By the end of 1966, the band’s academic studies were being seriously affected by their workload: they played gigs on October 31, November 4, 5 (two different venues), 8, 15, 18, 19, 22 … The members began to think seriously about whether to turn professional or cut back and continue with their education; clearly they could not do both. They had virtually committed themselves to giving it a try when they signed a six-way partnership deal with Peter Jenner and Andrew King on October 31 and all became members of the six-way partnership Blackhill Enterprises.
Until that point they had played to largely sympathetic audiences. Had they known what their reception would be like out in the provinces they might have reconsidered and decided that architecture and the arts were not so bad after all. However this was to come later, when the group was being booked on the strength of a chart single. At first they were favoured with supportive audiences and often ideal settings. One such was their ‘Music In Colour’ concert, held at the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington on January 17, 1967. Jenner’s new wife Sumi worked as an assistant to classical music promoter Christopher Hunt who, at her insistence, went to see the Pink Floyd play. He was favourably impressed and decided to book them.
Hunt: “I like what they do. I usually deal with classical chamber music but I believe that the Pink Floyd are something different from normal pop music. In fact, I have no interest at all in any other pop groups.” It was a beautiful event, attracting a UFO-style audience as well as the type of person normally seen at concerts of Berg, Schoenberg or Stravinsky. A successful concert in such a prestigious venue inevitably pushed them further towards turning professional. They really had to make up their minds; something that, as a band, they were bad at doing. Nick was still working in his father-in-law’s office, Rick was attending music classes, and Syd still sometimes turned up at Camberwell. Roger had the worst of it as he was trying to hold down a day job as an architect getting work experience at Fitzroy Robinson and Partners where he was engaged in designing bank vaults for the Bank of England. No wonder he was able to later write so convincingly about ‘Money’.
Peter and Andrew took the group into the Thompson Private Recording Company in Hemel Hempstead to record a demo tape to be sent around the record companies, a la the Beatles. But when the tape was played to Joe Boyd, the only person that any of them knew in the music business, he told them that the recording quality was dreadful and that they should spend more money in recording the songs professionally, then the record companies would have a ready-made product that they could release. This made sense, except that recording sessions were costly and funds were low. By a stroke of good fortune, the film-maker Peter Whitehead had been having an affair with Jenny Spires, Syd’s Cambridge girlfriend before Lynsey Korner. When Peter was commissioned to make a film about ‘Swinging London’ by the British Film Institute, she asked him to include Syd’s band in it and, as he was feeling guilty about seeing her behind Syd’s back, he agreed to finance a recording session and to film it.
Jenner and King asked Boyd if he would produce the session. Joe had recently recorded an album with the Incredible String Band, whom he both produced and managed through his new company Witchseason Productions – named after a line in Donovan’s ‘Season Of The Witch’: “Beatniks out to make it rich” – and had used Sound Techniques, a four-track facility at 46a Old Church Street, Chelsea (conveniently close to the Chelsea Arts Club). The recording engineer at Sound Techniques, John Wood, was particularly good at getting an accurate reproduction of sound – much needed with the ISB’s bells and whistles and wavering vocals – and the room had a very good feel to it. Before the sessions, the Floyd went down to watch AMM record there in order to familiarise themselves with the room and to see how a recording session actually worked. Peter Whitehead paid £80 to the band for the rights to use the results in his film and at eight in the morning of January 11, 1967 the Pink Floyd began their first proper studio session. They recorded ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Nick’s Boogie’ both of which are now on the DVD Pink Floyd London 1966/1967* That afternoon, and the next were spent making mono mixes of the tapes. John Wood got a very rich sound and this is easily the best recording of the first Pink Floyd line-up in full improvisational mode.
Rick Wright at one with the cosmos.
Boyd, in his capacity as UK representative of Jac Holzman’s Elektra Records, initially wanted to sign them to Elektra, but Holzman only saw the Floyd in rehearsal and got no idea of the excitement they generated live – which a good producer can of course capture in a studio – so he passed. Joe’s next idea was to approach Hort Schmolzi at Polydor, who was just opening up in Britain and had negotiated territorial distribution deals which got him the Who, Cream, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Schmolzi expressed an interest and the Floyd were booked into Polydor’s Stratford Place studios to rehearse for recording ‘Arnold Layne’, as well to see if the facilities were good enough to record in if the deal with Polydor went through.
In the meantime, booking agent Bryan Morrison heard the buzz that the Floyd was creating and booked them into the Architectural Association, even though he had never heard them. Always on the look out for the next big thing, he showed up at Polydor’s studios, accompanied by his assistants Tony Howard and Steve O’Rourke, to watch them rehearse. Unlike their own hippie managers, these were real music business types in camel-hair coats, short hair and Italian Mafia style suits. Joe was horrified because Morrison immediately launched into hard nose music biz talk. He airily dismissed the Polydor deal and said that they could get far more from EMI.
Joe Boyd: “I was theoretically going to be their record producer and we had a deal with Polydor. Then their agents told them they would make more, they would get a bigger advance, if they made the record first and sold the master to EMI. And ultimately this was true. They got offered a £5,000 advance from EMI, whereas they would have had a £1,000-£1,500 advance off Polydor but the royalty rate would have been much higher.”
Morrison said he would finance recording of the single in return for the publishing and Boyd was asked to produce it. In vain Joe asked for a commitment to produce an album but they argued this would tie their hands in negotiating with EMI who were notoriously anti-freelance producers and always liked to use their own in-house men.* Even though he was being asked to sabotage his own deal with Polydor, Boyd agreed to do it because he thought that if ‘Arnold Layne’ was a hit, they would be foolish to use anyone else to produce the album.
‘Arnold Layne’ and it’s B-side ‘Candy And A Currant Bun’ were recorded at Sound Techniques on January 29, 1967; eight or more takes for ‘Arnold’ and only two for ‘Candy’. It took another day, or maybe two, to mix down to mono from the four-track masters. The instrumental solo on ‘Arnold’ was quite tricky and took some time to get right, requiring some nimble work with the faders: Roger helped Joe pull tracks in and out. Boyd and engineer John Woods excelled themselves.
Nick Mason: “I think we started to develop a cult following because everyone was talking about the psychedelic revolution and light and sound and all the rest of it. People were looking to try and guess, as they always are, what was going to happen next in music. This suddenly looked like what was going to happen next. I mean, we were incredibly awful, we were a dreadful band, we must have sounded frightful, but we were so different and so odd that I think – I mean odd, for those days. Of course, now, people would look at it and laugh. You look at the early photographs and we just look like a sort of elderly version of the Monkees or something. At the time, that was what was happening and no-one really understood it, but they all thought they ought to try and get in on it. So the record deal was in fact a really rather good one considering we had no track record whatsoever and couldn’t play the instruments.”
As Joe feared would happen, he got shafted. He told me in 1980: “My only deal was to get a royalty on ‘Arnold Layne’ which, by the way, I’ve never gotten, because the contract ended up in the hands of Blackhill Enterprises … Basically what happened was that EMI said, ‘We’ll give you this contract and £5,000 and we want you to use our studios and our staff producers and everything.’ So they immediately went in and said, ‘Thanks a lot for doing ‘Arnold Layne,’ Joe. See you around,’ and at the time I didn’t really fight it. I didn’t really know what to do about it. Well, you know, it’s up to the group. If the group felt strongly enough that they wanted me to be their record producer they would have insisted on me to EMI, so ultimately it’s not really a business thing …”
Within the underground community there was enormous sympathy with Joe and many people felt that the Floyd had sold out. This was the reason that the Flies yelled ‘Sell out’ at them from the side of the stage at UFO; not because they’d signed to EMI but because they had not insisted on Boyd as their producer.*
The original idea, as proposed by Bryan Morrison, was to record six songs and choose the best two to hawk around the record companies. ‘Arnold Layne’ was not the band’s first choice for a single.
Nick Mason: “We really didn’t want ‘Arnold Layne’ to be our first single … We recorded the first two and they were snatched away and we were told ‘That’s it!’ All the record companies wanted the disc, so it was just a case of holding out for the biggest offer. By the time ‘Arnold Layne’ was released, we had already progressed and changed our ideas about what a good hit record should be. We tried to stop it being released but we couldn’t.”
‘Arnold Layne’ had a mildly fetishistic story line based on someone who stole girls’ underwear from washing lines. ‘Both my mother and Syd’s mother had students as lodgers,” said Roger in a 1967 interview, “because there was a girls’ college up the road. So there were constantly great lines of bras and knickers on our washing lines, and Arnold, or whoever he was, had bits and pieces off our washing lines. They never caught him. He stopped doing it after a bit when things got too hot for him. Maybe he’s moved to Cherry Hinton or Newnham possibly.”
The underwear thief became notorious and Roger made sure to keep Syd informed of the latest gossip. Syd was amused by the story and during his frequent hour-long train journeys between Cambridge and London, he wrote a song about it. It took him three weeks and became the jump-off point for a long improvisation in the Floyd’s set.
Syd: “Well I just wrote it. I thought ‘Arnold Layne’ was a nice name, and it fitted very well into the music I had already composed. I was at Cambridge at the time. I started to write the song. I pinched the line about “moonshine washing line” from Rog, our bass guitarist – because he has an enormous washing line in the back of his house. Then I thought, ‘Arnold must have a hobby’, and it went on from there. Arnold Layne just happens to dig dressing up in women’s clothing. A lot of people do – so let’s face up to reality. About the only other lyric anybody could object to, is the bit about, ‘It takes two to know’ and there’s nothing ‘smutty’ about that! But then if more people like them dislike us, more people like the underground lot are going to dig us, so we hope they’ll cancel each other out.”
Syd was referring to the shock and horror exhibited by the more prudish members of British society such as the pirate radio station Radio London who regarded it as “too smutty” for them to play. Presumably they had not been paid enough payola by EMI to like it. It is not as if this sort of thing was new to British pop music; in March 1966 The Kinks had a chart hit with ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ with a very camp reading of the line “and when he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight.” Maybe he got them from Arnold.
The puritanical outrage did seem to surprise the band who held varying opinions, ranging from Syd’s dismissal of it as something business men did – “It’s only a business-like commercial insult anyway. It doesn’t affect us personally” – to Rick’s view that it was a paranoid fear of the underground: “I think the record was banned not because of the lyrics, because there’s nothing there you can really object to – but because they’re against us as a group and against what we stand for.’
Roger took a more moderate view: “Let’s face it, the pirate stations play records that are much more ‘smutty’ than ‘Arnold Layne’ will ever be. In fact, it’s only Radio London that has banned the record. The BBC and everybody else plays it. I think it’s just different policies – not anything against us.”
Though not a top ten hit, ‘Arnold Layne’ reached number 20 in the Record Mirror chart before dropping out again. On March 10, the group played UFO and premiered a promo film* they made for the single which was in the shops that day. By then the Floyd were already at Abbey Road recording their first album because, unusually, they had been signed on an album deal, not to solely make singles. Boyd’s replacement turned out to be Norman ‘Hurricane’ Smith, whose qualification was that he had engineered innumerable Beatles sessions under the stewardship of George Martin. EMI wanted him to graduate to production, and presumably thought that he could hone his skills on this new malleable group, seeing him as performing the sort of role George Martin had with the Beatles: producer, musical adviser and arranger. After unsuccessfully attempting to reproduce the performance and sound quality of ‘Arnold Layne’ at Abbey Road, EMI reluctantly went ahead and released Joe’s Sound Techniques’ masters.
Having got the business of the single out of the way, work on the Floyd’s first album commenced on February 21, with an all-night session to record ‘Matilda Mother’, Syd’s beautiful evocation of a mother reading a bedtime story to her child. There was a distinctive Abbey Road sound in the mid Sixties and Norman ‘Hurricane’ Smith had learned all the EMI recording tricks such as double tracking combined with a soupcon of echo on certain vocals and he was able to give these a touch of phasing. The group recorded in Studio 3, using a little four-track that, in addition to all the wonderful gadgetry of the time – now found in museums only – had a memorable feature that summed up the recording ethos at EMI: a knob that said ‘pop’ and ‘classical’. The former setting gave a more subtle gradation to the faders whereas the latter was more abrupt, to cater to the cruder nature of the music. Like all the decks at EMI, the company had built it themselves.
Though the Floyd had engaged in some rather unseemly leaping about outside EMI’s Manchester Square headquarters for the benefit of photographers on the occasion of their signing, they did not go along with most attempts to market them. Roger told Disc and Music Echo: “I lie and am rather aggressive” and told the clearly puzzled reporter: “We give the public what they can see for themselves – we don’t want to manufacture an image. We don’t want to be involved in some publicity build-up.”
With the exception of Roger Waters’ ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk’, the Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is made up of Syd Barrett songs and some group instrumentals. In the six months from the summer of 1966 Syd had gone through a period of exceptional creativity at Earlham Street. He painted, played music, read voraciously, listened widely, smoked a lot of pot and took long voyages in his own head; this was the time he first began to take a large amount of acid. It was also the time during which he wrote virtually everything upon which his reputation as a songwriter is based.
It is a peculiarly English version of psychedelia that makes up The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, the title of which, appropriately is taken from chapter seven of Kenneth Grahame’s children’s book The Wind In The Willows. Much of English psychedelia refers back to childhood, a period of innocence and purity populated by gnomes and fairies, elves and dwarves. Peter Jenner thought that the last time Syd felt really happy was before his father’s death, so childhood became a refuge from the pressures of the modern world, a way of returning to the carefree pleasures of playing in Grantchester Meadows with his sister Rosemary, to lie down and watch the river flow by, listening to the distant bells (the subject of ‘Flaming’).
In this chapter of Wind In The Willows Rat and Mole encounter Pan, the mischievous Dionysian half-man, half-goat, much loved by Picasso, who was very much in the news in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The huge Tate Gallery show in July 1960 was almost certainly attended by Syd and throughout the Sixties, reproductions of Picasso’s Pan figures were to be found on middle-class living room walls and in the newly published Sunday newspaper colour supplements.
Pan is used by Grahame to convey rather profound spiritual concepts about elemental forces and the afterlife to his young readers. Cliff Jones in his perceptive essay ‘Wish You Were Here’ makes the point that when Rat and Mole meet Pan “the god of flocks, woods and fields”, they encounter him as “a golden, dream-like vision”. This intrigued Syd, who took the episode as the central beam of his writing for the album. And not just that, Syd would often inform friends of how he too had met Pan and been instilled with “the spirit of the forest.” Andrew King said, “He thought Pan had given him insight and understanding into the way nature works.” This then is the origin of the fairy-tale imagery, the mice and gnomes that permeate the album.
Syd absorbed information from everywhere, some of which he appropriated straight, some of which came out in undigested form, for instance, when the Floyd first performed ‘Matilda Mother’, Syd blatantly lifted lyrics from Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales. In order to record them, Andrew King had to approach the Hilaire Belloc estate for permission for their use but was refused.* Although the lyrics were rewritten the title still reflected Belloc’s ‘Matilda, Who Told Lies And Was Burned To Death.’
Syd: ‘I do tend to take lines from other things, lines I like, and then write around them but I don’t consciously relate to painting. It’s just writing good songs that matters, really.’ The lyrics were of great importance to him: ‘I think it’s good if a song has more than one meaning. Maybe that kind of song can reach far more people, that’s nice. On the other hand, I like songs that are simple. I liked ‘Arnold Layne’ because to me it was a very clear song.’
Barrett’s approach to songwriting owes much to the abstract expressionist painting that still dominated the art world at that time; it is an immediate response to surroundings. The lyrics are often descriptions of what he was wearing or what was happening at that very moment; word sketches in the Jack Kerouac sense of literally making word pictures of what was going on around him or in his head.
The second recording session for Piper, on February 27, began with ‘Chapter 24’; another case of Syd copping his lyrics from another source. In this case it was the notes to chapter 24 of the I-Ching or Book Of Changes, the Chinese oracle text that he first encountered in Cambridge on Seamus O’Connell’s mother’s bookshelves. Chapter 24 is the Fû hexagram or ‘Yoni Of Fire’ (K’un, the receptive earth, Chen, the arousing thunder, as the Wilhelm edition rather prudishly translates it) and Syd lifted the words to ‘Chapter 24’ from it almost verbatim: “All movements are accomplished in six stages and the seventh brings return … Therefore seven is the number of the young light, and it arises when six, the number of great darkness, is increased by one.” This is taken from the Richard Wilhelm translation that Syd owned at the time.
The I-Ching was popular hippie reading matter, and many people would not go out without first throwing the I-Ching to see what it advised. Syd: “That [‘Chapter 24’] was from I Ching, there was someone around who was very into that, most of the words came straight off that.”
While running the Indica Bookshop I remember Syd coming in and buying a copy of the Wilhelm edition, though I think it was a present for the girl he had with him. He was possibly inspired to rework the I-Ching after hearing that John Lennon had used Timothy Leary’s version of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead as inspiration for the lyrics to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’; “Turn off your mind, relax, and drift downstream” being from Leary’s introduction. Syd appropriated lyrics from wherever he found them: ‘Golden Hair’, on Barrett’s first solo album The Madcap Laughs, was an untitled early James Joyce poem, the fifth in the volume Chamber Music published in 1907, that Syd set to music while still in his teens.*
From the Piper At The Gates Of Dawn album sleeve shoot.
As word sketches of memories or descriptions of what was happening to him at that moment, Syd’s lyrics on the album constitute fragments of autobiography. It is not surprising, then, that there is a preoccupation with childhood and frequent images of Cambridge. ‘Bike’, one of Barrett’s classic songs, is like one of Duchamp’s ‘found objects’: only Syd would take such a commonplace object and write a song about it.* Though Syd himself wore a cloak onstage in the early days, I don’t recall it being black and red and I would like to think that the cloak referred to in the second verse is in fact an academic gown. It is only in Oxford and Cambridge that it is common to see people on the streets wearing academic gowns, or cloaks, often in red and black as described, and it is just the sort of thing that Syd might have got his hands on. Perhaps the line refers to both sorts.
‘Astronomy Domine’ was a recollection of Syd’s aforementioned acid trip when a plum and an orange became Venus and Jupiter. Barrett was aided in his astronomical whimsy by a copy of the small Times Atlas Of The Planets and Peter Jenner who helped him in writing those parts. It is Jenner’s garbled planetary recitations that open the track, and therefore the album.
‘Lucifer Sam’, originally called ‘Percy The Ratcatcher’, is a word sketch of a cat in the room, Syd’s fey English voice making the song strangely effective as well as it being a typical piece of Swinging London pop of the period. Syd: “It didn’t mean much to me at the time, but then three or four months later it came to mean a lot.” ‘Scarecrow’ sounds like a reference to the scarecrow in Derek McCulloch (Uncle Mac)’s BBC Radio Children’s Hour programmes of the late Forties and early Fifties. ‘Flaming’ and ‘The Gnome’ have their origins in Cambridge: buttercups and dandelions on Grantchester Meadows in ‘Flaming’, and the winding River Cam in ‘The Gnome’.
For this writer the inclusion on Piper of the adventures of a gnome called Grimble Gromble was most unfortunate. All one can say in its defence is that novelty tracks seemed to be an aberration shared by many British groups at the time: from Cream’s ‘Mother’s Lament’ (on Disraeli Gears) to Tomorrow’s ‘Three Jolly Little Dwarfs’. ‘The Gnome’ does of course fall into the fairy-tale, nursery rhyme category; an escape to the past obviously inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien. Syd: “Fairy tales are nice … 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. Leaving school and suddenly being without that structure around you and nothing to relate to … maybe that’s a part of it, too.”
The band were quite pleased with their efforts and enjoyed making the album. Syd: “That was very difficult in some ways, getting used to the studios and everything. But it was fun, we freaked about a lot. I was working very hard then.” One of the highlights was the fact that three of the Beatles, who were making Sgt. Pepper in Studio 2 next door, stopped by to visit and give the Pink Floyd encouragement. I was watching the Beatles session at the time and ran into one of the Floyd’s entourage in the canteen who told me they were there. I had previously taken Paul McCartney to see the group at UFO so I suggested he might stop by and say hello to his fellow EMI recording artists. Paul gathered up Ringo and George and we all went into Studio 3.
Roger Waters: “At about 5:30 in the afternoon Ringo, Paul and George came into our studio and we all stood rooted to the spot, excited by it all. Of course UFO was really a big scene by then.” To me the Floyd seemed very nervous, not of the Beatles, but of the actual recording set-up and I remember Roger trying to shout to Norman Smith through the thick soundproof glass control room window instead of using the open microphone provided for that purpose. These were their early days in the studio environment and they had not got the hang of it yet; however it did not take long for them to develop such technical mastery that the studio itself became their instrument. I understand that Paul, at least, often popped his head in to see how they were doing whenever Beatles and Floyd sessions overlapped. In the February 15, 1967 issue of Cherwell, Oxford University’s weekly paper, one of the Floyd, probably Syd, said “At the moment Paul McCartney is probably the single greatest influence on us.” McCartney returned the compliment by declaring to the music press that the Floyd’s album was “a knockout.”
The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn was released on August 5, 1967 and reached number 6 in the UK album charts, staying seven weeks in the Top 20. Though the album received a good reception, there was a general consensus among the band’s admirers that the album was a poor second to their live performance. It is an interesting album because it shows that despite their confusion when Syd left the band, many of their post-Barrett concerns were already in place with the large scale sound environments and controlled atmospheres that they later made entirely their own. ‘Bike’, with its prescient coda of clockwork and other sound effects, even prefigured Dark Side Of The Moon. The arrangement and the extended improvisation on ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ was a collaborative effort by all four members of the band and, more than anything, pointed the direction in which they were to go.
Nick: “Our album shows parts of the Pink Floyd that haven’t been heard yet.”
Roger: “There’s a part we haven’t even heard yet.”
Nick: “It’s bringing into flower many of the fruits that remained dormant for so long.”
Syd: “It all comes straight out of our heads and it’s not too far out to understand. If we play well on stage I think most people understand that what we play isn’t just a noise. Most audiences respond to a good set.”
Before the album was released, the Pink Floyd had another go at the pop charts – this time with ‘See Emily Play.’ The song was specially written for another classical event, called ‘Games For May’, promoted by Christopher Hunt on May 12, 1967 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank.
The advertisement read more like a notice for UFO than for a classical music venue:
SPACE-AGE RELAXATION FOR THE CLIMAX OF SPRING – ELECTRONIC COMPOSITIONS, COLOUR AND IMAGE PROJECTIONS, GIRLS AND THE PINK FLOYD.
Hunt released a press release saying: “The Floyd intend this concert to be a musical and visual exploration – not only for themselves, but for the audience too. New material has been written and will be given for the first time, including some specially prepared four-way stereo tapes. Visually the lights-men of the group have prepared an entirely new, bigger-than-ever-before show. Sadly we are not allowed to throw lighting effects as planned onto the external surfaces of the hall, nor even in the foyer. But inside should be enough!”
Roger Waters was responsible for the opening music, which sounded like the dawn chorus but which he actually created on tape. He told Chris Salewicz: ‘I was working in this dank, dingy basement off the Harrow Road, with an old Ferrograph. I remember sitting there recording edge tones off cymbals for the performance – later that became the beginning of ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’. In those days you could get away with stuff like chasing clockwork toy cars around the stage with a microphone. For ‘Games For May’ I also made ‘bird’ noises recorded on the old Ferrograph at half-speed, to be played in the theatre’s foyer as the audience was coming in. I was always interested in the possibilities of rock ‘n’ roll, how to fill the space between the audience and the idea with more than just guitars and vocals.” The band had to give up a week’s work to rehearse the songs however, apart from the lights and quadrophonic sound mix, they did not actually plan the performance until the day itself. They rehearsed on stage the morning of the show to try and work up their act but, by the time the audience began filing in to the QEH, they still had not figured out exactly what to do.
Roger: “We just took a lot props onstage with us and improvised. Quite a bit of what we did went down quite well, but a lot of it got completely lost. We worked out a fantastic stereophonic sound system whereby the sounds travelled around the hall in a sort of circle, giving the audience an eerie effect of being absolutely surrounded by the music – and of course we tried to help the effect by the use of our lighting. Unfortunately it only worked for people sitting in the front of the hall – still, this was the first time we’d tried it, and like a lot of other ideas we used for the first time at this concert, they should be improved by the time we do our next one. Also, we thought we’d be able to use the props and work our act out as we went along – but we found this extremely difficult. I think it’s important to know what you’re going to do – to a certain extent anyway, I always like to be in control of a situation. Another thing we found out from giving that concert was that our ideas were far more advanced than our musical capabilities – at that time anyway … we made a lot of mistakes at that concert, but it was the first of its kind and we, personally learnt a lot from it.”
EMI helped out by erecting huge speakers at the back of the hall to complement the Floyd’s own PA onstage and lending their expertise to help create the first quadraphonic PA system ever built in Britain (perhaps anywhere). This was controlled by a primitive joystick apparatus that could place both pre-recorded tapes and the instruments at any point within the circle made by the speakers. The light show was beefed up by the addition of 35mm film projections as well as the usual pulsating oil slides turning the hall into a cross between UFO and Santa’s grotto.
The show opened with Roger’s prerecorded tapes and the original set-list ran as follows: ‘Matilda Mother’, ‘Flaming’, ‘Scarecrow’, ‘Games For May’ (aka ‘See Emily Play’), ‘Bicycle’ (aka ‘Bike’), ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘Candy And A Currant Bun’, ‘Pow R Toc H’, and ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. The concert ended with a tape by Rick Wright called ‘Bubbles’ followed by a tape by Syd, and ‘Lucifer Sam’ which was presumably the encore.
‘Bubbles’ was accompanied by the release of millions of actual bubbles and a Floyd roadie dressed as an admiral of the fleet who came onstage carrying armloads of daffodils and threw them to the audience. Unfortunately, to the dismay of the hall’s management, when the bubbles burst they left a ring on the leather seats – thousands of them – and the daffodils were not all skillfully caught by the audience: some were trampled into the carpet. As a result, the Floyd were banned from ever appearing again at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Roger: “It seems we contravened a regulation. We were told that people might have slipped on the flowers we threw into the audience.” This was the height of flower power and the majority of the audience were in their finest hippie gear: frills, tatty lace and velvet, see through chiffon and crushed velvet as well as face paint, refractive third-eye lenses and extraordinary eye makeup were the norm. The Financial Times reported, “The audience which filled the hall was beautiful, if strangely subdued, and to enjoy them was alone worth the price of the ticket. But when you add the irrepressible Pink Floyd and a free authentic daffodil to take home, your cup of experience overflows.”
Roger reported: “Someone I know was sitting next to two old ladies who sat there still and silent until the interval. Then one turned to her friend and said, ‘They’re very good, aren’t they?’”
The Games For May concert can be seen as the precursor of Pink Floyd’s stadium shows, and ultimately of The Wall. The use of quad sound was an enormous breakthrough and is further proof that the Floyd’s career trajectory, rather than breaking into pre and post Barrett phases, was pretty well established from day one. From then on the Floyd used a quadraphonic sound mix wherever possible, developing their famed ‘Azimuth Co-ordinator’ or quadraphonic pan pot to do the job – the original one from Queen Elizabeth Hall having been stolen.
‘Games For May’ was identified by everyone as an obvious hit single, even Norman Smith who had great trouble in dealing with Syd because he would never play a song the same way twice.
“I saw that as a single straight away,” Smith told Nicky Horne, “and obviously one was looking for a follow-up to ‘Arnold Layne’ – I was at any rate, on behalf of the record company. It was a pretty difficult job with Syd because I think Syd … used lyrics with sort of musical phrasing, and it was a statement being made at a given time, that meant that if you came back five minutes later to do another take you probably wouldn’t get the same performance, and I think if I remember rightly we went through quite a few of Syd’s songs and then they played me a few, and it’s very difficult to pick out which I liked and which I didn’t like, so we’d come back and maybe try these songs again and these were different versions so it made it even more difficult. So the early days were quite difficult really but as a sort of very slow, unwinding process.”
Although the group was in the middle of a vocal overdubbing session for ‘Bike’ they decamped to Sound Techniques to record ‘See Emily Play’. There was either no time available at Abbey Road – which is unlikely – or they preferred the sound at Sound Techniques – which is probably the case. For whatever reason John Wood was amused to see mighty EMI’s studios rejected in favour of Sound Techniques when the band wanted to get a good sound. Exact recording dates are not available but ‘Emily’ was recorded either on May 18 or that weekend, on the 20 and 21. The Floyd took their EMI tape op, Jeff Jarrett with them which suggests that it was entirely a matter of sound that determined their choice.
There are varying reports of the sessions. David Gilmour, for instance, was shocked to see how out of it Syd was. David was living and working in Paris with his band Flowers when they had all of their microphones stolen. He came to London to replace them as you could buy secondhand Shures on Lisle Street in Soho for £7 when the same model in Paris was £35 new. Gilmour told Mark Paytress: “I don’t know at quite what point Syd started to go very strange, but I know I came back from France and I called Syd up while I was there and he said, ‘Why don’t you come down?’ They were recording and he told me to come down to the studio. And I went down there and he didn’t even recognise me.”
Gilmour had not seen Barrett in more than a year and the change was dramatic. Syd just stared back. ‘He was a different person from the one I’d last seen in October. I’d done plenty of acid and dope – often with Syd – and that was different from how he had become.”
To the members of the band the change had, of course, been gradual and perhaps they did not see to what extent Syd’s personality had changed. This was made especially difficult because the group had a working relationship as well as an old friendship. This particular day is a good case in point as musically it was by all accounts a brilliant session; Syd was right on form, the vocals sounded good, and the group had themselves a hit single. No one had any experience of mental illness and there were as yet few examples of acid casualties. Everyone just hoped for the best as there was little else they could do.
The lyrics for ‘See Emily Play’ had nestled in Syd’s ring binder for some time. All that was required was to change the name from ‘Games For May’ to ‘See Emily Play’. The words dated back to the London Free School period and were inspired by the Honourable Emily Tacita Young, 15-year-old daughter of Labour MP Wayland Young, Lord Kennet. Emily and her best friend Anjelica Houston attended Holland Park Comprehensive and were regulars at the London Free School’s basement and at the All Saints’ Hall dances where she was known as ‘Far Out Em’. (Later, at UFO, she was called ‘the psychedelic schoolgirl’). Peter Jenner lived in Notting Hill and after one LFS gig she went back to his house with Syd and spent hours smoking pot and talking. The next day Syd wrote ‘See Emily Play’ about her youthful naivety.
The music was composed just before the concert in May at a flat owned by Andrew King’s parents in Richmond Hill, which he shared with Rick Wright. Rick, being the musical one of the group, had set up a primitive demo studio in the living room with a number of tape recorders and other equipment. The studio was used by the Floyd to work out ideas and rehearse, much to the dismay of Andrew’s wealthy neighbours. Syd and Lynsey moved into the spare room and King remembers Syd finding the lyrics and composing the ‘Games for May’ line because they needed something special for the concert. The Richmond interlude appears to have been a good period for Syd and Lynsey living in pleasant surroundings with the band hovering on the brink of fame.
King told David Parker: “It was a very nice room … looked right across the Thames Valley. The Bentley was parked on the pavement outside. The Pink Floyd Bentley. Yes, we used to go to gigs in the Bentley.” He neglected to say that it wasn’t a new one, nonetheless, it was classier than the Beatles Austin Princess. ‘See Emily Play’ was released on June 16, 1967 at the height of the Summer of Love, and reached number six in the charts. The Pink Floyd had a Top 10 single.
It must have been excruciatingly difficult for the band to find themselves on the verge of pop success, and yet to find that Syd, who after all wrote and sang the song, was simultaneously sabotaging it all. Part of him delighted in the fame, the money, pop-star clothes, but there was another Syd, the bohemian, who rejected the lot of it. The more pressure there was on him, the more he vacillated between the two polar positions.
Roger Waters: “When he was still in the band in the later stages, we got to the point where anyone of us was likely to tear his throat out at any minute because he was so impossible … When ‘Emily’ was a hit and we were third for three weeks, we did Top Of The Pops, and the third week we did it he didn’t want to know. He got down there in an incredible state and said he wasn’t gonna do it. We finally discovered the reas on was that John Lennon didn’t have to do Top Of The Pops so he didn’t.”
At first Syd seemed pleased to be on Top Of The Pops, miming his song and playing the role of pop star. In fact Syd once stated that the Pink Floyd were pop stars first and musicians second, and totally agreed that the lavish pop lifestyle was what he wanted, but in this, as in many other things, his attitude was schizophrenic, and the ‘underground’ part of him rejected all that false glamour. TOTP only featured acts that were in the charts, so some bands found themselves on it for many weeks in a row. On the second week, Syd arrived in his full Kings Road finery then changed into shabby student clothes for the programme but by the third week, where a really good showing might have pushed them to number two (Procul Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ was firmly ensconced at number one), Syd refused to appear at all. This was a time when a chart single was a very strong determining factor in the price a band could charge for a live show and a Top 10 single could double your fee, so everyone was understandably keen to do a good job. Except Syd, who, that day, was a Keith Rowe musical purist.
* There are, in fact, no 1966 tracks on the release.
* EMI tried to keep everything in-house; they even built their own mixing desks.
* Boyd’s ears were attuned to the times: the day after recording ‘Arnold Layne’ he recorded the Purple Gang’s ‘Granny Takes A Trip’ at Sound Techniques which became another UFO favourite and would have gone further had not Peter ‘Lucifer,’ Walker, their leader, disbanded the group in order to train to be initiated as a Warlock.
* The surreal B&W clip featured the group larking about on a beach on a grey day with a tailoring dummy.
* Because Belloc died in 1872 it’s hard to see how they could have still been in copyright.
* In this case Syd used the lyrics word-for-word, changing only one word: ‘merry’ became ‘midnight.’
* Even now bikes far outnumber cars in Cambridge and are the most common mode of transport.