Inside Out

by Nick Mason

  ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ is an example of a piece that on vinyl (as was) is a cut-down version of the way it was played at gigs. ‘Interstellar’ had formed a central plank of our live shows ever since Powis Gardens. Based around Syd’s riff, the piece would generally be played with different elements structured in the same order each time. On the album it runs to less than ten minutes; live it could have lasted as long as twenty minutes. The trick was to construct these songs again so that they worked within the limitations of what was then a traditional song length. An added problem was that within a live performance there would inevitably be good and bad moments each time the song was played, particularly with the improvisational sections. A recording, on the other hand, has to be able to bear repeated listening. The two versions are of necessity very different beasts.

  On the other, more structured songs, Norman was able to bring his production skills to bear, adding arrangements and harmonies and making use of the effects that could be engineered through the mixing desk and outboard equipment. He also helped to reveal all the possibilities contained in Abbey Road’s collection of instruments and sound effects. Once we realised their potential we quickly started introducing all kinds of extraneous elements, from the radio voice cutting into ‘Astronomy Domine’ to the clocks on the outro of ‘Bike’. This flirtation with ‘musique concrète’ was by no means unique – George ‘Shadow’ Morton had already used a motorbike on the Shangri-Las’ ‘The Leader Of The Pack’ – but it was a relative novelty at the time, and from then on became a regular element in our creative process.

  Since Norman had worked with the Beatles it was predictable that at some stage of the recording we would get an audience with their eminences. Apart from anything else, we were between us taking up unprecedented amounts of Abbey Road’s studio resources, and consequently it had become almost a residency for both bands. When we realised that we wanted to spend more time in the studio, we renegotiated our deal with EMI, taking a cut in our percentage from 8 per cent to 5 per cent in exchange for unlimited studio time.

  We were ushered into Studio 2, where the Fab Four were busy recording ‘Lovely Rita’. The music sounded wonderful, and incredibly professional, but, in the same way we survived the worst of our gigs, we were enthused rather than completely broken by the experience. It is hard to explain just how oddly confident we managed to remain, considering our inexperience and lack of technical proficiency. There was little if any banter with the Beatles. We sat humbly, and humbled, at the back of the control room while they worked on the mix, and after a suitable (and embarrassing) period of time had elapsed, we were ushered out again. Whenever the Beatles took over Abbey Road, there was definitely a sense of occasion, as their entourage cocooned them in an exotic micro-climate within the confines of the studio.

  Piper was released in August 1967. Peter Jenner was impressed by Norman Smith’s contribution: ‘Norman was great. He managed to make a fantastic, very commercial record, condensing what Pink Floyd was doing into three minutes, without destroying the weird musicality, or the quirky nature of Syd’s writing.’ However, Peter still does not know what the album sold. ‘I was only interested in singles, no idea how the album did – a sign of my naivety.’ By the time the album came out, though, the underground movement, which had helped us on our way, was starting to totter under the onslaught of commercial pressures.

  The business community had latched on to the new craze for psychedelia and every pop show, dance and sing-song was now being advertised as a freak-out. The alternative spellings alone were something to behold. By mid-April Peter, Andrew and ourselves had felt obliged to run a spoof ad entitled ‘Freak Out-Schmeak Out’ to poke fun at them, but even so promoters who were jumping on the bandwagon, or just plain dumb, failed to get the joke, and their ads were still blithely using the line ‘Turn up, shell out, get lost’ – a variation on the LSD guru Timothy Leary’s ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’. The original concept of everyone making their own entertainment had already gone to the wall in favour of a commodity that could be sold.

  The instigators of the underground were also under attack. In a heavy-handed show of force by the establishment, IT had been taken to court on charges of obscenity. Hoppy was jailed for possession of marijuana and sent down to Wormwood Scrubs for six months, the severity of his sentence causing a considerable outcry. The crowd at UFO had changed: although Joe Boyd – ever the sharp promoter – had the Move and the Floyd drawing huge crowds on consecutive weekends in June, the audiences the gigs were attracting were now turning up to observe the phenomenon rather than participate.

  An unexpected development was that the tabloid press had got hold of the notion of a dangerous counter-culture and put the boot in. Earlier in the year a story ran in the News Of The World about the sordid goings-on at UFO – as a result of which the club ran into considerable difficulties – and mentioning those dangerous subversives the Pink Floyd. Suddenly this was sex and drugs and rock and roll. What made it particularly galling was that I hadn’t experienced any of this good stuff they were talking about. In fact, the article had failed to uncover anything of importance and had mistakenly reported that we had referred to ourselves as ‘social deviants’. The word ‘deviant’ has frequently been a trigger for tabloid journalists; in this particular case the reporter had got over-excited at seeing the phrase ‘social deviants’ on one of our posters. What he had failed to realise was that this was not a description of ourselves, but the name of our support band, a group led by Mick Farren. Lawyers were instructed, and eventually a meeting was held. We were subjected to the Mr Nice and Mr Nasty routine and agreed meekly to the standard apology in type this big on the back page.

  The press had missed the real story: that our front man, guitarist and songwriter was beginning to unravel in a serious way. We weren’t oblivious to the fact, but from our point of view Syd was having good days and bad days, and the bad days seemed to be increasing in number. Blinkered by our desire to be a successful band, we were determined to convince ourselves that he’d grow out of this phase. Other people around us had a clearer view. June Child was matter of fact about it: ‘Syd took a lot of acid. Lots of people can take some acid and cope with it in their lives, but if you take three or four trips a day, and you do that every day…’

  Syd was living in a flat on the Cromwell Road, which Peter Jenner remembers as ‘the catastrophic flat where Syd got acided out’. We never ventured inside – just picking Syd up for rehearsals or gigs, and not coming into contact with the other inhabitants. The rumour was that you should never accept a drink there, not even a glass of water, unless you poured it yourself, because everything was spiked. It was not a world the rest of us frequented. At that point, Roger, Rick and I were still loyal to the student culture of beer and occasional spirits. We were much more aware of the effects Syd’s lifestyle was having on our performances.

  At the ‘14-Hour Technicolour Dream’, Syd had been as tired as the rest of us, but his symptoms were much more severe. June Child had looked after him: ‘First of all we couldn’t find Syd, then I found him in the dressing room and he was so… gone. Roger Waters and I got him on his feet, we got him out to the stage. He had a white guitar and we put it round his neck; he walked on stage and of course the audience went spare because they loved him. The band started to play and Syd just stood there. He had his guitar round his neck and his arms just hanging down.’

  Shortly afterwards, we were due to perform at the Windsor Jazz Festival. We were forced to cancel. Syd was suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’, was the message sent out to the music press. When we had to pull out they sent poor Paul Jones on instead. Paul had recently split from Manfred Mann and was enjoying a successful solo career singing R&B. He mounted the stage to the cry of ‘Do you like soul music?’ A roar of ‘NO!!!’ came back from the assembled flower children, along with a hail of love beads and beer cans. Meanwhile, the rest of us reacted to these cancellations with embarrassment and fury, while the management
tried to formulate a plan.

  After lots of talk and not much action, mainly because there was hardly any information around on how to deal with drug problems, Peter arranged an appointment for Syd with the eminent psychiatrist R.D. Laing. I think Roger drove Syd up to North London for the consultation, but Syd refused to go through with it, so Laing didn’t have much to go on. But he did make one challenging observation: yes, Syd might be disturbed, or even mad. But maybe it was the rest of us who were causing the problem, by pursuing our desire to succeed, and forcing Syd to go along with our ambitions. Maybe Syd was actually surrounded by mad people.

  Roger also called Syd’s brother, saying we were extremely worried about him – he came down to London and went to see Syd, emerging to say he thought everything would be all right. This was a recurring reaction. There would be a lot of talk about Syd’s condition, but then he would have a good, focused period and we would think, great, he was back to normal.

  Eventually it was decided to send Syd off to Formentera, a small island just off Ibiza, along with the recently qualified Doctor Sam Hutt, who was going there on holiday to consider his own future. Sam was the underground’s very own house doctor, sympathetic to drug users and musicians: as Boeing Duveen And The Beautiful Soup and later Hank Wangford, Sam was able to introduce a performer’s perspective. ‘I was a very hip doctor. The gear I wore in hospital in the summer of love – instead of the white coat, the sleeveless, coat-length jacketeen in pink Indian silk with what looked like sperms on it in purple with a gold moiré silk lining. And the William Morris flares.’

  We frantically cancelled the planned gigs for August and shuffled them along a month. Syd set off for Formentera accompanied by his girlfriend Lindsay Corner, Rick and Juliette, Sam Hutt, his wife and their new baby. Roger and Judy were staying in Ibiza, a short ferry ride away. It was not a success: Syd showed no signs of improvement, but did display odd bouts of violence. On one night, when a powerful electric storm was raging, the turbulence outside reflected Syd’s inner torment – Juliette’s memory is of Syd literally trying to climb the walls.

  Meanwhile back in England, we were still planning a future for the band. Roger was telling Melody Maker, ‘We’re being frustrated at the moment by the fact that to stay alive we have to play lots and lots of places and venues that are not really suitable. We all like our music. That’s the only driving force behind us. We can’t go on doing clubs and ballrooms. We want a brand new environment and we’ve hit on the idea of using a big top.’ There was a vision of a way forward, but there seemed to be no way we could achieve it.

  When Syd returned from his stay on Formentera, in no better shape, we blindly plunged back into work. We managed – with some difficulty – a few dates in September in the UK and Holland, and went to De Lane Lea Studios to record Syd’s latest, and slightly unhinged, songs. On top of all that, we hastily prepared for our first tour of the US. We were due to open at Bill Graham’s Fillmore in San Francisco on 26th October, but the trip did not run smoothly. Beforehand, Andrew King says he had been worrying about everything to do with this tour. His apprehension was well placed.

  When Andrew set out in advance to see the agent in New York and get the contracts for the tour, the agent nonchalantly reached into a drawer and handed Andrew a gun for his personal use during the tour. Andrew, unfamiliar with firearms, questioned whether it was required. ‘You don’t have to have it, kid. If you don’t wanna use it, I’ll put it back in the drawer.’ Even the toughest end of English tour promotion never went that far.

  Andrew then headed across to the West Coast. Our work permits had not arrived, which meant we would miss our opening dates. Andrew remembers sitting in the offices of the legendarily short-fused impresario Bill Graham, listening to Bill lambaste some hapless record company executive on behalf of Jefferson Airplane who he was managing. Hanging up the phone he then turned his attention to this callow Brit whose band was not going to be able to turn up. ‘Bands always show for Bill Graham,’ he roared.

  Back in London, for us the situation meant waiting on a daily basis to hear if the paperwork had been completed, and whether or not we could catch the flight out that evening. We spent endless hours waiting at the US embassy in London for the correct visas to come through. There is a massive amount of paperwork on current tours, but even then, there was as much bureaucracy, combined with slower and more difficult communications. There were problems with the documents as well as the arrangement for setting up an exchange with the American musicians Sam The Sham and the Pharaohs – union rules still required an equal interchange of British and American acts.

  Bill Graham’s solution was to ring the American ambassador to London in the middle of the ambassador’s night, and he managed to force through the paperwork. To replace us, he hired in Ike and Tina Turner, who were playing in the Bay area, becoming the first black act at the Fillmore. Eventually, the visas finally arrived and off we went in time to make our dates at Bill’s other San Francisco venue, the Winterland. The omens were not good. Syd was told by an anxious stewardess to extinguish his cigarette prior to take-off, and before her horrified gaze he carelessly stubbed it out on the airplane carpet instead of the ashtray. No wonder the PanAm service on that particular flight left something to be desired. We arrived in San Francisco very late at night and totally exhausted, to be greeted not by the screams of our American fan club but by Bill Graham, still furious at having been kept hanging around.

  We were also reunited with Andrew King, who was still worried. He had walked into the Winterland, a 5,000–6,000 seater, seen the size of the place with its huge stage, and examined the powerful 35mm film projectors against which our basic 1kw Aldis equipment would pale. The venue’s regular light shows were run as independent specialist set-ups, and were both on a completely different scale and geared to the size of the auditorium. Andrew generously, and wisely, said we’d ‘combine resources’, realising that we had bitten off more than we could hope to chew. In fact we’d bitten off enough to eat for several weeks.

  The next day was spent desperately trying to assemble some equipment: we’d only taken the guitars, nothing else. I had assumed a drum kit would be there. All promises of support had mysteriously evaporated. The record company proved no help at all. A keyboard was found for Rick and a drum kit assembled. The Premier Company was English and worked through a network of affiliated agents in the States. The local dealer was probably shattered to be asked to release his stock to a virtually unknown British band representing Premier whose best-known endorsee Keith Moon was renowned for his appetite for destruction when it came to tame drum kits. Consequently, I suspect he gave me all the mismatched drums, cymbals and fittings he had lying around in the back of the storeroom – every element of the kit was a different colour.

  Finally we made it to the Winterland, and the first pleasant surprise of the tour. The organisation at the venue was very professional and the other musicians on the bill were refreshingly welcoming and enthusiastic about what we were playing, and lacked the competitive ‘blow everyone else off stage’ attitude we were familiar with in the UK. However, though we were billed as ‘The Light Kings of England’, the light show was, in Andrew’s words, ‘laughable. I did feel an arse, quite frankly’.

  We were supporting Big Brother & The Holding Company (the early and excellent Janis Joplin band), Richie Havens for one weekend, and H.P. Lovecraft the weekend after. Janis was wearing the legendary fur coat presented to her by the Southern Comfort company in recognition of services rendered. I’m not sure if that was for her personal level of consumption or for carrying a bottle of Southern Comfort on stage in an early example of product endorsement. Roger had brought along his own bottle, and offered Janis a swig. By the end of the show she returned it, emptied.

  The audiences were closer to our UFO following than the Top Rank crowd. California, and San Francisco in particular, was the whole centre of the hippy ideal. Unfortunately we were unable to be quite so laid-back; jet-lagged on
arrival, we were swept into a chaotic series of dates, under-financed, under-equipped and overwhelmed. And to top it all, Syd’s approach to this important show was to detune his guitar during ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ until the strings fell off.

  However, all was not lost, and a few of the dates, like the Cheetah Club at Venice in Los Angeles, were more successful. Whereas in the larger auditoria we were not the headline act – and the other acts on the bills were tight, well rehearsed, and were using their own equipment – in a club, as the main act, our lights would have some real impact, and we could control the overall ambience and mood, just as we could at UFO.

  The Cheetah Club show was the occasion that Syd decided his permed hair was too curly and had to be straightened before he could go on. He sent someone out for a tub of hair gel, which he then applied in copious amounts to correct the problem. Clad in an extraordinary pair of green boots tied up with rubber bands, he hit the stage and once again detuned his guitar throughout the first number. In a frenzy of anger, Roger gashed his hand in a furious attack on his bass guitar. He had been lent a pear-shaped Vox bass that lacked a cover for the strings, and so he kept catching his hand on the bare ends. At the end of the show he smashed the guitar to pieces. Its owner, apparently thrilled, calmly took the pieces away in a bag. Despite this, it was a great gig. The audience loved us, as did the unusual support act, Lothar And The Hand People. Apparently there was no one actually called Lothar – this was in fact the name of the group’s theremin, a remarkable Russian invention which produced Dr Who-like sounds when hands were waved in front of its antenna, and had been used by Brian Wilson on ‘Good Vibrations’. In addition, the group also contained several very nubile young women. I seem to remember they had no instruments, but simply writhed around to the music as the mood took them, in a rather avant-garde way.