Inside Out (5 page)

I found the whole event pretty strange. We were used to playing R&B parties where the entry fee was a keg of bitter. Suddenly
we were performing for a ‘happening’, and being encouraged to develop the extended solos that we’d only really put into the
songs to pad them out during our Countdown Club residency. The organisers asked us to come back to the Marquee for some similar
Sunday afternoon events, which subsequently became known as the Spontaneous Underground. This was fortuitous, since otherwise
we would never have met Peter Jenner.

Peter had recently graduated from Cambridge, although he did
not encounter any member of the Pink Floyd crowd during his time at the university (there was still a significant divide between
town and gown). He was working at the Department of Social Administration at the London School of Economics, teaching social
workers sociology and economics, and also involved in a record label called DNA. He was, in his own words, ‘a music nut’,
into jazz and blues in particular and had set up DNA with John Hopkins, Felix Mendelssohn and Ron Atkins, to reflect their
broad range of musical interest: ‘We wanted DNA to be an avant-garde thing, avant-garde anything: jazz, folk, classical, pop.’

At the end of the academic year Peter was marking a pile of papers one Sunday, and had reached the point where he needed to
get out for a breath of fresh air. He decided to head out from the LSE in Holborn across to the Marquee Club in Wardour Street,
where he knew there was a private gig happening. He knew this through an acquaintance called Bernard Stollman, whose brother
Stephen ran ESP, an arty American label, which included acts like the Fugs, and which had been an inspiration for the setting
up of DNA.

Peter recalls, ‘DNA had done some work with the free improvisation group AMM, recording an album in one day in Denmark Street.
The deal was rotten: 2 per cent out of which the studio time, and probably the artists, had to be paid, and as an economist
I came to the conclusion that 2 per cent of a £30 album was only 7d, and that it would take an awful lot of 7ds to earn £1,000,
which was my idea of a fortune. I decided that if DNA was going to work we had to have a pop band. That’s when I saw the Pink
Floyd Sound at the Marquee Club that Sunday. I did think the “Sound” part of their name was pretty lame.

‘I remember very clearly seeing the show. The band were basically playing R&B, things like “Louie Louie” and “Dust My Broom”,
things everybody played at the time. I couldn’t make out the lyrics, but nobody could hear the lyrics in those days. But what
intrigued me was that instead of wailing guitar solos in the middle, they made this weird noise. For a while I couldn’t work
out what it was. And it turned out to be Syd and Rick. Syd had his Binson Echorec and was doing weird things with feedback.
Rick was also producing some strange, long, shifting chords. Nick was using mallets. That was the thing that got me. This
was avant-garde! Sold!’

Peter wanted to get in touch with us, and was given a contact by Bernard Stollman. He came round to Stanhope Gardens to see
us: ‘Roger answered the door. Everybody else had gone off on holiday, as it was the end of the academic year. So we agreed,
“See you in September!” The record label was a whim of mine, a hobby, so I had no problem waiting. Roger hadn’t told me to
fuck off. It was just “See you in September” …’

When Peter came round to Stanhope Gardens, I was away on a low-budget first trip to the States. My trip to America was seen
as part of my continuing architectural education, a chance to go and see some of the great buildings in the USA, rather than
a rootsy musical pilgrimage. Lindy was out in New York – training as a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company – which
was another good reason to go, as she would have some time off in the summer recess (Juliette, Rick’s girlfriend, was also
out there at the same time, by chance).

I flew out on a PanAm 707 and spent a couple of weeks in New York. There was some cultural and architectural sightseeing –
the Guggenheim, MOMA, the Lever Building – but I did also get to see some live music. I saw the Fugs, and went to see some
jazz acts like Mose Allison and Thelonious Monk live at the Village Vanguard and the other Greenwich Village jazz clubs. I
spent a certain amount of time going to record shops. A lot of music was unavailable on import, and the stiff American album
sleeves, which looked very fancy in comparison to their rather flimsy British equivalents, were prized trophies.

For $99 Lindy and I then acquired a Greyhound bus ticket giving us unlimited travel for three months, and headed west on –
for us – a gigantic journey of 3,000 miles coast to coast, non-stop apart from the occasional refuel and refreshment break.
On the bus we got to know a newly married American couple – the groom was about to head off to Vietnam, which meant little
to us in 1966; the full significance only hit me later on, and I still occasionally wonder if he survived.

San Francisco was not yet the ‘Summer of Love’ capital of the world. Haight-Ashbury was still simply a crossroads. The city
was much more geared to sightseeing (trips to Alcatraz) and seafood. From there we took the Greyhound east to Lexington, Kentucky
and met up with a Poly friend Don McGarry and his girlfriend Deirdre. Don had bought a late Fifties Cadillac, with unreliable
brakes, which made the mountain passes rather exciting. We drove almost immediately – with the occasional architectural detour
– to Mexico City, where we managed to muddle our way around, before spending some time in Acapulco, amazed at how cheap everything
was out of season: rooms were a dollar a night. A further epic journey back to Lexington ensued, before I returned to New
York and back across the Atlantic.

The Pink Floyd Sound had not penetrated my consciousness very much during this trip. I simply thought that, come September,
I’d be back on the academic treadmill. However, in New York, I came across a copy of the
East Village Other
newspaper, with a report from London on up and coming bands, which mentioned the Pink Floyd Sound.

Finding this name check so far from home really gave me a new perception of the band. Displaying a touchingly naive trust
in the fact that you can believe everything you read in the papers, it made me realise that the band had the potential to
be more than simply a vehicle for our own amusement.

W
HEN THE
members of the Pink Floyd Sound reconvened in London after the summer break of 1966, Peter Jenner was still waiting. He came
back to Stanhope Gardens and said, ‘We’d love to have you on the label.’ Roger told him that we didn’t need a label, but we
did need a manager.

This instantly rekindled our vague fantasies of success, daydreams that might have otherwise disappeared with the end of the
summer. Slightly surprised by his persistence, but eager to seize any opportunity, we eventually agreed that Peter, and his
partner Andrew King, should manage the band. On one occasion, when we had a discussion about management, Andrew remembers
me saying, ‘No one else wants to manage us, so you might as well…’ We saw their involvement as a significant step for us,
giving us the chance to acquire a number of items, all essential if we were ever going to make the transition from amateur
to professional: regular, paid work, a level of credibility and some decent equipment.

Peter and Andrew had known each other since their schooldays at Westminster. Their fathers were both vicars: when Andrew was
about to go into his final year, his parents had to move away from London and decided to find a good Christian home where
their son could stay during term time. Consequently Andrew had lived with the Jenners in Southall, at the St George’s vicarage.
Peter was a year younger than Andrew, so they hadn’t really known each other at school, but living in the same house led to
shared interests. Sadly, I have no memory of the band receiving any
spiritual guidance from the unholy alliance that resulted from their friendship. However, Andrew observes that pastoral care
is a useful management tool in the music industry: ‘In a vicarage you have to be ready to deal with anything and anybody coming
through the door.’

In their year between the Oxbridge exams and going up in the autumn, Andrew and Peter went to the States, through another
clerical connection (this time Episcopalian) and worked in a whiskey distillery in Peking, Illinois, for six months, a location
that gave them easy access to Chicago at the weekends and a chance to absorb a rich mix of electric blues, jazz and gospel
music.

The two had kept in touch during their time at university – Peter at Cambridge, Andrew at Oxford. When Peter decided to start
managing us, he called his old friend Andrew for help, and more importantly, for cash. Andrew had a job with a company applying
scientific principles to educational training via a machine that asked trainees to select answers to multiple-choice questions
by pressing levers. After writing a program for the machine on thermodynamics (of which he only had the sketchiest knowledge),
Andrew was loaned out to the BEA airline to help motivate their staff. Each company thought he was in the other’s office,
whereas Andrew was more likely in bed, or practising origami with some Rizla papers… Neither the airline staff nor Andrew
himself seem to have been able to muster much motivation at all, and Peter’s call seemed a much more attractive proposition.

Peter remembers, ‘We were good mates and had been to see a lot of music together. We felt, “Why don’t we manage this band.
It could be interesting.” Andrew had left his job and was not working, I thought it would continue to be a good hobby.’ Together
they set up Blackhill Enterprises, named after Blackhill Farm, a property in the Brecon Beacons that Andrew had bought with
some inherited money. The rest of the legacy went on a
straight split between wild living and some much needed equipment for the Pink Floyd Sound.

Previously, on the few occasions we had actually been paid for gigs, any cash had been spent on upgrading our own individual
gear: Roger had picked up a Rickenbacker bass, and I’d moved on from my original makeshift kit to a Premier kit. After parting
company with Chris Dennis and his PA, we’d either borrowed one or made do with whatever system a venue possessed, usually
offering the kind of sound quality even a railway station announcer would have found unclear. Blackhill rectified the situation
immediately, taking us on a trip to the Charing Cross Road and buying us a Selmer PA system, as well as new bass and guitar
amps.

Initially, Peter had intended to continue running DNA as well as lecturing and managing us, while Andrew concentrated on Pink
Floyd, but when it became clear that DNA was not a going concern, Peter focused on us. Of the two, Peter was the hustler –
and the diplomat – who could talk his way into a deal. Peter describes himself as ‘an A1 bullshitter – still am!’ and had
the added bonus of a link into the underground scene. Andrew was more relaxed, and a lot of fun to be around, but his taste
for a good time sometimes led to moments of unreliability. However, he refutes the myth that our entire cash float for one
Scandinavian tour disappeared after a particularly good night out. In fact, he says, he just pulled out some loose change
from his pocket and a few krone rolled down a drain. It was unfortunate that Roger’s eagle eye registered this moment.

Apart from the time they had spent in Illinois, which had allowed them to observe the Chicago music scene in action, the two
really had virtually no experience of the music business. However, to our even less experienced eyes, they seemed to have
sufficient connections to find more, and better, work and to open negotiations with record companies. It would have been lunacy
for us to try and negotiate a record deal for ourselves as, dazzled by visions of Number One singles, we’d have signed for
a pittance with the first company that made an offer. Peter and Andrew would at least have hesitated for a polite moment or
so.

As well as the promise of more work, and the reality of new equipment, the Jenner–King team supplied us with a link into London’s
incipient underground movement through Peter’s involvement with the London Free School, an alternative educational establishment.
England in 1966 was going through some remarkable changes. The Labour government of Harold Wilson was in the middle of bringing
in a raft of changes in the laws concerning obscenity, divorce, abortion and homosexuality. The Pill had become available.
Female emancipation was developing into more than just a theory, allowing women like Germaine Greer and Caroline Coon (the
founder of Release, the world’s first phoneline for drugs and legal advice) to participate on equal terms.