Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (4 page)

‘My parents loved each other and enjoyed each other’s company, but, to be honest, I think they found us rather inconvenient,’ Gilmour told
Mojo
magazine in 2006. ‘We holidayed together when we were very little, but as soon as we got to the age where we could be bounced off into something else, like joining the Boy Scouts, we never went on holiday together again.’ Years later, Gilmour would rediscover letters and a diary from the time, revealing that even when his parents had returned to Cambridge, David and his siblings remained in Steeple Claydon until the end of the school year. ‘These things seem perfectly normal at the time. It’s only later when you think, “Hang on, that wasn’t so great.” ’

At the age of eleven, just as Barrett made his way to the County, Gilmour returned to Cambridge and was enrolled at the Perse Preparatory School for Boys. Situated just a few doors down from Syd’s family home, the Perse was a fee-paying grammar school run on strict authoritarian lines. Its old boys included Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of the Royal National Theatre. Dating back to the seventeenth century, a quarter of the Perse’s pupils were boarders, and all pupils were made to attend Saturday morning lessons, contributing to the atmosphere of, in the words of one of its former alumni, ‘a rather snooty public school’.

Though naturally bright, Gilmour’s approach to academia was found wanting. ‘I was lazy,’ he admits now. Elvis may have been a primary influence, but it was the arrival of a pair of guitar-playing, high-harmony singing siblings - the Everly Brothers and their 1957 breakthrough hit ‘Bye Bye Love’ - that was pivotal in Gilmour picking up the guitar.

‘I loved the Everlys. When I was thirteen, our next-door neighbour’s son was given a guitar, and he was completely tone deaf and had no interest in it whatsoever. So I borrowed it and never gave it back. I started plonking away on it, and my parents were pretty happy about that, and got me the Pete Seeger guitar book and record. These elementary lessons were wonderful.’

Also painstakingly working his way through the Seeger instruction manual was Gilmour’s friend Rado Klose, who, using his middle name as Bob Klose, would later go on to become a member of the early Pink Floyd.

‘David and I had known each other since we were born,’ says Klose. ‘His father had met mine before either of them even had families. I can’t recall if David actually took lessons from me, but I can remember the two of us listening to that Pete Seeger record and scrambling around listening to Radio Luxembourg. We’d hear a record, and think: How do you play that? And then set about trying to find out. The Ventures’ [1960 hit] “Walk Don’t Run” was one of those. David instantly picked up how to play it, while it took the rest of us much longer.’

Klose was also a pupil at the County: ‘At that time, your life is totally bound up in school. Syd was the year below me and Roger Waters was the year above. We all had similar musical tastes. For a while I was very much into jazz, but only jazz made up until 1935! Then Django Reinhardt. Roger was really into Jimmy Dufree. Discovering the blues, though, was a real moment of epiphany. I remember going into a record shop after school and finding a record by Leadbelly. I didn’t know what it was. I just liked the name, so the guy in the shop let me take it into the booth and listen. And it was like the essence of everything I’d ever liked in music - but more concentrated.’

While Leadbelly would become a shared favourite for Klose, Gilmour and Waters, the latter found his musical interests went unappreciated at home. From the age of twelve, Roger had regularly attended jazz concerts at the local Corn Exchange, but, unlike Syd’s mother, Mary Waters had little time for music.

‘She claimed to be tone deaf,’ her son recalled. ‘She had no real interest in the arts. She was very political. Politics was more important than anything else. I certainly didn’t feel encouraged in music either at home or at school.’

In 1961, the same year that Syd Barrett lost his father, Gilmour’s home life underwent a major upheaval. As part of what was commonly known as ‘the brain drain’, in which British academics were lured abroad by high-paying teaching posts, Doug Gilmour was offered a position at New York University, where he was eventually appointed Professor of Genetics. He and Sylvia announced their decision to go for a year. Gilmour’s ten-year-old brother Mark went with them, while his siblings stayed in England; sister Catherine was already attending university. The fifteen-year-old David was invited to the States, but, already fired up by the musical possibilities around him, he chose to stay in Cambridge, where he lodged with a family in Chesterton. Left unsupervised, Gilmour still found it easy to sneak out to attend gigs instead of studying for his O-Level exams. Waters, Barrett and Gilmour, with their shared academic backgrounds, all now had absent fathers, and were striking out independently, muddling towards the beginnings of what would become Pink Floyd.

If Gilmour was the first to embrace rock ’n’ roll, his future Floyd partners weren’t slow in seeking out a rebellious antidote to the strictures of Cambridge school life, even without Elvis to encourage them. If Waters’ meticulous raid on the Cambridge County orchard seems more like an art prank than a simple act of vandalism, then it’s little wonder. As a university town, Cambridge was perfectly placed to welcome the influence of a new school of non-conformist American underground writers and poets, ‘the Beat Generation’. The writers in question - Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs - always balked at the title, frequently protesting, ‘Three friends does not make a generation.’ Nevertheless, they shared enough of a like-minded vision to warrant the comparison. Ginsberg’s
Howl and Other Poems
(1956) and Burroughs’ novel
The Naked Lunch
(1959) both gained widespread over-exposure after running up against obscenity laws. Yet it was Kerouac’s
On the Road
, finally published in 1957 in the wake of the
Howl
trial, that helped establish the Beat Generation’s wider popularity. The story of a poetic drifter, hitching lifts and jumping freight trains across America, popping pills and enjoying casual sex to a soundtrack of bebop jazz, it became required reading material for smart teenagers growing up in a university town.

The Beats’ frantic creativity, anti-conformist stance and spirit of adventure appealed to both Barrett and Waters. In letters to his girlfriend Libby Gausden, Barrett enthused about
On the Road
. Experimenting with his appearance, he adopted the uniform of black trousers and fisherman’s sweaters, which was popular among art students and jazz fans. Sometime after the death of his father, he began to refer to himself occasionally as ‘Syd the Beat’, the ‘Syd’ taken from one Sid Barrett, the unrelated drummer in a jazz band he’d encountered playing the local Riverside Jazz Café.

‘There was at the time,’ Waters explained years later, ‘this idea of going east in search of adventure.’

Andrew ‘Willa’ Rawlinson accompanied Waters and others on various trips around Europe. ‘We took Roger’s mum’s car and drove to Istanbul via France, Italy and Greece,’ he recalls. ‘It took us about three months.’ Aged nineteen, Waters joined Rawlinson and others on a jaunt to the Middle East. ‘We went in an ambulance called Brutus,’ says Rawlinson. ‘We knew nothing about engines, put no water in it and it blew up in Beirut. So the five of us went our separate ways. Roger hitched back to England on his own.’ It was a trip that would provide an inspiration for his 2003 solo song ‘Leaving Beirut’, which opened with the line: ‘So we left Beirut, Willa and I . . .’

By 1962 Syd Barrett’s scepticism about rock ’n’ roll had diminished. His musical interests now included Americans such as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but also the homegrown instrumental guitar band The Shadows, a key influence on every aspiring guitarist in the early sixties. The release of the first Beatles single, ‘Love Me Do’, in 1962 and debut album,
Please Please Me
, a year later, gave another inspirational boost to the Cambridge music scene. The Beatles were English, nearer to home, ‘more like us’, and even the usually sceptical Waters said that ‘the songs on their first album were just so good.’ Barrett became an evangelical Beatles fan, and, having acquired his first electric guitar and the Holy Grail of learning manuals - the Pete Seeger record and book - started to think about a group of his own.

While Syd and John Gordon would spend time thrashing around on guitars, Syd’s first serious attempt came with the formation of Geoff Mott and The Mottoes, centred around their gregarious lead singer Geoff Mottlow, another ex-Cambridge County boy and Roger Waters’ rugby team-mate. The group had an ideal rehearsal space in Syd’s front room/bedroom and commandeered it for regular Sunday afternoon sessions. Barrett and Nobby Clarke played guitar, Mottlow sang lead vocals, while Clive Welham played drums.

‘It was quite possible that when me and Syd first started I didn’t even have any proper drums and was playing on a biscuit tin with knives,’ says Clive Welham. ‘But I bought a kit, started taking lessons and actually got quite good. I can’t even remember who our bass player was.’ Welham is certain that, contrary to most existing reference books, it wasn’t Tony Sainty, a local bassist who would end up playing in bands with David Gilmour. ‘I played in bands with Tony later,’ insists Clive, ‘but not with Syd. There were a lot of people who used to drop by and have a blow. Roger Waters was always round Syd’s house, but it was before he was doing music.’

The Mottoes’ repertoire revolved around covers of songs by Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, The Shadows and Eddie Cochran. Years later Barrett would tell the music press that ‘the band did a lot of work at private parties’, but The Mottoes only played one ticketed event, a fund-raising gig in March 1963 for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the local Friends Meeting House, advertised with a poster designed by Roger Waters. The connection was political as well as musical. Roger had followed his mother’s interest in left-wing politics by becoming a fundraiser for the
Morning Star
and chairman of the youth section of the local CND. (He later took part in CND marches to Aldermaston.) ‘We all behaved ourselves if Roger Waters was around,’ laughs Libby Gausden. ‘It was like a teacher coming into the room. Being older, Roger certainly looked the part. He had a motorbike before any of us even had driving licences
and
he owned a leather jacket.’ The band wouldn’t last, but, in 1965, Mottlow’s next group, The Boston Crabs, would score a minor hit with the future Northern Soul classic ‘Down in Mexico’, while Clive Welham would become a fixture on the Cambridge circuit.

At the age of sixteen, Syd’s days at the County were drawing to an end and he announced his intention to go to art school. His mother worked in the office of the Cambridge School of Art and to help her son’s progress, arranged for Syd and John Gordon to attend extra-curricular Saturday morning art classes. Their diligence paid off, and, in the summer of 1962, both boys enrolled at the school, where Syd, studying Art and Design, would remain for the next two years, cutting a swathe through the school and making a lasting impression on lecturers and pupils alike.

‘Syd was a very big personality,’ remembers fellow student John Watkins. ‘I mean this in the nicest possible way, but he had a real mouth on him. John Gordon reckons it was probably because his dad had died. But Syd really pushed it. He wouldn’t take bullshit, and he was always pissing about.’

Situated in East Road, the Cambridge School of Art had been founded in the nineteenth century. Ronald Searle, the cartoonist and illustrator of the popular St Trinian’s series of books, was a pupil, as were Spitting Image creators Peter Fluck and Roger Law.

‘Syd reminded me of a Spanish gypsy,’ says Richard Jacobs, a pupil in Barrett’s illustration class. ‘Later on he used to claim his grandmother
was
a gypsy. Though I’m not entirely sure we ever believed him. The first time I saw him was in the summer of 1962, and he was carrying an acoustic guitar and wearing Levi’s. I was very impressed. This was when the rest of us were all still dressing very straight. There was a common room in the basement area of the college and Syd seemed to commandeer it at break times. He was always sat on the window sill, playing guitar. He used to sing this old music hall thing - “just because my hair is curly, just because my teeth are pearly . . .” ’ (A 1910 jazz song, ‘Shine’, later recorded by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.)

The school also brought Barrett back into contact with David Gilmour. With Gilmour’s parents briefly returned from the US, David was now studying Modern Languages at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology next door. As John Watkins recalls, he seemed to spend most of his time between lectures in the art school. ‘There were several of us who played or, in my case,
half
-played guitar, and we started having sessions in the art school at lunchtimes,’ says Watkins. ‘Dave started sitting in on these, and spending more and more time with us. Before Cambridge, I’d come from Egypt and Cyprus, so I didn’t know what was going on in the English music scene. I had a guitar and I started to pick up stuff from Syd, who gave me a few lessons, and I was always hassling Gilmour for new chords. The Beatles were just starting, so Syd would have just learned something like “Twist and Shout”, and Dave turned me on to Dylan.’ Gilmour had discovered the American singer-songwriter when his parents returned from the US with a copy of his latest album.

‘In all the time I saw him there,’ says Stephen Pyle, another pupil, ‘I never saw Gilmour without that guitar in his hand. He was so single-minded about it, even then.’

While Gilmour was a more reliable teacher for learning new chords, Syd was prone to wilder tricks. ‘He took this experimental approach to playing,’ remembers another of his Cambridge peers, David Gale. ‘One time in his room, I recall Syd picking up a Zippo lighter, which he might have got off an American serviceman, and running it up and down the guitar neck. I also think someone had a Zippo with a musical box inside it that played a few notes, and he ran that up and down the neck of an amplified guitar, getting that bottleneck effect but with the music box tinkling away inside - which was the type of thing he’d end up doing in Pink Floyd.’