by Nick Mason
San Francisco was not yet the ‘Summer of Love’ capital of the world. Haight-Ashbury was still simply a crossroads. The city was much more geared to sightseeing (trips to Alcatraz) and seafood. From there we took the Greyhound east to Lexington, Kentucky and met up with a Poly friend Don McGarry and his girlfriend Deirdre. Don had bought a late Fifties Cadillac, with unreliable brakes, which made the mountain passes rather exciting. We drove almost immediately – with the occasional architectural detour – to Mexico City, where we managed to muddle our way around, before spending some time in Acapulco, amazed at how cheap everything was out of season: rooms were a dollar a night. A further epic journey back to Lexington ensued, before I returned to New York and back across the Atlantic.
The Pink Floyd Sound had not penetrated my consciousness very much during this trip. I simply thought that, come September, I’d be back on the academic treadmill. However, in New York, I came across a copy of the East Village Other newspaper, with a report from London on up and coming bands, which mentioned the Pink Floyd Sound.
Finding this name check so far from home really gave me a new perception of the band. Displaying a touchingly naive trust in the fact that you can believe everything you read in the papers, it made me realise that the band had the potential to be more than simply a vehicle for our own amusement.
WHEN THE members of the Pink Floyd Sound reconvened in London after the summer break of 1966, Peter Jenner was still waiting. He came back to Stanhope Gardens and said, ‘We’d love to have you on the label.’ Roger told him that we didn’t need a label, but we did need a manager.
This instantly rekindled our vague fantasies of success, daydreams that might have otherwise disappeared with the end of the summer. Slightly surprised by his persistence, but eager to seize any opportunity, we eventually agreed that Peter, and his partner Andrew King, should manage the band. On one occasion, when we had a discussion about management, Andrew remembers me saying, ‘No one else wants to manage us, so you might as well…’ We saw their involvement as a significant step for us, giving us the chance to acquire a number of items, all essential if we were ever going to make the transition from amateur to professional: regular, paid work, a level of credibility and some decent equipment.
Peter and Andrew had known each other since their schooldays at Westminster. Their fathers were both vicars: when Andrew was about to go into his final year, his parents had to move away from London and decided to find a good Christian home where their son could stay during term time. Consequently Andrew had lived with the Jenners in Southall, at the St George’s vicarage. Peter was a year younger than Andrew, so they hadn’t really known each other at school, but living in the same house led to shared interests. Sadly, I have no memory of the band receiving any spiritual guidance from the unholy alliance that resulted from their friendship. However, Andrew observes that pastoral care is a useful management tool in the music industry: ‘In a vicarage you have to be ready to deal with anything and anybody coming through the door.’
In their year between the Oxbridge exams and going up in the autumn, Andrew and Peter went to the States, through another clerical connection (this time Episcopalian) and worked in a whiskey distillery in Peking, Illinois, for six months, a location that gave them easy access to Chicago at the weekends and a chance to absorb a rich mix of electric blues, jazz and gospel music.
The two had kept in touch during their time at university – Peter at Cambridge, Andrew at Oxford. When Peter decided to start managing us, he called his old friend Andrew for help, and more importantly, for cash. Andrew had a job with a company applying scientific principles to educational training via a machine that asked trainees to select answers to multiple-choice questions by pressing levers. After writing a program for the machine on thermodynamics (of which he only had the sketchiest knowledge), Andrew was loaned out to the BEA airline to help motivate their staff. Each company thought he was in the other’s office, whereas Andrew was more likely in bed, or practising origami with some Rizla papers… Neither the airline staff nor Andrew himself seem to have been able to muster much motivation at all, and Peter’s call seemed a much more attractive proposition.
Peter remembers, ‘We were good mates and had been to see a lot of music together. We felt, “Why don’t we manage this band. It could be interesting.” Andrew had left his job and was not working, I thought it would continue to be a good hobby.’ Together they set up Blackhill Enterprises, named after Blackhill Farm, a property in the Brecon Beacons that Andrew had bought with some inherited money. The rest of the legacy went on a straight split between wild living and some much needed equipment for the Pink Floyd Sound.
Previously, on the few occasions we had actually been paid for gigs, any cash had been spent on upgrading our own individual gear: Roger had picked up a Rickenbacker bass, and I’d moved on from my original makeshift kit to a Premier kit. After parting company with Chris Dennis and his PA, we’d either borrowed one or made do with whatever system a venue possessed, usually offering the kind of sound quality even a railway station announcer would have found unclear. Blackhill rectified the situation immediately, taking us on a trip to the Charing Cross Road and buying us a Selmer PA system, as well as new bass and guitar amps.
Initially, Peter had intended to continue running DNA as well as lecturing and managing us, while Andrew concentrated on Pink Floyd, but when it became clear that DNA was not a going concern, Peter focused on us. Of the two, Peter was the hustler – and the diplomat – who could talk his way into a deal. Peter describes himself as ‘an A1 bullshitter – still am!’ and had the added bonus of a link into the underground scene. Andrew was more relaxed, and a lot of fun to be around, but his taste for a good time sometimes led to moments of unreliability. However, he refutes the myth that our entire cash float for one Scandinavian tour disappeared after a particularly good night out. In fact, he says, he just pulled out some loose change from his pocket and a few krone rolled down a drain. It was unfortunate that Roger’s eagle eye registered this moment.
Apart from the time they had spent in Illinois, which had allowed them to observe the Chicago music scene in action, the two really had virtually no experience of the music business. However, to our even less experienced eyes, they seemed to have sufficient connections to find more, and better, work and to open negotiations with record companies. It would have been lunacy for us to try and negotiate a record deal for ourselves as, dazzled by visions of Number One singles, we’d have signed for a pittance with the first company that made an offer. Peter and Andrew would at least have hesitated for a polite moment or so.
As well as the promise of more work, and the reality of new equipment, the Jenner–King team supplied us with a link into London’s incipient underground movement through Peter’s involvement with the London Free School, an alternative educational establishment. England in 1966 was going through some remarkable changes. The Labour government of Harold Wilson was in the middle of bringing in a raft of changes in the laws concerning obscenity, divorce, abortion and homosexuality. The Pill had become available. Female emancipation was developing into more than just a theory, allowing women like Germaine Greer and Caroline Coon (the founder of Release, the world’s first phoneline for drugs and legal advice) to participate on equal terms.
It was also a period of cultural change. The Beatles had kicked off a phenomenon where suddenly English bands dominated the international music scene. In the wake of the Beatles, English bands had been adopted by the American music market. It was the original version of Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. This was accompanied by a flourishing of English fashion, retail innovation, models, and photographers, bringing to prominence names like Mary Quant and Ozzie Clark, Carnaby Street and Biba, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Bailey and Donovan. Even English football was in the ascendant after the World Cup victory of 1966.
This commercial explosion was paralleled by a similar burst of activity in the educational area. Much of this was down to the art scho
ols, which were not only producing great designers and photographers but also a generation of talented rock musicians including Ray Davies, Keith Richards, John Lennon and Pete Townshend. An increase in the number of grants available had made further education not only a good career move, but also an excellent way of putting off the evil day of having to go out and earn a real living. Jobs were relatively plentiful and long-term careers easily available, which gave students a lot of choices, including simply opting to drop out (and back in) on an occasional basis. In fact, it’s amazing to think we were actually worried about what we were going to do with all our leisure time once all the robots on Tomorrow’s World did everything for us.
The only real downside to all of this was not to appear for another thirteen years. In the brave new, and very middle-class, alternative world, mainstream politics were rather neglected. By the time anyone realised, it was too late. The wallflowers, who had been left out of all the fun in the Sixties, got their own back during the 1980s by gaining control of the country and vandalising the health service, education, libraries and any other cultural institutions they could get their hands on.
In 1965, one of the significant moments marking the stirring of some kind of intellectual underground movement was a poetry reading organised at the Albert Hall in June – with a bill featuring Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso. The organisers expected a few hundred at most; 7,500 people turned up. This burgeoning intellectual underground began to coalesce around the Indica Bookshop. The money for Indica had been stumped up by Jane Asher’s brother Peter, who was also an old school friend of Peter Jenner and Andrew King. Indica’s other founders were Miles, the writer and journalist, and John Dunbar, a friend of Rick’s who later married Marianne Faithfull. The bookshop originally incorporated an art gallery in Mason’s Yard off St James’s before moving to Southampton Row. It was a place where ideas and experimental literature could be promoted by importing the work of American poets, an area where the crossover with the States was well established. The name Indica was derived from the botanical name ‘cannabis indica’, although the coy version was that it was short for ‘indications’. At another bookshop, Better Books, Andy Warhol came over from the States for one poetry reading, accompanied by an entourage including Kate Heliczer, the star of Warhol’s film Couch, who had brought over the first Velvet Underground tapes heard in the UK.
Both of these shops opened up a route for the kind of avant-garde American rock music that otherwise most of us would never have heard, like the Fugs and the Mothers of Invention. Sometimes the names of these US bands, which sounded weird to us, suggested an alternative group, but their music would turn out to be quite conventional. When we did get to hear many of the Americans like Country Joe & The Fish or Big Brother & The Holding Company we were often surprised to find that their music was in fact inspired by American country or blues music, although the content of their lyrics was radical enough for them to be thought of as underground bands.
Some of the people involved in the Indica Bookshop also contributed to the London Free School. This had been set up by a group that included Peter Jenner as a way of bringing further education to Notting Hill. One of the prime movers in the underground, John Hopkins – known to everyone as Hoppy – had picked up the idea from New York’s Free University, and this had in part sparked the whole venture. (Hoppy had been one of the first to deliberately ‘drop out’ of a set career path, leaving his job at the Harwell Atomic Research Establishment in the early 1960s to become a freelance photojournalist.)
Peter says, ‘The London Free School was an idea for the alternative education of the masses. In hindsight it was an incredibly pretentious middle-class operation. We’d all come from privileged backgrounds and had all been well educated, but we were not happy with what we had learnt. We’d been educated in very blinkered ways.’ The Free School was a response to the fact that people had become alienated from education, and that by teaching other people, the teacher could also learn from the pupils. It flared briefly for a year or so, and then disintegrated – all the principals were too busy with fingers in other pies from journalism to events management. The LFS, and the psychedelic movement, was in part inspired by the multiculturalism of Notting Hill. Peter makes the point that people do not remember the drabness of England post-war: ‘It was grim to behold. Psychedelia was anti-drab.’
The London Free School would gather in an old house in Tavistock Crescent in Notting Hill (now torn down) which belonged to Rhaunnie Laslett, founder of the Notting Hill Carnival. The Free School needed money to survive, and the organisers also wanted to set up a news and information sheet to let everyone know about the new underground. Peter Jenner and Andrew King came up with the solution: like all good vicars’ sons, they knew that if you wanted to raise money, you either held a whist drive or a dance. Whist seemed inappropriate, so the LFS hired the local church hall (also now torn down) at All Saints in Powis Gardens, Notting Hill, and put on the Pink Floyd Sound – we had decided to stick with Syd’s name for the band during our stint at the Marquee Club – as part of a ‘pop dance’.
We were probably not that overjoyed by the prospect: playing church halls wasn’t what we had expected our new managers to be aiming for. But in fact it turned out to be one of the best venues we could have found, since London W11 rapidly established itself as the hub of the alternative movement. The whole district of Notting Hill was becoming the most interesting area in London, mixing cheap rents, multicultural residents, activities like the London Free School and a thriving trade in illegal drugs. To combat the latter, the local police had also developed creative skills, mainly to do with fabricating evidence. This was something new for the intellectual radicals: apart from the CND marches, the middle classes had rarely had to confront the darker side of the law.
The All Saints hall itself was unremarkable. With a high ceiling, wooden floorboards and a raised dais at one end, it was like countless similar church buildings throughout the land. But the event quickly took on a personality of its own. The audience was different from the R&B fanatics and Top Of The Pops viewers. As well as the local hip fraternity, there were students or college dropouts, proud of being ‘freaks’, who would sit on the floor or just waft around waving their arms, a physical definition of what became known as ‘looning about’. They arrived with few of the preconceptions or expectations of a normal audience, and were often in a chemically altered state sufficient to find drying paint not only interesting but deeply significant. The effect on us was terrific. They responded so well and so uncritically to the improvised sections in our set that we began to concentrate on extending those rather than simply running through a sequence of cover versions.
Light shows played an important role at the All Saints shows: the events were conceived as ‘happenings’ and people were encouraged to participate however they wanted. An American couple, Joel and Toni Brown, initially projected some slides when they were over on a visit. When they had to return to the States, the contribution of the light show had become important enough for Peter, his wife Sumi and Andrew to construct some replacements. With budget a priority and in the absence of any friends in theatre lighting, Andrew and Peter decided not to approach the professional lighting companies, but instead headed down to their local electrical store, and loaded up with domestic spotlights, ordinary switches, gels and drawing pins, probably getting a trade discount as jobbing builders. All this standard lighting equipment was mounted onto battens nailed on a few planks, the contraption was plugged into the mains, and the lights simply switched on and off by hand. This was makeshift equipment, but for the time it was revolutionary – no other band had this kind of stage illumination.
A Melody Maker report of 22nd October 1966 gives a flavour of a typical performance by us: ‘The slides were excellent – colourful, frightening, grotesque, beautiful, but all fall a bit flat in the cold reality of All Saints Hall. Psychedelic versions of “Louie Louie” won’t come off but if they can inco
rporate their electronic prowess with some melodic and lyrical songs – getting away from dated R&B things – they could well score in the near future.’
Our set was including fewer R&B standards and more of Syd’s songs – many of which would form the basis of our first album. The R&B classics were mixed up with our longer workouts, so that ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, which we often used as an opener, might be followed immediately by a very straight cover of Bo Diddley’s ‘Can’t Judge A Book’ or Chuck Berry’s ‘Motivating’, one of Syd’s favourites.
Although this series of gigs was bringing us a regular audience, and we were becoming identified with what could already be defined as an ‘underground’, my impression is that none of the band members was particularly aware of the significance of the movement itself. We were sympathetic to its aims, but certainly not active participants. We enjoyed the mix of people involved, like Hoppy, Rhaunnie Laslett and the black activist Michael X, but our real interest lay in making it in the music business and buying our new PA system, not the ideals of a free newspaper.
The money from All Saints hall helped the Free School start their newspaper. IT (International Times) was created as a regular institution to give some cohesion to all the happenings and events going on in London. The model was New York’s Village Voice, with its distinctive mixture of arts reviews, investigative journalism and a mouthpiece for liberal and radical views. To launch the first issue – on sale, at all good alternative outlets, for one shilling, published by Lovebooks Ltd, and with a print run of 15,000 copies – IT organised a launch party at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, Camden on a cold October night.
The Roundhouse had been built in the 1840s as an inspection yard for steam engines, but the yard and its turntable became obsolete within fifteen years, as the size of the engines simply grew too large. Gilbeys, the distillers, had used it as a warehouse, but by the early 1960s the place was extremely run-down. It has been well documented that our road crew, who were in fact the management since we didn’t have a road crew as such, backed the transit van into the giant jelly moulded by an artist for the launch party. This cataclysmic culinary disaster obviously didn’t help reinforce any sense of order.