Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (15 page)

‘Roger was especially interested in the studio itself and the development of sound,’ recalls Smith.

But Andrew King remembers Syd showing a similar interest: ‘One of my strongest memories is of Syd mixing the song “Chapter 24”. I remember him at the desk operating the faders for the final mix. And he was very good at it. He knew what he wanted and he was totally capable of getting what he wanted - at a technical level.’

While Barrett is said to have written off several microphones in the course of the recording, and had the ‘meters frequently screaming in the red’, out of the occasional chaos came eleven songs for the album, and, most importantly, an additional single. ‘When I heard “See Emily Play”, I finally thought: This is it. This is the one,’ says Smith.

Pink Floyd premiered the single, then still titled ‘Games for May’, at a performance of the same name in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 12 May. Jenner had secured the show at the capital’s prestigious classical music venue through his wife Sumi’s friendship with the promoter Christopher Hunt. It was here that the band chose to premiere their new gizmo, the Azimuth Coordinator. Effectively the first quadraphonic sound system, the Coordinator had been built for the band by one of the boffins at Abbey Road. It comprised four rheostats contained in a large box and was equipped with a ‘joy-stick’, which would be operated by Richard Wright to pan the sound around 270 degrees in whatever venue the band were playing. The sheer volume at which Pink Floyd played that night was an issue, but it was their use of a bubble machine and the scattering of flowers that caused the most concern. ‘A combination of squashed daffodil stems and burst bubbles left this smeary liquid all over the leather seats and the floor,’ says Jenner. ‘We were immediately banned, and I don’t think they let pop groups back into the South Bank for some time after that.’

Just days later it would be the issue of volume that preoccupied the interviewer on the BBC1 arts show
Look of the Week
. Following a snippet of Pink Floyd performing ‘Pow R Toc H’, Barrett and Waters submitted to some incredulous questioning from the Austrian musician and string quartet fan Hans Keller. The exchange now plays like a quaint period piece: the earnest, suited musicologist versus the flowery-shirted pop upstarts. ‘Why does it all got to be so terribly loud [sic]?’ enquires Keller. ‘That’s the way we like it,’ counters Waters. Barrett, in a nice contrast to the strung-out Syd of legend, is as alert and well spoken as his bandmate. Keller remains singularly unimpressed, but does offer one sharp observation on Pink Floyd’s music: ‘My verdict is that it’s a little bit of a regression to childhood.’

Shunning Abbey Road, the band returned to Sound Techniques Studio, where they’d worked with Joe Boyd on ‘Arnold Layne’, to cut the new single, ‘See Emily Play’. But there was a problem. ‘The trouble with “See Emily Play” was it didn’t do a thing for Syd,’ explains Norman Smith. ‘In fact, I don’t think he was happy about recording singles full stop.’

On the day of the session, Syd took a telephone call from David Gilmour. The guitarist was on a brief visit to London, buying equipment for his own band Jokers Wild, then playing a residency in a Paris nightclub. Barrett sounded perfectly normal on the phone and invited Gilmour to the studio. On arrival, Gilmour was shocked by what he saw. ‘He looked very strange, glassy-eyed,’ he recalled. ‘He wasn’t terribly friendly, didn’t seem to recognise me. I stayed for an hour or two and then left. I knew about LSD, as I’d taken it myself, but I didn’t connect it to this. He was in a very strange state.’ Gilmour returned to France, troubled by his friend’s condition but unaware of just how much impact it would soon have on his own career.

‘See Emily Play’ was released on 16 June 1967. EMI bigwig Roy Featherstone would coin the slogan ‘Straight to Heaven in ’67’ to accompany the single’s release, and, as Peter Jenner recalls, ‘while that now sounds incredibly naff, as a slogan it worked at the time.’ The song included a dash of typical Syd experimentation - the sound of a plastic ruler being scraped along the guitar fretboard - but, as Norman Smith explains, ‘it had this wonderful melody, this amazing tune.’

The perfect amalgam of psychedelic excess and pure pop, ‘See Emily Play’ was brighter than ‘Arnold Layne’ on all levels, without the seamier subject matter of its predecessor, but with just enough of Wright’s spooked-sounding keyboards and Syd’s fey, disengaged vocals to prevent a complete slip into easy listening pop. As
New Musical Express
raved: ‘It’s full of weird oscillations, reverberations, electronic vibrations, fuzzy rumblings and appealing harmonies.’

Not as whimsical as some of his other compositions on
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
, the song was still steeped in random images from Syd and Roger’s Cambridge childhood. ‘I know which woods Syd’s talking about in “See Emily Play”,’ said Waters in 2004. ‘We all used to go to these woods as kids. It’s a very specific area - one specific wood on the road to the Gog Magog Hills.’

The Emily in question is similarly steeped in Floyd myths. Some claim it was Emily Young, one of the Notting Hill Free School and UFO club’s regular alumni, now a noted sculptress. While Emily met Syd on occasion, she claims to have no specific knowledge that the song was written about her. Others have suggested that Syd’s Earlham Street flatmate Anna Murray inspired the song. Again, Anna has never claimed to know that the song was written about her. At the time of the song’s release Waters told one radio interviewer, in the wonderful parlance of the era: ‘Emily could be anyone. She’s just a hung-up chick, that’s all.’

Two weeks after the song’s release, Pink Floyd were invited to play
Top of the Pops
. Andrew King would later say that Syd’s decline could be plotted through the group’s appearances on the show: two reluctant performances and one final non-appearance. Peter Wynne-Willson was with Syd in Trafalgar Square prior to one of the performances. ‘It was getting later and later. In the end, I said to him, “Isn’t it time we got going?” We hailed a cab and Syd asked it to go somewhere entirely different.’

Norman Smith was on hand to chaperone the band as they went to the show’s Lime Grove Studios in West London for their debut appearance. ‘I told them they’d have to mime, as that was what all the groups did back then,’ he recalls. ‘I don’t think Syd was happy, but the others accepted it. So they went off to have their hair washed and their make-up done. Normally, I didn’t think Syd cared how he looked, but when he came back, he looked like a pop star. I told him he looked fantastic. So he went straight over to the mirror, messed up his hair and grabbed a load of tissues to wipe off the make-up . . . A week later, we went back again, and the same thing happened. He just stood there on the show, letting the guitar dangle in front of him. I had a go afterwards, told him he was going to destroy our recording career if he carried on. But it just went in one ear and out the other.’

The single peaked at number 5. Taken back to the studio for a third appearance, the following week, Syd initially refused to go on. ‘We finally discovered that the reason was that John Lennon didn’t have to do
Top of the Pops
, so we didn’t,’ Roger Waters told
Melody Maker
.

Sue Kingsford encountered Syd on the afternoon of one of his scheduled
Top of the Pops
appearances. She and Jock were now living in a flat in Beaufort Street, South Kensington, near to Cromwell Road. ‘Suddenly we heard this banging on the door,’ she recalls. ‘And there was Syd. He had no shoes on, which was not unusual in those days, but his feet were filthy and bleeding. He looked completely off of his head. He didn’t say a word. He just came in and we gave him some Sugar Puffs and a cup of coffee. He still didn’t say anything. He just sat there. About an hour after he arrived, there was another bang on the door. It was some of the Floyd’s people: “Is Syd here?” We answered, “Yes, he’s in the kitchen but he’s not very well.” They were like, “I don’t give a fuck if he’s not very well.” They just dragged him out. Later that evening I discovered they’d dragged him off to do
Top of the Pops
. The reason he was sitting on a cushion during the show is because he was so out of it he couldn’t stand up.’

Despite their
Top of the Pops
appearance, the BBC invited the group to guest on the
Saturday Club
radio show at the end of July. Having been ferried to the recording studio, Syd again decided that he didn’t wish to participate. This time he offered no explanation. ‘When we got the call that it was our turn to go on, nobody could find Syd,’ remembers Norman Smith. ‘The doorman told us they’d seen someone that looked like him leaving. Roger Waters and I went out into the street and, sure enough, there he was, just turning the corner. That was the end of that.’

Inevitably, Barrett’s behaviour was souring his relationship with the rest of the group. Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, who was driving the band’s van, agreed to pair up with Syd for a night drive back from the South Coast after a gig. ‘I drove back from Portsmouth with Syd, as the others didn’t really want to be with him. I remember it was pouring with rain, and he smoked a joint, and he must have laughed for about two hours, but hardly spoke. He was obviously losing the plot.’

In August, Blackhill issued a statement to the press following the cancellation of several Pink Floyd dates. ‘It is not true Syd has left the group,’ Andrew King told the
New Musical Express
. ‘He is tired and exhausted, and has been advised to rest for two weeks.’

Peter Jenner called on Sam Hutt for advice. That summer, Hutt was fresh out of medical school and acquiring a reputation as London’s hippest doctor. ‘The idea was to send Syd to see “the good doctor”,’ explains Hutt now. ‘The idea being, “He knows all about the drugs and he takes them as well, but he’s not going to freak out.” ’

Hutt had rented a
finca
on Formentera, which then represented the western end of the hippie trail for those that didn’t fancy making the full journey East. Syd and Lindsay, Richard and Juliette, Sam, his wife and their young son headed off to the island for a fortnight, later to be joined by Roger and Judy Trim, who were staying on neighbouring Ibiza. The plan was for Barrett to kick back, play guitar, bask in the sun, enjoy himself. Syd duly obliged and seemed quite content during parts of the holiday, but there was one snag. As Hutt remembers, ‘He was munching acid all the time.’ The idyllic retreat was also prone to electrical storms, a freak weather condition that did little to improve Syd’s raddled state of mind. ‘You get sheet lightning behind the clouds and the whole sky lights up fluorescent,’ Hutt recalls. ‘It could affect you even if you weren’t taking anything at all. Add acid to the equation and Syd was, quite literally, trying to climb the walls. His fingernails were clawing the wall, as he was trying to get himself off the floor.’

‘I thought it was fucking awful.’ The Who’s Pete Townshend was among those unimpressed by
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
on its release that August. Townshend’s main gripe was that the record didn’t do justice to the group’s wall-of-sound live show. But Norman Smith had done the job asked of him. He’d curbed some of the band’s excesses and helped realise Peter Jenner’s dream of an avant-garde pop group. Less than twelve months earlier, Pink Floyd’s repertoire included the likes of ‘Louie Louie’, yet barely a trace of the blues was to be found in their first album. Richard Wright’s classical and jazz influences seem to have taken their place, the keyboards filling in the spaces usually occupied by a lead guitar, giving most of the record a sinister undertow. Childhood nursery rhymes permeate ‘Bike’, ‘The Gnome’ and ‘Flaming’ (‘Watching buttercups come to life . . . sleeping on a dandelion’), but on ‘Matilda Mother’ and ‘The Scarecrow’ there’s a hint of menace as well; like Grimm’s Fairy Tales set to music. A sixties spy movie theme burbles away on ‘Lucifer Sam’, with its cryptic mention of one Jennifer Gentle, in reality Jenny Spires.

Nocturnal sessions with
I-Ching
at Earlham Street find their way into ‘Chapter 24’, accompanied by droning keyboards and percussion, the band making use of the treasure trove of odd musical instruments scattered around the studio. In the bleaker, noisier corner were ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’. The latter was, in the words of Nick Mason, similar to ‘what Roy Lichtenstein was putting into his paintings’. With Peter Jenner reciting astronomical co-ordinates from a children’s book of the planets through a megaphone and Roger Waters’ primitive bass runs, it sounded like pop art and science fiction condensed into a rock song.

While Barrett’s songs had a wistful, child-like charm, ‘Pow R Toc H’ and Waters’ solo composition ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ now sound like dummy runs for some of the bassist’s later ideas. The shivery suggestion of madness and the frantic howling would be revisited on
Dark Side of the Moon
and
Animals
.

Yet Syd’s fairy-tale contributions to the album immediately struck a chord with those from his hometown. ‘There was something very Cambridge-like about it all,’ says Seamus O’Connell. ‘When we first heard these extraordinary songs, things like “Bike”, we all made that connection.’

‘I always thought Syd got stuck in a curious sort of protracted childhood,’ offers Anthony Stern. ‘So it was always there in the music. Childhood had been an idyllic time, and I think he found the idea of growing up and dealing with your parents’ world frankly terrifying.’

For Sue Kingsford, Syd’s hankering for his hometown was all too familiar. ‘I always thought he was out of his comfort zone when he wasn’t in Cambridge,’ she ventures. ‘Both of us often used to go back at weekends. I can remember us tripping one night in Cromwell Road, and Syd, who hadn’t said a word for hours, suddenly asked, “Are you going home this weekend?” I told him I was, and he replied, “Do you know, that’s all I want to do. I just want to go home.” ’

As steeped in 1967 as
Sgt Pepper
, Pink Floyd’s debut also translates for subsequent generations of listeners. Reviews were favourable, even if some of what
Record Mirror
called its ‘mind-blowing sounds’ were still a step too far for many pop fans.