A Very Irregular Head

As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver’s seat: as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway, and as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended . . . He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone, the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.

At the beginning of 1966 the English underground was still an amorphous collection of creative tendencies and unrealised possibilities. Ideologically, the counter-culture continued to be informed, on the one hand by various flavourings of old and new left politics that had grown out of the CND movement, and on the other by a distinctly apolitical or anti-political strand of radicalism based on an increasing disenchantment with parliamentary democracy and its attendant institutions. Musically the underground was still marching to the tune of CND. Jazz (in both its trad and modernist guises) and folk (revered for its ‘authenticity’ and the militancy of its protest wing) remained the music of choice for those who had walked to Aldermaston.

Pop music came late to the party - and in 1966 it was still referred to as pop music; the demarcation between pop groups and rock bands had not yet emerged. The Beatles were referred to as a pop group, and pop singles were the dominant currency. It is important to remember this when analysing the evolution of the English counter-culture. The underground was not spawned by the rock culture of the late 1960s - if anything the opposite is true. The term ‘underground’ was not even associated with music until 1967. Before then the term, in Britain at least, was chiefly applied to the film-makers who were influenced by the New York underground cinema of the early 1960s, and to the New Departure and Liverpool poets who had shed their beat influences or met them head on at the Wholly Communion poetry festival.

Much of this activity was going on completely outside the mainstream of British cultural life. What little attention it received tended to be either dismissive on the part of the arts establishment - what Michael Horovitz called ‘the stock-in-trade clichés and categories of literary urban sniping’ - or sensationalist on the part of the tabloid press. More often than not the counter-culture was simply mocked, covered merely for its novelty value. This patronising tone pervaded even the most quasi-liberal arts coverage in the quality press. In the face of such universal dismissal or indifference the underground thrived, as undergrounds usually do.

Meanwhile the UK music industry went obliviously about its business, and its drinking, in London’s Soho. The old money and the trust-fund libertarianism that had floated Mary Quant’s first boutique and Britain’s first offshore pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, were in Chelsea, but by 1966 the counter-culture was gravitating towards W11, that geographic sprawl, rich in socio-political resonance that encompassed Notting Hill Gate, Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park.

In her book Borderlands/La Frontera, the feminist poet and fiction writer Gloria E. Anzaldúa memorably depicted the US-Mexico border as a place ‘where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds’. The same could be said of London’s W11 in the 1950s and early 1960s. W11, then as now, masked great diversities in circumstance, aspiration and wealth. The fragmented urban geography of the area reflected its social history. An inharmonious mix of grand Victorian mansion blocks and half-completed stucco terraces, the result of successive generations of speculation and bankruptcy, sat side by side with rat-infested tenements and dereliction. Inequality was always highly visible in the urban landscape of W11, and became more pronounced the further north you ventured. This remained the case even when London began to swing in the 1960s. At the Notting Hill end of Portobello Road tourists flocked to the antique stalls and shops. At the Goldhawk Road end the poor sifted through second-hand clothes on old wooden barrows and rag-and-bone merchants still plied their trade on horse and cart. It was at this end, the Ladbroke Grove end, where the cultural action would be in the latter half of the decade. This is where the English underground took root, and this, owing to a mixture of happenstance and cultural convergence, is where Pink Floyd would find themselves by the autumn of 1966.

At the beginning of the year they were mainly performing their repertoire of R & B and blues covers at private functions and parties. According to Nick Mason the group had no more than five or six original compositions in its set at this time; these presumably would have been ‘Let’s Roll Another One’, ‘Lucy Leave’, ‘Butterfly’, ‘Remember Me’ and ‘Walk With Me Sydney’. By the end of 1966 Pink Floyd would be the underground’s house band. At the beginning of the year they were occasionally billed as ‘The Pink Floyd Sound’. By the end of the year they would have one.

W11 was as far removed from the ambience and architecture of Cambridge as it was possible to get, a perfect example of what the Chicago School of Urban Sociologists called ‘a zone of transition’. Dickens had called the area ‘a plague spot, scarcely equalled for insalubrity by any other in London’. The Times had called the area ‘a social dustbin’ and ‘a square mile of squalor’. The Kensington Post dubbed it ‘Rotting Hill’. The black underground paper Hustler called it ‘a transit area for vagrants, gypsies, and casual workers’.

This was where many of the Empire Windrush migrants headed from 1948 onwards, in many cases exchanging one shanty-town for another. This was where the mass murderer John Reginald Christie lived and carried out his crimes during the same period, promising back-street abortions to the desperate and dispossessed, knowing that most of them would not be traceable or even missed in this square mile of flotsam and flux. This was where Peter Rachman did most of his business, a slum landlord so notorious for his ruthless and exploitative methods that he gave his name to an -ism. Rachmanism continued to thrive long after the man himself died in 1962. This was where the Fascist leader Oswald Mosley enjoyed his last hurrah, exploiting the racial tensions that existed in the area and which spilled over into full-scale racially motivated riots during the summer of 1958.

W11 has always been characterised by division, dislocation and displacement. Its grid-lines and boundaries have been shaped historically by the transport routes that have been carved through it. In 1801 the Paddington branch of the Grand Union (at that time the Grand Junction) Canal was opened. In 1864 the western extension of the Metropolitan Railway opened, cutting another swathe through Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park. Exactly one hundred years later work began on the Westway, the controversial extension of the M40 route out of London, which displaced residents and turned the area into a huge building site for much of the decade.

In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa describes the particular hybrid psychology that develops among those who inhabit territories that are subdivided by such arbitrarily imposed intersections. She defines the borderland as ‘a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.’ Anzaldúa traces the cultural diversity specific to the Tex/Mex region she was familiar with. But in her evocation of annexation, alienation and unrest she could just as easily have been talking about the economic refugees and cultural renegades who gravitated towards W11.

Even the most liberal of inhabitants or cultural commentators admits that there was not much racial integration in the area during the early 1960s. What little interaction there was appeared to be confined to dope-scoring and visits to the numerous shebeens (illicit bars) that thrived after dark. It was here that Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler used to come to score, and where Keeler’s fractious relationship with dealer Lucky Gordon would bring unwelcome police attention to the area. In his autobiography, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, Mick Farren writes of the subtle behavioural codes that had to be learned in order for the visitor to be adopted, or at least tolerated, in cafes like the Rio where dope could be scored. Even here things were demarcated along racial lines: white dealers sold hash, black dealers dealt in grass. The terminology people used to define the area also denoted their ethnic background. The white population tended to refer to ‘The Gate’. Afro-Caribbeans spoke of ‘The Grove’.

It was partly as a way of counteracting this divide and galvanising the disparate strands of social activism and cultural energy in the area that the Notting Hill Free School was set up. The Free School is crucial to any account of the Pink Floyd story. This brief and uneasy liaison between pragmatically politicised housing activists and hippie utopians was a key convergence point for counter-cultural energy in the mid-1960s, and some of the movement’s most important and influential initiatives were spawned in its wake. The underground’s first newspaper, International Times, the appropriation of the Chalk Farm Roundhouse as a venue, the UFO club and the Notting Hill carnival all owe their existence to Free School thinking.

W11 had a history of philanthropic activity, motivated by slum housing and government indifference stretching back to the nineteenth century. This mixture of noblesse oblige and autonomous community action was part of the political fabric of the area long before the Free School was talked of. The most recent antecedents for the Free School were to be found in Alexander Trocchi’s The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds and Sigma, a Tactical Blueprint which called for a rejection of conventional politics and, according to Jeff Nuttall in his book Bomb Culture, ‘a kind of cultural jam session: out of which will evolve the prototype of our spontaneous university’. The roots (and routes) of the Free School could also be traced to the free university movement in the USA, and the initiatives of Joseph Berke and the radical psychiatry movement that was centred on Kingsley Hall in London. Indeed, one of the early participants in the activities of the Free School was pioneering psychoanalyst R. D. Laing. Jeff Nuttall was also an early participant, as were black activist and former Rachman henchman Michael De Freitas (later Michael X), Beatles manager Brian Epstein and poet Michael Horovitz.

The inaugural public meeting of the Free School on 8 March 1966 was attended by Warhol actress and Wholly Communion participant Kate Heliczer, who had also brought to England the first demo tapes of the Velvet Underground, jazz writer Ron Atkins, Alan Beckett of The New Left Review, and ufologist and ley-line expert John Michell. Also in attendance were four people who would play an integral part in the Pink Floyd story: John Hopkins, Peter Jenner, Andrew King and Joe Boyd.

John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins had left Cambridge University with a third-class degree in 1958. In order to avoid national service he took a job with the atomic energy authority at Harwell, near Oxford. ‘There I was with a questionable science degree, dodging the draft, and enjoying all the benefits of student life without having to be a student.’ Poet Mike Horovitz put him in touch with what he calls ‘grassroots avant-garde culture, the new left review people, people into film, poets and musicians’.

Hoppy’s ‘anti-career’ simultaneously mirrored and informed the wider development of the English underground. He was the counter-culture’s enabler, the man who talked schemes into existence and got things done. ‘He was the catalyst and the energiser. He was unbelievably active,’ says Barry Miles, who would also play no small part in the future scheme of things. ‘It was ridiculous the things he had a hand in, in getting going. I was absolutely in awe of Hoppy.’

Hopkins had moved to London at the end of 1960 to become a photographer, ‘working both for the straight press, like the Sunday Times, the Observer and Melody Maker, and with one foot in the alternative camp, including a lot of work for Peace News. By 1964 I was organising photo-coverage of the Aldermaston march for CND.’ He also worked for the Labour Party in the run-up to their 1964 election victory, and describes Harold Wilson’s subsequent u-turn from anti-nuclear weapons to pro-nuclear deterrent as a seminal moment. ‘The biggest political lesson I’ve ever learned. It left me with a disillusion with conventional politics which has lasted to this day.’

Hoppy’s Westbourne Grove flat soon became a drop-in centre and crash-pad for kindred spirits. Everyone who would eventually play a part in the English counter-culture seemed to pass within Hoppy’s orbit. Barry Miles was one of those who used to stay at Hoppy’s when in London, eventually moving up to the city from Cirencester in 1962. Miles initially worked at Better Books, which was in effect a drop-in centre itself for writers, poets, artists and other like-minded souls.

Peter Jenner was the son of a vicar. His grandfather was a Labour MP. ‘Very left-wing family,’ he says, describing his background and social milieu as ‘that middle-class group of people, as it were children of the Bloomsbury Set, children of the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front and the ISP. We’d all gone to posh universities with grants, for free. I was anti-hanging, pro-CND, went on all the early Aldermaston marches, and the anti-Suez demo where Nye Bevan spoke. Big jazz fan. Got into smoking dope at Cambridge.’

Peter Jenner remembers the area as being characterised by ‘big old dilapidated houses with ten rooms and maybe ten families and two bathrooms. Mainly immigrants who didn’t know how to protect themselves. A lot of the more decent accommodation was for whites only. The gap was being filled by Rachman and people like that, these horrible landlords were buying up old houses for three, four, five thousand pounds and letting rooms for six pounds a week when people were only earning ten pounds a week and if you didn’t pay they sent round people who broke your legs or threw you out on the streets. We had an awareness of all that. We’d all been bought up in post-war austerity and we were questioning what was going on. In a way what was carried over into the Fifties was a good version of the Thirties, i.e. no unemployment, but it was still a bit drab and dreary. By the Sixties we were saying, come on, there’s more to life than this.’

Joe Boyd had grown up in New Jersey, immersed in music. As a young, Princeton-educated promoter he had organised gigs for Sleepy John Estes, Jesse Fuller, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Skip James, Muddy Waters and the Reverend Gary Davis. He’d seen the American folk and jug band scene evolve and go electric and the folk record labels, Elektra and Vanguard, follow likewise. He had also been involved with the Newport folk and jazz festivals, where he had witnessed that watershed moment on the night of 25 July 1965 when Bob Dylan outraged the folk movement by inserting a jack plug into an electric guitar and kick-starting the second half of the Sixties.

Boyd had previously visited England in 1964 and 1965, managing the Blues and Gospel Caravan, and touring Europe with Coleman Hawkins and Roland Kirk. It was on the former tour that he first met John Hopkins when Hoppy was still a freelance photographer. By September 1965 Boyd was running the London office for Jac Holzman’s Elektra label and ideally positioned to witness the gathering momentum of the English counter-culture.

The first meeting of the Free School was held in the basement of a house in Powis Terrace. ‘The house belonged to John Michell. He had some sort of partnership with Michael De Freitas,’ says Hoppy. ‘Michael and John made the basement of this run-down terraced house available. Most of the activity of the Free School was not actually at the basement, but in informal classes elsewhere. There were lots of different groups of people doing different things. Some of it was to do with the political side of being a housing activist. Other stuff was to do with arts and crafts and photography. That was the crucible out of which the carnival was re-invented. The carnival had existed in some form before the free school, but it had gone dormant.’

‘The Free School was to do with the fact that the education system was very old-fashioned and teaching us in a locked-door way,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘I was a sociologist and economist and at the LSE I was getting involved in social work and psychology. The more I, and a lot of others, got involved, the links between the subjects were becoming more interesting than the subjects. In social terms there were a lot more West Indians around and there was an interesting cultural mix for me to live in, and a lot more interesting music around. In that sense the Free School was like a Workers’ Education[al] Association idea but in a more progressive way.’

In Courtney Tulloch’s The Grove newsletter of 23 May 1966 Hoppy defined the Free School’s ongoing mission as ‘a way in which people could get together to discuss questions which were vital to their everyday life. For instance how can one find out more about the school system, facilities for young children, legal matters, housing groups, consumer associations, sports groups, nursery groups, etc. How can people make their own entertainment? How can one try one’s hand at dramatics, or music, or painting?’

‘The only way it would have differed from any other kind of community project was that it was supposed to be a two-way thing,’ says Barry Miles. ‘Everybody who had a skill that they could teach was encouraged to go to the Free School and make themselves available. The idea was you would learn from the people who were coming to you. This is why Michael X was interested. He taught basic English. He knew a lot of people in the area who were basically illiterate but were too proud to ever have gone to an evening class. He thought this would be a good two-way movement, a situation where people were passing on their life skills to the person who was teaching them in a way they wouldn’t have done if it was being run by the council.’

One early convert to the Free School was Emily Young, the free-spirited daughter of the distinguished writer and politician Wayland Young (Lord Kennet). Young hung out at the Free School with her school friend Anjelica Huston (daughter of the film-maker John Huston) and was destined to play a pivotal role in the Pink Floyd story as the inspiration for Syd Barrett’s wayward muse in his song ‘See Emily Play’. ‘I was quite a serious girl, quite grumpy really. I was very bright but quite frustrated intellectually at school, so I didn’t go to school. I used to hang out with all these mad people and bohos at the Free School instead, and loved it. I was so hungry for interesting things. My resources were very good in my family life. There were a lot of books and amazing people coming through the house, upper-class, faintly bohemian, academic intellectual people, so I was well informed about the possibilities in life. Then John Hopkins, this ex-physicist, came to the morning assembly in school and said, “We’ve got this thing going. Everyone’s welcome to come. It’s a local resource. We’re here for the community. We do all these classes in music and dancing, and what’s going on in science and what’s going on in the arts. Come along. Join in.” So I went. I was that hungry and curious. I was a kid. I was fourteen-fifteen years old during that eighteen months, however long it was. Everyone else was much older. I don’t know what they thought of me. I used to pretend I’d gone to bed and then creep out of the house and go off and have this much more interesting life. Most nights I was down there. Then in the morning I’d creep in and say I’d been staying with a school friend over night, then pretend I was going to school and then go back to the Free School and sleep.’

‘A lot of people were turned off by the basement in Powis Terrace because all the walls were covered with psychedelic paintings,’ remembers Barry Miles. ‘And you’d have Michael De Freitas lurking around with his silver-top cane. Most people still regarded him as a pretty shifty character. Up until a few weeks before the Free School that room had still been a gambling club and he’d run a brothel in another part of the same building.’

‘It was pretty grungy. It wasn’t a nice place,’ admits Emily Young. ‘Earth floors, filthy stairs. You’d go down there and have interesting conversations and interesting drugs. I’d be sitting there, ears flapping, eyes wide, you know, with that adolescent self-consciousness. I didn’t say much, but I loved it. There were conversations about what was going on in cosmology. Plate tectonics, that was really new. Geologists were very resistant to it but it was making sense. And the age of the universe, they were just starting to tie those things in, nuclear decay times and half-lifes, and dating the age of the earth. Nowadays people think the Sixties was very modern and progressive. In fact there were all kinds of assumptions about the state of the universe that were wrong. And all this was taking place in a Dickensian slum. It was cold so we’d go and find old railway sleepers. There were lots of demolitions and we’d find lots of wood there. There was a coldwater tap at the back. And that’s how you’d make tea. Put the kettle over the fire. But on these huge swathes of demolition where everything was being ripped out for the motorway we’d go and have happenings. People playing saxophones and huge bonfires and drinking and dancing and poets doing their mad stuff. There were paupers, street people with absolutely no money. God knows how they lived. Really quite extreme some of them. Then there were these Americans coming over with their acid. They were wonderful, visionary, clean, healthy people talking about the way forward and the golden future and all the dreams of the hippy world and global consciousness.’

The Free School, for all its subsequent failings, can be seen as a microcosm of the wider questioning of society that was going on at the time, just one of many crucial convergence points for the radical ideas, philosophies and initiatives that were being articulated in the 1960s. It is important to place the early blossoming of Pink Floyd in this context. In the early autumn of 1966 their presence at the Free School was no more significant than many other factors. Emily Young acknowledges this when recalling the benefit gigs they played. ‘The Free School was going to do a fund-raising dance on a Saturday night at the old Church hall in All Saints Road. That’s where the Pink Floyd Sound was brought in to be a soundtrack. From my point of view that wasn’t the reason I was there. I was there because of all this other stuff that was going on which was much more to do with sociology and life philosophy. You know? How do you find a way through life?’

‘My impression was that many people were open to lots of different influences,’ says Hoppy. ‘There was a great deal of crossover. Musicians of one sort listening to what musicians of another sort were doing; black soul music, white rock and pop music, classical and serious avant-garde stuff, the Cornelius Cardew end of things. There were American jazz musicians visiting like Ornette Coleman and Steve Lacy. There was also the British jazz of course and there was AMM. Their music was so far out it was on the border between music and noise and street sound. Of all the music and groups and ideas from that era, the ones that have stayed closest to the original concept are AMM, who are still around today. They have a very strong ideological basis for what they do. Try talking to Eddie Prévost or Keith Rowe about what they do. They’ll whack you over the head with their critical understanding. They’re tough people.’

He’s not wrong. AMM are a crucial component in the evolution of the English underground. The rigour and longevity of their intellectual quest remains unparalleled, and the nature of their artistic development offers a revealing counterpoint to that of Pink Floyd, indicating how the avant-garde wing of the English rock scene might have evolved in a parallel universe if it hadn’t been co-opted and commercialised so swiftly.

AMM’s musical performances placed great emphasis on spontaneity, improvisation, collectivity and the strategic importance of silence. ‘For me, AMM wasn’t really about playing music,’ says founder member Lawrence Sheaff. ‘It was an examination of, a revelling in, a fathoming of, the nature of sound and silence itself and the relationship between the two. AMM, its performances and its discussions, helped bring the “where does it all come from” into sharper focus for me.’

Resisting commodification and complacency at every turn AMM adopted a strenuously analytical approach to their music, involving regular discussion sessions and performances that critiqued the very nature of music itself. Keith Rowe’s deconstructionist approach to the guitar in particular would have considerable impact on Syd Barrett. Rowe liberated the guitar from functionality and conventional tuning, often laying it flat, in ‘table top position’ as he called it, and manipulating the sound in the same way that John Cage had done with the prepared piano.

‘The American painters had centre stage: Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Kline, Newman, Kelly, Stella, Oldenburg, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns. They covered everything,’ remembers Lawrence Sheaff. ‘But it didn’t tell us where it all comes from. On this the world of art was mute. Still is. I guess I wanted to know where it all comes from. All the surface possibilities had been laid out. In painting, in music, what was left? Only subdivisions of the subdivisions. If you got that picture, where to go from there? “In” was where to go. “In” not “out”. For me AMM was a way to go “in”: to cut beneath the surface of things. For me, a great, silent whisper of a question was hanging behind every performance, “Where does it all come from?”’

Keith Rowe’s own search, although equally philosophical, was more informed by pragmatic responses to material problems. ‘It was a straightforward contradiction between my day life and my night life,’ he explains. ‘When I was studying at art school during the day, the artistic agenda was, who are you, what do you have to say, and was about developing your language. In the evenings we’d play jazz where I was just imitating Americans. Well, that’s just a basic contradiction - what I was doing on the canvas was contrary to what I was doing on the guitar. On the guitar I was not finding my own language. I was basically hijacking someone else’s language like Jim Hall or Wes Montgomery and emulating what they did. In the world of painting you don’t have permission to paint other people’s painting. You only have permission to do your own work, whereas in the world of jazz you could do someone else’s work. You could just rip off Coltrane, and play just like Coltrane - and that was fine. There was nothing wrong in doing that. I just didn’t like that relationship. I wanted to develop my own language. So I took this instrument and looked at it more like an art project of what can I do with this, rather than coming with a whole load of baggage about what it is you do with it. And I think I very simply just applied the agenda of painting to the guitar. But what does that actually mean in practice? For the Americans to develop an American school of painting, they somehow had to ditch or lose European easel painting techniques. They had to make a break with the past. What did that possibly mean if you were a jazz guitar player? For me, symbolically, it was Pollock laying the canvas on the floor, which immediately abandons European easel technique. I could see that by laying the canvas down, it became inappropriate to apply easel techniques. I thought if I did that with a guitar, then I would just lose all those techniques, because they would be physically impossible to do. So if it meant laying it on the table, I would lay it on the table.’

AMM’s modus operandi, and in particular Keith Rowe’s ideas about how to break with tradition and transcend technique, provided the context in which Syd Barrett was able to validate his own instinctive approach to music-making, and gave him the confidence to press ahead with his own style of experimentation. It was Rowe’s attempt to apply art-school thinking to the mechanics of guitar playing which finally liberated Syd from his own shackles of tradition and technique. He had been incorporating radical and untutored slide techniques into his playing for some time - David Gale maintains that in a spirit of ‘Hey, listen to this!’ he saw Syd running a Zippo lighter up and down his guitar as early as 1963 - now he had added conceptual justification for what he was doing.

‘It wasn’t “underground” at that point,’ says Keith Rowe. ‘At the time it just felt like we were doing the things which were interesting for us to do. It just happened to become something called “the underground” afterwards, but at the time I don’t think I was aware of it in that way. John Hopkins probably was aware of it. But I think we were just fighting for a new piece of territory, like everyone else.’

‘I first heard the Pink Floyd at the Spontaneous Underground in the spring of 1966 at the Marquee club on a Sunday afternoon,’ says Hoppy. ‘They were a series of Sunday afternoon gigs put on by Steve Stollman, the brother of Bernard Stollman who started up the ESP label in New York.’ Hoppy describes his first encounter with Pink Floyd as ‘like walking into a wall of sound, not unmusical, but certainly something like I’d never heard before. They had quite a lot of amplification for those days, all improvising over a theme, and some of the improvisations seemed to be pretty wild, but it all seemed coherent if you stood back and listened to it. They may well have played some more conventional rock ’n’ roll numbers but what I remember is their wall of sound.’

The now legendary Spontaneous Underground gigs were essentially a series of invitation-only events organised by Steve Stollman as a way of galvanising the creative energies that had become apparent at the previous year’s Wholly Communion poetry reading. A mimeographed flyer for the first one read:

Spontaneous Underground at the Marquee this Sunday January 30th organised by Steve Stollman of ESP Disk with the aid of everybody. Among those taking part will be Donovan/Mose Allison/Graham Bond/Pop/Mime/ Kinetic Sculpture/Discotheque/Boutique. THIS TRIP begins at 4.30 and goes on. Liquor licence applied for: Costume, masque, ethnic, space, Edwardian, Victorian and hipness generally . . . face and body makeup - certainly. This is a spontaneous party, any profit to be held in trust by Louis Diamond, Solicitor, that such spontaneities may continue. Invitation only, donation at door 6/6.

The iconography and hip argot of the flyer was a thinly codified calling card to initiates, those few hundred people who constituted the counter-culture at that time. Stollman’s flyers for the Marquee events were works of art in themselves, stream of consciousness signifiers and cut-up poetry for the in-crowd. Only the first of these events was actually called Spontaneous Underground. The others were simply, and unambiguously, known as the Trip. The flyer for the second event, held on 27 February, read:

In memoriam. King Charles. Marquee de Sade. Superman. Supergirl. Ulysses. Charlie Chaplin. All tripping lightly looning Phoenician moon mad sailors - in character as IN characters - characterised in costume at the Marquee this Sunday at 5 o’clock

Aside from Donovan, Mose Allison and Graham Bond, other participants in those early Trip gigs were Soft Machine, members of what would become Spontaneous Musical Ensemble and poets Johnny Byrne and Spike Hawkins, who were billed as the Poison Bellows and took to the stage with a wind-up gramophone in an old pram and proceeded to shock or annoy the audience out of their stoned reverie with deliberately bad conjuring tricks and Dadaist polemic.

‘It was a very social thing, and it was a very small world,’ says Peter Jenner, who also attended the Marquee events. ‘There was an awareness that something was going on in America and we didn’t quite know what it was. We knew more about New York than we did about LA and San Francisco. We read about hippies and the few who came over from America found us. We knew the people who managed the Fugs and that’s how I first got to know the Floyd.’

Inspired by the set-up at ESP Peter Jenner decided to launch his own record label. ‘The four of us, Ron Atkins, Felix Mendelsohn, myself and Hoppy, were going to have this label called DNA. It was going to be an avant-garde label. Delia Derbyshire and all those people, the Radiophonic Workshop, were just up the road. We could see what was happening in music. It was all going in a similar direction, avant-garde folk, avant-garde jazz, avant-garde classical, avant-garde pop. It was all about crossing over boundaries, which was also what the London Free School was all about. It was all the same general, I won’t say, philosophy, that would be too grand, but the same general mindset, certainly; the same way of thinking, or the same way of getting stoned, at any rate.’

At this particular juncture artistic boundaries remained fluid and undefined; everything was still up for grabs. ‘I’ve often mischievously said that I think a whole load of us could’ve been in the Rolling Stones, or it was very possible for some of us to be in the Pink Floyd or one of your best mates to be in the Beatles. It was still like that at that point,’ says Rowe. ‘It wasn’t ossified. It wasn’t set in stone already - it was flexible. People were moving round and it was just one huge scene. The divisions had not been set up.’

Unfortunately for DNA little of the label’s energy and AMM’s idealism translated into record sales. ‘We’d made this one record with AMM,’ recalls Peter Jenner. ‘Great record, very seminal, seriously avant-garde, but I’d started adding up and I’d worked out that [with] the deal we had, we got 2 per cent of retail, out of which we, the label, had to pay for recording costs and pay ourselves. I came to the conclusion that we were going to have to sell a hell of a lot of records just to pay the recording costs, let alone pay ourselves any money and build a label, so I realised we had to have a pop band because pop bands sold a lot of records. It was as simple as that and I was as naive as that. I saw the Floyd and thought, hey, that looks fun. They’re definitely avant-garde. Why were they avant-garde? Because I couldn’t work out who was making the noise. You couldn’t distinguish between the guitar and the keyboards. There was lots of sustained reverb and Binson Echorec going like mad. These walls of sound - well, more like little fences of sound . . . but it was enough to get me confused. However, I wasn’t impressed with the material they were playing.’

‘Instead of having wailing Eric Clapton [and] Pete Green guitar solos, they were having these free-form jams,’ says Jenner. ‘I thought that was the interesting part. But I thought they needed to play their own material and when I met them I discovered they did have their own material: Syd had songs. But I guess it was easier then to play familiar songs on stage. I could see why they did it. The blues boom was big so if you played “Dust My Broom” everyone knew where they were and you didn’t have to get to grips with all this weird shit. It was a pretty sensible way to get through your gigs and get booked again. And Syd wasn’t this great wailing player, he was a very inventive musician, but he wasn’t a practise-five-hours-a-day type. He was an inspirational guitar player rather than a technical one.’

Anthony Stern remains convinced that the light show was the chief catalyst for the band’s change of direction. ‘The reason their music changed into what it became is because that was the way to go with the light show, the mixture of light and music, painting with light and sound, and sound that becomes music. Which comes originally from the psychedelic experience, ’cos when you take acid, you may well have an experience where a sound heard will produce a flurry of images. It’s almost like you’ve had two hearts, two sensory systems in our brains are wired across to each other, someone had patched them through together so that when you see something, you hear something, when you hear something you see something.’

A second key factor was the introduction of the Binson Echorec. The Echorec was essentially the fifth member of Pink Floyd at this stage of their development. Introduced in the late 1950s the device was a pre-pedal echo unit powered by valves and driven by tape-heads. Used, with restraint, on some of the Shadows’ early recordings it enabled tape delay, echo, reverb and vari-speed. Used by Pink Floyd it greatly enhanced Syd’s ringing Telecaster tones and Rick Wright’s unorthodox phrasing and ethereal tone.

‘If you just have a jazz guitar and an amplifier there’s not that much you can do. You just have that sound and that’s it folks,’ says Bob Klose of his role in the band. ‘But once you have some echo units and so on you can start to get into repeat and that sort of pushes you in a certain direction. It’s not a negative thing, it’s a creative thing. You’ve got this other dimension you can use. And there was a kind of movement of music at that time that just wanted to deal with sound and not to think so much about traditional musicological harmonic logic. You didn’t need to have an orthodox technique at all.’

As Bob Klose indicates, Syd was now firmly aligned to a movement in music which eschewed convention and orthodoxy. Inspired by AMM, Syd’s musical thinking had finally caught up with his art-school thinking and he increasingly began to approach the guitar in terms of texture rather than technique. He stopped worrying about his competence and began to fly. The band still wasn’t confident enough at this stage to drop the cover versions altogether, in fact they would continue to include R & B standards in the set right up to the end of 1966, but Syd and Rick Wright in particular were beginning to construct their sound pictures from a whole new sonic palette.

‘That summer we went to Greece with Roger Waters and Rick Wright, and I gave them their first and only acid trip on the island of Patmos, where St John had the Revelation,’ says Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘They both had such an appalling time I don’t think they ever took it again. Roger had a really bad time on it and I was trying to help him. I had this Bible and I thought I was this black leopard. I just lay on the ground with this Bible, a long sleek cat. And there was Roger on the bed going “Argh!” Rick’s back got sunburnt. I remember the pink of his back being the colour of the wall and he just disappeared and merged into the wall. The sea looked like scales and I remember a boat came chugging in puffing black smoke. I thought, “The dragon’s coming. Oh, God help us.”’

David Gale remained wary of the more Utopian claims being made by acid users but he recognised both the drug’s ubiquity and its role as a catalyst during 1966. ‘There was an enormous, almost like an occult, revival sweeping through, in as much as hitherto abandoned outposts of interest in Eastern mysticism suddenly became mainstream. Kids convinced themselves that some kind of eclectic amalgam of bits and pieces of largely Eastern mystical or occult stuff could be assembled into some kind of guidance system. It was very cool to be thought of as spiritual. And accordingly, if that’s what you pressingly want to be, then your LSD experiences tend to confirm that. It may be possible to have a completely secular LSD experience - but not then - because one was surrounded by a belief in coincidence and synchronicity and the value of it, the significance of it. The density of it was actually overwhelming - it was everywhere.’

For some of the Cambridge crowd the soul-searching would lead to religious conversion in the form of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, referred to by its followers as Sant Mat, literally ‘Path of the Saints’. Sant Mat, a branch cut from the same tree as Sikhism, was led by a guru called Maharaj Charan Singh Ji, known by devotees, the satsangis, as ‘the Master’. The Cambridge exodus to Sant Mat began innocuously enough early in 1966 when Paul Charrier, who until then had been a fully paid-up hedonist, chanced upon a book about the movement.

‘That’s an interesting story in itself,’ says Andrew Rawlinson, ‘because all the books were privately published. You couldn’t buy them in bookshops. But there was one satsangi, Joseph Leeming, who was a professional writer. He used to go to publishers and say, “What do you need?” and they’d say, “We need a book on boating for boys,” or “stamp collecting in Ethiopia,” and he’d say, “I’ll have it for you in three months.” He went to them at one point and said, “How would you like a book on yoga and the Bible?” and they said, “Yeah, that might sell.” So here was a book by an established publisher that you could buy in any bookshop. A friend of ours bought it and [was reading] it. Paul picked it up and said “What’s this?” They said, “You don’t want to read that, Paul. You can’t do it without a master.” Paul read it and thought, “This is it.” The address of the master was in the back so Paul borrowed £200 off his girlfriend Bridget and flew to Delhi. He had no idea where Beas was. It’s a tiny village. Population of 500. So he rolls up out of the blue in an air force great coat with a toothbrush and his big wild hair and I would say he was the first Western youngster ever to do that.’

Rawlinson maintains that the whole subsequent hippie trail from Western Europe to mystical East began with those initial impulsive footsteps taken by Paul Charrier. ‘People of our age started to appear out of the hills a bit later but he’d actually gone there with an address. And he was totally bowled over. There was an ashram with self-contained buildings next to the river. India is chaotic. It’s like being in a cross-current of waves all the time and he gets to this place and it’s ordered and clean. No one is trying to get any money off you and you’re fed for nothing and for big meetings they were providing one million chapattis a day free. Paul sent some ecstatic letters back. He got initiated by a maharaji and came back a changed man. He said, “My aim is to work in the same office as my parents.” His parents worked for the local council!’

‘We were very spiritually influenced by LSD,’ agrees Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, ‘because we suddenly saw that there was maybe eternal life. It’s not a physical universe. It’s a consciousness universe and the human body is just a result of consciousness. Consciousness comes first. Other people became more interested in the mind and a lot of people ended the 1960s going to shrinks to find out more about their psychological make-up. Some people got seriously into their spiritual side, some people got seriously into psychiatry and some people just carried on drinking alcohol.’

David Gale was one of those who got into radical psychiatry and remained sceptical about Sant Mat and the satsangis. ‘A lot of people of Syd’s acquaintance were drawn quite hysterically, with massive enthusiasm, into it. And the Master, the Maharaj Charan Singh Ji - he of the audible life-stream - was successful in recruiting some of the best minds of my generation, including Andrew Rawlinson, probably the cleverest person in that whole group, and countless others. One by one, starting with Paul Charrier, they went to India, got initiated [and] saw the white light explode before them. [They] came back home, cut their hair off, threw away their hippie clothes, got suits, got a job, became vegetarians, stopped drinking, smoking and taking drugs, married women of the same persuasion as them, only had sex for procreative purposes, were advised to be ‘ordinary’ and to keep their heads down. Every morning when they got up they would meditate for two hours in an attempt to leave this earthly level of consciousness and get on to higher levels. It was slightly crazed. There was something hysterical about it. But a lot of hedonistic young men and women plumped for a lifestyle of utter asceticism and drew strength from denial. It may be that some of them on LSD went to the edge of the abyss and looked down, and backed off in horror and settled for something very strict. It may be there was guilt there. Or it may be that they weren’t that radical when the chips were down. But what happened was [that] this perfectly healthy riotous group of promiscuous, drug-taking, largely cheerful young men and women were split right down the middle. Half of them went to India, half of us stayed home.’

‘It went right down the middle, fifty-fifty,’ agrees Andrew Rawlinson, ‘if you count the Cambridge scene and all its London extensions. Half of us went into it and half of us didn’t. Syd would have gone into it. He asked the Master and the Master said, “I will not take an emotional request.” At that time it was very unusual for the Master to turn anybody down, but he did turn Syd down. Syd told me that he told him that his request to be initiated was emotional and not based on genuine spiritual research. But, of course, it’s typical of Syd that he would have done that because he didn’t look over his shoulder - that was the thing about Syd. He just thought, “I’m going to give this a go.”’

Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon, who was yet to convert, gives a slightly different account of Syd’s rejection. ‘Syd asked if he could have initiation and the Master said, “Not yet, go and finish your studies.” Syd was really disappointed because Paul Charrier was already following this path. I remember Syd coming round to Cromwell Road and saying, “I’m not going to smoke any more. I’m going to be a vegetarian and I’m going to follow this path.” I said, “Oh no, you can’t give up smoking dope, come and have a joint.” But he was very upset that the Master had turned him down.’

While some of his friends thought that Syd was merely dabbling, Andrew Rawlinson has no doubt about his sincerity. ‘I have a volume which Syd bought, which was one of the books produced by Maharaj Charan Singh Ji which is on the nature of love and Syd had underlined several sentences. So he clearly was influenced. He was interested in it before I was actually, despite the fact that I was two years older. Syd was in there right at the beginning.’

‘Syd was more than mildly interested,’ agrees David Gale. ‘He went along for an audience with the Master when he took over a suite of rooms in the Russell Hotel. And the Master said Syd wasn’t ready for the spiritual life. Now Storm thinks this was very disappointing for Syd because he’d been told he wasn’t spiritually mature, or had no spiritual potential. Or was on the road to becoming fucked up big time. Quite what the Master saw, nobody will ever know. So Syd couldn’t go to India and do that stuff. But he did take it a lot more seriously than Storm and me, who remain to this day the sceptics of that crew. And whether it depressed him and made him react in some way is debatable. I couldn’t say, but the moment when he was turned off the spiritual is certainly significant. Whether that made him determined to prove himself in other quarters-I don’t know.’

During the summer of 1966 Syd moved out of Tottenham Street and with his new girlfriend, fashion model Lindsay Corner, took up residence in the top-floor flat at 2 Earlham Street, just off Shaftesbury Avenue. The house was part of a block of run-down buildings, since demolished and rebuilt, next to the Marquis of Granby pub, conveniently close to the Indica Bookshop and the old vegetable market in Covent Garden. David Gale and Seamus O’Connell lived downstairs, along with artist John Whitely, who would later design the marbling effect on the second Pink Floyd LP A Saucerful of Secrets. The building was rented from the Church of England by light-show operator and Sant Mat convert Peter Wynne Wilson and his girlfriend and fellow satsangi, Susie Gawler-Wright. Both came from extremely privileged backgrounds, Wynne Wilson’s uncle was the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Also living at Earlham Street at the time were ‘Ponji’ Robinson and Jean-Simone Kaminsky, an absconder from the French Foreign Legion who ran a nice sideline in ‘adult literature’ from the house until one of his printing presses caught fire and the tenants had to dispose of the hardcore evidence hastily before the police were alerted.

It was here, in the top-floor flat at Earlham Street, surrounded by Indian prints, beads and bells that Syd to all intents and purposes shrugged off his Sant Mat rejection and wrote most of the songs that would make up the bulk of the first Pink Floyd album. Peter Jenner had asked the rest of the band to contribute songs as well but initially it was Syd who seized the initiative. Drawing upon all the experiences he had absorbed and assimilated in his late teens, and working, as Andrew Rawlinson observed, ‘quick, in the immediate context and with original juice’, he found the lyrics pouring out of him. Songs about scarecrows and transvestites, songs about bicycles and Siamese cats, songs about gnomes and getting stoned, songs about the I Ching and sci-fi, songs about Cambridge and childhood.

While Syd wrote, Nick Mason toured America by Greyhound bus. In New York he read a review in the East Village Other of up-and-coming London bands which mentioned the ‘Pink Floyd Sound’. In fact, it was Barry Miles, in his capacity as the East Village Other’s London correspondent, who had penned the review, the first the band had received outside of the student press. As Mason stated in his autobiography, he had fully assumed that in September he would be back on the academic treadmill. Peter Jenner and Andrew King had other ideas.

‘Andrew King and myself were both vicar’s sons,’ says Peter Jenner, ‘and we knew that when you want to raise money for the parish you have to have a social. So in a very old-fashioned way we said, “Let’s put on a social.” Like in the Just William books, like a whist drive. We thought, “You can’t have a whist drive. That’s not cool. Let’s have a band. That would be cool.” And the only band we knew was the band I was starting to get involved with.’

The first Free School benefit ran on Friday, 30 September. Nine further benefit gigs would be held throughout October, November and December. These gigs would do more than any others to cement Pink Floyd’s growing reputation. A surviving set list from the second of these gigs on 14 October reveals that Syd’s intense bout of creativity during the summer had borne fruit. The band performed seven of the tracks that would appear on their debut album: ‘The Gnome’, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’, ‘Snowing [aka ‘Flaming’], ‘Matilda Mother’, ‘Pow R. Toc H.’, and ‘Astronomy Domine’, as well as Barrett compositions ‘Let’s Roll Another One’ (aka ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’), ‘Lucy Leave’ and ‘Stoned Alone’. They also performed the instrumental ‘Flapdoodle Dealing’, and three Bo Diddley compositions, ‘Gimme A Break’, ‘I Can Tell’ and ‘Piggy Bank Surfers’.

Artist Duggie Fields had first heard the Floyd when he was living at 101 Cromwell Road, where the band sometimes rehearsed. Raised on Mose Allison, James Brown and the Motown and Stax Revues, he wasn’t initially impressed. ‘I used to put on whatever I had that had a better rhythm, hoping they might get it, but they never did.’ However, he was captivated by what he saw in a live environment. ‘They were totally new. There was a sound you hadn’t heard anywhere else. It was free-form experimental pop,’ he says. ‘And they were pop,’ he emphasises.

‘Hoppy was a bit of a magnet and he’d brought in these people who were draft dodgers and they’d done this light show,’ says Jenner. ‘We thought, that’s great, we want to have lights like that. We just got some oil paint and put them in a projector between two slides. Subsequently they got more sophisticated. You got a hairdryer to blow them and make them move faster, or to cool them down. That was more sophistication! Me and Andrew just got home domestic sealed spotlights and mounted them on bits of wood on the wall and then we got some gels and stapled them to the bits of wood and that was your lights, just close spots. And, of course, they didn’t throw very far and weren’t very strong, so we had to have them very close to the band. And when you did that you got these incredible shadows and colours moving within the shadows. It was just an accident but it enhanced the mystery of the band. Who were these people? Whoo! You can’t really see their faces. They didn’t come on and say, “Hi.” It was all very moody.’

One day in December 1966 Boyd and Hopkins set off on a reconnaissance mission around central London in Hoppy’s purple Mini, scouting for, as Boyd put it, ‘derelict cinemas and nightclubs fallen on hard times’. They eventually found what was to become the epicentre of psychedelia at the Blarney Club, an Irish ballroom underneath the Berkeley and Continentale cinemas at 31 Tottenham Court Road. It had a genial owner, Mr Gannon, and as Hoppy noted ‘a basement dance floor with a beautiful polished sprung floor’.

‘You couldn’t have bought what happened in a way. It was so sudden,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘Within four weeks they had to move it to the Blarney Club in Tottenham Court Road. Within weeks we’d sold out the Roundhouse, which was a venue no one knew and which was a complete shit pit. It all went off at an incredible speed. We started doing gigs with the Floyd in September. By December we had the centre-page spread in the Christmas edition of the Melody Maker, saying this was the most important band of the year. All the record companies wanted to sign us. All the publishers wanted to sign us. All the agents wanted to sign us.’

‘By the early winter of ’66 it was all starting to take off,’ agrees King. ‘But it didn’t surprise me. It was the first time I’d ever been involved in group management so I assumed that what was happening was normal. Y’know. You manage a band. You end up in the papers and then all these curious geezers come round and offer you funny deals. And then you get rich and famous and have sex with thousands of flower children.’

This was the high point for the English underground, the moment when Ken Kesey’s ‘century flower’ came into full bloom. ‘The summer of love was ’66 in Britain, rather than ’67,’ maintains Barry Miles. ‘Most of the things we think of as the Underground were happening by 1966. That was the time that people first started to hang out and smoke dope and dress in nice ways and parade around the King’s Road. Hung on You and Granny Takes a Trip [King’s Road boutiques] were late ’66, although even at the Albert Hall reading Kate Heliczer and all her friends had face paint on and were wearing granny dresses and psychedelic clothing. But it seems to me that ’66 was the great year. Indica had started in late ’65. That was another centre where everyone met. The newly emerging rock ’n’ roll aristocrats who used to go to the Scotch of St James, which was virtually next door - they were starting to come in and mix up with the artists who had been doing happenings since the early 1960s. And Better Books, instead of folding like we thought it would, carried on with Bob Cobbing as manager. Hoppy and I did a test run for International Times for the Aldermaston march in April, and by late ’66 International Times was up and running. By then, boy, everyone was around.’

International Times was launched with an all-night rave at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in north London on 15 October 1966. The building had been constructed in 1847 as a turning shed for steam engines but had not served its original function for nearly a century. Latterly it had been used as a bonded store by Gilbey’s, the gin distillers, and as the base for playwright Arnold Wesker’s theatre group, Project 43. When the IT founders commandeered the Roundhouse for their launch party it was in a filthy state, a dark dank circular shell of a building with a leaky conical roof. Undaunted, the flyer for the launch night was promising:

Pop/Op/Costume/Masque/Fantasy-loon/Blowout Drag Ball. All night rave to launch International Times with the Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, steel bands, strips, trips, happenings, movies. Bring your own poison and flowers & gas filled balloons & submarines & rocket ships & candy & striped boxes & ladders & paint & flutes & feet & ladders & locomotives & madness & autumn & blow lamps.

The organisers draped the filthy soot-covered building in psychedelic finery and handed out placebo acid on the door. An estimated 2,500 people turned up. Soft Machine played to the occasional accompaniment of an amplified motorcycle. Performance artist Yoko Ono got up on stage halfway through their set and invited the audience to ‘touch the person next to you’. Three weeks later she would meet John Lennon for the first time at the Indica gallery. Bob Cobbing and the newly formed London Film-Makers’ Co-operative projected Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and William Burroughs’ Towers Open Fire on to the wall. The toilets flooded and the huge sculpted jelly laid on for the guests was reduced to squidgy mess when Syd and Pip Carter took away the wooden supports that were holding up its makeshift mould and used them for Pink Floyd’s light show.

The band ran their entire equipment and Jenner and King’s hand-built light unit through a single thirteen-amp lead, thus ensuring that the sound tripped out - appropriately enough - at regular intervals. The power blew completely during ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, bringing the night’s proceedings to an inglorious end. But the underground had felt its strength and found its momentum. The second edition of IT unsurprisingly gave its own opening night a glowing review, stating that ‘The Pink Floyd, psychedelic pop group, did weird things to the feel of the event with their scary feedback sounds, slide projections playing on their skin.’

The first live review to appear in the mainstream music press seemed to confirm this perception of the band. The NME in December 1966 reported ‘the slides were excellent, colourful, frightening grotesque, beautiful, and the group’s trips into outer-space sounds promised very interesting things to come. Unfortunately all fell a bit flat in the cold reality of All Saints Hall.’ Presciently the review added, ‘Psychedelic versions of “Louie Louie” won’t come off but if they can incorporate their electronic prowess with some lyrical and melodic songs - getting away from R & B things - they could well score in the near future.’

‘There was some resentment towards them because they weren’t rock musicians,’ says Chris Welch of Melody Maker. ‘They’d all come from an educated background - architects, Cambridge, and all that - and there was a perception of them as elitist metropolitan kind of people, certainly among other musicians. When they were playing at the Marquee the support bands thought they were a bit snooty. They appealed to people who liked music as an adventure, as an ongoing experiment, that’s what they brought that was new and fresh. They weren’t yet another blues band playing in the style of the Yardbirds.’

A club is just bricks and mortars. A venue. A name. A location. A licensing deal. What makes a club is the creative energy that is unleashed there. The Cavern in Liverpool was just a dank cellar where you could get soup and a bun, but it gave birth to the Mersey sound. CBGB was a piss-pit on New York’s less than salubrious Bowery. The acronym stood, unironically, for Country, Bluegrass and Blues, but the thirty or so musicians who gathered there during the mid-1970s were responsible for punk rock. During the day Manchester’s Haçienda looked just like what it had once been, a yacht salesroom. At night it witnessed acid-house frenzy.

And so it was at UFO. You walked downstairs on faded and frayed beer-stained carpet tacked crudely to the concrete steps into a low-ceilinged ballroom with standard Gaelic pub decor, shamrocks and suchlike, on the walls. The small nondescript stage, which normally hosted ceilidhs, show bands and floor singers, had makeshift curtains draped unceremoniously across the front. However, between 23 December 1966 and its enforced closure at the end of September 1967 it hosted the revolution. The bouncers on the door sold, or gave away, acid. The best of the era’s light show exponents - Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, Jack Bracelin, Jo Gannon, Peter Wynne Wilson, Dermot Harvey, etc. - projected and perfected their art, experimenting on the hoof with oils and inks until their colours ran dry or their equipment overheated.

This was Syd’s creative zenith. Immersed in liquid projections and riding the crest of that final pure wave of Sandoz acid before the supply lines were shut down, Syd dissolved his ego in dappled shades of lime and limpid green, turquoise, violet and indigo. Hunched over his guitar he threw spontaneous improvised shapes and patterns on his Telecaster to match the improvised shapes and patterns that were being projected on to him. Shimmering blobs and bubbles and multilayered constellations of colours washed over him as he choreographed his own sonic abstractions which seemed to synchronise with the pulsating stimuli that emerged from the slides and celluloid wheels of the light shows. Visuals and sounds merged in one amorphous amoebic squall. Each enhanced and intensified the other.

‘The whole thing was a form of pop art,’ maintains Pete Brown, who witnessed the synergy of sound and light at UFO many times. ‘Mark Boyle was a terrific light-show guy; when he was down at the UFO, he did some beautiful things. It was very inventive. People responded to it, and the band played as part of that whole kind of space. They became creatures that existed in a visual environment. It was exciting to watch. Syd wasn’t just a rock star in the spotlight.’

Keith Rowe draws parallels between the disengaging possibilities of the table-top guitar and the ego-free environment of the light show. ‘If you think of laying the guitar down, it’s almost the equivalent of that light show. You’re actually putting it one step away from yourself. The attention’s not on you so much. When the guitar’s on the table, the attention’s on the table. When people are looking, they’re not looking at you any more, they’re looking at that. And so it’s this distance thing. I wasn’t at the centre of it. It had all those things, which Syd was feeling too. I can understand that act of “reclusement” with Syd. In a sense it’s already beginning there isn’t it? There’s a sign there of not wanting that gaze.’

Meanwhile the benevolent Mr Gannon averted his gaze too, turning a blind eye when ‘art-house’ movies were projected on to its walls, stating, ‘I’ve seen far worse than that in the navy.’ An occasional crate of whisky found its way to the police station just up the road so that the constabulary might also turn a blind eye to the licensing violations going on inside (a situation, it should be remembered, that also applied to the Blarney Club’s regular Irish clientele who were known to enjoy the occasional lock-in).

On Saturday, 31 December 1966, an all-night rave - Psychedelicamania - took place at the Roundhouse, featuring the Who, the Move and Pink Floyd. The event ran from 10 p.m. till dawn. The publicity posters promised ‘Central Heating and Improved Entrance Facilities’. The UK underground’s growing East Coast connections and avant-garde credentials were confirmed by mentions of ‘Psychedelic Psounds from the Mothers of Invention, the Fugs, Brain Police, Radiophonic Workshop, etc.’ Tickets were available from radical bookshops, such as Indica Books, Housmans and Better Books, and boutiques, including Biba and I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, and Hampstead Record Centre - an indication of how tightly bound and self-supportive the underground still was at this stage. ‘Come and Watch the Pretty Lights’ cajoled the flyers, with the customary knowing nod to the lysergic faithful.