CHAPTER FOUR WAKING THE GRAPEVINE

‘I remember thinking I could knock Pink Floyd into shape.’

David Gilmour

The Olympia theatre on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris has a sort of ruined splendour. Deep below the stage, in the basement of the building, lies a ragged circular lounge and tiny bar, serving red wine and pastis to thirsty rock stars and loitering members of the press. The sofas are threadbare, overlooked by pictures of the jazz and blues giants that have performed here over the past half a century. Tucked away in a tiny room, seated on a leather sofa and sipping from a mug of herbal tea, is David Gilmour.

It is 16 March 2006, ten days after Gilmour’s sixtieth birthday, and almost a year since his truce with Roger Waters for Pink Floyd’s Live 8 performance. The guitarist’s third solo album, On an Island, has just reached number 1 in the UK. It’s an album steeped in themes of encroaching old age and mortality, much of it inspired by the deaths of two close friends, including Tony Howard, one of the entrepreneurs who coaxed the young Pink Floyd away from their first managers in what must now seem like a past life.

A black T-shirt, Gilmour’s uniform for the tour, disguises the extra weight acquired since hitting his thirties. But he’s lost much of the ballast that accompanied Pink Floyd’s comeback in the mid-1980s. Life is calmer now. In unfussy jeans, workman’s boots and with a dusting of snowy-white stubble, Gilmour looks less like a rock star and more like someone you might find restoring antique furniture in a picture-postcard English town.

The guitarist has submitted himself to considerable press scrutiny to promote this new record. But it wasn’t always this way. ‘In Pink Floyd, we got away with talking to as few people as possible,’ he admits. Today, he will answer questions about Roger Waters and Pink Floyd, after a brief quip – ‘If we really must’ – and the thinnest of smiles.

Understandably happier to talk about his own record, he bristles with boyish enthusiasm for the songs, before, unaccountably, slipping into some unprompted anecdote about Roger Waters and Pink Floyd. When he puts on his guitar to have his photograph taken, Gilmour visibly relaxes. The transformation is quite striking. Squinting at the framed posters overhead, and acknowledging Floyd’s numerous visits to the Continent, Gilmour is insistent that Floyd never played L’Olympia. ‘Absolutely not,’ he says firmly. Yet before Floyd, Gilmour had plenty of misadventures in France. During tonight’s show, he will address the audience in near-perfect French, a skill that once held him in good stead on an early trip to the Continent.

It is 30 July 1966, and for David Gilmour and friends, England’s victory over Germany in the World Cup has been overshadowed by their current predicament. He and the remnants of what had once been Jokers Wild are on a slow train to Malaga, trundling through a Spanish heat haze, when the score is announced. Passengers congratulate the four dishevelled English teenagers, but are confused by their lack of interest. Since beginning their journey at London’s Victoria Station days earlier, the group’s precious cargo of guitars, keyboards, drums and amps has been unceremoniously dumped in the hold of a ferry from Dover; lost en route from Calais to Paris; retrieved in Paris; then lost again en route to Madrid.

Gilmour’s fluent French has saved the day when dealing with railway officials, but each time their equipment has reappeared it is in more dilapidated condition than before. The human cargo hasn’t fared much better.

The nineteen-year-old Gilmour and his bandmates, drummer Willie Wilson, bassist Rick Wills and keyboard player and saxophonist Dave Altham, have shared their train carriages with donkeys and chickens, and been harassed by gun-toting border guards who, in the era of General Franco’s Spain, have taken great exception to the length of their hair.

A year before, Jokers Wild had financed their own five-track album of Chuck Berry, Four Seasons and Frankie Lymon covers, but a record deal eluded them. By mid-1966, as Pink Floyd were signing their management deal with Blackhill, Jokers Wild were on their last legs. Since joining the band, Gilmour had supplemented his wages delivering wine, running a hot dog stall, loading sheet metal, and landing the very occasional £50-a-day gig as a photographer’s model for the likes of Varsity, the Cambridge University magazine.

The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein hadn’t offered the band a deal, but future DJ and musician Jonathan King, then a student at Cambridge University, saw them and invited Gilmour to London. The band recorded a cover of Sam and Dave’s ‘You Don’t Know What I Know’, but when the original was re-released, the Jokers Wild version was shelved. ‘Dave always told us that they wanted to sign him but not the rest of us,’ says Willie Wilson. ‘So he told us he told them to stuff it.’

‘Jonathan King noticed Dave at this club,’ recalls Rick Wills now. ‘He hung out where there were good-looking boys, but he was also on the lookout for musical talent. I went to Jonathan’s flat in London with Dave. He was on the phone talking to someone about getting a song played on Radio Caroline, and it happened right while we were there. We were like, wow! We knew someone in the music business that had real power.’

Through King, Gilmour was introduced to The Rolling Stones’ former mentor Alexis Korner, who formed a partnership with another aspiring entrepreneur, Jean-Paul Salvatori, to manage the young guitarist. Salvatori offered him a six-week residency at the Los Monteros hotel and beach club just outside Marbella.

‘Dave came back to Jokers Wild and said he’d been offered this gig,’ says Willie Wilson. ‘Who wants to do it? Are we all up for it? And most of the band said no. They all had day jobs. But Dave Altham and I both said yes. So we needed a bass player and Rick Wills was a mate who used to come to our gigs and was absolutely raring to go.’

Dave Altham had been playing keyboards, sax and guitar in Jokers Wild since 1964. John ‘Willie’ Wilson had first played in The Newcomers with Gilmour, and had, through Gilmour, landed a gig playing in another Cambridge outfit, The Swinging Hi-Fis, before taking over as drummer in Jokers Wild. Rick Wills played bass in another local band, The Soul Committee.

Before Marbella, though, Gilmour, Wills and Wilson would spend some time in London. ‘We left in Willie’s old Austin Cambridge,’ remembers Rick Wills. ‘Dave had got himself a flat in Moscow Road, near Queensway, but there wasn’t room for all of us. So Willie and I ended up living in that car. It was terrible. We survived on bread and milk.’ Nevertheless, under Salvatori’s guidance, the band were whisked down the Kings Road, kitted out in bell-bottomed, sailor’s trousers and blue Shetland jumpers, and put on stage at Sybillas, a nightclub in Swallow Street, where they immediately attracted attention. ‘We were tasty young boys in tight trousers, so we were prime fodder,’ says Rick. ‘The chef took a particular shine to me, chasing us round the kitchen with a meat cleaver.’

But if male attention was forthcoming, a record deal was not.

‘I don’t think Jean-Paul Salvatori had the slightest idea what he was doing when he sent us to Spain,’ says Willie Wilson. ‘He saw Dave as a good-looking guy who sang and played guitar, and he just saw money. His brother-in-law was Tony Secunda, who was doing well managing The Move, and I think he fancied the same.’

Recruiting Dave Altham, the four-piece set off on their gruelling trek through France and Spain. When the band eventually arrived in Marbella, they discovered the promised beach accommodation was a concrete bunker that had acted as a bomb shelter during the Second World War.

‘We also discovered that the club we were supposed to be playing hadn’t been built yet,’ says Willie, ‘so they threw a party up at the golf club nearby and got us to play to people like Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and Monica Vitti. They were all part of that Marbella set.’

Despite their parlous living conditions, the band, later toying with the name Bullitt (‘fast and flash-sounding, like the Steve McQueen movie’), began their residency at the soon-to-be-completed Los Monteros beach club, playing next to the open swimming pool and enduring the inevitable electric shocks.

‘On one hand our situation was desperate, as we were sleeping in a bomb shelter,’ says Rick. ‘But we were young, and there were lots of extremely good-looking women around, so we were having the time of our lives.’

When the season was over, the band returned to Cambridge, where a frazzled Dave Altham chose to remain. ‘Then we got another gig in Holland, playing a coming-out ball for Princess Beatrice, now Queen Beatrice,’ says Willie. ‘Next thing, Dave landed this two-month residency at a club called Jean Jacques in St Etienne, so Rick and I went with him. The gig was supposed to finish at Christmas, but in January we got a gig at Le Bilbouquet in Paris, and spent the next six months there.’

In between, the group played on demos for Johnny Halliday, the ‘French Elvis’, and at a party in Deauville, attended by sex symbol starlet Brigitte Bardot. ‘I didn’t meet her,’ insists Willie, ‘but Dave did. I think he went up to her and said, “Hello, I’m David”, because that’s exactly the sort of thing Dave would have done.’

It was in Paris that Gilmour also met Jimi Hendrix and was entrusted with squiring him around town. ‘I was an Englishman in Paris,’ Gilmour explained, ‘and I could speak reasonable French.’ Gilmour had seen Hendrix jamming at Blaises nightclub in London the year before and had raved about him.

‘We became a different band in 1967,’ explains Rick. ‘We’d started to do Hendrix and Cream covers, and Dave had also started writing songs. His parents came over to France for his twenty-first birthday and bought him a cream-white Fender Telecaster. I don’t think he ever took it out of his hands.’

When the band’s van was broken into and their microphones stolen, Gilmour realised it would be cheaper for him to go back to London and pick up replacements than buy them in France. It was on this flying visit that he encountered Pink Floyd and a debilitated Syd recording ‘See Emily Play’.

‘Dave came back and told us these stories about the bizarre songs Syd was writing,’ remembers Willie. ‘I remember him singing them to us, and telling us, “You won’t believe it, but Syd’s written a song about his bike.”’

‘That summer we had The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Sgt Pepper to listen to in France,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘When we’d left Cambridge in the summer of ‘66, Floyd hadn’t got a record deal. Then I heard through friends that they had. Then I heard the album. I thought it sounded terrific and, yes, I was sick with jealousy.’

By the time Floyd’s debut was released in August 1967, Bullitt had become Flowers, to capture the peace-and-love mood of the time. It was all to no avail. ‘That was when it got really hand to mouth – sometimes our hands didn’t even reach our mouths,’ says Willie. To save money, the three shared a single hotel room. Then Gilmour became sick. ‘Dave very rarely gets ill,’ says Willie. ‘But at the end he was so ill we couldn’t do any work.’

‘We hung on for as long as we could, but we had to come back when we were destitute,’ says Rick. The crunch came when Gilmour was admitted to hospital. ‘Dave had malnutrition and pneumonia, because he wasn’t eating. We couldn’t afford to. I weighed eight stone and Dave not much more.’

‘We left the hotel we were staying in without paying as Dave was so sick,’ says Willie. ‘To his credit, Dave went back there five years later after he’d made money with Pink Floyd, found the hotel and the couple who’d looked after him when he was ill, and paid them.’

In a final twist, the dispirited band was forced to push their broken-down van off the ferry at Dover. Rick and Willie headed straight back to Cambridge; the dogged Gilmour chose to stay in London: ‘To go back to Cambridge would have been admitting defeat.’

Instead Gilmour wound up sharing a flat in Calverton Road, Fulham, with Emo, before the pair commandeered another, more up-market pad in Victoria. Gilmour took a job driving a van for designers Ossie Clarke and Alice Pollock’s Quorum fashion boutique. Emo submitted to a short spell of gainful employment, studding leather belts at the boutique’s shop on the Kings Road. ‘Dave Gilmour never really said very much,’ Clarke’s wife the designer Celia Birtwell later recalled. ‘He just used to stand around. It was a bit unnerving.’

Gilmour’s experiences in France had only toughened his resolve. He was still looking to start another band. In November, he headed to the Royal Albert Hall for Pink Floyd’s opening slot for Jimi Hendrix. A few weeks later he showed up at the Royal College of Art where the band were playing alongside the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. With various Cambridge refugees then enrolled at the college, it had almost become a home-from-home gig. But it was obvious to all concerned that something was wrong. ‘They were awfully bad,’ admitted Gilmour. ‘Incredibly undisciplined.’

‘I remember seeing Syd play, or rather not play, or rather play something inappropriate at that gig,’ recalls Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘I said to Susie Gawler-Wright, “What’s going on?” and she said, “We don’t know. Syd is very strange.”’

In what would soon become a familiar pattern of confused and even non-communication, Nick Mason recalls approaching Gilmour after the art college gig, along the lines of: ‘If we said we were looking for another guitarist, would you be interested?’ Yet Nigel is certain he was asked by the group to telephone Gilmour about the job but that ‘Dave apparently doesn’t remember this.’ Emo, however, reckons it was Waters that phoned Gilmour at their flat in Victoria. Interviewed in 1973, Gilmour explained, ‘I knew all the guys in the band and they wanted to get rid of Syd. I was approached, discreetly, beforehand. It was put about in a very strange way.’

The final straw had been the ‘Christmas on Earth Continued’ show at Kensington Olympia. Barrett was there in body alone, appearing completely disconnected from his surroundings.

Long before his decline, Syd had struggled with the role of the traditional guitar hero. But it was the fact that he wasn’t another Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton clone that had made him appealing to Peter Jenner and Andrew King. Those close to Barrett at the time believe he was well aware of his shortcomings. Syd had expressed some insecurity about his playing in a letter to his old girlfriend Libby Gausden three years earlier, even mentioning a desire to recruit David Gilmour – referred to in the letter by his nickname of ‘Fred’ – but bemoaning the fact that Gilmour had his own band.

However, since Bob Klose’s departure, the idea of Floyd hiring another guitarist had never been mentioned. At a university gig in 1967, the late Tony Joliffe, a contemporary from Cambridge who’d played guitar in The Swinging Hi-Fis and sometimes drove Pink Floyd’s van, was coaxed on stage to perform. ‘Tony was an amazing blues guitarist, and everyone was asking Syd to let him have a go,’ remembers Emo. ‘Roger, Nick and Rick wanted to see what he was like. Tony got up and he was amazing. But I don’t think Syd wanted him up there, as he was aware that Tony was a better player.’

Nevertheless, whatever Syd’s wishes may have been, Gilmour was recruited as an additional guitarist, on a promised £30 a week. An introductory jam was arranged at Abbey Road’s Studio Two.

‘Andrew [King] and I had never met Dave before,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘So we wanted to see if he could cut the mustard. He did this amazing impression of Jimi Hendrix, so it was clear he was an incredible mimic. Which was what they wanted at the time – someone who could cover for Syd onstage.’ New Musical Express sent a photographer to the Victoria flat to take a picture of the Floyd’s new guitarist.

Gilmour insisted on another change. ‘Dave finally realised that as he was paying the rent, perhaps he should be the one sleeping in the bed and I should be sleeping on the sofa,’ laughs Emo. ‘It took him three months to realise, though.’

Bizarrely, Barrett had already proposed a change to the Floyd line-up. In a meeting at Blackhill’s office, he had suggested hiring, in Roger Waters’ words, ‘two freaks he’d met somewhere. One of them played the banjo, the other the saxophone.’ To this mix he also wanted to add ‘a couple of chick singers’. Nick Mason would later write that Barrett viewed Gilmour ‘as an interloper’, but Syd’s unpredictable behaviour during an early week of rehearsals in a West London school hall convinced them all that Gilmour’s presence was necessary. Barrett spent a couple of hours attempting to teach the band a new song entitled ‘Have You Got It Yet’. Each time the others reached the title in the chorus, Syd would change the song, turning it into the musical equivalent of an Escher staircase on which none of them would ever reach the top. ‘I actually thought there was something rather brilliant about it, like some clever kind of comedy,’ said Roger Waters. ‘But eventually I just said, “Oh, I’ve got it now”, and walked away.’

Publicity pictures were taken of the five-piece Floyd. In one, Syd is almost visibly fading into the background. In another, while the rest line up in suede jackets and dapper neck scarves, looking every inch the sixties rock group, a black-eyed, ghost-faced Barrett stares ahead beneath a mop of matted hair, as if he’d just surfaced from one of the Lesmoir-Gordons’ acid benders.

‘The light in his eyes was slowly going,’ remembers Emo. ‘He got those black circles underneath them, and you didn’t know whether it was mascara or not sleeping or both.’

A handful of gigs were booked for January 1968, commencing with a show at Birmingham’s Aston University. ‘Sometimes Syd sang a bit, sometimes he didn’t,’ recalled Gilmour. ‘My brief was also to play the rhythm parts and let Syd play what he wanted.’

Tim Renwick, then playing in a band called Wages of Sin, bumped into Gilmour on Denmark Street. ‘He started telling me how odd it was standing in for Syd and how unpredictable Syd was on stage. Some nights Syd tended not to play anything. He was out of his crust.’

‘I saw two of the gigs they did as a five-piece,’ says Emo, who was then enjoying another rare spell of gainful employment as a Floyd roadie (on £15 a week). ‘At the beginning Dave just played what was necessary. He’d learned the parts and just copied what Syd used to do. But you could tell Syd didn’t understand what was happening. He was standing so close to Dave he was almost an inch from his face. Dave wasn’t a physical person who’d have pushed him out the way, but you could see the look in his eyes, as if to say, “Help!” Syd stood like this in front of him, then started walking around him, almost checking that Dave was a three-dimensional object. That he was real. It was as if Syd was thinking: Am I dreaming this?’

As yet another compromise, the rest of the group hit on the idea of keeping Syd on board as a songwriter. ‘Our idea was to adopt The Beach Boys’ formula,’ said Nick Mason, ‘in which Brian Wilson got together with the band on stage when he wanted to. We absolutely wanted to preserve Syd in Pink Floyd one way or the other.’ By 1968, The Beach Boys’ similarly troubled composer had retired from live performances, while still writing many of the group’s songs. ‘There was no protest from Syd towards this idea,’ elaborates Peter Jenner. ‘But by that stage he’d become so detached that this was all going on around him. But I think that idea lasted about a week.’

‘I think Roger didn’t fancy that idea,’ insists Andrew King. ‘Because he fancied writing the songs instead.’

Barrett wasn’t the only one struggling. ‘I actually walked out of one of the first rehearsals,’ says Gilmour. ‘Roger had got so unbearably awful, in a way that I’d later get used to, that I stomped out of the room. I can’t remember how long I was gone for. I eventually came back. But I don’t think the band had fixed ideas of what I should do or how I should do it.’

It was on the way to a gig at Southampton University, on 26 January 1968, that the decision was taken not to call for Syd.

‘Somebody said, “Shall we collect Syd?”’ remembered Gilmour. ‘And somebody, probably Roger, said, “No, let’s not bother.”’

‘He was our friend, but most of the time we now wanted to strangle him,’ admitted Waters.

Experiencing a sense of relief at being able to perform live without worrying about what their frontman was or wasn’t going to do, the group decided to play the following night’s gig without Syd also.

Richard Wright, who was still living in Richmond Hill with Barrett, was faced with the unwelcome task of lying to his flatmate: ‘I had to say things like, “Syd, I’m going out to buy a packet of cigarettes”, and then come back the next day.’

‘Syd used to still turn up, even when they didn’t pick him up,’ says Emo. ‘He must have still had the itinerary, because there was one gig when he was there when we arrived to set up – just sat there on the stage waiting. Eventually it sunk in that there was some other guy playing his part.’

Years later, though, Richard Wright would claim that David Gilmour hadn’t been their only choice. ‘When Syd left we actually asked Jeff Beck to join,’ he said. ‘But he turned us down.’ Others claim the band were too shy ever to have asked Beck, and that he was even ‘rejected on the grounds that he couldn’t sing’.

Around the same time, Anthony Stern had run into Peter Jenner in Drum City, a music shop in London’s Piccadilly. ‘I played trumpet and had been into jazz, and while I could play the guitar, my playing wasn’t up to much,’ says Stern. ‘But Peter was like, “Look, Syd’s really falling behind, why can’t you be a second guitar player in Pink Floyd? … You come from Cambridge … You know them all.” Spontaneously, I just turned around and said, “Oh, no, I’m a film director” ’.

Gilmour’s self-confessed insecurity wasn’t helped by the management’s lack of faith. ‘We consciously fought to keep Syd in the band,’ agrees Peter Jenner. ‘The idea that Roger was going to become the main songwriter didn’t cross my mind. But I did think that Rick could have come into his own, and we did wonder if he and Syd would stick together.’

Wright shared the management’s misgivings. ‘Peter and Andrew thought that Syd and I were the musical brains of the group, and that we should form a break-away band,’ he later told Mojo. ‘And, believe me, I would have left with him, if I had thought Syd could do it.’

Despite the rest of the group’s scepticism, Jenner and King still believed that Barrett was the band’s golden goose, and aimed to establish him as a solo artist. Financially, Blackhill was still struggling, with Pink Floyd in debt to the tune of £17,000. At the end of 1967, the company had begun managing a young singer-songwriter, Marc Feld, now working under the name Marc Bolan, and his group Tyrannosaurus Rex. Feld had signed to Blackhill because they looked after his hero Syd Barrett, yet it would be another few years before he would become a bona fide pop star in his own right. An enterprising Jenner had also applied for a £50,000 grant from the Arts Council, supposedly to fund a hastily conceived rock opera featuring BBC underground rock DJ John Peel as narrator. When the tabloids got wind of the scam, they revived the previous year’s headlines, claiming that Pink Floyd’s ‘sound equivalent of LSD visions’ was reason enough to reject their application. The Arts Council agreed.

Unbeknown to Pink Floyd, the Morrison Agency was already circling. ‘Bryan was very wily,’ says Jenner. ‘He was the man who told us, “If a musician ever asks you for any money, say yes, provided they sign a publishing contract. You can give any musician twenty-five pounds for a publishing contract.” And Bryan acquired a lot of publishing contracts.’

In March 1968, Jenner and King formally dissolved their partnership with Pink Floyd, leaving the group free to secure a new management deal with Bryan Morrison. Morrison would eventually pass the job on to Steve O’Rourke, one of the ‘sinister dandies’ Joe Boyd had encountered the year before. Despite their previous misgivings, Boyd, Jenner and King had since warmed to both O’Rourke and Morrison’s booking agent Tony Howard. Says Jenner: ‘Knowing those two were involved was one of the reasons I felt confident that Floyd would get well looked after.’

Pink Floyd’s enterprising new manager, twenty-seven-year-old Steve O’Rourke, was the son of an Irish fisherman and had originally trained as an accountant. He moved into the music business in his late teens, later hired by Morrison after a stint as a pet food salesman. It was a job O’Rourke would cite as a badge of honour, telling the band that he would often sample his products to demonstrate their nutritious value to prospective clients, declaring, ‘If it’s good enough for me, it’s certainly good enough for Rover.’ O’Rourke had also made a small appearance in the Bob Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back, which was deemed a point in his favour. However, later, O’Rourke’s commitment to the idea that you could sell anything would prove a major stumbling block in his relationship with the more questioning Roger Waters.

‘Steve was much harder than Peter and I,’ admits Andrew King. ‘And I was rather jealous of him. He sorted out some big mistakes we’d made in our contractual relationship with EMI. He had an eye for the main chance and used it to their advantage. Steve had one client – the band – and nothing would compromise him in what he would do for the band. They could not have had a better manager.’

‘It was always a verbal agreement between Floyd and Steve,’ says another of the group’s confidants. ‘The deal was done on a handshake. I always thought that was a clever move on the band’s part. Somehow, it made Steve work that bit harder.’

On 6 April, Syd’s departure was officially announced. A week later, Pink Floyd released a single, ‘It Would Be So Nice’, with Richard Wright on lead vocals, the first effort from their new line-up. A perky sub-Kinks affair (which Waters would later describe as ‘complete trash’), it included a reference in the lyrics to the Evening Standard newspaper, which fell foul of the BBC’s regulations. Happy to garner any publicity, the band contacted the newspaper, while agreeing to change the offending lyric. But even a little controversy couldn’t save the song from barely denting the charts.

In Cambridge, the news of Floyd’s line-up change was met with mixed emotions. Barrett’s sister Rosemary had been appalled by her brother’s rapid decline, and blamed the music industry for indulging his drug use. She would later claim that after ‘See Emily Play’ she found Syd’s music too painful to listen to.

Bob Klose, who’d concentrated on his studies after quitting the band, welcomed the change. ‘Syd was the rocket fuel, but Dave was the steady burn,’ he quips. ‘I know that Roger Waters had the creative impulse, but a great band needs a great musician. You need someone who can sing and play and do all the very musical stuff, aside from the grand concepts.’

For Gilmour’s former bandmates, the news of his recruitment came as no surprise.

‘I was at home recuperating after the French trip when I heard,’ says Rick Wills. ‘I was disappointed, but it was a logical step. Next time I saw Dave, he’d come back to Cambridge after doing some gigs, and he had eighty pounds in cash on him – and this was when eighty pounds was still a lot of money. He was in Ken Stevens’ music shop – long hair, velvet jacket, boots from Gohill’s in Camden Town – buying a very expensive pair of headphones that you plugged straight into your guitar – and he’d got himself a Fender Strat by then. I thought: Christ, you look the part!’

On stage, though, the flashily attired, Fender Strat-wielding Gilmour was still understudying his predecessor, gamely singing Barrett’s whimsical lyrics and replicating his guitar lines. A batch of mimed promo videos made by the band that year for Belgian TV captured the group’s muddled situation. Waters mimes Barrett’s vocals on ‘Apples and Oranges’ and ‘The Scarecrow’. Wright half-mimes on ‘See Emily Play’, looking mortally embarrassed, while Waters upstages him by playing imaginary cricket and wielding his bass like a machine-gun. On each of the clips, Gilmour hangs around on the sidelines, looking swish and handsome, but not yet part of the gang.

Following UFO’s closure, Middle Earth in Covent Garden had become the underground cognoscenti’s club of choice. Jeff Dexter was one of the club’s regular DJs. ‘We put Floyd on at Middle Earth,’ he recalls, ‘and I thought the new line-up was brilliant. In those days lots of people thought the idea of showing you were out to lunch was kind of cool. But I thought David was, dare I say it, so much more professional.’

As Storm Thorgerson explains, ‘You have to remember Syd couldn’t play guitar very well. David could. Syd had an attractive voice but David had a great voice.’

Gilmour’s professionalism certainly held him in good stead on the night Syd showed up at Middle Earth and spent the gig glowering at him from in front of the stage.

The real test for the group and their new recruit would come in the studio. EMI needed a second album. Pink Floyd reconvened with Norman Smith at Abbey Road. They’d already endured several recording sessions with Syd and had one Barrett-sung composition in the can, ‘Jugband Blues’, recorded just before Christmas. Syd had requested a Salvation Army band to play on the track and the redoubtable Smith knew just where to find one, though rumour has it that, on seeing the uniformed brass players, Barrett simply instructed them to play anything. Their contributions gave the song an even edgier quality. ‘I think the track might have been playing in their headphones,’ recalled Peter Jenner, ‘but the brass band chose to ignore it.’ It was agreed to include ‘Jugband Blues’ on the new album, but not Barrett’s ‘Vegetable Man’ or ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’. Waters vetoed their inclusion on the grounds that they were ‘just too dark’.

The bassist had been especially prolific, delivering three self-penned songs: ‘Let There Be More Light’, a broody psychedelic wig-out, all about aliens landing in the Fens, which name-checked the Floyd’s familiar Pip Carter; ‘Corporal Clegg’, the first of what would be many diatribes against the futility of war; and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, a shivery, languid piece of what critics would later christen, to the band’s despair, ‘Space Rock’. Wright wrote and sang lead vocals on ‘See-Saw’ and ‘Remember a Day’, the last a slight piece of psychedelic pop originally intended for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Still raw from his experiences with Syd, Norman Smith was impressed by Barrett’s replacement. ‘Dave Gilmour was a different story altogether,’ he recalls. ‘So much easier.’ But while Gilmour may have been a more willing workmate than Barrett, collectively the band were more dogged than ever in their pursuit of experimental ideas, an approach that flummoxed the producer.

‘I still didn’t understand the music,’ admits Smith. ‘But what I’d noticed is that they’d started developing their own tapes at home, so I encouraged this, as I always thought they should produce themselves in the long run.’

Smith backed off from the process, showing the band how to use the studio, while chipping in with advice, and, on ‘Remember a Day’, taking over the drums when Mason struggled to produce the required feel. But Smith’s attitude jarred. ‘Norman gave up on the second album,’ griped Richard Wright. ‘He was forever saying things like, “You can’t do twenty minutes of this ridiculous noise.”’

Peter Jenner now believes that the band’s dissatisfaction stemmed from the fact that ‘Norman was becoming “Hurricane” Smith, a pop star in his own right, and perhaps didn’t feel he needed to be producing Pink Floyd.’

In fact, ‘Hurricane’ Smith’s pop career wouldn’t take off until the early seventies, but the noise in question probably referred to the album’s title track. Divided into three movements, and filled with a cacophony of hammering pianos and cluttering percussion leading to a final, tuneful coda, it was the first fruits of Waters’ decision to ‘stretch things out and be experimental’.

For Pink Floyd’s newest recruit, the experience was daunting and even alien: some versions of the songs had already been recorded with Syd; he barely contributed to the songwriting; and the harmony vocal skills that had been his forte in Jokers Wild weren’t required. ‘I didn’t feel like a full member,’ Gilmour said later. ‘I was a little on the outside of it all.’

Syd Barrett’s presence on the album – eventually called A Saucerful of Secrets – remains the subject of speculation. He’s supposedly playing guitar on ‘See-Saw’, ‘Remember a Day’ and ‘Jugband Blues’, and Gilmour believes he’s somewhere in the background on ‘Set the Controls …’ The final track, ‘Jugband Blues’, with its eerie, lurching brass arrangement, is the only song to feature Barrett’s lead vocals. Sounding like a ghost, he utters the final prescient line, ‘What exactly is a dream … and what exactly is a joke?’

‘We could never write like Syd,’ says Wright. ‘We never had the imagination to come up with the kind of lyrics he did. I cringe at some of my songs, like “Remember a Day”. But something like “Corporal Clegg”, which was one of Roger’s, is just as bad.’

“‘Corporal Clegg” is a good piece of work,’ insisted Waters later. ‘We had to keep going. Once you’re in a rock ’n’ roll band, you weren’t going to stop. That would have meant going back to architecture.’

Waters’ doggedness is apparent throughout the album. Plotting the movements in the title track but unable to read music, he and Nick Mason scored the piece by inventing their own symbols, prompting Gilmour’s comment that the song was mapped out ‘like an architectural diagram’.

The album misses Barrett and, rather tellingly, one of its weaker tracks, ‘See-Saw’, was originally titled by the band ‘The Most Boring Song I’ve Ever Heard Bar Two’. The record’s true legacy now is the creeping influence of ‘Let There Be More Light’ and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ on all those cerebral seventies rock bands that followed in the Floyd’s wake.

Released in June that year, reactions to the band’s latest creation were mixed. ‘Forget it as background music to a party,’ warned Record Mirror in an otherwise upbeat appraisal, while New Musical Express dismissed the title track as ‘long and boring, and has little to warrant its monotonous direction’.

‘I was surprised when Saucerful was criticised harshly in the press,’ admitted Mason. ‘I thought it had some very new ideas.’

But not everyone was so harsh about the new Floyd. DJ John Peel was moved to reverie by the group’s performance of the title track at the Midsummer High Weekend festival in London’s Hyde Park the day after the album’s release. Having experienced the performance from a boat floating on the Serpentine, Peel announced in Disc magazine that ‘it was like a religious experience … they just seemed to fill the sky and everything.’ His lengthy ramblings earned him a place in the Pseuds Corner column of Private Eye.

The Midsummer High Weekend was the first free festival ever staged in Hyde Park, paving the way for free shows in the park from The Rolling Stones and Blind Faith. Its organisers were the ever-resourceful team at Blackhill Enterprises, who fared better with the Royal Parks Commission than they had with the Arts Council earlier in the year. Floyd performed alongside Roy Harper, Jethro Tull and Blackhill’s great white hopes Tyrannosaurus Rex. ‘Hyde Park in ’68 was wonderful because it reminded us of our roots,’ ventured Nick Mason. ‘However spurious they may have been. It was a reminder that we were still part of this thing, which was by then a fairly commercial venture. So it gave us credibility.’ An unofficial launch for the Syd-less Floyd, both of the group’s hits, ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’, were conspicuously absent from the setlist that day.

While Pink Floyd road-tested a new sound, their former singer was in professional limbo. Peter Jenner had booked sessions for Syd at Abbey Road, but they’d proved difficult. Barrett’s odd behaviour in the past had all but made him persona non grata at the studio. The King family’s flat at Richmond Hill had provided a saner environment after Cromwell Road, but in his unwanted role as the freaks’ pied piper, Barrett soon had disciples beating a path to its door.

By January 1967, the Lesmoir-Gordons had moved some 400 yards from Cromwell Road into Egerton Court, a rambling mansion block opposite South Kensington tube station near Brompton Road. Film director Roman Polanski had been so taken with the building’s imposing décor and 1930s-era spiral staircase that he’d featured both in his 1965 movie Repulsion. David Gale, Dave Henderson, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, Ponji Robinson and Storm Thorgerson would soon occupy rooms at Egerton Court, its location being ideal for the Royal College of Art, where some of their number were now studying.

Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon was now working as an editor for the future film director Hugh Hudson, then directing commercials, but already responsible for the opening credits to the James Bond films. ‘The flat became a focal point for a very arty set,’ remembers Po. ‘Mick and Marianne used to come round to drop acid with Nigel – all of them watching the reflection of crystals spinning on the walls. Donovan would drop round, and everyone was wearing Granny Takes a Trip clothes and looking terribly groovy. We were the original Kings Road hippies.’

‘Nigel and Jenny took the biggest room at Egerton Court,’ remembers frequent house guest Emo. ‘David Gale had the smallest. It was so small, in fact, that he had to have a bed on stilts, so that there was somewhere for him to work. Storm was in a room that was about twenty-five feet long with an incredibly high ceiling. And he painted the walls bright orange and the window frames with red gloss paint. It was a complete horror-show, but he was like, “It’s over the top, which is how I like it.”’

‘I was a student, negotiating everything from love affairs to illicit deals to supposedly working at college,’ recalls Storm. ‘I was not in the best emotional state personally.’ Matthew Scurfield, another resident, says that ‘For Storm, there was a lot of talking and dissecting of the cosmos and the universe.’

Throughout the remainder of 1967 and the early months of 1968, the occupants of Egerton Court continued their stoic consumption of narcotics. But, perhaps inevitably, something had to give.

‘I spent three years sleeping on my brother’s floor there,’ recalls Matthew Scurfield, who took his first LSD trip at the flat. ‘That was where I got to know Nigel and Jenny. A lot of the things that have been said about Egerton Court are true. It’s not bending the truth to say there was a lot of acid-guzzling going on there. We took it in huge doses because no one knew what they were doing. But it wasn’t just a load of people lying around doing it. We were all very existential people. So the front part of the brain and the intellect were very much to the fore of what was going on.’

‘We often had great times on acid,’ says Po. ‘I can remember laughing myself silly for eight hours and wandering into pubs when I was on it and drinking pints of beer. But one of the cumulative effects of acid is that it opens your mind up to a lot of sensitive issues, and, after a while, those sensitive issues don’t go away. What people refer to as “acid flashbacks” are really your mind and nervous system being opened up to sensitivities that wouldn’t be opened up under normal circumstances. We all started to feel very raw. Whereas we used to smoke dope every day, now the dope was starting to open up those sensitivities as well. So suddenly you’re smoking a joint, and that’s making you feel paranoid as well. So the effects were kicking in for everybody. The joke was gone, and we were all feeling very edgy.’

When Nigel and Jenny left Egerton Court for a trip abroad, Syd and Lindsay took over their room. ‘That was the start of a complete nightmare for the rest of the flat,’ says Po. ‘Because by that time Syd was not functioning very well. He could be charming, but he could also be anxious, withdrawn and aggressive.’

‘I used to hear thumping noises and screams coming from their room. I knew what was happening,’ recalls David Gale. ‘Syd would start off tickling Lindsay and then it would quickly get much darker.’

‘There are all these stories about him hitting her,’ elaborates Po. ‘He’s supposed to have smashed his guitar and burnt her with cigarette ends, but I never actually saw that happen. I’d hear these furious rows, though, and I’d bang on the door. One night Syd opened it and came out, wearing a pair of red velvet trousers and nothing else. I thought he was going to hit me. I told him he had to stop as he was freaking the rest of us out. There’d be all these discussions in the kitchen the next morning, and I started locking my door at night, which I’d never done before.’

Emo and Matthew Scurfield were both there one night when they heard screams coming from Syd and Lindsay’s bedroom. ‘Matthew went in, as we could hear Syd banging Lindsay’s head off the floor, and Syd nutted him,’ says Emo. ‘Matthew came out bleeding so I went in, picked Lindsay up, and Syd saw the look in my eyes and backed off. It was awful to see someone behaving like that. I don’t think he knew what he was doing.’

‘Lindsay would lock herself in the loo and Syd would tell you to fuck off when you tried to intervene,’ says Matthew. ‘In the end I thought: Fuck it! I don’t want to be your mate any more. But it was odd, because sometimes he could be completely normal. It was like when you were kids at school and you saw a fight in the playground at lunchtime, and then, twenty minutes later, you’d see the same kid sitting in class, quite normal, as if nothing had happened. Syd was still thinking about his music at this time. I can remember seeing him at Egerton Court experimenting with a clock by putting it in a bath of water and recording the sound it made. But then the next minute it would all change again.’

Interviewed in 1988, the future critic and broadcaster Jonathan Meades talked of visiting a friend, Harry Dodson, at the flat, as a teenager. ‘Syd was this weird, exotic and mildly famous creature by that time, who happened to be living in this flat with these people who were, to some extent, pimping off him both professionally and privately,’ he recalled. ‘I went in there and there was this terrible noise. It sounded like heating pipes shaking. I said, “What’s that?” and he [Po] sort of giggled and said, “That’s Syd having a bad trip. We put him in the linen cupboard”.’

Meades says now that ‘I must have gone to Egerton Court about three times. I’m always reminded of that Martin Amis book, Dead Babies, in which he describes this reckless group of drug-takers. That Cambridge lot made me think of them, especially extraordinary characters like Emo. They were all much more gung-ho in what they’d do than I was. Any sense of self-survival seemed pretty absent in that crowd.’

‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ insists Po. ‘I don’t think Syd was still taking acid but he was smoking a lot of dope, and he used to get paranoid. What Jonty Meades called the laundry cupboard was, in fact, the toilet. There was no laundry cupboard. The toilet was like a cupboard – no window and one bare bulb. One day Syd was walking down the corridor, then the next thing I hear is him shouting, “Let me out! Let me out!” Somehow he’d locked himself in the toilet with the light off and had become very disorientated. He was probably very stoned and he began panicking. It took me twenty minutes to explain to him how to open the catch on the door. Jonty had walked into the flat and asked what happened. I think I said he’d locked himself in. When Syd came out he was hyperventilating, running in sweat.’

Meades’ friend Harry Dodson now recalls meeting Syd only a few times, and that he ‘seemed beyond all normal communication’.

Pop stardom, drug use and romantic entanglements would all become an issue.

‘There’s some suggestion that the women were as much of a problem as the drugs,’ offers David Gale. ‘Apart from the girlfriends, Syd would have lots of strange groupie girls coming round the house. Some of them specialised in making exotic shirts for rock stars and then shagging them – nice work if you can get it.’

‘At one point he was wearing lipstick, dressing in high heels and believing he had homosexual tendencies,’ David Gilmour told one writer years later. ‘I remember all sorts of strange things happening.’

As Jenny Fabian attests, Syd’s attitude towards sex seemed to be as distracted as it was for most other areas of his life. ‘By the time I had my liaison with Syd, he was very far gone,’ she told writer Mark Paytress in 2004. ‘Everyone was liaisoning all over the place in those days. But Syd wasn’t the sort of guy to flirt. I’d never seen him flirt. I wouldn’t say he was madly sexual, he certainly wasn’t predatory. If you were there and you were cool, there’d just be the smile or the indication that you were a friend enough to stay. It wasn’t anything more than that.’

For those that had known Syd at art school in Cambridge, the change in his behaviour was especially troubling. The happy-go-lucky Barrett of three years earlier was now absent. John Watkins had last seen his friend playing at the art school’s 1966 Christmas party. One evening, two years later, he ran into David Gilmour backstage at a Floyd show. ‘I asked how Syd was and Dave said, “A bit weird.” I got both their numbers and I phoned Syd up a week later, but he’d completely disappeared into himself. He probably knew who I was, but I couldn’t get anywhere with him.’

Yet by the summer of 1968, Syd wasn’t the only one experiencing the aftermath of the previous year’s LSD use.

‘Our group had split right down the middle,’ says David Gale. ‘With half of us going spiritual and half of us going to shrinks, myself in the latter half.’

That year, the Lesmoir-Gordons followed the lead of other Cantabrigians before them, disappearing to India to follow the Sant Mat path. Meanwhile, Matthew Scurfield and David Gale began attending sessions with colleagues of the celebrated R.D. Laing.

Earlier that year, Roger Waters claims to have driven Syd to an appointment with Laing, but says that Barrett refused to get out of the car. David Gale tried to engineer a repeat visit some months later. He remembers: ‘I called Ronnie Laing from Egerton Court at the behest of everyone there, because we’d all said, “Enough”, in spite of our absurd sixties coolness about “interrupting somebody else’s trip, man”. I told Laing that I was a friend of Syd Barrett’s and that I thought he would benefit from some psychotherapy. Laing said he wasn’t going to see anybody that didn’t come of their own accord.’ Promising Laing that Syd would attend, Gale booked a taxi. ‘When it arrived, we said, “Oh, Syd, we’ve arranged an appointment for you with R.D. Laing” – who was considered the Elvis of psychotherapy – and Syd just said no and that was it.’

‘When you’re young and your friend goes off the rails it’s hard to cope with,’ says Thorgerson. ‘We were not experts in analytical issues. Half of us were semi-crazy anyway, and, if not semi-crazy, had serious emotional defects and our own problems to bear.’

As well as Syd, John ‘Ponji’ Robinson would be among those who fell by the wayside. Ponji would go on to undertake an extraordinary form of therapy, which involved him taking LSD with his psychiatrist. Sadly, he eventually committed suicide.

In July 1968, as Pink Floyd embarked on their second US tour, Barrett left Egerton Court. Lindsay had already departed, finding a safe haven at Storm Thorgerson’s new place in Hampstead after one especially violent outburst. In years to come, on the rare occasions she has been interviewed, Lindsay would play down the suggestion of Barrett’s violence towards her. She would drop out of Syd’s life completely by the end of the sixties, eventually marrying and raising a family.

Barrett, in turn, drove his Austin Mini back to Cambridge, reportedly taking a whistle-stop tour around Britain during which he may have shown up unannounced at various Floyd gigs. He would return to London sporadically, sleeping on old friends’ floors, including Anthony Stern’s Battersea flat, where rumours surfaced that he was experimenting with heroin. ‘You’d see his mood declining as the evening wore on,’ recalls Stern. ‘Then he’d disappear into the lavatory and come back and his mood had changed. I don’t think it was cocaine, which was completely absent at that time. The issue of whether Syd tried heroin has become a delicate one, but at the time everything was being tried.’

With Syd gone, the Lesmoir-Gordons returned to their old room at Egerton Court and made a discovery. ‘I found a colour drawing Syd had left in our room,’ recalls Jenny. ‘It was a picture of a human head with a train going in one side and coming out the other, and at the top it had the words “That’s Weird” written across it.’

During the ensuing months, Syd would occasionally show up at Blackhill’s new offices in Princedale Road, Holland Park. Juliette Gale was now working in the same building, managing a modelling agency, Black Boy (later Black Boy And Blondelle), the first agency to represent black catwalk models. Time Out, London’s new hip underground magazine, also rented an office in the house. ‘I was at Time Out, which launched in the summer of ‘68,’ says future BBC DJ Bob Harris. ‘We had an office in the same building as Blackhill and Richard Wright’s girlfriend Juliette. I’d seen Syd with Floyd at the UFO club many times, but the only times I saw him now he was comatose in reception, slumped in a corner with Juliette shrugging her shoulders as you wandered through. It seemed terribly sad.’

Jenner and King strived to keep a closer eye on their charge, but even they met with his suspicion.

‘When he first left the band we had a rota of people who gave Syd supper one night a week,’ recalls Andrew King. ‘So he’d come and eat with us, as he’d known my wife since they were at art college in Cambridge together. I actually think he felt safer with her than me. I expect Syd saw me as part of “the business”. The last time he came to ours for supper was one of the last times I ever saw him.’

Syd’s former band were adjusting gingerly to their new handlers. Prior to undertaking their second US tour, Bryan Morrison sent Steve O’Rourke to see the band, claiming they needed to sign another agency contract as a formality for touring overseas. Waters was especially reluctant and suggested they sign a contract that lasted for the duration of the tour only. A day later, Morrison sold the agency to Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises. Steve O’Rourke was effectively sold to NEMS as part of the deal and, according to Waters, ‘never got a penny out of it’.

Floyd’s second US tour began almost as ignominiously as their first, with delayed work visas leading to the postponement of shows. Gigs alternated between underground hot spots such as Steve Paul’s The Scene club in New York and the Detroit Grande Ballroom. Bussed into the backstage areas of these outdoor events, Floyd would catch the last moments of sets from fellow Brits such as The Troggs before being bundled on stage themselves. Elsewhere, they’d fight for the audience’s attention between performances by homegrown heavies Blue Cheer and Steppenwolf. Midway through the dates, the money ran out, leaving the group stuck in Seattle until their US agency could settle their hotel bill.

‘It also felt as if we could only get gigs at weekends,’ said Roger Waters. ‘So when it wasn’t a weekend, we were stuck somewhere like the Mohawk Motor Inn on the outskirts of Detroit where you could get a room for eight dollars a night. Hour after hour spent sat by some crappy swimming pool with no money to go anywhere.’

Nevertheless, in New York, where the band stayed at the notorious Chelsea Hotel, Waters was tempted to try LSD again for the first time since his Greek holiday in 1966. While tripping, he ventured out to buy some food, and found himself frozen in the middle of Eighth Avenue, seemingly unable to move. Waters later claimed it was his last experience with the drug.

Even with Syd gone, Waters still felt moved to vent his ire on stage, developing his party piece of attacking the gong suspended behind Mason’s drum kit with great gusto during ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’. ‘Roger would do some very strange things on stage,’ recalls one eye-witness from the time. ‘He was so very tall that he cut a very strong figure. And there was also the way he dressed …’

Roger had already had a slightly too-short pair of fashionably snug red trousers customised with gold braid tassels on the hems. In the US, he acquired a cowboy-style holster fixed to his belt and, with a piece of twine, to his thigh, in which he took to carrying around his cigarettes. ‘The hippie clothes thing had a fairly narrow border,’ recalls one friend of the band. ‘But I guess we felt that Roger sometimes stepped outside it.’

Whatever his sartorial mishaps, Waters clearly helped to drive the band. Witnessing the group’s performance at the 100,000-seater JFK Stadium in Philadelphia was future Rolling Stone writer David Fricke. A freak thunderstorm later that day would lead to the cancellation of headliners The Who, but the upstart English band lower down the bill grabbed his attention. ‘From where I sat the Floyds were tiny moving matchsticks,’ he recalled. ‘Yet the music was big enough to move the air. For the forty or so minutes the Floyd were on stage they were the air.’

David Fricke’s enthusiasm had yet to translate to his future pay-masters. Struggling with the live gigs, Rolling Stone also felt confused by the new album. ‘The Pink Floyd are firmly anchored in the diatonic world, with any deviations from that norm a matter of effect rather than musical conviction,’ complained reviewer Jim Miller.

By September, the band were back performing before more partisan crowds, revisiting Gilmour’s old haunt, Le Bilbouquet in Paris, and their new home from home, the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden.

Slowly but surely Pink Floyd were changing, but not just musically. Earlier that year, they’d played the First International European Pop Festival in Rome alongside The Move and The Nice from the previous year’s Hendrix tour. The Nice’s Davy O’List, who’d understudied Syd on that tour, dropped into Floyd’s hotel suite.

‘I was rather shocked to see Dave Gilmour luxuriating on a double bed and holding a bottle of Scotch,’ O’List laughs, ‘because that was the first time I’d ever seen a member of Pink Floyd with a drink. Despite what was going on with Syd and the drugs, the rest of them had seemed so straight on that Hendrix tour.’

Faced with the challenge of filling Syd’s shoes and standing up to the bass player, David Gilmour was similarly partial to a smoke. Later, when asked by a Canadian student newspaper whether they used drugs while they performed, the guitarist’s answer was wonderfully obtuse: ‘Sometimes. Usually. But not much.’ The Gypsy Moth and the First World War flying ace outfits certainly looked authentic. Standing alongside the biplane, Pink Floyd had swapped their Kings Road threads for grease-spattered flying suits and goggles, their collective plumage of hair the only reminder that this was 1968 rather than 1916. It was October and Pink Floyd were being filmed for a very literal promo clip to accompany their new single, ‘Point Me at the Sky’. Unknown to them and EMI it would be their last UK-released single for eleven years. Unfortunately, like ‘Apples and Oranges’ and ‘It Would Be So Nice’, the Norman Smith-produced song showcased the group’s insurmountable struggle to write a hit single. Worse still, the chorus sounded troublingly like that of The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.

Undeterred by the song’s lack of performance on the charts, Pink Floyd simply savoured their chance to dress up like Biggles and fly in a Gypsy Moth.

‘I never felt the band was finished when those singles flopped,’ Nick Mason says. ‘Blind optimism, I suppose. I think we just believed that we were right and everybody else was wrong. We were one of the first bands to benefit from the freedom that The Beatles had provided. After Sgt Pepper, we all had a lot more freedom.’

If EMI were happy to overlook Pink Floyd’s failure in the singles charts, the band still had to consider the label’s attitude towards A Saucerful of Secrets, an album that had hardly matched Sgt Pepper for sales. Roger Waters summed up EMI’s approach as being, ‘Yes, that’s very nice … but now you have to get back to making some proper records.’

By the start of the New Year, they were already talking to Melody Maker about a planned double album, made up of individual compositions and group tracks. Yet an indication of where they were heading was already buried on the B-side of ‘Point Me at the Sky’ in an early version of a piece entitled ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’. Gradually expanded beyond its original two-and-a-half minutes, it would join ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ as another trial run for the wildly ambitious Floyd of the seventies: a slow-building melody, eerie effects, and complete avoidance of a conventional pop song structure.

‘It was abstract music, not so song-orientated,’ recalled Phil Manzanera, the future Roxy Music guitarist, then an avid Floyd fan. ‘They were doing things with sounds, having fun with the traditions of musique concrète and the Radiophonic Workshop. You have to remember a lot of people were lying down to listen to this stuff. It was a chill-out experience.’

To complement this abstract experience, A Saucerful of Secrets had been packaged in a suitably far-out sleeve. Just as the band’s Royal College of Art pals had been on hand to design flyers and posters, they now contributed the sleeve design for the group’s second album. Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell had formed a design partnership, though more by accident than design.

‘Storm had a friend who worked in a publishing company,’ recalls Po, ‘and she introduced us to the people who did Penguin book covers, and they wanted to be part of a new, hip scene. We’d just discovered a thing called infra-red film and Storm said we should do them in infra-red. They were for cowboy book covers, so we photographed David Gale, Dave Henderson, Nigel and Jenny – everyone from Egerton Court – in Richmond Park, dressed up in western wear. It looked like Stagecoach on acid. We presented them to Penguin, who loved them and gave us £40 a cover – which was enough for us to live on for the whole summer. We ended up doing about ten covers. I think it was Roger Waters, who was very friendly with Storm, who suggested we do the cover for A Saucerful of Secrets. We’d been experimenting in dark rooms and had a few sketches and rough pages.’ The suggested design – a tiny photograph of the band in Richmond Park surrounded by cosmic swirls – was intended to ‘give the album a surreal, acidy feel’.

‘At that point we were going to call ourselves Consciousness Incorporated, a very groovy name for the times,’ explains Po, ‘but you couldn’t call yourself Incorporated as it was an American term for a limited company. Going up to Egerton Court one day we saw written on the outside of the door in biro the word ‘Hipgnosis’. We were a bit pissed off about it as someone had graffitied on our nice clean door. But we both thought it was a great name – hip and gnostic. We never found out who wrote that on the door, but we always thought it was Syd. We called ourselves Hipgnosis and had a little card made, which said, “Photos, designs, artworks etc” and finished with the words “far outs, groovies, weasels and stoats”. Don’t ask me why.’

The duo were paid £110 for their efforts, and A Saucerful of Secrets would herald the start of their working relationship with Pink Floyd.

Yet before Floyd could head off into their own musical universe, there was the gravitational pull of their old singer to be negotiated. By January 1969, Syd was back in London, seemingly calmer, and settled in a new three-bedroom flat at Wetherby Mansions, a large block on Earls Court Square, just off the Old Brompton Road. His latest flatmates were a mutual friend by the name of Jules, who would soon move out, and the artist Duggie Fields, the former Regent Street Poly student and ex-Cromwell Road resident, viewed by those close to Syd as a calming influence.

‘He seemed much happier having left the band, which is why I agreed to get a flat with him,’ says Fields. ‘Syd still had money coming in from the Floyd. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it removed the pressure to get up in the morning and go to work. He seemed to be confused about what he should be doing.’

With Lindsay gone, Syd was now involved with Gilly Staples, another model from the Quorum boutique. He was also talking about making another record and contacted Malcolm Jones, head of EMI’s newly launched subsidiary, Harvest. Jones had devised the idea of an imprint label dedicated to hip, underground music. With Floyd’s success as its benchmark, Harvest would go on to enjoy success with Deep Purple and Roy Harper, alongside less successful waifs and strays from the Blackhill stable, including the Edgar Broughton Band.

Dedicated to making albums rather than chasing hit singles, Harvest would become synonymous with the progressive rock music of the next decade. More importantly, Jones was a Syd Barrett fan. Norman Smith was committed to Pink Floyd, so Syd asked Jones to produce some sessions, intending to revisit the songs he’d recorded with Peter Jenner (of which only ‘Golden Hair’ and ‘Late Night’ would appear on the finished album, The Madcap Laughs) and record new songs he claimed to have written.

‘Initially, it was just to see if Syd had anything worth recording,’ recalls Peter Mew, who engineered those first sessions at Olympic Studios. ‘He would sit down, sing a couple of verses, then stop and have a wander around and then start something else. You could see there was the essence of some really interesting stuff there, but he didn’t seem to be able to get it together enough to finish anything. Even stoned, musicians have some inkling of what they are going to be doing, even if it’s very bad and they do it badly, but Syd didn’t seem to have it together enough to sing a song from beginning to end, and he didn’t seem to be able to analyse critically what he’d done and then maybe do another take.’

Later, Barrett roped in David Gilmour’s former bandmate, Willie Wilson, and drummer Jerry Shirley, later of Humble Pie, to play on ‘Here I Go’ and ‘No Man’s Land’.

‘Syd started playing these songs and I drummed along,’ says Willie, who was now playing in a band called Bitter Sweet. ‘The trouble was, the song was never the same twice. Then Jerry Shirley tried to dub a bass on top of it, but he couldn’t follow it at all, as no two versions were the same.’

Jones booked more studio time, working on ‘Terrapin’ and ‘It’s No Good Trying’. From here on, the sessions became more problematic. Barrett showed up in the studio with an unusable recording of a revving motorcycle engine, which he wanted to dub onto a track. Later, he invited his old friends The Soft Machine to play on a song, but ignored their requests to know what key it was in, before walking out of the studio.

Jeff Jarratt was hired to engineer some of the sessions, but was stunned by the change in Syd since The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. ‘It was tragic,’ says Jeff now. ‘One minute there was this guy who was this creative force and next he was like a vegetable.’

According to Malcolm Jones, EMI never called a halt to the Madcap sessions, but Barrett told the producer that he wanted his former bandmates to help out with the final sessions. Despite his attitude towards Gilmour at Floyd’s Middle Earth gig the previous year, Syd was now in close contact with his successor. Gilmour had moved into a new flat at Richmond Mansions, also on Earls Court Square. He was hard to ignore, as Syd and Duggie’s kitchen window afforded a perfect view into the guitarist’s new pad.

‘My memory is that EMI were going to shut the album down and shelve it,’ said Gilmour. ‘And I think Roger and I volunteered to rescue the project if they gave us more time. They gave us three days and it was very tricky to get anything done. Syd was in a very poor state in the studio, falling over, knocking mikes over. We put it out as best we could.’

‘That was around the last time Syd and I communicated,’ recalls Po. ‘It was either just before or after his first solo album, I can’t remember, but we all went down to Olympic Studios. There was Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason, Syd, myself and one or two others. I can’t recall who was on bass but it wasn’t Roger. But we played “Back Door Man”, endlessly, for something like four hours. I was even playing guitar. It was being done to try and get Syd into a creative place, but it was obvious after several hours that it wasn’t going to happen. He was dropping his plectrum, not knowing what was going on …’

With his album almost completed, Syd suddenly quit London and trailed a group of Cambridge friends to Ibiza. ‘We saw him from a distance in the town square in San Fernando,’ recalls Emo. ‘Nobody knew he was coming. Someone said, “Hang on, isn’t that Syd?” He was stood there in his rock star clothes and Gohill boots in the blazing sunshine. He had two bags with him – one was stuffed full of all these filthy, unwashed clothes, and the other had about five thousand pounds in English banknotes spilling out the top.’ When the gang moved on to Formentera, Syd followed: ‘One moment he’d be giggling and smiling, the next he wouldn’t speak to anyone.’

Photographs remain from the trip: Barrett, beaming beneath curtains of unkempt hair, looking oddly incongruous against the Mediterranean landscape in his tight trousers and satin shirt. Later, having sustained bad sunburn after refusing to use any protective lotion, Syd returned to London, burnt and disorientated, while Gilmour and Waters did their best to patch his album together.

Adding to the pressure of completing their friend’s record, Pink Floyd’s trouble-shooters had already begun work on what would become the band’s next album. Somehow, during a hectic 1969, Mason, Waters and Wright would find the time to get married to Lindy Rutter, Judy Trim and Juliette Gale, respectively.

Nevertheless, in March 1969, as Barrett prepared to start The Madcap Laughs, Pink Floyd had already recorded an immediate follow-up to A Saucerful of Secrets in a frantic nine-day burst. French film director Barbet Schroeder had commissioned the group to compose the soundtrack to his new movie, More. EMI agreed to release the record, but, as it was a private commission, Floyd were denied use of Abbey Road, booking into Pye Studios instead.

EMI’s willingness to let the band make a film soundtrack, rather than ‘a proper record’, after their last three singles had flopped seems surprising in the twenty-first century. Yet the concept of Floyd as film soundtrack composers was no great leap. In their days in Stanhope Gardens, Floyd had performed music to accompany landlord Mike Leonard’s light experiments and in December 1967 had appeared playing along to Leonard’s light shows in an edition of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, and in 1968 had supplied some incidental noodling for a low-budget British film entitled The Committee. However, on 20 July 1969 Floyd found themselves hired by the BBC to improvise during a live broadcast of the first moon landings. ‘There was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other,’ recalled David Gilmour. ‘The song was called “Moonhead” – a nice, atmospheric, spacey 12-bar blues.’

‘Doing film music was a path we thought we could follow in the future,’ said Gilmour. ‘It wasn’t that we wanted to stop being a rock ’n’ roll group, it was more of an exercise.’ Not to mention a potential safety net, should being a rock ’n’ roll group not work out.

Barbet Schroeder, the son of a Swiss diplomat, was a left-wing film-maker who had begun his movie career assisting the director Jean-Luc Godard. More’s plot centred around the misadventures of a male hitch-hiker who succumbs to heroin addiction after encountering a beautiful female junkie. With scenes of drug use, wild bongo playing and the frequently bared breasts of its blonde star Mimsi Farmer, it is a film that perhaps could only have been made in the 1960s.

‘I was a big fan of the first two Floyd records,’ says Barbet Schroeder now. ‘I thought they were the most extraordinary things I’d ever heard, and just wanted to work with them. I went to London and took a print of the movie More, and showed it to them. I didn’t want typical film music – made to the minute and recorded with the image on the big screen. I didn’t believe in film music. I wanted this to be the music the characters were listening to. At a party, the music came out of the loud speaker in a room, so we recorded it to sound as if it was playing in the room.’

‘He didn’t want a soundtrack to go behind the movie,’ remembered Waters. ‘He wanted it literally. So if the radio was switched on in the car for example, he wanted something to come out of the car. He wanted it to relate to exactly what was happening in the movie. I was sitting at the side of the studio writing lyrics while we were putting down the backing tracks. It was just a question of writing eight or nine songs with instrumentals.’

‘Roger was the big creative force,’ says Schroeder. ‘I remember this incredibly hectic two weeks. The sound engineer couldn’t believe the speed and the creativity of the enterprise.’

Of the instrumental tracks, ‘Quicksilver’ and ‘Main Theme’ explored the same ‘abstract music’ that had so enthralled fan Phil Manzanera on A Saucerful of Secrets. ‘Green is the Colour’ is a dainty acoustic reverie; the cosmic organ fills in ‘Cirrus Minor’ place it squarely in the box marked ‘Space Rock’; while the Gilmour-sung ‘Cymbaline’ is very nearly a straightforward pop song. The biggest break with tradition came with ‘The Nile Song’ and ‘Ibiza Bar’, where Gilmour is finally let off his leash, and Mason clatters around the kit in the manner of his idols Ginger Baker and Keith Moon.

Hipgnosis chose a film still for the cover. No cosmic collage this time, just the movie’s protagonists cavorting in front of an Ibizan windmill. The image was tarted up with a dark-room treatment that gave it the fuzzy edge experienced during the coming-up moments of an LSD trip.

More premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1969, but sank without a trace, its copious sex and drugs denying it a proper UK release. Unexpectedly, for what the group considered ‘a stop-gap album’, the soundtrack made it into the Top 10 in June. Nevertheless, as David Gilmour later explained, ‘EMI now thought we should cut out all the weird nonsense and get on with it.’

Weird nonsense had nevertheless become Pink Floyd’s stock in trade during their live shows, as much as on record. Oddly, where Syd’s reluctance ever to play the same thing twice had infuriated his bandmates, they in turn were now exploring a kind of controlled chaos, as well as realising Roger’s vision to make Pink Floyd concerts an event. ‘It was about more than watching a band stand in front of 600 watts of Marshall speakers,’ said Richard Wright later. ‘It was about an entertaining show.’

In June 1969, Waters’ desire for a spectacle peaked with ‘The Final Lunacy’ at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Whereas smaller haunts, such as North London’s Fishmonger’s Arms, were still mainstays on the Floyd gig sheet, the Albert Hall was roomy enough to accommodate their most grandiose ideas yet. For some time now the group had been performing segments from The Massed Gadgets of the Auximines, a suite divided into two main sections known as ‘The Man’ and ‘The Journey’. The piece would never be recorded in its entirety, but many of the individual parts would be reworked for the More, Ummagumma and Relics albums.

The suite was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in April 1969 and then expanded two months later for ‘The Final Lunacy’. Taped sound effects, as well as the band’s own performance, were panned 270 degrees around the venue by their personalised sound gadget, the Azimuth Coordinator. In a grand piece of performance art, a table was constructed on stage during the show, at which the crew sat and drank tea while listening to a transistor radio randomly tuned in and amplified through the speakers. Roger Waters would revive the same trick on later solo tours, playing cards with some of his band during a long instrumental passage.

Putting aside any misgivings he may have had about the album, producer Norman Smith was wheeled out on a mobile podium at the Albert Hall to conduct players from the Ealing Central Amateur Choir and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra during A Saucerful of Secrets. Richard Wright played the Albert Hall’s church-style organ (‘Fraught with difficulties, as there’s a huge delay between pressing the keys and the noise coming out,’ recalled Waters), one of the band’s crew roamed the stage in a gorilla suit, a pair of cannons were fired (Waters: ‘the same ones they used for 1812 Overture – fucking great’) and a smoke bomb exploded, prompting a life-long ban from the hall, something David Gilmour delightedly recalled when playing there again as a solo act in 2006.

Guitarist and Floyd friend Tim Renwick watched the performance from the audience. ‘What you have to remember is that there was a lot of humour there. It was all very “art school” but very lighthearted. But talking to him, even back then, Roger always had this thing about wanting to do something more than just a rock show. He wanted a big presentation.’

‘There was a period in the sixties where fame and fortune were irrelevant to people’s lives,’ explains Duggie Fields. ‘It was all about the creativity.’ For Pink Floyd, that period had ended. Their ‘far-out sounds’, to quote one review of the time, may have excluded them from the singles charts, but, with a new breed of discerning album buyer to pitch to, EMI viewed the group as a potential money-spinner.

‘I remember once seeing Mick Jagger and Keith Richards plotting and talking about money,’ says Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘Which was something I never did in the sixties. Jenny asked Roger if he wanted to be rich and famous, and he turned round straight away and said, “Oh yeah!”’

‘I had no idea that I would ever write anything,’ Waters said years later. ‘I’d always been told at school that I was absolutely bloody hopeless at everything. I took responsibility in the Floyd because nobody else seemed to want to do it. I know I can be an oppressive personality because I bubble with ideas and schemes, and in a way it was easier for the others to go along with me.’

Yet becoming rich and famous while staying true to their grand vision would prove trickier. Released in November 1969, Floyd’s promised double album, Ummagumma, seemed like another stop-gap rather than a concerted move forward. The first record was given over to live recordings taken from two shows at Manchester College of Commerce and Mother’s, the Midlands’ answer to London’s Middle Earth. The second record contained five solo compositions; two from Waters, one each from his bandmates. The live recordings of ‘Astronomy Domine’, a now fleshed-out ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, and ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ offer a time-capsule of Pink Floyd in the late sixties. By then, they had become, as Nick Mason said, ‘a proper working rock ’n’ roll band’. And it showed.

Yet the grand vision of the solo pieces worked less well. ‘Someone suggested – probably Roger – that we should all do a solo ten minutes on the other record,’ said Gilmour. ‘So we all went in to try and do our things, whatever they were.’

Engineer Peter Mew remembers the decision-making process: ‘My recollection is that everybody assembled in the studio on the first day with Norman Smith, who asked, “Have you got any songs?” To which Floyd replied, “No.” After which, it was decided that each of them would have a quarter of the album. There was no grand plan. I think that was pretty much decided on the first day.’

Richard Wright’s contribution was a four-part piano concerto entitled ‘Sysyphus’ [sic]. Later dismissed by its composer as ‘pretentious’, the heady piano rumblings identified Wright as the source of much of Pink Floyd’s gothic musical tendencies. The title was taken from the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a poor soul sent to Hades and condemned forever to push a giant rock up a hill only for it to roll back down again as soon as it reached the top. An analogy, some might suggest, for the browbeaten keyboard player.

‘To annoy an audience beyond all reason is not my idea of a good night out,’ said Nick Mason when asked about the perils of playing with Syd Barrett. With this in mind, perhaps, Mason lightened the percussive noodling on his own ‘The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party’ with some soothing flute played by his new wife Lindy. Gilmour’s composition, ‘The Narrow Way’, was a part acoustic, part electric guitar odyssey split into three segments on which he played all the instruments, including drums. Some of it had already been performed on John Peel’s BBC show Top Gear under the title ‘Baby Shuffle in D Major’. Yet Gilmour struggled with the lyrics. ‘I remember ringing Roger to beg him to write me some words,’ he admitted. ‘And he just said, “No, do it yourself”, and put the phone down, which was probably his way of helping me find my feet. It sort of makes me cringe now.’

Waters suffered no such insecurity, and managed two solo pieces, ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ and ‘Grantchester Meadows’. The last was a gentle elegy to a picturesque stretch of the River Cam, and the album’s most convincing track. The former has Waters spouting gibberish in a Scottish accent over various sound effects, as if The Goons had been allowed to run riot through Abbey Road.

What all of the pieces had in common was a section where each Floyd member sounds as if they’ve been left to fool around in the studio unsupervised.

‘It would have been better if we’d gone away, done the things, come back together, discussed them, and people could have come in and made comments,’ Waters admitted to Disc and Music Echo. ‘I don’t think it’s good to work in total isolation.’

‘All those tracks ended up being realised to their full potential,’ believes Peter Mew. ‘If you start from the point of view that you don’t quite know what you’re doing and you’re making it up as you go along, it’s difficult to know where it’s going to end up. “Grantchester Meadows” is probably the most tuneful, but even that ends with a fly being swatted – so it’s all rather tongue in cheek. I think they were exploring the boundaries of the technology on that album. There’s lots of cute little sound effects – double speed, reverb – good stuff, bearing in mind the state of the technology at the time.’

Ummagumma was recorded on the hoof, with sessions fitted in around the band’s gigging schedule. And, in hindsight, it shows. Nevertheless, two solid years of playing every hippie dive in the country had paid off. Ummagumma gave Floyd and EMI’s Harvest label a number 5 album and the best reviews of their career so far: ‘A truly great progressive rock album,’ claimed Record Mirror.

The title itself prompted much speculation. Routinely described as ‘Cambridge slang’, Emo claims, ‘It was a word I made up about shagging. As in, “I’m off home for some Ummagumma.” Floyd thought I’d heard it somewhere before, but it was off the top of my head.’

The front cover shot was taken at the house of Libby January’s parents, the scene of the Jokers Wild and Tea Set double-bill years earlier. It is the band’s last attempt at traditional front cover pop star posing, with a barefoot Gilmour positioned at the front, alongside the images disappearing into infinity in the mirror to his right. Chief roadies, Alan Styles and Pete Watts, appeared on the back cover with the band’s equipment arranged, at Nick Mason’s suggestion, in the shape of a military aircraft carrier, a proper boys’ toys collection of kit.

The inside sleeve contained the biggest surprise of all. While each band member had an individual portrait, Roger shared his with his new wife Judy, pictured cradling a glass of white wine, while Roger looked on dotingly.

In years to come, while remaining faithful to some of their earlier efforts, Ummagumma was rated less highly by the band themselves.

‘My own view is that A Saucerful of Secrets had pointed the way ahead, but we studiously ignored the signposts and headed off making Ummagumma,’ admitted Mason, ‘which proved that we did rather better when everyone worked together rather than as individuals.’

‘We were very good at jamming,’ offered Gilmour. ‘But we couldn’t quite translate that onto a record.’

The next move, then, would be yet more jamming, not in London’s Pye or Abbey Road Studios but in the more exotic locale of Rome. Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni had first seen Pink Floyd playing the launch party for International Times at the Roundhouse in 1966. In late 1969 he approached them to compose the music for his next film, Zabriskie Point. Reflecting the political mood of the time, the movie followed the exploits of a student rioter who steals a plane, flies it to Death Valley, California, and proceeds to have lots of sex with the obligatory hippie chick encountered along the way. He gets shot dead by the police; she blows up a mansion, as a protest, presumably, against ‘straight’ America’s bourgeois values. So far, so good …

Antonioni paid for the band to stay at the opulent Hotel Massimo D’Azeglio in Rome, so the Floyd were at his beck and call. ‘It was sheer hell,’ claimed Waters. Work would begin at a nearby studio in the evening, after the band had consumed as much gratis food and wine as they could stomach, with Antonioni on hand but often nodding off in the studio as the night wore on. The next day, Roger would take the director the finished tapes for approval. ‘It was always wrong, consistently,’ explained Waters. ‘There was always something that stopped it being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong and he’d still be unhappy.’

The movie bombed, and the finished soundtrack, released the following year, included just three Floyd tracks, ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat’ – which used the sound of a heartbeat, an idea later revisited on Dark Side of the Moon – a slight country-rock number called ‘Crumbling Land’, and a reworking of ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’, entitled ‘Come in Number 51, Your Time is Up’. The rest of the soundtrack was bumped up with contributions from The Grateful Dead and The Kaleidoscope, among others. Of the Floyd pieces overlooked by Antonioni for inclusion was Richard Wright’s haunting piano-led ‘Violent Sequence’, recorded to accompany footage of real-life student riots, which would later reappear as ‘Us and Them’ on Dark Side of the Moon. As Nick Mason would ruefully admit, ‘We were now following a band policy of never throwing anything away.’