks referred to the psychogeography of favoured Liverpool childhood haunts. Each represented different, and defining, facets of the LSD experience as mediated through England’s two most famous songwriters at the height of their creative powers. McCartney’s ‘Penny Lane’ represented psychedelia’s yin, with its clarity, its exuberance, its piccolo trumpet fanfare, its surrealism of the commonplace (bankers and barbers, poppies in trays, firemen rushing in from the pouring rain) and that tell-tale reality-blurring reference to the nurse who thinks she’s in a play and is anyway. Lennon’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, with its dirge like tempo, its hazy drawl, its stream-of-consciousness lyric taken to the brink of inarticulacy, its introversion, its pitch shifts, woozy Mellotron, sawing cellos, false ending and hallucinatory coda, was psychedelia’s yang.

‘I always say to people that “Arnold Layne”, “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane” were the three breakthrough British rock songs, where you could actually write about British subjects in a semi-social, poetic, historical kind of way,’ says Pete Brown. ‘That was great for me. That really helped me an awful lot to see where I was going and what I could do, and I just started writing it all for Cream. It was very good to see those things being successful and prominent, and that people liked them, ’cos I could see that there was something for me in it, too. It was the way I was going at the time and it really enforced that I was doing the right thing and opened it up for people like me big time. You could look at English subjects, you didn’t have to be transatlantic.’

Within weeks of the release of ‘Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Arnold Layne’ every former mod on the block seemed to be writing songs about toy shops, teddy bears, toffee apples, magicians, mad men, mythical beasts, penny-farthings, children’s playgrounds, weather vanes, fairground rides and rainbows. Inspired by the Beatles and Syd Barrett, everyone threw off the shackles of R&B and got in touch with their inner infant. Steve Winwood, who up to the end of 1966 had been the best teenage Ray Charles imitator in the business, left the Spencer Davis Group and formed Traffic, who collectively retreated to the country to pen songs about paper suns and Berkshire poppies. Winwood’s old band, not to be outdone, recorded the cello-drenched ‘Time Seller’. Fellow Brum-beat boys the Move, who possessed a threatening and thuggish beauty all of their own, became UFO regulars with a pop art–Happening stage act that involved smashing up TV sets and burning effigies of Harold Wilson. Their first two singles, ‘Night of Fear’ and ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’ (released in January and April 1967 respectively), crackled with pill-induced paranoia and bad-trip imagery.

It wasn’t all down to LSD. The Move’s songwriter, Roy Wood, maintains that he never went near the stuff and, as the more astute chroniclers observed, plenty of compliant pop musicians merely donned paisley and chiffon and pretended in the name of the cause, overlaying their routine ‘Route 66’ riffs with suitably lavender-scented lyrics and prettified vocal delivery. Record companies, still giddy from the profits of the mid-1960s Beat Boom continued to hand out generous recording budgets, allowing arrangers to embroider tracks with string sections, brass bands, sitars and Mellotrons, while producers doused everything in echo and phasing. For a brief moment that collusion of warped whimsy and auditory disorientation became the dominant sound of English pop.

During this period the members of Pink Floyd finally gave up their academic studies in order to devote themselves to music. Nick Mason, by his own admission, was not shaping up to be a convincing architect and had spent his final months at Regent Street Polytechnic getting other people to write his essays for him. Mason was offered a timely sabbatical from college and never went back. Rick Wright, too, had long since ceased to attend music college. Roger Waters had a day job gaining work experience at the prestigious design consultancy firm of Fitzroy Robinson and Partners but gave up a potentially lucrative career as an architect to devote himself to the band. Syd had also pretty much dropped out of college by 1967 and like Nick Mason had been offered a sabbatical, as Maggi Hambling recalls. ‘Robert Medley, who was the very inspired head of painting at Camberwell, believed that, when the person left, they left with the present of their personality – this gift from the art school of your personality, not personality as we think of it, but as a painter or sculptor. Roger told me he’d been to see Robert Medley and said to him that he was doing two gigs a week and earning £200 a week and would it be all right for him to have a sabbatical and have a year off and then come back in a year’s time. He seemed quite sensible about it. He said, “You never know. It’s all fashion, and you never know how long this success will last.” Robert, being a very civilised humane human being, said, “Of course,” and he never came back.’

Several of Syd’s contemporaries were surprised to see him give up his art for the music business. ‘He was such a nice guy that I felt really sorry when he got mixed up with rock music,’ says Stan Willis. Syd’s close friend Anna Murray agreed. ‘He was very carried away by the music and he liked performing, but at the time I thought he’d be better off as a painter,’ she told John Cavanagh. ‘His temperament suited it better. I was really surprised when he took off into the music so hugely. I felt he was swept up and it wasn’t necessarily his intention or his driving force. It wasn’t apparent to me that it was the most important thing in his life at all.’

‘I remember Juliette Gale telling me what a wrench it was for Syd to go back on his idea of being a painter. It wasn’t an easy decision for him to take at all,’ confirms Bob Klose.

Pink Floyd officially turned professional on 1 February. Later that month they signed on the dotted line with EMI for an advance of £5,000. Publicity photos from the day show the band members grinning and high-kicking in the street outside EMI’s Manchester Square headquarters.

The band signed to EMI during a period when the tabloid press was at the height of a scaremongering campaign to inform its readership of the drug peril afflicting Britain’s youth. The very week that Pink Floyd joined EMI, the News of the World was in the middle of a three-part exposé called ‘Pop Stars and Drugs’ which implicated almost every leading pop star in the land, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Moody Blues, the Move, Cream and Donovan (among other gems, the News of the World called for Donovan’s ‘Sunshine Superman’ to be banned and for pop stars to be dope-tested like race horses or athletes). The series provided the moral catalyst, and indeed the direct tip-off, that led to the arrest, on 12 February, of Mick Jagger and Keith Richard at Richards’ Sussex home. The subsequent conviction, overturned on appeal, prompted William Rees-Mogg’s famous Times editorial, ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel’. Pink Floyd themselves were implicated in the concluding week of the News of the World features, and were directly linked with the psychedelic drug scene.

This, then, was the climate in which the underground’s house band signed to one of the biggest and most strait-laced record labels in the world. EMI immediately felt compelled to put out a press release disassociating the group from ‘psychedelic pop’ and drug use. ‘The Pink Floyd are not trying to create hallucinatory effects on their audience,’ it read. This prompted John Hopkins to write in issue ten of International Times in March 1967: ‘Actually, I think I prefer it when the Floyd give me hallucinations.’

This wasn’t the first time that EMI had been embroiled in such controversy. In January 1967 mod group the Game had caused seven minutes of an episode of BBC’s Juke Box Jury to be pulled after a heated discussion about their Parlophone single, ‘The Addicted Man’, boiled over. The single was hastily withdrawn even though it conveyed an anti-drug message. Another EMI signing, the Shots, had changed their name to the Smoke – suitably ambiguous – in the summer of 1966 and penned a song called ‘My Friend Jack’ (‘eats sugar lumps’). Mindful of the controversy that had greeted the Game’s single, EMI made them change the lyrics of the chorus, ‘Oh, what beautiful things he sees’. The band complied with the equally drug-soaked ‘He’s been travelling everywhere’, which seemed to satisfy the censorious record company, who presumably thought it was a travelogue. Had they possessed a keener ear for vernacular and nuance they would have realised that lots of people were singing about going on journeys during 1967.

Peter Jenner defends EMI’s stance and public utterances regarding the signing of their new charges. ‘They had to distance themselves. They absolutely had to. They couldn’t possibly have said, “Oh yes, they’re a drug band and we support them and we’re giving them money.” Sir Joseph Lockwood was a crafty old sod. He knew we were playing on that psychedelic thing and the drug culture. And the News of the World had exposed us. When I first saw that I was still working at the LSE. I thought, “What shit are we going to get?” I still don’t know how EMI dealt with it. To this day I’m surprised how little trouble we got. I have no recollection of us being pursued or photographers camping outside. It just came and went. It was a non-story. They didn’t quite get what was going down and how rampant the whole psychedelic drug thing was, and the theology of it.’

One person who did get the theology of it was Syd. He was no more of a proselytiser than his beer-supping band mates but he was living the lifestyle to the full. ‘Syd and I moved from Tottenham Street down to Earlham Street,’ says David Gale. ‘I had a room that was under an advertisement for Cadet cigarettes and looked out across to the Cambridge Theatre over the road. Syd had a room upstairs and there was a guy there – who’d better remain nameless even to this day, insofar as he was responsible for stealing a very large block of opium from the Botanical Museum in Kew Gardens. This is a typical lurid hippie aside, but Syd was partaking, like everybody else, of whatever people came up with, y’know? If somebody came in with a bunch of opium, you’d take it. Probably heroin retained its scary profile, but even that was dabbled in. It was kick out the jams, no holds barred. And Syd was right in there, and clearly got swept up in a way that outstripped him.’

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon had detected the shape of things to come in the way that Roger Waters had reacted to his maiden acid voyage a year earlier. ‘Roger wouldn’t have wanted to go with it. He wouldn’t have wanted to let go of being Roger Waters. Major ego. He wanted fame and fortune. Syd was more transcendental.’

‘I remember Syd being really excited one night at UFO because Paul McCartney was there,’ remembers Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘But he wasn’t as driven as Roger to be a famous and enriched person,’ adds Nigel. ‘He wanted to be on stage and do his music and communicate his stuff but I don’t think he craved fame.’

Another resident of 101 Cromwell Road, Hester Page, also noticed the differences at close quarters. ‘Syd was delightful to be with. Very sensitive. Quietly spoken. Didn’t show off. There was no side to him at all. He was just a very sweet guy so people liked being around him. Whereas someone like Roger was much more of a showman. A bigger ego. Had more presence about him and he was more aware of the world they were entering into.’

Anthony Stern qualifies this assessment somewhat. ‘I think a natural modesty was characteristic of the whole Cambridge gang, actually. None of us had massive egos. I think it was slightly frowned upon. It was a bit vulgar, a bit cheap to beat your chest and want to be like a pop star. But there was a social divide in music. The working-class lads – and that counted for most pop stars and pop musicians – had this burning desire to make something of themselves to get away from their backgrounds. They had a sense of ego, which I don’t think Pink Floyd ever had, perhaps because they come from middle-class, very secure backgrounds. But you did see that with all the other bands that were going on in London at the time, who weren’t perhaps from that privileged background. There was a much greater urgency to make it. The Floyd just wanted to get on and do what they wanted to do best. The word “ambition” has a slightly different meaning in their careers than in other people’s careers. I used to work with Tony Secunda, who was managing the Move. He had an office underneath the flat where I was living with Peter Whitehead, and he would say to me things like “I’ve got this band called the Move. They’re so much better than the Floyd.” And I said, “Tony, you just don’t get it do you?” The Move hadn’t got an ounce of that psychic spirituality that the Floyd had. So there was this big divide. It was basically the Floyd versus the Rolling Stones’ mentalities. One was an inward-looking, very English, slightly middle-and upper-middle-class, airy-fairy, Arcadian view of music and the other was a driving ambition to be big in America.’

Whatever the merit of these observations one thing is indisputable. Fame changed everything. Even though ‘Arnold Layne’ was only a minor hit, reaching number 20 in the charts, it kick-started a process that propelled the band out of the security bubble of the London underground and into the mainstream.

On the day of its release, Saturday, 11 March, ‘Arnold Layne’ was played on Juke Box Jury, the long-running BBC1 light entertainment show where new records were judged ‘Hit’ or ‘Miss’ by a panel of guest celebrities. Hosted by old Etonian and stalwart of the Light Programme David Jacobs, the reviewing panel that evening comprised disc jockeys Pete Murray and Jimmy Savile, the ‘reigning’ Miss World Reita Faria and actress Judy Geeson. Murray denounced Pink Floyd as ‘a con’ and psychedelia as a ‘one-month wonder’. ‘No wonder Pete Murray thought it was a hype,’ says Peter Jenner, ‘because suddenly it was everywhere.’ Despite Murray’s withering assessment, BBC radio did play ‘Arnold Layne’, as did most of the offshore pirate stations. However, the most mainstream and popular offshore station, Radio London, in a fit of moral pique banned the record completely.

The gigs changed too. The Floyd left the sanctuary of the counter-culture and ventured out into Top Rank territory where their live set was often met with indifference or down right hostility. The Birdcage Dancehall, Portsmouth, the Top Spot, Ross-on-Wye or the California Ballroom, Dunstable, were not UFO or the Roundhouse. The Birdcage in Portsmouth was a mod stronghold and the audience greeted ‘Interstellar Over drive’ accordingly. At the California Ballroom punters poured beer on the stage from the balcony and hurled pint pots and coins at the band. Elsewhere audiences waited for the feed back and caterwauling to stop and the resident DJ to come back on and play some hit-parade music so they could resume dancing and fighting and copping off and all the other things audiences do when they remain singularly unimpressed with light shows, lengthy improvisations and songs about currant buns and transvestites.

A few weeks after signing with EMI Pink Floyd entered Abbey Road studios and began recording their debut album. Commencing on 21 February with ‘Matilda Mother’ and concluding on 21 May with ‘Bike’, the tracks that were recorded fell into two distinct styles; the lengthy improvisations featured in the band’s live act, ‘Astronomy Domine’, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, ‘Pow R. Toc H.’, and ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’, and the shorter songs that Syd had penned, mostly at Earlham Street during the summer and autumn of 1966, ‘Lucifer Sam’, ‘Matilda Mother’, ‘Flaming’, ‘The Gnome’, ‘Chapter 24’, ‘The Scarecrow’ and ‘Bike’.

If acid had put the Beatles in touch with their inner Scouser, it put Syd Barrett in touch with his inner Cantabrigian. Regression and rebirth was a well-trodden path among acid initiates. Back in 1943, Albert Hoffman on his initial LSD trip had experienced profound reminders of his childhood, likening the oneness with nature he experienced to the mystical visions he had while walking in the woods as a young boy. More recently John Lennon had mixed images of ego-death and karmic renewal on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘She Said She Said’, ending the former with the mantric ‘of the beginning | of the beginning’ and interjecting the poignant ‘when I was a boy | everything was right’ into the latter. For Syd childhood now chimed with equal resonance. Barely out of his teens, for him acid was the magic ingredient that enabled him to dissolve the fortress walls of adulthood and skip gleefully back to infancy. From this vantage point he could invoke and reflect upon a world of certainty, a time before anxiety, before the expectations of ambition and the imposition of status, a time when tea was on the table and his father was in his study.

‘You’ve gotta look at Cambridge really; you’ve gotta look at Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, more than the lifestyle thing,’ says Pete Brown of Syd’s influences. ‘Maybe it’s inspired by people like Rimbaud and Verlaine and people like that, but I think the English fringe thing is more to do with it, always has been. Language, lateral thinking, looking at the weirdness of British existence, looking at rural or semi-rural peculiarities.’

No account of Syd Barrett’s creative blossoming can take place without examining these earliest and most enduring influences. The lives and works of Edward Lear (1812–88), Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll (1832–98), Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932) and Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) form a thematic framework within which Syd’s initial flowering as a songwriter can be contextualised and understood. The songs that were overtly influenced by Belloc, Grahame et al. only constitute a very small body of his oeuvre but these are the songs for which he is best known and on which his reputation as a songwriter largely rests.

‘That English Robin and Puck and Goodfellow thing. The slightly whimsical faery quality that he had,’ notes Emily Young. ‘It’s from the English folk tradition, but not the English workingman one. You’re not quite sure if he will appear or disappear. More of the Irish and Celtic and less of the Germanic. Something of “the trees have secrets”. I think he was absolutely in touch with that.’

As Emily Young suggests, Syd was very precise in his absorption of childhood literature. There is nothing of the Germanic or Norse tradition, no Hans Christian Andersen, no Aesop, no Brothers Grimm and, despite what some have suggested, little or no Tolkien either. He draws very directly upon Belloc, Grahame, Lear and Carroll, and little else but the merest hint of C. S. Lewis and the found material he plundered from a few nursery rhyme pocket-books.

Lear’s A Book of Nonsense, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and Belloc’s Cautionary Tales are among the best-loved works in English children’s literature. The characters and settings they spawned, the Owl and the Pussycat, the Mad Hatter’s tea-party, Toad of Toad Hall and the rest were, until the advent of Harry Potter, the bedrock and stimulus of children’s imaginations for the best part of a century.

Like Syd Barrett, all four authors suffered the loss of a parent at an early age. Edward Lear, the youngest of twenty children, was rejected by his mother and given to an older sister to bring up when he was four. From an early age he suffered from what he called ‘the morbids’, an all-enveloping depression that dogged him periodically throughout his life. His work, he once said, ‘was a “universal panacea for the ills of life” – it left no time for brooding or recrimination and kept the morbids at bay’.

Kenneth Grahame’s mother died of scarlet fever in 1864 when he was five. As his father, a chronic alcoholic, was incapable of looking after his children, Kenneth, along with his three brothers and sisters, was uprooted from his childhood in Scotland and sent to Cookham Dean in Berkshire, where he was brought up by his paternal grandmother. During the last twenty years of his life Grahame senior neither saw nor provided for his children.

Hilaire Belloc’s father, Louis, died aged forty-two in 1872, when the child was just two years old. The infant Hilaire was the designated chief mourner at the funeral, walking behind the coffin, holding his mother’s hand. Charles Dodgson’s mother died in 1851 during his first year at Oxford University, when he was eighteen. His mother’s unmarried sister, Lucy, subsequently looked after the Dodgson family and remained with them for the rest of her life.

These absences had an undeniable impact on each author’s creative life. Certain themes recur throughout their work directly as a result of these early traumatic losses. Disembodied identity, a dream-like sense of the self in limbo without place or purpose, rootlessness, restlessness, rejection, detachment, escapism, retreat into imaginary worlds, the past recounted in reverie, the lost grandeur of classicism and antiquity, faded or unreachable Arcadia, protracted childhood and the potency of myth – all crop up time and time again and in many guises, as they do through Syd Barrett’s songs.

There are other connections, too. Hilaire Belloc’s childhood in France was characterised by a total absence of men in his family. He was an indulged, precocious, combative, gifted and belligerent child in a chaotic maternal household, cosseted and protected by a widowed mother and two widowed grandmothers. In 1871, the year after Hilaire was born, the family had to flee their home when Paris was besieged by the Prussian invasion. The family home was subsequently occupied and sacked by the Prussian army. Hilaire subsequently grew up, as A. N. Wilson put it in his biography of Belloc, ‘with an in-built domestic mythology of Paradise Lost … of bittersweet memories of a France which had vanished forever’. Belloc’s mother, Bessie, later wrote a biography entitled I Too Have Lived In Arcadia. To ward off grief and disruption the young Hilaire immersed himself in literature, read prodigiously from an early age and was writing metrically precise poetry by the age of seven.

Kenneth Grahame also spent his childhood living in a world of his own imagination. When he wasn’t exploring his large Berkshire home with its numerous nooks and crannies, its womb-like cupboards and corners, its winding staircase and its dusty vaulted attic, he was roaming the surrounding countryside, projecting on to its fir-tree woods, meadows and willow-bordered river an anthropomorphic vision of a fantasy world populated by creatures of his own creation. He regarded the house’s unkempt wild orchard as elf-haunted, and its duck pond as the source of the Nile.

Something else that Lear, Dodgson, Grahame and Belloc’s best-remembered works have in common is that they were all part of a satirical backlash against the conventions of their genre. Nineteenth-century children’s literature was puritanical and doctrinaire in tone, with an evangelical emphasis on morality and an overriding duty to instruct. For countless generations the appeal of the Alice stories, The Wind in the Willows, the nonsense verse and Cautionary Tales lay in their subversive connotations. The best-loved of these works were essentially rebellious texts, loved equally by adults and children alike. Children were captivated by an inventive cast of the mischievous, the macabre, the nonsensical and the grotesque, and by the explicit rejection, or complete absence, of adult authority. Adults recognised their richly parodic nature and the way they mocked the social order and the moral certainties of the adult universe.

In the 1960s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass would be eagerly reclaimed by the acid generation. Alice’s shifting identity, the logic twists of the narrative and the dreamscape of bizarre characters were fruitful thematic territory for any imaginative child who had grown up in the shadow of the bomb and had come of age in the era of psychedelic drugs. In America the love generation appropriated Walt Disney’s largely forgotten Fantasia for much the same reason. In the case of Alice, though, the appropriation began much earlier, and is embedded deep in the psyche of English nostalgia. Although it was well received in his lifetime, interest in Carroll’s work declined rapidly after his death in 1898. It was the horrors of the Great War of 1914–1918 that restored Alice to the English literary consciousness. While European avant-garde sensibilities turned to Dada, futurism, and nihilism, the English cultivated a fondness for the lost world of Edwardiana and Victoriana. When English pop music adopted the same iconography in the mid-1960s, it was merely tapping in to a potent strain of nostalgia that has been there since Passchendaele, the Somme and Flanders destroyed the faith, trust and patriotism (and limbs) of an entire generation of youth.

Edward Lear created a fascinating nonsensical cosmogony of human, animal and plant life, populated by such creatures as the Jumblies, the Quangle Wangle, the Pelican Chorus, the Akond of Swat and, perhaps most famously, the Dong with the Luminous Nose. He wrote nonsense botany, nonsense recipes, nonsense limericks and nonsense songs and constructed an entire nonsense alphabet.

John Lennon was clearly the pop world’s most obvious descendant of Lear. The characters that populate his books John Lennon in His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965), such as Eric Hearble, Treasure Ivan, the Wumberlog and Mr Boris Morris, as well as the language that describes them and the sketches that accompany them, are highly reminiscent of Lear. Although the influence was never as overt in Syd’s work (his influences rarely were), he exhibited the same sense of playful absurdity.

Syd’s letters to Libby crackle with the same kind of offbeat wit and invention that characterised much of Lear’s own correspondence. Often Syd is undeniably juvenile – e.g. a drawing of a limbless man sunbathing is accompanied with the caption ‘Don’t disturb him, he’s quite armless’ – but then so is much of Edward Lear’s work. Documenting his travels through the Scottish Highlands with his friend Phipps Hornby in 1841 Lear drew a series of bizarre illustrations depicting the two men cramming huge game birds into their knee-high boots (‘P & L being hurried insert the remains of their lunch in their boots’) and Lear being comically poked in the eye by a brush-wielding child (‘L – on ascending the cabin stairs – nearly loses his eye by the abrupt and injudicious promission of a new broom in the hands of a misguided infant’). Syd sent Libby illustrations depicting, among other things, a stick man carrying a huge sausage above his head (‘sausage thief running’) being pursued by another stick man (‘copper – whistle note (G#)’). Another drawing, captioned ‘A retch [sic] goes to school with his paints in a box while all sleep and are not bothered’, is pure modern-day Lear in its lyrical inventiveness.

Syd even walked like a Lear illustration. As biographer Vivian Noakes noted, many of Lear’s drawings were suffused with ‘a sense of movement – the arms are flung spontaneously back like bird’s in flight and the legs stride out or stand poised expectantly on tip-toe as if they are going to be spun round like a child’s top’.

Like Lear, Syd would populate his lyrics with imagery drawn from botany, zoology and nature. Lear and Carroll influenced the clarity of his lyrics too, and, of course, a key chapter in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, where Rat and Mole embark upon a mystic odyssey downriver and encounter the great god Pan, provided the title of the first Pink Floyd LP. Interestingly enough, Grahame only wrote the ‘Piper’ and ‘Wayfarers All’ chapters in the book almost as an afterthought, in order to give the book its mystic dimension. Coincidentally Syd only named Pink Floyd’s debut LP at the last minute. The album’s working title right up until July 1967 was Projection.

Of course, Grahame’s influence ran far deeper than the mere naming of an LP. Syd’s notion of transcendentalism and pantheism, the symbolism of the wild wood and his vision of protracted childhood and lost Arcadia were all informed by the author of The Wind in the Willows.

Several of Syd’s most famous songs are pastiches of things that were already pastiches themselves. Belloc took the morally improving literature of the nineteenth century as the model for his mockery in Cautionary Tales. Carroll drew on familiar rhymes and traditional fairy tales as the basis for his own mimicry. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland he directly parodies Isaac Watts’ ‘How Doth the Little Busy Bee’ and Robert Southey’s ‘You Are Old, Father William’, while the Mock Turtle sings a parody of Mary Howitt’s ‘Will you walk into my parlour said the spider to the fly’. The opening stanza from ‘Jabberwocky’ (’Twas brillig and the slithy toves …) was lifted from a parody of Anglo-Saxon verse that Carroll had written ten years earlier, complete with portmanteau words and ‘learned’ footnotes of the kind that would be found in an authentic academic text.

Belloc, of course, had the most explicit influence of all. Syd’s song ‘Effervescing Elephant’ was a masterful Belloc pastiche and in its original form ‘Matilda Mother’, the first track that the Pink Floyd recorded for the Piper album, lifted its lyrics verbatim from Belloc’s ‘Jim Who Ran Away from his Nurse and Was Eaten by a Lion’, ‘Henry King Who Chewed Bits of String, and Was Early Cut Off in Dreadful Agonies’, and ‘Matilda Who Told Lies and was Burned to Death’.

‘Matilda Mother’ is pivotal when considering Syd’s vision of childhood. Any notion of fey whimsy is constantly undercut by unsettling images which constantly rock the song out of its kindergarten complacency. In Syd’s child-world, security always comes with conditions attached, certainty is always juxtaposed with poignancy. The gestation of the song was simple enough. Like ‘Let’s Roll Another One’ the lyrics of ‘Matilda Mother’ were hastily amended at the last minute. Syd simply replaced Hilaire Belloc’s words with his own and submitted them to the same metrical beat as the Cautionary Tales, even here though he still retained an element of mimicry. For the song’s opening line he minimally adapted the children’s poem ‘When Good King Arthur Ruled the Land’ to read ‘There was a king who ruled the land’. What is original about the song is not the verses, which are largely drawn from the common stock of fairy-tale imagery, but the sudden urgent interjection of the chorus where Syd steps out of his myth-world to plead, ‘Why d’yer have to leave me there, hanging in my infant air | waiting’, and then attempts, not wholly successfully, to resolve this air of restlessness with the reassuring and placatory, ‘You only have to read the lines of scribbly black and everything shines’. The song’s opening verse is sung by Rick Wright, and Syd comes in for the chorus with that unnervingly strangulated plea. Wright sings the second chorus, the ambiguous ‘Wondering and dreaming | the words had different meaning’, which leaves the listener pondering whether Syd means that the words had different meaning when he was a child, or different meaning when transformed by the sensory bombardment of LSD. What takes the song entirely out of its realm is Syd’s astonishing denouement in the final verse. ‘For all the time spent in that room’ shocks the listener out of reverie and transports us to somewhere more sinister and unsettling. The next line, ‘The doll’s house darkness | old perfume’ is without precedent in English pop song. We are invited, Alice in Wonderland-style, to peer in through tiny windows, to see beyond the props and into the shadow world. It evokes the synaesthesia of scent memory and maternal warmth, the stale lingering perfume of lily-of-the-valley and maiden aunts.

Cambridge compatriot Matthew Scurfield recalls that both he and Syd owned a Pollock’s toy theatre, the lavishly embellished and beautifully lit wooden model theatres that were in vogue during the nineteenth century and allowed imaginative children to stage their own miniature productions at home. Many eminent Victorian artists had them, including John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Robert Louis Stevenson was also a fan and eulogised them in print. By the 1930s they had fallen out of favour. Benjamin Pollock was one of the last manufacturers of these curios and his name has become synonymous with the brand. In the era of Triang, Airfix and Scalextric, it speaks volumes about Syd’s imagination that he owned and treasured one of these arcane toys. The tableau of possibilities presented by the Pollock’s theatre had an enduring influence on his outlook and his writing. The tranquil and dispassionate gaze and a sense of peering in from a disengaged vantage point would recur time and time again in his lyrics.

The week after recording ‘Matilda Mother’ Pink Floyd returned to the studio to record a condensed and reined-in version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, which, although completely innovative in terms of what anyone else was doing at the time, lacked the drive and the sheer inventive onslaught of its live counterpart. During the same session the band recorded ‘Chapter 24’, which took its words almost unchanged from the Fu hexagram of the I Ching. As he had done with Belloc for ‘Matilda Mother’, Syd drew upon what was close to hand, this time his copy of the Richard Wilhelm translation of the ancient Chinese oracle, which Barry Miles remembers him purchasing from the Indica Bookshop. Syd’s audibly stoned delivery of the adapted text has a certain wasted charm, but his stilted singing style and a tendency to roll his ‘r’s self-consciously reveal a man who is still not entirely at ease with his vocal capabilities.

The song’s real strength lies in its arrangement, which for the first time allowed Pink Floyd to take full advantage of the generous facilities of Abbey Road studios. ‘Chapter 24’ is embellished with harmonium, bells and Mellotron, and also gives the first real indication of Syd’s strength as a melodist. Sometimes the found nature of his material, the parodying element in his writing and the simple nursery-rhyme bounce of his lyrics could detract from the marvellous tunes he wrote. ‘Chapter 24’ contains a palpable folk influence and cadences and inflections which could only have been drawn from the English hymn tradition.

‘Flaming’, recorded in one take on Thursday, 16 March, was originally called ‘Snowing’ and had been a feature of the band’s live set since the previous summer. The change of title can be interpreted in two ways. ‘Flaming’ was acid-users’ slang for the visual after-glow effect experienced while hallucinating. It was also part of the title of the opening track on AMM’s debut album, ‘Later During a Flaming Riviera Sunset’, and the opening effects sequence on the Pink Floyd track directly refers to a segment of the AMM piece. Either way, ‘Flaming’ is an exuberant piece of nursery-psych, sending us whirling through Syd’s acid wonderland in two minutes and forty-two seconds. The lyric, like that of ‘Matilda Mother’, is pitched ambivalently between childhood innocence and drug-heightened sensations, mixing fantasia (‘sitting on a unicorn’), a painterly eye (‘watching buttercups cup the light’) and acid visions (‘streaming through the starlit skies’) while utilising English colloquialisms (‘yippee’, ‘no fear’) that had never previously appeared in English pop song. The song’s ‘Hey ho, here we go’ refrain was adapted from the traditional work song ‘Donkey Riding’, which itself is based on the Scottish shanty ‘Hieland Laddie’, recorded by Pete Seeger among others, and contained in the Pete Seeger Songbook, one of Syd’s earliest guitar-tuition guides. The donkey referred to in the title is actually a donkey engine, a device for lifting cargo from ships, but because of the animal’s biblical associations the song was sung widely in schools by children of Syd’s generation.

Easily the weakest of Syd Barrett’s fantasy songs is ‘The Gnome’. It has a twee and lazy lyric, which is rendered in Syd’s most self-conscious and stilted style, replete with rolled ‘r’s. From the opening ‘I want to tell you a story’ – which evokes Max Bygraves as much as furry-booted trolls – to the relief of the final ‘hooray’, ‘The Gnome’ gives ready ammunition to all those surly mods who stood around at gigs waiting for the band to stop and the resident DJ to start spinning Motown again. The song was partly inspired by one of Syd’s favourite childhood stories, Denys Watkins-Pitchford’s The Little Grey Men, which tells the tale of three gnomes, Dodder, Sneezewort and Baldmoney, who search for their long-lost brother, Cloudberry. It certainly brought out Syd’s most fey and impressionable tendencies. The only section that doesn’t evoke an embarrassed wince is the wide-eyed wonder of ‘look at the sky | look at the river | isn’t it good’ which evokes those warm summer evenings spent with Libby, gazing silently out of car windows at the Cambridgeshire countryside. Syd’s hushed semi-spoken delivery connects the song for one brief welcoming moment to the pantheism of The Wind in the Willows, but it is only brief respite: all too soon we are being ‘twee’ed to death by those wine-drinking tunic-wearing elfin folk.

On Monday, 20 March, a day after attempting six takes of ‘The Gnome’, the band returned to the studio to work on the Roger Waters composition ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’. Lyrically it’s risible, and recognisably from the same hand that penned the gimmicky ‘Walk with Me, Sydney’ three years earlier. The song’s vamping by numbers is pure university revue fodder from a man who hasn’t yet found his voice. For this reason alone

‘Stethoscope’ rarely warrants a mention in critiques of the early Pink Floyd. In fact, the song contains some of the most breathtaking musical interplay on the entire Piper album, and some of the most riveting and intense soloing that Syd ever committed to vinyl.

Waters’ forgettable lyrics are, in fact, mere bookends. After thirty-three seconds they give way to a mutated 4/4 jam between what Fred Frith called ‘charmingly inept blues clichés on the bagpipe stop of the Farfisa organ and a non-stop barrage of clipped rhythmic noises from Mr Barrett, clearly on a totally different plane of existence from his fellow musicians’. At two minutes and fifteen seconds Syd releases a pained yelp and the whole thing hurtles headlong into a breakneck crescendo: the tempo is the fastest the Floyd ever attempted on record. ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ is the sound of a discarded R&B template splintering into a thousand sonic shards.

As if to illustrate the sheer breadth and scope of Syd’s creativity, the same day that the Floyd worked on ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ they also recorded ‘The Scarecrow’ in a single take. ‘The Scarecrow’ bears all the hallmarks of Syd’s ‘toy theatre’ aesthetic. The dispassionate gaze is rendered in a pastorale. ‘The Scarecrow’ can best be described as a frieze, formal and illustrative in construction, and adhering to principles that the poet Charles Baudelaire applied to his depictions of Parisian dandies a century earlier: ‘I want to show the moderns moving about on friezes,’ Baudelaire said, ‘stripped to their essentials, to place them in paintings arranged in harmonies of colour, in harmonies of lines, line and colour fitted to each other.’ ‘The Scarecrow’ is one of Syd’s most painterly songs, a picture-book evocation of rural life. But this is not Kenneth Grahame or even A. A Milne territory, where a precisely mapped-out narrative is based on those enchanted places of a child’s youth. ‘The Scarecrow’ is essentially a landscape of the mind, disengaged and uninvolved, where the imagery remains unencumbered by human intrusion.

Although not overtly analogous, the inert, passive, all-seeing scarecrow is a perfect vehicle for Syd’s own neutrality, and even though the song’s finale is notionally uplifting – the scarecrow is both resigned and carefree – there is a sense of foreboding in the denouement. It’s apparent in the prescient ‘his head did no thinking | his arms didn’t move’, and even more so in the ambivalent and understated ‘the black and green scarecrow is sadder than me’. What does Syd mean here? Does he mean even sadder than me, or sad in contrast to my happiness? If it’s the former then the song hints at some underlying and, so far, unarticulated unease that will soon surface both in Syd’s psyche and his behaviour.

Like ‘Chapter 24’, the melody of ‘The Scarecrow’ is infused with a folk sensibility, while the cadences again reveal an instinctive awareness of the English hymnal. The marrying of words to music is flawless, and the lyric, with its clever rhythmic shifts and clipped internal rhymes (‘everywhere | he didn’t care’; ‘around | on the ground’; ‘not unkind | he doesn’t mind’) is among the best that Syd ever wrote.

The song’s instrumental outro adds sympathetic pastoral touches, although given the strength of the melody it would probably have worked just as well sung a cappella. The wood blocks which simulate the clip-clop of horses’ hooves at the beginning of the track are in truth mildly intrusive and burden the song with a heavy-handed literalism that it doesn’t warrant or need, detracting as they do from the wind-blown frailty of the lyric and the song’s disarmingly subtle waltz-time tempo.

The next three tracks that were recorded were ‘Astronomy Domine’, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Pow R. Toc H.’, all with lengthy instrumental sections. Worked on extensively between 21 March and 12 April – fourteen takes alone were attempted of ‘Astronomy Domine’ – these three tracks formed the bedrock of the band’s live set and did much to cement their reputation as the high priests of psychedelia. But for all their space-rock credentials, what is noticeable about all three tracks is just how rooted they are in the commonplace. ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, as Roger Waters once said, suggests space exploration in name only, and although its opening riff probably launched a thousand trips down at UFO, it was, as we now know, based on Syd’s uncanny ability to transform any material that came to hand into something entirely new. The structure and tonal palette of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ may align it to jazz and the European avant-garde but it began life as a TV theme tune and a Bacharach and David song. The track’s cosmic connotations might have been sidestepped completely had they called it ‘Steptoe’ or ‘The Red Book Variations’. After all, ‘Pow R. Toc H’., with equally appropriate acid route-map tones, attracts little of the cosmic baggage of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ simply by having a title that was derived from army signalling terminology and a fellowship organisation for soldiers founded during the First World War. Although ostensibly a group composition in temperament, ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ is indisputably Roger Waters’ brainchild. And although Rick Wright, as so often, drives the melodic content with his tinkling interludes of cocktail jazz it is Waters’ eerie vocalisations that give the track its brooding and menacing momentum. In fact ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ is utterly bereft of psychedelic leitmotifs, being closer in spirit to the exotica of Martin Denny and Les Baxter than it is to acid rock.

On ‘Astronomy Domine’, Syd the imagist poet comes to the fore for the first time and the meaning of the lyrics is almost wholly subservient to the shapes they make. The song is built on layers of internal rhyme, onomatopoeia and alliteration (one of the few occasions that Syd resorted to the device) as Syd revels in wordplay for its own sake. The imagery conveys a strong sense of synaesthesia (a condition which some have suggested that Syd experienced), as if designed to replicate the sensations of a light show, with colours colliding, congealing and bursting into a thousand fragments. The whole thing seems to have been conceived during sensory bombardment from one of Mike Leonard’s light machines. But even in the midst of this bombardment other elements of the track are reassuringly grounded in Syd’s childhood. The descending ‘whoo-ooo’ chorus is pure comic-book spooky, and while the line ‘Neptune Titan | Stars can frighten’ was never going to challenge George Ligeti or Richard Strauss for pride of place in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, it encapsulates Syd’s fairy-tale take on the cosmos perfectly. Even more rooted in childhood is the telling reference to Dan Dare, Frank Hampson’s legendary cartoon creation for the Eagle comic which ran from 1950. The rugged action hero Dan, with his archenemy the Mekon, Digby his faithful batman and his personal spaceship, Anastasia, was staple reading for any middle-class school boy in the 1950s. It featured beautifully drawn panels which paid meticulous attention to detail, and the strip’s golden years, 1956 to 1959, coincided exactly with Syd’s early teens.

Although the adventures of Dan Dare are notionally set in outer space, the storylines and much of the terminology are rooted in the familiar English military argot of the Second World War. Planes are ‘crates’, the space-fleet controller Sir Hubert is RAF to the core and one of the most damning insults that can be heaped upon the Mekons is that they are humourless. It seems entirely appropriate, then, that Syd should bring Dan Dare into his repertoire. Even in the midst of his free-association versifying, his muse remains reassuringly unmistakeably English. Syd may have been one of psychedelia’s progenitors but he was never a card-carrying literalist for the cause. He would never have written anything as self-consciously à la mode as ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ with its tangerine trees and newspaper taxis – although it is probably fair to say that, when stoned ennui set in, he was more than capable of emulating Lennon’s ‘I’m Only Sleeping’.

‘Lucifer Sam’ is the odd track out on the Piper album. Neither lengthy instrumental nor three-minute fairy tale, its taut style is a throwback to the Floyd’s earlier raw R&B. ‘Lucifer Sam’ has a compact form and driving riff that would have made it a prime candidate for a single (or at least a perfectly serviceable B-side) if there hadn’t already been stronger contenders. It’s a character song like ‘Arnold Layne’ rather than a still-life study like ‘The Scarecrow’, and by Syd’s oblique standards it is specific and direct. Jenny Spires appears thinly disguised as Jennifer Gentle and although the whole thing whiffs of stoned paranoia (‘that cat’s something I can’t explain’ – it’s just a cat, Syd, there really is nothing to explain) and menacing undertones it also possesses a nimble and playful wit.

Syd made remarkable progress both as a singer and interpreter during the Piper sessions and ‘Lucifer Sam’ was one of his best vocal outings to date. Syd’s singing was often wilfully artless and uninvolved. Here he sounds impassioned. ‘Lucifer Sam’ has none of the strangulated delivery of ‘Lucy Leave’, the archness of ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ or the self-conscious tweeness of ‘The Gnome’ or ‘Chapter 24’. The way he slurs the enunciation of ‘Lucifer’ and ‘Jennifer’ and exaggerates the hard ‘t’ at the end of ‘cat’ shows a singer growing in confidence. This new-found confidence is particularly noticeable in the complex phrasing of the final verse where the mysterious nocturnal actions of Sam are very precisely aligned to assonance and internal rhymes (ground/found/around) which deliberately mimics the sound of a miaowing cat. ‘Lucifer Sam’ was worked on extensively between Wednesday, 12 April, and Tuesday, 18 April. The track was augmented with a distinctive bowed bass, maracas and organ; Syd attempted several vocal takes until he got his phrasing just right.

After these intensive sessions there was no more studio activity until 21 May. While they were recording their debut album Pink Floyd continued to gig extensively. Although they still played predominantly in and around London their appearances at UFO became less frequent. As their popularity grew, fuelled by the success of ‘Arnold Layne’, they found themselves playing provincial theatres, often to indifferent or hostile audiences. When they weren’t touring the Top Rank and Starlight Ballrooms, the band did find time to play two epoch-making underground gigs. In the early hours of Sunday, 30 April, hot on the heels of a gig at the Tabernacle Club in Stockport on the 28th and a day trip to Zaandam in Holland for a TV appearance, the band played the legendary 14 Hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace. The bill read like a who’s who of the underground and featured among others the Move, Soft Machine, the Pretty Things, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Tomorrow, John’s Children, the Social Deviants, the Purple Gang, Syn and the Flies. Bands played simultaneously on two stages erected at either end of the huge hall, which created a cacophony of noise for the 10,000 who attended the event. Less discerning trippers chose to stand equidistant between the two stages, all the better to fully absorb the maelstrom.

Syd was at this time in his psychedelic pomp. He played delicate glissandi and as the dawn crept in he held his mirrored guitar up to the rising sun and reflected shards of light back onto the appreciative audience. Daevid Allen of Soft Machine credits this performance as the inspiration for his own glissando guitar technique. ‘The rest of the band looked a bit sheepish, I thought, but there was this incredible Wagnerian music coming off them,’ he remembers. ‘It sounded like the music of the spheres.’

The event had been planned as a way of raising money for International Times and the newly formed Arts Lab in Covent Garden but little of the money found its way back into underground coffers. John Lennon and John Dunbar were peaking on acid at Lennon’s Weybridge Mansion when they saw a report of the event on the BBC evening news and decided to go down and check it out. In the iconic footage shot by Peter Whitehead they can be seen wandering about in a dazed state, Lennon, in granny glasses and afghan coat, licks his lips as come-down dehydration sets in.

Reviews of the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream were decidedly mixed. The Sunday Mirror saw it as ‘the last struggle of a doomed tribe trying to save itself ’ and the more sceptical elements within the underground press viewed it as a ‘rip-off waiting to happen’. The perennially good-natured Hoppy shook hands with everyone as they left, like the vicar at some alternative village fete. Meanwhile some of the stragglers enacted an impromptu happening, constructing a giant joint out of stage back-drops, which a bunch of aggrieved mods then proceeded to trample to bits. The symbolism was not lost on those who witnessed it.

In stark contrast to the chaotic nature of the Alexandra Palace event Pink Floyd played one of their most creatively fulfilling concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday, 12 May. Called ‘Games for May – Space Age Relaxation for the Climax of Spring’, the multimedia event showcased the first quadraphonic sound system ever used in Britain. Nick Mason in his autobiography remembers Games for May as one of the most significant events the band ever performed. International Times hailed it as ‘a genuine twentieth-century music chamber concert.’ Games for May featured Peter Wynne Wilson’s elaborate light show, electronic tape installations especially recorded by Roger, Rick and Syd, and the by now common sight of a cast of beautiful people handing out flowers to the audience. According to the concert programme the band performed ‘Matilda Mother’, ‘Flaming’, ‘The Scarecrow’, ‘Games for May’, ‘Bicycle’ (sic), ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’, ‘Pow R. Toc H.’, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Lucifer Sam’. The set was greeted by an enraptured audience in what was one of the key events of the summer of love.

A slightly adapted and retitled version of the song that Syd wrote especially for the event became Pink Floyd’s next single. Recorded a week after the Festival Hall concert, ‘See Emily Play’ was the high point of English psychedelia, Pink Floyd’s perfect pop moment. As economical as a haiku, as enigmatic as a Zen koan, ‘See Emily Play’ distilled all of Syd’s dreamy evocation, mystery, and wistfulness into three two-line verses. No other pop song of the period conveyed such crystalline clarity. No other pop song of the period said so much by saying so little.

There is still some conjecture as to whom the Emily of the title referred. Libby Gausden maintains that Emily was going to be the name of their first child when she and Syd talked about getting married. The most obvious candidate though is Emily Young, the earnest, questing and rebellious Free School teenager who, like the Emily of the song, wore a long black gown that touched the ground and as she sat imbibing all the knowledge, hash and collective lunacy going on around her in the autumn and winter of 1966.

‘They’d written this song about Emily and, I thought, that’s probably me,’ she says. ‘There weren’t any other Emilys. Now there’s a billion. I decided that it was about me but I didn’t know, really and truly. I tucked it away in my heart and didn’t think about it again as anything I would claim. It was just something that went on in my head and it spoke to my own little creative spirit.’

As with the debate over ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and Steptoe and Son/My Little Red Book, it is just as likely that ‘Emily’ was derived from both sources, beginning life as Libby and Syd’s dream-child, then made flesh in the hinterlands of Notting Hill four years later. The song’s opening verse is a perfect cameo of an adolescent flower child trying on personae, searching for identity, and like all adolescents, sometimes trying a little too hard. The depiction causes Emily Young little consternation.

‘The thing about “Emily tries but misunderstands” – I’m not really sure what that was about. Maybe I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and everyone could see it. I was so young to be hanging out with all these people in their twenties and thirties and forties and fifties. I was like a child. I was like a sponge. You have to borrow someone else’s dreams till tomorrow at that age. Me and Anjelica were fifteen-year-old schoolgirls and very innocent and ignorant really, but very pleased to be getting these experiences. I had this incredible hunger so to “try and misunderstand”. I don’t know, maybe I was trying to be clever and sophisticated. Maybe it’s a good thing to try and misunderstand. Maybe I was trying to do the wrong thing and misunderstood and was actually doing the right thing.’

The song’s second verse ‘Soon after dark Emily cries | Gazing through trees in sorrow | Hardly a sound till tomorrow’ would not have looked out of place etched into a nineteenth-century woodcut, or accompanying an illustration in one of Syd’s beloved fairy-tale books. It’s not simply Carrollesque. It sounds as though it could have come from the pen of Charles Dodgson himself.

Whether he knew it or not, Syd had written an anthem for all the questers, all the Emilys. ‘Float on a river forever and ever? Absolutely! I’m going to float on a river forever and ever. That’s the human condition. That’s what everybody does,’ says Emily Young, who having followed her own true path these past forty years is now a world-renowned sculptress.

The final track recorded for Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the closing track on the album, ‘Bike’, was Syd’s supreme homage to gleeful unrepentant infantilism. Written well before Pink Floyd hit the big time, ‘Bike’ was legendary among Syd’s circle of friends possibly as early as the summer of 1965 as they first witnessed the blossoming of his eccentric songwriting gifts. ‘I remember Syd playing things in Roger’s back garden,’ says Andrew Rawlinson. ‘I think I remember him playing “I’ve got a bike” but don’t rely on that memory because there’s too many people who say, “Ah, I remember the time Syd composed a tune while I was sitting there …” I don’t know if that’s true but I do remember him singing it on his own.’

The song’s most likely inspiration was A. A. Milne’s ‘The Engineer’ from Now We Are Six. The poem’s jerky scansion and pay-off line (‘It’s a good sort of brake | But it hasn’t worked yet’) are replicated perfectly in Syd’s song.

The disarming simplicity of ‘Bike’ has often overshadowed what a cleverly constructed and complex little ditty it is. As in all the best nursery rhymes the certainty of Syd’s list of ‘I’ve gots’ – the bike, the cloak, the mouse, the gingerbread men, the room – is constantly qualified and undermined both within the verses, where each qualifier is rendered with immaculate middle-class politeness (‘I’d give it to you if I could | But I borrowed it’; ‘If you think it could look good | Then I guess it should’; ‘Take a couple if you wish | They’re on the dish’) and by the refrain ‘You’re the kind of girl that fits in with my world’ which like the dynamics and denouement of ‘Matilda Mother’ takes us into another perceptual realm entirely. The first half of that ambiguous refrain, with its simultaneous hints at commitment, convenience and selfishness, is undermined by the subtle disavowal implicit in the rejoinder ‘I’ll give you anything | Anything, if you want things’, where a jaded sense of ‘Oh well, if things are what you want …’ is palpable. ‘Bike’, like so many of Syd’s songs, is full of these hidden layers of distancing and disengagement. Nothing is ever fully embraced. The song is constantly destabilising and sabotaging its own certainties.

A looped coda of sound effects brings ‘Bike’ to an unnerving hallucinatory conclusion. As with the horses’ hooves on ‘The Scarecrow’, the collage of goose-squawks and clock chimes in ‘Bike’ (enthusiastically plundered from the same series of EMI sound effects EPs that the Beatles used on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) lends the song a degree of literalism that it doesn’t really need. Where the clip-clops in ‘The Scarecrow’ detract from its charming waltz time, the clanging melange of tape effects in ‘Bike’ somewhat overshadows the ‘psychedelic music hall’ mood of the final verse, which slows to half speed to great effect and burdens Syd’s kindergarten whimsy with an implied madness that isn’t apparent in the song itself.

‘OK. He writes a song about a bike,’ notes Pete Brown. ‘If you compare that to something like “My White Bicycle” by Tomorrow, it’s a completely different idea. One of them is clearly set in the English countryside and it’s a kind of modest thing. The other is like a kind of tribal, but also much more commercial, idea of a song. It’s much more deliberately “rocky” and commercial and produced.’

The recording of ‘Bike’ brought to an end a fruitful period that had seen Pink Floyd move from underground cult to fully-fledged pop stars. By July ‘See Emily Play’ was in the Top 10. The band had made prestigious TV and concert appearances and received critical approval in the mainstream press. Behind the scenes, though, the cracks were beginning to show.

In an astute recollection of the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream contained in his biography, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, Mick Farren noted the wind of change that was blowing through the cavernous Alexandra Palace as the underground found itself for the first time in the full glare of mainstream news reportage. Farren suspected, with good reason, that the counter-culture wasn’t ideologically equipped to deal with the transformation. With an air of foreboding he pointed to the palpable air of exploitation and naivety that hung over the Alexandra Palace event. Farren’s most telling observations lay in what he detected in the minor details. Since his band, the Social Deviants, had opened the event, he had plenty of time to observe the pageantry unfolding behind the scenes.

‘My first surprise was how the denizens of backstage – considering that they were looked up to as the prime motivators – were actually more conservative than the punters outside. Considerably more drinking was going on backstage, and although a few world-class druggers were among those assembled, I quickly realised two things. Most bands, even though they might have their flamboyant extremists, also had members who, despite their long hair and floral shirts, still clung to a decidedly brown-ale consciousness and would probably never change. Too many didn’t believe a word of all this counter-culture malarkey, and were only embracing the trend as another avenue to rock-business success.’

In such incidentals the future was being forged. Gestural politics and notional support for ‘the cause’ were slowly giving ways to careers. Sincere creative impulses were essentially at the beck and call of fashion and trend. The shrewder and more hard-nosed participants were wising up and cashing in. Pharma ceutical enlightenment and obliteration were an active hindrance to the dictates of commerce. For all the counter-culture’s claims of building a new psychedelic Jerusalem the only real blurring of boundaries between performers and audiences was in the minds of those who were too fried on acid to notice that, stripped of its day-glo finery, it was business as usual.

‘It’s interesting isn’t it?’ says David Gale, as he ponders Farren’s observations. ‘It puts the artists in the role of making consumables, and the kids as consumers. So it shifts that idea that we were all equal celebrants at this great cultural party.’

As Syd was about to find out.

About the Author

Rob Chapman is a regular contributor to Mojo magazine, and has written for The Times, Guardian, Independent on Sunday, Uncut, Word and the dance music fanzine Jockey Slut. He is the author of Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio (1992) and The Vinyl Junkyard (1996). His novel Dusk Music was published in 2008. He has compiled and written sleevenotes for CD reissues by artists as varied as The Last Poets and John Fahey, as well as numerous psychedelia and loungecore compilations. He lives in Manchester.

By the Same Author

non-fiction

Selling the Sixties: Pirates and Pop Music Radio

The Vinyl Junkyard

Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head

fiction

Dusk Music

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