Inside Out (3 page)

What history does record is that Rick had been born in Pinner, that his father Robert was the chief biochemist for Unigate
Dairies, and that the family home was in Hatch End on the outskirts of London: from there Rick attended Haberdashers’ Aske’s
Grammar School. Rick played trumpet as a schoolboy, and always maintained that he played the piano before he could walk…
but would then add that he didn’t walk until he was ten. In fact it was a broken leg at twelve years old – with two months
spent in bed – that left him with a guitar for company but no tutor. Rick taught himself to play using his own fingering,
and later, encouraged by his Welsh mother Daisy, used the same approach for the piano. This teach-yourself method produced
Rick’s unique sound and style, and probably prevented him from ever making a living as a professor of technique at a conservatoire.

After a brief flirtation with skiffle, Rick had succumbed to a trad jazz influence, playing the trombone, saxophone and piano.
I’m sorry to say that he once confessed to using a bowler hat as a mute for the trombone. He went to see Humphrey Lyttelton
and Kenny Ball at Eel Pie Island, and Cyril Davies, one of the fathers of British R&B, at the Railway Tavern in Harrow. He
also hitched or cycled to Brighton at weekends before mods went on scooters and adopted the dress style of a raver (collarless
shirt, waistcoat and, on the odd occasion, bowler hat). Before arriving at the Poly he had a brief stint as a Kodak delivery
assistant, where work experience had been based on watching the drivers sidling off at midday to play golf before returning
to the depot at eight o’clock in the evening to clock out and claim their overtime.

My impressions of Rick at college are of someone quiet,
introverted, with a circle of friends outside the Poly. Jon Corpe remembers that ‘Rick was the possessor of manly good looks,
with long, luscious eyelashes that made the girls curious about him.’

In our first year, Rick, Roger and I all found ourselves in a band constructed by Clive Metcalfe, another Poly student who
played in a duo with Keith Noble, one of our classmates. I’m sure that Clive was the original motivator of the band: he could
actually play the guitar a bit and had clearly spent many hours learning the songs. The rest of us were all recruited in the
most casual ‘Yeah, I used to play a bit’ way rather than through any burning ambition. This first Poly band – the Sigma 6
– consisted of Clive, Keith Noble, Roger, myself and Rick, with Keith’s sister Sheila occasionally helping out on vocals.
Rick’s position was a little tenuous since he had no electric keyboard. He would play if a pub venue had a piano, but without
any amplification it was unlikely anyone could hear him over the drums and the Vox AC30s. If no piano were available, he would
threaten to bring along his trombone.

Rick’s girlfriend, and later wife, Juliette was more a guest artist with a repertoire of various blues pieces including ‘Summertime’
and ‘Careless Love’ that she sang particularly well. Juliette, who’d been studying modern languages at the Poly, left for
university in Brighton at the end of our first year, at the same time as Rick went on to the London College of Music. However,
by then we had found enough in common musically to continue our friendship.

I think the band stabilised around the worse rather than the better players. We briefly had one really capable guitarist (I
know he was good because he had a nice instrument and a proper Vox amplifier) but he moved on after a couple of rehearsals.
My memory is that we never tried to formalise the line-up: if two guitarists turned up it simply extended the repertoire,
as undoubtedly one of them would know a song the rest of us hadn’t learnt. At this point Roger was designated rhythm guitarist.
He
was only relegated to bass later when a refusal to spend the extra money for an electric guitar, combined with Syd Barrett’s
arrival, forced him to take a more lowly position. As he later remarked, ‘Thank God I wasn’t pushed down to the drum kit.’
I have to agree with that sentiment. If Roger was drumming, I suppose I’d have ended up as the roadie…

Like most start-up bands far more time was spent talking, planning and coming up with names than rehearsing. Gigs were very
few and far between. Until 1965 none of the gigs we did was strictly commercial in the sense that they were organised by us
or fellow students for private rather than public functions. Birthday parties, end of terms and student hops were the norm.
We rehearsed in a tearoom in the basement of the Poly, and along with songs suitable for student parties such as ‘I’m A Crawling
King Snake’ and numbers by the Searchers we also worked on songs written by one of Clive Metcalfe’s friends, a fellow student
called Ken Chapman. Ken became our manager/songwriter. He had cards printed up offering our services for parties, and a major
publicity drive for our – thankfully brief – manifestation as the Architectural Abdabs was mounted around a rather coy photograph
of us, and an article in the student paper in which we expressed our allegiance to R&B over rock. Unfortunately, Ken’s lyrics
tended to be a little too far on the ballad-cum-novelty side for us with lyrics such as ‘Have you seen a morning rose?’ (set
to the tune of ‘Für Elise’) and ‘Mind the gap’. But he did eventually get an opportunity to demo them to a well-known publisher,
Gerry Bron, who came along to audition the band and the songs. We rehearsed manfully for this opportunity but it was not a
great success. Gerry liked the songs better than the band (well, that’s what Ken told us anyway), but not even the songs made
it.

By the start of our second year as students in September 1963, Clive and Keith had decided to strike out on their own as a
duo,
and so the next version of the band began to coalesce around a house owned by Mike Leonard. Mike, then in his mid-thirties,
was a part-time tutor at the Poly, who, in addition to his love of architecture, was fascinated by ethnic percussion and the
interplay between rhythm, movement and light, which he enthused about during his lectures. In September 1963, by now also
teaching at the Hornsey College of Art, Mike acquired a house in North London and wanted some tenants to provide him with
rent income.

39 Stanhope Gardens in Highgate is one of those comfortable Edwardian houses with spacious rooms and high ceilings. Mike was
in the process of converting it into a flat on the ground floor with his own rather more exotic accommodation and drawing
office above. He had opened up the substantial roof area and created a large space ideally suited as a rehearsal facility,
but luckily for him the stairs were just too steep and we rarely had the energy to lug all the equipment to the top.

Mike also needed some part-time help in his office, where his work adding toilet accommodation to schools for the London County
Council enabled him to finance the design and building of the light machines he was constructing at home; these used perforated
metal or glass discs with perspex elements rotated by electric motors to throw out patterns of light onto a wall. Mike’s suggestion
that we become his tenants seemed an ideal arrangement, so Roger and I moved in. Over the next three years Rick, Syd and various
other acquaintances all lived there at different periods; the mood of the place was captured by an early
Tomorrow’s World
documentary on BBC TV, which showed one of Mike’s light machines in action while we rehearsed downstairs (the programme bravely
predicted that by the 1970s every living room in the land would have its own light machine).

Mike owned two cats called Tunji and McGhee – one a Burmese, the other a Siamese – that both he and Roger were particularly
fond
of. As a result Roger continued a cat relationship for years. I think he found their arrogant aggression comforting. The walls
in the house were covered in hessian and after trailing a kipper across the fabric Mike would signal mealtimes to the cats
by the use of an old motor horn. The cats would sprint back from terrorising the neighbourhood, leap through the letter box
and then start a crazed trip up the walls and along the window ledges until they found the kipper, occasionally nailed to
the drawing office ceiling.

Stanhope Gardens made a real difference to our musical activities. We had our own permanent rehearsal facility, thanks to
an indulgent landlord: indeed, we used the name Leonard’s Lodgers for a while. Rehearsals took place in the front room of
the flat where all the equipment was permanently set up. Unfortunately, this made any study very difficult and sleep almost
out of the question since it was also Roger’s and my bedroom. The neighbours naturally complained, though the threatened noise
injunction never materialised, but, just in case, we occasionally eased their pain by renting a rehearsal hall in the nearby
Railway Tavern on the Archway Road.

There were never any complaints from Mike. In fact, he became an active participant. He was a capable piano player, and we
persuaded him to purchase a Farfisa Duo electric organ and become our keyboard player for a while. Mike still has the Farfisa.
The other great bonus was that Mike gave us access to the experiments in light and sound going on at the Hornsey College.
Roger, in particular, spent many hours down there working with the light machines, and became a kind of de facto assistant
to Mike.

So, throughout our second year at college, we lived at Stanhope Gardens, rehearsed, played the occasional gig, while we continued
our studies in a fitful fashion. The next really significant change in our fortunes was the arrival of Bob Klose in September
1964. Bob, another product of Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, came
to London with Syd Barrett, and enrolled in the architectural school two years below us. Bob was able to move straight into
Stanhope Gardens since I’d moved out of the flat during the summer and back home to Hampstead. It had become quite obvious
that if I was to stay at the Poly, which seemed to be a good idea at the time, I would have to do some more work, and studying
at Stanhope Gardens was impossible.

Bob’s reputation as a guitar player was well known and much deserved. Going into a guitar shop with him was a delight as even
supercilious salesmen were impressed with his Mickey Baker jazz chords and lightning finger work, although from our point
of view he did regrettably favour the more conservative semi-acoustic guitars over the Fender Stratocaster. With Bob we felt
musically more confident, but as Keith Noble and Clive Metcalfe had both left the Poly and the band, we were desperate for
a vocalist. The Cambridge connection worked again, and Bob supplied us with Chris Dennis. He was a little older than the rest
of us, and had been part of some of the better bands on the Cambridge music scene. Chris was an RAF dental assistant stationed
at Northolt. He didn’t have a car (I was generally the driver – still driving the Austin ‘Chummy’) but he did own a Vox PA
system consisting of two columns and a separate amplifier with individual channels for the microphones. When pressed we could
put guitars through the PA as well. With all this equipment Chris was, of course, automatically guaranteed the position of
vocalist.

As front man for the band – now called the Tea Set – Chris had an unfortunate tendency for making Hitler moustaches with his
harmonica, saying ‘Sorry about that, folks’ and announcing each number (‘with deadly aplomb’ as Bob Klose puts it) as ‘Looking
Through The Knotholes In Granny’s Wooden Leg’. Had Chris stayed with the band, I suspect this routine might have proved a
liability when the Floyd became, so I am reliably informed, the
darlings of London’s underground intelligentsia.

We parted company with Chris after a short while, when Syd Barrett started to play with us on a regular basis. Roger knew
Syd from Cambridge – Roger’s mother had taught Syd at junior school – and we had been planning to add him to the band even
before he arrived in London to study at Camberwell College of Art. It was very much a case of Syd joining us, rather than
him recruiting a band. Bob Klose recalls the moment well: ‘I remember the rehearsal that sealed Chris Dennis’s fate. It was
the attic at Stanhope Gardens. Chris, Roger, Nick and I were working over a few of the R&B faves then current. Syd, arriving
late, watched quietly from the top of the stairs. Afterwards he said, “Yeah, it sounded great, but I don’t see what I would
do in the band”.’

Although Syd was not sure where he might fit in, it felt right that he should join. As a result, the days of Chris Dennis
and his PA system were numbered. Since Bob had been responsible for recruiting Chris, Roger decided that he should accordingly
be in charge of handling the unrecruiting procedure, which Bob undertook from a payphone in Tottenham Court Road tube station.
As it happened, Chris was being posted abroad in any case. And so partially by default Syd became the front man.

Having no childhood reminiscences of Syd I can only say that on first meeting him in 1964 he was delightful. In a period when
everyone was being cool in a very adolescent, self-conscious way, Syd was unfashionably outgoing; my enduring memory of our
first encounter is the fact that he bothered to come up and introduce himself to me.

Syd’s upbringing in Cambridge had been possibly the most bohemian and liberal of us all. His father Arthur, a university and
hospital pathologist, and his mother Winifred had always encouraged him in his music. They had allowed, even welcomed, rehearsals
by Syd’s early bands in their front room. This was
advanced behaviour for parents in the early 1960s. Alongside music, Syd’s interest in and talent for painting was evident
during his time at Cambridgeshire High School, which he left to study art at Cambridge Tech, just after the death of his father.
An old acquaintance of his, David Gilmour, was also there, studying modern languages. The two got along well – getting together
at lunchtimes with guitars and harmonicas for a jam – and later spent a summer down in the south of France, hitch-hiking around
and busking.

Syd was not always Syd – he’d been christened Roger Keith, but at the Riverside Jazz Club he went to in a local Cambridge
pub, one of the stalwarts was a drummer called Sid Barrett. The club regulars immediately nicknamed this newly arrived Barrett
‘Syd’, but with a ‘y’ to avoid total confusion, and that’s how we always knew him.