Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (7 page)

Nick’s musical education also began with Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and regular scanning of the airwaves in search of Radio Luxembourg. He learned to play the violin and piano, but showed no great aptitude at either. A drum kit followed later, and Mason became part of an ad-hoc school group called The Hot Rods, whose repertoire rarely extended beyond tireless renditions of the
Peter Gunn
TV theme.

At the age of eleven, Mason was enrolled at Frensham Heights, a co-ed boarding school near Farnham in Surrey. Today, the school prides itself on ‘No uniforms, no competition, teachers and pupils all on a first-name basis.’ And even in the 1950s, compared to Waters’ experiences at the strait-laced, boys-only Cambridge County, Nick’s time at Frensham Heights was a good deal more relaxed. ‘I enjoyed my time at Frensham,’ he wrote in 2004. ‘It was fairly traditional, in terms of blazers and exams, but it had a far more liberal approach to education.’

Mason didn’t apply himself quite so vigorously to his academic work as might have been expected. At Frensham, his interest in music was stirred by the modern jazz and, later, bebop records played in the school common room. By the time he was fourteen, he was playing drums again, albeit on his own terms. ‘I never had any formal training,’ he said later. ‘And I think that was a big mistake. The easiest way to learn something properly is to be taught it.’

After leaving school, Nick ‘drifted into a five-year architecture course’ at Regent Street Poly in the spring of 1962. Perhaps tellingly, Frank Rutter, the father of Nick’s then girlfriend and future wife, Lindy, was an architect of some note. Even then, while drumming again, he seemed to share none of David Gilmour’s burning ambition to become a musician. As Mason would tell one interviewer some years later: ‘I’m a very bad example of how things can still go right without trying - how you can still get lucky.’

More than architecture or music, Nick’s passion was cars, one of which, a 1930 Austin ‘Chummy’, he used to drive himself to and from the Poly. Mason wrote in his 2004 book that this car was the reason Roger Waters first ‘deigned to speak to me’. Waters wanted to borrow the vehicle; the protective Mason refused, claiming it was currently out of action. Shortly after, Roger spotted Nick behind the wheel. Nevertheless, when the two were given a shared assignment, they struck up a friendship.

In September 1963, Poly students Keith Noble and Clive Metcalfe were casting around for like-minded students and placed a notice on the college noticeboard. ‘It said, “Anyone want to start a group?” ’ recalls Clive Metcalfe. At the time Noble and Metcalfe were already some way ahead of their new rhythm section. ‘Keith and I used to sing together in a bar in Albemarle Street in Piccadilly. We were doing everything from The Beatles to Peter, Paul and Mary, R&B, twelve-bar blues. I was actually at the Chelsea School of Art, but at the time it was being rebuilt so they put us into Regent St Poly.’ Keen to expand beyond a duo, Noble and Metcalfe began rehearsing in the student common room with ‘the people that saw our notice and turned up’. These included Mason and Waters (then playing rudimentary guitar), and Keith Noble’s sister Sheilagh.

‘Sheilagh used to sing with Keith, but I don’t remember her doing very much with us,’ says Metcalfe. ‘Roger wasn’t very well developed as a musician, so although I originally played lead and rhythm guitar, when we realised we needed a bass player, I switched to bass.’

The band took the name of The Sigma 6 after expanding to a sextet with the arrival of another Poly student, pianist Richard William Wright. Born on 28 July 1943, Wright was the son of a biochemist, Robert, who was employed at the local Unigate Dairies, and his wife Daisy. The Wrights lived in Hatch End, Pinner, North London. Pinner was also home to Reg Dwight, who would become Elton John, and, much later, Duran Duran’s future lead singer Simon Le Bon.

After a stint at the local prep school, St John’s, Richard was enrolled at Haberdashers Aske’s, a fee-paying grammar school, then located in Hampstead. (It later moved to Elstree.) By the time Richard reached his teens, he’d learned trombone, saxophone, guitar and piano, and was a frequent visitor to trad jazz gigs at the Railway Tavern in neighbouring Harrow and Wealdstone, where The Who would later launch their career. ‘I wasn’t into pop music at all,’ he said later. ‘I was listening to jazz. The music I first listened to that made me want to be a musician was back in the days of Coltrane, Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy.’

A brief stint as a messenger boy for the local Kodak factory in Harrow and Wealdstone ensued, but, unsure of what he wanted to do with his life, Richard sheepishly followed his careers master’s advice and, in 1962, signed up to study architecture at Regent Street Poly. Years later, he would admit that ‘being an architect never really interested me’.

Not owning a keyboard at the time, Wright’s role in the band was dependent on whether a piano was available at the venue. Bookings were mostly student birthday parties and private functions in and around the Poly. With Sheilagh Noble gone, Wright’s girlfriend Juliette Gale, then also studying at the Poly, stepped in as an occasional singer.

‘Juliette was lovely and she sang brilliantly,’ remembers Clive Metcalfe. ‘She’d sing blues, things like “Summertime”. Rick Wright was just incredibly quiet. I don’t think I ever really got to know him.’

By the end of the year, the group had acquired a manager and sometime songwriter in another student, Ken Chapman, who’d push his own compositions on to the band to fit in with their repertoire of R&B numbers. (‘There was one that was set to the tune of Beethoven’s
Für Elise
,’ recalled Waters.) Chapman also hustled an audition with Gerry Bron, then a music publisher and later the founder of Bronze Records. ‘He said the songs were quite good but to forget the band,’ remembered Nick Mason. ‘I think if we’d listened to anyone who had any taste at the time we’d have folded up right there and then. But we were so egocentric we just carried on.’ Throughout the coming year there were many name changes, including, supposedly, The Megadeaths and The Screaming Abdabs (later shortened to The Abdabs). Interviewed for an article in the student magazine, The Abdabs were photographed posing awkwardly beside a lamp-post in Great Titchfield Street, Waters - denouncing rock as ‘beat without expression’ - wearing his regulation Dylan-style black leather box jacket and best sneer.

‘I struggled with Roger,’ admits Clive Metcalfe. ‘Nick Mason was very easy-going but I found Roger rather acerbic, and I was an easy target. I’d grown up in the country and had had a rather sheltered background. Roger didn’t suffer fools gladly, and I’m afraid he could make a fool of me rather easily.’

‘I’m not sure if I was aware of being menacing,’ Waters explained later. ‘Although I think that in my insecurity I probably tried cultivating it. I was so frightened of everything as a young man that I became quite aggressive.’

At the same time as he was attending the Poly, Wright was taking private lessons in musical theory and composition at the Eric Gilder School of Music, but realising architecture was not his vocation, he jumped ship (or was pushed, according to some sources) at the end of his first year.

‘I gave up in boredom,’ he later explained. ‘So I started going abroad to places like Greece, and then came home to earn a bit of money in jobs like interior designing and private decorating. But I was very unhappy and turned to studying music.’ Wright eventually enrolled at London’s Royal College of Music.

Meanwhile, Waters and Mason struggled to apply themselves to their studies. Waters, especially, seemed as frustrated with his teachers at the Poly as he had been with those at the County, clashing repeatedly with his Architectural History lecturer. ‘I must have been horrible to teach,’ he admitted years later. ‘I was very bolshie. It was just like school, and I hoped I’d escaped all that.’ Yet there were two lecturers that didn’t attract Waters’ withering contempt. The first, his head of year, encouraged him to bring his guitar into class, and allowed him to play it during study time. The other was architect Mike Leonard, who taught part-time at the Poly and at the Hornsey College of Art. He was an accomplished pianist and, although some fifteen years older than his pupils, shared an interest in the more avant-garde areas of music. Much to Waters’ curiosity, Leonard was also experimenting with lighting effects; designing and building contraptions out of glass and Perspex, and experimenting with oil slides. Leonard’s house in Stanhope Gardens, Highgate, was large enough to double as a rehearsal space, but he also needed tenants to help pay the mortgage. Mason and Waters were the first to move in.

The arrival of guitarist Bob Klose, David Gilmour’s childhood friend, in the summer of 1964 proved timely. Klose had been playing regularly in a Cambridge band, Blues Anonymous, and had become a highly rated guitarist. However, his arrival prompted Clive Metcalfe and Keith Noble to return to working as a duo. ‘Bob was one of those guitarists that I thought got overly clever,’ says Metcalfe. ‘With me and Keith in the band the sound really wasn’t gelling.’ Metcalfe and Noble would go on to write ‘A Summer Song’, a US Top 40 hit for Chad and Jeremy later that year. Klose moved into Stanhope Gardens and took over as guitarist, while Waters switched to bass.

Bob Klose wasn’t the only Cantabrigian to move down to the capital. Since enrolling at the Camberwell School of Art, Syd was now in London permanently, sharing a bed-sit with David Gale in a decrepit house in Tottenham Street, where another of the Cambridge gang, Seamus O’Connell, was already living with his mother.

‘It was this rundown crappy tenement block just off Tottenham Court Road,’ says Seamus now. ‘I did well at the County up until O-levels, but then I went a bit off my nut due to family troubles. My mother decided to move to London and I went with her. So I was living in this place and studying for my A-Levels, when David and Syd moved down.’

While Barrett disappeared each morning to Camberwell, Gale was studying film at the Royal College of Art and working part-time in the Better Books shop on Charing Cross Road, then the capital’s main emporium for beat literature and magazines. At night, they would repair to what Gale remembers as ‘our scummy little room’ with a mattress either side. As one visitor recalls, ‘While domesticity was not a priority in any of the places we lived, that flat in Tottenham Street was the only one I recall in which there were cockroaches.’

Inevitably, Barrett soon found himself drawn to the Highgate lodgings of his old schoolfriend Roger Waters. Within months Syd had moved to Stanhope Gardens alongside Klose, Waters and another Cambridge deserter, Dave Gilbert. Wright had moved in with Juliette Gale, while Mason had returned to the relative sanctuary - and swimming pool - of his parents’ Hampstead home.

For the Cambridge contingent, their first visit to the drummer’s parents’ home came as surprise. ‘The band barely had any money for petrol to make the journey,’ recalls Libby Gausden. ‘When we arrived at Nick’s we were made very welcome by the sort of people you didn’t think would make you feel welcome at all. There we were, all black clothes and hair, thinking we were beatniks. I recall Nick had a very good drum kit and money for amplifiers and his parents were quite happy for him to be playing in a group. It seemed to us coming from Cambridge that London people had money.’

Mike Leonard’s house was an Aladdin’s cave of exotic musical instruments, suits of armour, beatnik books and jazz records, shared with his cats Tunji and McGhee. The set-up appealed to Syd’s sense of the bizarre. While Leonard lived and worked on the upper floor, Barrett, Mason, Waters and Klose rehearsed below. ‘The noise was phenomenal,’ Leonard said in 1991. ‘The neighbours sent round the police and council officials. Then they had a lawyer’s letter saying someone’s health was being damaged.’ Undeterred, the band, now calling themselves The Spectrum Five, continued the din, while a fascinated Barrett and Waters helped Leonard with his prototype lights machines. The group would also supply the music for Mike’s experiments at Hornsey College of Art’s Sound and Light Workshop.

Mike would sit in on some rehearsals and play organ, but, despite a couple of performances with the band in a local pub, had no desire to become a pop star: ‘I was a bit too old and didn’t have the right image.’ Instead, he was content to encourage the band while marvelling at Barrett’s practical jokes and fumbled attempts to cook Sunday lunch: ‘Half an uncooked cabbage would end up on your plate.’ The band briefly adopted the name Leonard’s Lodgers in their landlord’s honour.

Having taken a break from his studies, the briefly absent Richard Wright was soon back playing keyboards on a permanent basis. He had also enjoyed a musical breakthrough of his own, selling one of his own songs, ‘You’re the Reason Why’, to Liverpudlian harmony trio Adam, Mike and Tim, for the princely sum of £75.

Nevertheless, the role of a proper lead singer was still unfilled. Juliette Gale had left the Poly to attend university in Brighton. Barrett and Klose muddled through on lead vocals, but soon realised that they needed a proper frontman. Syd approached Geoff Mottlow, but he’d just had a hit with The Boston Crabs, and turned them down. At Klose’s suggestion, they sought out another Cambridge refugee.

Chris Dennis had sung in a local band called The Redcaps, worked as a technician for the RAF, and had the rare distinction of having sung with Malta’s first electric group, The Zodiacs, during a posting on the island. He was older than his penniless student bandmates, and had the benefit of owning a Vox PA system.

‘It was very much a case of me joining them,’ says Dennis now. ‘They wanted to play strictly blues - Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf - stuff that was unheard of in the UK at the time. I was much more into rhythm and blues after seeing The Rolling Stones at the Rex Ballroom in Cambridge. That was much more my style.’

Dennis attended rehearsals at Mike Leonard’s place and stuck with the group for six months, playing around a dozen gigs, including an opening slot for Jeff Beck’s group The Tridents. ‘With a lot of bands you find there’s someone in the group who’s there only because they’re a friend, and, at first, I thought Syd was surplus to requirements. He used to sing some numbers, like Chuck Berry’s ‘No Money Down’, but he didn’t have any presence. Roger was the leader. It was Roger who told me what to sing and what songs to learn.’