Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (3 page)

At the time of the three principal Floyds’ arrival into the world, Cambridge was, as one of their childhood peers now describes it, ‘a place where licensed eccentricity was considered permissible. You’d see all these brilliant but rather odd people such as Francis Crick who discovered DNA, cycling eccentrically down the street.’ Syd’s father was another familiar, eccentric figure, often to be seen cycling on an upright bicycle down Hills Road.

Dr Arthur Max Barrett, known to all as Max, was a university demonstrator in pathology at the local Addenbrooke’s hospital. Later, he would take up the position of morbid anatomist at the university. In his spare time he was a noted amateur painter and botanist, with the privilege of his own set of keys to the city’s botanical gardens. Displaying the musical talent for which his son would become better known, Dr Barrett was also a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society.

He was married to Winifred Garrett, the great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the country’s first female physician in 1865. The Barretts had five children: Alan, Donald, Ruth, Roger (later known as Syd) and Rosemary. Syd was born on 6 January 1946 in the first family home at 60 Glisson Road, near the centre of Cambridge. Three years later, the family moved to a nearby five-bedroom house at 183 Hills Road.

A few minutes’ walk from the Barretts’ new home was Rock Road, where the family of George Roger Waters would settle when he was just two years old. Roger’s father, Eric Fletcher Waters, had grown up in County Durham, the grandson of a coal miner and prominent Labour Party agent. He became a schoolteacher and, being a devout Christian and conscientious objector, refused to join up at the outbreak of the war. Instead he did voluntary work and drove an ambulance during the Blitz and joined the Communist Party. But halfway through the conflict, Eric had a change of heart and decided to sign up for the war. He eventually joined the City of London Regiment, 8th Battalion Royal Fusiliers as a second lieutenant.

Preceded by one brother, John, Roger was born on 6 September 1943. His mother, formerly Mary Whyte, was also a schoolteacher. When Eric was posted overseas, Mary moved with her sons from Great Bookham, in Surrey, to Cambridge, believing they would be safer from German bombing raids over London.

Eric Waters was declared missing presumed dead on 18 February 1944, during the Allies’ assault on the beaches of Anzio, on the Italian coast. Roger was just five months old at the time.

David Jon Gilmour arrived in the world on 6 March 1946. The Gilmours’ home at the time was a village outside Cambridge called Trumpington. The family moved several times, before finally settling at 109 Grantchester Meadows in the Newnham district, near the River Cam, when David was ten years old. His father, Doug, and mother, Sylvia, met at Cambridge’s Homerton College, where both were training to be teachers. Sylvia went on to become a film editor, eventually working for the BBC. Doug Gilmour became a senior lecturer in zoology at the university. The couple had four children: David, his brothers Peter and Mark, and a sister, Catherine.

‘Cambridge was a great place to grow up,’ says Gilmour. ‘You’re in a town dominated by education, you’re surrounded by bright people. But then it’s also got this rural heart that spreads practically to the centre. There were great places to meet up with friends.’

While Gilmour has no memory of the meeting, he first encountered Barrett and Waters when the three were enrolled by their parents at a Saturday morning art club at Homerton College. Both Waters and Barrett attended Morley Memorial primary school in Blinco Grove, where Mary Waters was working as a teacher. It was here that Syd’s precocious talents first became apparent. Noted for his gift of mimicry, he and sister Rosemary (known to most as Roe) also won a shared prize for playing the piano when Syd was seven years old.

Nick Barraclough, a fellow Morley Memorial pupil, later to become a musician and BBC broadcaster, remembers Syd as ‘a beautiful boy and incredibly artistic. My sister was in his class. They would have been about ten or eleven, and the pupils were asked to paint their impressions of a hot day. Most of the children drew a beach or a sun. Roger - as he was still called then - drew a girl lying on a beach in a bikini with an ice-lolly dripping over her, which all seemed terribly advanced considering his age.’

All three boys sat and passed their 11-plus, the then compulsory test which divided British schoolchildren into those deemed intelligent enough for a grammar school education, or, if not, the secondary modern school system. ‘My father was a primary school teacher,’ remembers Barraclough, ‘and the two Rogers both came to him at different times to be coached in advance for the 11-plus.’

Waters was enrolled at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys (formerly the Cambridge and County School) in Hills Road in 1954. Now re-invented as Hills Road Sixth Form College, back then ‘the County’ was, as one former pupil described it, ‘a grammar school that thought it was a public school, with masters, mortar boards and sadism’. The school had a record for high academic achievement, with a similarly impressive Oxbridge output.

Roger became a noted sportsman: a wicket keeper in the school’s first XI cricket team, and an impressive fly half in the rugby team. He also joined the school’s Combined Cadet Force, initially against his wishes, spending some time at the weekend naval training school at HMS
Ganges
. Part of the Force’s training involved target practice and marksmanship, to which he was better disposed. However, although he was smart and witty, his sharp tongue and overbearing streak could also make him unpopular. On at least one occasion his fellow pupils beat him up. ‘I think I was roundly hated by most of the people involved,’ admitted Waters later.

‘Roger was in the year above me,’ remembers fellow County boy Seamus O’Connell. ‘I was friends with another chap called Andrew Rawlinson, whose nickname was Willa, and who was a great friend of Roger’s. The relationship between Roger and I was a bit fraught at school as he wasn’t always that pleasant, but we still counted each other as friends.’

Later, tiring of the Cadet Force, and in a fit of pique, Roger simply handed in his uniform and refused to attend further training, leading to a dishonourable discharge. Fellow County pupil Tim Renwick, who would go on to work with Pink Floyd as a guitarist, recalls the scandal: ‘I was a couple of years younger than Roger, but everyone in the school heard about it. He caused rather a fuss. Though I’m sure I can remember hearing that Roger told them he was leaving on the grounds that he was a conscientious objector.’

Waters’ childhood experiences would find their way time and again into Pink Floyd’s music, leaving even the most inattentive listener in little doubt about his feelings for life at the County.

‘Roger tolerated his schooling,’ said Mary Waters. ‘His attitude was, “You have to get on with it and make the most of it.” ’

‘I hated every second of it, apart from games,’ Roger insisted. ‘The regime at school was a very oppressive one. It was being run on pre-war lines, where you bloody well did as you were told, and there was nothing to do for us but to rebel against it. It’s funny how, when you get these guys at school, they will always pick on the weakest kid. So the same kids who are susceptible to bullying by other kids are also susceptible to bullying by the teachers. It’s like smelling blood. They home in on it. Most of the teachers were absolute swine.’

‘I always presumed that Pink Floyd’s
The Wall
was about the masters at the County,’ says Nick Barraclough, who followed Waters to the school. ‘The headmaster there at the time was a man named Eagling, who was, to this day, the scariest man I have ever known. The two Rogers would have been right in the thick of all that.’

Being schooled after the Second World War in an education system still behind the times, hampered by pre-war attitudes, and hardly attuned to a generation enjoying the peace and relative prosperity not afforded to their parents, the late fifties was an era of opportunity for teenagers, unlike any before.

Railing against the school system, Waters would later describe an episode that encapsulated this contempt. Deciding to seek revenge on the school’s gardener for some real or imagined slight, he and a group of co-conspirators went into the school orchard with a stepladder and singled out the gardener’s favourite tree. They then proceeded to eat every apple on the tree, taking care not to remove any from the branches. Recounting the incident for
Musician
magazine over thirty years later, Waters proudly recalled ‘being filled with a real sense of achievement’ after the elaborate prank.

Three years behind Waters, Syd Barrett’s progress through the County was marked by an overriding passion for art and a keen interest in poetry and drama. Also displaying an anti-authoritarian streak, Barrett could charm his way out of trouble by being smart, good-looking and, as Gilmour recalls, ‘a sharp cookie, very able in many areas’. Nevertheless, adhering to more conventional lines, Syd rose through the ranks to become patrol leader, Kingfisher patrol, in his local Scout troop.

In June 1961, aged fifteen, Syd began a relationship with Elizabeth Gausden (known by everyone as Libby), a pupil at the nearby Cambridge Grammar School for Girls. ‘Syd actually had a girlfriend already, a very pretty, fluffy German girl called Verena Frances,’ remembers Libby. ‘But we hit it off. He always used to say, “You’re not the prettiest, but you’re the funniest girl ever”. He was a wonderful boy. Everybody loved him.’

John Gordon first encountered Syd in the County’s art class. ‘He shone from the first day,’ he remembers. ‘His hair was longer than anyone else’s. He spoke his mind to the teachers and would even walk out of a class if he was being told off.’

Syd frequently refused to wear his school blazer and was also notable for wearing his shoes without laces, a trait that continued into adulthood. Encouraged by his parents, Syd also indulged the keenly creative streak that had first surfaced at the Morley Memorial, participating in poetry readings and public speaking. But his adolescence would be blighted. On 11 December 1961, Dr Barrett died. ‘His father had been ill for a long time,’ says Libby Gausden. ‘He had cancer and it was very painful, and I think it was almost a great relief to the children as he was suffering so much before he died. Syd was a great diary writer. Each page was about a foot and a half long, and he would fill every page. But on the day his father died, he just wrote “Poor Dad died today”.’

Many people have speculated about the impact of his father’s death on Syd. David Gilmour, who spent a great deal of time with his friend in those years, says that ‘Syd never spoke about it. People say his father’s death changed him, but at the time it was difficult to recall any great change.’

‘I didn’t know Syd’s father or his brothers, so I never really knew where the men in the family got to,’ recalls John Gordon. ‘Syd always seemed more worldly than me, and had more freedom and experience, and, after his father died, he seemed to readily take on a lot more responsibility.’

Once his older siblings moved out of 183 Hills Road, Syd commandeered a large room at the front of the house as his bedroom, while his mother let out the former bedrooms to lodgers, many of whom were attending the university and who included at least one minor British aristocrat and a future Japanese Prime Minister.

If Waters and, to some extent, Barrett were displaying an anti-authoritarian streak, they now had an official excuse. With the advent of Bill Haley and The Comets’ hit single ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in 1955, the media had officially announced the invention of the teenager, and their designated soundtrack - rock ’n’ roll. Two years later, Elvis Presley would give this new music an iconic image and provide a role model for a generation. Syd’s brother Alan played saxophone in a skiffle group, and Syd himself began messing around with a ukelele before persuading his mother to buy him a Hofner acoustic guitar.

‘After school, Syd and I would meet in the corridor and I would go over to his, as he lived almost opposite the school,’ remembers John Gordon. ‘My father was a musician, but part of me didn’t want to be like him, so I’d shunned learning the piano but wanted to learn guitar with Syd. He’d also got hold of some American imports and I had an older uncle who was bringing in Bill Haley and Eddie Cochran 78s and 45s. I would take them over to Syd’s and we’d try and learn guitar from them. Syd was into everything. Everyone now talks about him liking Bo Diddley, but he was into much broader stuff than that.’

The fourteen-year-old Waters was the ideal age for rock ’n’ roll, but was initially wary. Instead, his musical tastes skittered between Dixieland jazz and blues singers such as Bessie Smith. ‘Anything,’ he admitted later, ‘but rock ’n’ roll.’ Having acquired a guitar from an uncle, Waters also began taking tentative classical lessons with a local female teacher, but later admitted that he’d given up ‘as it hurt my fingers, and I found it much too hard’.

Meanwhile, David Gilmour shared none of his future bandmate’s suspicion about rock ’n’ roll. ‘I’m not sure if “Rock Around the Clock” was the very first record I bought, but it must have been one of the first,’ he recalls. (He later revealed that the 78rpm disc was destroyed when the family’s au pair accidentally sat on it.) Gilmour was much more taken with Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which followed a year later. At home, his parents’ record collection included numerous blues 78s. Like Waters and Barrett, Gilmour had also discovered Radio Luxembourg, with its diverse mix of music that was outside the remit of any existing British radio station - ‘All sorts of strange sounds’ - and which would have a marked influence on a whole generation of English rock musicians.

While Gilmour’s musical education was already underway, his education proper had begun at the age of five when he was sent to boarding school. Doug Gilmour decided to take a six-month sabbatical from Cambridge University and go to Wisconsin in the American Midwest with Sylvia. The children were despatched to Steeple Claydon in Buckinghamshire where they remained until the end of the following school year.