The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
– G.K. Chesterton, 1908
I’d rather stay here with all the madmen,
Than perish with the sad men roaming free . . .
’Cause I’m quite content they’re all as sane as me.
– David Bowie, 1970
The performance that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that reaches into the realms of insanity.
– Mick Jagger as ‘Turner’, Performance, 1970
By the summer of 1969, London had no shortage of casualties returned from the unknown regions with their minds destroyed. Vince Taylor, whose attempted 1967 ‘comeback’ had proven not so much messianic as plain messy, was back in London. According to the latterday Bowie, he was here befriended by the boy from Brixton, a case of the has-been meets the wannabe:
David Bowie: [He had] these strange plans showing where there was money buried, that he was going to get together; he was going to create this new Atlantis at one time. And he dragged out this map of the world, just outside Tottenham Court Road tube station . . . and he laid it on the pavement . . . [] . . . in rush hour traffic, and us kneeling and looking, and he was showing me where all the space ships were going to land . . . [with] all these commuters going backwards and forwards over our map! [1990/2000]
Although I’m not fully convinced Bowie ever enjoyed such an experience with his very own ‘leper messiah’, in 1969–70 he hardly needed to look hard to find a role model for a megalomaniacal rock star whose mind had turned to mush with all that adulation and imbibing of ill-advised substances. In the post-Altamont soundscape, figures who had previously been basking in the iridescent light of a warm sun were melting visibly as their own starlight turned up the heat inside their heads. Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green and former Floyd frontman Syd Barrett were two actual models for Ziggy who were about to find that fame was a dish that quickly grew cold. And another well-respected, contemporary English rock artist, surely known to Bowie, spent almost as much time behind four enclosed walls at this time as Bowie’s half-brother, Terry.
As one loco Vince was fast disappearing into the hinterland, culturally and psychologically, another Vince was returning from a spell in the local asylum with a half-share of all the royalties accrued from the classic 1968 number-one single ‘Fire’. Classically trained organist Vincent Crane – prophetically named after Van Gogh by his arty parents – had just returned from a four-month spell in the Banstead mental institution, after a cataclysmic breakdown on the first Crazy World of Arthur Brown US tour; only to find himself heading back to the States for another make-or-break tour in the winter of 1969 on the back of the band’s chart-bound debut album.
The Crazy World was literally teeming with borderline basket cases – Brown had himself taken the psychedelic tag of the band a tad literally while the band’s original drummer, Drachen Theaker, found a unique way of handing in his resignation: walking out to sea with a guitar above his head. And while the band was in the States for a second time, replacement drummer Carl Palmer discovered: ‘Arthur had gone off with his wife to live in some commune in New Jersey. We did manage to locate him but he just wouldn’t pick up the phone . . . Arthur at that stage had really lost the plot.’ Stuck in a New York hotel on salary, Palmer and Crane began cooking up ideas for a band of their own, a powerhouse trio that would comprise just organ, bass and drums (an idea Palmer would take to Emerson Lake & Palmer). The name of the band came courtesy of a lady to whom Palmer had brought Crane, hoping to get him off LSD:
Carl Palmer: One evening in New York we went out together, with Vincent’s girlfriend at the time, to this girl’s apartment. Now, Vincent’s problems . . . stemmed from him taking too much acid and the reason we took him down to this apartment was to see this girl . . . She was going to explain how bad it was and that he should stop taking it, basically. The person she chose to talk about was the bass player in this group called Rhinoceros [who had] taken a lot of chemical substances and started calling himself ‘the atomic rooster’ . . . When we got back to England I said to Vincent, ‘Why don’t we call our band the Atomic Rooster?’
Not that Palmer ever thought Crane’s problems ended with acid. Even he realized that, ‘It wasn’t entirely to do with drugs with Vincent – he was mentally ill.’ Before they could pursue their common musical goals, Crane again returned to Banstead for a short stay, while Palmer lined up a manager (the mighty Robert Stigwood) and a record deal (with the not so mighty B&C Records). By 29 August 1968 the new power-trio and a recuperated Crane were ready to take over the recently disbanded Cream’s mantle, headlining a triple Lyceum bill on the back of the Arthur Brown association, above the Mk. 2 version of Deep Purple, themselves just nine gigs old and destined for greater things. (Purple’s latest composition, ‘Child in Time’, a breakthrough in every sense, could almost have been penned with Crane in mind: ‘Sweet child in time, you’ll see the line / The line that’s drawn between good and bad . . .’)
Atomic Rooster’s set that night and in the months preceding the February 1970 release of their meticulously assembled first LP largely comprised Crane’s meditations on his still-intermittent madness, penned while the experience of another confinement remained freshly raw. Of the seven originals that constituted that doom-laden debut, the overbearingly powerful ‘Banstead’, a coruscating plea to ‘take me out of this place / I’ll swear you’ll never see me here again / . . . though I know this life is driving me insane’, was the least ambiguous. Not that there was a lot of shade elsewhere. Just darker shades of black. ‘Friday the 13th’, the album-opener and single, was a voyeuristic voyage into the interior of a split personality (‘Someone please, please save me / No one will save you, they won’t try / Someone please, please help me / Everyone’s lonely when they die’). Then there was ‘Winter’, which made Nick Drake’s musings on the passing of the seasons seem positively bucolic:
The album had another, attendant theme – the unreality of fame. In the orchestrated hard-rock number, ‘Decline and Fall’, Crane describes seeing ‘the crowd as they pack the hall’, then the same crowd ‘as they turn away’, all the while wondering aloud, ‘Who will catch me as I fall?’ Elsewhere he chides one particular face in the crowd who craves some sexual connection with the rock God. The sarcastic ‘And So to Bed’ – one of a number of ‘groupie’ songs penned at this time by English rock bands (following The Rolling Stones’ expansive lead) – seeks to make her change her view, if not her ways: ‘You think that up here I’m so special / But put in a crowd I would be just like you / You think to be with me would make a change in you . . .’
But this was just a tangent to the overarching theme underlying Crane’s compositions now and forever: the loneliness of the long-suffering head case. Even in the period August 1969 through May 1970, as an audience rapidly grew for this unique trio, Crane felt that the band really needed a different point of view. The recruitment of guitarist John McCann gave Rooster a much-needed second songwriter. But despite the chart success brought by McCann’s more pop-oriented songs (‘Tomorrow Night’ and ‘Devil’s Answer’), Crane sensed a dilution of purpose and changed his mind again, unable to stomach a subsidiary role in his own band.
In the summer of 1971, after Rooster’s second album, Death Walks Behind You (with its memorable cover, replicating William Blake’s stark image of the mad king Nebuchadnezzar), had consolidated their initial success, Crane disbanded the second incarnation of Atomic Rooster; and though there would be three more Rooster albums in name, he would never again recapture the unity of purpose that the original band enjoyed in the brief time when he and Carl Palmer – ELP bound by May 1970 – adhered to their original brief: heavy soul music used as a form of exorcism for all-too-real inner demons.
If a combination of the bright lights of fame and LSD’s flashing lights triggered something deeply disturbing inside Crane, another impressionable musical virtuoso was finding it equally hard to reconcile his public persona with his inner self. Peter Green, the baby-faced blues guitarist who had taken the Bluesbreakers template into the mainstream with Fleetwood Mac, was struggling to keep his own deep-rooted demons at bay. Mac had been formed in the summer of 1967 as a straight blues cover-band. At the time, Green actually poured scorn on Cream’s Eric Clapton, the man he replaced in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, because ‘he’s lost the feeling. He could get it back but he’s so easily influenced. He sees Hendrix and thinks, “I can do that.” . . . But I’ll always play the blues.’
Despite professing these purist intentions, though, Fleetwood Mac soon morphed into a vehicle for Green’s own musical meditations, a chord change first signalled in a June 1968 Melody Maker interview where Green announced, ‘In the past I’ve sung other people’s songs. But now I sing all my own songs on stage and the next album will be all our own songs.’ Four months earlier, he had recorded the song that shifted the band’s sensibility in this new direction, propelling them towards a Clapton-like superstardom for which Green himself was psychologically ill-prepared. The tom-tom voodoo of ‘Black Magic Woman’ was initially only a minor UK hit, but it showed that a talent as great as Green’s was never going to be content to let his band remain the Elmore James ‘cover’ combo that second guitarist Jeremy Spencer wanted them to be. Instead, the addition of Danny Kirwan in August 1968 gave Mac a three-guitar sound and a more playful foil for Green, sidelining Spencer and his James obsession.
Like so many others in these interesting times, Green’s burgeoning creativity as a songwriter was the direct result of a great deal of soul-searching and copious drug-taking. The results to begin with were a steady stream of wrenchingly powerful blues songs fully the equal of anything to come out of sweet home Chicago – although his was the blues of the wondering Jew, not the put-upon black man. During the first of his regular columns for Beat Instrumental, inserted in its September 1968 issue, he bared some of these personal concerns, singling out the song ‘Trying So Hard to Forget’, first recorded at a February session with Duster Bennett, as ‘probably the most meaningful of my own blues . . . [it] sums up my past life and present feelings in one very blue song’. He was already writing in terms that suggested the painful past was something that remained ever-present:
People, I’ve tried so hard to forget,
But I can’t stop my mind wandering,
Back to the days I was just a downtrodden kid . . .
This was clearly not someone who should have received any psychedelic substance, let alone LSD, but introduced he was by the dean of dosers himself, Augustus Owsley Stanley III. It was Owsley, a year on from dosing several thousand ‘free’ sandwiches at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, who spiked the soft drinks of the whole band backstage at San Francisco’s Fillmore West in January 1969. In fact, any immediate effect was more pronounced on Jeremy Spencer than it was on Green. As L.A. scenester Judy Wong has said of her then-house-guest: ‘Jeremy was literally two people. I didn’t expect some lunatic Englishman [who would] open my windows at four in the morning [to] shout obscenities . . . [at] the neighbours.’ (Owsley finally got his comeuppance when he spiked the water-fountain at a later Mac gig in New Orleans and a concert-goer returned home announcing he was Jesus. His parents called the cops, who went looking for Owsley but found his house band, the Grateful Dead, instead.)
According to Green, for whom the star-trip had already palled anyway, Owlsey’s rarefied acid initially had a cleansing effect: ‘Once I took LSD, that got rid of all that vanity.’ The cleansed Green was inspired to write a barrage of songs about loneliness and despair. Just as ‘Albatross’ was hitting the number one spot in the UK, Green and Mac were in a studio in New York cutting his most plaintive work to date, ‘Man of the World’, a song of unbearable sadness, which contrasted that public persona with the tortured soul inside (‘I guess I’ve got everything I need . . . but I just wish that I’d never been born’).
Green soon began to worry whether he had laid too much of himself on the line. By April 1969, he was insisting, ‘On the record it was a story of me . . . [but] it’s not true of me now.’ Meanwhile, ‘Man of the World’, rush-released by Fleetwood Mac to capitalize on ‘Albatross’ (and subsequently re-recorded by their manager Clifford Davis12), was storming the charts, peaking at number two. Two more companions pieces in both sentiment and chronology, ‘Before the Beginning’ and ‘Do You Give a Damn for Me’, were also recorded for the first time in January 1969. They showed any claim on Green’s part that he had passed beyond such feelings to be a scented smokescreen. The former, in particular, suggested someone determined to get back to some place that was there before the pain: ‘And how many times must I be the fool / Before I can make it, make it on home?’
Despite the band originally being conceived as an electric blues outfit, pure and uncut, Green was becoming increasingly ambitious with his musical ideas. ‘Albatross’ had been the first time he had used the spatial potential of stereo (Mick Fleetwood’s tom-toms being panned left and right), overdubbed guitar and cymbals accentuating the positives his original idea contained. It was also the first Mac single made without Spencer on hand. Even as he continued democratically dividing up the songs on each Fleetwood Mac album, allowing Spencer and Kirwan to flex their more limited musical muscle, every time a new single was needed it was Green who decided what it would be. And with good cause. In the space of two years, each of five Green-composed A-sides – ‘Black Magic Woman’, ‘Albatross’, ‘Man of the World’, ‘Oh Well’ and ‘Green Manalishi’ – not only represented a clear advance on its predecessor but, after the minor hiccup that was ‘Black Magic Woman’, all would go Top Ten in the UK.
The follow-up to ‘Man of the World’ was Green’s most ambitious musical excursion to date. ‘Oh Well’, according to Green, was an attempt to ‘represent my two extremes – as wild as I can be and [also] my first sort of semi-classical attempt’. It was too ambitious to be contained by a single side of seven-inch vinyl, and was spread across both sides of the disc, the B-side being a five-minute-forty departure from the basic musical idea that saw Green play acoustic and electric guitars, timpani and cello, while Spencer – the only other band-member on hand – tiptoed around on the piano.
More worryingly, the terse lyrics appeared to include a partial transcription of Green’s first conversation with God: ‘Now, when I talked to God I knew he’d understand / He said, “Stick by my side and I’ll be your guiding hand.”’ And this was no metaphysical discourse, à la ‘Highway 61 Revisited’; Green really had started to believe he had a direct line to the Man Upstairs, a source of real concern to his then-girlfriend, Sandra:
‘That summer Peter was really excited by all the possibilities that were presenting themselves. This correlated with . . . [us] both for quite some time [being] very spiritually connected and searching . . . [It was] then I made the robes – one white and one red velvet. For Peter, they were nothing to do with any Christian faith. I think psychologically it was definitely a move into psychosis, or perhaps a precursor to it – he was getting stuck into identification with God! Because of all the adoration people were giving him, he was finding it very hard to differentiate between that exalted state and mere mortality – albeit with a God-given talent.’
The rest of the band were now just as nonplussed by Green’s state of mind as by their new musical direction. Mick Fleetwood and John McVie had both bet Green that ‘Oh Well’ would not chart – a bet they roundly lost; and with that loss, they perhaps lost their old friend for good. Their openly agnostic attitude to his new interest in Jesus certainly did not sit well with him. The song ‘Closing My Eyes’, on Green’s last album with Mac, Then Play On, was one lyrical diatribe he admitted the following year had been ‘written around the time I had such a great faith in Jesus that I felt I was walking and talking with God. I wanted to tell people about it, but they turned it round and tried to shatter my dreams. This was written after they had broken my faith.’ The ‘they’ go unnamed, but it is clear that as far as Green was concerned, the Us that was once Fleetwood Mac was fast becoming Them.
At least the critical and commercial reception accorded ‘Oh Well’ convinced the remainder of Mac that Green still knew where they should be heading musically; and they gamely went along with him, even as the songs became elongated explorations of space, time and rhyme. ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ – provisionally ear-marked as the follow-up to ‘Oh Well’ until somebody realized what would happen if the Beeb ever found out the song was about jerking off – became in concert a prelude to twenty-five-minute jams that tended to wander the gamut of Green’s imagination in search of the lost chord.
Sometimes, as in one magnificent version captured at Boston’s Tea Party the first week of February 1970, he found it. By then, though, he had already succumbed to the belief that he was being held back by the band, and that once he was free of them – just as his mind had been ‘freed’ by LSD – he would be at one with God. A series of sessions in the fall of 1969 with Clifford Davis, ex-Mac member Bob Brunning’s new band, and Peter Bardens, demonstrated how much he felt constrained by a band he had cast in his own image.
This conviction took full possession of Green during another US tour in January 1970 that included a three-day residency at the Fillmore West and a two-day stint in New Orleans with Grateful Dead; and another shattering experience, courtesy of Owsley’s acidic assistance (during the Louisiana jaunt, Green told Patti Boyd’s sister Jenny, ‘Stay away from me. I don’t want to get caught in your world’). Playing with real fire, he was about to get burned. Yet in the lysergic present the outcome was the gloriously grandiloquent ‘Green Manalishi’, a song beyond anything dreamed of in Elmore James’ philosophy. If the long-term result was a mind prone to shutting down, in the here and now this outlandish epic became the centrepiece of some of the most experimental rock sets since Barrett took Floyd into overdrive. Green later sought to explain how his true masterpiece came about; the result of what he says was a dream, but was in all probability an acid trip:
Peter Green: This little dog jumped up and barked at me while I was lying in bed dreaming. It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time. It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body which I eventually did . . . [] . . . I woke up and looked around. It was very dark and I found myself writing a song . . . The reason this happened was this fear I got that I earned too much money and I was separate from all the people . . . [The song] wasn’t about LSD, it was [about] money, which can also send you somewhere that’s not good. [In this] dream I saw a picture of a female shop assistant and a wad of pound notes, and there was this other message saying, ‘You’re not what you used to be. You think you’re better than them.’ I had too much money . . . The Green Manalishi is the wad of notes. The devil is green, and he was after me. [1994/1996]
By now, the dog wasn’t the only thing barking: Green was giving some of the wackiest interviews to ever appear in the UK music press. One dating from the previous December contains a description by himself of ‘someone who does try to do the will of God in an earthly way . . . I want to do something and it’s difficult to know what. I don’t want to just waste my life . . . Sometimes I think music is everything, other times I don’t think it’s anything . . . I want to put something in my head because there’s nothing there.’ This now oft-voiced concern soon led to the infamous front-page headline in the 28 February 1970 NME, ‘Why Peter Green Wants to Give His Money Away’. It seems he felt increasingly ‘guilty about squandering my money on myself’. If bemused band-members were wondering where this was all heading, Green had confided his state of mind to Mick Fleetwood during that ill-fated US tour: ‘I want to find out about God. I want to believe that a person’s role in life is to do good for other people, and [that] what we’re doing now just isn’t shit.’
Two months after he bared his soul to his closest confidant in the band, Green found himself at an all-night party in Munich. He had decided to disregard the concerns of the rest of the band and escape to a hippy commune in the company of roadie Dennis Keane, where he could be free to do drugs and make music, in that order. For an unprepared Keane, imbibing the wine laced with LSD resulted in ‘all hell [breaking] loose in my head’. If Keane somehow made his way back to the band, Green stayed on through the whole dark night of his soul. This would be the trip that finally tripped Green’s mind. Two decades on, with Green finally returned to a halting lucidity after many painful years in and out of mental wards, he offered a surprisingly metaphorical explanation of the events that evening: ‘I just sat around and thought about everything. I was thinking so fast! I couldn’t believe how fast I was thinking! And I kinda run out of thoughts.’
Shortly before Keane stumbled away from the weird scene at the Munich all0nighter, he had ventured into the basement, where he found Green jamming with his equally high German hosts. To Keane’s ears: ‘The sound they were making was awful, this kind of freaky electronic droning noise. It wasn’t music as I knew it.’ Jeremy Spencer, who had made his own way to the party and briefly sat in on the jam session, was equally critical of the results: ‘It was pretty weird. I didn’t like what [Peter] was playing. He was just jamming.’
Green, though, was convinced that he had found what he had been looking for, even telling Beat Instrumental in May: ‘[When] I played on the commune [in Munich] . . . it was then that I found out how much I’ve changed, through playing personally for them. When the pressure is off, it all comes out naturally.’ He even took a tape of the session with him when he finally emerged from the twenty-four-hour party, and on occasions played ‘this LSD tape’ (as he called it) for friends. One of them, percussionist Nigel Watson, ‘found the playing weird, even scary at times, but it was still there, free-form in one sense but spot-on in another. He was obviously really pleased with it.’ Even after Green mislaid the tape in Los Angeles at the end of his lost decade, he recalled the experience with surprising fondness: ‘When we jammed, I couldn’t believe what I was coming out with. I was playing things that I didn’t know I could play and the notes seemed to be going all round the room.’
He now tried to take this sense of freedom into the studio when, after a six-month hiatus from recording, he returned there in April to cut ‘Green Manalishi’. Although it would be his last recording with Fleetwood Mac before he quit – the band had already been apprised of his decision – there was precious little required of the others. As John McVie recalls: ‘“Manalishi” . . . was very much Peter sitting at home with his Revox . . . He came in with a demo and said, “Here’s the parts”.’
Green himself was delighted with the outcome: ‘Making “Green Manalishi” was one of the best memories [from that time]. The mixing down of it in the studio . . . I thought it would make number one. Lots of drums. Bass guitars. All kinds of things . . . Danny Kirwan and me playing those shrieking guitars together.’ In fact, the single stalled at number ten; probably because the whole thing was just too widescreen to be contained on the seven-inch format. Certainly compared with the stunning fifteen-minute version Mac recorded for the BBC in the last few weeks of Green’s tenure in the band (available on Receiver’s second archival trawl, Showbiz Blues), the single barely qualified as a prototype.
In the months after his departure from Mac, Green cut two singles and an experimental album of instrumental (End of The Game), hoping to get back to that Munich vibe – ‘trying to reach things that I couldn’t before, but I had experienced through LSD and mescaline’ – only to find when he came to edit the tracks that ‘there wasn’t enough to make up a record; it was only freeform’. The first of two solo singles – ‘Heavy Heart’ b/w ‘No Way Out’ – continued in a similar vein. The second single, ‘Beast of Burden’ – not issued until the beginning of 1972, when it sank without trace – was more like the Green of old, castigating the world for its ill-treatment of ‘beasts of burden who worked for the right to live’, to a crescendo of congas and wailing guitars.
But Green the guitar-god was done; it was time to go home. Sometime in 1971, back with his parents, the diffident East End boy went down the pub with original Mac bassist Bob Brunning. While there he confessed ‘he’d given away all his guitars, didn’t want to play music and didn’t want to talk about it’. The damage had been done in double-quick time. The repair work would proceed at an altogether more painstaking pace. Meanwhile, for some years his former band continued trying to bring him back into the fold, before chancing on an FM-friendly sound a million miles and ten million sales removed from ‘Green Manalishi’.
*
Green’s journey from ‘Black Magic Woman’ to ‘Green Manalishi’ almost exactly replicates the travails of Syd Barrett, another figure who back in the spring of 1966 was playing Slim Harpo with his own r&b combo, The Pink Floyd Sound, but had by the close of 1970 reached the end of his creative tether. A key difference, though, was that Green’s relationship with the band he formed and fronted for the first three years of its existence was generally a supportive one, even when the others were plagued by doubts as to Green’s creative direction, or Green himself was experiencing acid flashbacks or demonic visions.
Unlike Green, Barrett had conflicting emotions about his former band – its ongoing status had been eating away at him ever since he left them to their own game plan. The experience of working with two of his erstwhile colleagues on The Madcap Laughs had produced decidedly mixed results. And he seemed profoundly unimpressed by what Pink Floyd had achieved on their own, telling one journalist in the stint of promotional interviews arranged around his debut solo offering: ‘When I went I felt the progress the group could have made [without me]. But it made none, none at all, except in the sense it was continuing . . . [So] I didn’t have anything to follow.’
He had a point. The latest in a series of stop-gap Floyd long-players was the double album Ummagumma, released on 1 November, which comprised a series of individually composed song-suites, resulting in four different shades of ‘Saucerful of Secrets’, bumped up by a ‘bonus’ live album of old tracks. The latter had been due to include their concert tour de force ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ before the track was removed at the last minute, perhaps because it was too much of a reminder of the Barrett-era. A tepid ‘Astronomy Domine’ had to suffice instead. From the other side of Dark Side . . . , Barrett’s replacement, Dave Gilmour, duly admitted: ‘At the time we felt . . . Ummagumma was a step towards something or other. Now I think [we] were . . . just blundering about in the dark.’
When Barrett himself heard what they had done to the brand, he was underwhelmed, telling one journo who summoned the nerve to ask: ‘They’ve probably done very well. The singing’s very good, and the drumming is good as well’ – the muso equivalent of the kindly teacher typing a school report on some backward kids left in his charge, looking for positives, but failing to hide the condescension (and the clue is: the studio album contains exactly one vocal track).
And yet, despite everything, when Barrett began work (with surprising haste) on a second solo album, with Madcap barely in the racks, it was to Dave Gilmour he again turned to make it happen – barely a month after he had told one rock critic: ‘There [will be] no set musicians [on the next album], just people helping out . . . which gives me far more freedom in what I want to do.’ Waters, though, would not be required; either because Barrett had had enough of that kingly leer, or because Waters didn’t need no more education.
For now, Barrett seemed full of enthusiasm and ideas, insisting that he was keen to discover whether ‘it’s possible to continue some of the ideas that came from a couple of tracks on the first album’, while dismissing his debut offering as ‘only a beginning – I’ve written a lot more stuff’. And on the evidence of a BBC session and a couple of EMI sessions at the end of February 1970, he really did seem to have developed some ideas first explored on ‘Octopus’ and ‘Dark Globe’, the two most successful tracks on The Madcap Laughs.
On 24 February 1970, Barrett turned up at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios for the first time since his Christmas 1967 farewell to the Floyd. There ostensibly to plug a new LP, he decided instead to again use a Top Gear session as an opportunity to work up new songs. And, just as in 1967, this chronically unreliable artist breezed through the session, recording five tunes in an afternoon, only one of which – ‘Terrapin’ – came from The Madcap Laughs. Of the other four, one was a Richard Wright song he had always liked, but never returned to (‘Two of a Kind’). The remaining three were new Barrett originals, ‘Baby Lemonade’, ‘Effervescing Elephant’ and ‘Gigolo Aunt’, though the last of these for now only consisted of a single verse, which Barrett sang three different ways. As Gilmour later told journo Tim Willis: ‘Syd was great that day. Listen to those perfect double-tracked vocals. [And] he only had three hours for mixing.’ The experience seems to have convinced Gilmour to give producing his friend another try. And this time he would hold the fort the whole night through.
The nice pair thus convened at Abbey Road studios two days later to begin work on a second Syd LP, with drummer Jerry Shirley requisitioned to play whenever the song demanded it, and engineer Peter Bown there to press record (and hold Barrett’s dick, if we are to believe one particular Bown tall-tale13). On day one they worked quickly and efficiently, cutting ‘Baby Lemonade’ in a single take and two vocal takes of another new song, ‘Maisie’, which would be cross-cut on the released take. All very professional.
The following day Barrett began proceedings by demoing to two-track (i.e. stereo) no less than four ‘new’ songs, none of which he’d recorded at the BBC session: ‘Wolfpack’, ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’, ‘Living Alone’ and ‘Dylan Blues’. The last of these actually pre-dates Floyd. Perhaps it was recalled here because Barrett thought it was time he recast himself as a singer-songwriter by doffing his satirical hat to the daddy of them all. He then moved on to ‘Gigolo Aunt’, one of his funniest, finest songs, now with three distinct verses. It was a good start – in fact, the following month Barrett happily boasted to Sounds’ Giovanni Dadomo that he already had ‘four tracks in the can’ (it was actually three). At the same time, Gilmour was telling a Disc reporter he was the only man for the job: ‘No one else can do [a Syd album]. It has to be someone who knows Syd, someone who can get him together.’
It was a fateful comment. As Gilmour knew all too well, only Syd could get himself together, and between the end of February and the start of April he once again lost his way in the woods. The relatively lucid interviewee of January became in just two months someone who, to evoke Andrew King’s depiction of the latterday Barrett, ‘was trying to battle his way through the most enormous barrier to say two coherent words’. When sessions resumed the first three days in April, they proved exponentially less productive, the musical equivalent of pulling teeth.
Barrett’s flatmate, artist Duggie Fields, who went with him to the final session on 3 April, remembers: ‘He was so dysfunctional [he] literally sat there, not knowing what he was doing. Forgot what he was supposed to be singing, was certainly not focused at all.’ It was a shock to Fields, who recalls that ‘he didn’t have those problems when . . . we first got the flat14. They developed. Maybe he had symptoms of them which one didn’t really register, but . . . he wasn’t like that at first – he functioned.’ Meanwhile, though Gilmour continued to be remarkably patient, gently prodding and prompting, ever prepared to play the waiting game, EMI engineer Pete Bown was about as unsympathetic as a collaborator can be:
Peter Bown: I made sure they were closed sessions. Because if anyone had seen Syd, that would have been it. He used to wander around, couldn’t stay still in the studio; his legs were jittery and nervous all the time. I had to follow him around the studio with a microphone in my hand – wearing a pair of carpet slippers so I didn’t make any noise – just to get a take. He was wandering all over the place musically too. His pitch was out and his timing completely shot. They took down everything on tape in those days, so it’s all there somewhere, with David trying to keep him calm and relaxed. It was like a teacher trying to help a forlorn child.
At some point during these April sessions, Gilmour (and Bown) decided they would have to work with what they could get – or abandon the album altogether. Barrett’s performances in the studio had always sat somewhere between erratic and idiosyncratic, but it now seemed he could no longer control his vocal cords. As the Barrett album sessions progressed, the inclusion on Madcap of those three songs from the Gilmour/Waters session began to seem positively prescient. As drummer Jerry Shirley told Kris DiLorenzo: ‘Sometimes he’d sing a melody absolutely fine, and the next time around he’d sing a totally different melody, or just go off key . . . You never knew from one day to the next exactly how it would go.’ In the end, Gilmour realized that this time around he would have to intervene:
Dave Gilmour: We had basically three alternatives at that point . . . One, we could actually work with him in the studio, playing along as he put down the tracks – which was almost impossible . . . The second was laying down some kind of track before and then having him play over it. The third was him putting the basic ideas down with just guitar and vocals and then we’d try and make something out of it all. It was mostly a case of me saying, ‘Well, what have you got there, Syd?’ and he’d search around and eventually work something out. [1974]
By now, Barrett could slip from one mode of synaptic discourse to another with nary a nod. When the authors of the British Journal of Psychiatry article ‘Laing’s Models of Madness’ challenged the validity of Laing’s worldview, they went to some pains to describe how someone sliding into madness would be unable to ‘distinguish two very different kinds of experience, [the] psychedelic and [the] psychotic’: when it came to the former, the person would be ‘seeing more possibilities that can be acted upon, which makes life exciting’, whereas with the latter, s/he would be ‘seeing so many possibilities that action [became] impossible’. This was now Barrett. The April 1970 sessions demonstrated that his capacity to see things through was fast evaporating, replaced by an often overwhelming feeling of inertia. He had passed through the fire too many times, and each time it was becoming harder to wend his way back.
And yet he still had the odd song, or four, lying around. When two sessions in a single day (7 June) were squeezed between Floyd tours of the USA and Germany and work on their own album, Atom Heart Mother, the result was another quartet of demos: ‘Milky Way’, ‘Rats’, ‘Wined and Dined’ and ‘Birdie Hop’. The demos were further evidence that Gilmour was now committed to getting Barrett to put ‘basic ideas down with just guitar and vocals and then we’d try and make something out of it all’. But just as with the February demos, Gilmour did nothing with these particular tracks, ‘Milky Way’ becoming yet another mystifying discard. Only ‘Rats’ and ‘Wined and Dined’ were revived at the pukka album sessions, which finally resumed on 14 July as Gilmour succeeded in squeezing three solid days of work out of Syd (14, 15 and 17 July).
The first July session demonstrated that Barrett, knowingly or unknowingly, had fallen in line with Gilmour’s plan, as he ran down solo takes of ‘Effervescing Elephant’, ‘Dolly Rocker’, ‘Love Song’, ‘Let’s Split’ and ‘Dominoes’. The whole of the following day was then spent overdubbing ‘Dominoes’, the one first-rate new original he had brought to these sessions; contributing his legendary backward guitar solo, achieved by turning the tape over and letting it play in reverse. At the third and last session, he returned to ‘Effervescing Elephant’, a ninety-second-long piece of Lear-like nonsense he’d been carrying around for the last six months, to provide a fitting end to the recording career of a man who had made the nursery rhyme such an integral part of the late-Sixties pop sensibility.
Yet even at the end of this 17 July session, it is doubtful whether anyone in attendance thought they had an album in the can. Certainly EMI engineer Alan Parsons, who presided over tape operations at the February and June sessions, carried no such conviction: ‘If it hadn’t been for dropping in and out and cutting up tapes and doing things it would have just been laughable. There would just have been nothing releasable there at all . . . just a series of “madcap laughs”.’
It now devolved to Dave Gilmour to salvage the album by applying a palette of overdubs to the twelve songs he had picked out as Madcap’s successor. Over nine sessions in just four days he had available before leaving for France with Floyd – 21–24 July – Gilmour bounced from tape to tape, sculpting something that was more than a set of demos, but less than a strong second LP. Barrett turned up for the first couple of sessions, after which, according to Parsons, ‘he was discreetly told, “Thank you very much Syd, we don’t need you.”’
The result was another album that fell short of what Barrett continued to believe he had in him. He confessed to Michael Watts the very week Barrett was released that the songs ‘are very pure, you know; the words . . . [but sometimes] I feel I’m jabbering’. That was pretty much what the music press thought, too, and Barrett now decided to leave them to it. But some months later, in conversation with Beat Instrumental’s Steve Turner, he revealed just how disappointed he had been with the released artefact: ‘[The songs] have got to reach a certain standard, and that’s probably reached in Madcap once or twice . . . On the other one only a little – just an echo of that.’
Nonetheless, whatever Syd thought of the failings inherent in his own effort, it was as nothing to what he thought of the Floyd’s continued attempts to supersede their psychedelic past. Floyd’s first 1970s album, Atom Heart Mother, had been released a fortnight before his, so the subject inevitably came up in conversation with Watts. Barrett again proved unsparing in his assessment of their work to date: ‘Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people . . .’
And he did not confine his investigations on their ‘progress’ to the just-released platter. Syd was still keeping tabs on them, at some point visiting the sessions themselves, probably in early June, when Ron Geesin was wrestling with arranging Atom Heart Mother’s side-long title track (still at that juncture called ‘The Amazing Pudding’). Geesin, on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the strain, says he ‘just thought he [Syd] was a nutter. He didn’t know what was going on.’ But Geoff Mott, who accompanied Barrett to the session in question, insists: ‘There was nothing sad about Syd’s behaviour. I can still see him keeping an eye on proceedings, sitting on his hands with that quizzical smile on his face.’
Actually, try as Syd might to continue dismissing Floyd’s current work as simply their way of ‘working their entry into an art school’, the quartet were finally on the right track, producing music that was not only architectural, but instantly identifiable. Over the next year they would become one of the more interesting live acts in the world, building their set around two side-long songs – ‘Atom Heart Mother’ and ‘Echoes’ – that would start to cement their post-Barrett reputation as one of the more adventurous exponents of English ‘prog-rock’.
At the same time, Barrett’s own influence would diminish in almost exact proportion to his dissipating presence from the public arena. And it wasn’t all down to the failure of his commercial output. In part, he simply lacked that necessary work ethic – inspiration came quick or not at all, and when it slid away, he let it slide (hence the perfunctory technique in much of his ‘art’). It was one thing that set him apart from the others in the Floyd family. The Floyd, month on month, year on year, remorselessly worked on building their reputation as a live act, refusing to be collectively dissuaded even when individually convinced that they were ‘blundering about in the dark’. Barrett preferred to mention in passing how awfully nice it would be to get up and do something, then leaving it at that.
He had hinted as much at the beginning of 1970, in conversation with Journo Chris Welch, suggesting: ‘I’d like to play sometime on the scene. Got to do something. It would be a splendid thing to get a band together.’ It would take him a further six months to arrange anything, but eventually he agreed to play a short set at Extravaganza ’70, a four-day ‘music and fashion festival’ at Kensington’s cavernous Olympia exhibition hall, the first week in June. When he did take the stage, for the first time in thirty months, the set was shorter than the February 1970 John Peel Session, comprising three of those songs, plus the strongest track from Madcap. As for getting a band together, basic backing was provided by Gilmour and Shirley, the only musicians he trusted to bring to the Extravaganza.
Yet that final song at Olympia, a fiery five-minute ‘Octopus’, suggested Syd was still capable of some musical pyrotechnics. Containing more than a whiff of its original ‘Clowns and Jugglers’ self, its skidding guitar runs were a flickering reminder of the U-Fo Barrett. But just as Syd started to feel the glow again, he cut short the performance, and with it his London performing career. Without a performing self prepared to promote the product, and increasingly circular in conversation, he was never going to turn Barrett into a viable commercial release. It was destined to remain ‘just an echo’ of former triumphs. Released the first week in November 1970, the album engendered less of the natural curiosity Syd’s solo debut received, and EMI expressed minimal interest in perpetuating this maddening maverick’s recording career.
*
Across town at Island HQ they were having a similar problem with Bryter Layter, the second album of their own introspective singer-songwriter Nick Drake, also released that first week in November 1970. Like Barrett, Drake had abandoned playing live before he had even completed the follow-up to his solo debut. The only promotional avenue now open was press interviews, and that avenue was all but bricked up for good the day Drake met Island press officer, David Sandison:
David Sandison: The first time I ever met Nick Drake was the week . . . Bryter Layter was released. He arrived an hour late, wasn’t very interested in a cup of coffee or tea or anything to eat. During the next half hour he said maybe two words. Eventually I ran out of voice, paid the bill and walked him back to Witchseason.
If Barrett had never been part of the singer-songwriter scene, and knew little of the circuit of ex-folk clubs and college gigs that provided an ideal arena in which to forge a golden era of English singer-songwriters, for an artist like Drake – who never enjoyed even one 45 in his lifetime, recorded just two early radio sessions (only one of which appears to have survived15), and was chronically self-conscious in person – there was one route and one route alone to recognition. But by June 1970 he had already abandoned performing.
The one journalist who persisted in trying to get a Drake interview, Sounds’ Jerry Gilbert, got almost the same treatment as Sandison at a prearranged meeting in February 1971, when he tried to push the songwriter to explain the lack of live performances. But Drake finally offered up an explanation of sorts: ‘There were only two or three concerts that felt right, and there was something wrong with the others. I did play [Les] Cousins, and one or two folk clubs in the North, but the gigs just sort of petered out.’
In fact, Drake was cocooned from the very start, offered only to audiences who would ‘understand’ where he was coming from and might forgive the more protracted tune-ups between songs. In an era when promoters thought nothing of putting Jimi Hendrix on the same bill as The Monkees, or an acoustic David Bowie with the stodgy boogie of Humble Pie, he was consistently mollycoddled by the Witchseason family.
And if his introduction to the core Witchseason audience was certainly daunting – third on the bill to Fairport Convention at the Royal Festival Hall on 24 September 1969, the night they debuted their English folk-rock masterpiece, Liege & Lief – anyone else would have seen it as an extraordinary break. No slogging around ‘folk clubs in the North’ for this privileged youth. Even the other act on that night’s landmark bill, John and Beverley Martyn, were in perfect tandem with Drake’s musical direction. The pair soon took Drake to their collective bosom; and when in May 1970 they moved to a ‘traditional house’ surrounded by Hampshire countryside, they provided Drake with an escape from the city (directly inspiring his most idiomatic song, ‘Northern Sky’).
The Martyns also had an album to promote; and from a similar commercial base point. Although John Martyn already had two Island albums to his own name (London Conversation and The Tumbler), the duo’s debut, the warmly received Stormbringer, had just appeared in the shops. Only now did the new husband’s perceptible talent in those earlier offerings begin to deliver on Chris Blackwell’s faith. Not surprisingly, Joe Boyd was quick to suggest the pair share a further bill with Drake at the altogether more intimate Queen Elizabeth Hall, another potentially prestigious South Bank affair that would hopefully bring further press attention, along with another sympathetic, patient audience.
The February 1970 showcase, though, only proved that Nick Drake was fast losing what little performing craft he had mustered from months of unbilled performances at Les Cousins. John Martyn, internally fuelled by liberal amounts of alcohol before every performance, was pained to see such a self-conscious performer: ‘When he played live it was just soul-destroying to watch him. It was like watching a man being stripped naked.’ Reports of the show reached an old friend from Marlborough, Simon Coker, who recalled the teenage Drake as ‘a confident performer. And [then] I heard about this particular performance . . . from people . . . who said he mumbled. And I remember saying at the time, “That doesn’t sound like Nick at all.”’ Not the Nick he had known, anyway.
It had never occurred to Joe Boyd – and why would it? – that he wasn’t doing Drake a huge favour by foisting him on the very folk who bought Witchseason’s assorted Island output. And now, following the QEH showcase, he assigned the fledgling songster the support slot on two short but important tours. The first of these announced the fifth Fairport Convention incarnation in two-and-a-half years (Sandy Denny and Ashley Hutchings having quit on Liege & Lief’s completion, to pursue their own individual visions of English folk-rock); the second slot was on a five-date foray for Fotheringay, Denny’s eagerly awaited post-Fairport combo. Drake didn’t even last the five dates. As Boyd relates in his own memoir, ‘When he called me from the road after the third date, his voice had the crushed quality of defeat, “I, uh, I don’t think I can do any more shows, uh, I’m sorry.” He just wanted to come home.’ And that appears to have been that.16
If Boyd was nonplussed by this impasse, Island boss Blackwell adopted the stoical view: ‘It was hard to put pressure on someone who wouldn’t tour when their record only cost five hundred quid.’ Both remained convinced that the terrible beauty of Drake’s songs would eventually register with record buyers, and continued to fund further sessions. Displaying remarkable faith (and foresight), the pair coerced the increasingly withdrawn ex-student into turning up at the studio with whatever songs he was still writing, while Boyd persevered in his search for the perfect sonic backdrop to this songwriter’s uniquely English vision.
The discernible deterioration in Drake’s daily demeanour concerned Boyd, and his Sound Techniques compadre John Wood, less than this indeterminate quest; perhaps because, to them, introspection was now the chosen response of many to the Sixties’ more overt excesses. As Drake’s friend and arranger, Robert Kirby points out: ‘Walking around Cambridge in those days, there were fifty people worse than Nick that you would pass on the pavement every hour.’ And it wasn’t like Boyd and Wood weren’t surrounded by such types. Two equally extraordinary guitarists on the Witchseason roster – John Martyn and Richard Thompson – could be just as withdrawn:
John Martyn: I was actually very shy and retiring and ever so sweet and gentle until I was twenty and then I just got the heave with . . . all that terribly nice, rolling-up-joints-and-sitting-on-toadstools-watching-the-sunlight-dapple-its-way-through-the-dingly-dell-of-life’s-rich-pattern stuff. Back then, everybody expected you to be like that . . . I very consciously turned away from that. [1990]
Thompson, already something of an enigma (where did that darkness in those early songs come from?), inspired a sense of awe in fellow musicians that kept most prying eyes at bay. Linda Peters, who before marrying Thompson got to know Drake as well as any lady friend, believes that ‘there was a point when . . . Richard could [have] go[ne] Nick’s way . . . It was very hard for him to pull himself out of that, but he . . . latched onto people who were outgoing enough to pull him out of it . . . He made a definite effort to do that, and Nick didn’t.’ Anthea Joseph, too, found Thompson and Martyn ‘in their individual ways . . . equally difficult to deal with. But you could talk to them . . . I don’t remember any “ordinary” conversations with Nick . . . not one.’
The naturally taciturn Thompson was in a particularly traumatized state of mind in the early months of 1970. His songs of the period remain the darkest ever penned by someone who once okayed the release of a compilation of archival recordings entitled Doom and Gloom from the Tomb. ‘Crazy Man Michael’ and ‘Farewell, Farewell’, his two original contributions to the Liege & Lief LP, were songs from the brink – as was ‘Never Again’, another song penned at the time that he did not record until 1974. In ‘Crazy Man Michael’, the darkest from a pitch-black lot, the narrator is driven mad when he stabs a talking raven in a rage (as you do), only to discover that he has killed his true love and is now ‘cursed be’, an outcome previously foretold by the garrulous bird. The depiction of mad Michael fully reflected the way Thompson now appeared to some:
Crazy Man Michael, he wanders and walks
And talks to the night and the day-o
But his eyes they are sane and his speech it is clear
And he longs to be far away-o.
In reality, Thompson was channelling some very real grief and guilt; for back in May 1969 he and his girlfriend Jeannie ‘the Taylor’ Franklin had been travelling in the back of the Fairport van on the way home from a gig in Birmingham when the roadie fell asleep at the wheel, and the van crashed into the central reservation. Thompson survived, but Jeannie (and original Fairport drummer Martin Lamble) did not.
Although in a recent interview with Mojo, Thompson claimed he ‘was never in the studio at the same time’ as Joe’s private project, quarter of a century earlier he described his experience at a 1970 Drake session to Zigzag magazine’s Connor McKnight, who wrote the only profile of Drake published in his lifetime: ‘It was at Trident[!] I think, and I asked him what he wanted; but he didn’t say much, so I just did it and he seemed fairly happy. People say that I’m quiet, but Nick’s ridiculous.’ Thompson’s first experience of dubbing guitar to a Drake song live, which resulted in Bryter Layter’s ‘Hazy Jane II’, might actually have provided him with the kind of jolt he needed; and, as wife Linda Thompson suggests, would continue to need.
Hoping to make that ‘breakthrough’ album, which might chase away all of Witchseason’s financial problems, Joe Boyd’s concerns remained primarily musical. But even he had to work away at Drake in order to get a clear indication of what he thought about a particular performance, or performer: ‘I had to cross-examine him to make sure he liked the arrangements. He definitely was a big fan of [Richard] Thompson . . . [but] most people, myself included, were too careful, wary of disturbing his silences.’
In fact, Thompson seems to have recognized Drake as someone who drained people of their bonhomie even when, as in his case, it was in short supply. When Boyd dispatched Nick Drake to Fairport’s rural retreat in Little Hadham, to work on some songs for his second album with the new Fairport rhythm-section, Dave Pegg and Dave Mattacks, he seems to have stayed largely out of their way. The larger-than-life Danny Thompson, whose acoustic bass played such a part in defining Five Leaves Left’s unique feel, was not being invited back for Drake’s second album, perhaps because, as Boyd says, ‘Danny would slap [Drake] on the back, tease him in rhyming slang, make fun of his self-effacement and generally give him a hard time.’ And so it would be left to Dave Pegg to interpret Drake’s non-verbal signs, playing along to the songs he was shown at Little Hadham for ‘three or four days’.
Even Pegg, though, had to admit the poor boy was now ‘so introverted, you could never tell if he liked stuff or not . . . It was just running through arrangements . . . He had all the songs, and [some] fairly positive ideas about how he wanted them done.’ Thrown in at the deep end of Drake’s dark sea, Pegg got on with it. As did Mattacks. Even if Drake never really explicated what he wanted done with the music he made up, he was presumably okay with Fairport’s contribution because Pegg’s plangent bass would burble away on nine of the ten songs on Bryter Layter, while Dave Mattacks gently taps his way through half the album. But there were still strings a-plenty to pull.
In the end, the new sonic smorgasbord again failed to thrill Drake, who mumbled the most veiled of criticisms to his one public interrogator, Jerry Gilbert: ‘We started doing [Bryter Layter] almost a year ago. But I’m not altogether clear about this album – I haven’t got to terms with the whole presentation.’ He made much the same ill-expressed point to David Sandison who, as an Island insider, knew something of the circumstances involved in making the album: ‘At the time . . . I got the impression from Nick that he didn’t like the strings, or the way the album was presented . . . [Yet] Bryter Layter took a year to make because Nick Drake spent that long making damn sure it was precisely the way he wanted it.’
Like Barrett, Drake was the kind of artist who, even when unconvinced by what a musical overseer-cum-producer was doing to his songs, kept his thoughts largely to himself. It left Boyd to interpret the most intangible of clues. Because whatever Drake thought of Joe as a producer, he was still to a large extent in awe of the person himself. (Anthea Joseph again called it right when observing: ‘He was emotionally tied to Joe, it was a mental thing.’) Only when the album was done did he finally ‘confront’ Boyd.
So what was his problem? According to Boyd: ‘He felt that it was too arranged, too produced, too many other personalities.’ This, though, was precisely Boyd’s forte. As arranger Kirby pointed out shortly before his death, the man ‘was more of a facilitator [than a] producer. He would put the deals together and then get various inspired combinations of musicians to make up the terrific range on the [Witchseason] albums.’
One ‘inspired combination’ Boyd brought about during the Bryter Layter sessions did provide Drake with the musical context he’d always craved. Welsh-born Velvet Underground founder John Cale – who was back in Britain formulating the sound for his own baroque rock symphony, Paris 1919 – was both an arranger and a fine songwriter in his own right, classically trained (under Aaron Copeland, no less), and demonstrably capable of bringing out strange fruit in artists as diverse as Nico, The Modern Lovers and The Stooges. The two songs Cale now arranged for Drake – ‘Northern Sky’ and ‘Fly’ – were the product of a single brainstorming session; Boyd’s description of the pair arriving at the studio the next morning, ‘John with a wild look in his eyes and Nick trailing behind’, perfectly capturing the nature of these contradistinct personalities.
The ever-eclectic Cale proceeded to play viola, harpsichord, celeste, piano and organ, while the ever-dependable Pegg plucked away on his bass. And, for once, Drake rose to the challenge of a great arranger, delivering in ‘Northern Sky’ perhaps his finest vocal performance; as Cale’s uplifting arrangement vies for dominion over the atypically downbeat Drake lyric: ‘Would you love me through the winter? / Would you love me till I’m dead? / Oh, if you would and you could / Come blow your horn on high.’17 But Cale found his experience of working with ‘the genius musician’ (as he later described him) no more edifying than previous nominees, telling Nick Kent in 1975, ‘You couldn’t talk to him. He was like a zombie, like he just had no personality left.’
The exquisite high of ‘Northern Sky’ was an impossible act to follow, and Drake didn’t really try. The low-key instrumental ‘Sunday’ would be its solitary successor and album coda – one of three instrumental with which Drake bookended his latest ten-song collection (the other two, ‘Introduction’ and the title track, would open each side). Boyd told American collector Frank Kornelussen, when co-compiling the posthumous Time of No Reply LP, ‘Nick was reluctant to introduce other songs to the Bryter Layter sessions for fear [I] might choose a vocal performance in place of any of the three instrumental, of which Nick was very proud.’ But that may well not be the whole truth and nothing but. Given the problem Drake was having summoning up single sentences in conversation – and as Linda Thompson says, by now he ‘made monosyllabic seem quite chatty’ – it seems highly likely he was experiencing similar difficulties with the lyrics he once pored over.
Whether Drake sensed it or not, the songs were starting to dry up – just three years after he first found his muse. Because he had made the fateful decision not to return to any of the songs he had accumulated in the long lead-up to Five Leaves Left – even ‘Things Behind the Sun’, which Boyd pushed him continually to record – Drake placed an unnecessary burden across his own back. As engineer John Wood recalls, ‘He [simply] didn’t have the [Bryter Layter] material ready, for unlike Five Leaves Left he was actually still writing for this album.’ ‘Northern Sky’ may be where it is on the album, the penultimate spot, because it was the last song he penned. Certainly if it was written in Hampshire while staying with the Martyns, as Beverley has indicated, then the song dates from the summer of 1970, by which time he was fast disappearing into an interior world. And for one of the Martyns it was quite a shock:
John Martyn: When I first met [Nick] he was rather more urbane than he became. He was always charming, delicately witty. But he just became more and more withdrawn . . . He just slipped and slipped further and further away into himself and divorced himself from the mundane. It [was] very sad, really.
It was only now that those who had always been closest to Drake began to sense that their boy was not so much introspective as almost cataleptic. For his parents, far removed from the hurly burly of London in pastoral Henley-in-Arden, their physical distance was as nothing to the growing chasm between their son and the world at large. According to his mother, Molly, it had been – at least in the beginning – a conscious choice: ‘He took this room [in Hampstead], all alone, and he decided to cut off from all his friends and that he was just going to concentrate on music.’ His father was left nonplussed: ‘[Once] he shut himself off in this room . . . it was rather difficult to get at him.’ Those who could still get to London easily, such as college friend Brian Wells, ‘would go and see him, [but] by then he’d become odd’. Drake could have been one of Laing’s case studies, as Barrett almost was. He was shutting down from within, a paradigm for the divided self that Laing previously identified in that controversial work:
The [divided] individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question . . . He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body . . . Such an individual, for whom the elements of the world . . . have a different hierarchy of significance from that of the ordinary person, is beginning, as we say, to ‘live in a world of his own’ . . . It is not true to say, however . . . that he is losing ‘contact with’ reality and withdrawing into himself. External events no longer affect him in the same way as they do others: it is not that they affect him less; on the contrary, frequently they affect him more . . . It may however, be that the world of his experience comes to be one he can no longer share with other people . . . It is lonely and painful to be always misunderstood, but there is at least from this point of view a measure of safety in isolation . . . He maintain[s] himself in isolated detachment from the world for months, living alone in a single room . . . But in doing this, he [begins] to feel he [is] dying inside . . . [so] he emerge[s] into social life for a brief foray in order to get a ‘dose’ of other people, but ‘not an overdose’ . . . [before] withdraw[ing] again into his own isolation in a confusion of frightened hopelessness.
If by the end of 1970 Drake was cutting himself off from the world that lay outside his music, he was evidently intent on reflecting this shift in the music itself. He told Jerry Gilbert that he planned to make his third album a solo album in the true sense: ‘For the next one I [like] the idea of just doing something with John Wood, the engineer at Sound Techniques.’ He had already told Joe Boyd as much as the producer was preparing to pack his bags and take off for a job with Warners in L.A.: ‘The next record is just going to be me and guitar.’ Until now he had gone along with Boyd’s way of making him a household name. It was increasingly clear it wasn’t working. And though he failed to articulate his feelings to Boyd at this crucial juncture, when it might have made a difference, Drake felt let down.
He did, however, voice his disenchantment to three friends: Robert Kirby Paul Wheeler and Brian Wells. Wheeler was surprised to find his friend even thought in terms of commercial success (‘I didn’t think he was in it for that’); while Wells, having sat and listened to the whole of Bryter Layter in Drake’s presence, felt constrained to comment: ‘Well, if I’d made a record like that and it hadn’t sold I’d have been in the pits.’ Drake muttered back, ‘Now you see.’ Kirby, still slightly in awe of his fellow musician, noticed that ‘after Bryter Layter bombed, it [became] apparent that all was not well’. He even came to believe that, such was his friend’s disenchantment, he ‘stopped writing for a while’. Meanwhile, Drake’s bright and beautiful sister, who had her own upward career trajectory to consider, couldn’t see why her brother’s music was not selling and determined to find out why his record company was failing him. She was in for a surprise:
Gabrielle Drake: I think the crux came around the time he produced Bryter Layter . . . I rang up Island because we thought he was deeply depressed at that time because Island weren’t supporting him, that he’d brought out a record, and they’d never give him dates and things like that . . . They said, ‘We’d do anything for Nick, give him publicity, but he won’t do [any of] it.’ . . . I suddenly realized that . . . [here] was not where the problem lay.
The sister began to fear for her brother’s state of mind but felt powerless to intervene, while Nick continued to drift downward, invisible to the world he had once hoped to impress in song.
*
Meanwhile, another cracked actor feared for the very future of his own troubled sibling; and was equally fearful of whether he, too, might succumb to the schizophrenia that threatened to consume his entire family. Like Gabrielle Drake, David Bowie had tried his best to help his (half-)brother, Terry, but by the winter of 1971 he had come to feel the familial bonds tying him to his schizoid sibling were holding him down, too. Although Terry had not been definitively diagnosed with schizophrenia until 1969, the signs had been there for some time. Indeed, to brother David’s mind, he was simply living out the family curse. Some ten years older than his half-brother, Terry was thirteen when his aunt Una was interned at Park Prewett, a Victorian asylum near Basingstoke, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and given electro-shock treatment. By April 1957, she was dead (from cancer, though some in the family seemed convinced she took her own life). When David’s cousin Kristina was temporarily housed with his family, as her mother slowly succumbed to the familial disturbance of the mind, it seemed to the young David a question not of if, but when:
David Bowie: It scared me that my own sanity was in question at times, but on the other hand I found it fascinating that my family had this streak of insanity . . . [Terry] was manic depressive and schizophrenic. I often wondered at the time how near the line I was going and how far I should push myself. I thought that it would be serving my mental health better if I was aware that insanity was a real possibility in my life . . . [] . . . It had tragically afflicted particularly my mother’s side of the family . . . There were far too many suicides for my liking – and that was something I was terribly fearful of. I think it really made itself some kind of weight I felt I was carrying. [1993]
That weight was something Bowie liked to turn to his advantage. Tony Zanetta, Main Man Records employee turned memoir-writer, recalled how in the Ziggy years ‘the genetic madness that lurked in his family was a theme to which he turned whenever his life seemed out of control, or he made mistakes that he did not wish to acknowledge. It could be used to explain anything.’ He also had a certain a tendency to place himself at the centre of a psychodrama, family or otherwise, though in real life he preferred to be ever the observer, one step removed from others’ meltdowns.
Thus, by the time the BBC broadcast their exhaustive 1993 overview of his career. Bowie was vividly describing his brother in the throes of a psychotic episode on the way home from a a February 1967 Cream concert they’d attended in Bromley. As he tells it, Terry: ‘collapsed on the ground and he said the ground was opening up and there was fire and stuff pouring out of the pavement, and I could almost see it for him, because he was explaining it so articulately.’ It is an enticing description, were it not for its distinct similarity to the account from Terry’s own lips of his first psychotic episode outside Chislehurst Caves, reproduced in the Gillmans’ Alias David Bowie seven years before Bowie gave his version, which led to him sleeping rough for eight days before turning up at his mother’s house, just as David was making one of his rare visits:
Terry Burns: I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Terry, Terry,’ and I looked up and there was this great light and this beautiful figure of Christ looking down at me, and he said to me, ‘Terry, I’ve chosen you to go out into the world and do some work for me.’ He said, ‘I’ve picked you out.’ And the light of his face was so intense that I fell to the ground. I was on my stomach resting on my hands looking down and when I looked around me there was this big burning, a big ring of fire all around me, and the heat was intense, it was terrible. And then it all disappeared.
In Terry’s version, though, his brother was nowhere to be seen, and Bowie’s version – which seems to have been accepted at face value by just about every Bowie author since its 1993 appearance, despite its belated, somewhat suspicious appearance after Terry’s death – raises its own sorts of questions. Though he doubtless did hear about this and other such episodes from family members, and perhaps from Terry himself, Bowie had by the time of the episode fled his mother’s coop and was ensconced at Ken Pitt’s place. He was almost certainly in denial about his brother’s true mental state for some time (he made no mention of it to Pitt in those early months). Indeed, if his realisation of the true state of his brother’s schizophrenia coincided with its appearance as subject-matter in his songs, these only stated to appear early in 1969 with songs such as ‘Janine’ and ‘Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed’, the latter a whimsical precursor to ‘All the Madmen’.
Both songs would remain in the set through February 1970, when Bowie debuted the first song he intended for The Man Who Sold the World, ‘The Width of a Circle’ (which in its complete form would include the couplet, ‘He struck the ground, a cavern appeared / And I smelt the burning pit of fear’, a seeming reference to the Chislehurst Cave incident or something like it). If Bowie did witness a similar episode after going to see a Cream show in London, it seems doubtful that he would have let it gestate so long before coming out in song. In fact, only the band’s farewell performance at the Albert Hall on 26 November 1968 really fits this timeline.
Something certainly provided a tipping point in Bowie’s songwriting. Pre-1969, allusions to his family’s predisposition are non-existent; whereas Terry’s breakdown became the perennial backdrop to his work in the period 1969–70, when he started to write the kind of songs that made him the iconoclast most likely to. At the same time he became (almost simultaneously) involved in relationships with two women who remember constant references to the family curse. Mary Finnegan, for much of this period both landlady and lover, believed it was ‘the fact of Terry . . . which explained his refusal to take LSD, for the drug was suspected . . . of inducing . . . schizophrenia’. And then when Bowie met the refreshingly hedonistic Angie Barnett, some time around April 1969, he couldn’t wait to bring up the rattling skeleton in his family’s cranial closet:
Angie Bowie: David told me how he worshipped Terry, and how Terry had been such a big influence on him, introducing him to music, politics and poetry – and also to a haunting fear . . . Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic . . . Terry was in a mental ward, as David revealed himself to me that [first] night in Beckenham, confessing to an awful dread that he might follow his half-brother’s path. It was an especially frightening prospect, he told me, because Terry was in fact one of several people in his mother’s family who had become unhinged. David said that sometimes when he got drunk or stoned, he could almost feel the family madness in him.
One further clue that Bowie had consciously placed himself on that tightrope separating sanity from insanity throughout the period leading up to the writing and recording of The Man Who Sold the World (TMWSTW) – only to then disown the album for the next decade – comes from an intentionally flippant comment he made to a Creem interviewer in October 1971, on the verge of starting Ziggy Stardust: ‘There was nothing ambitious about The Man Who Sold the World, except maybe the ambition to crawl out of a cave.’ That cave, one suspects, had a name.
There was also a more immediate reason why Terry remained on David’s mind throughout the six months it took to create TMWSTW. Bowie’s now-wife Angie had taken pity on the forlorn figure, no longer welcome in his mother’s home, and took her husband at his word when he said that ‘he worshipped Terry’. As such, she brought Terry temporarily into the Bowie household as shelter from the storm now raging inside his head, inviting him to stay at Haddon Hall ‘for up to four weeks at a time’. Hence why, when photographer Ray Stevenson called at the hall, Bowie’s closest musical associate, producer/bassist Tony Visconti, told him ‘not to make jokes about “loonies”.’ The reality of living with a schizophrenic, though, ultimately proved too wearing for the would-be wunder-kind and his wife, who were forced to recognize that Terry’s madness was real and that Cane Hill was the only place for him.
Before that decision was made, however, Terry’s presence at the recently established communal headquarters of Bowie Enterprises seems to have directly inspired Bowie to write his first real song of brotherhood, ‘All the Madmen’. Here he positively welcomed the possibility that he might end up among ‘the madmen’, being ‘quite content they’re all as sane as me!’ And whenever the subject came up in interviews at this time – usually at his prompting – he painted Terry’s internment at Cane Hill in glowing terms, though nothing could have been further from the truth: ‘The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution. As for my brother, he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much . . . He’d be happy to spend the rest of his life there, mainly because most of the people are on the same wavelength as him.’
Angie was not so bowled over by the sentiment of a song in which the narrator is ‘on the same wavelength’ as the madmen. By now, the pair had established a routine where ‘he would play me what he’d just written. If I liked it – well, even if I didn’t, even if I judged it too dark or twisted or melodramatic, as I did “All the Madmen” – . . . he’d polish it up.’ This time she couldn’t relate, but ‘All the Madmen’ was set to define the latest and most convincing Bowie persona, while the rest of the songs cut for his next Mercury album would follow its lead into equally dark, twisted terrain.
Never entirely comfortable with the skeletons he now chose to confront in song, it would take Bowie thirty years to admit he had been feeding off his own fearfulness: ‘I’d been seeing quite a bit of my half-brother during that period, and I think a lot of it, obviously, had been working on me . . . I think his shadow is on quite a lot of the [Man Who Sold the World] material . . . I think I was going through an awful lot of concern about what exactly my [own] mental condition was, and where it may lead.’
Of the songs contained on TMWSTW, ‘After All’ is perhaps the scariest. Straight out of Village of the Damned, these children really do ‘sing with impertinence, shading impermanent chords’. While for all the megalomania unleashed on side two (the title track, ‘Saviour Machine’, ‘The Supermen’), what is wholly absent from this newlywed’s new album is any song of love. Its one ‘love song’ is the jaundiced ‘She Shook Me Cold’, where a maneater ‘sucked my dormant will’, even as he willingly offers to ‘give my love in vain / to reach that peak again’. Throughout the album, wholesome emotions are put behind frosted glass; a lesson Bowie’s father had taught him. As Bowie told The Times back in 1968, adopting his father’s voice (and values): ‘To get emotional about something, well, that’s only fit for the servants’ quarters – like mental illness.’
Bowie’s post-‘Fame’ description of TMWSTW songs as ‘all family problems and analogies, put into science fiction form’ was meant as an oblique allusion to the album’s real subject matter at a time when his true biography remained misted by myth. More disingenuous was a simultaneous assertion – at a time when cocaine was wont to do the talking for him – that the 1970 album was a case of ‘holding . . . some kind of flag for hashish. As soon as I stopped using that drug, I realized it dampened my imagination’.
In truth, his wild imagination rarely ran riot as it did on the nine TMWSTW . . . songs. He had finally delivered the goods – even if he had to be given a strong nudge in the right direction by right-hand men guitarist Mick Ronson and producer Tony Visconti. (Visconti later complained: ‘David was so frustrating to work with at the time. I [just] couldn’t handle his poor attitude and complete disregard for his music.’) In fact, it seems to have been Visconti and Ronson who were largely responsible for the sheer heaviness of the sound on the album; with Bowie allowing them to have their way, as he openly admitted to journo Penny Valentine on its release:
David Bowie: It was my idea initially to get heavier – just to try it another way – but [Tony Visconti] got it all together. I probably needed a heavier sound behind me, and obviously it’s worked. It’s not that I have a very strong feeling for heavy music – I don’t. In fact I think it’s fairly primitive as a musical form. [1971]
Two months before he had begun work on TMWSTW, Bowie had described a very different record to the same female pop journalist: ‘The next album will be more solid. As the first side will be completely augmented it means specially writing a whole set of new material. The second side will just be me with a guitar.’ The half-acoustic/half-electric format – which may have originated with manager Ken Pitt, publicist to Dylan when he had used said format to such effect on his apocalyptic 1966 tour – was adopted by Bowie in concert throughout 1970–71. But when it came time to make the album, it was primarily Ronson who imposed the sound on Bowie’s songs; and as Visconti says, ‘Mick’s idols were Cream. [So] he coached Woody [Woodmansey] to play like Ginger Baker and me to play like Jack Bruce.’
For the first time, the intensity of the music matched Bowie’s edgy new lyrics, the doom-laden message being further reinforced by the (original) album sleeve. Both Bowies had happily approved a cover they had commissioned from their Arts Lab friend Mike Weller, which placed a rugged rifle-toting cowboy in the foreground and Cane Hill in the background. Weller would later make the extraordinary claim that it was his ‘idea to design a cover that depicted Cane Hill, [the] main impetus [having come] from visiting a friend who was a patient there’. That original TMWSTW cover, though, is such an exact visual representation of ‘All the Madmen’ – with a hint of ‘Running Gun Blues’ – it would be somewhat incredible to discover it was not Bowie’s conception. Perhaps Weller’s assertion was his way of getting back at Bowie after the singer replaced Weller’s sleeve – with the infamous ‘dress cover’ – for the UK edition.
By the time Weller delivered his evocative sleeve at the end of 1970, the singer-songwriter was already starting to think he may have put too much autobiography into his latest creation, and began to back-pedal. The change of sleeve was probably one manifestation of this concern, though it came too late for his American label, who were preparing to ‘rush-release’ the album to coincide with Bowie’s first US visit in February 197118. Yet once he was thousands of miles away from Beckenham, he seemed happy addressing the album’s more autobiographical elements. When Creem’s Patrick Salvo noted that ‘growing up before one’s time can . . . lead to any amount of various functional disorders, [and] this is found quite plainly in some of your writings’, the still largely unknown Bowie did not summon his disingenuous self. He simply agreed: ‘You’re right. It happened to my brother . . . I mean, there’s a schizoid streak within my family, so I dare say that I’m affected by that.’
Back home, though, the English album, issued the following April, was hastily housed in the ill-conceived ‘dress cover’, perhaps another attempt to sabotage the album’s prospects; or just another ill-conceived attempt to construct an image ironic enough for a young rock audience and outrageous enough to worry their mamas and papas. After all (by jingo), he had called the band he formed back in the winter of 1970 The Hype, a name he claimed at the time he ‘deliberately chose . . . because now no one can say they’re being conned’. Although the glammed-up ensemble looked more like Village People than The Spiders From Mars, Bowie would later claim a direct lineage. At the July 1972 Dorchester press conference his manager organized to introduce Ziggy he told the largely American press: ‘We died a death. [But] I knew it was right . . . and I knew it was what people would want eventually.’ Tony Visconti, The Hype’s legendary stardust cowboy bassist, would go on to claim that The Hype’s Roundhouse debut was ‘the very first night of glam rock . . . [There was] Marc Bolan visibl[y] resting his head on his arms on the edge of the stage, taking it all in.’
If the BBC broadcast of The Hype’s debut concert suggests they were still a long way from the finished article, it confirmed that the songs had started coming thick, fast and heavy. Almost the whole of TMWSTW would be written from scratch in the two months following The Hype’s live debut, including at least a couple of songs – ‘Black Country Rock’ and ‘The Width of a Circle’ – for which the final lyrics were only produced when there was a backing track already recorded and a vocal track urgently required. The former track, according to Visconti’s lively autobiography, ‘was actually its working title, which simply described the styles of music we’d used. [But] David [then] cleverly incorporated those words into the song.’ As for the Bolanesque wail, mid-song, ‘David spontaneously did a Bolan vocal impression because he ran out of lyrics.’ Scrabbling around for song ideas, he even nicked the refrain for ‘Saviour Machine’ from 1968’s unreleased ‘Ching-a-Ling’.
Ironically, the frenetic way the album was pulled together gave it a real unity of sound and vision. Yet at the time, TMWSTW made very few waves. In the UK, the hook-free non-album single ‘Holy Holy’ didn’t help, proving that when Bowie said, ‘I don’t want to be one of those singers whose career depends on hit singles’, he wasn’t joking. In the US, not only was the album released a couple of months earlier, it was supported by the altogether more appropriate lead-single, ‘All the Madmen’, the perfect introduction to the darkened grotto of The Man Who Sold the World. Despite Bowie’s refusal to champion what he (plus Ronson and Visconti) had wrought, taken as a whole TMWSTW was a real statement of intent. And it was one that was recognized, by NME’s Nick Kent at least, as a musical manifesto for the 1970s:
[The album is] a great epic work of tortured third-generation rock & roll poetry. Whether it was the ‘Width of a Circle’, an eight-minute odyssey where Dante and Genet meet and do battle in Bowie’s own inferno of crazed puns, homosexual encounters and black magic symbolism; or ‘All the Madmen’, where ‘the thin men walk the streets, while the saints [sic] lay underground’; or the menace of ‘Running Gun Blues’ and the neurotic and blaringly sexual ‘She Shook Me Cold’. Bowie delivers them all in a style that can only be paralleled with such works as ‘Desolation Row’ and Astral Weeks, while his band, led by Mick Ronson, played like the Cream on a forced diet of Valium.
Even Kent’s verdict, though, was not delivered until October 1972, when the world was just about catching up. By then, wife Angie and new business manager Tony Defries had begun to drill into Bowie that mystery was a necessary prerequisite for superstardom. As of March 1971 – with the UK finally succumbing to T-Rextasy with their first number one, ‘Hot Love’ – he also had the example of his close friend Marc Bolan to draw on. On March 10, Bowie entered Radio Luxembourg’s London studio to cut some demos of songs he had been working on during his trip to the States. The first demo, ‘Moonage Daydream’, was a sci-fi analogy-in-song destined to form a key part of Ziggy’s repertoire. Another demo, initially called ‘Song for Marc’, would be introduced to the rock world the following year as ‘Lady Stardust’. Stardom beckoned for Bowie, as a theme if not an actuality. The megalomania of the man who sold the world was about to give way to the kind that drew on the unquestioning adulation of a rock audience.