by Bill Kopp
The version of “Interstellar Overdrive” on Tonite is harder-edged than the recording Pink Floyd would make two months later for its debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Boyd’s production style is somewhat more immediate and up-close than that of EMI’s Norman Smith, and the Tonite version has more of a live feel. After stating its “head,” “Interstellar Overdrive” dissolves into its abstract and exploratory style. Wright’s haunted house organ runs brush up against Mason’s manic drumming, while Roger Waters’s bass and Syd Barrett’s guitar are largely consigned to providing atmosphere. Barrett’s guitar stabs, in particular, dispense with conventional ideas concerning meter and melody. For use on the soundtrack, the “Interstellar Overdrive” recording was broken into smaller sections. This January 1967 recording is often cited as one of the earliest examples of psychedelic improvisation captured on recording tape. Arguably superior to its Piper counterpart—and owing to the quick-get-it-done, audio verité manner in which it was recorded by Boyd—the Tonite version of “Interstellar Overdrive” is perhaps the best high-fidelity example of how the song would have sounded at one of Pink Floyd’s live shows of the era.
“Nick’s Boogie” is curiously named: there’s absolutely nothing boogie-related about the twelve-minute instrumental named after Pink Floyd’s drummer. In sound and style, “Nick’s Boogie” lies halfway between “Interstellar Overdrive” and the later Roger Waters composition “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” Less “rock” in style and altogether more atmospheric, the track provides evidence for why the label “space rock” would often be applied to Pink Floyd’s music. With its hypnotic mallet drumming, keyboard lines that suggest the twirling of a radio knob late at night, and abstract, effects-laden guitar splashes, “Nick’s Boogie” sounds like none of the tunes on the soon-to-be-recorded The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, yet very much like the sound and style Pink Floyd would adopt once Syd Barrett was gone.
Regardless of the degree to which working for film might have interested the group, Pink Floyd would soon have other matters on its collective mind; less than three weeks after completing work on their part of the Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London soundtrack, the four members of Pink Floyd signed a recording contract with EMI.
In October 1967, by which time the earliest sessions for Pink Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, had already begun, Pink Floyd traveled to the BBC Radiophonic Workshops in London, with a goal of composing soundtrack music for a proposed television program. While nothing came of this effort, mere days later the band cut a series of abstract pieces collectively known as “John Latham.” A conceptual artist, Latham was a classmate of Roger Waters and Nick Mason at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic (now part of University of Westminster). Latham had produced a 16mm film in 1962 titled Speak; Pink Floyd had projected the proto-psychedelic film at some of its live performances, and eventually set out to create a studio soundtrack to accompany the film. The idea was abandoned, and the nine takes of “John Latham” remained unreleased. The tracks also remained outside the reach of enterprising bootleg collectors; until the release of the 2016 box set, The Early Years, “John Latham” had been heard by few if any outside the band’s immediate orbit.
Ranging in length from two and a half to over five minutes, the nine takes of “John Latham” reprise some of the sonic ideas employed in the more abstract sections of “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Pow R. Toc H.” All takes are seemingly improvised; there’s little to suggest that the musical exploration within the recordings was planned in advance. “John Latham” almost completely dispenses with melody, and to many listeners the tracks will seem closer to a collection of sound effects than what most would consider music. There’s a strong sense of leaving events to chance; an approach not wholly dissimilar to the one employed by American West Coast psychedelic group the Grateful Dead. In fact, aside from its prominent featuring of Richard Wright’s celestial Farfisa organ, much of what Pink Floyd called “John Latham” sounds like what the Dead would call “Space” or “Drums.”
As 1967 ended, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London had yet to be released; the BBC Radiophonic Workshop idea had come to nothing, and the experimental tracks made to accompany John Latham’s Speak went onto the shelf. But Pink Floyd’s interest in the potential of music created to accompany moving images was piqued. In time, the group would create entire works for film, and elements of multimedia production would become an integral part of the group’s on- and offstage persona. Yet all of these future endeavors would take place without the group’s original leader and founder, Syd Barrett.
Part II
Point Me at the Sky (1967–1968)
Chapter 7
Scream Thy Last Scream
Sessions for what would become A Saucerful of Secrets had commenced a mere three days after the UK release of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. As Barrett’s behavior became increasingly erratic, the sessions yielded little of use from among his contributions. Between early August 1967 and late January 1968, Pink Floyd and producer Norman Smith booked more than two dozen days’ worth of studio time in three different London studios. Those sessions were largely abortive. Other than the non-album single “Apples and Oranges,” for many decades the only officially released fruit of the sessions would be songs written by Roger Waters or Rick Wright.
The band did complete two songs—and made significant progress on a third—though all would remain officially unreleased until their inclusion on 2016’s The Early Years box set. But dedicated collectors have long had access to copies: “I have to admit I released those ‘Syd-o-files’ into [circulation] years ago,” admits Peter Jenner. “I always was rather cross that they wouldn’t let those things go out, because although they weren’t flattering to Syd, I think they were brilliantly wonderful pieces of work.” Jenner characterizes the tracks as special “in a sort of psychotic way; they’re a bit like those Van Gogh paintings of the birds over the fields, and the sky against it. There’s something about [those songs] that told you about his mental condition.”
On its surface, “Scream Thy Last Scream” is a continuation of Syd Barrett’s musical approach—descending chord lines, disjointed phrasing—and his penchant for unusual lyrical subjects. But with its mention of an old woman and a casket, the tune reveals a darker mindset than its composer had displayed on the songs from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. “Scream” also betrays a certain lyrical laziness: whereas before Barrett’s use of seemingly unrelated words and phrases felt childlike, here it feels as if Barrett is losing interest.
“Vegetable Man” is quite close to its BBC broadcast counterpart; the primary difference here is that the sound fidelity on the studio version is far superior, and the song’s ending section is truncated. But where Barrett may have been phoning it in for “Scream Thy Last Scream,” “Vegetable Man” is a tight—if characteristically baffling—piece of songwriting. While very few of the song’s lines rhyme in the traditional sense, as Barrett fan Robyn Hitchcock points out, “Barrett had quite a lot of internal rhymes.” Darkly autobiographical lyrics like “In my paisley shirt I look a jerk” fit thematically, but don’t rhyme with previous or subsequent lines of the song. And while the tune lacks a discernible chorus (other than perhaps the query, “Vegetable Man, where are you?”), it does feature a piling-up of words as the song reaches its musical climax. “One of Syd’s first trademarks was just putting in as many words as he wanted to,” Hitchcock notes. “And there was a lot of assonance.”
Barrett wrote “Vegetable Man” while in the front room of manager Peter Jenner’s home. “It was a description of him at the time,” Jenner says. When he looked at himself it was like, ‘Oh, fucking hell!’” Jenner characterizes both “Scream Thy Last Scream” and “Vegetable Man” as “great music [full of] great sorrow.”
Another song recorded in late 1967 remained unreleased in any form until 2016, and—although its existence had been documented many years ago—it escaped falling into circulatio
n among trader-collectors of unreleased Pink Floyd material. “In the Beechwoods” would surface on The Early Years, where listeners could enjoy the rare treat of a previously unheard Barrett-era track. Though it lacks vocals—and there are no known written lyrics—as an instrumental work, it sounds close to complete.
“In the Beechwoods” features a remarkably straightforward and catchy melody. Opening with some trademark organ swells from Richard Wright and hypnotic mallet work from Nick Mason, the song works into a sprightly, uptempo chord progression that sounds little like anything Syd Barrett had written for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The chorus—as the melody clearly is designed to support a vocal line—features a call-and-response between guitar/bass and drums. Nearly two minutes in, the song’s “bridge” is musically less interesting than the rest of the tune; listeners are left to speculate if lyrics might have been intended as the primary focus of the section. Some quick glissandi from bassist Roger Waters leads the song back into its main structure. Nearly the final two minutes of “In the Beechwoods” are given over to repeated voicing of the song’s chorus. The instruments fade out, not in the customary manner of the recording engineer pulling all of the volume faders toward zero, but by the four musicians gradually reducing the complexity and volume of their playing. Though he would appear on one or two tracks destined for A Saucerful of Secrets, Syd Barrett’s contribution to “In the Beechwoods” would serve as his effective studio swan song with Pink Floyd.
A sense of gallows humor seems to have pervaded what is generally accepted to have been the final Pink Floyd recording session with Syd Barrett present as a member of the group. Session notes for a pair of dates at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in late January suggest the band knew that ideas were in short supply: the piece being worked on was given the provisional title “The Most Boring Song I’ve Ever Heard Bar 2.”
By these early 1968 sessions, it was clear to all parties—except Barrett—that Pink Floyd could not continue as it had done. “We’d spent the previous two, three, four months trying to keep them together with Syd,” Jenner recalls, “to keep Syd in the band and working and making records, and it became increasingly difficult.” Jenner explains that circumstances reached the point at which “the band couldn’t know where Syd was, and then when he was onstage, they didn’t know what song he would play.”
Waters, Wright, and Mason (and to a lesser extent because he was a new member, Gilmour) made the decision to forge ahead without Syd Barrett, and informed managers King and Jenner and booking agent Bryan Morrison. Jenner recalls what happened next. “Bryan said, ‘Hey: you’re the Pink Floyd. But no one knows who the Pink Floyd are, so you can just keep going.’”
The group had first thought it could continue with Barrett as a non-performing member who remained as songwriter. Jenner calls the idea “doing a Brian Wilson,” referencing the Beach Boys leader’s mid-1960s retirement from live performance. “But Syd didn’t go on writing the songs,” Jenner says. The decision was made to break up Blackhill Enterprises (Pink Floyd plus the management team of Andrew King and Peter Jenner). King and Jenner duo chose to remain with Syd.
While there would never be a publicly announced formal diagnosis of Barrett’s condition, from his point of view, Jenner saw drug use as—at the very least—a contributing factor to his mental condition. He suggests that Pink Floyd’s 1967 tour of America may have provided the pivotal set of circumstances. “At the time there was a lot of ‘theological’ acid taking,” he says. “It was a sort of, ‘this is not just getting stoned; this is expanding your horizon, growing your sense of awareness. This is a new religion.’ I suspect Syd had a lot of acid either deliberately or accidentally or both, and so he was never the same by the time he came back.”
Once guitarist David Gilmour was brought on board as a member—initially as a backup, but quickly becoming a “replacement” for Barrett—Pink Floyd would have taken stock of its situation. Syd Barrett had written most everything the band performed or recorded. Waters had composed a song or two, as had the most musically accomplished of the lot, keyboardist Rick Wright. Drummer Mason never made claims to being a songwriter. Newcomer David Gilmour had nearly no songwriting experience (his Jokers Wild band mate Willie Wilson recalls a Paris session in which a Gilmour original was recorded, but demurs from elaborating. “And Dave won’t thank me if I do otherwise,” he says. “He wouldn’t have wanted you to hear it.”). Still—experienced songwriters or not—EMI expected Pink Floyd to come up with an album to follow its debut.
There’s an old saw in the pop music world that goes something like this: “An artist has his entire life to write songs for his debut album, and a few weeks at best to compose songs for the follow-up.” There’s a kind of universal truth in that assertion, as evidenced in countless examples of what critics refer to as the “sophomore slump.” Tasked with creating material on par with their first batch of songs, some songwriters come up short. Having exhausted their backlog of songs for the first album, the second record sometimes takes the form of discarded tracks, leftovers, and songs that for one reason or another didn’t make the cut for the debut.
For Pink Floyd in January 1968, this problem would have been more serious, as the man who had written most of the band’s material was gone, and he had left little behind. Neither “Vegetable Man” nor “Scream Thy Last Scream” was seriously considered for inclusion on the band’s second LP. Pink Floyd would have to start fresh, mustering up whatever creativity it could to create material for a new album.
Sessions resumed in earnest, sandwiched between live dates scheduled in England, Wales, and the continent. Pink Floyd would work on material destined for A Saucerful of Secrets until May 28, with the album appearing on UK record store shelves exactly one month later. But because of pressure from EMI for a single—ostensibly to sustain the band’s commercial momentum—by late February 1968 attention turned at least briefly to the task of cutting an A- and B-side of a planned 45-rpm release. Like another pair of tunes the band would cut for a second 1968 single, the defining characteristic of these tunes is their similarity to the kind of songs Syd Barrett might have written. Or at least that was the plan; neither “It Would Be So Nice” nor “Julia Dream” ranks among the most distinguished entries in the Pink Floyd catalog.
“It Would Be So Nice” does get off to a promising start: the repeated chorus is delivered in exuberant fashion, with the band providing dramatic instrumental support. But the tone shifts jarringly into the verses, which owe more to the English music hall tradition, a style at which the Kinks’ songwriter Ray Davies excelled. Songwriter Rick Wright is clearly doing his best to conjure up a Syd Barrett–style tune, and while “It Would Be So Nice” has period charms, this piece of musical fluff doesn’t portray Pink Floyd in a positive light.
The single’s flip side, “Julia Dream,” marked David Gilmour’s first appearance as lead vocalist on a Pink Floyd song. Here it’s Roger Waters attempting to write a Barrett-flavored tune, and he fares slightly better than does Wright. The gentle arrangement presages a style the group would explore more fully on the soundtrack for the film More. Admittedly a slight—if inoffensive—ditty, “Julia Dream” is notable as one of only a handful of Pink Floyd songs in which Rick Wright makes use of the Mellotron, an early tape-based sample playback keyboard. The tune stands out in one other, small way: “Julia Dream” is but one of only a handful of songs in the Pink Floyd catalog that could be considered a love song.
As the first release from the post–Syd Barrett lineup, Pink Floyd’s “It Would Be So Nice” backed with “Julia Dream” failed to set the charts alight. Though “Julia Dream” would be performed for a BBC session, neither song is known to have made it into the band’s regular live set list.
Chapter 8
Something Else
A Saucerful of Secrets would be released in the UK at the end of June 1968. The band had not gone out of its way to publicize Syd Barrett’s exit, though an early March press release had made his departure
official. His most significant contributions to the band’s second album, however limited, would be positioned at the end of the second side of the LP.
With David Gilmour still settling into the band and working toward defining his role as something more than a Barrett stand-in, it would fall to bassist Roger Waters to provide most of the songs for Saucerful. In a 2003 retrospective interview—not one of his more diplomatic moments—Waters reflected on the situation the band faced as 1968 began. “After Syd went crazy, and Dave joined in ’68, we were all of us searching, fumbling around, looking for ‘Where do we go now?’” he said. “Because here was the guy who started producing all these songs and was sort of the heartbeat of the band.” But speaking with the benefit of hindsight, he also noted, “You have to work to your strengths. And it’s a very good thing that we couldn’t write singles. We might not have done some of the interesting work that we did.”
“Let There Be More Light” opens the LP with a pulsing and insistent bass line, soon joined by subtle drum work from Nick Mason and one-chord keyboard textures from Wright. As the instrumental introduction approaches the one-minute mark, the overall musical intensity and complexity builds. Everything then dissolves in a wash, giving way to a slow, deliberate melody built on a Waters bass line doubled an octave higher by Wright’s organ. Wright also provides the hushed, gentle vocals of the verse while Waters whispers along. That approach is contrasted by the chorus where the band plays forcefully, and Gilmour takes over on vocals. Three more verses and choruses—the song has no traditional lyric chorus; each refrain has its own set of lyrics—ratchet up the intensity, and the lyrics briefly namecheck the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” An extended instrumental run provides the remainder of “Let There Be More Light,” giving David Gilmour an opportunity to display his lead guitar skills.