by Mark Blake
The Emily in question is similarly steeped in Floyd myths. Some claim it was Emily Young, one of the Notting Hill Free School and UFO club’s regular alumni, now a noted sculptress. While Emily met Syd on occasion, she claims to have no specific knowledge that the song was written about her. Others have suggested that Syd’s Earlham Street flatmate Anna Murray inspired the song. Again, Anna has never claimed to know that the song was written about her. At the time of the song’s release Waters told one radio interviewer, in the wonderful parlance of the era: ‘Emily could be anyone. She’s just a hung-up chick, that’s all.’
Two weeks after the song’s release, Pink Floyd were invited to play Top of the Pops. Andrew King would later say that Syd’s decline could be plotted through the group’s appearances on the show: two reluctant performances and one final non-appearance. Peter Wynne-Willson was with Syd in Trafalgar Square prior to one of the performances. ‘It was getting later and later. In the end, I said to him, “Isn’t it time we got going?” We hailed a cab and Syd asked it to go somewhere entirely different.’
Norman Smith was on hand to chaperone the band as they went to the show’s Lime Grove Studios in West London for their debut appearance. ‘I told them they’d have to mime, as that was what all the groups did back then,’ he recalls. ‘I don’t think Syd was happy, but the others accepted it. So they went off to have their hair washed and their make-up done. Normally, I didn’t think Syd cared how he looked, but when he came back, he looked like a pop star. I told him he looked fantastic. So he went straight over to the mirror, messed up his hair and grabbed a load of tissues to wipe off the make-up . . . A week later, we went back again, and the same thing happened. He just stood there on the show, letting the guitar dangle in front of him. I had a go afterwards, told him he was going to destroy our recording career if he carried on. But it just went in one ear and out the other.’
The single peaked at number 5. Taken back to the studio for a third appearance, the following week, Syd initially refused to go on. ‘We finally discovered that the reason was that John Lennon didn’t have to do Top of the Pops, so we didn’t,’ Roger Waters told Melody Maker.
Sue Kingsford encountered Syd on the afternoon of one of his scheduled Top of the Pops appearances. She and Jock were now living in a flat in Beaufort Street, South Kensington, near to Cromwell Road. ‘Suddenly we heard this banging on the door,’ she recalls. ‘And there was Syd. He had no shoes on, which was not unusual in those days, but his feet were filthy and bleeding. He looked completely off of his head. He didn’t say a word. He just came in and we gave him some Sugar Puffs and a cup of coffee. He still didn’t say anything. He just sat there. About an hour after he arrived, there was another bang on the door. It was some of the Floyd’s people: “Is Syd here?” We answered, “Yes, he’s in the kitchen but he’s not very well.” They were like, “I don’t give a fuck if he’s not very well.” They just dragged him out. Later that evening I discovered they’d dragged him off to do Top of the Pops. The reason he was sitting on a cushion during the show is because he was so out of it he couldn’t stand up.’
Despite their Top of the Pops appearance, the BBC invited the group to guest on the Saturday Club radio show at the end of July. Having been ferried to the recording studio, Syd again decided that he didn’t wish to participate. This time he offered no explanation. ‘When we got the call that it was our turn to go on, nobody could find Syd,’ remembers Norman Smith. ‘The doorman told us they’d seen someone that looked like him leaving. Roger Waters and I went out into the street and, sure enough, there he was, just turning the corner. That was the end of that.’
Inevitably, Barrett’s behaviour was souring his relationship with the rest of the group. Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, who was driving the band’s van, agreed to pair up with Syd for a night drive back from the South Coast after a gig. ‘I drove back from Portsmouth with Syd, as the others didn’t really want to be with him. I remember it was pouring with rain, and he smoked a joint, and he must have laughed for about two hours, but hardly spoke. He was obviously losing the plot.’
In August, Blackhill issued a statement to the press following the cancellation of several Pink Floyd dates. ‘It is not true Syd has left the group,’ Andrew King told the New Musical Express. ‘He is tired and exhausted, and has been advised to rest for two weeks.’
Peter Jenner called on Sam Hutt for advice. That summer, Hutt was fresh out of medical school and acquiring a reputation as London’s hippest doctor. ‘The idea was to send Syd to see “the good doctor”,’ explains Hutt now. ‘The idea being, “He knows all about the drugs and he takes them as well, but he’s not going to freak out.”’
Hutt had rented a finca on Formentera, which then represented the western end of the hippie trail for those that didn’t fancy making the full journey East. Syd and Lindsay, Richard and Juliette, Sam, his wife and their young son headed off to the island for a fortnight, later to be joined by Roger and Judy Trim, who were staying on neighbouring Ibiza. The plan was for Barrett to kick back, play guitar, bask in the sun, enjoy himself. Syd duly obliged and seemed quite content during parts of the holiday, but there was one snag. As Hutt remembers, ‘He was munching acid all the time.’ The idyllic retreat was also prone to electrical storms, a freak weather condition that did little to improve Syd’s raddled state of mind. ‘You get sheet lightning behind the clouds and the whole sky lights up fluorescent,’ Hutt recalls. ‘It could affect you even if you weren’t taking anything at all. Add acid to the equation and Syd was, quite literally, trying to climb the walls. His fingernails were clawing the wall, as he was trying to get himself off the floor.’
‘I thought it was fucking awful.’ The Who’s Pete Townshend was among those unimpressed by The Piper at the Gates of Dawn on its release that August. Townshend’s main gripe was that the record didn’t do justice to the group’s wall-of-sound live show. But Norman Smith had done the job asked of him. He’d curbed some of the band’s excesses and helped realise Peter Jenner’s dream of an avant-garde pop group. Less than twelve months earlier, Pink Floyd’s repertoire included the likes of ‘Louie Louie’, yet barely a trace of the blues was to be found in their first album. Richard Wright’s classical and jazz influences seem to have taken their place, the keyboards filling in the spaces usually occupied by a lead guitar, giving most of the record a sinister undertow. Childhood nursery rhymes permeate ‘Bike’, ‘The Gnome’ and ‘Flaming’ (‘Watching buttercups come to life … sleeping on a dandelion’), but on ‘Matilda Mother’ and ‘The Scarecrow’ there’s a hint of menace as well; like Grimm’s Fairy Tales set to music. A sixties spy movie theme burbles away on ‘Lucifer Sam’, with its cryptic mention of one Jennifer Gentle, in reality Jenny Spires.
Nocturnal sessions with I-Ching at Earlham Street find their way into ‘Chapter 24’, accompanied by droning keyboards and percussion, the band making use of the treasure trove of odd musical instruments scattered around the studio. In the bleaker, noisier corner were ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’. The latter was, in the words of Nick Mason, similar to ‘what Roy Lichtenstein was putting into his paintings’. With Peter Jenner reciting astronomical co-ordinates from a children’s book of the planets through a megaphone and Roger Waters’ primitive bass runs, it sounded like pop art and science fiction condensed into a rock song.
While Barrett’s songs had a wistful, child-like charm, ‘Pow R Toc H’ and Waters’ solo composition ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ now sound like dummy runs for some of the bassist’s later ideas. The shivery suggestion of madness and the frantic howling would be revisited on Dark Side of the Moon and Animals.
Yet Syd’s fairy-tale contributions to the album immediately struck a chord with those from his hometown. ‘There was something very Cambridge-like about it all,’ says Seamus O’Connell. ‘When we first heard these extraordinary songs, things like “Bike”, we all made that connection.’
‘I always thought Syd got stuck in a curious sort of p
rotracted childhood,’ offers Anthony Stern. ‘So it was always there in the music. Childhood had been an idyllic time, and I think he found the idea of growing up and dealing with your parents’ world frankly terrifying.’
For Sue Kingsford, Syd’s hankering for his hometown was all too familiar. ‘I always thought he was out of his comfort zone when he wasn’t in Cambridge,’ she ventures. ‘Both of us often used to go back at weekends. I can remember us tripping one night in Cromwell Road, and Syd, who hadn’t said a word for hours, suddenly asked, “Are you going home this weekend?” I told him I was, and he replied, “Do you know, that’s all I want to do. I just want to go home.”’
As steeped in 1967 as Sgt Pepper, Pink Floyd’s debut also translates for subsequent generations of listeners. Reviews were favourable, even if some of what Record Mirror called its ‘mind-blowing sounds’ were still a step too far for many pop fans.
Photographer Vic Singh, hired to shoot the band for the album’s cover, was similarly unsure. ‘Their music seemed alien and quite surreal,’ he says now. ‘When I first heard it, I thought: This is never going to work.’ Then sharing a studio with, among others, David Bailey, Singh was an up-and-coming society photographer and friends with George Harrison. ‘George had been given a prism lens. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he passed it to me.’ Singh told Jenner and King to raid whatever boutiques they could to get the brightest clothes in which to dress the band. This time, even Syd seemed happy to play by the rules. Vic relaxed the band ‘with a few joints and a couple of shots of Scotch in the coffee – and then snapped away’. The Quiet Beatle’s prism lens split the finished image, rendering the Floyd in duplicate. ‘It was unusual and different, and they were delighted with it,’ says Singh. ‘And Syd did his own little drawing on the back cover.’ The Piper at the Gates of Dawn would be one of the few Pink Floyd studio album sleeves actually to feature the group on its front cover.
Vic Singh’s experiences with Syd that year contrasted with those of Andrew Whittuck. A freelance photographer, shadowing the likes of The Beatles and the Maharishi in London that summer, Whittuck photographed Pink Floyd at Abbey Road and at his parents’ house. ‘I’d actually been to primary school in Hampstead with Nick Mason,’ he says now. ‘Though of course we were both too cool to mention it.’ The band and a roadie arrived with their lighting rig and set up in Whittuck’s bedroom: ‘They played me the album, which was quite unlike anything I’d ever heard, and there was lots of talk about the composer Stockhausen, which was where it was at, apparently. They all crashed out in my brother’s room and Syd was practically asleep after wedging himself into a corner between the door and the bed. Eventually, my mother came in, took one look at him and announced, “That chap looks like he needs a strong cup of tea.” She went off and brought him a cup. Of course, I was embarrassed, but, to be fair, Syd did actually perk up a bit after that.’
Pink Floyd were now attracting the attention of the music press, and interviews from the time see both Waters and Mason more forthcoming than their singer. ‘I lie and I’m rather aggressive,’ announced Roger to Disc and Music Echo. ‘I want to be successful and loved in everything I turn my hand to,’ Nick told the same interviewer. In contrast, Barrett is shyer and far less verbose. ‘Our music is like an abstract painting,’ he offered in a brief moment of insight. ‘It should suggest something to each person.’
Back from Formentera, Syd and the band reconvened at Sound Technique Studios, as EMI were already looking for another single. Among the new songs on offer was Barrett’s horribly prophetic creation ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’. Abbreviated from its original title, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream Old Woman with a Casket’, the song featured Nick Mason on vocals shadowed by insidious, creepy Pinky and Perky-style vocals, the music swaying and lurching. ‘Vegetable Man’ was hardly any brighter, with a desperate Syd declaring, ‘I’ve been looking all over the place for a place for me’ against a tuneless oompah rhythm. ‘He was singing about himself. It was an extraordinary document of serious mental disturbance,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘A song of amazing mad grandeur,’ counters a more sympathetic Andrew King. Dr Sam Hutt dropped in while the band was recording the track. Unfortunately, he was tripping: ‘All I can remember thinking was: Uh-oh, here come the demons!’
‘We were probably the only people in Los Angeles that had a copy of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,’ insists Alice Cooper. Pink Floyd’s debut was released in the US at the end of October 1967, when Alice was still just plain Vincent Furnier, the nineteen-year-old singer in a band called The Nazz and ‘utterly fixated by all British bands’. Alice’s and Pink Floyd’s paths would cross within weeks of the album’s release.
Andrew King, in his capacity as tour manager, flew to the States in advance of Floyd’s inaugural US tour. As he now explains, ‘Everything went wrong from day one.’
In San Francisco, King discovered that the group’s work visas had not yet arrived. Under union rules, a visiting British band had effectively to swap with an American group visiting the UK, in this case Sam the Sham and The Pharoahs. ‘I had to explain the situation to our promoter Bill Graham,’ says King. ‘Which made me feel like a complete prick.’ Graham, a formidable figure on the American West Coast, was not a man to be trifled with. He had arranged for Pink Floyd to play club dates and theatre shows alongside Janis Joplin’s band, Big Brother and The Holding Company. The absent visas meant the first six West Coast dates had to be cancelled. ‘An irate Bill ended up getting the American ambassador out of his bed in London at 4 a.m. to sort out the visas,’ continues King. ‘The band were on the next plane out. If there was one consolation, I got to see the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, whom Bill booked to play the first night instead of the Floyd.’
Arriving in the US with only their guitars, the band were confronted with two major problems. Their US label Capitol (‘who hadn’t a fucking clue about us or our music’, according to Peter Jenner) hadn’t organised any instruments and the band were forced to hustle the local music shops into lending replacements. Arriving at the 5,500-seater Winterland Auditorium, where they were due to open for Janis Joplin and Richie Havens, King realised that the group’s homemade light show, which they’d brought with them, ‘would be absolutely fucking useless and more suited to a primary school play’. The headliners graciously allowed them to use their own.
In the UK, the West Coast music scene was romantically perceived as a counterpart to London’s underground music clique. In the wake of The Beatles, any visiting British band intrigued the American music press. The just-launched Rolling Stone magazine sent photographer Baron Wolman down to Sausalito where Pink Floyd were staying. The band willingly played up for the camera. ‘They were obviously pleased to be in San Francisco,’ recalls Wolman now. ‘At one time Syd grabbed a couple of sugar cubes and put them in his mouth, an obvious reference to his fondness for LSD and one of the more popular ways of ingesting that particular drug.’
However, as Waters would later protest, many of the West Coast’s flagship groups were essentially country-blues bands. They might be given to lengthy jams and dope-smoking, but musically they were surprisingly conservative in their sound and influences. Pink Floyd’s mind-bending mix of jazz, beat pop and electronic noodling was far removed from Janis Joplin. The contrast wasn’t lost on the music press. As Rolling Stone’s star critic Ralph Gleason wrote: ‘On the West Coast we have recently seen The Cream, The Who, Procol Harum, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. Three groups are winners. The other two just do not make it. In person, Pink Floyd, for all its electronic interest, is simply dull in a dance hall following Big Brother and Janis Joplin.’
The band found their smaller club shows, in which they could use their bijou lighting system, were better received – some of the time. Prior to flying out from London, Syd had had his hair permed at Vidal Sassoon’s, and the resultant frizz was not to his liking. Lighting tech Peter Wynne-Willson had had his own hair permed at the same time. ‘Syd, myself and a few others went to Vidal Sass
oon’s in London and had our hair permed. I wonder if Syd had an adverse reaction to the perm? I do remember that the horror look came into his eyes soon after.’
Before going on stage at the Cheetah Club in Santa Monica some reports claim Barrett, in a fit of pique, poured the contents of a tub of Brylcreem over his hair, into which he crushed a handful of (the barbiturate) Mandrax capsules. Wynne-Willson claims no memory of this. In the great spirit of rock myth and hearsay, others, including Sam Hutt, are adamant they’d seen him perform this trick on stage previously at the UFO club (‘I remember being terribly impressed, and thinking: This is a man who has his finger on some kind of pulse.’) Nevertheless, Nick Mason’s memory of the show extends to Syd applying the hair gel but not the drugs. Once asked to comment on the likeliness of the story, David Gilmour quipped that he ‘couldn’t believe Syd would waste good Mandies’. Once on stage Barrett is said to have detuned his guitar, provoking Roger Waters to cut his own hand while hitting his bass in anger.
Cheetah Club regulars The Nazz approached the band after the show. ‘The Floyd had run out of money in Los Angeles and ended up staying with us for a couple of nights,’ claims Alice Cooper. ‘We had a place on Beethoven Street in Venice. I remember getting up one morning and there was Syd staring at a box of cornflakes the way you or I would watch television. It was obvious that there was already something very, very wrong.’
‘I don’t think we’d run out of money,’ corrects Andrew King. ‘But we were feeling very lonely and dispirited. The Nazz invited us round to theirs to smoke some pot. They were incredibly kind to us when we most needed it. Though we did watch them play that club and they cleared the place.’
Offstage, Syd was also a liability: uncommunicative with reps from the band’s American record company and appearing monosyllabic during an interview with Dick Clark on the popular US TV show American Bandstand. Tellingly, during a mimed performance of the Floyd’s new song ‘Apples and Oranges’, Syd seems barely bothered to mouth the words beneath his bird’s nest hair-do, the camera frequently cutting to a rather aggrieved-looking Roger Waters and an unflappable Nick Mason. It was, at least, an improvement on the day before on The Pat Boone Show, when Syd spent most of the time cutting his interviewer dead with a silent stare and a single-word answer to the question, ‘What do you like?’ Barrett: ‘America.’