by Mark Blake
Waters suffered no such insecurity, and managed two solo pieces, ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ and ‘Grantchester Meadows’. The last was a gentle elegy to a picturesque stretch of the River Cam, and the album’s most convincing track. The former has Waters spouting gibberish in a Scottish accent over various sound effects, as if The Goons had been allowed to run riot through Abbey Road.
What all of the pieces had in common was a section where each Floyd member sounds as if they’ve been left to fool around in the studio unsupervised.
‘It would have been better if we’d gone away, done the things, come back together, discussed them, and people could have come in and made comments,’ Waters admitted to Disc and Music Echo. ‘I don’t think it’s good to work in total isolation.’
‘All those tracks ended up being realised to their full potential,’ believes Peter Mew. ‘If you start from the point of view that you don’t quite know what you’re doing and you’re making it up as you go along, it’s difficult to know where it’s going to end up. “Grantchester Meadows” is probably the most tuneful, but even that ends with a fly being swatted – so it’s all rather tongue in cheek. I think they were exploring the boundaries of the technology on that album. There’s lots of cute little sound effects – double speed, reverb – good stuff, bearing in mind the state of the technology at the time.’
Ummagumma was recorded on the hoof, with sessions fitted in around the band’s gigging schedule. And, in hindsight, it shows. Nevertheless, two solid years of playing every hippie dive in the country had paid off. Ummagumma gave Floyd and EMI’s Harvest label a number 5 album and the best reviews of their career so far: ‘A truly great progressive rock album,’ claimed Record Mirror.
The title itself prompted much speculation. Routinely described as ‘Cambridge slang’, Emo claims, ‘It was a word I made up about shagging. As in, “I’m off home for some Ummagumma.” Floyd thought I’d heard it somewhere before, but it was off the top of my head.’
The front cover shot was taken at the house of Libby January’s parents, the scene of the Jokers Wild and Tea Set double-bill years earlier. It is the band’s last attempt at traditional front cover pop star posing, with a barefoot Gilmour positioned at the front, alongside the images disappearing into infinity in the mirror to his right. Chief roadies, Alan Styles and Pete Watts, appeared on the back cover with the band’s equipment arranged, at Nick Mason’s suggestion, in the shape of a military aircraft carrier, a proper boys’ toys collection of kit.
The inside sleeve contained the biggest surprise of all. While each band member had an individual portrait, Roger shared his with his new wife Judy, pictured cradling a glass of white wine, while Roger looked on dotingly.
In years to come, while remaining faithful to some of their earlier efforts, Ummagumma was rated less highly by the band themselves.
‘My own view is that A Saucerful of Secrets had pointed the way ahead, but we studiously ignored the signposts and headed off making Ummagumma,’ admitted Mason, ‘which proved that we did rather better when everyone worked together rather than as individuals.’
‘We were very good at jamming,’ offered Gilmour. ‘But we couldn’t quite translate that onto a record.’
The next move, then, would be yet more jamming, not in London’s Pye or Abbey Road Studios but in the more exotic locale of Rome. Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni had first seen Pink Floyd playing the launch party for International Times at the Roundhouse in 1966. In late 1969 he approached them to compose the music for his next film, Zabriskie Point. Reflecting the political mood of the time, the movie followed the exploits of a student rioter who steals a plane, flies it to Death Valley, California, and proceeds to have lots of sex with the obligatory hippie chick encountered along the way. He gets shot dead by the police; she blows up a mansion, as a protest, presumably, against ‘straight’ America’s bourgeois values. So far, so good …
Antonioni paid for the band to stay at the opulent Hotel Massimo D’Azeglio in Rome, so the Floyd were at his beck and call. ‘It was sheer hell,’ claimed Waters. Work would begin at a nearby studio in the evening, after the band had consumed as much gratis food and wine as they could stomach, with Antonioni on hand but often nodding off in the studio as the night wore on. The next day, Roger would take the director the finished tapes for approval. ‘It was always wrong, consistently,’ explained Waters. ‘There was always something that stopped it being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong and he’d still be unhappy.’
The movie bombed, and the finished soundtrack, released the following year, included just three Floyd tracks, ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat’ – which used the sound of a heartbeat, an idea later revisited on Dark Side of the Moon – a slight country-rock number called ‘Crumbling Land’, and a reworking of ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, entitled ‘Come in Number 51, Your Time is Up’. The rest of the soundtrack was bumped up with contributions from The Grateful Dead and The Kaleidoscope, among others. Of the Floyd pieces overlooked by Antonioni for inclusion was Richard Wright’s haunting piano-led ‘Violent Sequence’, recorded to accompany footage of real-life student riots, which would later reappear as ‘Us and Them’ on Dark Side of the Moon. As Nick Mason would ruefully admit, ‘We were now following a band policy of never throwing anything away.’
CHAPTER FIVE THE SPACES BETWEEN FRIENDS
‘I’ve always thought of going back to a place where you can drink tea and sit on the carpet.’
Syd Barrett
Syd had painted the floorboards orange and purple. In his muddled state of mind, he’d started near the door and had, literally, painted himself into a corner. He had also neglected to clean the floor first, simply slapping the paint over discarded bus tickets, matchsticks and cigarette butts. But these were minor setbacks. Syd was waiting to be photographed for the cover of his first solo album by his friend Mick Rock. The two had taken an acid trip a fortnight before. They’d drawn pictures, listened to music and, as Rock recalls, spent most of the time laughing.
Syd had certainly made an effort. As well as a spot of interior decorating, he’d cleared the furniture out of his room at Wetherby Mansions, dressed himself in a yellow shirt and his polka dot Hung On You trousers – changing later into his Granny Takes a Trip velvet pair – with flatmate Duggie Fields’ 1940s demob coat for added vagrant chic, and positioned a vase of flowers on the bare boards beside him. As a finishing touch, he’d enlisted latest flatmate and sometime bed partner Iggy to smear his eyelids with kohl and appear naked behind him.
The Madcap Laughs was released in January 1970, with its snapshot of domestic life chez Barrett on the cover, and a glimpse of what Melody Maker deemed the ‘mayhem and madness representing the Barrett mind spilling out of the music inside’.
For those used to the intergalactic rock of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, this was an oddly earthbound experience: just Syd’s sometimes faltering voice, his often desultory guitar-strumming and the sound of a drummer and bassist bluffing it out in the background. Barrett sounded familiar and whimsical on ‘Terrapin’ but psychologically wounded on ‘Dark Globe’. On ‘She Took a Long Cold Look’, he could be heard turning the pages of his songbook halfway through, and on ‘If It’s In You’ he even stopped the song and started it again.
Listening now, it all sounds as if it’s held together with tape and string. Original producer Malcolm Jones winced at the finished album, especially those mistakes: ‘I thought it was unnecessary and unkind to include those.’ At first, Waters and Gilmour stuck by their decision to include everything. ‘We wanted to inject some honesty into it,’ explained the guitarist. ‘We wanted to explain what was going on.’ In truth, perhaps they’d wanted to shock both Syd and his audience after the experience of those tortuous recording sessions. As Gilmour said later, ‘We got that very frustrated feeling of, “Look, it’s your fucking career, mate. Why don’t you get your finger out and do something?”’<
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By the time The Madcap Laughs was released, Syd’s life at Wetherby Mansions was sometimes as deranged as his music suggested. The mysterious Iggy’s bare behind would be for ever immortalised on the cover of the record. But, even today, nobody seems able to shed any light on who she was or where she came from. Known as ‘Iggy the Eskimo’, the striking, dark-haired model had been photographed in a 1966 issue of New Musical Express with a gang of similarly hip, beautiful people demonstrating the dance craze ‘The Bend’. She had previously been an acquaintance of Anthony Stern’s before, according to Duggie Fields, she arrived penniless at Wetherby Mansions, needing somewhere to stay.
Anthony Stern still has a piece of film of Iggy dancing in London’s Russell Square ‘and she’s wearing clothes that could have been made yesterday’. DJ Jeff Dexter recalls that some years before she hooked up with Barrett, Iggy was a familiar figure at his club nights at the Orchid Ballroom in Purley, South London. A mercurial figure, Iggy’s real name and current whereabouts seem destined to remain unknown.
‘I have no idea who Iggy was or even what her real name was,’ claims Duggie now. ‘She was never Syd’s girlfriend. They just got together from time to time. She was an extraordinary-looking girl, though. I once saw her getting off the number 31 bus in a gold lame, forties-era dress in the middle of the day. The dress had a train which rode up as she came down the stairs, exposing the fact that she wasn’t wearing any knickers … I saw her not long after Syd left the flat and she was looking more like a Sloane Ranger. I heard she’d become involved with one of the voguish religious cults at the time.’
Some months after moving into Wetherby Mansions, and following on from his time with Quorum model Gilly Staples, Syd had begun a relationship with another would-be model, Gala Pinion. Gala had moved down to London with Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, and landed a job at the Chelsea Drug Store. To complicate matters, she was one of Lindsay Corner’s closest friends. When Syd and Duggie’s original flatmate moved out, Gala moved in.
‘I’d known Gala since she was fourteen,’ says Po. ‘Her and Lindsay were best friends, so I was surprised when that happened, and I suspect it caused a lot of upset. I think Gala thought she could take Syd on. Gala wanted to look after him, but Syd actually needed professional help.’
Like David Gale, Emo and others before him, Duggie witnessed Syd’s violent mood swings. ‘There was lots of melodrama,’ he says. ‘I had seen him being violent to Gilly, and it happened again with Gala. They would have these dramatic explosions and physical fights. Then, of course, Syd could change in an instant and be completely charming again.’
Over a period of a few months, Syd’s behaviour began to deteriorate once more. To avoid him, Fields began staying in his room, painting. Left unsupervised, Syd’s bedroom became increasingly fetid as he refused to open the windows or even the curtains. He allowed a couple of speed freaks, Greta and Rusty, to move into the flat’s communal living room, having previously let them sleep in the hallway.
Sue Kingsford dropped by the flat regularly. ‘At Duggie’s, Syd just got odder and odder,’ she recalls. ‘He wouldn’t speak for hours. We all watched the moon landings there [in July 1969]. I think we all thought it was a conspiracy by the Americans. Syd, of course, never said a word.’
Sue was among those that Syd routinely hustled for drugs. ‘I’d found a chemist in Cambridge that would write me a prescription for sixty Mandrax a month,’ she admits. ‘Syd used to pester me for them. I’d say, “OK, I’ll give you one”, but he’d be like, “Come on, come on, I know you’ve got more than that.” He was taking things so indiscriminately. He wasn’t taking one of anything, he was doing six. It was like Syd was always trying to get out of it, to get out of himself.’
A trade name for the drug Methaqualone and prescribed as a sleeping tablet, Mandrax had become the favoured pill of London’s hip set. After fighting off the initial temptation to fall asleep, usually by consuming mugfuls of tea or coffee, users that could stay conscious during the first thirty minutes would then find themselves slipping into a blissful, waking trance.
‘Mandrax was everywhere,’ admits Fields. ‘Everyone was taking it. Dave Gilmour’s flatmate fell off the balcony at Richmond Mansions because he was on it. Amazingly, he escaped unhurt.’
‘There was,’ Emo points out, ‘a soft grass verge underneath.’
Jenny Fabian also visited Syd at the flat, and was shocked by his decline. She recalls him barely acknowledging her. She also took Mandrax with him. ‘You enter this weird, fuzzy twilight world where everything’s comfortable,’ she recalled. ‘It’s a great place to be and you could see why Syd wanted to be there, because he’d obviously bombarded the old brain cells with acid.’ However, like Duggie, she also witnessed plenty of moments of clarity amid all the drug-induced chaos. ‘Every so often he’d make an incredibly pertinent remark that made you realise he was probably saner than the rest of us.’
‘I knew people who took more drugs than Syd and were much bigger casualties than him,’ insists Fields. ‘Also, in the circles we moved in, madness was considered socially acceptable. There was almost a romance about mental disturbance, the same way there was about drugs. I still think that was part of it with Syd. It always felt to me as if he’d fallen into a depression more than anything. He was forever saying, “I have to get another band together …” but he just didn’t have the drive. Without any schedule, he could lie in bed thinking he could do anything in the world he wanted. But when he made a decision that limited his possibilities.’
Syd even started painting again, or talking about painting. ‘But he would never finish anything, never produce a final work,’ says Duggie. It was during these quieter spells that Syd would reveal a painful awareness of his circumstances. ‘I never had a conversation with Syd about being a pop star, when he was a pop star,’ says Fields. ‘But we had a significant conversation about it later. Syd would say to me, “I’m a failed pop star.” Then he’d turn on me. “But what are you? You’re twenty-three and you’re not even famous. I’m already a has-been.”’
Considering his frame of mind, EMI’s decision to put Syd back in a recording studio seems like an incredible leap of faith. However, The Madcap Laughs had sold over 5,000 copies in just two months. Syd was recording again by February 1970, with David Gilmour producing and Jerry Shirley playing drums. The process would prove as arduous and disjointed as before. Gilmour tried recording the musicians first and getting Syd to sing along to the track later. When that proved difficult, he recorded Barrett first and put the other musicians on afterwards. The notion that Syd could work with musicians simultaneously seemed out of the question.
Pieced together over five months that year, some of the tracks to surface on the album, later titled Barrett, including ‘Baby Lemonade’, ‘Dominoes’ and ‘Gigolo Aunt’, showed traces of Syd’s former sparkle. Others, such as ‘Rats’ and ‘Wolfpack’, were compelling in their sheer mania. Richard Wright added welcome keyboards to the record, helping Gilmour to coax their old friend through the recording process. ‘By then, we were just trying to help Syd any way we could,’ Wright recalls. ‘We weren’t worrying about getting the best guitar sound. You could forget about that.’
A curious Duggie Fields dropped in on the sessions. ‘Syd was lost and having to be told what to do,’ he recalls. ‘He’d just zoned out. But you didn’t know if he was deliberately messing up, because he did play mind games with people.’
‘He rarely took any notice of what was said, or repeated what he’d done in the same way,’ explained Gilmour. ‘He never communicated whether he felt things were going well or badly.’ One night, the guitarist offered Syd a lift back to his flat. Barrett was silent throughout the journey. Dropped off outside his front door, he turned to Gilmour and showed a tiny flicker of gratitude. ‘He turned to me and said, “Thank you”, very quietly,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘That was the only moment that anything like that happened.’
Backing up Duggie Fields’s claims that Syd
could be perfectly lucid at times, a BBC session for John Peel’s Top Gear show recorded at the start of the sessions had found Barrett on unusually good form. A brief return to live performance later that summer at The Music and Fashion Festival at Kensington’s Olympia found him stricken with nerves. ‘I can’t remember why we did it,’ admitted Gilmour, who played bass with Jerry Shirley on drums. Promoted by Bryan Morrison, the six-day event also included Syd acolytes Tyrannosaurus Rex and Barrett’s idol Bo Diddley. Syd acquitted himself well enough, but raced through his four-song set, dashing offstage as soon as the last chord was struck.
Sadly, for all Barrett’s moments of clarity, there were still many instances of great confusion. One evening, Syd showed up at the Wrights’ new home in Bayswater, thinking he was still in Pink Floyd and that they had a gig to play that night. One afternoon, bumping unexpectedly into Roger Waters in Harrods department store, Syd fled the shop, dropping his bag in a panic. Waters picked it up to discover it filled with children’s sweets. On a whim, Syd swapped his red Austin Mini for a 1950s Pontiac Parisienne Convertible, which T.Rex’s percussionist Mickey Finn had acquired in a raffle. The car would remain unused outside Wetherby Mansions, stickered with parking tickets, until Barrett gave it away to a passing stranger in exchange for a packet of cigarettes. In hindsight, it might have been for the best.