The record that Drake and Martyn were discussing, presumably over a pint (or seven), may well have been the truly awful karaoke ‘single’ version of ‘May You Never’ that Martyn recorded with a full band in November 1971, a particularly misguided attempt on Martyn’s part to generate a hit single. Significantly, when he re-recorded it for the emblematic Solid Air album, a whole year later, it was to an arrangement cast by the light of a pink moon; which may be as close to a mea culpa as the belligerent Scot ever got. By then Nick’s own music had truly dropped off an abyss, prompting another, gentler form of cajoling from Martyn’s pen, ‘Solid Air’.
The title track to Martyn’s breakthrough album was about Drake, though Martyn seemed surprisingly coy about the song’s subject at the time of its release, claiming ‘it was done for a friend of mine, and it was done right, with very clear motives’. He also phoned Paul Wheeler, a mutual friend, who was house-sitting for the Lennons at Tittenhurst Park, the night he wrote the song. Wheeler recalls, ‘John had just visited Nick [sic] and he sang me an a capella version of “Solid Air”.’ The starkly expressive song was a plea for their friend to rejoin the human race, prompted by their most recent meeting:
Don’t know what’s going wrong in your mind
And I can tell you don’t like what you find
When you’re moving through solid air.
By the time Solid Air appeared in the winter of 1973 the music of Nick Drake was on nobody’s lips. He, and the album in which he had ‘been painting it blue’, had disappeared from the public consciousness with nary a whisper. Even his closest friends feared that there was no way back. Brian Wells, who had been abroad when Pink Moon appeared, picked it up on his return and, as he duly informed Nick Kent, ‘marvelled at the fact that Nick, though quite lost in confusion and personal depression, could produce a work that captured him in the complete creative ascendant.’ Arthur Lubow would also laud the sheer willpower it took to deliver a statement this intense:
In personal terms, the achievement is astonishing, for when he wrote and recorded [Pink Moon], Nick was so depressed that he could barely speak, so confused that he would stand helplessly at an intersection, unable to cross . . . It is despair without the comfort of self-indulgence. It is suffused with a bare and horrifying beauty. It is the last work of a prematurely mature artist.’
What other people made of the album in the half-decade after its release has gone largely undocumented, though Connor McKnight, writing for the counterculture’s favourite music monthly, stumbled on the record in the winter of 1974 and felt compelled to tell Zigzag’s readership about it. And without the attendant myth that would attach to Drake after his early death, and knowing precious little detail about the man behind the records, he still concluded: ‘It is impossible to avoid the seering [sic] sensibility behind [Pink Moon]. The album makes no concession to the theory that music should be escapist.’ And nor does it. Even the iconoclastic Nick Kent couldn’t help but note that he found it full of ‘obliquely sinister overtones’, in his 1975 NME overview of Drake’s career.
Conceding nothing to commercial considerations, and as spartan and ghost-ridden as the songs of Robert Johnson, Drake mustered all that he had in him in order to realize twenty-eight searing minutes of song. All that was now needed was the one grand gesture that would let the world know the suffering was real and unbearable. And perhaps if he had succeeded in his attempt to hang himself at Far Leys a few months later, as appears to have almost happened25, then Pink Moon might indeed have been accepted as ‘the last work of a prematurely mature artist.’ But Robert Johnson he was not, and the end would not be so swift, or so poetic – even if the twenty-four-year-old knew full well that, in the end, ‘Pink moon gonna get you all.’
5. 1971–72: Nowt Strange As Folk
Every exertion of my will, every attempt to put an end to the disintegration of the outer world and the dissolution of my ego, seemed to be a wasted effort . . . I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time.
– Albert Hofmann, describing his first-ever LSD trip, 16 April 1943, in LSD: My Problem Child
I’m treading the backward path. Mostly, I just waste my time.
– Syd Barrett, to Mick Rock, 1971
Everybody was convincing me that I was a messiah . . . I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy . . . It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity; I put myself very near the line.
– David Bowie, Cracked Actor, 1974
For Syd Barrett, the songs had simply ceased to come. Not that he had yet surrendered to the inevitable, even after he returned to the family home in Cambridge. Perhaps – like Nick Drake – he was hoping against hope that such a move would reattach his musical muse to its wellspring. Already he was talking about returning to his original love, painting. Back in March 1971 he had described his day-to-day life to Melody Maker’s Michael Watts as ‘pretty unexciting. I work in a cellar, down in a cellar . . . I think of me being a painter eventually.’ But, by December, Barrett’s muse seemed to be wholly becalmed. When his old photographer-pal Mick Rock popped in to see him in the guise of Rolling Stone’s English correspondent, Barrett’s frustration with himself was evident in much of what he said. At one point he confessed to Rock: ‘I may seem to get hung-up, that’s because I am frustrated work-wise, terribly. The fact is I havent done anything this year . . . I’ve got an idea that there must be someone [I could] play with.’
Rock interpreted their conversation as Syd’s way of ‘trying to figure out what he wanted to do. He talked about “treading the backward path”, retracing his steps, trying to find himself in some way, finding the kid in him and going back there to sort out his identity . . . His mum brought us tea and iced sponge in the garden. Poor lady . . . she didn’t know what the hell was going on.’ Although Barrett seemed ‘very up and bubbly’, Rock also remembers how ‘he would laugh in strange, strange moments. Like there was a joke, but it was only his joke.’ Evidently he was still not sure, what exactly is a joke? For all the enforced jollity, there was this ineffable sense that Barrett already knew he’d penned his last. At the end of the afternoon, Barrett offered to show Rock ‘a book of all my songs before you go’, then cryptically adding: ‘There’s really nothing to say.’ And one suspects there really was nothing to say.
If Syd himself was a spent force by the end of 1971, his influence on the future course of rock was once again about to be felt around this dark globe, as two of music’s most enduring statements took the fate of the ex-Floyd frontman as a jumping-off point. Issued almost exactly a year apart, but both initially conceived in the weeks between Rock’s conversation with Barrett and its 23 December appearance in Rolling Stone, David Bowie’s The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon would become the two benchmarks for most forms of English rock from here to Punk. And each took its cue from the laughing Madcap himself.
Of Syd’s former bandmates, Roger Waters was the one who had been thinking of writing about the man who showed him the way. It was a case of finding the right context. And that was not as part of Meddle, the Pink Floyd album EMI had just released when the band convened at Broadhurst Gardens for four days in mid-to-late December to begin preparing a new live set for a series of UK shows scheduled across the first two months of 1972. The song ‘Brain Damage’, a.k.a. ‘The Lunatic is On the Grass’, which he presented to the other three at their first December rehearsal, was something he had been playing around with at the Meddle sessions that summer but had not developed any further. Only at this point did he decide Syd was a subject matter worthy of his pen, warranting his time and providing a way of reinforcing his assumption of the de facto leadership of the band that was once Barrett’s:
Roger Waters: There was a residue of Syd in all of this. It was pretty recent history. Syd had been the central creative force in the early days – [while] maybe I provided some of the engine room – and so hi
s having succumbed to schizophrenia was an enormous blow . . . That was certainly expressed in ‘Brain Damage’. [2004]
Originally intended as the closing theme to their new song-suite, the opening image of ‘Brain Damage’: ‘The lunatic is on the grass, remembering games, and daisy-chains and laughs / Got to keep the loonies on the path’, was a direct evocation of the Barrett of yesteryear. Indeed, as Waters said in 1998: ‘The grass [in “Brain Damage”] was always the square in between the River Cam and King’s College chapel . . . I don’t know why, but the song still makes me think of that piece of grass. The lunatic was Syd, really. He was obviously in my mind. It was very Cambridge-based, that whole song.’
‘Brain Damage’ was more than just another song brought to a possible Floyd project; it was the trigger for an album dealing with how life’s demands can lead people to the brink. The title of the piece when Floyd first toured with it the winter of 1972 said it all – Eclipse: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics. Even without the subtitle, there was no mistaking the album’s ghost in the machine. As Dave Gilmour recently remarked: ‘There are specific references to “Syd moments” in [the] lyrics of Dark Side. Syd was a constant presence in our minds and consciences.’ At the same time, Waters already had a grander theme in mind, and it was one that would dominate all of his songwriting in the years when the Floyd were remorselessly moving towards becoming the biggest band on the planet. The plan was, in Waters’ words, to ‘do a whole thing about the pressures we personally feel that drive one over the top.’ What he did not do was spring this concept on the rest of the band until rehearsals began to assume a direction of sorts:
Dave Gilmour: Sometime after we started and got quite a few pieces of music sorta formulated vaguely, Roger came up with the specific idea of going through all the things that people go through and what drives them mad; and from that moment obviously our direction slightly changed. We started tailoring the pieces we already had to fit that concept, and Roger would tailor words in to fit the music that we had. [1977]
Floyd drummer Nick Mason believes that Waters actually hijacked a project originally conceived along broader lines: ‘The concept was originally about the pressures of modern life – travel, money and so on. But then Roger turned it into a meditation on insanity.’ Vestiges of that original conceit would continue to be represented, with ‘On the Run’ beginning life as ‘The Travel Sequence’, while Waters turned up with a home demo of the song ‘Money’ for the band to work on. But it was mortality and insanity that became the bedrock of their first album-length meditation on life.
Waters may simply have been trying to steer the others away from reworking the idea underlying their earlier performance-piece ‘The Man & the Journey’ (the subtitle of which clearly connects it to Eclipse – ‘More Furious Madness from Pink Floyd’). If that suite had been a conglomeration of songs from other projects, old and new, cobbled together to form ‘a day in the life’, Dark Side of the Moon also began with the band scrabbling around looking for old bits and pieces they could reuse. Or to utilize Gilmour’s chosen phrase, ‘You jam, you knock stuff about, you plunder your old rubbish library.’
‘Brain Damage’ was by no means the oldest piece now attached to a new canvas. ‘Us and Them’ had originally been part of a twenty-minute instrumental called ‘The Violent Sequence’, which the band had intended for Michelangelo Antonioni’s impenetrable piece of cinematic codswallop, Zabriskie Point. The sequence, composed by Richard Wright, was debuted in concert back in February 1970, even though it was fated to become one of half-a-dozen pieces Antonioni passed on. The new lyric they grafted on in December 1971 – with a title that had already served as a chapter heading in R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience (1967) – Waters initially suggested he would sing himself. After all, these lyrics intentionally developed another of his favourite themes, which he now bolted on to the song-cycle – ‘our failure to connect with each other’:
Dave Gilmour: When we started on a new album we’d always dredge through old tapes to see if there was anything left over we could make use of . . . [But] when Roger walked into Broadhurst Gardens with the idea of putting it all together as one piece with this linking theme he’d devised, that was a moment . . . You see, nobody back then had problems with the concept of concepts, so to speak. [1998]
English rock bands at this portentous juncture in rock history had no fear they would be lambasted for displaying such ambition. The concept album had yet to become a naughty word. The NME had still not devised their own send-up of Tommy, called Dummy, or begun to ridicule the pretensions of many an English prog-rocker with headlines such as, ‘Is this man a prat?’ If there was a heyday for the extended song-cycle or theme, it was now. While Floyd rehearsed their new concept, Jethro Tull were putting the finishing touches to a two-part, forty-five-minute rock symphony called Thick as a Brick, which told listeners to ‘mark the precise nature of your fear’. Tulls front-man Ian Anderson later claimed it was ‘a spoof of the genre’, though if it was, he wisely avoided saying so at the time.
Other prog bands were just getting warmed up. Genesis, who within three years would create their own hundred-minute concept double-album, the triumphant The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, were piecing together their twenty-five-minute seven-part epic, ‘Supper’s Ready’. Yes, too, were looking to record their first side-long track, ‘Close to the Edge’, for the album of the same name. Pink Floyd themselves, as pioneers of the side-long song, were already fully conversant with what was required to put ‘it all together as one piece with this [one] linking theme.’
In fact, this was pretty much how ‘Echoes’ had been pieced together, as a compilation of smaller ‘ideas’. As the band’s engineer, John Leckie, later recalled: ‘The tapes we took to Air [studios] were filled up with lots of little ideas . . . They were all called “Nothing” – “Nothing One”, “Nothing Two” and so on . . . [“Echoes”] was conceived as one big thing, [but from] bits in various sections . . . [and] recorded that way.’ Floyd coterminously developed the work over a series of live performances, until they were absolutely satisfied they had found a way to make the whole thing blend.
This modus operandi would also inform both the new work, and its successor, Wish You Were Here. In both cases, Floyd would work on the album while simultaneously touring the material around the world for a year or so. Even in an era when bands regularly debuted their new songs months before they recorded or released them, this was a unique way of working. For now, Floyd saw an album as the conclusion of the tour-promotion-album process, not the starting point. As Gilmour points out, ‘In those days tours got booked in. And back then, they weren’t promotional vehicles; they were entities in their own right.’
Floyd were certainly treating the new piece as an entity in its own right. The UK Eclipse tour programme even came with a lyric sheet for the new songs. But certain segues were not so seamless. Eclipse in its earliest guise comprised five sequences – ‘Breathe’, ‘Time’, ‘Money’, ‘Us and Them’ and ‘Brain Damage’ – stitched together with a series of musical joins, some solid, others audibly coming apart at the seams; making for almost a return to the sons of nothing.
‘The Mortality Sequence’ linking ‘Time’ and ‘Money’ was an instrumental piece over which the band projected taped letters of St Paul, though it wasn’t entirely clear whether the fiercely agnostic Waters was lampooning the solace religion could provide in death, or demonstrating that religious fervour led irredeemably to madness. As well as these tape cut-ups, a long ‘Travel Sequence’ gave Gilmour and Wright an opportunity to jam to their heart’s content – as of now, they didn’t know what they were ‘On the Run’ from. As such, Eclipse still contained echoes of its side-long predecessor, being the kind of music that in Richard Wright’s view, ‘we created . . . when all three of us [sic] got together and collaborated, rather than individually coming to the studio with a song’.
Nor for the time being was there any redemptive coda to Eclipse – the album charted
the passage from birth (‘Breathe’) to mental breakdown. (One can’t help but wonder how the album might have fared if this had continued to be the case.) As such, the final line of the work as debuted at Portsmouth Guildhall on 21 January 197226 was, ‘I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon’; the expression ‘dark side of the moon’, ‘always [being] considered [by the band] to be a metaphor for the other side of madness’, [as cover designer Aubrey Powell avers].
Even at this juncture the band thought that single phrase was the real title of the new song-suite – though they publicly called the piece Eclipse (Medicine Head had just used Floyd’s preferred title on their own album). And Waters claims that, when he wrote this concluding line, he fully intended to suggest he personally identified with that lunatic on the grass: ‘When I say, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon”, what I mean is, If you feel that you’re the only one . . . that you seem crazy ’cos you think everything is crazy you’re not alone. There’s a camaraderie involved in the idea of people who are prepared to walk the dark places alone. A number of us are willing to open ourselves up to all those possibilities.’ In another discussion of the album’s genesis, Waters suggested that fear was another very real factor in the lyrics he was now writing:
All the Madmen Page 20