by Nick Mason
Part of the promotion for the band revolved around television. Years before MTV, the system was for a band to appear on one of the celebrity shows then current. The presenter, usually a popular singer of a certain age anxious to extend his career, would sing a couple of numbers, and then bring guests on to chat, with musical interludes from the likes of us. With Syd approaching a catatonic state, you might think this was not a recipe for success, and you’d be right. Syd was being difficult, if not bloody-minded. After miming the song perfectly for the run-through, he would then stand there listlessly for the actual take, while the director vainly said, ‘OK, this is the take.’ So while Roger and Rick were forced to undertake the vocal duties, Syd would stand staring vacantly and gloomily into the middle distance. After miming ‘Emily’ in an ecstasy of embarrassment we were led forward for a little chat. If other guests were within microphone range they ruthlessly used the opportunity to grasp valuable camera time, butting in with stories, jokes or inane comments.
On another show, hosted by Pat Boone, he kindly kept his other guests at bay in order to enjoy a casual chat with us. Despite some desperate and deft footwork by the rest of us, he picked the by now very unstable Syd to converse with. The world held its breath as he asked Syd what he liked. We trembled in anticipation while our minds flooded with endless unsuitable responses. ‘America,’ Syd said brightly. Pat smiled, the audience whooped and hollered and the rest of us broke into a sweat as we carted him off.
Away from the television studios Syd was little better. Coming out of a meeting with Capitol Records, we stood on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. ‘It’s nice here in Las Vegas,’ observed Syd. Later, at the Hollywood Hawaiian, a typical LA motel, with floodlit cactuses and garish decor, Roger found Syd asleep in a chair with a cigarette burning through his fingers.
After this we’d had enough. Andrew reached Peter in London by phone and said ‘Get us out of here’. We completed our West Coast commitments, but cancelled the East Coast leg, and flew back direct to a gig in Holland. If proof was needed that we were in denial about Syd’s state of mind, this was it. Why we thought a transatlantic flight immediately followed by yet more dates would help is beyond belief.
Back in England Bryan Morrison had negotiated us a slot on a Jimi Hendrix tour. This was a great opportunity to watch Jimi Hendrix perform and actually spend time with some musicians we admired. At last we found we had some common ground with other bands, particularly the Nice, who seemed to have similar musical leanings, but astonishing technical proficiency, and in the case of their keyboard player Keith Emerson, later the ‘E’ of ELP, true virtuosity.
This package tour was run to a very tight schedule, the principal aim, as far as the promoter was concerned, being to make sure that Jimi’s fans got good value for money, and that whatever else happened his slot would be on time. To check we didn’t overrun our eight minutes, there was somebody standing with a stopwatch in the wing. Andrew remembers if we overran by even thirty seconds, there was a stern warning, if it happened again we would be off the tour. So our longer numbers like ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ must have been extremely pruned back. Peter Wynne Willson remembers that when the package tour had the house lights up our lights were virtually redundant. He tried to persuade the management to insist on a rider in any contract that the house lights should be down, and a screen and projection site provided, but that would not happen for some years.
Syd was still a loose (and hallucinating) cannon. On one occasion he failed even to get to the theatre. We realised early on that he wasn’t going to show and managed to co-opt Dave O’List from the Nice to play. We had very little light on Dave and we certainly played ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. I know it felt perfectly passable as a performance, and I don’t think many people spotted the substitution.
The tour was really our first exposure to the world of rock’n’ roll as we had always imagined it. Pop stars with tight trousers and loose morals accompanied by screaming girls with tight dresses and even looser morals. This was one of the rare – I can’t tell you how rare – occasions that we were chased down the street by overexcited girls. I have ever since had great sympathy for the plight of the fox, as the thunder of hooves (or teenage girls’ shoes) stampeding behind you is bloody frightening. In this particular field sport – perhaps more balanced than usual – the role of hunter and hunted was not always clear, as the various musicians and entourage on the package tour were also in full mating cry…The girls were probably only just out of school, but you could see them in the hotel lobbies looking extremely cool as they spotted who they might snare next.
There was a tour coach that everyone boarded, like a crazy school outing with all the musicians in the coach, except for the headliners. Our recent modes of transport had become unpredictable. Some months earlier we had seen fit to purchase a Bentley under some misconception that this would be practical transport and enhance our image to boot. Yet another car salesman had triumphed and we experienced some exciting motoring since no garage ever really got the brakes to work properly. Roger still dreams about this particular vehicle, and clearly remembers leaving one particular gig and being forced to negotiate a roundabout by driving straight over the top of it. We had also rented one car from Godfrey Davis, which Andrew King had signed for, since they would not hire cars to musicians. After we embarrassedly dropped the car off weeks late, with 17,000 miles on the clock and rubbish piled knee-high in the back, apparently the rental company changed their rules so that not even a company director’s signature was sufficient guarantee if the company had anything to do with the music business.
To coincide with the Hendrix tour, we released a single called ‘Apples And Oranges’, another attempt to create a hit. This was another of Syd’s whimsical compositions, and would have made a great album track, but it was probably not really suitable for the job. However, under pressure, we tried to turn it into a hit, with Norman Smith’s help, adding overdubbed choruses and echoes. I don’t remember playing it live much, if at all. It is possible that there was a certain amount of US pressure to release it to tie in with our tour, but we had no time to do any real promotion out there. This was a case of trusting the advice we were given, and learning that sometimes, if not always, it was best to stick with our own instincts, and make our own decisions.
The tour finished and we played a show at Olympia in December 1967, an event called ‘Christmas On Earth Continued’. Syd was completely out of it yet again, and the rest of us were finally reaching breaking point. It was time to come out of denial. We had tried to ignore the problems, and willed them to go away, but even our lust to succeed could no longer obscure the fact that we could not continue with Syd in this state, coupled to which it just was not fun any more – and doubtless no fun for Syd either. We did not want to lose Syd. He was our songwriter, singer, guitarist, and – although you might not have known from our less than sympathetic treatment of him – he was our friend.
Our initial idea was to follow the Beach Boys’ lead. This was a solution suggested by the stories we had heard about Brian Wilson: apparently incapable of live performance, he was effectively a home-based writer. We thought we could augment the band with an extra guitarist to take the pressure off Syd. Jeff Beck’s name was mentioned, which would have been an interesting (and spectacular) experiment. I don’t think any of us would have had the courage to make the phone call at the time. Roger eventually managed it twenty-five years later.
But we knew someone we could call: Roger and Syd’s old friend from Cambridge, David Gilmour.
OUR FIRST discreet overture to David Gilmour had come about when I spotted him in the audience at a Royal College of Art gig at the end of 1967. The RCA, next to the Albert Hall, was at the time the closest thing we had to a home venue following the demise of UFO. We had friends in a number of the departments at the college, which led to a certain amount of cross-pollination between poster design, sleeves, photography and music, as well as the continual use of RCA facilities
for extra-mural activities.
As David was not a student, I assumed he was there to check us out. During a break I sidled up to David and muttered something about the possibility of him joining us as an additional guitarist. This was not a unilateral recruiting drive on my part, just the first chance any of us had had to broach the subject with him. David was certainly interested, mainly, I imagine, because although he thought of us – correctly – as less experienced than his previous band, Jokers Wild, we had acquired all the trappings that they had never been able to: an agent, a record deal and a couple of hit records.
Jokers Wild had been one of the most highly rated bands in the Cambridge area. They were all seen as accomplished musicians. Willie Wilson, who replaced the original drummer Clive Welham, resurfaced with Tim Renwick in Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, and later formed part of the shadow band we used on the live shows of The Wall.
I now can’t recall the first time I met David. We had certainly both played at the same venues, including at Libby January and her sister’s party, and we had clearly encountered each other in some social settings, since I was able to pick him out in the crowd at the RCA.
As a native of Cambridge – his early musical encounters with Syd had been at the Cambridge Tech – David had found plenty of work around for Jokers Wild either locally, playing to US airmen awaiting World War III, or on the occasional foray to London. However, David had ventured further afield following a busking holiday in the south of France with Syd and some friends in August 1965. He decided to return to the Continent with Jokers Wild, and they had stuck it out for a year or so including the ‘Summer of Love’, pragmatically re-christening themselves the Flowers. That band had finally broken up and at the time I saw him at the Royal College of Art David was at something of a loose end, driving a van for the designers Ossie Clarke and Alice Pollock, who ran the Quorum boutique in Chelsea.
We approached him formally just before Christmas 1967, when we proposed that he join as the fifth member of Pink Floyd. Syd had been talked into agreeing that David joining was a good idea. We went through the formalities of a highly reasonable band meeting, but it must have been made clear to Syd that disagreement was not an option. David accepted our offer, and we promised him a salary of £30 a week, omitting to tell him the real take-home pay was a quarter of that. Steve O’Rourke, who by now had become our primary point of contact within the Bryan Morrison Agency, provided a room in his house, which was equipped with a Revox tape recorder and some free sandwiches, where David mastered our entire repertoire in a matter of days.
A far more taxing problem for David was establishing himself within the existing band. Officially he was the second guitarist and additional vocalist. But Syd saw David as an interloper, while the rest of the band saw him as a potential replacement for Syd. However, we took yet another opportunity to avoid articulating this to David, happy to avoid the harsh truth. With these unclear signals, David had to make the best of an awkward situation.
Events thereafter moved quite quickly. There was a handful of gigs in early 1968 where we tried playing as a five-piece. What Syd was experiencing at these shows we can only guess at: he was probably completely confused, and angry that his influence was being steadily eroded. On stage, he put the minimum of effort into his performance, seemingly just going through the motions. This lack of contribution was probably his refusal to take part in the whole charade. As he withdrew further and further, this merely convinced us that we were taking the right decision.
The clearest example of Syd’s attitude was a rehearsal session in a school hall in West London, where Syd spent a couple of hours teaching us a new song he’d titled ‘Have You Got It Yet?’ He constantly changed the arrangement so that each time we played the song, the vocal chorus of ‘No, no, no’ was guaranteed to be wrong…It was one final, inspired demonstration of all his anger and frustration.
Things came to a head in February on the day we were due to play a gig in Southampton. In the car on the way to collect Syd, someone said ‘Shall we pick up Syd?’ and the response was ‘No, fuck it, let’s not bother’. To recount it as baldly as this sounds hardhearted to the point of being cruel – it’s true. The decision was, and we were, completely callous. In the blinkered sense of what we were doing, I thought Syd was simply being bloody-minded and was so exasperated with him that I could only see the short-term impact he was having on our desire to be a successful band.
Considering we had never previously rehearsed together as a four-piece, the performance worked well musically, with David covering all the vocal and guitar parts. It was an indication of how little Syd had been contributing to the recent gigs, but even so, it is astonishing how blithely confident we must have been to take this step. Most importantly, the audience didn’t ask for their money back: it was clear that the absence of Syd was not a critical drawback. We simply didn’t pick him up again.
Although we had conveniently forgotten to inform the management of our modified line-up and new travel arrangements, Peter and Andrew – and Syd, naturally – rapidly realised what was going on. The matter would have to be resolved. Since what we had at the time was a six-way partnership, Roger, Rick and I didn’t even have a majority to claim the band name, and with Syd’s added importance as the main songwriter, his claim was probably stronger.
Surprisingly, perhaps, this was never an issue. Just as the partnership had been set up as an eminently equitable arrangement, so too dismantling it was conducted in a civilised manner. A meeting was held with everybody, including Syd, at Peter’s house in early March. Peter says, ‘We fought to keep Syd in. I didn’t really know David, although I knew he was a talented guitarist and a very good mimic. He could play Syd guitar better than Syd.’ However, Peter and Andrew conceded, and after only the odd outbreak of recriminations, the partnership was dissolved. Syd’s suggestion for resolving any problems, by the way, was to add two girl saxophone players to the line-up.
We agreed to Blackhill’s entitlement in perpetuity to all our past activities. The three of us continued as Pink Floyd and Syd left the band. Peter and Andrew clearly felt that Syd was the creative centre of the band, a reasonable point of view given our track record up until that point. Consequently, they decided to represent him rather than us. ‘Peter and I deserved to lose Pink Floyd,’ says Andrew. ‘We hadn’t done a good job, especially in the US. We hadn’t been aggressive enough with the record companies.’ Andrew thinks that none of us – David apart – came out of this phase with flying colours. And he makes the point that the decision to part company was definitely a shock to Syd, because he had never considered the rest of us (as others might have) to be effectively his backing band – ‘he was devoted to the band.’
‘It was a natural parting of the ways,’ says Peter. ‘We wanted to develop Blackhill, so we couldn’t have Pink Floyd as partners if we were concentrating on other acts. Pink Floyd questioned whether we could look after them without Syd. And Andrew and I might always have been harking back to the Syd days.’ His view was that if Syd was taken away from the pressures of being in the band and given more space and time, he would become more stable. Peter says, ‘I wish I knew what happened. I wish I had not let it happen. We all wanted to help, we all tried and we could not find the solution. If Syd is unhappy about what happened, I feel bad about my share of the fault. If Syd is not unhappy, then he achieved a state of reclusive peace and tranquility. I would love to know the answer.’
Following the break-up of our partnership with Blackhill, and lacking the obligatory management, it seemed logical to ask Bryan Morrison to take us on. We went to see him, and he agreed to supply Steve O’Rourke’s services to manage us. Bryan would continue to develop his publishing empire, while Tony Howard would handle the bookings. Steve remained our manager for the rest of his life.
Both Andrew and Peter think that Bryan and Steve were able to see the possibilities of exploiting the situation we had created together. Bryan remembers lecturing Steve on the benefits of s
ticking with us rather than attempting to discover new talents. Andrew recalls sitting with Steve in the Speakeasy Club (the influential music business club off Upper Regent Street) long before the split, and Steve telling him, ‘Do you realise how important and influential Pink Floyd will be on millions of kids?’, and also observes that Steve always took the job of managing us very seriously. He was never flippant about it, as Bryan could sometimes be.
Steve came from a very different background to the band. His father Tommy was a fisherman on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland; when the great American documentary maker Robert Flaherty made his film Man of Aran about life on the islands in the 1930s, Steve’s father was one of the featured characters. Tommy was then persuaded to come to England to seek his fortune in films, and although the outbreak of war and conscription put paid to his chances of screen glory, he settled in London, where Steve was born.
With his previous background in sales, and techniques honed at the Bryan Morrison finishing school, Steve brought a harder edge to our management. He exuded a sense of confidence, was a tough negotiator, and attired in his dark blue suit he looked like he meant business. It remained his preferred style of management, only the quantity of suits multiplied. We learnt that as a pet food salesman he would whip out a tin of the product, dip in a spoon and eat it. We found this commitment to his clients both admirable and seriously alarming, and Steve probably regretted going into such detail about his sales technique, since Roger was prone to dredge it up in conversation in later years.