Pink Floyd All the Songs

by Jean-Michel Guesdon

  Leonard’s Lodgers

  Waters, Mason, and Wright (the latter in the meantime having quit the Regent Street Polytechnic for the London College of Music) decided to pursue their musical adventure together, leaving Metcalf and Noble to go their own way. Thirty-nine Stanhope Gardens, in the London district of Highgate, was a vast Edwardian house that had just been bought by Mike Leonard, a devotee of light shows who was a lecturer at Regent Street Polytechnic and Hornsey College of Art. This became not only their home but also their new rehearsal space. “Stanhope Gardens made a real difference to our musical activities,” writes Nick Mason. “We had our own permanent rehearsal facility, thanks to an indulgent landlord: indeed, we used the name Leonard’s Lodgers for a while. Rehearsals took place in the front room of the flat where all the equipment was permanently set up. Unfortunately, this made any study very difficult and sleep almost out of question since it was also Roger’s and my bedroom.”5

  In September 1964, a new musician joined Leonard’s Lodgers. A former pupil at Cambridgeshire High School, Rado “Bob” Klose was a long-standing acquaintance of David Gilmour and Syd Barrett. And it was with Syd that he came to London, taking up a place at the Regent Street Polytechnic (two years below the Waters-Wright-Mason trio) while Barrett pursued his study of painting at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Klose moved into the first floor of Stanhope Gardens, occupying the room vacated by Mason, who had moved back in with his parents for financial reasons. Klose was an experienced guitarist who listened to a lot of blues and jazz (especially Mickey Baker). He suggested to Waters, Wright, and Mason that they bring in Chris Dennis as singer. Then working as a dentist at the Northolt RAF base, Dennis happened to own, recalls Nick Mason, a “Vox PA system consisting of two columns and a separate amplifier with individual channels for the microphones.”5 Tea Set, the lineup with Dennis, lasted for just two short months, until the arrival of Syd Barrett.

  “Syd” and the Birth of the Pink Floyd Sound

  Roger Waters thought about bringing Syd into the band as soon as he heard that his childhood friend had come to college in London. “It was great when Syd joined,” recalls Rick Wright. “Before him we’d play the R&B classics, because that’s what all groups were supposed to be doing then. But I never liked R&B very much. I was actually more of a jazz fan. With Syd, the direction changed, it became more improvised around the guitar and keyboards. Roger started to play the bass as a lead instrument and I started to introduce more of my classical feel.”3 However, it seems that before joining the future Pink Floyd, Syd had doubts about how he would fit in. Bob Klose recalls his first appearance, in the middle of the rehearsal session (in the attic at Stanhope Gardens) that would seal Chris’s fate: “Syd, arriving late, watched quietly from the top of the stairs. Afterwards he said, ‘Yeah, it sounded great, but I don’t see what I would do in the band.’”5

  Two months after Syd Barrett joined, in December 1964 (or early 1965 according to some sources), the group recorded a demo of their first few songs in a small, Decca-owned studio in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead. This comprised a cover of “I’m a King Bee” by Slim Harpo, three compositions by Barrett (“Butterfly,” “Lucy Leave,” and “Remember Me”), a collective number entitled, “Double O Bo,” and Roger Waters’s very first composition: “Walk With Me Sydney.” Their first auditions were not long in coming—for a new club called Beat City, for the famous ITV television show Ready Steady Go! and for the Countdown Club (three ninety-minute sets per evening). Bob Klose left the group in summer 1965 to concentrate on his studies, while Syd Barrett and David Gilmour set off for the South of France. It was soon after this that Tea Set was renamed the Pink Floyd Sound (as a tribute to two American South bluesmen) and the group was offered new gigs in various clubs and universities.

  The “Happenings” at the Marquee Club

  While their various engagements at the London clubs enabled the Pink Floyd Sound to make a name for themselves, it was without doubt their participation in the third Giant Mystery Happening at the Marquee Club that was to seal the band’s future. These happenings (also known as the Spontaneous Underground), aimed at celebrating an alternative culture in full creative ferment, were the brainchild of American Steve Stollman, who had come to London to search for new talent with which to supplement his brother Bernard’s label ESP-Disk.

  On January 30, 1966, Stollman booked the Marquee Club (the Mecca of the English rock scene) for the first of the Giant Mystery Happening events, at which Donovan, Graham Bond, and Mose Allison appeared. He repeated the experiment on February 27 and again on March 13, and on every Sunday afternoon thereafter. It was as the Pink Floyd Sound that Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason rose to the challenge and participated in the third event, billed on the flyers as the “Trip.” Steve Stollman: “I hadn’t a clue who they were, but someone suggested them.”6 Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, an avant-garde filmmaker responsible for the 1966 documentary Syd Barrett’s First Trip, recalls that Steve Stollman was looking for unconventional sounds for these Sunday sessions: “‘I knew Steve Stollman. He was looking for experimental music, and nobody else wanted to play those Sunday afternoon sessions. That’s how they got the Floyd.’”6 Pink Floyd’s lengthy, blues-derived psychedelic improvisations caused quite a sensation among the hip young Londoners lucky enough to find themselves at the appropriately named “Trip.” Hoppy (real name John Hopkins), a leading photographer of Swinging London and a key figure in the British counterculture, remembers the first time he encountered the group: “It was like walking into a wall of sound, not unmusical, but certainly something like I’d never heard before.”7 Barrett, Waters, Wright, and Mason took part in Stollman’s Marquee events again from March 27 to June 12, and then from September 30 to the end of 1966. (The exact dates of their appearances at the Spontaneous Underground are not known.)

  It was at the Spontaneous Underground of June 12, 1966, that Peter Jenner first heard the hallucinogenic music forged by Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason. “The Floyd were mostly doing blues songs, but instead of having howling guitar solos with the guitarist leaning back, like all guitarists did back then, they were doing cosmic shit. They weren’t doing interesting blues songs. But it was what they did with them that was interesting. I think what Syd was doing was a way of being distinctive and filling in the gaps where you should have had a howling Clapton or Peter Green guitar solo. I was very intrigued.”1

  Jenner and King, Two Friends in Search of the New

  The son of a vicar, Peter Jenner (born in 1943) studied economics at Cambridge and at twenty-one years of age was appointed a lecturer at the London School of Economics. Less interested in the theories of Malthus and Marx than in avant-garde music, it was not long before he quit that venerable institution and began to frequent some of Swinging London’s trendier spots. He became a member of the Notting Hill community and a friend of the ubiquitous Hoppy (John Hopkins). In 1964, he helped to establish the Notting Hill Carnival, a celebration of Caribbean culture, and in 1966 he contributed to the founding of the London Free School. He was also a collaborator on the London-based underground newspaper the International Times (it). In spring of the same year, Peter Jenner set up an independent record company, DNA Productions, with Hoppy, Ron Atkins, and Alan Beckett, and fitted out a small studio in a former dairy at 46a Old Church Street, Chelsea. Joe Boyd was in charge of production and John Wood of recording at Sound Techniques, where the free-improvising ensemble AMM and subsequently the avant-garde jazzman Steve Lacy recorded. While the music of AMM was interesting and unusual in that it no longer owed anything to the harmonic and rhythmic structures of the blues, it was also, like the free jazz of Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor, the preserve of a small number of neophytes. Hoppy being preoccupied with other projects, Peter Jenner partnered his longtime friend Andrew King in this new venture. Born in 1942, Andrew was also a vicar’s son. A cybernetics expert, he quit his job at British Airways after becoming bored there. The two frien
ds were on the lookout for avant-garde sounds.

  September Meeting

  Instinctively, Jenner set his sights on Pink Floyd, although at first he could not work out where their strange sonority came from: “[…] it turned out to be Syd and Rick,” he recalls. “Syd had his Binson Echorec and was doing weird things with feedback. Rick was also producing some strange, long, shifting chords. Nick was using mallets. That was the thing that got me. This was avant-garde! Sold!”5 Pink Floyd was innovative while at the same time preserving the original spirit of rock ’n’ roll. Their experimentation and Syd Barrett’s intriguing and seductive dandy image struck Jenner and King as providing all the necessary ingredients for success.

  On that June 12, 1966, as soon as the Floyd had finished their set, Jenner rushed over to them and exclaimed: “‘You lads could be bigger than the Beatles!’ and we sort of looked at him and replied in a dubious tone ‘Yes, well we’ll see you when we get back from our hols,’ because we were all shooting off for some sun on the Continent.”3 Undaunted, Jenner got hold of their address from Steve Stollman and turned up at their Stanhope Gardens lair. “Roger [Waters] answered the door. Everybody else had gone off on holiday, as it was the end of the academic year […] Roger hadn’t told me to fuck off. It was just ‘See you in September.’”5

  And so, in September 1966, Peter Jenner and Andrew King became their official managers. “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.”5 The first two things Jenner and King did were to create Blackhill Enterprises (named after King’s cottage in Wales) and to use a small legacy that King had received to buy new equipment and a lot of spots for the light show.

  Blackhill and the Free Concerts

  On October 31, Barrett, Waters, Wright, and Mason became partners with Jenner and King in Blackhill Enterprises, whose offices were located at 32 Alexander Street, Bayswater. In keeping with the hippie philosophy of the day, any profits accumulated by the group—along with any from ventures with the other artists already signed or about to be signed by the production company—were to be distributed six ways. Those other artists would include Marc Bolan (the future leader of T. Rex, who married June Child, the Blackhill Enterprises secretary), Roy Harper, the Edgar Broughton Band, the Third Ear Band, and Kevin Ayers. “They were very nice, an honourable exception to the shady rule about managers, and really cared for the people they worked for,” notes Robert Wyatt, then the drummer and singer with Soft Machine.

  Peter Jenner and Andrew King had the peculiarity of getting their artists to play in venues hitherto reserved for classical music, such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Mayfair and the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, where Pink Floyd played on January 16 and 17, 1967, respectively. Little motivated by the lure of financial gain, Blackhill Enterprises would also initiate the free concerts in Hyde Park (having overcome the reservations of Parliament). Several of these jamborees would become engraved on the collective memory: that of June 29, 1968, featuring Pink Floyd, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Roy Harper, and Jethro Tull; and the Rolling Stones’ concert of July 5, 1969 (in which Family, the Battered Ornaments, King Crimson, Roy Harper, the Third Ear Band, Alexis Korner’s New Church, and Screw also appeared), dedicated to Brian Jones, who had died two days earlier.

  The collaboration of Jenner, King, and Pink Floyd lasted until Barrett’s departure. The arrival of David Gilmour marked the beginning of a new chapter for Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason, while the two producers would continue to manage Syd Barrett.

  The UFO Adventure

  Jenner and King, who had an extensive network of friends and acquaintances, introduced Pink Floyd to the nascent London underground movement, opening wide the doors of the London Free School and indeed those of all the iconic venues of Swinging London to them. The group played All Saints Church Hall, which became famous for its light shows; the Roundhouse, appearing alongside Soft Machine at the October 15 launch party for it, the counterculture magazine founded by Hoppy, David Mairowitz, Pete Stansill, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes, and Tom McGrath; and finally the famous UFO Club, where they performed for the first time on December 23, 1966. This major center of alternative culture, founded by the irrepressible Hoppy and Joe Boyd, a twenty-four-year-old American responsible for recruiting and recording new talent for the Elektra label, would propel the group to the forefront of the alternative scene. As a result, the Floyd, somewhat despite themselves, became the emblematic group not only of the club, but of the entire London underground. Nick Mason would later write: “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 […]. […] We were busy being a band: rehearsing, travelling to gigs, packing up and driving home. Psychedelia was around us but not within us. […] Of the band, Syd was perhaps intrigued by the wider aspects of psychedelia, and drawn to some of the philosophical and mystical aspects […].”5

  By the end of 1966, the Pink Floyd Sound had already distanced themselves from the popular music of the US and made a mark for themselves as one of the major groups on London’s new music scene. Andrew King would later reveal: “We didn’t realise it, but the tide was coming up the beach, and the Pink Floyd were right on top of the wave.”5

  Joe Boyd and the Group’s Recording Debut

  On January 11 and 12, 1967, Pink Floyd recorded “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Nick’s Boogie” for the soundtrack of Peter Whitehead’s documentary Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, followed two weeks later by “Arnold Layne” and “Candy and a Currant Bun.” These recordings were made with Joe Boyd at Sound Techniques studios. Naturally, the American producer considered signing Pink Floyd to Elektra, but Jac Holzman, his former boss, who had only heard the group rehearsing onstage, was not particularly keen. Polydor, on the other hand, the label to which at that time the Who and Cream were signed, showed a real interest and offered a £1,500 advance. Too late… Bryan Morrison, originally engaged to line up gigs for the group, had entered into what proved to be fruitful negotiations with EMI. And so on February 28, 1967 (the date varies from source to source with other possibilities being February 1, as claimed by Nick Mason, although this seems improbable, and February 27), Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason, supported by Peter Jenner and Andrew King, signed a contract with the record company that had signed the Beatles, obtaining a £5,000 advance in the bargain. In Andrew King’s words: “… a shit deal, but a thousand times better than the Beatles.”5 On the other hand, and here’s the rub, a clause in the contract stipulated that they had to part ways with Joe Boyd, the producer of their first single and, more importantly, the founder of the UFO Club who had helped the group to take off. Barry Miles: “Even though he was being asked to sabotage his own deal with Polydor, Boyd agreed to do it because he thought that if ‘Arnold Layne’ was a hit, they would be foolish to use anyone else to produce the album.”3 In the end, this is precisely what they did.

  BOB DIE LION!

  Among the earliest influences on Syd Barrett were the Beatles, Booker T. and the MG’s, Miles Davis, and an American folk singer by the name of Bob Die Lion, whose debut album Barrett looked for in vain in the record stores of Cambridge. And there was a good reason why he couldn’t find it, because this folk singer was clearly Bob Dylan!

  HE WAS NAMED ROGER BUT KNOWN AS SYD!

  The origin of the nickname “Syd” is the subject of debate. According to Nick Mason, “Syd was not always Syd—he’d been christened Roger Keith, but at the Riverside Jazz Club he frequented in a local Cambridge pub, one of the stalwarts was a drummer called Sid Barrett. The club regulars immediately nicknamed this newly arrived Barrett ‘Syd,’ but with a ‘y’ to avoid total confusion,
and that’s how we always knew him.”5 Others maintain that Roger had simply found the first name of this drummer (or double bassist according to some) to his liking. Yet another version suggests that he had been renamed well before this time, during a boy scouting event at which he had opted to wear a cap rather than the traditional beret. Nevertheless, he never really took to it, especially in the presence of his family.