by Mark Blake
Anna Murray and Barrett shared an interest in painting, and the two struck up an immediate friendship. ‘Anna painted as well,’ explains John Whiteley, ‘and she and Syd became great friends. They used to smoke a hell of a lot of dope together – as we all did back then.’
Syd commandeered the attic room at Earlham Street, becoming close friends with the house’s other prime tenant, Peter Wynne-Willson and his girlfriend, Suzie Gawler-Wright. Wynne-Willson had left his public school after taking part in the Aldermaston March and was then working as a lighting technician during the first run of the stage musical Oliver! Suzie would be accorded the nickname of the Psychedelic Debutante. Wynne-Willson once arranged a group trip during a performance of Handel’s The Messiah at the Royal Albert Hall. The pair would be quickly absorbed into the Floyd’s entourage, with Wynne-Willson taking over as the band’s lighting tech when Joe Gannon disappeared back to the United States. ‘When the theatres I was working in threw stuff out, I’d take them home and renovate them,’ explains Wynne-Willson, who was now in charge of the Jenners’ homemade lighting rig.
One of his earliest onstage lighting gimmicks would involve stretching a condom over a wire frame. He would then drip oil paint on to it, through which light would be shone, creating one of the first oil slide effects. This became a defining feature of Pink Floyd’s live shows. In another burst of creativity, he fashioned a pair of what became known as ‘cosmonocles’. These were a pair of welding goggles with the dark lenses removed and replaced by clear glass and two glass prisms, giving a distorting, disorientating view.
‘I can remember putting a pair on and walking down Charing Cross Road – or rather, trying to walk down Charing Cross Road,’ recalls Emo. ‘A copper asked me what I was doing, and I think we made him put them on as well. Of course, the view was even worse if you were stoned. Or tripping.’
‘1966 in London was fantastic,’ remembers Storm Thorgerson. ‘We were all full of hormones and life.’
At Earlham Street, Syd played guitar, wrote songs, smoked dope and hung out with new girlfriend Lindsay Corner, who’d moved from Cambridge to London to pursue a modelling career. Under the tutelage of Seamus O’Connell’s mother, he had become enamoured with I-Ching, the mystical Chinese Book of Changes, and the Chinese board game ‘Go’. Stoned sessions of each would be followed by restorative chocolate bars from Café Pollo in nearby Old Compton Street.
I-Ching would be one of Syd’s many musical inspirations at that time, alongside tarot cards, Hilaire Belloc, The Beatles, Mothers of Invention, Aldous Huxley … As Roger Waters later explained, ‘Syd was never an intellectual, but he was a butterfly who would dip into all sorts of things.’
Cambridge boy John Davies was now in London training to become a veterinary surgeon and recalls that ‘the Earlham Street flat was a lovely place to hang out on a Saturday. It was all happening. Syd would play us records and new songs he’d just written. I can remember sitting there, incredibly stoned, listening to him strumming “Scarecrow” on an acoustic guitar.’
‘There was something that happened at Earlham Street that sums Syd up for me,’ says Po. ‘He had this little room – bedroll in one corner, guitar in the other, a rail with some velvet trousers and flowery shirts hanging off it. Nothing else. And I remember sitting there playing “Go” with him. There was a bare lightbulb overhead and it was a bit too bright. I was like, “Sydney, isn’t there something you can do about that light?” He said, “Yes, there is.” He had some oranges in a brown paper bag. He tipped them out, made a hole in the bag, screwed the light bulb in around it, and we now had a beautiful lampshade, giving this soft light on our game. He was always able to do these effortlessly artistic things that would have taken the rest of us ages to think about.’
Blackhill set about getting its new charges to record a demo tape that could be pitched to record companies, ‘despite the fact’, as Jenner admits, ‘that we didn’t really know anyone in the business apart from Joe Boyd’. At Thompson’s Recording Studio, Hemel Hempstead, Floyd recorded, among other things, ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ and a newer composition, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. The first was typical Carnaby Street acid-pop, the ideal soundtrack for mini-skirted podium dancers (‘Don’t touch me, child,’ declares Barrett camply in its chorus). But it was ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ that would become Floyd’s signature song, an instrumental ‘freak-out’, growing out of a guitar figure reputedly inspired by Love’s version of the Bacharach and David standard ‘My Little Red Book’, which Jenner is said to have hummed to Syd.
Anthony Stern was now living in Carlisle Street in London’s West End and working with film-maker Peter Whitehead, the artist Syd had encountered in his Cambridge studio some four years earlier. Running into Peter Jenner one day in Soho, the Floyd’s manager handed Anthony a copy of the band’s demo for ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. ‘I thought it was absolutely right for the sort of films I wanted to make,’ says Stern. On a trip to America the following year, Stern secured funding for his film, San Francisco, which featured the rough, early version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ set to abstract, flashing images of America in 1967, which, in Stern’s words, ‘attempted to duplicate the Pink Floyd’s light show’.
With management, a booking agent, and now a demo tape, a rejuvenated Pink Floyd went back to Cambridge in December 1966 to play the art school’s Christmas party.
In attendance that night was future photographer Mick Rock, then in his first year at Cambridge University. With a taste for dope and hallucinogenics, Rock had made a connection with Pip and Emo: ‘They kept talking about their friend Syd and his band Pink Floyd and how they were named after two bluesmen I’d never heard of. They raved about this guy Syd. I was completely blown away when I first saw Pink Floyd. But it was all Syd. You didn’t even notice the rest of the band. Pip and Emo took me to meet him, but first I met Lindsay Corner. We hung out, smoked a joint, and I remember being very taken with her. And when I found out after the show that she was Syd’s girlfriend, I was even more impressed.’
After the gig, Rock joined Barrett and friends back at Hills Road to smoke more dope and ponder the merits of Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Review and that year’s hippest novel, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. A friendship began between Rock and Barrett that would endure into the next decade and some time after Syd’s departure from Pink Floyd.
Another of Syd’s former college friends was also in the audience. John Watkins had helped to organise the event. He recalls: ‘I went up to Syd afterwards, full of praise – “It’s fantastic what you’re doing.” And he looked at me and said, “Thanks, but I think I need to kick the drummer and the keyboard player up the arse.” But then, that was his way. It felt as if he started a new band every week at art school. I could never imagine him staying in one group, playing the same songs, night after night …’
Back in London, Hoppy and Joe Boyd had formed a partnership of their own. Boyd had seen Pink Floyd’s shows at All Saints Hall and was searching for a regular venue in which to stage similar events. Boyd found his ideal venue in the Blarney Club, an Irish showband ballroom beneath the Berkley and Continental Cinemas on Tottenham Court Road. Boyd struck a deal with the Irish owner, Mr Gannon, on a handshake and agreed to pay £15 a week for the use of the venue every Friday night. Originally billed as ‘UFO-Night Tripper’, before becoming known simply as UFO, the club opened its doors on 23 December 1966, with performances from Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine (in support). UFO would become a weekly event from the New Year, with Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine establishing themselves as its so-called ‘house bands’, the former securing 60 per cent of the gross takings for their first three appearances.
Unusually for the time, the club’s organisers found themselves making money, with much of the surplus being put towards paid advertisements in International Times, which helped keep the paper afloat. In return, IT’s staff, such as it was, would run the door at UFO. The club ran from ten o’clock at night until eight in th
e morning, its fashionable clientele, psychedelic soundtrack and then space-age lighting effects disguising the fact that the polished dancefloor and overhead mirror ball were firmly rooted in showbiz tradition. There was no alcohol licence, but a small stall dispensed macrobiotic food to hungry clubbers, while a German drug-dealer, known only as Marlon, was on hand to sell trips. UFO’s in-house lighting wizard, the late Mark Boyle, had been a regular at Mike Leonard’s sound and light workshop at Hornsey College of Art. Boyle worked on a makeshift platform, mixing together different substances between clear slides to be warmed by a projector lamp, before, effectively, melting and spreading across the band on stage.
‘Nowadays, UFO would make a 1970s disco look sophisticated,’ says Mick Farren, then writing for International Times and singing with his own band, The Social Deviants. ‘But at the time, the ambience was mind-blowing.’
‘You’d drop acid and arrive blotto,’ says Jenny Fabian. ‘It was like descending into a subterranean world of dreams. There were people floating about with that beatific gaze in their eyes, or flat out on the wooden floor. I often lay there myself, absorbed in the old black-and-white films they showed between music. There was also something regressive about the whole thing. If you went to have a pee, beyond this hall of dreams lay a dark, winding corridor, brightly lit, but black and dripping with condensation, which led to a garish Ladies, and I’d look in the mirror and be amazed at what I saw … It was always a relief to get back into the womb of make-believe.’
As well as live music, the club staged performance art – jugglers and mime acts – as well as screening avant-garde film shows. But as time progressed, the live bands became an increasingly important part of UFO’s appeal. Despite the club’s womb-like ambience, an element of competition arose between the respective bands’ audiences, if not the groups themselves. ‘Floyd were very trippy, very druggy, but very white rock. They were for people who liked Tolkien and went looking for UFOs on Hampstead Heath,’ says one Soft Machine devotee. ‘The Soft Machine were more avant-garde in a European sense. They fitted the bill at jazz festivals in France. Their audience seemed more socially conscious – into black civil rights and the working-class revolution.’ For some, the merits were purely musical and visual. ‘There was always competition between my friends as to who was better,’ says John Leckie. ‘We always argued about who was most stretching the boundaries. Soft Machine could certainly play better. But Floyd were more abstract and, of course, they had Syd.’
Even among their own entourage, not everyone was convinced by the Floyd’s musical worth. ‘To be completely honest, I was never a fan,’ laughs John Whiteley. ‘I helped do the lights for them at UFO, but I can still recall Syd playing away and shouting out the chords to the others – telling them what to play.’
Yet The Soft Machine’s drummer Robert Wyatt remembered his rivals with affection: ‘There was an at-easeness about the Floyd, which I rather liked. Soft Machine’s equipment would always blow up and Floyd would let us use theirs, which didn’t usually happen between rock bands at the time. Most of them were in their cocoons. I was still listening to John Coltrane and not buying rock records. But I was amazed when I saw Floyd play, at their nerve in taking their time to get from one note to the other. I couldn’t do it, but Floyd were always in control.’
With both bands free to perform the music they wanted, for as long as they wanted, Floyd and Soft Machine had the advantage of playing to, as Wyatt puts it, ‘people who didn’t know what year it was, let alone what time it was.’
The distortion of time that accompanies an acid trip made Floyd the ideal soundtrack for the LSD experience. Prior to their performances at UFO, their crew would clear the crowd away from the area directly in front of the speakers. As Miles later wrote in New Musical Express, ‘This was originally designed to prevent stoned hippies from burning out their eardrums, but it soon assumed a curious, ritual significance, like a Zen ceremony, the emptying of the space into which the Floyd’s mysterious music was about to spurt.’
On stage, they performed with their homemade spotlights up close and projections slipping across the backdrop behind them, casting shadows over the band and adding to the mystique. Syd’s abstract guitar riffs battled with Richard Wright’s unearthly-sounding keyboards. Roger Waters, gangling and aloof, delivered a thudding bass to underpin the din, and some ungodly screaming when the mood demanded it. One night, Joe Boyd recalled seeing a tripping Pete Townshend crouched by the side of the stage, pointing at Waters and claiming the Floyd bassist was ‘going to swallow him’.
‘I tripped three times at UFO,’ recalls Townshend now. ‘I thought Roger was very handsome and very scary, and what I was really afraid of was that he was going to steal my girlfriend, whom he openly fancied, while I was weakened by acid.’ The girlfriend in question, Townshend’s future wife Karen Astley, was a beautiful art student who had already featured on the inaugural UFO club poster. She routinely attracted attention at UFO, according to The Who’s guitarist, on account of ‘dancing in a dress that looked like it had been made out of a cake wrapper’.
Trouble at UFO erupted rarely. Visiting mods sometimes took exception to the prevalent peace-and-love vibes, though many would end up dropping acid themselves and joining the party. On other occasions, tripping bikers became heavy-handed with the female clientele. A greater threat to public order came when some of the beautiful people broke free from the pack, hippie bells tinkling, kaftans askew, ending up on Tottenham Court Road in the small hours and attracting the interest of the passing constabulary.
Sam Hutt, London’s first ‘alternative doctor’, later to become country singer Hank Wangford, was a UFO regular and still marvels at how much the club’s clientele could get away with: ‘The Irishman who owned the place was incredibly pragmatic. He literally turned a blind eye to what was going on – very Irish. To him it was no different to the local pub staying open late.’
‘You have to remember that this was a rented Irish showband joint,’ adds Mick Farren: in those days the police had to be sweetened, ‘even in the normal run of things – without hippies all over the joint one night a week.’ A crate of whiskey at Christmas was the accepted sweetener.
In January 1967, Barrett’s path crossed again with Peter Whitehead, who was now making films, assisted by Syd’s art exhibition partner Anthony Stern. Wholly Communion, a movie of the 1965 Royal Albert Hall poetry reading, featuring Allen Ginsberg, and Charlie is My Darling, the following year’s documentary of a Rolling Stones tour, would establish Whitehead as a diarist of the so-called counter-culture. ‘Mr Trendy’, as Andrew King later described him, even if, as Peter insists, ‘I didn’t really like pop music and had never been to a pop concert before in my life.’
Whitehead was halfway through making another film, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, which spliced together interview snippets and footage of Mick Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, David Hockney and more, as a time-capsule document of the pop stars, movie stars and artists of the time. What it needed, though, was a suitably now soundtrack. ‘There was no way I wanted to put the bloody Rolling Stones on it,’ says Whitehead. ‘Anthony knew I liked The Soft Machine, and told me about how Syd was in The Pink Floyd, who were doing something similar.’
Peter ventured out to the UFO club and encountered Syd backstage – ‘He was already a little out of it’ – though his attention was more drawn to Barrett’s escort, a beautiful girl named Jenny Spires.
‘Jenny was the first girl who totally encapsulated the vibe at UFO,’ offers Anthony Stern. ‘She lived in my flat for a while, and I was sitting there one night, when I heard a door open and this lovely sound of bells jingling, like a reindeer. It was Jenny. She had these bells on her ankles, and she was the most wonderful vision of a new type of woman. I didn’t hear such a lovely sound again, until I went to a town called Herak in Afghanistan in 1972, where the horses had the exact same bells on, and I suddenly had this flashback of Jenny coming through the door of my flat
again.’
In what would become a familiar pattern in Syd’s complicated love life, Jenny – yet another Cambridge girl – wasn’t alone in vying for his affections. Around the same time, Syd was linked to a Quorum boutique model and sometime 2 Earlham Street resident Kari-Ann Moller, who would go on to marry Mick Jagger’s brother, Chris.
‘I started seeing Jenny Spires as well,’ explains Peter Whitehead. ‘Back at my flat one night I showed her a lot of the images I’d cut for the film, and told her how I needed some music. She suggested the Floyd, but they didn’t have any proper recordings.’
Arranging the deal with Syd and Blackhill, Whitehead stumped up £85 for two hours of recording time at Rye Muse studios, later renamed Sound Technique, in Kensington, and filmed the group’s performance of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, the earlier demo of which had so impressed Anthony Stern. ‘I liked it because it was very dark, druggy, mysterious and semi-classical,’ says Whitehead. Like Stern, Peter believed the piece would be ideal for his film also.
In the ensuing footage, Barrett can be seen playing dissonant, freeform guitar, his baggy red-and-black T-shirt and spidery pencil moustache rendering him rather less stylish than his bandmates that day. Mason, in particular, looks, as one Floyd insider puts it, ‘very Carnaby Street’. With extra time to fill, the band jammed their way through another piece, entitled ‘Nick’s Boogie’, though only ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ would find its way into the finished film. Years later, Whitehead’s additional footage of the band performing at UFO and the Alexandra Palace would appear on the commercially released video and DVD, Pink Floyd London 1966–1967.
