For Pink Floyd Addicts
In 1965, Jokers Wild recorded five songs for an album from which the single “Don’t Ask Me [What I Say]” would be taken. Among the musicians who would play with the group between 1964 and 1966 were Rick Wills and Willie Wilson, who later contributed to David Gilmour’s eponymous first album in 1978.
Roger Waters never went anywhere without his guitar, and Nick Mason recalls the motto inspired by a Ray Charles song that was inscribed on his instrument case: “I Believe to My Soul.“
PINK AND FLOYD
Before cutting loose from the influence of the blues, Pink Floyd made a name for themselves subjecting blues standards to psychedelic treatment. Indeed the group owes its name to two exponents of the Piedmont blues: Pink Anderson (1900–1974) and Floyd Council (1911–1976), from South and North Carolina respectively—two pioneers of the blues whom Syd Barrett came across while reading a text by the ethnomusicologist Paul Oliver on the back of a Blind Boy Fuller album. And two names that sounded good together!
IN YOUR HEADPHONES
Jenner’s voice can be heard at the beginning of “Astronomy Dominé,” the opening song on the group’s first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
For Pink Floyd Addicts
The London offices of Blackhill Enterprises, located at 32 Alexander Street, Bayswater, would later house the independent label Stiff Records, launched in 1976, which signed artists such as Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, and Madness.
The name Boyd chose for his first production company, Witchseason Productions, was a reference to the song “Season of the Witch” by the Scottish folk singer Donovan.
Joe Boyd, Creator of the UFO Club
Born on August 5, 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts, Joe Boyd was twenty-two when he first stepped foot on European soil. The occasion was the Blues and Gospel Caravan tour he was in charge of organizing. This former Harvard student had already made a name for himself in the world of music, and taking his first steps as a tour manager under the aegis of the famous impresario George Wein (founder of the Newport Jazz Festival), he organized a number of shows for the bluesmen Sleepy John Estes, Skip James, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and Muddy Waters. He was also responsible for the sound system at the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival, during which Bob Dylan went electric in front of a crowd of stunned folk traditionalists! In 1964 he organized various European tours for the jazzmen Roland Kirk and Coleman Hawkins in addition to the Blues and Gospel Caravan tour. It was on this occasion that he met John “Hoppy” Hopkins, who had come along to take photographs. A year later, in autumn 1965, Boyd returned to London, this time mandated by Jac Holzman to represent Elektra Records and recruit new talent.
London was swinging, and Joe Boyd intended to play a full part in counterculture life. With Peter Jenner, John Hopkins, Alan Beckett, and the jazz critic Ron Atkins, he set up DNA Productions. This company signed a management agreement with AMM, an avant-garde jazz band started in 1965 by the guitarist Keith Rowe, the saxophonist Lou Gare, and the drummer Eddie Prévost, which Boyd subsequently contracted to Elektra. Their long improvisations tending toward free jazz were to exert a certain influence on Pink Floyd, in particular Keith Rowe on the playing of Syd Barrett. (This can be heard on the album AMMMusic, recorded at Sound Techniques studios in June 1966 and produced by Hopkins, Jenner, Atkins, and Beckett.)
In 1966, Hoppy abandoned DNA Productions to throw himself into the adventure that was the London Free School (LFS), an “anti-university” comprising a night school and a community advice center whose aim was to offer an “alternative” education based on no-holds-barred debates on any subject with a social dimension. Boyd, his loyal comrade in arms, also got involved. Despite its commendable intentions, the venture got into financial difficulty and soon went under, but not before it had given birth to a number of countercultural institutions in the capital: the happenings at All Saints Church, the Notting Hill Carnival, the newspaper it, and the UFO Club.
The UFO, England’s First Psychedelic Club
In 1966, Boyd decided to open a club, once again in partnership with Hoppy. The two men had become aware of the lack of a suitable venue for the development of underground culture, the Marquee no longer fitted the bill. Boyd would later claim that a void was waiting to be filled, and that hundreds of fans were looking for a central rallying point.24 In December 1966, Boyd and Hoppy settled on the Blarney Club, a former Irish ballroom located below a couple of movie theaters at 31 Tottenham Court Road.
The room, accessed via a wide staircase, had shamrocks on its walls and a ceiling fan above. The UFO (standing for unidentified flying object)—the name favored in the end over “Underground Freak Out”—was born. The opening night was December 23, 1966. On the program, which was entitled “UFO Presents Night Tripper,” were underground films by Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol (imported directly from New York) plus performances by Soft Machine and Pink Floyd.
The initial agreement was for the club to be held on the two last Fridays of 1966 only. On the strength of the success of the first two events, the UFO reopened its doors in January 1967. In addition to Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, the club presented sets by groups such as the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Graham Bond Organisation, Procol Harum, Eric Burdon, Family, the Social Deviants, Tomorrow, Jeff Beck, and Ten Years After, many of which included experimental lighting effects created by Mark Boyle and announced on colorful posters designed by Michael English and Nigel Waymouth (of Hapshash and the Coloured Coat). The Floyd very quickly became the club’s totemic group, playing there between January and September 1967. The UFO literally supercharged the band’s career, and its off-the-wall music and the light shows attracted more and more fans. “They were the first group to open people up to sound and colour,”11 Jenny Fabian, Andrew King’s girlfriend and co-author of the novel Groupie, would later write. “I’d lie down on the floor and they’d be up on stage like supernatural gargoyles […] and the same colour that was exploding over them was exploding over us. It was like being taken over, mind, body and soul.”5
The UFO soon became a victim of its own success. Too small to accommodate its ever-increasing crowd, the club started having confrontations with the law. Hopkins’s arrest on drug offenses in June 1967 marked the beginning of the end. After the owners of the premises canceled the lease, the club moved to the Roundhouse, whose exorbitant rent caused it to close its doors for good in October.
Producer (Briefly) of the Floyd
Throughout the UFO adventure, Boyd continued to work as a producer and talent spotter. When the filmmaker Peter Whitehead began to shoot a documentary on Swinging London, Joe Boyd was the natural choice of producer to record “Interstellar Overdrive,” the Floyd song chosen for the soundtrack, at Sound Techniques studio in Chelsea on January 11 and 12, 1967. Boyd tried to get the group signed by Elektra, but met with a refusal from Jac Holzman. The Floyd then turned to Polydor, and the record label accepted an arrangement under which Boyd would act as their producer on an independent basis. Having been dismissed by Elektra in the meantime, Boyd then set up his own production company, Witchseason Productions, and produced the group’s first single, “Arnold Layne”/“Candy and a Currant Bun,” recording both songs on January 29. Unfortunately, Boyd’s flair would not pay off. Bryan Morrison, taken on by Jenner and King to get bookings for the group, intervened with EMI and succeeded in obtaining a far more satisfactory contract. There can be no doubt that Joe Boyd wanted his relationship with Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason to continue, but EMI had other plans. After the contract signing, the head of the A&R (Artists & Repertoire) department, Sidney Arthur Beecher-Stevens, who had never liked independent producers, demanded that the group work with EMI’s own teams. “They owned Abbey Road after all. They wanted their own man, Norman Smith, who had recently been promoted from being the Beatles’ engineer, to be our producer. That was the deal on offer, and we acquiesced […],”5 recalls Nick Mason, before adding that Peter Jenner, who was given the u
nenviable task of informing Joe Boyd of these changes, regrets to this day having ousted him so abruptly, as does Andrew King, who has admitted that “The alacrity with which Peter and I left Joe standing was shameless.”5
Promoter of British Folk Rock
However badly he took it, his brutal ejection from the Pink Floyd spaceship did not stop Joe Boyd from bouncing back. The young producer, who continued to officiate at Sound Techniques with engineer John Wood, now turned his attention to promoting the new British folk-rock scene, as embodied by the Incredible String Band (The Incredible String Band, 1966; The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, 1968), Fairport Convention (Fairport Convention, 1968; Unhalfbricking, 1969; Liege & Lief, 1969), Nick Drake (Five Leaves Left, 1969; Bryter Layter, 1970), and Fotheringay (Fotheringay, 1970).
Returning to the United States in the seventies, Boyd made the excellent documentary entitled simply Jimi Hendrix, and collaborated on the soundtracks of two major movies of the decade: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). Later he founded the label Hannibal, which went on to produce R.E.M.’s third studio album, Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), and Loudon Wainwright III’s Social Studies (1999). In 2006, Boyd published his memoirs in the book White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.
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After his ousting, Joe Boyd was to have a revenge of sorts. EMI tried to have the group rerecord “Arnold Layne” and “Candy and a Currant Bun,” but Boyd’s recordings remained superior to the new takes and are the ones that mark the real start of the Floyd’s recording career.
1967
Arnold Layne /
Candy And
A Currant Bun
SINGLE
RELEASE DATE
United Kingdom: March 10, 1967
Label: Columbia Records
RECORD NUMBER: DB 8156
Arnold Layne
Syd Barrett / 2:53
Musicians
Syd Barrett: vocals, backing vocals (?), electric guitar, acoustic guitar (?)
Roger Waters: bass, backing vocals (?)
Rick Wright: organ, backing vocals (?)
Nick Mason: drums
Recorded
Sound Techniques, London: January 29, 31 (?), February 1 (?), 1967
Technical Team
Producer: Joe Boyd
Sound Engineer: John Wood
Genesis
At the end of January or the very beginning of February 1967, around two weeks after recording “Interstellar Overdrive,” a new session was booked at Sound Techniques studios. This was financed by Bryan Morrison, who had been engaged by Jenner and King a while before to act as the Floyd’s agent. Morrison’s plan was for the group to record a number of songs that could be hawked around the record companies, notably EMI, the most prestigious of them all, thereby recouping the production costs. Jenner and King again asked Joe Boyd—who had just produced the first album of the Incredible String Band for his newly formed company Witchseason Productions—to produce it, and John Wood, one of the two owners of the studio and its sound engineer, to engineer it with Geoff Frost. And so on January 29 several songs were recorded, including “Arnold Layne” and “Candy and a Currant Bun.” Morrison judged the results good enough for him to start selling, and he abandoned the idea of recording any more. These two songs would constitute the group’s first single. Both were credited to Syd Barrett.
“Arnold Layne” dates from the period when Barrett was still living with his mother in Cambridge. “I thought ‘Arnold Layne’ was a nice name, and it fitted very well into the music I had already composed,” he explains […]. “I was at Cambridge at the time and I started to write the song. I pinched the line about ‘moonshine washing line’ from Rog, our bass guitarist, because he has an enormous washing line in the back garden of his house. Then I thought Arnold Layne must have a hobby, and it went on from there.”8 Arnold’s hobby is a peculiar one: he steals women’s clothing from clotheslines, then dresses in it and admires himself in the mirror. A strange pastime that feeds his fantasies and deviant behavior to the point where he is eventually caught red-handed. His punishment, which we are to understand as some kind of incarceration (prison? lunatic asylum?) is not long in coming: Doors bang…
The inspiration for “Arnold Layne” came from a real-life incident, as Roger Waters explains: “My mother and Syd’s mother had students as lodgers […]. There was a girls’ college up the road. So there were constantly great lines of bras and knickers on our washing lines, and Arnold, or whoever he was, had bits and pieces off our washing lines. They never caught him. He stopped doing it after a bit when things got too hot for him.”3 A song about fetishism, then, “Arnold Layne” sits somewhere between the Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” (a broadside on trendiness) and the Who’s “Pictures of Lily” (which deals with teenage fantasies). It is a song in which humor and a certain taste for provocation are never allowed to descend into vulgarity. The poet and Cream lyricist Pete Brown would heap praise upon the songwriter: “Syd was one of the first people to get hits with poetry-type lyrics. The first time I heard ‘Arnold Layne’ I thought ‘Fucking hell!’ It was the first truly English song about English life with a tremendous lyric. It certainly unlocked doors and made things possible that up to that point no one thought were.”2
All the same, when it was released in the United Kingdom as the A-side of Pink Floyd’s first single, on March 11, 1967, it was immediately banned by the majority of radio stations, notably Radio London and Radio Caroline. Roger Waters perceptively explains: “I don’t think the record was banned because of the lyrics, because you can’t really object to them. I think they must be against us as a group. They don’t seem to like what we stand for.”9 It was the Morning Star that would find the most appropriate adjectives for the song: “clever and ironic…”9
Having reached number 26 on the British charts on March 29, 1967, the song climbed to number 20 the next day, testifying not only to the influential role played by the counterculture media, but also to the efficiency of Blackhill Enterprises in buying up quantities of the single! The group had the idea of making a short promotional film to accompany “Arnold Layne,” and entrusted its direction not to Peter Whitehead, but to Derek Nice, head of promotions at EMI and an acquaintance of June Child. The shoot took place in the village of East Wittering on the West Sussex coast, and cost the modest sum of £2,000. The film shows the four members of the group on a beach, their faces intermittently masked, in the act of dressing a mannequin.
Production
Joe Boyd would later confess that he no longer had a precise recollection of the recording sessions, while emphasizing: “One thing to note is that [the sessions] took place before the EMI deal and there was no guarantee at the time that [the songs] would be released on EMI.”10 Unfortunately for Boyd, the adventure continued after signing with the major—only without him.
For the time being, the Floyd took over the Sound Techniques studio, which was equipped with a console built by the highly talented Geoff Frost, a four-track tape recorder, also partly built by Frost, and four monitors, one assigned to each of the tracks! “[…] that was the usual practice in studios at the time!”10 explains John Wood, looking back. Nick Mason recalls the speakers being Tannoy Reds, “[…] the definitive speaker of the period.”5 The recording took the whole of January 29, and the Floyd got down to it with the help of a plentiful supply of psychedelic substances, which were particularly appreciated by Barrett and Jenner… “I’ve never known so much dope consumed at a session!”10 the sound engineer later opined.
“Arnold Layne” is a song the group regularly played live, one that could go on for considerably longer than ten minutes. For commercial reasons, the Floyd needed to bring it down to three minutes, the standard duration for a single.
It is Syd Barrett who launches the track, most probably on his 1962 Fender Esquire. He was also playing a Danelectro 3021 around this time (see the UFO Club gig of Janu
ary 20, 1967), although he favored the Fender as his main instrument. His playing is distinctly rock: he alternates a slightly distorted-sounding palm mute with strumming and arpeggios. He uses a Binson Echorec to obtain a mild echo, and there is apparently some reverb as well, no doubt courtesy of the famous EMT plate. Syd is supported by Roger Waters, who plays some superb bass on his Rickenbacker 4001S. Together, they establish a solid rhythm over which Rick Wright places chords on his Farfisa Compact Duo, the organ that would become one of the characteristic sounds of the group’s early period. Syd is probably using a 50-watt Selmer Truvoice Treble-n-Bass amp, while Roger and Rick seem to be plugged directly into the console, as John Wood partially confirms: “We were doing quite a lot of DI’ing (direct injection) of the amps and things, which was a bit unusual in those days.”10 As for Nick Mason, he plays more of a pop rhythm on his Premier drums, with the snare drum and ride and crash cymbals dominating. Syd sings the lead vocal. His voice is pleasant and assured, and he doubles himself on backing vocals, assisted almost certainly by Rick or Roger. He also seems to play an acoustic rhythm guitar part (a Harmony Sovereign H1260?), which can be heard at 2:04.
Pink Floyd All the Songs Page 3