CHAPTER THREE A STRANGE HOBBY

‘Turn up, tune in, fuck off!’

Roger Waters

‘What a rave! A man crawling naked through jelly. Girls stripped to the waist. Offbeat poetry. Weird music …’ Sixties gossip magazine Titbits was quick to recount the ‘Spontaneous Underground Happening’ in February 1966. The event took place at the Marquee club on Wardour Street, in the heart of London’s Soho. Within weeks, one of the bands providing the music would be The Pink Floyd Sound, as they were now commonly billing themselves.

The year of 1966 would be a causal one for rock music and popular culture as a whole. The Beatles released Revolver – an album filled with exotic sounds that reflected the group’s LSD experiences – Cream, rock’s first so-called super-group, began inventing heavy metal; while Jimi Hendrix wowed London’s clubland with his dazzling, pyrotechnic approach to playing the electric guitar. In London, a collision of fashion, art and music was slowly taking effect, and would peak during the following year’s so-called Summer of Love.

The arrival of both Hendrix and Cream made an impact on Pink Floyd. ‘I remember seeing them as a callow youth,’ recalled Roger Waters. ‘They both played the Regent Street Poly as part of our end-of-term hop, and it was astonishing to see and hear these long improvisations.’

Whatever their place might be in this new world, the band’s personal situation was far from glamorous. Money was in perilously short supply, and the dilemma of juggling work and college commitments with gigs remained. Mason was slogging on at the Regent Street Poly but had arranged to work for Lindy’s architect father, and Waters had put his studies on hold while he gained more practical experience at a firm of city architects. Wright and Barrett were both still ensconced at their respective colleges.

Pink Floyd’s appearance at certain ‘happenings’ around the capital in early 1966 sprang from the activities of a group of London ‘scenesters’. John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins was a Cambridge graduate and one-time physicist for the Atomic Energy Authority. He took an unscheduled trip to Moscow, was subsequently interrogated by the security services, and ended up quitting his job. By the early sixties he was working as a free-lance photographer for Fleet Street and Melody Maker.

‘Hoppy got into outraging the bourgeoisie, smoking dope, and had an overall sense of anarchism,’ claimed one contemporary. But, as another explains, ‘Hoppy was also a natural organiser at a time when everybody else was just fooling around.’ After a visit to the US in 1964, Hopkins returned to the capital with the idea of establishing an underground newspaper and what would become known as the London Free School. The school was the first to come to fruition. Set up in the basement of 26 Powis Terrace in Notting Hill, it was, as he explained in October 1966, ‘a non-organisation, existing in name only, with no elected officers and no responsibilities’.

One of Hopkins’ acquaintances, black activist Michael de Freitas, known as Michael X, arranged the loan of the building from its owner. First to move into the basement were squatters, who immediately gave the place a back-to-nature vibe. ‘It was so wet and cold there that they ripped up the floorboards and put them on the fire,’ remembers Hoppy. ‘So one of the things the school was well known for was its earth floor.’

With its walls painted in psychedelic colours, it swiftly attracted musicians, poets, beatniks, liberal intellectuals, and the general flotsam and jetsam of London’s artistic underground. Acting as an ad-hoc community centre, those involved were also available to offer practical advice to tenants on housing law, and even teach rudimentary English to local immigrants. Years on, some of those involved with the school would be instrumental in organising the first Notting Hill Carnival, while Michael X arranged for boxing legend Muhammad Ali to visit the area in 1966.

As Hoppy insists now, ‘The Free School was an open-ended idea and the people that populated it filled it with whatever they wanted to.’

Among those involved were Joe Boyd, a twenty-five-year-old American who ran the UK office of Elektra Records, and Peter Jenner, a twenty-four-year-old who had graduated from Cambridge University with a first-class honours degree in Economics, and was currently lecturing at the London School of Economics. Jenner was a former flatmate of Eric Clapton’s, and something of ‘an avant-garde music nut’.

Hopkins, Jenner, Felix de Mendelsohn (another of the Free School alumni) and Hoppy’s flatmate, the jazz critic Ron Atkins, had founded a production company called DNA, and recorded the free jazz group AMM. In what Jenner now describes as ‘a spectacularly shit deal’, they arranged with Boyd to release AMM’s album, Music from a Continuous Performance, through Elektra.

‘AMM would play guitars, pianos, but also radios and saws,’ recalls Hoppy. ‘They were working on the boundary between music and noise. After an hour of listening to them, you’d walk out into the street and it was as if it was all still carrying on. There was an improvised movie called Shadows made by John Cassavetes in the late fifties, and AMM was the musical equivalent of that. Absolutely hypnotic.’

AMM guitarist Keith Rowe’s atonal approach, and his use of random objects to coax noises out of his guitar, would have a marked influence on Syd Barrett, who would later watch an AMM recording session. Yet by avoiding any recognisable semblance of melody, the group was unlikely to challenge The Beatles for commercial appeal, a drawback not lost on Jenner.

AMM would appear at one of the first of these happenings at the Marquee. English folkie Donovan, daubed in red and black eye make-up, and jazz organist Graham Bond were among those making up the entertainment at the inaugural event on 30 January 1966. The happening had been organised by Steve Stollman, whose brother Bernard ran the experimental music label ESP Records in New York.

‘I was a twenty-two-year-old American let loose in London,’ says Steve Stollman now. ‘One of the first places I went to was Better Books, as they sold my brother’s records. There, I got to know Hoppy and all these other interesting people. I wanted to help my brother get some visibility for his label. ESP put out records by Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and The Fugs – unusual stuff. Somebody, maybe me, said it would make sense to take this club that was unused on a Sunday afternoon. So I spoke to the Marquee’s owners. The alleged rationale was to raise some money for Kingsley Hall [the community project of psychoanalyst R.D. Laing], as we had all read Laing’s book Knots. I still think a few bucks we made went to the place.’

The event began at 4.30 p.m., admission was six shillings and sixpence, there was no official advertising to support the event, and the audience were individually invited: musicians, writers, poets, the underground cognoscenti. A promotional statement from the organisers suggested a dress code of ‘costume, masque, ethnic, space, Edwardian, Victorian and hipness generally …’ The dividing line between performer and audience was deliberately blurred.

‘Halfway through, I was called to the front door as Robert Shelton, the New York Times critic, had showed up in a suit and tie,’ recalls Stollman of one of the early happenings. ‘We’d insisted everyone dress up bizarrely – even if it was just having a handkerchief hanging out your ear. As Robert was the guy who famously discovered Bob Dylan, I told him he had the best costume in the joint and let him in.’

It’s since been widely reported that The Pink Floyd Sound performed at both the first Marquee happening in January and again on 27 February. However, other eyewitness accounts claim that the group actually made their Marquee debut at the third event on 13 March.

As Stollman readily admits now, ‘I didn’t know The Pink Floyd Sound from The Green Floyd Sound. I hadn’t a clue who they were, but someone suggested them.’

‘I knew Steve Stollman,’ explains Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘He was looking for experimental music, and nobody else wanted to play those Sunday afternoon sessions. That’s how they got the Floyd.’

Stollman nevertheless maintains that the band’s performance that night was recorded. ‘I remember seeing a guy called Ian Somerville, who was a friend of William Burroughs, sat in the booth at the Marquee with headphones on the whole time. Nobody knows what became of that tape.’ The band’s set of blues standards and their own compositions, all delivered with Barrett’s abstract guitar playing and extended instrumental jamming, was the ideal soundtrack for the occasion.

‘Good sounds, good poetry, a lovely event,’ offers Stollman. ‘I swear the Floyd played for nearly three hours. Nobody wanted to stop them, as it was so much in the spirit of what was going on at the time.’

‘Floyd’s music was new but it wasn’t completely foreign to what was happening elsewhere,’ elaborates Hoppy. ‘We were all listening to avant-garde jazz, and my girlfriend at the time had brought back tapes of The Velvet Underground from New York. John Cage had also given a concert at the Saville Theatre in 1964 or 1965, and that had made a dent on people’s musical consciousness. Floyd were different, but they fitted right into all that.’

Further Sunday afternoon happenings ensued, with the future David Bowie – then still just plain David Jones – among those who encountered the group and was impressed by the ‘strange presence with his white face and black eyeliner singing in front of the band’.

But Stollman’s interest in staging such happenings quickly waned when the Marquee’s management proposed opening a bar during the events. ‘I thought fights would break out,’ he laughs. ‘A lot of people were stoned, so I didn’t think there should be alcohol available with all this stuff happening. So my interest faded.’

Stollman would later end up having to leave the country after being named in a tabloid newspaper exposé, following his involvement in a BBC-funded documentary about LSD: ‘There I was, on the front page, with my eyes blacked out. A scandal!’

For Floyd, though, a vital connection had already been made. One Sunday in June, weary of marking LSE exam papers, Peter Jenner headed to the Marquee. ‘I knew who Steve Stollman was, and I think I’d seen an ad for this thing in the Melody Maker,’ he recalls. After observing ‘various people sliming around in jelly’, Peter encountered The Pink Floyd Sound: ‘The Floyd were mostly doing blues songs, but instead of having howling guitar solos with the guitarist leaning back, like all guitarists did back then, they were doing cosmic shit. They weren’t doing interesting blues songs. But it was what they did with them that was interesting. I think what Syd was doing was a way of being distinctive and filling in the gaps where you should have had a howling Clapton or Peter Green guitar solo. I was very intrigued.’

Peter’s interest was driven by something more prosaic than just the music. ‘By this time I’d added up the figures at DNA and, unless we sold a lot of records, it was never going to survive. Basically, we needed a pop group.’ A year before, Peter had even approached The Velvet Underground, having heard Hoppy’s tapes of the band, only to be told by the group that artist Andy Warhol already had the job of managing them.

Realising that the Floyd were without management, Jenner made an approach. ‘I got their number from Steve Stollman, and I went up to Highgate where they were living with Mike Leonard. I didn’t know Mike so I didn’t know what was going on there, but it all sounded a bit arty – and that was part of the appeal. The first person I talked to seriously was Roger. I said, “Do you want to be on our label?” And Roger said they were all going off on holiday and to come back in September.’

Jenner’s impression then was that the group were ‘quite serious in a semi-pro way’, but that their future was far from certain. ‘They’d bought a van and some gear with their grant money, but they were on the verge of splitting up,’ he claimed in 1972. Certainly, without any bookings on the immediate horizon and with college work and career choices to be made, the band had plenty to contemplate when they went their separate ways for the summer.

Mason was the first to leave, following girlfriend Lindy to New York where she was now working with the Martha Graham Dance Company. Here, Mason would experience the US jazz scene beyond just hearing the music on record, catching celebrated pianists Thelonious Monk and Mose Allison on the same bill, before he and Lindy headed off to the West Coast. If Mason was experiencing serious doubts about the future of the band, he was buoyed by the discovery of an article in the New York underground magazine, East Village Other, name-checking The Pink Floyd Sound. As he later recalled: ‘It made me realise that the band had the potential to be more than simply a vehicle for my own amusement.’

Juliette Gale had also disappeared to the States that summer, leaving boyfriend Richard Wright at a loose end. Some of the Cambridge set had spent the past three summers in the Greek and Balearic Islands, hopping between Mykonos, Ibiza and Formentera, working on their tans, puffing strong weed and setting the world to rights. Richard and Juliette had also been to Lindos, Rhodes. In the summer of 1966, Wright joined Roger Waters for another Greek excursion.

‘There was Nigel and me, Russell Page, David Gale, Rick, Roger and Judy,’ recalls Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon. The Judy in question was Judy Trim, a former pupil of the Cambridge County School for Girls and the daughter of a research scientist at the university. She and Roger had been together since their teens. ‘Rog, Andrew Rawlinson and me were all after Judy,’ recalls Storm Thorgerson. ‘And Rog got her.’

‘It was on that holiday that Roger took his first acid trip,’ continues Jenny. ‘We set off across Europe in this old American car and in the middle of the night woke up to discover that it would only go backwards. The mechanic we took it to actually used the word, “Kaput”. So we caught a slow train across Yugoslavia to Greece. Eventually, we found this villa and we let Rog and Ju-Ju – as they called each other then – have the best room in the house. Roger insisted on it, though I do believe they found a scorpion under the bed. Roger was a very forceful character but in other ways he could be rather shy. I remember he and I being alone on the beach one day, and he seemed terribly nervous. He was with Judy but he seemed rather shy around women.’

Unlike most of the party, Waters had never tried LSD. On the Greek island of Patmos, he decided to take a drop from Nigel’s bottle and pipette. ‘It was an extraordinary experience,’ recalled Waters. ‘And it lasted about forty-eight hours.’ He would later say that he only took acid once after that.

Regrettably, the Greek sojourn also revealed the first indication of Waters’ fraught relationship with Richard Wright, a rift that would have a significant implication for Pink Floyd years later. ‘Rick was a shy, sweet chap,’ remembers Jenny. ‘He had a girlfriend who was in America at the time, whom he seemed to think an awful lot of. But Roger was always putting him down. It was as if he was using Rick as his punchbag.’

Reconvening at Stanhope Gardens after their respective holidays, the band members found Peter Jenner still keen to get involved. When Waters informed him that what the band really needed was a manager, Peter shelved his plans to sign them to DNA and enlisted an old friend and fellow London Free School colleague, Andrew King. ‘Pete and Joe Boyd were going to run DNA together, and I was going to manage,’ recalls Andrew King. ‘But when the label didn’t work out, Pete suggested he and I manage Floyd together.’ Jenner arranged for a twelve-month leave of absence from his LSE post, with an option to return if his pop management career failed to take off.

Andrew King and Peter Jenner had been at school together and had spent time travelling in the United States after leaving university. They were, as King explains, ‘middle-class, liberal intellectuals involved in the London avant-garde scene’.

‘I didn’t listen much to pop music,’ admits Jenner. ‘I just about got into Bob Dylan and The Byrds. But I didn’t think that white men could sing the blues.’

At the time, King was working in public relations for British European Airways, but, crucially, had some family money to invest. Pleading poverty, Waters persuaded the new management to splash out on a band PA, which they did, only for the equipment to go missing immediately. King and Jenner dug into their wallets again. Later, Waters would reveal that he initially thought the pair were high-class drug-dealers on the make.

Meanwhile, the Free School needed money. ‘One of the things we did was put out a newsletter,’ says Hoppy. ‘I was paying the production costs, and although I’d been doing rather well in Fleet Street as a photographer in the early sixties, by this time I was doing other things and getting poorer and poorer, so to keep the school and the newsletter going we decided to hold a benefit, which turned into a series of benefits.’ Peter Jenner booked The Pink Floyd Sound to play these benefits at the All Saints Church Hall, just off nearby Westbourne Park Road. A significant venue in the area, the hall would later stage musicals and plays, and provide a general meeting place for the Notting Hill community. At the time, it also hosted one of London’s first pre-school playgroups.

John Leckie, who would go on to engineer sessions for Pink Floyd, later producing such luminaries as The Stone Roses and Radiohead, grew up in nearby Ladbroke Grove: ‘I saw Floyd a few times at the All Saints Hall. Fantastic. The only thing was that it was a school hall. There were all these tiny kids’ tables and chairs set up, which always seemed very funny every time someone suddenly jumped up, freaking out and idiot-dancing to this far-out music.’

It was at the All Saints Hall that Andrew King had his first Pink Floyd experience. ‘I think that’s where I first saw them,’ he says now. ‘They were still doing fifteen-minute versions of “Louie Louie” and I remember thinking how weird it all sounded. I knew about the blues and the roots of rock ‘n’ roll and this wasn’t right. But those musical inconsistencies were what worked. I also thought Syd exuded a certain magnetism.’

Also in attendance was fledgling author Jenny Fabian, who would go on to write the 1969 music biz novel Groupie. ‘I had just run away from my first husband, and was living in Powis Square,’ she says now. ‘I was always on the lookout for something extraordinary, and was drawn into All Saints Hall by the people I saw going in. The music was interesting, the guys on stage looked interesting, and the lead singer looked more than interesting.’ Recognising Jenner and King ‘as a couple of public schoolboys I’d known in a past life’, Jenny said she ‘allowed Andrew to seduce me’, before befriending the real object of her affections, Barrett, who would later appear in her novel in the thinnest of disguises as Ben, while the band were recast as Satin Odyssey.

Adding to Syd’s magnetic performance during these gigs was a then exotic light show, courtesy of Joel and Toni Brown, an American couple on a visit from Haight-Ashbury, the hippie district of San Francisco. Though rudimentary by today’s standards, the couple’s use of coloured slides and a projector was a far cry from the standard overhead lights of most theatre venues. When the Browns returned to the US, Peter Jenner and his wife, Sumi, set about fashioning a copycat set from ‘half-inch-thick timber shelving, domestic fixed spotlights from Woolworths, drawing pins and plastic gel’. Joe Gannon, a seventeen-year-old American from the All Saints Hall gigs, was co-opted into becoming the group’s first lighting tech.

While the Jenners’ lighting rig might seem hopelessly primitive by today’s standards, at the time it gave Pink Floyd a distinct visual edge over their competitors, as well as tapping into what Peter Jenner describes as the ‘mixed-media world’. The band members were receptive to the idea, having been used to providing musical accompaniment to Mike Leonard’s light and sound workshop at the Hornsey College of Art. In March, they had played the University of Essex’s rag ball to a projected backdrop of footage filmed by a student in a wheelchair, as he was pushed around London.

With their avant-garde lightshow and back projections, word gradually spread of the All Saints Hall’s shows, even if one early gig was so sparsely attended that Syd ended up jokily reciting a speech from Hamlet to the handful of punters. ‘There were about twenty people there when we first played,’ admitted Roger Waters. ‘The second week one hundred, and then three to four hundred, and then, after that, many couldn’t get in.’

In keeping with both their own and their management’s left-leaning politics, the band would soon find themselves playing an Oxfam benefit gig (on the same bill as comedians Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Barry Humphries) and a Majority Rule for Rhodesia show at the Camden Roundhouse. Yet with the Free School floundering, Hoppy’s tireless campaigning began again in earnest. Inspired by New York’s Village Voice, Hopkins enrolled Barry Miles (later just Miles), among others, into the idea of launching a free newspaper for the alternative community. Miles had started the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, both respective Meccas for the hip community and a popular stopover for visiting American beatniks. He was also friends with Paul McCartney. The paper, International Times, was created, in the words of Miles, to ‘link London to New York and Paris and Amsterdam … to unite the painters, the music people, the dance people …’

On 15 October 1966, International Times was set up in the basement at Indica and launched with a party at London’s Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, a one-time turning station for steam locomotives and a former gin distillery. Hoppy and Miles charged ten shillings on the door and punters were given a free sugar cube, which they were told may or may not have been spiked with LSD (in truth, none of them was spiked). Inside, amid the treacherous ruins of the distillery, its missing floorboards and abandoned horse-drawn carts, around two thousand people, some tripping, some thinking they were tripping, marvelled at the sight of mini-skirted actress Monica Vitti, Marianne Faithfull in a bum-length nun’s habit, Paul McCartney and Jane Asher dressed as Arabs, and, as New Society magazine later reported, ‘trendy people, beatniks, beards, dollies and gold lamé cavemen’. The Pink Floyd Sound were booked to headline, with support from The Soft Machine, an experimentally inclined jazz- rock band, who used the sound of a revving motorcycle in their performance that night. Before the Floyd’s performance, there was an accident, in which Syd and roadie Pip Carter are supposed to have destroyed a 6ft jelly art installation, either by backing the group’s van into it, or removing a plank of wood vital in keeping the mould upright.

‘I remember the jelly,’ laughs Jeff Dexter, then a club DJ in London. ‘The Roundhouse gig was the first time I saw The Pink Floyd. I didn’t think much of the show but the people show was fantastic. I was intrigued by Floyd’s little entourage, mainly the girls around Syd.’

Glammed up in their best satin shirts and silk scarves, according to one eyewitness, the Floyd ‘honked and howled and tweeted’ while a primitive light show and projected slides blinked and dripped psychedelic colours around them.

‘Their music was almost entirely a very loud psychedelic jam that rarely seemed to relate to the playing of any introductory theme, be it “Road Runner” or some other R&B classic,’ wrote Miles in 2004. ‘After about thirty minutes, they would stop, look at each other, and start up again, pretty much where they’d left off, except with a new introductory tune.’

‘I think it was a stroke of good fortune that we couldn’t work out how to play covers,’ admitted Roger Waters. ‘It forced us to come up with our own direction, our own way of doing things.’

As Richard Wright elaborated: ‘Everything became more improvised around the guitar and the keyboards. Roger started to play the bass as a lead instrument.’

Whatever the group’s musical shortcomings, Peter Jenner was delighted with the outcome of the Roundhouse gig. ‘There was a great feeling that night,’ he recalls. ‘We’d made contact with lots of other like-minded souls; other bands, other people. There was this sense of, “Wow, this is our place.”’

By Jenner’s own admission, he and Andrew King wanted to court ‘the posh papers’. For them, ‘this was a cultural thing, not just pop music’. A week later, The Pink Floyd (the Sound had been dropped at Peter Jenner’s suggestion) gained their first mention in the national press with a surprisingly sympathetic review in the Sunday Times, in which an interviewed Waters talked of ‘co-operative anarchy’ and of the band’s music ‘being a complete realisation of the aims of psychedelia’, a quote he later disowned as ‘obviously tongue-in-cheek’. ‘Co-operative anarchy’ aside, Floyd and their new management still understood the importance of a business deal.

At the end of the month, Jenner and King signed a six-way partnership with the four band members, establishing the company Blackhill Enterprises. (The name was taken from a cottage owned by King’s family in the Brecon Beacons.) Barrett, Waters, Wright and Mason finally gave up their studies. Though, as Bob Klose later recounted, ‘Syd had a real battle with himself over the decision to leave art college. He went through agonies over that.’ Not for the first time, those close to Syd wondered why this talented artist was giving it up for music.

‘I always thought it amazing that Syd and Roger’s mothers were both OK about them dropping out of art school and architecture,’ recalls Libby Gausden. ‘Especially Mary Waters, as Roger was on his way to becoming an architect.’

Blackhill Enterprises established a base in Jenner’s flat at 4 Edbrooke Road, Notting Hill, hiring June Child, who lived in the flat below, to answer the phone. For Jenner and King, the personalities of their new charges were becoming clearer. ‘Sometimes it felt like it was Syd and the three blokes he was playing with,’ admits King. ‘You could say, though, that initially Nick and Rick were along for the ride and Roger was lurking.’

‘Syd was a good-looking chap and the singer, so he was always the one you would focus on,’ elaborates Jenner. ‘Syd was the creative one, and, at first, very easy to get along with. But Rick was very pretty as well, so it wasn’t just Syd. Rick I liked a lot. He was very gentle and it’s a classic management situation: he wasn’t any trouble so you didn’t notice him. You were always more aware of the people that were high maintenance. Nick was easy to get along with and the one who could talk to all of the others. But he was Roger’s mate, so would always side with him if something was put to a vote. Roger was the organisation. He would be the one you went to for sorting out practical issues. He was very questioning and wanted to know exactly what was going on.’

‘Roger organised everything,’ recalls Libby Gausden. ‘Years later when I heard he was fighting for the name of Pink Floyd, I remember thinking, “You bloody well deserve it, you do”.’

Barrett and Waters had both begun to write songs while still in Cambridge. One of Syd’s earliest attempts, ‘Let’s Roll Another One’, would be retitled ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ – to deflect accusations of a pro-dope message – and end up as the B-side of the group’s first single. Waters had made his compositional debut with the still unrecorded ‘Walk With Me, Sydney’, a hokey duet intended to be sung by Barrett and Juliette Gale. By November 1966, the band’s repertoire would include such Barrett compositions as ‘Matilda Mother’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’, as well as Waters’ early effort, ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’. ‘They were all encouraged to write,’ says Jenner. ‘But it was Syd who came out with the great songs.’

The autumn of 1966 marked both a highly creative period for Barrett, and also, it seems, a time of personal contentment, in stark contrast to the mania that would ensue just months later. Towards the end of the previous year Syd had moved to a room in a narrow, three-storey house at 2 Earlham Street, near London’s Cambridge Circus.

Then ‘a typical 1966 hippie pad, from its purple front door to the psychedelic graffiti on the walls’, according to one visitor, 2 Earlham Street has long since been renovated, and a newsagents now trades on its ground floor. It was the first of several successors to 27 Clarendon Street, the Cambridge dope den from a couple of years earlier. The building’s prime tenant was the late Jean-Simone Kaminsky, an absconder from the French army who’d wound up in England, and, via a sympathetic MP, had first found lodgings in Cambridge, next door to Matthew Scurfield.

Kaminsky moved to London, and took over the rent at 2 Earlham Street. While holding down a job at the BBC, he also had a sideline producing so-called ‘intellectual sex books’ on a couple of printing presses at the flat.

Later, when one of the presses caught fire, the building had to be evacuated. When the blaze was stopped, the fire brigade discovered Kaminsky’s illegal literature, and called the police. The rest of the building’s tenants swiftly stashed the offending books in the back of a van and drove round London throwing the sodden remains into all available gardens.

With furniture fashioned from discarded crates found in neighbouring Covent Garden, conditions were Spartan. John Whiteley, a former guardsman from the north of England, then working as a handyman at Better Books (‘I was the only one among those intellectuals who could change a lightbulb’), was living there on and off with his girlfriend Anna Murray when the Cambridge contingent descended en masse. ‘That lot all seemed to arrive at the same time,’ recalls Whiteley now, ‘Ponji Robinson, Dave Gale, Seamus O’Connell, which is how I came to know Syd.’ With the help of his hip mother, the eminently sensible Seamus (‘I was into beer and jazz and blues’) organised a controlled rent for the whole place of five pounds five shillings and five pence a week.

Anna Murray and Barrett shared an interest in painting, and the two struck up an immediate friendship. ‘Anna painted as well,’ explains John Whiteley, ‘and she and Syd became great friends. They used to smoke a hell of a lot of dope together – as we all did back then.’

Syd commandeered the attic room at Earlham Street, becoming close friends with the house’s other prime tenant, Peter Wynne-Willson and his girlfriend, Suzie Gawler-Wright. Wynne-Willson had left his public school after taking part in the Aldermaston March and was then working as a lighting technician during the first run of the stage musical Oliver! Suzie would be accorded the nickname of the Psychedelic Debutante. Wynne-Willson once arranged a group trip during a performance of Handel’s The Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall. The pair would be quickly absorbed into the Floyd’s entourage, with Wynne-Willson taking over as the band’s lighting tech when Joe Gannon disappeared back to the United States. ‘When the theatres I was working in threw stuff out, I’d take them home and renovate them,’ explains Wynne-Willson, who was now in charge of the Jenners’ homemade lighting rig.

One of his earliest onstage lighting gimmicks would involve stretching a condom over a wire frame. He would then drip oil paint on to it, through which light would be shone, creating one of the first oil slide effects. This became a defining feature of Pink Floyd’s live shows. In another burst of creativity, he fashioned a pair of what became known as ‘cosmonocles’. These were a pair of welding goggles with the dark lenses removed and replaced by clear glass and two glass prisms, giving a distorting, disorientating view.

‘I can remember putting a pair on and walking down Charing Cross Road – or rather, trying to walk down Charing Cross Road,’ recalls Emo. ‘A copper asked me what I was doing, and I think we made him put them on as well. Of course, the view was even worse if you were stoned. Or tripping.’

‘1966 in London was fantastic,’ remembers Storm Thorgerson. ‘We were all full of hormones and life.’

At Earlham Street, Syd played guitar, wrote songs, smoked dope and hung out with new girlfriend Lindsay Corner, who’d moved from Cambridge to London to pursue a modelling career. Under the tutelage of Seamus O’Connell’s mother, he had become enamoured with I-Ching, the mystical Chinese Book of Changes, and the Chinese board game ‘Go’. Stoned sessions of each would be followed by restorative chocolate bars from Café Pollo in nearby Old Compton Street.

I-Ching would be one of Syd’s many musical inspirations at that time, alongside tarot cards, Hilaire Belloc, The Beatles, Mothers of Invention, Aldous Huxley … As Roger Waters later explained, ‘Syd was never an intellectual, but he was a butterfly who would dip into all sorts of things.’

Cambridge boy John Davies was now in London training to become a veterinary surgeon and recalls that ‘the Earlham Street flat was a lovely place to hang out on a Saturday. It was all happening. Syd would play us records and new songs he’d just written. I can remember sitting there, incredibly stoned, listening to him strumming “Scarecrow” on an acoustic guitar.’

‘There was something that happened at Earlham Street that sums Syd up for me,’ says Po. ‘He had this little room – bedroll in one corner, guitar in the other, a rail with some velvet trousers and flowery shirts hanging off it. Nothing else. And I remember sitting there playing “Go” with him. There was a bare lightbulb overhead and it was a bit too bright. I was like, “Sydney, isn’t there something you can do about that light?” He said, “Yes, there is.” He had some oranges in a brown paper bag. He tipped them out, made a hole in the bag, screwed the light bulb in around it, and we now had a beautiful lampshade, giving this soft light on our game. He was always able to do these effortlessly artistic things that would have taken the rest of us ages to think about.’

Blackhill set about getting its new charges to record a demo tape that could be pitched to record companies, ‘despite the fact’, as Jenner admits, ‘that we didn’t really know anyone in the business apart from Joe Boyd’. At Thompson’s Recording Studio, Hemel Hempstead, Floyd recorded, among other things, ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ and a newer composition, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. The first was typical Carnaby Street acid-pop, the ideal soundtrack for mini-skirted podium dancers (‘Don’t touch me, child,’ declares Barrett camply in its chorus). But it was ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ that would become Floyd’s signature song, an instrumental ‘freak-out’, growing out of a guitar figure reputedly inspired by Love’s version of the Bacharach and David standard ‘My Little Red Book’, which Jenner is said to have hummed to Syd.

Anthony Stern was now living in Carlisle Street in London’s West End and working with film-maker Peter Whitehead, the artist Syd had encountered in his Cambridge studio some four years earlier. Running into Peter Jenner one day in Soho, the Floyd’s manager handed Anthony a copy of the band’s demo for ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. ‘I thought it was absolutely right for the sort of films I wanted to make,’ says Stern. On a trip to America the following year, Stern secured funding for his film, San Francisco, which featured the rough, early version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ set to abstract, flashing images of America in 1967, which, in Stern’s words, ‘attempted to duplicate the Pink Floyd’s light show’.

With management, a booking agent, and now a demo tape, a rejuvenated Pink Floyd went back to Cambridge in December 1966 to play the art school’s Christmas party.

In attendance that night was future photographer Mick Rock, then in his first year at Cambridge University. With a taste for dope and hallucinogenics, Rock had made a connection with Pip and Emo: ‘They kept talking about their friend Syd and his band Pink Floyd and how they were named after two bluesmen I’d never heard of. They raved about this guy Syd. I was completely blown away when I first saw Pink Floyd. But it was all Syd. You didn’t even notice the rest of the band. Pip and Emo took me to meet him, but first I met Lindsay Corner. We hung out, smoked a joint, and I remember being very taken with her. And when I found out after the show that she was Syd’s girlfriend, I was even more impressed.’

After the gig, Rock joined Barrett and friends back at Hills Road to smoke more dope and ponder the merits of Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Review and that year’s hippest novel, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. A friendship began between Rock and Barrett that would endure into the next decade and some time after Syd’s departure from Pink Floyd.

Another of Syd’s former college friends was also in the audience. John Watkins had helped to organise the event. He recalls: ‘I went up to Syd afterwards, full of praise – “It’s fantastic what you’re doing.” And he looked at me and said, “Thanks, but I think I need to kick the drummer and the keyboard player up the arse.” But then, that was his way. It felt as if he started a new band every week at art school. I could never imagine him staying in one group, playing the same songs, night after night …’

Back in London, Hoppy and Joe Boyd had formed a partnership of their own. Boyd had seen Pink Floyd’s shows at All Saints Hall and was searching for a regular venue in which to stage similar events. Boyd found his ideal venue in the Blarney Club, an Irish showband ballroom beneath the Berkley and Continental Cinemas on Tottenham Court Road. Boyd struck a deal with the Irish owner, Mr Gannon, on a handshake and agreed to pay £15 a week for the use of the venue every Friday night. Originally billed as ‘UFO-Night Tripper’, before becoming known simply as UFO, the club opened its doors on 23 December 1966, with performances from Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine (in support). UFO would become a weekly event from the New Year, with Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine establishing themselves as its so-called ‘house bands’, the former securing 60 per cent of the gross takings for their first three appearances.

Unusually for the time, the club’s organisers found themselves making money, with much of the surplus being put towards paid advertisements in International Times, which helped keep the paper afloat. In return, IT’s staff, such as it was, would run the door at UFO. The club ran from ten o’clock at night until eight in the morning, its fashionable clientele, psychedelic soundtrack and then space-age lighting effects disguising the fact that the polished dancefloor and overhead mirror ball were firmly rooted in showbiz tradition. There was no alcohol licence, but a small stall dispensed macrobiotic food to hungry clubbers, while a German drug-dealer, known only as Marlon, was on hand to sell trips. UFO’s in-house lighting wizard, the late Mark Boyle, had been a regular at Mike Leonard’s sound and light workshop at Hornsey College of Art. Boyle worked on a makeshift platform, mixing together different substances between clear slides to be warmed by a projector lamp, before, effectively, melting and spreading across the band on stage.

‘Nowadays, UFO would make a 1970s disco look sophisticated,’ says Mick Farren, then writing for International Times and singing with his own band, The Social Deviants. ‘But at the time, the ambience was mind-blowing.’

‘You’d drop acid and arrive blotto,’ says Jenny Fabian. ‘It was like descending into a subterranean world of dreams. There were people floating about with that beatific gaze in their eyes, or flat out on the wooden floor. I often lay there myself, absorbed in the old black-and-white films they showed between music. There was also something regressive about the whole thing. If you went to have a pee, beyond this hall of dreams lay a dark, winding corridor, brightly lit, but black and dripping with condensation, which led to a garish Ladies, and I’d look in the mirror and be amazed at what I saw … It was always a relief to get back into the womb of make-believe.’

As well as live music, the club staged performance art – jugglers and mime acts – as well as screening avant-garde film shows. But as time progressed, the live bands became an increasingly important part of UFO’s appeal. Despite the club’s womb-like ambience, an element of competition arose between the respective bands’ audiences, if not the groups themselves. ‘Floyd were very trippy, very druggy, but very white rock. They were for people who liked Tolkien and went looking for UFOs on Hampstead Heath,’ says one Soft Machine devotee. ‘The Soft Machine were more avant-garde in a European sense. They fitted the bill at jazz festivals in France. Their audience seemed more socially conscious – into black civil rights and the working-class revolution.’ For some, the merits were purely musical and visual. ‘There was always competition between my friends as to who was better,’ says John Leckie. ‘We always argued about who was most stretching the boundaries. Soft Machine could certainly play better. But Floyd were more abstract and, of course, they had Syd.’

Even among their own entourage, not everyone was convinced by the Floyd’s musical worth. ‘To be completely honest, I was never a fan,’ laughs John Whiteley. ‘I helped do the lights for them at UFO, but I can still recall Syd playing away and shouting out the chords to the others – telling them what to play.’

Yet The Soft Machine’s drummer Robert Wyatt remembered his rivals with affection: ‘There was an at-easeness about the Floyd, which I rather liked. Soft Machine’s equipment would always blow up and Floyd would let us use theirs, which didn’t usually happen between rock bands at the time. Most of them were in their cocoons. I was still listening to John Coltrane and not buying rock records. But I was amazed when I saw Floyd play, at their nerve in taking their time to get from one note to the other. I couldn’t do it, but Floyd were always in control.’

With both bands free to perform the music they wanted, for as long as they wanted, Floyd and Soft Machine had the advantage of playing to, as Wyatt puts it, ‘people who didn’t know what year it was, let alone what time it was.’

The distortion of time that accompanies an acid trip made Floyd the ideal soundtrack for the LSD experience. Prior to their performances at UFO, their crew would clear the crowd away from the area directly in front of the speakers. As Miles later wrote in New Musical Express, ‘This was originally designed to prevent stoned hippies from burning out their eardrums, but it soon assumed a curious, ritual significance, like a Zen ceremony, the emptying of the space into which the Floyd’s mysterious music was about to spurt.’

On stage, they performed with their homemade spotlights up close and projections slipping across the backdrop behind them, casting shadows over the band and adding to the mystique. Syd’s abstract guitar riffs battled with Richard Wright’s unearthly-sounding keyboards. Roger Waters, gangling and aloof, delivered a thudding bass to underpin the din, and some ungodly screaming when the mood demanded it. One night, Joe Boyd recalled seeing a tripping Pete Townshend crouched by the side of the stage, pointing at Waters and claiming the Floyd bassist was ‘going to swallow him’.

‘I tripped three times at UFO,’ recalls Townshend now. ‘I thought Roger was very handsome and very scary, and what I was really afraid of was that he was going to steal my girlfriend, whom he openly fancied, while I was weakened by acid.’ The girlfriend in question, Townshend’s future wife Karen Astley, was a beautiful art student who had already featured on the inaugural UFO club poster. She routinely attracted attention at UFO, according to The Who’s guitarist, on account of ‘dancing in a dress that looked like it had been made out of a cake wrapper’.

Trouble at UFO erupted rarely. Visiting mods sometimes took exception to the prevalent peace-and-love vibes, though many would end up dropping acid themselves and joining the party. On other occasions, tripping bikers became heavy-handed with the female clientele. A greater threat to public order came when some of the beautiful people broke free from the pack, hippie bells tinkling, kaftans askew, ending up on Tottenham Court Road in the small hours and attracting the interest of the passing constabulary.

Sam Hutt, London’s first ‘alternative doctor’, later to become country singer Hank Wangford, was a UFO regular and still marvels at how much the club’s clientele could get away with: ‘The Irishman who owned the place was incredibly pragmatic. He literally turned a blind eye to what was going on – very Irish. To him it was no different to the local pub staying open late.’

‘You have to remember that this was a rented Irish showband joint,’ adds Mick Farren: in those days the police had to be sweetened, ‘even in the normal run of things – without hippies all over the joint one night a week.’ A crate of whiskey at Christmas was the accepted sweetener.

In January 1967, Barrett’s path crossed again with Peter Whitehead, who was now making films, assisted by Syd’s art exhibition partner Anthony Stern. Wholly Communion, a movie of the 1965 Royal Albert Hall poetry reading, featuring Allen Ginsberg, and Charlie is My Darling, the following year’s documentary of a Rolling Stones tour, would establish Whitehead as a diarist of the so-called counter-culture. ‘Mr Trendy’, as Andrew King later described him, even if, as Peter insists, ‘I didn’t really like pop music and had never been to a pop concert before in my life.’

Whitehead was halfway through making another film, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, which spliced together interview snippets and footage of Mick Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, David Hockney and more, as a time-capsule document of the pop stars, movie stars and artists of the time. What it needed, though, was a suitably now soundtrack. ‘There was no way I wanted to put the bloody Rolling Stones on it,’ says Whitehead. ‘Anthony knew I liked The Soft Machine, and told me about how Syd was in The Pink Floyd, who were doing something similar.’

Peter ventured out to the UFO club and encountered Syd backstage – ‘He was already a little out of it’ – though his attention was more drawn to Barrett’s escort, a beautiful girl named Jenny Spires.

‘Jenny was the first girl who totally encapsulated the vibe at UFO,’ offers Anthony Stern. ‘She lived in my flat for a while, and I was sitting there one night, when I heard a door open and this lovely sound of bells jingling, like a reindeer. It was Jenny. She had these bells on her ankles, and she was the most wonderful vision of a new type of woman. I didn’t hear such a lovely sound again, until I went to a town called Herak in Afghanistan in 1972, where the horses had the exact same bells on, and I suddenly had this flashback of Jenny coming through the door of my flat again.’

In what would become a familiar pattern in Syd’s complicated love life, Jenny – yet another Cambridge girl – wasn’t alone in vying for his affections. Around the same time, Syd was linked to a Quorum boutique model and sometime 2 Earlham Street resident Kari-Ann Moller, who would go on to marry Mick Jagger’s brother, Chris.

‘I started seeing Jenny Spires as well,’ explains Peter Whitehead. ‘Back at my flat one night I showed her a lot of the images I’d cut for the film, and told her how I needed some music. She suggested the Floyd, but they didn’t have any proper recordings.’

Arranging the deal with Syd and Blackhill, Whitehead stumped up £85 for two hours of recording time at Rye Muse studios, later renamed Sound Technique, in Kensington, and filmed the group’s performance of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, the earlier demo of which had so impressed Anthony Stern. ‘I liked it because it was very dark, druggy, mysterious and semi-classical,’ says Whitehead. Like Stern, Peter believed the piece would be ideal for his film also.

In the ensuing footage, Barrett can be seen playing dissonant, freeform guitar, his baggy red-and-black T-shirt and spidery pencil moustache rendering him rather less stylish than his bandmates that day. Mason, in particular, looks, as one Floyd insider puts it, ‘very Carnaby Street’. With extra time to fill, the band jammed their way through another piece, entitled ‘Nick’s Boogie’, though only ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ would find its way into the finished film. Years later, Whitehead’s additional footage of the band performing at UFO and the Alexandra Palace would appear on the commercially released video and DVD, Pink Floyd London 1966–1967.

At Sound Technique, Pink Floyd cut more songs, including another new Barrett composition, ‘Arnold Layne’, under Joe Boyd’s guidance. The group filmed a promo clip for the song, featuring the four goofing around with a shop window dummy on a freezing Sussex beach. It now offers a rare snapshot of the band in light-hearted mode, even if Barrett seems strangely upstaged by a showboating Roger Waters, who hams it up unselfconsciously for the camera, gangling across the sand in slightly too short drainpipe trousers.

Peter Jenner blithely admits that ‘back then, we didn’t know what we were doing’, but the vague plan was for Boyd, in his capacity as an A&R man, to secure a deal for the band. According to Jenner, Boyd had brought over his boss, Jac Holzman, label manager of Elektra Records, who’d signed Peter Jenner’s new favourites Love, to see the band, ‘but he didn’t like it, and blew us out’. However, Nick Mason recalls that Holzman had offered ‘a rather grudging one and seven-eighths percentage’.

Yet Polydor Records pitched in with a better offer, which included Joe being retained as an independent producer. (He had now formed his own independent production company Witchseason, the name taken from Donovan’s ‘Season of the Witch’ single). A contract was drawn up. Within days, though, the deal would fall apart.

Bryan Morrison was one of the country’s shrewdest booking agents. Working out of an office on London’s Charing Cross Road, Morrison managed The Pretty Things, as well as handling publishing and agency bookings for a variety of acts, including all the bands that appeared at the fashionable Speakeasy. Jeff Dexter was among those who first invited Morrison to the UFO club to see Pink Floyd.

Speaking in 1982, Joe Boyd recalled that Morrison and two of his aides, Tony Howard and future Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke, visited him and the band while they were rehearsing. ‘There was an immediate, intense dislike between myself and those three,’ he said. Later, Boyd would recall ‘velvet jackets, scarves knotted around their throats, tight trousers … the dandyism only made them more sinister.’

This combination of old-school mores and elements of the prevalent ‘head culture’ made for a formidable mix. ‘Joe would have been intimidated by Morrie, Steve and Tony,’ concedes Jeff Dexter, ‘because they were a force to be reckoned with.’

It would prove a significant encounter. Morrison had already approached Blackhill with a view to representing the band, had looked over The Pink Floyd’s contract with Boyd and Polydor and told them they could do better. Before Joe could raise any objection, Blackhill had backed out of the Polydor deal and signed with Morrison, who would then fund an independent recording to be pitched to record companies.

‘The trouble was that Joe was the only person we knew in the industry,’ admits Jenner. ‘And, for us, he’d rather blotted his copybook with the Jac Holzman business. Along comes Bryan Morrison and he seemed to know everybody … In those days it was EMI or Pye or Decca. EMI were considered much hipper because they had The Beatles and they owned Abbey Road. Bryan told us, “You go with the company with the most money”, and that saves you from thinking.’ Bryan Morrison had hooked EMI after receiving a letter from EMI Parlophone’s new producer Norman Smith, who was scouting for bands.

‘I’d sent out letters to all the managers and agents I could think of,’ says Norman Smith now. ‘I got one back from Bryan Morrison, who invited me to go and see Pink Floyd. I’d never heard of them and, to be honest, I had no real interest in psychedelia. But he took me to the UFO club, and, while the music did absolutely nothing for me, I could see that they did have one hell of a following even then. I figured I should put my business hat on, because it was obvious to me that we could sell some records.’ The proposed deal hit a snag when Jenner and King requested an advance. ‘They wanted some front money – £5,000,’ says Smith. ‘But EMI didn’t usually pay an advance. It was difficult to get it past the company’s management but eventually I did.’

According to Smith, EMI’s then head of A&R, Beecher Stevens, ‘rowed himself in on the deal’, and has since been wrongly credited with signing the group. Nevertheless, Jenner recalls that the label was ‘very excited to be seen as so hip and so groovy by landing the band’. Better still, The Pink Floyd had secured an album deal rather than one dependent on hit singles.

The spurned Joe Boyd had nobly produced the new versions of ‘Arnold Layne’ and its B-side ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ (with, as he later recalled, ‘Roger over my shoulder, extending his big index finger on one of the faders’). However, EMI’s regulations did not include using outside producers, while the Morrison Agency hiked up the band’s fee for playing the UFO club. Joe Boyd’s involvement with Pink Floyd was all but over. As he complained: ‘It was a case of, “Thanks a lot for doing ‘Arnold Layne’, Joe. See you around.”’

‘There was always a little bit of needle between Joe and ourselves after that,’ says Jenner. ‘But we didn’t have time to be doing UFO every time they wanted us to. So now we’re having the conversation of, “Well, how much money are you going to pay?” Joe felt he’d been done over, which, it has to be said, he had been. I like to think we’ve all got over it now.’

Boyd wrote of the coup in his book, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s: ‘Like me, Jenner and King were out of their depth. None of us imagined that decades later you could go to the remotest part of the globe and find cassettes of Dark Side of the Moon rattling around in the glove compartments of Third World taxis.’

A song about a fetishist whose ‘strange hobby’ involves stealing women’s underwear, Pink Floyd’s debut single, ‘Arnold Layne’, was released on 11 March 1967. The Kinks and The Who were already dabbling with more outlandish lyrical ideas as well as blazing a trail for quirkily English bands that were happy to sound quirkily English. ‘Arnold Layne’ was a creepier addition to the pack. The lyrics were supposedly inspired by a real incident in Cambridge, where an unidentified knicker-thief had raided Mary Waters’ washing line. Roger had regaled Syd with the story.

The music employed a woozy, merry-go-round rhythm, with Barrett’s vocals sounding defiantly English, bordering on the deadpan. It is Richard Wright’s Farfisa organ that provides the clearest link to psychedelia, splashing colour in place of a traditional guitar solo, and dominating the song. In the spring of 2006, touring as keyboard player in David Gilmour’s solo band, Wright would sing Syd’s lead vocals on a version of the song.

‘Arnold Layne’ is a reminder of just how integral the quiet, diffident Wright was to Pink Floyd’s earliest work. ‘Everyone, including me, underestimated Rick,’ admits Peter Jenner. ‘But he was so important to those early records. I remember him sorting out those harmonies and arrangements, telling people what to sing, tuning Roger’s bass … I also felt there was a lot more to the way Rick and Syd worked together than history allows for.’

With a little help from the management (‘We spent a couple of hundred quid trying to buy it into the charts,’ admitted Andrew King), ‘Arnold Layne’ reached number 20 in the UK, and was banned by Radio Caroline and Radio London, due to its supposedly risqué content. ‘We can’t think what they’re so perturbed about,’ protested Waters in Disc and Music Echo. ‘It’s a song about a clothes fetishist who’s obviously a bit kinked. A very simple, straightforward song about one sort of human predicament.’

UFO’s former house band had gone decidedly overground, even if a mooted appearance on the BBC’s flagship Top of the Pops was cancelled when the single began reversing down the charts. ‘We want to be pop stars,’ Waters told one interviewer. On the surface, the band seemed willing to jump through the requisite hoops: high-kicking in their best shirts and boots for a promotional photo outside EMI’s Manchester Square HQ; posing self-importantly with EMI bigwig Beecher Stevens in his office; and, above all, submitting to a punishing tour schedule, courtesy of the Morrison Agency, that found them zigzagging across country and frequently playing two gigs a night.

‘Arnold Layne’ aside, much of the group’s set still consisted of the less chart-friendly ‘freak-outs’ that wowed the mightily stoned in the UFO club. The reception was markedly different in the provinces: disgruntled punters poured beer on the band from the balconies, and Waters, who was unafraid to offer a withering aside to even the most hostile crowd, took a deep gash to the forehead one night from a thrown coin. Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell spent six months driving the band’s van to gigs, and saw how badly The Pink Floyd’s music could go down: ‘You’d play to a bunch of, say, twenty mods, who all stood around looking horrified by this psychedelic band that didn’t mean fuck all, when they just wanted to listen to Junior Walker.’

As The Pink Floyd became EMI’s trophy underground band, the scene that spawned them was changing. By the spring of 1967, Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones had been busted for drugs, and the music business’s preoccupation with illicit substances became perfect tabloid fodder. The News of the World splashed headlines such as ‘POP SONGS AND THE CULT OF LSD’, and The Pink Floyd were misquoted as describing themselves as ‘social deviants’. The paper had confused them with Mick Farren’s band, The Social Deviants. Lawyers were consulted and The Pink Floyd received an apology. Holding their nerve, they even managed to convince EMI that their music was in no way recreating the experience of tripping, as accused. (‘Quite how we managed that, I don’t know,’ admitted Nick Mason.)

While The Pink Floyd escaped, others were less fortunate. Caught up in the furore, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins was arrested for possession of marijuana and jailed for six months. (‘I was careless, incredibly careless,’ he says now.) Before going to Wormwood Scrubs prison, he arranged for Joe Boyd to take sole control of the UFO club. As an A&R man, Boyd understandably decided to focus on booking new bands rather than staging more mixed-media happenings.

In the following years Boyd would help orchestrate the careers of Fairport Convention and Nick Drake, among many others. But for some, this more commercial approach to UFO was indicative of the schism that existed in the underground scene – simply that it was no longer ‘underground’. The Pink Floyd’s move to EMI dovetailed with this change. ‘I thought it was a shame that the Floyd weren’t “ours” any more,’ says Jenny Fabian.

Mick Farren takes a more pragmatic approach. ‘It was pretty obvious to the more rational among us that the Floyd would end up on a major label, but some of the freaks saw it as a sell-out. I remember the words “Pink Finks” being painted on the wall of the UFO toilet. But it did bother me how they seemed to back off in major haste from the drug culture in which they’d made their name when the shit really started going down – the Stones being busted, Hoppy going to jail, major street harassment … That seemed like a cop-out.’

Yet for the group themselves, the scene had given them a launch pad for their music rather than a lifestyle philosophy. Having opted out of college and work to pursue a musical career, the pursuit of that career was more important than the fortunes of the London Free School or International Times.

‘There were elements of the “underground” that we did tune into,’ says Nick Mason now. ‘You supplied the music while people did creative dance, painted their faces, bathed in a giant jelly. But probably through being middle-class, reasonably well-educated people, we could talk our way through a certain amount of stuff, including making ourselves sound as if we were part of the current movement.’

Roger Waters felt an even greater distance. ‘To this day I still don’t know exactly what a lot of that stuff was about,’ he admitted. ‘You’d hear the odd thing about a revolution, but nothing specific. I read International Times a few times, but what was the Notting Hill Free School actually all about? What was it meant to do? I never gathered what it was, apart from a few “happenings”. The “happenings” that we put on were always a joke.’

EMI may have been persuaded to pay for the band’s new Ford Transit and a new Binson Echorec, the box of tricks that helped create those space-age sound effects, but splashing out for a hotel was unheard of. Gigs in the far north still meant a night drive back to London. The ramshackle crew mucked in together. Peter Wynne-Willson loaded gear and patched together Floyd’s homemade lighting rig between gigs. Peter had yet to pass his driving test, however, so Blackhill’s secretary, the late June Child, would often drive the van instead. The pretty, blonde-haired June would prove an integral part of Pink Floyd’s set-up, and a shoulder for Syd to cry on. June would later marry Barrett acolyte and Blackhill client Marc Bolan.

‘I would buy a lot of equipment and materials to experiment with for different lighting effects,’ recalls Peter Wynne-Willson, ‘and each month June would come to Earlham Street to go through the mass of receipts. To make this boring process more interesting we developed a system whereby, on either side of a little table under the high-level bed, we would sit with our feet in each other’s crotch. Such a delightful little ritual we had. June wore the shortest of skirts.’

Nevertheless, the whirlwind of gigs was soon taking its toll on Blackhill’s star player. ‘I saw Floyd’s touring schedule years later,’ said one Floyd confidant. ‘Whoever programmed them to run around England in the way they did in the condition they did? Sheer madness. It would have been debilitating for anyone, never mind someone on drugs.’

Matthew Scurfield was now about to start his acting career in theatre rep, but followed his brother Ponji to Earlham Street, and saw, up close, the effect of Syd’s new workload. ‘Syd was someone who wasn’t totally in the groove, like the other members of the group,’ he says. ‘He wasn’t ambitious in the way Roger was. I always thought Syd was like an outsider even within the Floyd. It was very obvious at times that a lot of their ambition thwarted his art. It was always, “Come on Syd. It’s time to go!”’

Barrett’s drug use from the time remains the subject of much speculation. What was Syd taking, how much was he taking and how often? And what about the rest of the band? ‘Back then I don’t think Roger and Nick hardly ever took drugs,’ recalls Andrew King. ‘I always thought Roger was a “down the pub for a couple of pints” chap. Rick was smoking some dope. Syd was trying everything.’

‘Syd, Andrew and I smoked dope,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘Although I don’t recall Syd ever saying to me, “Let’s take a trip”, I knew he was doing LSD. How much, I don’t know. I’ve always been told that he had what you might call “religious acid friends”, yet I don’t remember Syd being evangelical about LSD. But I do think it was a trigger for his problems.’

‘Syd definitely wasn’t taking LSD every day in Earlham Street,’ insists Peter Wynne-Willson. ‘It may have been the dope rather than the acid that brought on problems. I know the dope is a lot stronger these days, but young men who smoke dope between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two are particularly susceptible to mental trouble if they are of a sensitive disposition. With Syd, I don’t remember a trip that was a turning point or anything like that. He sometimes had a hard time on dope, but not on acid. In England there was mostly hash available. Syd and I would generally smoke joints, sometimes chillums; we rarely smoked pipes of pure hash together.’

For Peter Jenner, Pink Floyd’s (at some point that year they seemed to lose the definitive article) appearance at ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’ at Alexandra Palace in April ‘coincided with the height of acid use that summer’. Staged as a fundraiser for International Times, which had just been raided and all but closed down by the police, it would be John Hopkins’ last organisational feat before going to prison.

‘I was the one that parlayed the rent of the hall,’ says Hoppy now, ‘and they were still looking for me years after. It was a gas. Ten thousand people must have gone through the doors at some time. Michael X’s friends were de facto security. What we didn’t realise till later was that they pocketed the money that people were paying. So very little made it back to central control.’

Pink Floyd were billed to play alongside The Pretty Things, The Soft Machine and the underground’s latest overground star, Arthur Brown, soon to enjoy his first hit single, ‘Fire’, and performing while wearing a burning head-dress. There were avant-garde film shows, beatnik poetry readings, a fairground helter-skelter and the opportunity to smoke banana skins in a fibreglass igloo. John Lennon was among those who turned up to watch the madness.

That same night the Floyd had played a Dutch TV show before catching a flight back to London and driving at breakneck speed to Alexandra Palace in Muswell Hill. Peter Jenner, eager to make the most of the event, had dropped a tab of LSD a little too early. ‘I was still driving the van while I was coming up,’ he says. Meanwhile, Peter’s old university pal, ‘the alternative doctor’ Sam Hutt was in a similar state. ‘I drove up with Rick Wright, and I was tripping,’ he recalls. ‘Driving on acid? Not something I would recommend to anyone. All I can remember is being transfixed by this shiny cape Rick was wearing – or at least I think he was wearing.’ Inside the venue, Hutt would become similarly transfixed by the helter-skelter. ‘I just kept going up and down, up and down, getting reborn every time,’ he laughs.

For The Soft Machine’s Robert Wyatt, Pink Floyd’s 4 a.m. performance ‘must have been one of the greatest gigs they ever did. It completely blew my mind.’ Others have wrongly claimed that Syd was too incapacitated to perform, yet photographs from the night also show Barrett with his hands on his guitar, clearly lucid enough to play, even if Richard Wright’s cape isn’t quite the shiny creation of Dr Sam Hutt’s memory.

For organiser John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Pink Floyd’s dawn performance, good or otherwise, took a back seat to other events happening at the same time. ‘One of our friends was a chemist,’ he recalls, with some relish, ‘and he came along with some stuff which we now think was a cousin of DMT [the hallucinogenic, diemethyltryptamine]. Whatever it was, my girlfriend and I had a nice warm glow and ended up outside Ally Pally in the dawn light looking down across London. I never saw Pink Floyd play that night. Or if I did, I can’t remember a thing.’

Peter Jenner’s reference to ‘Syd’s religious acid friends’ may well refer to some of his flatmates that year. In 1967, Syd left Earlham Street for a room in one of the flats at 101 Cromwell Road. The Lesmoir-Gordons had taken the first-floor flat some twelve months before, moving in with another Cambridge émigré, Bill Barlow, landlord of the notorious 27 Clarendon Street in Cambridge, home to numerous local hipsters. The Cambridge ‘scene’ now spread to this new party house in the capital, located in a now-demolished Victorian building close to the West London Air Terminal coach station in Earls Court.

Nevertheless, with Nigel studying at the London School of Film Technique and moving in the most fashionable circles, number 101 became a Mecca for the capital’s overlapping art, music, movie and drug crowds. The poet Allen Ginsberg, the film-maker Kenneth Anger, and singers Donovan and Mick Jagger were among those who dropped by.

From 1965 onwards, the building’s various rooms had offered a rehearsal space for Pink Floyd and, briefly, lodgings for Roger Waters. It would also play host to various exotic tenants. These would include, at various times, John Esam, the New Zealand-born beatnik and an early link in London’s LSD distribution chain, and Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, aka Stash de Rola, the son of the prominent French artist Balthus. Stash was a confidant of The Rolling Stones, who would later be arrested on drug charges with Brian Jones, and would also take a memorable acid trip with Syd Barrett – of which more later.

The artist Duggie Fields had briefly studied architecture at Regent Street Poly, where he met the Cambridge contingent through Juliette Gale. Sometime in 1965 he moved into 101 Cromwell Road. ‘Pink Floyd used to rehearse in one of the rooms,’ he recalls now. ‘And I used to go downstairs and put on an American R&B record as loud as I could because I thought they had no sense of rhythm and subtlety, and I rather hoped some of it might find its way into what they were doing.’

Duggie was still living at Cromwell Road, in a room papered with Marvel Comics, when Barrett took the room next to his.

‘The house had seven rooms on those two top floors, and there were nine or ten people living there,’ says Fields now. The living-room’s walls, ceilings and floor were painted white (an idea lifted from the 1965 movie The Knack … and How to Get It), and films were often projected on the walls – sometimes deliberately running backwards. The room was routinely occupied by the building’s lodgers, their friends and sometimes complete strangers.

‘I can remember coming home from college to find maybe twenty people sitting around. I wouldn’t know any of them and there’d be nobody there that actually lived at the flat,’ says Fields. ‘And this could be happening during the day as well as the night.’

On the floor below lived a lecturer (‘poor Mr Poliblanc’ as one of the residents now refers to him), who was totally unconnected with the group. ‘One of our number worked out a way of wiring up the meter so we were effectively stealing his electricity,’ admits Duggie. ‘The landing also became a rubbish dump, as it was several floors up and nobody could be bothered to take the rubbish out. To this day I have no idea where the rubbish at 101 actually went.’

As well as housing such doyens of the capital’s counter-culture, number 101 also offered shelter to Pip and Emo. There was a false ceiling installed in the hallway, with enough room above it to create a claustrophobic hidey-hole, big enough for a mattress.

‘Cromwell Road was always a last resort,’ groans Emo. ‘We went there when we’d been kicked out of everyone else’s flats. I still remember that platform suspended over the corridor. Girls were always terrified to get up there, and there was always a rush between me and Pip to get to that bed if it was the only one available.’

In the words of one of his acquaintances, ‘Duggie Fields was not into self-annihilation’, but while he stayed sane, many of the Cromwell Road regulars did not. Although stories about the house’s occupants may have been exaggerated, Mick Rock, another regular visitor, recalls a general air of drug-induced chaos: ‘Apart from Duggie’s room, the rest of the place was full of acid burn-outs.’

Communal trips at Cromwell Road were certainly commonplace, whether during Barrett’s residency or not, with one eyewitness recalling a bottle of LSD and pipette kept in the fridge of the Lesmoir-Gordons’ flat. On at least one occasion a party of trippers were said to have marched the wrong way down the perilous entrance to the coach station, convinced of their invincibility despite the risk of oncoming vehicles. The spiked iron railings surrounding 101 Cromwell Road proved an even greater hazard to anyone believing they were indestructible while under the influence. One night Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon found another of his old Cambridge drug buddies, Johnny Johnson, naked, disorientated and hanging on to the drainpipe outside 101’s bathroom window. Nigel managed to persuade him back in. Johnson had previously attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself out of a window, and would succeed the next time he tried.

In May that year, Joe Boyd claims to have come across Lindsay Corner and a ‘crazy-eyed’ Syd in London’s West End. Lindsay told him that Barrett had been taking acid every day for a week.

Barrett’s supposed daily acid use has long been the subject of wild speculation. Some think he was taking it every day; most claim he wasn’t. However, others in Pink Floyd’s entourage were concerned that his flatmates might be encouraging his drug use by ‘spiking’ his drinks with LSD. ‘Cromwell Road was full of heavy, loony, messianic acid freaks,’ said Peter Jenner.

Two of the occasional people around Syd at Cromwell Road were known as ‘Mad Sue’ and ‘Mad Jock’. In the real world, ‘Jock’ was Alistair Findlay. ‘Sue’, his then girlfriend, was Susan Kingsford, a model, who had first encountered Barrett and Gilmour while at the Cambridge Technical College. After appearing in a TV advert, as one of the first Cadbury’s Flake girls, she moved to London and paired up with another of 101 Cromwell Road’s residents, who had worked for Robert Fraser, the art gallery owner who got busted with some of The Rolling Stones. This friend ‘fell in with the druggies,’ says Sue now, ‘and I fell in with him.’ She also makes a fleeting appearance in Peter Whitehead’s film footage of ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’, wearing, in her own words, ‘a musquash coat and nothing else, holding a daffodil and beaming beatifically’.

‘I remember Sue and Jock floating about,’ says Mick Rock. ‘Sue was this incredibly beautiful girl who’d taken too much acid.’ But Duggie Fields recalls that ‘Sue really wasn’t mad at all, possibly just a little wacky.’

While asserting that her LSD use was prodigious – ‘We took it constantly – enormous quantities’ – Sue insists that they never spiked anyone. ‘Why would anyone do such a thing?’ she insists. ‘In those days, if you took acid it was all very serious. You did it and then listened to Bach, or watched Kenneth Anger’s latest film, or read the Tibetan Book of the Dead.’

‘Spiking was a heinous crime,’ Alistair Findlay told Syd Barrett biographer Tim Willis. ‘You just wouldn’t do it.’

‘If they were spiking everyone,’ asks Duggie Fields, ‘why didn’t they spike me? It never happened.’

Whatever his later problems, Syd was certainly compos mentis when he started work on Pink Floyd’s debut album. The group were quickly ensconced at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. Widely regarded as one of the best studios in the world, Abbey Road was run along strict lines: white-coated technicians were on hand to deal with any equipment malfunctions, and tape ops and engineers were taught every aspect of the trade, from how to wrap up cable properly to the correct positioning of microphones. Best of all was the inspiring mix of musicians passing through its doors on a daily basis. As Abbey Road tape op and later engineer Jeff Jarratt recalls, ‘You could come in one day and find the classical composer and conductor Otto Klemperer in Studio One, The Beatles in Studio Two, and Pink Floyd in Studio Three.’

In keeping with company policy, the Floyd’s designated producer was their A&R executive Norman Smith, a dapper ex-RAF man, experienced jazz musician and sometime studio engineer for The Beatles. ‘He was old-school with a very dry sense of humour,’ recalled Roger Waters, ‘and always gave the impression of being a retired song-and-dance man. I liked him enormously.’

Sessions for what would become The Piper at the Gates of Dawn album began in Abbey Road’s Studio Three in January 1967. At various times during the next few months, The Beatles would be next door in Studio Two creating Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Smith had staked his reputation on Pink Floyd, but, as he recalls now, ‘It was not the easiest of associations.’ To break the ice, the producer sat at the piano playing jazz and ‘bashing away while the band joined in’. These jamming sessions worked well, but Syd was less receptive to taking advice about his own music. ‘With Syd it was like talking to a brick wall,’ says Smith. ‘He would do a take, come back into the control room and have a listen. I’d make some suggestions, and he would just nod, not really saying anything, go back into the studio, do another take and it would be exactly the same as the one before. Roger was very helpful, and the others were fine, though I remember Rick was extremely laid-back, but with Syd I eventually realised I was wasting my time.’

Jeff Jarratt worked as a tape op during the sessions. ‘My memories are different from Norman’s,’ he says now. ‘Syd was clearly the band’s main creative force, and I thought he was fantastic. When I was asked to do the sessions I went to see Floyd play live, and I was absolutely amazed. It was so fresh and exciting; I hadn’t heard anything like it. Norman would have been directing them in the best way for that stuff to sound good on record. So perhaps there were things he said that challenged their way of thinking.’

Similarly, Waters remembers that ‘despite him [Syd] doing a lot of acid there were no real problems at that stage.’ Nevertheless, all agreed that the band’s more outlandish musical ideas jarred with the traditionally minded Smith.

‘I wasn’t that knowledgeable about the sort of music they were playing,’ admits Norman. ‘Psychedelia didn’t interest me. But I felt it was my job to get them to think more melodically.’ On that score, Smith succeeded in ‘discouraging the live ramble’, as Peter Jenner calls it. Instead, freeform live numbers such as ‘Pow R Toc H’ were hacked down to a more manageable length, though a ‘licensed ramble’ was permitted with the 9 minute 41 second version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. According to the late Abbey Road engineer Pete Bown, this was the song he heard Floyd rehearsing when he first checked in to begin working on the album. ‘I opened the door and nearly shit myself,’ he recalled years later. ‘By Christ it was loud. I had certainly never heard anything quite like it before.’

‘Peter Bown was an unbelievable character,’ remembers Jeff Jarratt. ‘A fun, extrovert guy. He was older than the band, but he was very receptive to new ideas.’ ‘Pete had a much more creative attitude than perhaps Norman did,’ offers Peter Jenner. ‘He was also extremely gay, ragingly gay, which seemed quite unusual back then.’ Andrew King recalled Bown seated at the mixing desk painting the tips of his fingers with a plastic skin compound used to repair cuts and grazes, as he was concerned that endless sessions working the desk would ‘wear them out through over-use’.

Stories of Pink Floyd meeting The Beatles during these sessions are steeped in apocrypha. They range from the fictitious – that Barrett secretly played on Sgt Pepper – to the simply mundane – that the Floyd were taken in to meet The Beatles, encountering a grumpy Lennon and a cheerier McCartney. Nick Mason wrote of ‘sitting humbly as they [The Beatles] worked on a mix’ of what would become ‘Lovely Rita’. Norman Smith now adds a new tale to the collection. He was in Studio Three, attempting to bond with Floyd at the start of the Piper sessions, when ‘the door opened and who should walk in but Paul McCartney. He introduced himself to them, though they obviously knew who he was, and then tapped me on the shoulder as he left and said, “You won’t go wrong with this chappie.” I think the boys were impressed.’

‘What you have to remember,’ says Jeff Jarratt, ‘is that bands were running into each other all the time at Abbey Road. Who knows how many times Floyd and The Beatles might have met?’

Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell also recalls a meeting between Barrett, Waters and Paul McCartney at the UFO club: ‘There was this little corridor by the side of the stage, and I was sat there when McCartney came in, smoking a joint. Paul was a very affable guy and he passed the joint around. After he’d gone Syd was like, “Wow, that was Paul McCartney and he’s come to see Pink Floyd.” I was surprised, because I was like, “Syd, you’re pretty cool as well now.” I also remember that Roger, who I’d never seen smoke before, took a huge hit off that joint. He knew when to play the game.’

The Beatles’ success at Abbey Road certainly enabled ‘the boys’ to make The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Following The Beatles’ Revolver, the studio’s engineers had become used to phasing, multi-tracking, and all manner of what Jenner calls ‘weird shit’.

‘Roger was especially interested in the studio itself and the development of sound,’ recalls Smith.

But Andrew King remembers Syd showing a similar interest: ‘One of my strongest memories is of Syd mixing the song “Chapter 24”. I remember him at the desk operating the faders for the final mix. And he was very good at it. He knew what he wanted and he was totally capable of getting what he wanted – at a technical level.’

While Barrett is said to have written off several microphones in the course of the recording, and had the ‘meters frequently screaming in the red’, out of the occasional chaos came eleven songs for the album, and, most importantly, an additional single. ‘When I heard “See Emily Play”, I finally thought: This is it. This is the one,’ says Smith.

Pink Floyd premiered the single, then still titled ‘Games for May’, at a performance of the same name in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 12 May. Jenner had secured the show at the capital’s prestigious classical music venue through his wife Sumi’s friendship with the promoter Christopher Hunt. It was here that the band chose to premiere their new gizmo, the Azimuth Coordinator. Effectively the first quadraphonic sound system, the Coordinator had been built for the band by one of the boffins at Abbey Road. It comprised four rheostats contained in a large box and was equipped with a ‘joy-stick’, which would be operated by Richard Wright to pan the sound around 270 degrees in whatever venue the band were playing. The sheer volume at which Pink Floyd played that night was an issue, but it was their use of a bubble machine and the scattering of flowers that caused the most concern. ‘A combination of squashed daffodil stems and burst bubbles left this smeary liquid all over the leather seats and the floor,’ says Jenner. ‘We were immediately banned, and I don’t think they let pop groups back into the South Bank for some time after that.’

Just days later it would be the issue of volume that preoccupied the interviewer on the BBC1 arts show Look of the Week. Following a snippet of Pink Floyd performing ‘Pow R Toc H’, Barrett and Waters submitted to some incredulous questioning from the Austrian musician and string quartet fan Hans Keller. The exchange now plays like a quaint period piece: the earnest, suited musicologist versus the flowery-shirted pop upstarts. ‘Why does it all got to be so terribly loud [sic]?’ enquires Keller. ‘That’s the way we like it,’ counters Waters. Barrett, in a nice contrast to the strung-out Syd of legend, is as alert and well spoken as his bandmate. Keller remains singularly unimpressed, but does offer one sharp observation on Pink Floyd’s music: ‘My verdict is that it’s a little bit of a regression to childhood.’

Shunning Abbey Road, the band returned to Sound Techniques Studio, where they’d worked with Joe Boyd on ‘Arnold Layne’, to cut the new single, ‘See Emily Play’. But there was a problem. ‘The trouble with “See Emily Play” was it didn’t do a thing for Syd,’ explains Norman Smith. ‘In fact, I don’t think he was happy about recording singles full stop.’

On the day of the session, Syd took a telephone call from David Gilmour. The guitarist was on a brief visit to London, buying equipment for his own band Jokers Wild, then playing a residency in a Paris nightclub. Barrett sounded perfectly normal on the phone and invited Gilmour to the studio. On arrival, Gilmour was shocked by what he saw. ‘He looked very strange, glassy-eyed,’ he recalled. ‘He wasn’t terribly friendly, didn’t seem to recognise me. I stayed for an hour or two and then left. I knew about LSD, as I’d taken it myself, but I didn’t connect it to this. He was in a very strange state.’ Gilmour returned to France, troubled by his friend’s condition but unaware of just how much impact it would soon have on his own career. ‘See Emily Play’ was released on 16 June 1967. EMI bigwig Roy Featherstone would coin the slogan ‘Straight to Heaven in ’67’ to accompany the single’s release, and, as Peter Jenner recalls, ‘while that now sounds incredibly naff, as a slogan it worked at the time.’ The song included a dash of typical Syd experimentation – the sound of a plastic ruler being scraped along the guitar fretboard – but, as Norman Smith explains, ‘it had this wonderful melody, this amazing tune.’

The perfect amalgam of psychedelic excess and pure pop, ‘See Emily Play’ was brighter than ‘Arnold Layne’ on all levels, without the seamier subject matter of its predecessor, but with just enough of Wright’s spooked-sounding keyboards and Syd’s fey, disengaged vocals to prevent a complete slip into easy listening pop. As New Musical Express raved: ‘It’s full of weird oscillations, reverberations, electronic vibrations, fuzzy rumblings and appealing harmonies.’

Not as whimsical as some of his other compositions on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the song was still steeped in random images from Syd and Roger’s Cambridge childhood. ‘I know which woods Syd’s talking about in “See Emily Play”,’ said Waters in 2004. ‘We all used to go to these woods as kids. It’s a very specific area – one specific wood on the road to the Gog Magog Hills.’

The Emily in question is similarly steeped in Floyd myths. Some claim it was Emily Young, one of the Notting Hill Free School and UFO club’s regular alumni, now a noted sculptress. While Emily met Syd on occasion, she claims to have no specific knowledge that the song was written about her. Others have suggested that Syd’s Earlham Street flatmate Anna Murray inspired the song. Again, Anna has never claimed to know that the song was written about her. At the time of the song’s release Waters told one radio interviewer, in the wonderful parlance of the era: ‘Emily could be anyone. She’s just a hung-up chick, that’s all.’

Two weeks after the song’s release, Pink Floyd were invited to play Top of the Pops. Andrew King would later say that Syd’s decline could be plotted through the group’s appearances on the show: two reluctant performances and one final non-appearance. Peter Wynne-Willson was with Syd in Trafalgar Square prior to one of the performances. ‘It was getting later and later. In the end, I said to him, “Isn’t it time we got going?” We hailed a cab and Syd asked it to go somewhere entirely different.’

Norman Smith was on hand to chaperone the band as they went to the show’s Lime Grove Studios in West London for their debut appearance. ‘I told them they’d have to mime, as that was what all the groups did back then,’ he recalls. ‘I don’t think Syd was happy, but the others accepted it. So they went off to have their hair washed and their make-up done. Normally, I didn’t think Syd cared how he looked, but when he came back, he looked like a pop star. I told him he looked fantastic. So he went straight over to the mirror, messed up his hair and grabbed a load of tissues to wipe off the make-up . . . A week later, we went back again, and the same thing happened. He just stood there on the show, letting the guitar dangle in front of him. I had a go afterwards, told him he was going to destroy our recording career if he carried on. But it just went in one ear and out the other.’

The single peaked at number 5. Taken back to the studio for a third appearance, the following week, Syd initially refused to go on. ‘We finally discovered that the reason was that John Lennon didn’t have to do Top of the Pops, so we didn’t,’ Roger Waters told Melody Maker.

Sue Kingsford encountered Syd on the afternoon of one of his scheduled Top of the Pops appearances. She and Jock were now living in a flat in Beaufort Street, South Kensington, near to Cromwell Road. ‘Suddenly we heard this banging on the door,’ she recalls. ‘And there was Syd. He had no shoes on, which was not unusual in those days, but his feet were filthy and bleeding. He looked completely off of his head. He didn’t say a word. He just came in and we gave him some Sugar Puffs and a cup of coffee. He still didn’t say anything. He just sat there. About an hour after he arrived, there was another bang on the door. It was some of the Floyd’s people: “Is Syd here?” We answered, “Yes, he’s in the kitchen but he’s not very well.” They were like, “I don’t give a fuck if he’s not very well.” They just dragged him out. Later that evening I discovered they’d dragged him off to do Top of the Pops. The reason he was sitting on a cushion during the show is because he was so out of it he couldn’t stand up.’

Despite their Top of the Pops appearance, the BBC invited the group to guest on the Saturday Club radio show at the end of July. Having been ferried to the recording studio, Syd again decided that he didn’t wish to participate. This time he offered no explanation. ‘When we got the call that it was our turn to go on, nobody could find Syd,’ remembers Norman Smith. ‘The doorman told us they’d seen someone that looked like him leaving. Roger Waters and I went out into the street and, sure enough, there he was, just turning the corner. That was the end of that.’

Inevitably, Barrett’s behaviour was souring his relationship with the rest of the group. Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, who was driving the band’s van, agreed to pair up with Syd for a night drive back from the South Coast after a gig. ‘I drove back from Portsmouth with Syd, as the others didn’t really want to be with him. I remember it was pouring with rain, and he smoked a joint, and he must have laughed for about two hours, but hardly spoke. He was obviously losing the plot.’

In August, Blackhill issued a statement to the press following the cancellation of several Pink Floyd dates. ‘It is not true Syd has left the group,’ Andrew King told the New Musical Express. ‘He is tired and exhausted, and has been advised to rest for two weeks.’

Peter Jenner called on Sam Hutt for advice. That summer, Hutt was fresh out of medical school and acquiring a reputation as London’s hippest doctor. ‘The idea was to send Syd to see “the good doctor”,’ explains Hutt now. ‘The idea being, “He knows all about the drugs and he takes them as well, but he’s not going to freak out.”’

Hutt had rented a finca on Formentera, which then represented the western end of the hippie trail for those that didn’t fancy making the full journey East. Syd and Lindsay, Richard and Juliette, Sam, his wife and their young son headed off to the island for a fortnight, later to be joined by Roger and Judy Trim, who were staying on neighbouring Ibiza. The plan was for Barrett to kick back, play guitar, bask in the sun, enjoy himself. Syd duly obliged and seemed quite content during parts of the holiday, but there was one snag. As Hutt remembers, ‘He was munching acid all the time.’ The idyllic retreat was also prone to electrical storms, a freak weather condition that did little to improve Syd’s raddled state of mind. ‘You get sheet lightning behind the clouds and the whole sky lights up fluorescent,’ Hutt recalls. ‘It could affect you even if you weren’t taking anything at all. Add acid to the equation and Syd was, quite literally, trying to climb the walls. His fingernails were clawing the wall, as he was trying to get himself off the floor.’

‘I thought it was fucking awful.’ The Who’s Pete Townshend was among those unimpressed by The Piper at the Gates of Dawn on its release that August. Townshend’s main gripe was that the record didn’t do justice to the group’s wall-of-sound live show. But Norman Smith had done the job asked of him. He’d curbed some of the band’s excesses and helped realise Peter Jenner’s dream of an avant-garde pop group. Less than twelve months earlier, Pink Floyd’s repertoire included the likes of ‘Louie Louie’, yet barely a trace of the blues was to be found in their first album. Richard Wright’s classical and jazz influences seem to have taken their place, the keyboards filling in the spaces usually occupied by a lead guitar, giving most of the record a sinister undertow. Childhood nursery rhymes permeate ‘Bike’, ‘The Gnome’ and ‘Flaming’ (‘Watching buttercups come to life … sleeping on a dandelion’), but on ‘Matilda Mother’ and ‘The Scarecrow’ there’s a hint of menace as well; like Grimm’s Fairy Tales set to music. A sixties spy movie theme burbles away on ‘Lucifer Sam’, with its cryptic mention of one Jennifer Gentle, in reality Jenny Spires.

Nocturnal sessions with I-Ching at Earlham Street find their way into ‘Chapter 24’, accompanied by droning keyboards and percussion, the band making use of the treasure trove of odd musical instruments scattered around the studio. In the bleaker, noisier corner were ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’. The latter was, in the words of Nick Mason, similar to ‘what Roy Lichtenstein was putting into his paintings’. With Peter Jenner reciting astronomical co-ordinates from a children’s book of the planets through a megaphone and Roger Waters’ primitive bass runs, it sounded like pop art and science fiction condensed into a rock song.

While Barrett’s songs had a wistful, child-like charm, ‘Pow R Toc H’ and Waters’ solo composition ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ now sound like dummy runs for some of the bassist’s later ideas. The shivery suggestion of madness and the frantic howling would be revisited on Dark Side of the Moon and Animals.

Yet Syd’s fairy-tale contributions to the album immediately struck a chord with those from his hometown. ‘There was something very Cambridge-like about it all,’ says Seamus O’Connell. ‘When we first heard these extraordinary songs, things like “Bike”, we all made that connection.’

‘I always thought Syd got stuck in a curious sort of protracted childhood,’ offers Anthony Stern. ‘So it was always there in the music. Childhood had been an idyllic time, and I think he found the idea of growing up and dealing with your parents’ world frankly terrifying.’

For Sue Kingsford, Syd’s hankering for his hometown was all too familiar. ‘I always thought he was out of his comfort zone when he wasn’t in Cambridge,’ she ventures. ‘Both of us often used to go back at weekends. I can remember us tripping one night in Cromwell Road, and Syd, who hadn’t said a word for hours, suddenly asked, “Are you going home this weekend?” I told him I was, and he replied, “Do you know, that’s all I want to do. I just want to go home.”’

As steeped in 1967 as Sgt Pepper, Pink Floyd’s debut also translates for subsequent generations of listeners. Reviews were favourable, even if some of what Record Mirror called its ‘mind-blowing sounds’ were still a step too far for many pop fans.

Photographer Vic Singh, hired to shoot the band for the album’s cover, was similarly unsure. ‘Their music seemed alien and quite surreal,’ he says now. ‘When I first heard it, I thought: This is never going to work.’ Then sharing a studio with, among others, David Bailey, Singh was an up-and-coming society photographer and friends with George Harrison. ‘George had been given a prism lens. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he passed it to me.’ Singh told Jenner and King to raid whatever boutiques they could to get the brightest clothes in which to dress the band. This time, even Syd seemed happy to play by the rules. Vic relaxed the band ‘with a few joints and a couple of shots of Scotch in the coffee – and then snapped away’. The Quiet Beatle’s prism lens split the finished image, rendering the Floyd in duplicate. ‘It was unusual and different, and they were delighted with it,’ says Singh. ‘And Syd did his own little drawing on the back cover.’ The Piper at the Gates of Dawn would be one of the few Pink Floyd studio album sleeves actually to feature the group on its front cover.

Vic Singh’s experiences with Syd that year contrasted with those of Andrew Whittuck. A freelance photographer, shadowing the likes of The Beatles and the Maharishi in London that summer, Whittuck photographed Pink Floyd at Abbey Road and at his parents’ house. ‘I’d actually been to primary school in Hampstead with Nick Mason,’ he says now. ‘Though of course we were both too cool to mention it.’ The band and a roadie arrived with their lighting rig and set up in Whittuck’s bedroom: ‘They played me the album, which was quite unlike anything I’d ever heard, and there was lots of talk about the composer Stockhausen, which was where it was at, apparently. They all crashed out in my brother’s room and Syd was practically asleep after wedging himself into a corner between the door and the bed. Eventually, my mother came in, took one look at him and announced, “That chap looks like he needs a strong cup of tea.” She went off and brought him a cup. Of course, I was embarrassed, but, to be fair, Syd did actually perk up a bit after that.’

Pink Floyd were now attracting the attention of the music press, and interviews from the time see both Waters and Mason more forthcoming than their singer. ‘I lie and I’m rather aggressive,’ announced Roger to Disc and Music Echo. ‘I want to be successful and loved in everything I turn my hand to,’ Nick told the same interviewer. In contrast, Barrett is shyer and far less verbose. ‘Our music is like an abstract painting,’ he offered in a brief moment of insight. ‘It should suggest something to each person.’

Back from Formentera, Syd and the band reconvened at Sound Technique Studios, as EMI were already looking for another single. Among the new songs on offer was Barrett’s horribly prophetic creation ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’. Abbreviated from its original title, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream Old Woman with a Casket’, the song featured Nick Mason on vocals shadowed by insidious, creepy Pinky and Perky-style vocals, the music swaying and lurching. ‘Vegetable Man’ was hardly any brighter, with a desperate Syd declaring, ‘I’ve been looking all over the place for a place for me’ against a tuneless oompah rhythm. ‘He was singing about himself. It was an extraordinary document of serious mental disturbance,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘A song of amazing mad grandeur,’ counters a more sympathetic Andrew King. Dr Sam Hutt dropped in while the band was recording the track. Unfortunately, he was tripping: ‘All I can remember thinking was: Uh-oh, here come the demons!’

‘We were probably the only people in Los Angeles that had a copy of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,’ insists Alice Cooper. Pink Floyd’s debut was released in the US at the end of October 1967, when Alice was still just plain Vincent Furnier, the nineteen-year-old singer in a band called The Nazz and ‘utterly fixated by all British bands’. Alice’s and Pink Floyd’s paths would cross within weeks of the album’s release.

Andrew King, in his capacity as tour manager, flew to the States in advance of Floyd’s inaugural US tour. As he now explains, ‘Everything went wrong from day one.’

In San Francisco, King discovered that the group’s work visas had not yet arrived. Under union rules, a visiting British band had effectively to swap with an American group visiting the UK, in this case Sam the Sham and The Pharoahs. ‘I had to explain the situation to our promoter Bill Graham,’ says King. ‘Which made me feel like a complete prick.’ Graham, a formidable figure on the American West Coast, was not a man to be trifled with. He had arranged for Pink Floyd to play club dates and theatre shows alongside Janis Joplin’s band, Big Brother and The Holding Company. The absent visas meant the first six West Coast dates had to be cancelled. ‘An irate Bill ended up getting the American ambassador out of his bed in London at 4 a.m. to sort out the visas,’ continues King. ‘The band were on the next plane out. If there was one consolation, I got to see the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, whom Bill booked to play the first night instead of the Floyd.’

Arriving in the US with only their guitars, the band were confronted with two major problems. Their US label Capitol (‘who hadn’t a fucking clue about us or our music’, according to Peter Jenner) hadn’t organised any instruments and the band were forced to hustle the local music shops into lending replacements. Arriving at the 5,500-seater Winterland Auditorium, where they were due to open for Janis Joplin and Richie Havens, King realised that the group’s homemade light show, which they’d brought with them, ‘would be absolutely fucking useless and more suited to a primary school play’. The headliners graciously allowed them to use their own.

In the UK, the West Coast music scene was romantically perceived as a counterpart to London’s underground music clique. In the wake of The Beatles, any visiting British band intrigued the American music press. The just-launched Rolling Stone magazine sent photographer Baron Wolman down to Sausalito where Pink Floyd were staying. The band willingly played up for the camera. ‘They were obviously pleased to be in San Francisco,’ recalls Wolman now. ‘At one time Syd grabbed a couple of sugar cubes and put them in his mouth, an obvious reference to his fondness for LSD and one of the more popular ways of ingesting that particular drug.’

However, as Waters would later protest, many of the West Coast’s flagship groups were essentially country-blues bands. They might be given to lengthy jams and dope-smoking, but musically they were surprisingly conservative in their sound and influences. Pink Floyd’s mind-bending mix of jazz, beat pop and electronic noodling was far removed from Janis Joplin. The contrast wasn’t lost on the music press. As Rolling Stone’s star critic Ralph Gleason wrote: ‘On the West Coast we have recently seen The Cream, The Who, Procol Harum, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. Three groups are winners. The other two just do not make it. In person, Pink Floyd, for all its electronic interest, is simply dull in a dance hall following Big Brother and Janis Joplin.’

The band found their smaller club shows, in which they could use their bijou lighting system, were better received – some of the time. Prior to flying out from London, Syd had had his hair permed at Vidal Sassoon’s, and the resultant frizz was not to his liking. Lighting tech Peter Wynne-Willson had had his own hair permed at the same time. ‘Syd, myself and a few others went to Vidal Sassoon’s in London and had our hair permed. I wonder if Syd had an adverse reaction to the perm? I do remember that the horror look came into his eyes soon after.’

Before going on stage at the Cheetah Club in Santa Monica some reports claim Barrett, in a fit of pique, poured the contents of a tub of Brylcreem over his hair, into which he crushed a handful of (the barbiturate) Mandrax capsules. Wynne-Willson claims no memory of this. In the great spirit of rock myth and hearsay, others, including Sam Hutt, are adamant they’d seen him perform this trick on stage previously at the UFO club (‘I remember being terribly impressed, and thinking: This is a man who has his finger on some kind of pulse.’) Nevertheless, Nick Mason’s memory of the show extends to Syd applying the hair gel but not the drugs. Once asked to comment on the likeliness of the story, David Gilmour quipped that he ‘couldn’t believe Syd would waste good Mandies’. Once on stage Barrett is said to have detuned his guitar, provoking Roger Waters to cut his own hand while hitting his bass in anger.

Cheetah Club regulars The Nazz approached the band after the show. ‘The Floyd had run out of money in Los Angeles and ended up staying with us for a couple of nights,’ claims Alice Cooper. ‘We had a place on Beethoven Street in Venice. I remember getting up one morning and there was Syd staring at a box of cornflakes the way you or I would watch television. It was obvious that there was already something very, very wrong.’

‘I don’t think we’d run out of money,’ corrects Andrew King. ‘But we were feeling very lonely and dispirited. The Nazz invited us round to theirs to smoke some pot. They were incredibly kind to us when we most needed it. Though we did watch them play that club and they cleared the place.’

Offstage, Syd was also a liability: uncommunicative with reps from the band’s American record company and appearing monosyllabic during an interview with Dick Clark on the popular US TV show American Bandstand. Tellingly, during a mimed performance of the Floyd’s new song ‘Apples and Oranges’, Syd seems barely bothered to mouth the words beneath his bird’s nest hair-do, the camera frequently cutting to a rather aggrieved-looking Roger Waters and an unflappable Nick Mason. It was, at least, an improvement on the day before on The Pat Boone Show, when Syd spent most of the time cutting his interviewer dead with a silent stare and a single-word answer to the question, ‘What do you like?’ Barrett: ‘America.’

No one is entirely sure whether Syd took LSD while in the US (most think not), but there were other narcotic distractions.

‘When we went to the States, the dope consumption went up,’ says Peter Wynne-Willson. ‘In California it was all grass, very strong and different, as it was always smoked without tobacco. So smoking straight grass in the States may have been that extra notch on the ratchet … Two young women took Syd and I off to some hillside … mountain … I couldn’t call it a retreat, because it was phenomenal, a beautiful house. They plied us with prodigious amounts of dope, which wasn’t so critical for me, as I only had to operate lighting equipment, but for Syd … to my memory that was the first time I saw Syd standing on the stage unable to play the guitar.’

Despite their singer’s unpredictability, there had been some pleasant distractions on the tour for the others, with Waters and Mason initiated into the delights of Southern Comfort, courtesy of Janis Joplin, and several members of the travelling party enjoying the ministrations of obliging female fans, while kicking back at a groupie-friendly motel on Santa Monica Boulevard. One eyewitness claims that some individuals were obliged to book themselves appointments at the Middlesex Hospital’s venereal disease clinic on returning to the UK.

Nevertheless, with their singer in freefall, Andrew King pulled the plug on the remaining East Coast gigs, and the dejected party flew back to Europe.

‘There were a lot of criss-crossing emotions and feelings running about the place,’ remembers King. ‘We all had a number of conversations with Syd.’ These included Waters demanding that Barrett be fired on the spot. Stopping off to play a festival in The Netherlands before continuing to the UK, the band tried to communicate with Syd backstage via handwritten notes. King found himself considering the possibility that ‘we were all mad and Syd was the sane one.’

‘I never really got a coherent story of what happened in America,’ claims Peter Jenner. ‘But I remember Andrew was shell-shocked when he got back … The trouble is I probably would have considered some of Syd’s behaviour fine. It was avant-garde, and I thought avant-garde was cool.’

For some in the camp, the split was partly attributable to a division between those who smoked dope and those who didn’t. Waters, with his drive and tenacity, was seen as ‘not being cool’. ‘A ridiculous thing when you think about it now,’ says one of their associates, ‘but in the hippie mindset of the time, we all thought that was the case.’

There was another, less tangible, division between Syd and his bandmates, according to Libby Gausden. In October, just back from the US tour, Syd visited Libby at her new job, working as a translator at the university. She was also just about to get married. ‘Syd told me that everyone else in the band was being very sensible and wanting to buy flats with the money they’d made on the tour, but that he had spent every single penny he’d earned on a bright pink car which he was now having shipped over. He was doubled up with laughter at this and the thought of the others all putting their money towards flats and houses. He thought pop music was for fun and that he should spend everything.’

Libby’s boss also walked into the office and saw Barrett. Unaware of who he was, but knowing that Libby was about to get married, her boss took her aside afterwards to offer some sage advice: ‘He said, “Ooh, don’t get tempted by that one. He’s very peculiar”.’

For Jenner, the ‘Syd problem’, as Waters was now calling it, escalated on the band’s next run of dates. With barely twenty-four hours’ respite after returning from the US, Pink Floyd were due to play the Royal Albert Hall, on the opening date of a tour supporting Jimi Hendrix. The rest of the bill included pop’s latest movers and shakers: Amen Corner, The Move and The Nice. Each band was allotted an exact number of minutes for their set, with many venues requiring a matinée and evening performance. While Hendrix usually travelled alone, the support groups journeyed by coach, picked up from outside the London Planetarium in Baker Street. ‘All these groups on one coach; it was rather like the Cliff Richard film Summer Holiday,’ says Nick Mason, drolly, but Andy Fairweather-Low, then the teenage singer with Amen Corner, recalled the Floyd ‘as unsociable buggers, who never spoke to anybody’. Fairweather-Low would go on to become a guitarist in Roger Waters’ solo band, though at some point on that Hendrix tour there was an altercation between his manager and Waters. For Nick Mason, the Hendrix shows offered both good and bad experiences. ‘We’d led a very solitary existence as a band before that tour,’ he recalls. ‘Mainly because we were playing our own strange music. So, on one level, it was wonderful to hang out with Hendrix and other musicians. But by the end of it, we were frazzled – and that was because of Syd.’

Even with their abbreviated time slot, Barrett behaved as if he’d rather be anywhere else. ‘He used to go off on these long walks and then arrive two minutes before he was due to go on stage,’ says The Nice’s singer and guitarist Davy O’List. ‘I’d seen this happen so I was aware that there was tension. Musically, I thought they were fabulous, and I used to watch them from the audience trying to work out what they were doing.’ O’List’s attention to detail would pay off. ‘One day, possibly in Liverpool, Syd didn’t turn up, so the band asked me if I’d stand in,’ he recalls. ‘I told them I knew “Interstellar Overdrive”, so they produced Syd’s hat and told me to put it on. I decided to play with my back to the crowd. The audience was full of fourteen-year-old girls who all started screaming, thinking I was Syd, so I decided not to turn around. Roger was smiling, thinking they’d got away with it. Which was the point at which I got a bit brave and turned around – and all the screaming stopped. As soon as Syd found out, he came back. I did notice that he wouldn’t even look at me when we were on the coach after that.’ Barrett’s performances remained unpredictable, although O’List never stood in again. ‘In the past I’ve exaggerated and told people I played more shows,’ he admits now. ‘But that’s only because I wished it had been true.’

In November, the tour pitched up at Cardiff ‘s Sophia Gardens. Nick Kent, the future NME writer, then a fifteen-year-old fan, was in the audience. ‘It was the moment psychedelia arrived in the suburbs,’ he recalls. ‘Previously, all this stuff was only happening in London. The Nice had ten minutes, Amen Corner, fifteen … So everyone was pulling out their most flamboyant stuff, going in for the kill. Except the Floyd. They came on and played, I think, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”. But I think they’d turned Syd’s amp down, because you could hear this cacophony in the background while the other three tried to hold the thing together. It looked like he was unravelling.’

Backstage, visitors encountered Barrett sitting in the corner of the dressing room in what appeared to be an acid torpor, tentatively playing with a toy steam engine he had acquired, and looking terrified whenever anyone struck up a conversation.

Considering Barrett’s condition, a stint of prodigious LSD use was perhaps not the best idea. During a rare few days off, a contingent of Cambridge and London hedonists set off in a rented Ford Zephyr for Blackhill Farm, Andrew King’s family cottage in the Brecon Beacons, notable for a large penis sculpture in the garden, rendered by Eric Clapton’s sometime pianist Ben Palmer.

The party included the Lesmoir-Gordons, Syd, Lindsay, Cromwell Road hipster Stash de Rola and a Cambridge fashion model known as Gai Caron, who would later marry Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell. Now the events of the trip have an absurd, cartoonish quality, but there’s a bleaker undercurrent. The noise and odd behaviour attracted a warning visit from the police, Nigel and Jenny became lost in a snowstorm while tripping, and Stash, whose favoured garb included a Victorian night gown and a velvet cape, attempted to sit in the cottage’s open fire, believing, according to Jenny, ‘that if we really believed in the love, he wouldn’t burn’.

The ridiculous antics took on a stranger hue where Syd was concerned. ‘The first night tripping, he spent most of it perched on a wine bottle,’ recalls Nigel. ‘He had his two feet on it and his hands on a beam overhead and he somehow managed to keep his balance. Later that week, when tripping again, he did a shit on the doorstep, which we thought most peculiar. Even on acid that wasn’t a terribly sane thing to do.’

Viewing his flatmates and neighbours as part of the problem, the Blackhill team had extricated Syd from Cromwell Road before the summer was over. Barrett and Lindsay had moved temporarily into Andrew King’s family-owned flat on Richmond Hill with Rick and Juliette. Disturbing rumours circulated of Syd’s pet cat being left at Cromwell Road where it was supposedly fed LSD and died. A second-floor property overlooking the River Thames, the Richmond Hill pad was supposed to provide a saner atmosphere. The pressing issue now, though, was to follow that up with another hit single, even if Syd didn’t share the rest of the band’s or their management’s sense of commitment.

‘Syd was beginning to feel deeply disappointed by what was happening with the Floyd,’ says Anthony Stern. ‘Around this time, he used to visit me in a flat I had in Norfolk Mansions in Battersea, and treat it as a sort of refuge. The thing about growing up in Cambridge was you never ever wanted to do what had been done before. Syd was innately revolutionary and creative, and he just didn’t get the idea of commerciality.’

Instead of writing another hit single, Barrett would spend hours with Stern plotting out their ideas for a film, to which they gave the working title of ‘The Rose-Tinted Monocle’. The pair had come across a book by the American author and inventor Buckminster Fuller, and had been especially taken with one passage referring to ‘inherently regenerative constellar energy association events’. ‘This was conceived as the basis for the film,’ explains Stern. ‘The energy association events would be episodes in a film. Syd and I wanted to make a film that had no linear structure but consisted of all these fragments which when viewed holistically would give you a sense of oneness – almost like something you might watch to aid you with meditation.’

While Barrett would never see the film through to completion, Stern would work with many of the ideas first devised for ‘The Rose-Tinted Monocle’, and create a movie of his own, which would later be offered to Pink Floyd. In the meantime, away from his fledgling film project, Syd was still being encouraged by others to think more like a pop star.

Syd’s next creation, ‘Apples and Oranges’, had been released as a single to coincide with the US tour and hopefully nudge Floyd back into the UK charts for Christmas. Where previously Syd had sung of transvestite underwear thieves and mysterious ‘hung-up chicks’, this was, apparently, inspired by a more mundane occurrence: a girl he’d seen shopping in Richmond that, according to some, may have been Lindsay Corner. Jaunty psychedelia-by-numbers, but with none of the hypnotic charm of ‘Arnold Layne’ or ‘See Emily Play’, it barely made a dent on the charts. Syd may have been perceived as Floyd’s resident songwriting genius, but it was Richard Wright’s B-side, ‘Paintbox’, that now seems the better song.

‘After “See Emily Play” there was that traditional music biz pressure of, “Where’s the next hit?”’ says Andrew King. ‘Syd was the most likely person to come up with a hit single, so it was him we were pushing. I didn’t think “Apples and Oranges” was that bad, but I suspect at the time we were thinking: Oh dear … but if that’s the best they can come up with …’ Producer Norman Smith admits: ‘I chose it. But it was the best of a bad lot.’

Quizzed about the song’s lack of success, though, Barrett was unusually forthright. ‘Couldn’t care less,’ he shrugged. ‘All we can do is make records we like. The kids dig The Beatles and Mick Jagger not because of their music but because they always do what they want to do and to hell with everyone else.’

‘We put Syd under a lot of pressure,’ concedes Peter Jenner. ‘But then we were also under financial pressure and that made everything worse.’ Blackhill had moved out of the Edbrooke Street flat to a proper office in Alexander Street, Westbourne Grove, with some of the money from Floyd’s EMI deal. Yet the company was now inadvertently paying the band and crew on a first come, first served basis. Cheques were regularly bouncing, prompting employees to collect theirs earlier in the week to cash them first.

‘We hired an accountant, who started asking all these questions,’ says Jenner. ‘Like, “Can I see your books?” And we were like, “Books?” “Have you paid your National Insurance?”, and we were going, “National Insurance?” The live market was also drying up for the Floyd. We weren’t such an easy sell any more. We hadn’t had another hit, so we couldn’t play the pop clubs, [and] the blues clubs wouldn’t have us any more. Which just left the college gigs and there weren’t that many and we’d played them all.’

A disillusioned Peter Wynne-Willson quit his role as the band’s lighting tech at the end of the Hendrix tour. Tellingly, in the light of Blackhill’s financial insecurity, his successor John Marsh was willing to work for a lower wage. Instinctively, Wynne-Willson also allied himself with Syd, whose position in the band was growing shakier by the day. As 1967 wound to a close, the naivety and blind optimism of just twelve months earlier seemed to be dissolving.

‘By the end of 1967 the zeitgeist had changed,’ ventures Wynne-Willson. ‘And it wasn’t the cosy, hippie thing any more.’

Accompanying the so-called Summer of Love, the News of the World had run a weekend expose on UFO, dubbing it ‘a hippie vice den’. The police, who had turned a blind eye, informed Mr Gannon that if he opened the following Friday, his premises would be raided and his licence revoked. Joe Boyd moved UFO to the Roundhouse, but run-ins with local skinheads and the inflated rent took their toll. UFO effectively ended in October 1967. Meanwhile, its former house band and their star singer were in real danger of falling apart.

On 22 December, Floyd appeared on the bill alongside The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who and The Move at the ‘Christmas on Earth Continued’ show at Kensington Olympia. Inside the cavernous venue, 30ft lighting towers, fairground-style attractions and boutiques flanked the bands. But Syd was in no condition to perform. Bundled on stage by Jenner, King and June Child, he simply stood there, his arms hanging loosely by his side, his guitar draped around his neck but supposedly unplugged. As Nick Mason would later write, ‘We had tried to ignore the problems, and will them to go away, but it was time to come out of denial. We were reaching breaking point.’

‘It all happened so quickly,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘In just a few months Syd had gone from being a carefree student, living on his grant, having a smoke now and again, to having all these people wanting to be his best friend and relying on him to play the gig, do the interview, write the hit single, bring in the money … tell them the meaning of life.’

Asked for his thoughts by one pop magazine interviewer, Syd was already working up a new strategy. ‘All I know is I’m beginning to think less now,’ he said. ‘It’s getting better.’