Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  At nearly three times the length of its studio counterpart, the live “Pow R. Toc H.” enters free-form musical territory, and previews the kinds of sounds the group would explore in greater detail on A Saucerful of Secrets. Sessions for that album were already well under way by the time of the Rotterdam show.

  After the Hippy Happy Fair, the remainder of Pink Floyd’s 1967 concert engagements consisted of twice-nightly performances. With Barrett’s deteriorating mental state and a demanding schedule—two brief sets sandwiched among other acts on a bill topped by the Jimi Hendrix Experience—the band had little opportunity to engage in the long-form musical excursions they clearly favored.

  Melody Maker’s Chris Welch may have been intentionally provocative when he wrote in August 1967 that Pink Floyd’s live set was “thunderous, incomprehensible, screaming, sonic torture.” In that same piece, Waters responded that “the sort of thing we are trying to do doesn’t fit into the sort of environment we are playing in.” The supporting bands on the bill, he explained, often played covers of Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” making for an incongruent musical experience at best.

  The exact date remains a matter of contention, but contemporary reports suggest that Barrett missed a December 2 show in Brighton, England, and that guitarist (and Syd’s childhood friend) David Gilmour—late of moderately successful Cambridge band Jokers Wild—filled in for him on that date. At least one other performance from that period featured guitarist David O’List of the Nice filling in for the absent-without-leave Barrett.

  Along with several other acts, the Nice and Pink Floyd were both part of the late 1967 Jimi Hendrix tour of England; each band had a very brief time onstage. “We had seventeen minutes for a show,” recalls manager Peter Jenner, “and we had to do it twice nightly.” O’List was already a fan of Pink Floyd, and he says that on the tour he used to go out into the audience every night after his band’s set and watch Pink Floyd play. “That’s how I learned their stuff,” he says. “I was very interested in their sounds, and with what Syd was doing with echo.”

  O’List says that there was little rivalry between the bands on the Hendrix tour. “Remember, this was 1967,” he says. “Everybody was handing each other flowers.” Even though they weren’t close friends, O’List saw enough of Barrett on the tour to know something wasn’t quite right. “I did think he was a bit distant,” O’List recalls. “He used to get on the coach; everyone else would be saying ‘hi’ and smiling. He’d look quite serious and walk to the back of the bus. So I thought there was something going on.”

  On November 18, mere moments before taking the stage, Pink Floyd found itself without its guitarist. O’List recalls the scene. He bumped into three members of Pink Floyd in the dressing room backstage. One of the band asked aloud, “Is that Syd walking off?” When they realized he was gone, they turned to O’List and asked him to step in. “I was pretty flabbergasted,” he recalls. He was concerned that fans would recognize him and be disappointed—or worse—that Barrett wasn’t fronting the group. “Don’t worry about that,” he recalls being told by one of the band members. “You just wear Syd’s hat, and they’ll think you’re him.” So he donned Barrett’s big black hat.

  “They knew what I could do, and I knew their music,” O’List says. The guitarist joined Waters, Wright, and Mason onstage, and when it came time for a guitar solo, O’List felt he was in his element. “We did twenty minutes of ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’” he recalls. “And I did a ten-minute guitar solo.” O’List says that his approach was different from that of Syd Barrett. “Their music suddenly changed with me,” he says, “because I did a proper lead guitar solo, which Syd didn’t quite do; he did more noises and sounds.”

  Another group, Tomorrow, shared management with Pink Floyd, and on one occasion the band’s guitarist got a call of his own to fill in for Barrett. “One night we were playing somewhere else, says Steve Howe. “I was rushed to London to stand in for Syd. I was delighted; I love playing with people I hadn’t played with before.” But once he arrived, he was met by Steve O’Rourke of Pink Floyd’s management team Blackhill Enterprises, who told him, “Well, thanks a lot, but actually Syd’s just about going to make it.”

  Though his guitar style was far more sophisticated than Barrett’s, Howe remains convinced that he would have fit in seamlessly. He concedes that Tomorrow “had songs, but they weren’t the main thing we had. We had this explosive instrumental interpretation-improvisation going on onstage.” Like Pink Floyd, the live and studio music of Tomorrow had little in common with each other. “When Syd got on stage, I think he ad-libbed a lot more across the music,” Howe says. “And I imagine that’s what I would do. ‘Okay, we’re in C? Well, I could do something here.’ ‘Oh, nobody’s singing? Okay. I’ll open up.’ ‘Somebody’s singing? I won’t open up.’ So I would have just bluffed my way through it, and enjoyed it because of that.” Though the bands crossed paths often in those days—Howe believes Tomorrow and Pink Floyd were on the same bill more than a dozen times—he didn’t have a clear sense of just how unstable Barrett had become. “A lot of stories were exchanged . . . gossip of knowing that Syd was a bit on the edge,” he says. “Maybe he dropped too many tabs [of LSD] and he was all going a bit shaky at times. So you kind of accepted that.”

  Between Barrett’s often incapacitated onstage demeanor and his band mates’ increased ambitions, something clearly had to give. Waters voiced his frustrations concerning the latter in August 1967 when he spoke to Melody Maker’s Chris Welch. “We can’t go on doing clubs and ballrooms. We want a brand new environment . . . we’ll have a huge screen 120 feet wide and 40 feet high inside and project films and slides.” While there was little precedent for that kind of performance in 1967, Waters’s vision for the future sounds very much like the live shows Pink Floyd would mount in the years after Syd Barrett’s departure.

  In one of his increasingly rare lucid moments, Syd Barrett expressed much the same sentiments when speaking to Melody Maker in December 1967, mere weeks before his exit from Pink Floyd. “We feel that in the future, groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show. They’ll have to offer a well-presented theatre show.”

  Peter Jenner notes that for Pink Floyd circa 1967, “there was always the strain between whether they were an art group or whether they were making hit records. The market and the record company were saying, ‘Make hit records,’ but in some other senses, there was also a strong sense of the art thing. And that was perhaps why Syd became . . .” his voice trails off for a moment, “why it started breaking up in time.”

  By January 12, 1968, Gilmour had been added to the group, ostensibly as a “second” guitarist. The five-piece lineup played no more than five—likely only four—live dates. En route to a January 26 concert at Southampton University, a group decision was made not to collect Barrett. For all practical purposes, Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett ceased to exist on that date.

  Chapter 5

  BBC One

  In 1967, as the band got off the ground both creatively and commercially, Pink Floyd could be seen to have something of a split personality: though the band did play some of its studio songs in concert, and did incorporate its exploratory side into some studio tracks, the contrast between live and studio Pink Floyd was striking.

  Yet in significant ways, a reconciliation of those two distinctive characteristics would be found in the band’s performances for broadcast on the British Broadcasting Company. Through 1967, Pink Floyd appeared on BBC radio on no fewer than three occasions, showcasing material that drew from the band’s recorded catalog (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and a handful of singles and B-sides) as well as hinting at the sound the band created live onstage. Though some of those performances are lost forever, two sessions have survived and received their first official release as part of the Pink Floyd box set The Early Years.

  When the opportunity came to perform on the BBC, Pink Floyd stood apart from most of the band’s contemporaries:
the band never performed covers. This stood in stark contrast to groups such as the Beatles, who used their many BBC appearances to showcase material from their massive set list, songs they had been performing since the late 1950s.

  Pink Floyd’s earliest surviving BBC session dates from September 25, 1967; the four musicians arrived at Piccadilly Studios in London, where they cut six songs, ostensibly live, for broadcast on the popular Top Gear radio program. In practice, the BBC did allow some primitive overdubbing—usually vocals—and the presence of what sounds like double-tracking (multiple unison vocals by one singer) strongly suggests that Pink Floyd was offered and took full advantage of such an opportunity. The October 1 broadcast of that performance was notable for the first appearance of guest host John Peel; Peel would soon become one of Pink Floyd’s most enthusiastic supporters, and gave the band’s music prominent focus on his radio shows through the next several years.

  The BBC performance of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’s “Flaming” is quite close to the album version, but does feature a much more prominent and muscular drum part from Nick Mason. While the LP version finds Mason carrying the beat with little more than taps on the bell of one of his cymbals, the BBC performance of “Flaming” has forceful, full-kit drumming that moves the tune away from the slightly twee arrangement toward something more rocking. The BBC version also features less in the way of backing vocal harmonies. It’s likely that the few onstage performances of “Flaming” would have lacked backing vocals as well: “monitors” (speakers that would allow the band members to hear their vocals among the loud instruments) would not become part of Pink Floyd’s onstage gear until the 1970s.

  Pink Floyd’s BBC version of “The Scarecrow” isn’t appreciably different from its album counterpart; the radio performance does serve to illustrate the band’s ability to play a tricky song with odd musical phrasing in a more or less live context. This is all the more remarkable in light of Barrett’s worsening mental state; by all evidence he was having an especially good day in this late September session. More troublesome days were to come.

  Musically, “The Gnome” is among the less challenging numbers on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, so it’s little surprise that the band played it well on its first BBC date. For the radio recording, Waters’s uncharacteristically bouncy bass line is a bit more forward in the sound mix. “The Gnome” is as close as Pink Floyd would ever come to a campfire-style singalong, with the possible exception of “Seamus” on 1971’s Meddle.

  Keyboardist Richard Wright takes his turn on lead vocal for the Top Gear broadcast of “Matilda Mother.” The radio version features less refined vocal harmony work, but otherwise it’s a near copy of the recording on Piper. The primary difference is Wright’s use of his Farfisa organ (“Compact” both in nature and model name), a much more practical instrument to bring to a radio session than the much larger and heavier Hammond organ used on the album. Wright’s keyboard is also run through a wah-wah pedal, alternating the amount of bass and treble signal coming from the instrument.

  A very brief snippet of one of Pink Floyd’s live numbers—thirty seconds of “Reaction in G”—could have been the most tantalizing moment on the Top Gear session; sadly, Peel and co-host Pete Drummond speak over the recording, making jokes. What remains is barely enough to identify it as the free-form tune that appeared often in the band’s live set around this time.

  Radio listeners on that October afternoon were treated to one completely new track, Roger Waters’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” Studio sessions for the new composition had only begun in mid-August, and other than a pair for performances at UFO and four other London-area dates in September, there were no opportunities for British fans to have heard the tune. “Set the Controls” wouldn’t be released until the following summer, by which time Syd Barrett had been gone for several months. Though few—including the band—would have known at the time, the Top Gear broadcast of the song was effectively a preview of Pink Floyd’s future direction. “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” would remain a fixture of the band’s live set into the new decade. The version for BBC is slightly less developed than the studio recording; other than its decidedly hypnotic sound, the most notable quality of the recording is Richard Wright’s Farfisa organ solo, variations upon the three-note motif around which the song is based.

  Pink Floyd would return for a second Top Gear session—the group’s last with Barrett—on the morning of December 20, 1967. In contrast to the band’s previous BBC appearance, this session would feature mostly new and previously unheard material. In fact, studio versions of two of the four songs recorded that day for the BBC would remain unreleased until 2016.

  “Scream Thy Last Scream” would remain drummer Nick Mason’s sole lead vocal on a Pink Floyd recording, save for his heavily treated spoken part on Meddle’s “One of These Days.” At the time of this broadcast, promoting the song made sense, as the band hoped “Scream” would be the next Pink Floyd single, following “See Emily Play.” But its strange, borderline-nonsensical lyrics about an old woman with a casket led EMI to veto its release. The song as performed on Top Gear features many Barrett sonic trademarks: odd musical phrasing, descending melodic lines, and outré subject matter. A double-speed voice (Barrett) in unison with Mason’s vocals would be part of the studio version, but is not part of the radio broadcast recording, presumably due to technical limitations of the BBC’s recording studio.

  Even less commercially minded is the next song from the December Top Gear session. “Vegetable Man” has long been a part of the Pink Floyd legend as one of the last tracks to feature Syd Barrett. “Vegetable Man” is an oblique autobiographical account of Barrett’s mental decline. Its arrangement is in some ways pure Piper-era Barrett, but the song stands one of his songwriting conventions on its head. Abandoning the oft-used descending melodic line, “Vegetable Man” instead creeps upward on the scale, in half-steps. Its insistent arrangement yields little in the way of catchy melody, and there’s a sinister air about the band’s overall sonic attack. While the studio version fades out on a blues-based chord structure, the version recorded for Top Gear reveals that a good part of “Vegetable Man” is closely related to Neal Hefti’s “Batman Theme,” with its title lyrics replacing “Batman.”

  At least a few enterprising fans taped that performance off the radio, and—especially as Barrett faded from the scene—its very existence became legendary. Bootleg copies of the studio version wouldn’t appear for many years, so the Top Gear recording was the one shared among the most dedicated fans. One of those fans was Robyn Hitchcock, then leading the Cambridge-based neo-psychedelic group The Soft Boys. “I heard it on a cassette,” he recalls. “Quite primitive, with kind of a hum in the background.” During the band’s sessions for the 1980 album Underwater Moonlight, The Soft Boys cut a faithful cover of “Vegetable Man.” Other hip bands of that first psychedelic-revival era covered the previously obscure tune as well, including the Jesus and Mary Chain.

  A reading of “Pow R. Toc H.” takes Pink Floyd back in time a few months to when Barrett’s psychological state was much more stable. The Top Gear performance isn’t remarkably different from the studio version on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, though Barrett’s guitar playing feels a bit more inspired and/or manic, with a guitar tone closer to that found on the 1965 demos than anything in Pink Floyd’s more recent catalog. Also, Roger Waters’s screams on this BBC recording are a notch more terrifying than those on Piper.

  “Jugband Blues” would appear in studio form on Pink Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets. By the time of the December Top Gear performance, the studio version was complete, and the BBC performance is quite different from its studio counterpart. Barrett’s tune shifts time signatures, and a favorite technique of his—shoehorning lyrics into phrases where they wouldn’t normally fit—is a defining feature of the song. The Salvation Army band accompaniment—prominent on the studio version—is wholly absent here, but a m
id-song freakout has more in common with “Astronomy Dominé” and “Pow R. Toc H.” than the ditties on Piper.

  With the BBC sessions completed, never again would Pink Floyd concern itself with songs about unicorns, scarecrows, and gnomes. A new chapter—notably, not one the band had anticipated nor sought—was about to dawn.

  Chapter 6

  Speak

  In happier and more organized times during 1967, Pink Floyd embarked on a musical sideline that would eventually become a defining part of the band’s character. Though the group’s initial efforts were tentative and perhaps not taken very seriously, Pink Floyd produced works for use in film. Because the band’s onstage presentation had always incorporated visuals, the combining of sound and image was not an alien concept to Barrett and his band mates.

  In fact, the first piece recorded for use in a film was one of the band’s showcase numbers, “Interstellar Overdrive.” In January 1967, Pink Floyd assembled at London’s Sound Techniques Studio to record for Peter Whitehead’s loosely documentary-style film Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. The film aimed to chronicle the then-current music and fashion scene of “Swinging London,” and Whitehead wanted appropriate music for its soundtrack. Some of the artists featured on the original soundtrack album released in 1968 were relatively well known: the Small Faces and Chris Farlowe had both scored several hits in the UK by the time of the soundtrack’s release. Others like Vashti Bunyan were closer to the underground scene from which Pink Floyd arose.

  Joe Boyd produced Pink Floyd’s two-day session at Sound Techniques, which consisted of a nearly seven-minute version of “Interstellar Overdrive” and a track that would remain unreleased for some time, “Nick’s Boogie.”