Inside Out (7 page)

At the end of October, we formalised our arrangement with Peter and Andrew by becoming partners in Blackhill Enterprises.
The four of us with Peter and Andrew each owned one-sixth of the company, which meant we could all share in the Floyd’s success
and any other profits from Blackhill’s ventures with other bands and the massive entertainment empire that Andrew and
Peter envisaged. The deal was very much of its time, ‘organised in the appropriate hippie way’ in Peter’s phrase, ‘a sweet
idea’, in Andrew’s.

Blackhill set up shop, literally – there was a flat above and a shop front downstairs – at 32 Alexander Street in Bayswater,
a property leased by Andrew’s girlfriend Wendy, which much later became the original headquarters of Stiff Records. Andrew
lived in the top flat, and Roger, Rick and Syd all lived there at various times, as did Joe Gannon, who was our original lighting
man and who later became a successful US-based director, producer and lighting director, notably for Alice Cooper. The place
was soon in chaos. Part band sitting room and storage, part office, it was only put in order through the arrival of June Child,
our secretary, assistant road manager, chauffeur and personal assistant. She became an invaluable member of the team, providing
the missing element of organisation to our working lives – and later married Marc Bolan, another of Blackhill’s artists.

Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine remembers Blackhill as ‘a lovely bunch of people. They were very nice, an honourable exception
to the shady rule about managers, and really cared for the people they worked for. I think that most of us were less lucky
than that.’ Soft Machine were one of the few bands we got to know, as we frequently found ourselves working beyond the fringes
of mainstream pop music. The happenings at Powis Gardens and the Roundhouse were not the traditional way of ‘paying your dues’.

Considering their rather haphazard approach to management, Peter and Andrew proved to have terrific intuition when it came
to discovering bands. Pink Floyd were not the only band they nurtured. Although they initially had to concentrate on our needs,
they would in due course launch the careers of Edgar Broughton, Roy Harper, as well as Marc Bolan and Tyrannosaurus Rex, and
work with bands like Slapp Happy and the Third Ear Band.

Their connection with the classical music promoter Christopher Hunt was an example of what made Blackhill such good news for
us at this time. Instead of relying on the tried and tested circuit of existing clubs and venues, Peter and Andrew were constantly
looking for alternative ways to promote their alternative band. Peter’s wife Sumi was Christopher’s secretary. He was able
to organise a show for us in January 1967 at the Commonwealth Institute, a beautiful purpose-built auditorium in Kensington
that was mainly used for the type of ethnic music recital by artists like Ravi Shankar that had recently come into vogue.
We needed the clout of a classical promoter to open the door for us, since I am sure the authorities would otherwise have
assumed that a riot was bound to take place; I imagine they still thought ‘rock’ was something to do with drainpipe trousers,
Teddy boys and Bill Haley.

The Westminster connection also came in handy by supplying Jonathan Fenby, who wrote the first Pink Floyd press releases,
and they were good, because he knew what the press would consider a good story – at the time he was a Reuters journalist,
who later became editor of the
Observer
and the
South China Morning Post,
as well as a distinguished author. We gained some editorial coverage in the quality press through Jonathan – the first piece
appeared in the
Financial Times.
Then Hunter Davies’ column in the
Sunday Times
of 30th October 1966 ran a short piece on psychedelia with quotes from Andrew and Roger, who stated ‘If you take LSD what
you experience depends entirely on who you are. Our music may give you the screaming horrors or throw you into screaming ecstasy.
Mostly it’s the latter. We find our audiences stop dancing now. We tend to get them standing there totally grooved with their
mouths open.’ Hunter Davies made a one-word comment on all this: ‘Hmm’. Hunter was the journalist who shortly afterwards made
his name as an observer of the pop world with his biography
The Beatles
in 1968.

We continued with more one-off appearances. These were generally not so much actual gigs as private events announced by word
of mouth, a few out of town in places like Bletchley and Canterbury, most in London, back at Hornsey College of Art, as well
as more All Saints events – the last one there was on 29th November. There were also a couple of follow-ups at the Roundhouse
including ‘Psychodelphia vs Ian Smith’, which announced ‘All madness welcome! Bring your own happenings and ecstatogenic substances.
Drag optional’, but none of them quite captured the mood of the original
IT
launch.

Playing other venues was a steep management learning curve. When we played one gig at a Catholic youth club, the bloke in
charge refused to pay up, claiming that what we were playing ‘wasn’t music’. Andrew and Peter went to the small claims court
– and to their, and our, total disbelief, we lost, as disappointingly the magistrate completely agreed with the youth club
manager’s opinion …

An Oxfam benefit called ‘You Must Be Joking?’, held at the Albert Hall in December, was another useful showcase, although
we were bottom of the bill. There were enough big names above us, including Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Chris Farlowe, and
the Alan Price Set, to guarantee an audience of five thousand. We also gained an insight into how the rest of the music business
viewed us when Alan Price raised a laugh at our expense by banging the reverb on his Hammond organ and announcing that this
was psychedelic music. At the time we were mortified, probably because all our mums were in the audience; any sense of resentment
has nearly worn off.

We also returned to the Marquee Club in December, but had a fairly uncomfortable relationship with the club and its audiences.
The manager, John Gee, came from a jazz background, and seemed unhappy with the music the club was now hosting. Irascible
and understandably disapproving after exposure to an
endless stream of noisy bands, he seemed to dislike both punters and bands with equal venom. With our weird music and funny
lights as well as our particularly amateur brand of musicianship we must have been a total anathema to him.

Sadly the Marquee audience and our support groups had a rather similar view. The Marquee had opened in 1958 first as a jazz
club, but with the times had emerged as the fulcrum of the British R&B movement. Even though initially the jazzers had looked
down on R&B with disdain, if not outright hatred, particularly as some of the musicians who also made their living as session
players could see their regular gigs and hence livelihoods disappearing fast, the club was really the heart of the British
R&B movement rather than the underground, and although we did enjoy a short residency it was really much closer to a brief
encounter.

The Marquee was an archetypal music club. The dressing room was tiny, scented with sweat and the great smell of cheap men’s
cologne – always so much simpler than attempting to shower in a sink – and on a successful night had the atmosphere of a student
party held in a lift. Otherwise it was better to make for the bar at the back where fine ale was dispensed in plastic beakers
just in case the patrons should take exception to the music or each other. You could work in the knowledge that you might
get wet but at least you would avoid severe lacerations as long as you didn’t leave the stage.

Fortunately, there was one club which could have been purpose-made for us – this was UFO, pronounced ‘U-fo’ and short for
Underground Freak Out. If Indica was the underground’s high street shop, the London Free School its education system, and
IT
its Fleet Street, then UFO was its playground, set up by Joe Boyd and John Hopkins (Hoppy). Joe was a Harvard graduate and
music freak who had first been over to England in the spring of 1964 as tour manager for the Blues and Gospel Caravan. He
met Hoppy when he came down to take photos of the Caravan.
When Joe returned later with a job as A&R man for Elektra Records, he was amazed to find that in his absence the whole underground
movement had suddenly blossomed.

Within days of coming back to London in the autumn of 1965 he’d attended the first meeting of the London Free School, and
a year later had become involved in the idea of setting up a nightclub. Hoppy and Joe found the venue: the Blarney Club in
Tottenham Court Road, which was an Irish dancehall, with a decor featuring shamrocks, leprechauns and all things Hibernian.
The club was just down from the police station and underneath two cinemas, which meant the show couldn’t start until around
10 p.m. when the cinemas closed, because of the noise problems. The first night of UFO was on 23rd December 1966 – we played
at the opening – and thereafter the club ran every Friday night through to eight in the morning.

UFO added another dimension to our career: even if it wasn’t an established club, this was London’s West End, and the place
was crowded with people who wanted to see us and knew what to expect. We were familiar with a large number of the audience,
and looked forward to playing there. It made a welcome change to the trepidation we felt whenever we played out of London.
Knowing we had a partisan audience and the beginnings of a fan base, we would break away from the band room to wander around
and watch the other acts: Soft Machine appeared regularly, and there were theatre groups, poetry readings and performance
art events. There were also plaudits on offer, rather than the lack of understanding we tended to find outside the capital.
UFO felt like a genuine base camp for those expeditions.

In June Child’s words, ‘it was the ambience that people went for. It was dark, you went downstairs… basically like an elongated
cellar. There was a very limited stage and you had small speakers, probably AC30s, and the lighting rig which was like a little
platform’. The lighting rig was set up on something like a painter and decorator’s scaffolding tower.

Jenny Fabian, the author of the novel
Groupie
(which had a
succès de scandale
when it came out in 1969; we appeared thinly disguised as Satin Odyssey), remembers a typical night at UFO: ‘The best thing
was Friday night, when you could dress up like an old film star, drop acid, go down to UFO, see all the likewise people, get
a stick of candy floss and float around until the Floyd came on. They were the first authentic sound of acid consciousness.
I’d lie down on the floor and they’d be up on stage like supernatural gargoyles playing their spaced-out music, and the same
colour that was exploding over them was exploding over us. It was like being taken over, mind, body and soul.’

UFO had various light shows as well as our own (we were still the only band who possessed one). Robert Wyatt recalls UFO’s
in-house lighting man Mark Boyle ‘doing lights and burning himself to pieces to do these experiments with different coloured
acids. You just saw him with these goggles, looking all burnt, high up on some rigging.’ There was also a fifty-year-old called
Jack Bracelin, who ran a nudist colony in Watford, and occasionally used one corner of UFO for a smaller light show, presumably
whenever the weather in Hertfordshire turned inclement. While Robert remembers that the light show allowed him a certain amount
of anonymity, so that his band could relax into ‘the same swirly gloom’ as the audience, we were still interested in using
the light shows to illuminate rather than obscure us.

Town
magazine ran a piece on the underground and captured the mood of UFO in particular: ‘The Pink Floyd is the underground’s
house orchestra. Their music sounds more like Thelonious Monk than the Rolling Stones. Projected slides bathed the musicians
and audience in hypnotic and frenzied patterns of liquid-coloured
lights. Honeycombs, galaxies and throbbing cells whirl around the group with accelerating abandon as the music develops.’

We may have been adopted as the house orchestra, but we rarely got to share the psychedelic experience. We were out of it,
not on acid, but out of the loop, stuck in the dressing room at UFO. We were busy being a band: rehearsing, travelling to
gigs, packing up and driving home. Psychedelia was around us, but not within us. We might buy a book at Indica, but we certainly
never had time to linger. We’d read
IT
but the primary reason was to check whether we’d had a review or not. Of the band, Syd was perhaps slightly more intrigued
by the wider aspects of psychedelia, and drawn to some of the philosophical and mystical aspects that his particular group
of friends was exploring. But although he was interested, I don’t think – like the rest of us if we had wanted to – he had
enough time to become fully immersed in the scene.

The rest of the world got its impression of psychedelia from the sort of ad that was placed in
Melody Maker
for ‘Psychedelicamania’ at the Roundhouse on New Year’s Eve: ‘WHAT IS A FREAK OUT? When a large number of individuals gather
and express themselves creatively through music, dance, light patterns and electronic sound. The participants, already emancipated
from our national slavery, dressed in their most inspired apparel, realise as a group whatever potential they possess for
free expression. IT’S ALL HAPPENING MAN!’

Around this time, one turning point in my own personal musical development was the night Cream played at the Poly, where we
still performed from time to time, although we were only paying punters for this particular gig. The moment when the curtain
went back is crystal clear in my mind. Cream’s road manager was on the stage – probably still trying to nail Ginger Baker’s
double bass drums to the floor. Ginger was famous for insisting on this, and there are ruined marble floors and carpets around
the globe to
prove it. From this moment on I had to have a double bass drum kit – and went straight out and bought one the next day.