by Nick Mason
From our point of view the ‘Technicolour Dream’ was more of a logistical nightmare. That night we had been playing at a gig in Holland in the early evening, finished the show, packed up, been driven through the night at high speed by over-excited Dutchmen to catch the last flight out, and rushed madly over to North London to make our appearance. Given this itinerary, the chances of enjoying any benefits of a psychedelic love-in were remote. Syd was completely distanced from everything going on, whether simply tripping or suffering from a more organic neural disturbance I still have no idea.
In comparison, I think ‘Games For May’ a fortnight later was one of the most significant shows we have ever performed, since the concert contained elements that became part of our performances for the following thirty years. Peter and Andrew had set up the event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the arts complex on London’s South Bank through Christopher Hunt, the promoter who had arranged for us to play at the Commonwealth Institute. Once again Christopher’s classical music credentials proved invaluable, as he was one of the few people who could engineer an entrée into this prestigious venue.
Although we had little time for preparation or rehearsal to fill our two-hour slot, we did manage to conceive the evening as a Pink Floyd multimedia event. Unlike our regular gigs, there were no support acts, so we were able to control the environment and create a particular mood. The audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall were seated, so the intention was clearly that, uniquely for a rock concert, they should listen and watch, rather than dance. A large part of this show was improvised. We had our usual repertoire of songs, and premiered ‘See Emily Play’ (‘You’ll lose your mind and play free games for May…’), but most were chosen as vehicles, like ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, to act as a framework for constantly changing ideas. Everyone remembers Syd for his songwriting, but he probably deserves equal credit for his radical concept of improvised rock music.
We had some extra lights and a bubble machine, as well as the domestic slide projectors, which had to be installed right in the middle of the stalls to get any sort of light throw. This required some technical and legal improvisation, since at the time lighting and sound mixing was controlled from the side of the stage. It was some years before it became standard practice to have the sound and lighting desks in the middle of the auditorium.
IT reported that the event was ‘really good thinking … a genuine twentieth-century chamber music concert. The cleanness of presentation of the hall itself was perfect for the very loose mixed media.’ It’s just a shame we couldn’t capitalise on this reception and avoid the next year of drudgery fulfilling endless routine gigs.
The Azimuth Co-ordinator, which had its first outing at ‘Games For May’, was a device operated by Rick, which we had commissioned from Bernard Speight, a technical engineer at Abbey Road. There were two channels, each with a joystick, one for his Farfisa organ, the other for sound effects. If a joystick was upright the sound was centred, but moving it diagonally would dispatch the sound to the speaker in the equivalent corner of the hall. Rick could send his keyboard sounds swirling round the auditorium, or make footsteps – supplied from a Revox tape recorder – apparently march across from one side to the other. Nobody remembers who came up with the name of the device, but the Oxford English Dictionary defines an azimuth as ‘the arc of the heavens extending from the zenith to the horizon, which cuts it at right angles’. It seemed rather well put, I thought.
We were also banned from ever performing again at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, not because of over-excited fans ripping up the seats but because one of the road crew, dressed as a full admiral of the fleet, tossed flower petals into the aisles. The hall authorities deemed this a potential safety hazard for the less sure-footed of the audience…
This was typical of the disrespect, and often downright hostility, that existed between rock bands and venue management. On matters of safety and lighting, they would impose innumerable petty rules, some justified, many purely to indicate their disapproval. One that particularly annoyed us was when venues would demand higher levels of auditorium lighting for rock bands than for other forms of entertainment, especially damaging for us, as the impact of our light show would be severely diminished. An air rifle was occasionally employed to make sure the house lighting was modified to our liking. It was in fact de rigueur to be banned from all major venues, and as Andrew King says, you always told everyone you were banned even if you hadn’t been. I think like virtually every other group we were banned from the Albert Hall ‘for life’ for a short while…
‘Arnold Layne’ had also received a ban, from the pirate radio stations Radio London and Radio Caroline, as well as the BBC, which really did make it difficult to promote since there was only a handful of radio stations broadcasting at the time. The ban was due to vague references in the lyrics that could be construed, if you tried really hard, as a celebration of ‘sexual perversion’. Of course, not long afterwards, the BBC completely – and with a charming naivety – failed to notice anything sexual in the lyrics of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’. It seems absurd now – and wonderfully old-fashioned given the ultra-explicit nature of lyrics in the twenty-first century – but at the time there was still great sensitivity to censorship. The Lord Chamberlain had retained power over the London theatres until 1967, and even as late as 1974 we were still expected to get clearances for the films accompanying our live concerts from the British Board of Film Censors (including, bizarrely, getting a special dispensation not to have to show the censor’s licence on screen before the films, which would rather have spoilt the effect).
In any case, getting played on the radio was difficult, as available airtime was still very limited. The Musicians Union had negotiated a deal with the BBC that restricted the amount of records that could be broadcast on the radio to forty hours a week. This left hours of music to be performed by the jobbing musicians who made up the radio orchestras. This was fine when the songs were a nice bit of crooning with a trumpet solo, but when they tried to recreate ‘Purple Haze’ it was the aural equivalent of a one-armed paper hanger.
Faced with these obstacles one option open to us – and any other band hoping to enjoy Top Twenty success – was to hype the record. In an age before electronic point of sale data, the system was very simple: it was fairly well known which shops supplied their returns to indicate record sales, and various persons would be sent in to the relevant outlets to buy the chosen single incessantly. Apparently you had to be very careful in one hyper’s office. An inadvertently opened cupboard could cause serious injury as a cascade of unplayed records came spilling out. One particular specialist, in return for £100, would load up his sports car with flowers and chocolates and set off around the record shops to convince the girls behind the counter to adjust the sales figures, which they were delighted to do.
‘Arnold Layne’, released in March 1967, had reached Number Twenty in the UK charts. For the follow-up, ‘See Emily Play’ was chosen, and we tried recording it at Abbey Road. However, we just could not reproduce the sound of ‘Arnold Layne’, and so we all trailed back to Sound Techniques to recreate the magic formula, which gave Joe Boyd a certain wry pleasure.
By the time ‘Emily’ came out, we had gained some additional benefits from the banning of ‘Arnold Layne’. I think the stations were a little shamefaced, and it looked as though their street cred might take a turn for the worse if they were not seen to be accommodating the new bright young things. All the radio stations played the record and we reached Number Seventeen after two weeks. This Top Twenty chart position entitled us to an appearance on Top Of The Pops. This marked an important new rung in the upward ladder, and gave us real exposure. Being seen by a national television audience would directly affect our drawing power and thus our earning capacity as a live band. ‘AS SEEN ON TV!’ was worth at least another hundred quid a night.
Most of the day was spent with run-throughs, make-up, pressing of fancy clothes, hair washing and trimming, all at
the BBC’s well-equipped facility at Lime Grove. What the road crew quickly found out was that since the hair and make-up departments did not know who any of the new bands were, they could also go in, chat up the girls, and get their hair washed, trimmed and blow-dried. Rarely have I seen such deliciously gleaming road crew as those roaming the corridors of the BBC that night.
However, I felt the show itself was pretty much of an anticlimax. Miming feels pretty daft at the best of times, and this was not even the best of times. It was always a chore to mime, especially for a drummer. To keep the sound level down you had to avoid hitting the drum skins completely or just use the drum sides. Both methods looked very awkward. In later years the whole ghastly exercise included using plastic cymbals and pads. In addition, you had all the adrenalin of performance with no physical activity or real audience response to absorb it. Compared to the show, though, the complete lack of excitement afterwards was soul-destroying. I suppose I expected the world to change after being on the telly. Surely we were now real pop stars? But it seemed not. The world carried on as before, and off we went to yet another dreadful venue where the audience still hated us, but I suppose at least they hated us ‘AS SEEN ON TV!’
The following week the record was up to Number Five so we went and did it all over again. A third appearance was planned, but Syd threw a spanner in the works, refusing to do the show, and giving an indication of the trouble that lay ahead. He articulated the reason as ‘If John Lennon doesn’t have to do Top Of The Pops, why should I?’
Any chance of the record reaching Number One was out of the question. Procol Harum had ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ out at exactly the same time, and it would not budge from the top spot. Each week we looked despairingly at the chart assuring ourselves that everyone must have bought a copy of ‘Whiter Shade’ by now – but clearly even if they had they suffered from poor short-term memories or wanted two copies. (Procol’s Gary Brooker was reviewing singles for Melody Maker: he spotted ‘Emily’ straight away. ‘The Pink Floyd. I can tell by the horrible organ sound…’)
Commercial success was appealing to all of us, apart from Syd. Norman Smith – who was now our official EMI producer – remembers that when there was talk about picking a follow-up to ‘Arnold Layne’, and that maybe ‘See Emily Play’ should be the single, Syd reacted as if the word ‘single’ was a nasty concept. Although he was happy to chip in with catchy musical ideas, he hated the idea of anything being ‘commercial’.
Norman Smith had been dispatched by EMI to oversee the recording of ‘See Emily Play’ at Sound Techniques, and to produce the recording sessions for our first album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, which were held at Abbey Road, starting in March 1967. After trying, in his words, ‘to become a famous jazz musician’, Norman had applied for a job at EMI after seeing an ad in The Times for apprentice engineers. The age cut-off was twenty-eight, and Norman was in his mid-thirties, so he pruned six years off his age, and, to his surprise, was asked back for an interview, along with over a hundred other applicants. Asked by one of the interviewers what he thought of Cliff Richard, who was just emerging at the time, Norman was far from complimentary about Cliff. The interviewers, again to his surprise, tended to agree. And Norman was appointed as one of three new apprentices.
From then on he was set to sweeping floors, being told to nip out and get a pack of cigarettes or make some tea, and occasionally pushing a button on the orders of an engineer. Then one day ‘these four lads with funny haircuts came along’. The Beatles had arrived at Abbey Road, and, by pure serendipity, Norman was assigned to record their test – after which he thought to himself, ‘That’s the last we’ll see of you boys, because they weren’t terribly good, to put it mildly.’ The Beatles had other ideas, and Norman recorded them up to the end of Rubber Soul.
Norman had always had aspirations to be a producer, and after George Martin left EMI to set up AIR studios, he was asked to take over the Parlophone label. In response to his initial flurry of letters of introduction, he had got a call back from Bryan Morrison asking him to take a look at a band called Pink Floyd. Norman and Beecher Stevens – who had just joined EMI as head of A&R – did not see eye to eye, and were both trying to carve out their own territory. The fact that they both wanted to sign us to EMI probably played into our hands as they independently hustled hard for us to join the label. Norman remembers that the hierarchy took a while to be convinced about this unknown group, and the £5,000 advance was a tremendous amount at the time. When they finally agreed, they told Norman – possibly in jest – that he could sign us but his job was on the line.
I think Norman saw us as his opportunity to do a George Martin. He was interested, like us, in using studio facilities to the full, was very good-natured and a capable musician in his own right. Most important of all for us, he was happy to teach us rather than protect his position by investing the production process with any mystique.
For our recordings, Norman was assisted by Peter Bown, an experienced EMI house engineer, and again a man who had been at the studios for years, seen it all, and done most of it himself. At one early session, urged on by Peter and Andrew, we ran through our repertoire to select a number to start recording and to impress our new comrades. Regrettably they had all been on late sessions the day before. After thirty minutes Peter Bown had fallen asleep across the console, and Norman remembers that he followed suit a short while later.
Given our lack of experience in the studio, we were extremely lucky to have someone like Norman. It was still rare for musicians to be allowed anywhere near the mixing desk, and not unknown for session players to be brought in to save on studio time: the Beatles had begun changing this, as their success convinced record companies to interfere less and less. Virtually every subsequent band owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Beatles for creating an attitude where popular music was made by the artists, and not constructed for them.
From our first day, Norman encouraged us to get involved in the whole production process. He was aware of our interest in the science and technology of recording when, in his words, ‘most bands at the time were just trying to be part of the Mersey Sound bandwagon’.
At the time the Abbey Road Studios (officially the EMI Studios) were an odd mixture of conservatism and radicalism. The company also had a huge engineering department where they built many of their own recording machines, mixing desks and outboard gear. Recording took place on four-track machines, which was then mixed down onto ¼” mono or stereo tape. All editing was carried out by trainees using little brass scissors, in order to prevent any magnetism affecting the sound. The whole building was painted throughout in a shade of green that I can only imagine was inspired by the KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka.
Very much like the BBC, this type of organisation produced a wealth of good engineers. They had become well versed in the techniques required to record every sort of instrument and ensemble, and were unfazed by recording rock music one day and Herbert von Karajan with an eighty-piece orchestra the next. There was, though, a sharp divide between classical and pop in the upper echelons; although the pop releases were subsidising the classical recordings, the staff who created them were treated like other ranks by the top brass. The chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, must take a lot of credit for bringing down this antiquated hierarchy. To put things in context, two years before he joined EMI, the board had decided there was ‘no future’ in the long-playing record.
One of the features of such a well-equipped studio as Abbey Road was that since electronic effect machines had still to be invented, the empire owned vast quantities of instruments that were scattered around the studios. Bell pianos, Hammond organs, clavinets, tympani, gongs, triangles, Chinese blocks, temple bells and wind machines were there to be used (and can be heard throughout Piper and A Saucerful Of Secrets, as well as, I believe, numerous Beatles records). An extensive sound-effect library was also available, as well as purpose-built, tile-lined echo chambers that we especially favoured for recording foo
tsteps.
Although my memory is that the recording for Piper went pretty smoothly, that there was general enthusiasm from everybody and that Syd seemed to be more relaxed and the atmosphere more focused, Norman Smith disagrees. ‘It was never easy on my part. I always felt I was treading on this ice the whole time, and I had to watch exactly what I said to Syd. He was always terribly fragile. He would perhaps have laid down a vocal track and I would go up to him and say, “OK, Syd, that was basically good, but what about blah, blah, blah?” I never got any response, just “Hum, hum”. We would run the tape again, and he would sing it exactly the same way. We could have done a hundred takes of the vocal track and it would always have been the same. There was a certain stubbornness in the man’s make-up.’
We were finishing songs in one or two days in the studio, where sessions were firmly regimented – three-hour blocks, morning, afternoon and evening, with lunch and tea breaks strictly adhered to – and then heading off to do some gigs during the rest of the week. The ease of recording was in part due to the fact that we were effectively recording our live set, and listening to Piper now gives a rough indication of the set list we’d been playing at UFO and the Roundhouse, although the studio versions – to fulfil the demands of the three-minute track – were inevitably shorter, with more concisely constructed solos.
However, some of the more whimsical songs on the album may have been advisedly dropped from the set when we faced the menacing crowds at places like the California Ballroom: God knows what they would have made of the gnome called Grimble Gromble. Finding replacement songs was not a problem, though. Andrew recalls, ‘Syd was writing at a rate of knots. Songs were pouring out of him, as often happens; there’s a point where the writing suddenly erupts. Some people can sustain it, others cannot.’