Roger Keith Barrett was born January 6, 1946 at 60 Glisson Road, off Hills Road, Cambridge, the fourth of five children: Alan (b. 1937), Donald, Ruth and Rosemary. His father, Dr. Arthur Max Barrett had attended Cambridge High School before making his career at the London Hospital. It was at the London Hospital that he met Winifred Flack who worked there as the head of the kitchens. She came from a distinguished London family, her great grandmother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, having been the first woman physician in Great Britain. It was largely as a result of Anderson’s campaigning efforts that women were able to enter the medical profession. A year after her death in 1917, her small dispensary was named the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in her honour.* In 1938, Dr Barrett was appointed University Demonstrator in Pathology at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and he returned to his home town with his wife – they were married in 1935 – to raise a family. They quickly became central figures in the intellectual life of Cambridge. Dr. Barrett loved music and was a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society; there was an upright piano in the music room around which the family would sometimes gather. He had his own key to the University Botanical Gardens on Hills Road where he painted plants in watercolour. He was also an expert on fungi and is said to have written several books on that subject though there is no record of them at the British Library. There are suggestions that he illustrated them himself, so Syd’s artistic talent probably came from his father’s side of the family. His mother had a great interest in scouts and guides and was a high ranking figure in the county Girl Guides Brigade. She did a lot of social work, running a lunch club for old-age pensioners and doing other good works.
In 1950, when Syd was four, the family moved a few blocks south to a large doublefronted, five bedroom house at 183 Hills Road, large enough for all the family and their friends. Hills Road was a good deal more leafier then and had a lot less traffic. There was a large, well lit, double-height entry hall with an open staircase which led to a wooden first-floor gallery, protected by a wooden balustrade off which lay the bedrooms. The kitchen and living room was always filled with visitors and the childrens’ schoolmates. It was a big, friendly household but when Dr. Barrett was appointed the university’s Morbid Anatomist – he worked as a police pathologist – he was so occupied with his work at Addenbrooke’s that he rarely was able to spend time alone with any of his children. He engaged in a number of research programmes including pioneer research into cot death syndrome and after his death a ward was named after him.
Young Roger (to be referred to as Syd from now on to distinguish him from Roger Waters) was a keen scout. It was a family tradition; his parents had first got together on a London Hospital scout troupe outing to Essex in the hot summer of 1930 when they encountered each other in a haystack. Syd enjoyed camping and outdoor activities and graduated from cub scout to scout and finally Boy Scout Patrol Leader. Syd was a gregarious, extrovert child; the clown of the family with a great sense of humour – he would entertain everyone by playing the Jew’s harp, acting out Eccles and Major Bloodnok from The Goon Show, and imitating Wilfred Pickles’ Yorkshire accent from the BBC quiz show Have A Go – but he was a spoiled child and used to getting his own way. As the youngest boy, his mother doted on him but when things didn’t go as he planned he was capable of violence: breaking windows, throwing stones at passing cars and misbehaving until he once more gained control.
Syd Barrett merging with the coloured lights that were such an integral part of Pink Floyd’s live show. It is possible that the strobe effects contributed to Barrett’s mental breakdown.
Syd and his younger sister, Rosemary (‘Roe’), were closest in age and spent a great deal of time together, sharing a bedroom and becoming very close. They often went roller-skating together or explored Grantchester Meadows where they would bathe in the River Cam. The meadows remained one of Syd’s favourite places and he attributed the strong atmosphere of childhood innocence in his lyrics, the references to fairy tales and nursery rhymes, to his idyllic childhood: “I think a lot of it has to do with living in Cambridge, with nature and everything – it’s so clean, and I still drive back a lot. Maybe if I’d stayed at college I would have become a teacher.” When Syd was seven, he and Rosemary won the piano prize at the Cambridge Guildhall for a rendition of ‘The Blue Danube.’
At Hills Road he was enrolled in the Morley Memorial Junior School, being taught by Mary Waters, Roger’s mother. He was so close to his sister that when it came time for her first day at the school, it was Syd that took Rosemary, not their mother. According to Roe they skipped down the road hand-in-hand together but according to Syd’s teachers he was sometimes so reluctant to attend school that his father had to bring him. It was clear that with the obvious exception of art, Syd was not much good at his lessons and he only just scraped through the 11+ examination to Cambridge County High School, just up Hills Road from his house. Though he does not seem to have suffered in the same way as Roger at the County, Syd encountered disciplinary problems, particularly when he would arrive at school without his school blazer or tie. He had wide flat feet and felt more comfortable with no shoelaces and socks, something the school also frowned upon. He was hyperactive, always bouncing on the balls of his feet – a habit he continued into adulthood – and continually interrupted the teachers to excitedly make his own point, but whereas Roger reacted to the teachers with peevish ill-will, Syd had early on discovered that he could usually charm people into letting him have his own way. He was usually able to talk his way out of situations and would wheedle his way around the teachers with smiles and jokes. Syd won poetry reading and public speaking competitions and played the lead in school plays, all of which appealed to his extrovert side. According to his sister Rosemary, many of the twists and turns in Syd’s songs that his fans took so seriously were really jokes, designed to put people on.
Syd Barrett as a child.
Syd’s personality changed dramatically when his father died suddenly on December 11, 1961. Dr Barrett had developed an aggressive cancer and, though the children knew that he was ill, the seriousness of his condition was not made apparent until about a week before his death so it came as a great shock. Syd could not concentrate on his studies and he became rebellious and difficult at home, unable to deal with a situation where he had no control. His sister thinks that out of all the children, Syd was possibly most affected by their father’s death. Winifred now had to bring up five children as a single mother and could no longer devote as much attention to him as before. Money was also a problem and she began to take in lodgers to supplement her income, two to each spare room. This was a common occurrence in the neighbourhood and the lodgers were all ‘high class’ people: among Winifred’s guests were Junichiro Koizumi, later the prime minister of Japan, and Jean Moreau’s daughter. The three older children had all left home so Syd was moved from his upstairs bedroom into the large ground floor to the left of the hall which was fitted with its own Yale lock, giving him in effect a bedsitter of his own.
The Madcap Laughs session, Earl’s Court, 1969.
Syd reacted very badly to all these changes. He threw himself into his art, spending as much time painting as possible. He more or less took over the big communal room downstairs as a painting studio and would often creep away from school to go home and paint; he only lived across the street. Cross-country running was a good lesson for him to sneak away from; he would start the run with the rest of the boys, drop back, then go home, get in an hour of painting, return to the route and join the run somewhere towards the end, huffing and puffing as if he had run the entire distance.
If art was his first love, music came a close second. Like most of his friends, Syd tuned in to Radio Luxembourg in the evenings for black American rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm ‘n’ blues: Bo Diddley was his favourite, and remained so. Luxembourg was also good for skiffle which caused Syd to take up the ukulele. His older brother, Alan, was also keen and played saxophone in a local skiffle group for a while. According to Floyd folklore, Syd’s first real instrument was a banjo, given to him when he was 11 by his father. Syd later claimed that he found it in a second hand store and “plunked away quite happily for about six months. Then I decided to get a guitar.” This suggests that he was older than 11 which appears more likely. His first guitar was a Number 12 Hofner Acoustic, bought by his parents when he was 14, which he played in his bedroom with friend John Gordon, using an amplifier that Syd made himself from a kit. Syd and John called themselves the Hollerin’ Blues.
When he was 16 Syd joined a local group, Geoff Mott & the Mottoes and switched to a Futurama 2. “At the time I thought it was the end in guitars,” said Barrett. “Fantastic design.” It was an iconic instrument, an inexpensive copy of the Fender Stratocaster, with its cut-away body, its angled machine-head ending in a rounded phallic curve and of course its vibrato-bar which made for a whole new range of guitar hero histrionics even though it often threw the guitar out of tune. This was the big switch, musically, from Woody Guthrie, folk and blues, to the electric music of the Shadows.
Pink Floyd, EMI House, 1967.
‘On the train home I clearly remember sitting with Syd making a drawing of all the equipment we through we’d ever need, which consisted of two Vox AC30S.’
Roger Waters
Aside from Syd on guitar and vocals and Geoff Mott as lead singer, the lineup of Geoff Mott & the Mottoes consisted of Tony Sainty on bass and Clive Wellham on drums. They practiced in Syd’s room on Sunday afternoons and, according to Syd, did a lot of work at private parties. However, Barrett scholars say there was only one proper gig, a local CND fundraiser – perhaps organised by Roger Waters who was at school with Geoff and played alongside him in the High School rugby team. As the chairman of YCND Cambridge, Roger sometimes designed posters for the group who mostly played Shadows instrumentals, plus a few Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran songs, along with some original material. Roger occasionally sat in at band practice in Syd’s room but he was not yet a proficient guitarist.
Roger had saved up enough money from pea-picking to buy a 1946 Francis Barnet 125cc motor cycle on which he roared around the Cambridge streets, an apparently terrifying sight with his long legs and teeth clenched tightly together. Roger: “Syd Barrett – who was a couple of years younger – and I became friends in Cambridge. We both had similar interests – rock ‘n’ roll, danger and sex and drugs, probably in that order. I had a motor bike before I left home, and we used to go on mad rides out into the country. We would have races at night, incredibly dangerous, which we survived somehow. Those days – 1959 to 1960 – were heady times.”
Syd and Roger were part of a group of young people who hung out at the Criterion pub, a run-down establishment in Cambridge’s town centre, where they kept company with Aubrey Powell – known as ‘Po’ – Storm Thorgerson and David Gilmour. Roger: “Syd and I went through our most formative years together, riding on my motorbike, getting drunk, doing a little dope, flirting with girls, all that basic stuff. I still consider Syd a great primary inspiration; there was a wonderful human tenderness to all his unique musical flights.”
Being a university town there was a lot of interest in the American Beat Generation and like Roger, Syd was interested in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and the novels of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs; Syd was particularly fond of Kerouac’s On The Road. Roger also read James Joyce though he was never a big reader: “There was a very strong pseudo-intellectual but beat vibe. It was just when the depression of the postwar was beginning to wear off and we were beginning to go into some kind of economic upgrade. And just at the beginning of the Sixties there was a real flirtation with prewar romanticism, which I got involved with in a way, and it was that feeling that pushed me toward being in a band.”
Syd and Roger. Syd is holding his mirrored Fender Telecaster.
Roger and Syd spent a lot of time listening to music together although Roger had still not yet learned to play well enough for them to jam properly. However it was understood between them, that Roger would go to London to study architecture and that Syd would eventually follow him to the capital to study art. Once there, they would form a band together. This was confirmed on November 21, 1961, when Roger and Syd went up to London to see Gene Vincent at the Gaumont State Ballroom, Kilburn. Roger: “On the train home I clearly remember sitting with Syd making a drawing of all the equipment we thought we’d ever need, which consisted of two Vox AC30s.”
Syd won an arts scholarship and in September 1962, he began a two year arts programme at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (CCAT) on Collier Road. Among his fellow students was his Cambridge musical friend John Gordon. Syd quickly adopted the correct art school beatnik look: he dropped the Brylcremed quiff and squeezed into tight black “drainies”, bought a baggy sweater and shades to match those worn by Zbigniew Cybulski in Wajda’s 1958 masterpiece Ashes And Diamonds that put an entire generation of would-be existentialists into dark glasses. His outfit was completed by a pair of grey moccasins or flapping laceless shoes. At college they called him ‘Syd-the-Beat’, after his interest in Beat Generation literature and his sartorial daring. Trad jazz was big with art students then and, like Roger, Syd took to hanging out at the Riverside Jazz Club at the Anchor on Mill Pond. There he got to know the house band whose drummer was called Sid Barrett. Syd was naturally given the same name, only spelt with a ‘y’. Syd enjoyed his new name which was like the Goons’ ‘Sid-er-ney’ and ‘Sid-knee’.
His then girlfriend Libby Gausden, whose father taught at CCAT, complained to Tim Willis that she and Syd argued over presents: she wanted a 45 of Gerry & the Pacemakers’ late-1964 hit ‘Ferry Cross The Mersey’ but instead he gave her Red Bird, a 1959 EP of Christopher Logue reading his poetry to jazz. It was typical of the direction he was going in. His painting changed from more figurative work to abstraction and he began to use collage elements such as lace on his canvases. Like most British art students at the time, he was influenced by the shows of American abstract expressionism and pop art put on at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Tate Gallery and the American Embassy where works by Pollock, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol and Rothko were exhibited. There was also a great interest in Kurt Schwitters ‘Mertz’ objects at this time and Tooth’s were showing the collage work of Dubuffet. It was an exciting time in art and Syd followed it closely but he was bored at college and would strum his Hofner with his bare toes beneath his desk.
In the summer of 1963, Syd joined an impromptu blues band called Those Without in which he played a Hofner bass, an instrument he used for several years. The other members were Alan Sizer on guitar and vocals, someone called “Smudge” on guitar and Steve Pyle on drums. The band continued with a changing line-up and Syd played with them again in January 1965, only this time as lead singer and guitarist.
In 1964, Syd and Steve Pyle from Those Without combined with members of David Gilmour’s first group, the Newcomers (though without David) to play a few gigs under the revived name of the Hollerin’ Blues. Ken Waterson was on vocals, harmonica and maracas, fellow Newcomer Barney Barnes was on keyboards, piano and vocals, and Pete Glass played harmonica. Like all of Syd’s early bands, the Hollerin’ Blues practiced in his bedroom at the Barrett family home where all were made welcome and a tea-trolley was left outside the door. As far as Winifred was concerned, Syd was a genius and everything he did was creative and special.
109 Grantchester Meadows– the childhood home of David Gilmour.
Another of Syd’s friends from Cambridge was Seamus O’Connell, who had been two years above Gilmour at the Perse school. O’Connell’s rather bohemian mother was separated from his father and encouraged Seamus to have his friends around, no doubt preferring them to be where she could keep an eye on them. Roger Waters was a regular visitor there and described how Seamus’s mother would stay up all night, cooking boiled potatoes and sausages for Seamus and his friends while they listened to jazz and blues records. She had an interest in the occult and Syd spent hours browsing through her library of books on the Tarot, magic, astrology and the I-Ching, or Book Of Changes, asking her questions and following up her answers. He was absorbing ideas and images which would shortly come tumbling out as songs.
It was at CCAT that Syd and David Gilmour met again and became friends. Gilmour, whose nickname was “Fred”, for much the same inexplicable reason that Roger’s name became Syd, was a much more dedicated musician and it was through his friendship with David that Syd’s interests focused more on music.
David Jon Gilmour was born on March 6, 1946 at 109 Grantchester Meadows, across from the River Cam in Cambridge, the second of three sons to Sylvia and Douglas Gilmour. His father was a professor of genetics and a senior lecturer in zoology at the university and his mother was a teacher and later a film-editor on Junior Points Of View, the ITV programme which allowed younger viewers to give their opinion on television shows. David’s parents appear to have been a bit bohemian, easy going, or even lax, depending how you look at it. He told Phil Sutcliffe: “They enjoyed each other’s company and I think they found us rather inconvenient.”
In 1951, when Douglas Gilmour took a one year job in America, David and his younger brother were put in a boarding school. David: “I was five and my brother was four! Which is pretty strange, isn’t it? Later you think, ‘Hang on, that wasn’t so nice’.” After the age of 10 David never accompanied them on holidays; when they went to France, he was sent off to Scout Camp which, fortunately, he enjoyed.
It was a musical family. David: “My parents sung well, my brother played flute, and my sister the violin.” The first record David bought was Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’ on a shellac 78 which, sadly, and to his acute distress, his parents’ au pair girl sat on. His second was Elvis Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’. During the blues and folk revival of the late Fifties/early Sixties David, like Roger and Syd, listened to a lot of Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Howlin’ Wolf. Like most early Sixties musicians, David couldn’t help but be influenced by the Shadows and Hank Marvin, “hence the red Strat” – as he stated on his website – the guitar most associated with him from Floyd days.
But he began on a more humble instrument; when he was 13 David acquired a Tatay Spanish guitar, loaned to him by a friend next door. The boy’s mother had given him the instrument but he was not very interested in it and David forgot to give it back. With the aid of Pete Seeger’s tutor, he quickly learned to play: the first track taught how to tune the instrument and how to play a few chords. David never got beyond the third track but it got him started. He would sit up late at night, listening to Radio Luxembourg on headphones attempting to work out the bass, rhythm and lead guitar parts of every record that came on: “and try to learn all the parts of my favorite songs – bass, rhythm guitar, lead. Naturally it took a while, often involving 20 passes or more at the song during a week’s time!”
“I spent a lot of time with friends,” Gilmour told David Mead, “and Bob Klose, who was in the very early incarnation of Pink Floyd and was one of my childhood friends, he played a lot of blues music and stuff to me. My scale of interest was incredibly broad: folk music through blues and through to straight pop music. I wouldn’t say blues was the dominant one.”
109 Grantchester Meadows – the name of a road in the south part of Newnham, not in Grantchester itself – is in an idyllic English setting, one of a row of large houses situated on the edge of the meadows on the popular footpath and bicycle track sometimes known as the Grantchester Grind that follows the River Cam to Grantchester where it emerges at The Orchard, the outdoor tea garden popular with students ever since its opening in 1868 (the poet Rupert Brooke used to lodge there). The River Cam and the meadows are the source of the distant bells, summer evening birds, and holding hands by the river in David’s song ‘Fat Old Sun’ on the (1970) Pink Floyd album, Atom Heart Mother.
David went to the Perse School, a common-entrance, fee-paying private school on Hills Road, originally founded as a grammar school back in 1615. Two years above him were Seamus O’Connell, David Gale (later Syd’s flatmate in London), and film-maker Anthony Stern who, like Roger sporting friends, all formed parts of the link that joined the Floyd and their circle. Now, as when Gilmour attended, the Perse has some of the best academic results in the country, though David had some trouble with his modern language A-levels and in 1963 decided to go on to Cambridge College of Arts and Technology and retake them there. (He failed.)
Cambridge is not large, and most people of a certain age knew each other, relationships moved and changed between the boys and girls and a lot of time was spent sitting in El Patio or the Kenya Coffee House talking teenage dreams over frothy Pyrex cups of coffee. At CCAT David and Syd spent each lunch hour in a painting studio in the art department playing guitars together, studying R&B riffs and analysing Keith Richards’ style. They would go to Millers Music Centre and try to memorise the riffs when listening to records in the booths.
“We sat around learning Beatles songs, Rolling Stones songs, R&B, blues songs …” Gilmour told Alan di Perna. “I can recall spending some time working on ‘Come On’, the first Stones A-side (June 1963), working all that out, playing harmonicas and stuff. He’d know something, I’d know something, and we’d just swap, as people do in back rooms everywhere.” By this time David had a Hofner Club 60, the best of the three Club models with its ebony fingerboard and inlay to the machine head and neck. This was the guitar that launched many Sixties British rockers, as photographs of the young John Lennon and Paul McCartney show.
‘I can recall spending some time working on ‘Come On’, the first Stones A-side (June 1963), working all that out, playing harmonicas and stuff. He’d know something, I’d know something, and we’d just swap, as people do in back rooms everywhere.’
David Gilmour
David and Syd both owned the Pete Seeger Teaches Guitar self-tutoring guitar book and record set and would get together in Syd’s room at 183 Hills Road to practice the chords. David told Karl Dallas: “We spent a lot of time together as teenagers listening to the same music. Our influences are pretty much the same. I don’t want to go into print saying that I taught Syd Barrett everything he knows, ‘cause its patently untrue, but there are one or two things in Syd’s style that I know come from me.” David became a regular visitor to 183 and was easily the better guitarist with a much greater technical mastery and was able to help Syd with a number of things. Syd was always more concerned with effects, textures and musical tricks than with expressing himself musically on the instrument. According to Bob Klose he could only play E and Amajor, and strum a 12-bar blues: G7, C7, and D7. His skill lay much more with lyrical ideas. Sometimes Syd and David would take their guitars to the Mill, a riverside pub on Mill Lane by the Weir, and play an acoustic session together.
David’s first band the Newcomers were in existence between January and October 1963. Originally called Chris Ian & the Newcomers, the band shortened their name to the Newcomers after Chris Ian Culpin, the drummer, left and was replaced by Willie Wilson in March. David was on guitar and vocals, and the rest of the band consisted of Johnny Philips and Ken Waterson on vocals, Roger Bibby on bass and Barney Barnes on rhythm guitar. They had two managers, David Hurst and Nigel Smith, so they probably did play some gigs. The Newcomers rehearsed in the scout hut on Perne Road, using a domestic hi-fi system including corner hi-fi speaker cabinets on three legs with a small amp in the back that would constantly fail. The units would hum and buzz and vibrate their way across the stage like miniature robots. (After the Newcomers disbanded early in 1964, Wilson and Waterson went on to join Syd in the Hollerin’ Blues.)
In March 1962, Clive Welham, who had played drums with Syd in both the 1960 Hollerin’ Blues trio and in Geoff Mott & the Mottoes, started his own band, the Ramblers, whose line-up consisted of Richard Baker on bass, John Gordon, the third member of the original Hollerin’ Blues, on rhythm guitar, Chris ‘Jim’ Marriot and his brother Mervyn on vocals and Albert Prior on lead guitar. David sat in with the Ramblers during April and May 1963 and also played with them at Sawston Village College late that year.
A few months later, David, Clive Welham and John Gordon decided to reform the group under the name Joker’s Wild. Completing the line up were multi-instrumentalist David Altham on guitar, saxophone, keyboards and vocals and Tony Sainty, the original bass player with Geoff Mott & the Mottoes. They practiced at David’s parents’ house on Grantchester Meadows and had a residency every Wednesday at the Victoria Ballroom* in the Market Square in the centre of Cambridge from 1964 until 1966 and often played the nearby US Air Force bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall as well as the usual pubs and parties. David: “We were quite popular because we played all the current dance music, and that’s what people wanted to hear. At one point, we had five residencies at the same time.”
All five men were vocalists so their repertoire tended toward high harmony material as performed by the Beatles, Beach Boys, Four Seasons and countless black American R&B groups like the Coasters or the Wrens. An acetate exists of their cover versions of Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers’ 1956 doo-wop hit ‘Why Do Falls Fall In Love?’ and conversely, Manfred Mann’s R&B-styled ‘Don’t Ask Me What I Say’ (from their 1964 debut album The Five Faces Of Manfred Mann).
In the summer of 1965, Syd and Storm Thorgerson drove down to the south of France in a beat up Land Rover. David, whose parents were once more in America, hitch-hiked down and met up with them in a camp site near St. Tropez. David: “Bacon and eggs on the Primus for breakfast – fantastic.” They busked on the streets for change, playing Beatles numbers from the Fabs’ new film Help! until French police arrested them for not having a permit. It was not until the ill-fated five-piece Pink Floyd line-up that David and Syd again played together in a band.
On the way back the trio stopped off in Paris and bought the green paperback Olympia Press Travellers Companion books that were banned in England such as The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, and Pauline Reagé’s The Story of O. “I remember sitting in the campsite reading these things,” Gilmour recalls.
Joker’s Wild, David’s pre-Floyd Cambridge group. David on left.
Back in Cambridge, David and Syd, in the spirit of the times, fully experimented with magic mushrooms – easily available in the meadows around town – hashish, easily available from certain pubs, and LSD which made an early appearance at both Oxford and Cambridge, thanks to certain professors bringing the formula back from Stamford University. “There was a seriousness to acid then, and even to dope,” Gilmour told Tim Willis. “We wanted to explore the subconscious reaches of the mind, untap its potential. We were trying to understand the universe.” There was, of course, a certain euphoria attendant to the experience as well. They were part of the same set of closely linked friends, to the extent that when Syd broke up with Vivien Brans in 1965, she next stepped out with David.
As well as lead guitarist in Joker’s Wild, Gilmour was often the featured vocalist; Wilson Pickett’s current hit, ‘In The Midnight Hour’ was his big number, augmented by a tricky solo on his flame timber Hofner Club 60 that made all the girls gasp in admiration. The band was organised in a very democratic way and was extremely professional considering they were all teenagers. Drummer Clive Werlham told Nicholas Schaffner that David’s greatest musical asset was his sense of feel and timing: “What he does in a number is 99 % of the time right, and I used to love his guitar playing for that. Short riffs or whatever, whether he’s playing a raunchy uptempo number or something mellow and laid-back, it was always perfect for what was needed to be there. That’s some intuition.”
Meanwhile David’s parents had moved to Greenwich Village, New York, where David’s father had joined the so-called brain drain. In the late Fifties and early Sixties, hundreds of Britain’s top scientists moved to the USA where salaries were astronomically higher and the labs were lavishly equipped. Rather than interrupt his education, David’s easy going, liberal parents set the 18-year old up in a small flat on Mill Road near the centre of Cambridge and trusted him to get on without their parental guidance. He lived a typically bohemian life, getting in at 4 am after a gig, doing any jobs that came his way to supplement his income including working as a male model; presumably at the local art school. It was little wonder he failed his modern languages exams.
In 1966 David’s brother Peter Gilmour* replaced Tony Sainty on bass in Joker’s Wild who, by now, had developed a substantial local following. They opened for visiting acts such as Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band and the Animals at places like the Dorothy Ballroom – ‘the Dot’ – where the Pink Floyd played in 1967 or the Rex where they played during their first major UK tour in 1969. But London was the place to make it. It was only 50 miles away and more and more this became the destination of the band’s Ford Transit.