Inside Out

by Nick Mason

  There was no stage, but there was an old cart that was used as a platform. Our entire combination of instruments, amps and light show was being run off one single 13-amp lead, which would barely have supported the power supply for the average kitchen. Consequently the illumination levels were extremely low, and torches and candles supplied most of the light. The power expired on an irregular basis signalling the end of – or breaks in – the sets.

  Lighting effects at the Roundhouse were also minimal. They consisted of Andrew and Peter’s hand-built rig and some underpowered Aldis 35mm projectors – the kind of machines families used to display their summer holiday snaps – containing slides filled with mixes of oil, water, inks and chemicals that were then heated with small butane blow lamps. Great skill was required not to overheat the contraption; otherwise the glass cracked, spilling the ink, creating the possibility of a small fire, and the certainty of an atrocious mess. Our lighting technicians could be instantly identified by the lurid stains on their fingers and the blisters on their hands.

  The IT launch was a success. The Floyd’s performance was described by Town magazine as ‘shattering ear-drum and eye-ball’, and by IT itself as doing ‘weird things to the feel of the event with their scary feedback sounds’. This was like Powis Gardens with added glamour. The word was out, and the faces and the celebrities were starting to turn up. A couple of thousand people attended. The event brought together the beautiful people and the celebs, including Paul McCartney, Peter Brook, Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti, and awarded a politically incorrect prize for the ‘shortest-barest’, allegedly won by Marianne Faithfull. Soft Machine also performed, with the startling addition of a revved-up motorbike making a guest appearance at some point in their set. There were pop-art-painted American cars, a fortunetelling cubicle, an all-night alternative film show. And there was the largest audience we had ever faced.

  We did spend quite a lot of time out in the audience sharing the experience, but this was one of the last times we did so; the time would come shortly when we began to retreat to the self-contained culture of the band dressing room. I do remember that most of us were wearing heavy make-up, and spent an inordinate amount of time curling or backcombing our hair into what we thought pop stars should look like. Our wardrobe was another drain on our budget. It was not until a few years later that a casual T-shirt approach became the norm, along with the attendant cash savings. For now we felt that satin shirts, velvet loon pants, scarves and high-heeled Gohill boots were mandatory.

  At the end of October, we formalised our arrangement with Peter and Andrew by becoming partners in Blackhill Enterprises. The four of us with Peter and Andrew each owned one-sixth of the company, which meant we could all share in the Floyd’s success and any other profits from Blackhill’s ventures with other bands and the massive entertainment empire that Andrew and Peter envisaged. The deal was very much of its time, ‘organised in the appropriate hippie way’ in Peter’s phrase, ‘a sweet idea’, in Andrew’s.

  Blackhill set up shop, literally – there was a flat above and a shop front downstairs – at 32 Alexander Street in Bayswater, a property leased by Andrew’s girlfriend Wendy, which much later became the original headquarters of Stiff Records. Andrew lived in the top flat, and Roger, Rick and Syd all lived there at various times, as did Joe Gannon, who was our original lighting man and who later became a successful US-based director, producer and lighting director, notably for Alice Cooper. The place was soon in chaos. Part band sitting room and storage, part office, it was only put in order through the arrival of June Child, our secretary, assistant road manager, chauffeur and personal assistant. She became an invaluable member of the team, providing the missing element of organisation to our working lives – and later married Marc Bolan, another of Blackhill’s artists.

  Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine remembers Blackhill as ‘a lovely bunch of people. They were very nice, an honourable exception to the shady rule about managers, and really cared for the people they worked for. I think that most of us were less lucky than that.’ Soft Machine were one of the few bands we got to know, as we frequently found ourselves working beyond the fringes of mainstream pop music. The happenings at Powis Gardens and the Roundhouse were not the traditional way of ‘paying your dues’.

  Considering their rather haphazard approach to management, Peter and Andrew proved to have terrific intuition when it came to discovering bands. Pink Floyd were not the only band they nurtured. Although they initially had to concentrate on our needs, they would in due course launch the careers of Edgar Broughton, Roy Harper, as well as Marc Bolan and Tyrannosaurus Rex, and work with bands like Slapp Happy and the Third Ear Band.

  Their connection with the classical music promoter Christopher Hunt was an example of what made Blackhill such good news for us at this time. Instead of relying on the tried and tested circuit of existing clubs and venues, Peter and Andrew were constantly looking for alternative ways to promote their alternative band. Peter’s wife Sumi was Christopher’s secretary. He was able to organise a show for us in January 1967 at the Commonwealth Institute, a beautiful purpose-built auditorium in Kensington that was mainly used for the type of ethnic music recital by artists like Ravi Shankar that had recently come into vogue. We needed the clout of a classical promoter to open the door for us, since I am sure the authorities would otherwise have assumed that a riot was bound to take place; I imagine they still thought ‘rock’ was something to do with drainpipe trousers, Teddy boys and Bill Haley.

  The Westminster connection also came in handy by supplying Jonathan Fenby, who wrote the first Pink Floyd press releases, and they were good, because he knew what the press would consider a good story – at the time he was a Reuters journalist, who later became editor of the Observer and the South China Morning Post, as well as a distinguished author. We gained some editorial coverage in the quality press through Jonathan – the first piece appeared in the Financial Times. Then Hunter Davies’ column in the Sunday Times of 30th October 1966 ran a short piece on psychedelia with quotes from Andrew and Roger, who stated ‘If you take LSD what you experience depends entirely on who you are. Our music may give you the screaming horrors or throw you into screaming ecstasy. Mostly it’s the latter. We find our audiences stop dancing now. We tend to get them standing there totally grooved with their mouths open.’ Hunter Davies made a one-word comment on all this: ‘Hmm’. Hunter was the journalist who shortly afterwards made his name as an observer of the pop world with his biography The Beatles in 1968.

  We continued with more one-off appearances. These were generally not so much actual gigs as private events announced by word of mouth, a few out of town in places like Bletchley and Canterbury, most in London, back at Hornsey College of Art, as well as more All Saints events – the last one there was on 29th November. There were also a couple of follow-ups at the Roundhouse including ‘Psychodelphia vs Ian Smith’, which announced ‘All madness welcome! Bring your own happenings and ecstatogenic substances. Drag optional’, but none of them quite captured the mood of the original IT launch.

  Playing other venues was a steep management learning curve. When we played one gig at a Catholic youth club, the bloke in charge refused to pay up, claiming that what we were playing ‘wasn’t music’. Andrew and Peter went to the small claims court – and to their, and our, total disbelief, we lost, as disappointingly the magistrate completely agreed with the youth club manager’s opinion …

  An Oxfam benefit called ‘You Must Be Joking?’, held at the Albert Hall in December, was another useful showcase, although we were bottom of the bill. There were enough big names above us, including Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Chris Farlowe, and the Alan Price Set, to guarantee an audience of five thousand. We also gained an insight into how the rest of the music business viewed us when Alan Price raised a laugh at our expense by banging the reverb on his Hammond organ and announcing that this was psychedelic music. At the time we were mortified, probably because all our mums were in the au
dience; any sense of resentment has nearly worn off.

  We also returned to the Marquee Club in December, but had a fairly uncomfortable relationship with the club and its audiences. The manager, John Gee, came from a jazz background, and seemed unhappy with the music the club was now hosting. Irascible and understandably disapproving after exposure to an endless stream of noisy bands, he seemed to dislike both punters and bands with equal venom. With our weird music and funny lights as well as our particularly amateur brand of musicianship we must have been a total anathema to him.

  Sadly the Marquee audience and our support groups had a rather similar view. The Marquee had opened in 1958 first as a jazz club, but with the times had emerged as the fulcrum of the British R&B movement. Even though initially the jazzers had looked down on R&B with disdain, if not outright hatred, particularly as some of the musicians who also made their living as session players could see their regular gigs and hence livelihoods disappearing fast, the club was really the heart of the British R&B movement rather than the underground, and although we did enjoy a short residency it was really much closer to a brief encounter.

  The Marquee was an archetypal music club. The dressing room was tiny, scented with sweat and the great smell of cheap men’s cologne – always so much simpler than attempting to shower in a sink – and on a successful night had the atmosphere of a student party held in a lift. Otherwise it was better to make for the bar at the back where fine ale was dispensed in plastic beakers just in case the patrons should take exception to the music or each other. You could work in the knowledge that you might get wet but at least you would avoid severe lacerations as long as you didn’t leave the stage.

  Fortunately, there was one club which could have been purpose-made for us – this was UFO, pronounced ‘U-fo’ and short for Underground Freak Out. If Indica was the underground’s high street shop, the London Free School its education system, and IT its Fleet Street, then UFO was its playground, set up by Joe Boyd and John Hopkins (Hoppy). Joe was a Harvard graduate and music freak who had first been over to England in the spring of 1964 as tour manager for the Blues and Gospel Caravan. He met Hoppy when he came down to take photos of the Caravan. When Joe returned later with a job as A&R man for Elektra Records, he was amazed to find that in his absence the whole underground movement had suddenly blossomed.

  Within days of coming back to London in the autumn of 1965 he’d attended the first meeting of the London Free School, and a year later had become involved in the idea of setting up a nightclub. Hoppy and Joe found the venue: the Blarney Club in Tottenham Court Road, which was an Irish dancehall, with a decor featuring shamrocks, leprechauns and all things Hibernian. The club was just down from the police station and underneath two cinemas, which meant the show couldn’t start until around 10 p.m. when the cinemas closed, because of the noise problems. The first night of UFO was on 23rd December 1966 – we played at the opening – and thereafter the club ran every Friday night through to eight in the morning.

  UFO added another dimension to our career: even if it wasn’t an established club, this was London’s West End, and the place was crowded with people who wanted to see us and knew what to expect. We were familiar with a large number of the audience, and looked forward to playing there. It made a welcome change to the trepidation we felt whenever we played out of London. Knowing we had a partisan audience and the beginnings of a fan base, we would break away from the band room to wander around and watch the other acts: Soft Machine appeared regularly, and there were theatre groups, poetry readings and performance art events. There were also plaudits on offer, rather than the lack of understanding we tended to find outside the capital. UFO felt like a genuine base camp for those expeditions.

  In June Child’s words, ‘it was the ambience that people went for. It was dark, you went downstairs… basically like an elongated cellar. There was a very limited stage and you had small speakers, probably AC30s, and the lighting rig which was like a little platform’. The lighting rig was set up on something like a painter and decorator’s scaffolding tower.

  Jenny Fabian, the author of the novel Groupie (which had a succès de scandale when it came out in 1969; we appeared thinly disguised as Satin Odyssey), remembers a typical night at UFO: ‘The best thing was Friday night, when you could dress up like an old film star, drop acid, go down to UFO, see all the likewise people, get a stick of candy floss and float around until the Floyd came on. They were the first authentic sound of acid consciousness. I’d lie down on the floor and they’d be up on stage like supernatural gargoyles playing their spaced-out music, and the same colour that was exploding over them was exploding over us. It was like being taken over, mind, body and soul.’

  UFO had various light shows as well as our own (we were still the only band who possessed one). Robert Wyatt recalls UFO’s in-house lighting man Mark Boyle ‘doing lights and burning himself to pieces to do these experiments with different coloured acids. You just saw him with these goggles, looking all burnt, high up on some rigging.’ There was also a fifty-year-old called Jack Bracelin, who ran a nudist colony in Watford, and occasionally used one corner of UFO for a smaller light show, presumably whenever the weather in Hertfordshire turned inclement. While Robert remembers that the light show allowed him a certain amount of anonymity, so that his band could relax into ‘the same swirly gloom’ as the audience, we were still interested in using the light shows to illuminate rather than obscure us.

  Town magazine ran a piece on the underground and captured the mood of UFO in particular: ‘The Pink Floyd is the underground’s house orchestra. Their music sounds more like Thelonious Monk than the Rolling Stones. Projected slides bathed the musicians and audience in hypnotic and frenzied patterns of liquid-coloured lights. Honeycombs, galaxies and throbbing cells whirl around the group with accelerating abandon as the music develops.’

  We may have been adopted as the house orchestra, but we rarely got to share the psychedelic experience. We were out of it, not on acid, but out of the loop, stuck in the dressing room at UFO. We were busy being a band: rehearsing, travelling to gigs, packing up and driving home. Psychedelia was around us, but not within us. We might buy a book at Indica, but we certainly never had time to linger. We’d read IT but the primary reason was to check whether we’d had a review or not. Of the band, Syd was perhaps slightly more intrigued by the wider aspects of psychedelia, and drawn to some of the philosophical and mystical aspects that his particular group of friends was exploring. But although he was interested, I don’t think – like the rest of us if we had wanted to – he had enough time to become fully immersed in the scene.

  The rest of the world got its impression of psychedelia from the sort of ad that was placed in Melody Maker for ‘Psychedelicamania’ at the Roundhouse on New Year’s Eve: ‘WHAT IS A FREAK OUT? When a large number of individuals gather and express themselves creatively through music, dance, light patterns and electronic sound. The participants, already emancipated from our national slavery, dressed in their most inspired apparel, realise as a group whatever potential they possess for free expression. IT’S ALL HAPPENING MAN!’

  Around this time, one turning point in my own personal musical development was the night Cream played at the Poly, where we still performed from time to time, although we were only paying punters for this particular gig. The moment when the curtain went back is crystal clear in my mind. Cream’s road manager was on the stage – probably still trying to nail Ginger Baker’s double bass drums to the floor. Ginger was famous for insisting on this, and there are ruined marble floors and carpets around the globe to prove it. From this moment on I had to have a double bass drum kit – and went straight out and bought one the next day.

  Young Turks of psychedelia we might be, but we were as stunned by the display of hardware as we were by the band itself. I drooled over that champagne-sparkle Ludwig drum kit while the others lusted after the stacks of Marshall amplifiers as Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger launched into the opening of �
�NSU’. We were even impressed when the curtains closed again almost immediately as they decided to try and fix various technical problems. The fact that Jimi Hendrix later came on to guest on a couple of numbers – his first appearance in England – was the icing on the cake.

  For me that night was the moment that I knew I wanted to do this properly. I loved the power of it all. No need to dress in Beatle jackets and tab-collar shirts, and no need to have a good-looking singer out front. No verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-chorus-end structure to the songs, and the drummer wasn’t at the back on a horrid little platform… he was up at the front.

  This simply reinforced what passed for our master plan: a desire to get more work, buy more equipment and land a record deal. At the end of 1966, a combination of timing and luck was starting to work for us, and with Syd’s distinctive songwriting and our improvisational style, we did have a rather rough but definitely original musical approach to offer the record companies.

  Events moved very quickly in this period. Our desultory contact with Peter Jenner either side of the summer vacation had snowballed through the autumn, and during the winter things, in Peter’s phrase, ‘took off like a rocket’. There was substantial interest in this new phenomenon from record companies, publishers and agents. Melody Maker ran a feature on what was happening, Harper & Queen’s antennae twitched. Peter recalls a moment when he realised that there was something afoot. He was on his way to UFO on Tottenham Court Road, and when he came into Oxford Street there were ‘all these kids with bells round their necks. I thought, “Fucking hell, this is really starting to happen.” Unbelievable.’