by Mark Blake
After just three days of filming, the band returned to England for a gig at Bradford University. When the film’s German producer Reiner Moritz was unable to settle their hotel bill, Maben remained a prisoner in the hotel until the funds could be sent to him. He also had another pressing worry: there were still gaps in the movie, which he hoped Floyd would agree to fill at a later date.
In December, the band joined Maben in Paris at the Studio Europasinor to mix the Pompeii film and shoot some more footage. They were filmed on an empty soundstage in Paris, performing ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’ and a version of Meddle’s novelty track, ‘Seamus’, this time named ‘Mademoiselle Nobs’ in homage to the Afghan hound, Nobs, coaxed into howling along to Gilmour’s harmonica.
Maben also shot fly-on-the-wall interview footage in Paris, which was left out of the original edit but surfaced on the director’s cut in 2002. The group’s knockabout humour is in full flow, as an off-camera Maben attempts to conduct an interview. The Floyd, scooping out oysters and swigging from bottles of beer, deflect each enquiry. Waters, his eyes little beads of mischief, is the most evasive of the lot.
‘Are you happy with the filming?’ asks Maben at one point.
‘What do you mean, happy?’ hisses the bass player, blowing smoke rings.
‘Well, do you think it’s interesting?’
There’s an excruciatingly long pause.
‘What do you mean, interesting?’ replies Roger, almost sneering.
‘They took the mickey out of me all the time of course,’ admitted Maben. ‘Roger was perhaps the most unsettling of the four. Although Peter Watts, the roadie, mentioned to me that Syd Barrett was a hundred times worse.’
Watching now, it offers a candid glimpse of the band dynamic. The group had developed a telepathic sense of humour and penchant for in-jokes and one-upmanship, as would any gang of young males who had spent far too much time in each other’s company over the last three years. Nevertheless, their respective roles are neatly encapsulated. Waters is the ringleader and chief tormentor; Gilmour backs him up without rising to his levels of outright sarcasm; Mason makes some attempt at conciliation (‘Adrian … Adrian … this attempt to elicit conversation out of the chaps is doomed to failure’) but can’t help goading Waters on; Wright grins wearily and tries to give straight answers to the questions. In the background, a laughing Floyd roadie, Chris Adamson, enjoys the all-too-familiar display of feathers. When Maben attempts to involve Adamson in the interview, Mason jumps in, quick as a flash: ‘He’s not very important; don’t waste any film on him. What’s the French for “He is only a roadie”?’ Beneath loud guffaws, it sounds as if Gilmour attempts to answer.
A sixty-minute version of Live At Pompeii would eventually premiere at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival to mixed reviews. Yet it was not quite the finished article. Maben would meet up with the band again the following year to shoot some more footage, which, unbeknown to all of them, would give the film even greater importance.
In the meantime, while not matching Atom Heart Mother’s number 1 placing, Meddle still reached a healthy number 3. Frustratingly, it fared less well in the US at number 70, later prompting a serious review of the band’s relationship with their American label, Capitol.
Despite its poorer showing in the US, Meddle’s streamlined approach won over the group’s toughest critics, with Rolling Stone applauding ‘David Gilmour’s emergence as a real shaping force in the group’. On home turf, the music press were divided. Sounds praised ‘Echoes’ as ‘one of the most complete pieces of music Pink Floyd have ever done’. The magazine’s rival, Melody Maker, was less impressed. Deputy editor Michael Watts, a long-time fan of the band, berated ‘Pink’s Muddled Meddle’ and ‘vocals that verged on the drippy and instrumental workouts that are decidedly old hat’.
A month later, Watts took delivery of a parcel at the Melody Maker offices. Unwrapping what he presumed was a Christmas gift from some grateful record company PR, he found himself confronted with a bright red hardwood box, the lid held in place with a catch. Watts flipped the catch and jumped back as a spring-loaded boxing glove shot out, narrowly missing his face. It was a Yuletide present from Pink Floyd.
For Syd Barrett, the start of a new decade would mark the beginning of his slow withdrawal from the music business. His second solo album, Barrett, appeared at the tail end of 1970, in a sleeve drawing of insects that Syd himself had created during his art school days. ‘Syd Barrett is capable of much greater things than this,’ carped Disc and Music Echo. Syd half-heartedly agreed to promote the album, appearing in photographs in the Melody Maker sporting a drastic crop. He made for a reluctant, distracted interviewee: ‘I’ve never really proved myself wrong, I just need to prove myself right.’
In the summer of 1971, Mick Rock was granted an audience, taking photographs and interviewing Syd in the garden at Hills Road for Rolling Stone magazine, while Syd’s doting mother kept them fuelled with tea and cakes. In the pictures, Barrett appeared smiling and relaxed, looking closer to his previous pop star self with his hair grown out again. Yet the interview is loaded with telling phrases, betraying both his muddled mind (‘I’ve got a very irregular head’) and a sense of uncertainty about what the future might hold. ‘I’m treading the backwards path,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘Mostly, I just waste my time.’
Syd would show up in London that summer to visit Mick and his then wife Sheila at their flat in Shepherds Bush. He would appear on the doorstep unannounced, smoke a joint and then disappear again, re-appearing months later.
In January that year, Syd had been among the guests at his old flatmate Seamus O’Connell’s wedding in Cambridge. He turned up with Roger Waters, behaved impeccably and even disappeared to the pub after the ceremony with Seamus’s mother. Back in Cambridge, Peter Wynne-Willson, who had now become a satsangi, picked Syd up at his mother’s house and took him to a local Sant Mat meeting. ‘There were going to be a few people there that he knew, and we thought that he might like it,’ remembers Peter. ‘But he became edgy very quickly and left. That was the last time I ever saw Syd. I rather got the impression that he really wasn’t very keen on seeing people that reminded him of those days.’
While Barrett may have been keen to distance himself from his contemporaries in Pink Floyd, by the end of the year he’d made a welcome reacquaintance with an old girlfriend. Jenny Spires was now back in Cambridge and living with her new partner, a musician named Jack Monck. Syd felt safe around Jenny, and, in January 1972, she brought him to watch a gig at the local King’s College Cellars. Monck was playing bass for American bluesman Eddie ‘Guitar’ Burns. Playing drums was John Alder, aka Twink, who’d previously drummed for UFO club regulars Tomorrow. He and Barrett had met before on numerous occasions in London. ‘I thought he was very together,’ recalled Twink. ‘It was a warm relationship, no bad vibes at all.’
That night at the King’s College Cellars, Barrett borrowed a guitar, climbed on stage with Monck and Twink, and ran through a handful of improvised twelve-bar numbers as a warm-up to the headliner’s set.
The following night, Barrett joined the pair for an ad-hoc support slot to Hawkwind at the Cambridge Corn Exchange. They used the name The Last Minute Put Together Boogie Band, and had even rehearsed a handful of Syd’s own songs earlier in the day. The trio were joined that night by American guitarist Bruce Paine and Fred Frith, guitarist with English jazz-rockers Henry Cow. Unfortunately, Barrett was unable to remember the chord changes to his old songs, choosing instead to repeatedly thrash out the riff to the Yardbirds’ version of ‘Smokestack Lightnin’.
Undeterred, Twink and Monck persevered, showing up at Hills Road a few days later to talk to Syd about putting a band together. Barrett agreed and the three began rehearsing, even working up his own songs ‘Octopus’ and ‘Golden Hair’, before being offered a gig at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, supported by MC5, the late-sixties protest rockers of ‘Kick Out the Jams’ fame
.
On 5 February 1972, Barrett, Twink and Monck adopted the name Stars and made their debut, an off-the-cuff afternoon gig at the local health food eaterie, the Dandelion. Some eyewitnesses recalled the show as being a little chaotic and that Barrett’s musicianship trailed behind that of his bandmates, but the group were pleased with their performance.
Stars played again at the Dandelion, and also performed a similarly spur-of-the-moment open-air gig just off the Market Square in Cambridge. The only known photograph of Barrett at these gigs shows his hair grown out to shoulder length and his face obscured by a heavy, dark beard; unrecognisable from the pop star of five years earlier, and indistinguishable from any of the bearded, long-haired ‘heads’ for whom he was performing. Drugs, however, were noticeable by their absence. None of his bandmates even recall Syd smoking a joint, never mind taking anything stronger. While his general manner was distracted and he appeared a little fragile, he was, in the words of one eyewitness, ‘no more peculiar than a lot of people around, but you had to be on your toes to keep up with the odd tangents he would hit in conversation.’
It was an impression shared by the rock critic Nick Kent, who’d first seen Barrett unravelling on stage in 1967. Kent was then writing for the underground newspaper Frendz. The paper’s offices in Notting Hill’s Portobello Road were above a rehearsal space, where he encountered Syd and some of the Stars entourage. ‘This was early 1972, the hippie dream was dying and there were an awful lot of acid casualties like Syd, so he fitted right in,’ explains Kent. ‘Every day you’d encounter people who’d had a bad acid experience coming into the office and trying to tell us their vision of the world. Syd actually wasn’t as bad as most of those people.’ However, Kent also experienced Barrett’s odd conversational tangents. ‘There was a young hippie kid there that day that asked him, “Written any new songs, Syd?”’ laughs Nick. ‘And Barrett replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”’
Back in Cambridge, the boomy, shed-like ambience of the Corn Exchange was unsuited to Syd’s new band. As word spread that Barrett was performing live again, tickets for the 24 February show sold quickly and the venue was packed, with bus-loads of Syd devotees making the trip to Cambridge. Unfortunately, as precursors to punk rock, the incendiary MC5 were bound to make it difficult for any act that had to follow them. Barrett had initially shown willing. He’d shaved off his beard and bought a new pair of velvet trousers. Eyewitnesses recall a set that included Syd’s solo pieces, ‘Golden Hair’ and ‘Octopus’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘Lucifer Sam’. On stage, though, Stars were beset with sound problems, as Barrett sliced a finger on one of his strings and began bleeding, and Jack Monck’s bass amp cut out midway through the show. Syd began to visibly retreat on stage, looking and sounding, once again, as if he’d rather be anywhere else.
Still undeterred, Stars played the Corn Exchange again, just two days later, alongside the progressive rock band Nektar. Mick Brockett was then working as a lighting engineer for Nektar and had previously seen Pink Floyd while working at the Roundhouse. Brockett, who kept a diary at the time, described the gig in one word: ‘pathetic’.
‘I was very disappointed,’ he recalls now. ‘Syd and Twink bombarded our ears, even backstage, with disjointed chord sequences, screaming and yelling, with almost no musical content.’
It would be the last time Stars performed. Just days later, Melody Maker appeared with a poor review of the first Corn Exchange show by writer and Syd aficionado Roy Hollingsworth. ‘He changed time almost by the minute, the keys and chords made little sense,’ he wrote. ‘The fingers on his left hand met the frets like strangers. They formed chords, re-formed them and then wandered away again. It was like watching somebody piece together a memory that had suffered the most severe shellshock …’
Also in the audience that first night at the Corn Exchange was Clive Welham, the drummer in Barrett’s very first band. ‘Syd just seemed to stand there, doing nothing, looking around, as if to say, “What’s happening?”’ remembers Clive. ‘I left the gig early. I was almost close to tears. I couldn’t stand to see him like that.’
‘It was a disastrous gig,’ conceded Twink. Barrett showed up on his doorstep, holding a copy of the Melody Maker review the morning it came out. ‘Syd was really hung up about it. He said he didn’t want to play any more.’ Stars was over.
Barrett contained his anger until he was back at Hills Road. Ranting and raving, he smashed furniture, before retreating to his bedroom in the cellar. Once down there, he began smashing his head repeatedly against the ceiling.
CHAPTER SIX NEW CAR, CAVIAR
‘You’ve got to be competitive, aggressive and egocentric – all the things that go to make a real star.’
Roger Waters
In London’s cavernous Earls Court exhibition hall it is the favourite topic of conversation as showtime draws near. While the human traffic buzzes between the overpriced food stands, merchandise stalls stacked high with Floyd designer Storm Thorgerson’s latest artistic creations, and bars dispensing warm beer in flimsy plastic cups, the question gets tossed back and forth: Will they or won’t they do Dark Side of the Moon?
It is October 1994 and Pink Floyd have been on tour since April. Sometime in July, somewhere in the American Midwest, Pink Floyd had begun performing their 35-million-selling album in its entirety during the second half of the show. Since then, it has been played again randomly as the tour passed through Rotterdam, Basel, Hanover and Rome. London will strike it lucky. Six of Pink Floyd’s fourteen completed gigs at Earls Court will feature the complete Dark Side of the Moon. Roger Waters’ dissertation on the human condition is now twenty-one years old. Waters is gone, but his former colleagues and a team of hired hands will reproduce his finest forty-one minutes tonight, rolling back the years for those in the audience old enough to remember it first time around, and those younger who’ve discovered it since. It begins and ends with the sound of a human heartbeat, in between pinwheeling through the gamut of emotions and experience, exploring fear, failure, greed and insanity, beautifully played and packaged for a stadium audience.
It was all very different in 1972.
‘Due to severe mechanical and electric horror we can’t do any more of that bit, so we’ll do something else …’
Roger Waters made his announcement about twenty minutes into the first performance of Pink Floyd’s new piece at The Dome, Brighton on 20 January. The plan had been to open the show with their latest work in progress, still unrecorded, but supposedly entitled Dark Side of the Moon. Struggling to play in time to a tape of sound effects, their equipment began misbehaving and the band ran aground, just a few bars into a song that in a year’s time would be known as ‘Money’, and which would help turn Pink Floyd into one of the biggest bands on the planet. In reality, it wasn’t the taxing nature of the band’s new music that was the problem. Just as in Pompeii, Floyd’s mammoth sound and lighting rigs were being run from the same power source. Something had to give.
Frustrated, Waters and Gilmour stalked off stage. After a brief respite, they returned to strike up the opening bars to ‘Atom Heart Mother’. Unfortunately, as Nick Mason later admitted when discussing the band’s general frame of mind, ‘We were in acute danger of dying of boredom.’ That night, the cod orchestral rock concerto, albeit minus the orchestra, from 1969, sounded lacklustre and old hat. In a strange way, the band had run out of steam and lost their way yet again.
On the same night in Cambridge, Syd Barrett was jamming on stage at the King’s College Cellars with the musicians that would make up his new band Stars. Yet his old group’s planned musical venture couldn’t have been further from Barrett’s frayed twelve-bar blues.
Nick Mason’s frustration with much of the group’s existing material was shared by his bandmates. Roger Waters, especially, was keen to explore the direction the group had taken with ‘Echoes’, and to create another so-called ‘epic sound poem’ driven by a similar lyrical theme. Despite the red herring of the Dark Sid
e of the Moon title, there was still an overwhelming desire to shake off the ‘Space Rock’ image, to write about real people, real emotions and real life.
Dark Side of the Moon (the definitive article would appear with the 2003 reissue) began the way most Pink Floyd albums began: with the band messing about in a studio for hours and seeing if they could come up with anything worthwhile. On 29 November 1971, having just completed a run of North American dates, the group booked five days at Decca Studios in West Hampstead, the same venue in which David Gilmour had once auditioned with Jokers Wild. Prior to this, they had held a band meeting at Nick Mason’s house in Camden, where Roger Waters pitched an idea.
‘I remember sitting in his [Mason’s] kitchen, looking out at the garden and saying, “Hey, boys, I think I’ve got the answer,”’ he recalled. Waters described his vision for a piece of music ‘all about the pressures and difficulties and questions that crop up in one’s life and create anxiety’.
‘I remember Roger saying that he wanted to write it absolutely straight, clear and direct,’ remembered Gilmour. ‘To say exactly what he wanted to say for the first time and get away from psychedelic patter and strange and mysterious warblings.’