by Mark Blake
Years later, though, Richard Wright would claim that David Gilmour hadn’t been their only choice. ‘When Syd left we actually asked Jeff Beck to join,’ he said. ‘But he turned us down.’ Others claim the band were too shy ever to have asked Beck, and that he was even ‘rejected on the grounds that he couldn’t sing’.
Around the same time, Anthony Stern had run into Peter Jenner in Drum City, a music shop in London’s Piccadilly. ‘I played trumpet and had been into jazz, and while I could play the guitar, my playing wasn’t up to much,’ says Stern. ‘But Peter was like, “Look, Syd’s really falling behind, why can’t you be a second guitar player in Pink Floyd? … You come from Cambridge … You know them all.” Spontaneously, I just turned around and said, “Oh, no, I’m a film director” ’.
Gilmour’s self-confessed insecurity wasn’t helped by the management’s lack of faith. ‘We consciously fought to keep Syd in the band,’ agrees Peter Jenner. ‘The idea that Roger was going to become the main songwriter didn’t cross my mind. But I did think that Rick could have come into his own, and we did wonder if he and Syd would stick together.’
Wright shared the management’s misgivings. ‘Peter and Andrew thought that Syd and I were the musical brains of the group, and that we should form a break-away band,’ he later told Mojo. ‘And, believe me, I would have left with him, if I had thought Syd could do it.’
Despite the rest of the group’s scepticism, Jenner and King still believed that Barrett was the band’s golden goose, and aimed to establish him as a solo artist. Financially, Blackhill was still struggling, with Pink Floyd in debt to the tune of £17,000. At the end of 1967, the company had begun managing a young singer-songwriter, Marc Feld, now working under the name Marc Bolan, and his group Tyrannosaurus Rex. Feld had signed to Blackhill because they looked after his hero Syd Barrett, yet it would be another few years before he would become a bona fide pop star in his own right. An enterprising Jenner had also applied for a £50,000 grant from the Arts Council, supposedly to fund a hastily conceived rock opera featuring BBC underground rock DJ John Peel as narrator. When the tabloids got wind of the scam, they revived the previous year’s headlines, claiming that Pink Floyd’s ‘sound equivalent of LSD visions’ was reason enough to reject their application. The Arts Council agreed.
Unbeknown to Pink Floyd, the Morrison Agency was already circling. ‘Bryan was very wily,’ says Jenner. ‘He was the man who told us, “If a musician ever asks you for any money, say yes, provided they sign a publishing contract. You can give any musician twenty-five pounds for a publishing contract.” And Bryan acquired a lot of publishing contracts.’
In March 1968, Jenner and King formally dissolved their partnership with Pink Floyd, leaving the group free to secure a new management deal with Bryan Morrison. Morrison would eventually pass the job on to Steve O’Rourke, one of the ‘sinister dandies’ Joe Boyd had encountered the year before. Despite their previous misgivings, Boyd, Jenner and King had since warmed to both O’Rourke and Morrison’s booking agent Tony Howard. Says Jenner: ‘Knowing those two were involved was one of the reasons I felt confident that Floyd would get well looked after.’
Pink Floyd’s enterprising new manager, twenty-seven-year-old Steve O’Rourke, was the son of an Irish fisherman and had originally trained as an accountant. He moved into the music business in his late teens, later hired by Morrison after a stint as a pet food salesman. It was a job O’Rourke would cite as a badge of honour, telling the band that he would often sample his products to demonstrate their nutritious value to prospective clients, declaring, ‘If it’s good enough for me, it’s certainly good enough for Rover.’ O’Rourke had also made a small appearance in the Bob Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back, which was deemed a point in his favour. However, later, O’Rourke’s commitment to the idea that you could sell anything would prove a major stumbling block in his relationship with the more questioning Roger Waters.
‘Steve was much harder than Peter and I,’ admits Andrew King. ‘And I was rather jealous of him. He sorted out some big mistakes we’d made in our contractual relationship with EMI. He had an eye for the main chance and used it to their advantage. Steve had one client – the band – and nothing would compromise him in what he would do for the band. They could not have had a better manager.’
‘It was always a verbal agreement between Floyd and Steve,’ says another of the group’s confidants. ‘The deal was done on a handshake. I always thought that was a clever move on the band’s part. Somehow, it made Steve work that bit harder.’
On 6 April, Syd’s departure was officially announced. A week later, Pink Floyd released a single, ‘It Would Be So Nice’, with Richard Wright on lead vocals, the first effort from their new line-up. A perky sub-Kinks affair (which Waters would later describe as ‘complete trash’), it included a reference in the lyrics to the Evening Standard newspaper, which fell foul of the BBC’s regulations. Happy to garner any publicity, the band contacted the newspaper, while agreeing to change the offending lyric. But even a little controversy couldn’t save the song from barely denting the charts.
In Cambridge, the news of Floyd’s line-up change was met with mixed emotions. Barrett’s sister Rosemary had been appalled by her brother’s rapid decline, and blamed the music industry for indulging his drug use. She would later claim that after ‘See Emily Play’ she found Syd’s music too painful to listen to.
Bob Klose, who’d concentrated on his studies after quitting the band, welcomed the change. ‘Syd was the rocket fuel, but Dave was the steady burn,’ he quips. ‘I know that Roger Waters had the creative impulse, but a great band needs a great musician. You need someone who can sing and play and do all the very musical stuff, aside from the grand concepts.’
For Gilmour’s former bandmates, the news of his recruitment came as no surprise.
‘I was at home recuperating after the French trip when I heard,’ says Rick Wills. ‘I was disappointed, but it was a logical step. Next time I saw Dave, he’d come back to Cambridge after doing some gigs, and he had eighty pounds in cash on him – and this was when eighty pounds was still a lot of money. He was in Ken Stevens’ music shop – long hair, velvet jacket, boots from Gohill’s in Camden Town – buying a very expensive pair of headphones that you plugged straight into your guitar – and he’d got himself a Fender Strat by then. I thought: Christ, you look the part!’
On stage, though, the flashily attired, Fender Strat-wielding Gilmour was still understudying his predecessor, gamely singing Barrett’s whimsical lyrics and replicating his guitar lines. A batch of mimed promo videos made by the band that year for Belgian TV captured the group’s muddled situation. Waters mimes Barrett’s vocals on ‘Apples and Oranges’ and ‘The Scarecrow’. Wright half-mimes on ‘See Emily Play’, looking mortally embarrassed, while Waters upstages him by playing imaginary cricket and wielding his bass like a machine-gun. On each of the clips, Gilmour hangs around on the sidelines, looking swish and handsome, but not yet part of the gang.
Following UFO’s closure, Middle Earth in Covent Garden had become the underground cognoscenti’s club of choice. Jeff Dexter was one of the club’s regular DJs. ‘We put Floyd on at Middle Earth,’ he recalls, ‘and I thought the new line-up was brilliant. In those days lots of people thought the idea of showing you were out to lunch was kind of cool. But I thought David was, dare I say it, so much more professional.’
As Storm Thorgerson explains, ‘You have to remember Syd couldn’t play guitar very well. David could. Syd had an attractive voice but David had a great voice.’
Gilmour’s professionalism certainly held him in good stead on the night Syd showed up at Middle Earth and spent the gig glowering at him from in front of the stage.
The real test for the group and their new recruit would come in the studio. EMI needed a second album. Pink Floyd reconvened with Norman Smith at Abbey Road. They’d already endured several recording sessions with Syd and had one Barrett-sung composition in the can, ‘Jugband Blu
es’, recorded just before Christmas. Syd had requested a Salvation Army band to play on the track and the redoubtable Smith knew just where to find one, though rumour has it that, on seeing the uniformed brass players, Barrett simply instructed them to play anything. Their contributions gave the song an even edgier quality. ‘I think the track might have been playing in their headphones,’ recalled Peter Jenner, ‘but the brass band chose to ignore it.’ It was agreed to include ‘Jugband Blues’ on the new album, but not Barrett’s ‘Vegetable Man’ or ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’. Waters vetoed their inclusion on the grounds that they were ‘just too dark’.
The bassist had been especially prolific, delivering three self-penned songs: ‘Let There Be More Light’, a broody psychedelic wig-out, all about aliens landing in the Fens, which name-checked the Floyd’s familiar Pip Carter; ‘Corporal Clegg’, the first of what would be many diatribes against the futility of war; and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, a shivery, languid piece of what critics would later christen, to the band’s despair, ‘Space Rock’. Wright wrote and sang lead vocals on ‘See-Saw’ and ‘Remember a Day’, the last a slight piece of psychedelic pop originally intended for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Still raw from his experiences with Syd, Norman Smith was impressed by Barrett’s replacement. ‘Dave Gilmour was a different story altogether,’ he recalls. ‘So much easier.’ But while Gilmour may have been a more willing workmate than Barrett, collectively the band were more dogged than ever in their pursuit of experimental ideas, an approach that flummoxed the producer.
‘I still didn’t understand the music,’ admits Smith. ‘But what I’d noticed is that they’d started developing their own tapes at home, so I encouraged this, as I always thought they should produce themselves in the long run.’
Smith backed off from the process, showing the band how to use the studio, while chipping in with advice, and, on ‘Remember a Day’, taking over the drums when Mason struggled to produce the required feel. But Smith’s attitude jarred. ‘Norman gave up on the second album,’ griped Richard Wright. ‘He was forever saying things like, “You can’t do twenty minutes of this ridiculous noise.”’
Peter Jenner now believes that the band’s dissatisfaction stemmed from the fact that ‘Norman was becoming “Hurricane” Smith, a pop star in his own right, and perhaps didn’t feel he needed to be producing Pink Floyd.’
In fact, ‘Hurricane’ Smith’s pop career wouldn’t take off until the early seventies, but the noise in question probably referred to the album’s title track. Divided into three movements, and filled with a cacophony of hammering pianos and cluttering percussion leading to a final, tuneful coda, it was the first fruits of Waters’ decision to ‘stretch things out and be experimental’.
For Pink Floyd’s newest recruit, the experience was daunting and even alien: some versions of the songs had already been recorded with Syd; he barely contributed to the songwriting; and the harmony vocal skills that had been his forte in Jokers Wild weren’t required. ‘I didn’t feel like a full member,’ Gilmour said later. ‘I was a little on the outside of it all.’
Syd Barrett’s presence on the album – eventually called A Saucerful of Secrets – remains the subject of speculation. He’s supposedly playing guitar on ‘See-Saw’, ‘Remember a Day’ and ‘Jugband Blues’, and Gilmour believes he’s somewhere in the background on ‘Set the Controls …’ The final track, ‘Jugband Blues’, with its eerie, lurching brass arrangement, is the only song to feature Barrett’s lead vocals. Sounding like a ghost, he utters the final prescient line, ‘What exactly is a dream … and what exactly is a joke?’
‘We could never write like Syd,’ says Wright. ‘We never had the imagination to come up with the kind of lyrics he did. I cringe at some of my songs, like “Remember a Day”. But something like “Corporal Clegg”, which was one of Roger’s, is just as bad.’
“‘Corporal Clegg” is a good piece of work,’ insisted Waters later. ‘We had to keep going. Once you’re in a rock ’n’ roll band, you weren’t going to stop. That would have meant going back to architecture.’
Waters’ doggedness is apparent throughout the album. Plotting the movements in the title track but unable to read music, he and Nick Mason scored the piece by inventing their own symbols, prompting Gilmour’s comment that the song was mapped out ‘like an architectural diagram’.
The album misses Barrett and, rather tellingly, one of its weaker tracks, ‘See-Saw’, was originally titled by the band ‘The Most Boring Song I’ve Ever Heard Bar Two’. The record’s true legacy now is the creeping influence of ‘Let There Be More Light’ and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ on all those cerebral seventies rock bands that followed in the Floyd’s wake.
Released in June that year, reactions to the band’s latest creation were mixed. ‘Forget it as background music to a party,’ warned Record Mirror in an otherwise upbeat appraisal, while New Musical Express dismissed the title track as ‘long and boring, and has little to warrant its monotonous direction’.
‘I was surprised when Saucerful was criticised harshly in the press,’ admitted Mason. ‘I thought it had some very new ideas.’
But not everyone was so harsh about the new Floyd. DJ John Peel was moved to reverie by the group’s performance of the title track at the Midsummer High Weekend festival in London’s Hyde Park the day after the album’s release. Having experienced the performance from a boat floating on the Serpentine, Peel announced in Disc magazine that ‘it was like a religious experience … they just seemed to fill the sky and everything.’ His lengthy ramblings earned him a place in the Pseuds Corner column of Private Eye.
The Midsummer High Weekend was the first free festival ever staged in Hyde Park, paving the way for free shows in the park from The Rolling Stones and Blind Faith. Its organisers were the ever-resourceful team at Blackhill Enterprises, who fared better with the Royal Parks Commission than they had with the Arts Council earlier in the year. Floyd performed alongside Roy Harper, Jethro Tull and Blackhill’s great white hopes Tyrannosaurus Rex. ‘Hyde Park in ’68 was wonderful because it reminded us of our roots,’ ventured Nick Mason. ‘However spurious they may have been. It was a reminder that we were still part of this thing, which was by then a fairly commercial venture. So it gave us credibility.’ An unofficial launch for the Syd-less Floyd, both of the group’s hits, ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’, were conspicuously absent from the setlist that day.
While Pink Floyd road-tested a new sound, their former singer was in professional limbo. Peter Jenner had booked sessions for Syd at Abbey Road, but they’d proved difficult. Barrett’s odd behaviour in the past had all but made him persona non grata at the studio. The King family’s flat at Richmond Hill had provided a saner environment after Cromwell Road, but in his unwanted role as the freaks’ pied piper, Barrett soon had disciples beating a path to its door.
By January 1967, the Lesmoir-Gordons had moved some 400 yards from Cromwell Road into Egerton Court, a rambling mansion block opposite South Kensington tube station near Brompton Road. Film director Roman Polanski had been so taken with the building’s imposing décor and 1930s-era spiral staircase that he’d featured both in his 1965 movie Repulsion. David Gale, Dave Henderson, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, Ponji Robinson and Storm Thorgerson would soon occupy rooms at Egerton Court, its location being ideal for the Royal College of Art, where some of their number were now studying.
Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon was now working as an editor for the future film director Hugh Hudson, then directing commercials, but already responsible for the opening credits to the James Bond films. ‘The flat became a focal point for a very arty set,’ remembers Po. ‘Mick and Marianne used to come round to drop acid with Nigel – all of them watching the reflection of crystals spinning on the walls. Donovan would drop round, and everyone was wearing Granny Takes a Trip clothes and looking terribly groovy. We were the original Kings Road hippies.’
‘Nigel and Jenny t
ook the biggest room at Egerton Court,’ remembers frequent house guest Emo. ‘David Gale had the smallest. It was so small, in fact, that he had to have a bed on stilts, so that there was somewhere for him to work. Storm was in a room that was about twenty-five feet long with an incredibly high ceiling. And he painted the walls bright orange and the window frames with red gloss paint. It was a complete horror-show, but he was like, “It’s over the top, which is how I like it.”’
‘I was a student, negotiating everything from love affairs to illicit deals to supposedly working at college,’ recalls Storm. ‘I was not in the best emotional state personally.’ Matthew Scurfield, another resident, says that ‘For Storm, there was a lot of talking and dissecting of the cosmos and the universe.’
Throughout the remainder of 1967 and the early months of 1968, the occupants of Egerton Court continued their stoic consumption of narcotics. But, perhaps inevitably, something had to give.
‘I spent three years sleeping on my brother’s floor there,’ recalls Matthew Scurfield, who took his first LSD trip at the flat. ‘That was where I got to know Nigel and Jenny. A lot of the things that have been said about Egerton Court are true. It’s not bending the truth to say there was a lot of acid-guzzling going on there. We took it in huge doses because no one knew what they were doing. But it wasn’t just a load of people lying around doing it. We were all very existential people. So the front part of the brain and the intellect were very much to the fore of what was going on.’
‘We often had great times on acid,’ says Po. ‘I can remember laughing myself silly for eight hours and wandering into pubs when I was on it and drinking pints of beer. But one of the cumulative effects of acid is that it opens your mind up to a lot of sensitive issues, and, after a while, those sensitive issues don’t go away. What people refer to as “acid flashbacks” are really your mind and nervous system being opened up to sensitivities that wouldn’t be opened up under normal circumstances. We all started to feel very raw. Whereas we used to smoke dope every day, now the dope was starting to open up those sensitivities as well. So suddenly you’re smoking a joint, and that’s making you feel paranoid as well. So the effects were kicking in for everybody. The joke was gone, and we were all feeling very edgy.’