by Mark Blake
Peter Jenner’s reference to ‘Syd’s religious acid friends’ may well refer to some of his flatmates that year. In 1967, Syd left Earlham Street for a room in one of the flats at 101 Cromwell Road. The Lesmoir-Gordons had taken the first-floor flat some twelve months before, moving in with another Cambridge émigré, Bill Barlow, landlord of the notorious 27 Clarendon Street in Cambridge, home to numerous local hipsters. The Cambridge ‘scene’ now spread to this new party house in the capital, located in a now-demolished Victorian building close to the West London Air Terminal coach station in Earls Court.
Nevertheless, with Nigel studying at the London School of Film Technique and moving in the most fashionable circles, number 101 became a Mecca for the capital’s overlapping art, music, movie and drug crowds. The poet Allen Ginsberg, the film-maker Kenneth Anger, and singers Donovan and Mick Jagger were among those who dropped by.
From 1965 onwards, the building’s various rooms had offered a rehearsal space for Pink Floyd and, briefly, lodgings for Roger Waters. It would also play host to various exotic tenants. These would include, at various times, John Esam, the New Zealand-born beatnik and an early link in London’s LSD distribution chain, and Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, aka Stash de Rola, the son of the prominent French artist Balthus. Stash was a confidant of The Rolling Stones, who would later be arrested on drug charges with Brian Jones, and would also take a memorable acid trip with Syd Barrett – of which more later.
The artist Duggie Fields had briefly studied architecture at Regent Street Poly, where he met the Cambridge contingent through Juliette Gale. Sometime in 1965 he moved into 101 Cromwell Road. ‘Pink Floyd used to rehearse in one of the rooms,’ he recalls now. ‘And I used to go downstairs and put on an American R&B record as loud as I could because I thought they had no sense of rhythm and subtlety, and I rather hoped some of it might find its way into what they were doing.’
Duggie was still living at Cromwell Road, in a room papered with Marvel Comics, when Barrett took the room next to his.
‘The house had seven rooms on those two top floors, and there were nine or ten people living there,’ says Fields now. The living-room’s walls, ceilings and floor were painted white (an idea lifted from the 1965 movie The Knack … and How to Get It), and films were often projected on the walls – sometimes deliberately running backwards. The room was routinely occupied by the building’s lodgers, their friends and sometimes complete strangers.
‘I can remember coming home from college to find maybe twenty people sitting around. I wouldn’t know any of them and there’d be nobody there that actually lived at the flat,’ says Fields. ‘And this could be happening during the day as well as the night.’
On the floor below lived a lecturer (‘poor Mr Poliblanc’ as one of the residents now refers to him), who was totally unconnected with the group. ‘One of our number worked out a way of wiring up the meter so we were effectively stealing his electricity,’ admits Duggie. ‘The landing also became a rubbish dump, as it was several floors up and nobody could be bothered to take the rubbish out. To this day I have no idea where the rubbish at 101 actually went.’
As well as housing such doyens of the capital’s counter-culture, number 101 also offered shelter to Pip and Emo. There was a false ceiling installed in the hallway, with enough room above it to create a claustrophobic hidey-hole, big enough for a mattress.
‘Cromwell Road was always a last resort,’ groans Emo. ‘We went there when we’d been kicked out of everyone else’s flats. I still remember that platform suspended over the corridor. Girls were always terrified to get up there, and there was always a rush between me and Pip to get to that bed if it was the only one available.’
In the words of one of his acquaintances, ‘Duggie Fields was not into self-annihilation’, but while he stayed sane, many of the Cromwell Road regulars did not. Although stories about the house’s occupants may have been exaggerated, Mick Rock, another regular visitor, recalls a general air of drug-induced chaos: ‘Apart from Duggie’s room, the rest of the place was full of acid burn-outs.’
Communal trips at Cromwell Road were certainly commonplace, whether during Barrett’s residency or not, with one eyewitness recalling a bottle of LSD and pipette kept in the fridge of the Lesmoir-Gordons’ flat. On at least one occasion a party of trippers were said to have marched the wrong way down the perilous entrance to the coach station, convinced of their invincibility despite the risk of oncoming vehicles. The spiked iron railings surrounding 101 Cromwell Road proved an even greater hazard to anyone believing they were indestructible while under the influence. One night Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon found another of his old Cambridge drug buddies, Johnny Johnson, naked, disorientated and hanging on to the drainpipe outside 101’s bathroom window. Nigel managed to persuade him back in. Johnson had previously attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself out of a window, and would succeed the next time he tried.
In May that year, Joe Boyd claims to have come across Lindsay Corner and a ‘crazy-eyed’ Syd in London’s West End. Lindsay told him that Barrett had been taking acid every day for a week.
Barrett’s supposed daily acid use has long been the subject of wild speculation. Some think he was taking it every day; most claim he wasn’t. However, others in Pink Floyd’s entourage were concerned that his flatmates might be encouraging his drug use by ‘spiking’ his drinks with LSD. ‘Cromwell Road was full of heavy, loony, messianic acid freaks,’ said Peter Jenner.
Two of the occasional people around Syd at Cromwell Road were known as ‘Mad Sue’ and ‘Mad Jock’. In the real world, ‘Jock’ was Alistair Findlay. ‘Sue’, his then girlfriend, was Susan Kingsford, a model, who had first encountered Barrett and Gilmour while at the Cambridge Technical College. After appearing in a TV advert, as one of the first Cadbury’s Flake girls, she moved to London and paired up with another of 101 Cromwell Road’s residents, who had worked for Robert Fraser, the art gallery owner who got busted with some of The Rolling Stones. This friend ‘fell in with the druggies,’ says Sue now, ‘and I fell in with him.’ She also makes a fleeting appearance in Peter Whitehead’s film footage of ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’, wearing, in her own words, ‘a musquash coat and nothing else, holding a daffodil and beaming beatifically’.
‘I remember Sue and Jock floating about,’ says Mick Rock. ‘Sue was this incredibly beautiful girl who’d taken too much acid.’ But Duggie Fields recalls that ‘Sue really wasn’t mad at all, possibly just a little wacky.’
While asserting that her LSD use was prodigious – ‘We took it constantly – enormous quantities’ – Sue insists that they never spiked anyone. ‘Why would anyone do such a thing?’ she insists. ‘In those days, if you took acid it was all very serious. You did it and then listened to Bach, or watched Kenneth Anger’s latest film, or read the Tibetan Book of the Dead.’
‘Spiking was a heinous crime,’ Alistair Findlay told Syd Barrett biographer Tim Willis. ‘You just wouldn’t do it.’
‘If they were spiking everyone,’ asks Duggie Fields, ‘why didn’t they spike me? It never happened.’
Whatever his later problems, Syd was certainly compos mentis when he started work on Pink Floyd’s debut album. The group were quickly ensconced at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. Widely regarded as one of the best studios in the world, Abbey Road was run along strict lines: white-coated technicians were on hand to deal with any equipment malfunctions, and tape ops and engineers were taught every aspect of the trade, from how to wrap up cable properly to the correct positioning of microphones. Best of all was the inspiring mix of musicians passing through its doors on a daily basis. As Abbey Road tape op and later engineer Jeff Jarratt recalls, ‘You could come in one day and find the classical composer and conductor Otto Klemperer in Studio One, The Beatles in Studio Two, and Pink Floyd in Studio Three.’
In keeping with company policy, the Floyd’s designated producer was their A&R executive Norman Smith, a dapper ex-RAF man, experienced jazz musician and som
etime studio engineer for The Beatles. ‘He was old-school with a very dry sense of humour,’ recalled Roger Waters, ‘and always gave the impression of being a retired song-and-dance man. I liked him enormously.’
Sessions for what would become The Piper at the Gates of Dawn album began in Abbey Road’s Studio Three in January 1967. At various times during the next few months, The Beatles would be next door in Studio Two creating Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Smith had staked his reputation on Pink Floyd, but, as he recalls now, ‘It was not the easiest of associations.’ To break the ice, the producer sat at the piano playing jazz and ‘bashing away while the band joined in’. These jamming sessions worked well, but Syd was less receptive to taking advice about his own music. ‘With Syd it was like talking to a brick wall,’ says Smith. ‘He would do a take, come back into the control room and have a listen. I’d make some suggestions, and he would just nod, not really saying anything, go back into the studio, do another take and it would be exactly the same as the one before. Roger was very helpful, and the others were fine, though I remember Rick was extremely laid-back, but with Syd I eventually realised I was wasting my time.’
Jeff Jarratt worked as a tape op during the sessions. ‘My memories are different from Norman’s,’ he says now. ‘Syd was clearly the band’s main creative force, and I thought he was fantastic. When I was asked to do the sessions I went to see Floyd play live, and I was absolutely amazed. It was so fresh and exciting; I hadn’t heard anything like it. Norman would have been directing them in the best way for that stuff to sound good on record. So perhaps there were things he said that challenged their way of thinking.’
Similarly, Waters remembers that ‘despite him [Syd] doing a lot of acid there were no real problems at that stage.’ Nevertheless, all agreed that the band’s more outlandish musical ideas jarred with the traditionally minded Smith.
‘I wasn’t that knowledgeable about the sort of music they were playing,’ admits Norman. ‘Psychedelia didn’t interest me. But I felt it was my job to get them to think more melodically.’ On that score, Smith succeeded in ‘discouraging the live ramble’, as Peter Jenner calls it. Instead, freeform live numbers such as ‘Pow R Toc H’ were hacked down to a more manageable length, though a ‘licensed ramble’ was permitted with the 9 minute 41 second version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. According to the late Abbey Road engineer Pete Bown, this was the song he heard Floyd rehearsing when he first checked in to begin working on the album. ‘I opened the door and nearly shit myself,’ he recalled years later. ‘By Christ it was loud. I had certainly never heard anything quite like it before.’
‘Peter Bown was an unbelievable character,’ remembers Jeff Jarratt. ‘A fun, extrovert guy. He was older than the band, but he was very receptive to new ideas.’ ‘Pete had a much more creative attitude than perhaps Norman did,’ offers Peter Jenner. ‘He was also extremely gay, ragingly gay, which seemed quite unusual back then.’ Andrew King recalled Bown seated at the mixing desk painting the tips of his fingers with a plastic skin compound used to repair cuts and grazes, as he was concerned that endless sessions working the desk would ‘wear them out through over-use’.
Stories of Pink Floyd meeting The Beatles during these sessions are steeped in apocrypha. They range from the fictitious – that Barrett secretly played on Sgt Pepper – to the simply mundane – that the Floyd were taken in to meet The Beatles, encountering a grumpy Lennon and a cheerier McCartney. Nick Mason wrote of ‘sitting humbly as they [The Beatles] worked on a mix’ of what would become ‘Lovely Rita’. Norman Smith now adds a new tale to the collection. He was in Studio Three, attempting to bond with Floyd at the start of the Piper sessions, when ‘the door opened and who should walk in but Paul McCartney. He introduced himself to them, though they obviously knew who he was, and then tapped me on the shoulder as he left and said, “You won’t go wrong with this chappie.” I think the boys were impressed.’
‘What you have to remember,’ says Jeff Jarratt, ‘is that bands were running into each other all the time at Abbey Road. Who knows how many times Floyd and The Beatles might have met?’
Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell also recalls a meeting between Barrett, Waters and Paul McCartney at the UFO club: ‘There was this little corridor by the side of the stage, and I was sat there when McCartney came in, smoking a joint. Paul was a very affable guy and he passed the joint around. After he’d gone Syd was like, “Wow, that was Paul McCartney and he’s come to see Pink Floyd.” I was surprised, because I was like, “Syd, you’re pretty cool as well now.” I also remember that Roger, who I’d never seen smoke before, took a huge hit off that joint. He knew when to play the game.’
The Beatles’ success at Abbey Road certainly enabled ‘the boys’ to make The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Following The Beatles’ Revolver, the studio’s engineers had become used to phasing, multi-tracking, and all manner of what Jenner calls ‘weird shit’.
‘Roger was especially interested in the studio itself and the development of sound,’ recalls Smith.
But Andrew King remembers Syd showing a similar interest: ‘One of my strongest memories is of Syd mixing the song “Chapter 24”. I remember him at the desk operating the faders for the final mix. And he was very good at it. He knew what he wanted and he was totally capable of getting what he wanted – at a technical level.’
While Barrett is said to have written off several microphones in the course of the recording, and had the ‘meters frequently screaming in the red’, out of the occasional chaos came eleven songs for the album, and, most importantly, an additional single. ‘When I heard “See Emily Play”, I finally thought: This is it. This is the one,’ says Smith.
Pink Floyd premiered the single, then still titled ‘Games for May’, at a performance of the same name in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 12 May. Jenner had secured the show at the capital’s prestigious classical music venue through his wife Sumi’s friendship with the promoter Christopher Hunt. It was here that the band chose to premiere their new gizmo, the Azimuth Coordinator. Effectively the first quadraphonic sound system, the Coordinator had been built for the band by one of the boffins at Abbey Road. It comprised four rheostats contained in a large box and was equipped with a ‘joy-stick’, which would be operated by Richard Wright to pan the sound around 270 degrees in whatever venue the band were playing. The sheer volume at which Pink Floyd played that night was an issue, but it was their use of a bubble machine and the scattering of flowers that caused the most concern. ‘A combination of squashed daffodil stems and burst bubbles left this smeary liquid all over the leather seats and the floor,’ says Jenner. ‘We were immediately banned, and I don’t think they let pop groups back into the South Bank for some time after that.’
Just days later it would be the issue of volume that preoccupied the interviewer on the BBC1 arts show Look of the Week. Following a snippet of Pink Floyd performing ‘Pow R Toc H’, Barrett and Waters submitted to some incredulous questioning from the Austrian musician and string quartet fan Hans Keller. The exchange now plays like a quaint period piece: the earnest, suited musicologist versus the flowery-shirted pop upstarts. ‘Why does it all got to be so terribly loud [sic]?’ enquires Keller. ‘That’s the way we like it,’ counters Waters. Barrett, in a nice contrast to the strung-out Syd of legend, is as alert and well spoken as his bandmate. Keller remains singularly unimpressed, but does offer one sharp observation on Pink Floyd’s music: ‘My verdict is that it’s a little bit of a regression to childhood.’
Shunning Abbey Road, the band returned to Sound Techniques Studio, where they’d worked with Joe Boyd on ‘Arnold Layne’, to cut the new single, ‘See Emily Play’. But there was a problem. ‘The trouble with “See Emily Play” was it didn’t do a thing for Syd,’ explains Norman Smith. ‘In fact, I don’t think he was happy about recording singles full stop.’
On the day of the session, Syd took a telephone call from David Gilmour. The guitarist was on a brief visit to London, buying equipment for
his own band Jokers Wild, then playing a residency in a Paris nightclub. Barrett sounded perfectly normal on the phone and invited Gilmour to the studio. On arrival, Gilmour was shocked by what he saw. ‘He looked very strange, glassy-eyed,’ he recalled. ‘He wasn’t terribly friendly, didn’t seem to recognise me. I stayed for an hour or two and then left. I knew about LSD, as I’d taken it myself, but I didn’t connect it to this. He was in a very strange state.’ Gilmour returned to France, troubled by his friend’s condition but unaware of just how much impact it would soon have on his own career. ‘See Emily Play’ was released on 16 June 1967. EMI bigwig Roy Featherstone would coin the slogan ‘Straight to Heaven in ’67’ to accompany the single’s release, and, as Peter Jenner recalls, ‘while that now sounds incredibly naff, as a slogan it worked at the time.’ The song included a dash of typical Syd experimentation – the sound of a plastic ruler being scraped along the guitar fretboard – but, as Norman Smith explains, ‘it had this wonderful melody, this amazing tune.’
The perfect amalgam of psychedelic excess and pure pop, ‘See Emily Play’ was brighter than ‘Arnold Layne’ on all levels, without the seamier subject matter of its predecessor, but with just enough of Wright’s spooked-sounding keyboards and Syd’s fey, disengaged vocals to prevent a complete slip into easy listening pop. As New Musical Express raved: ‘It’s full of weird oscillations, reverberations, electronic vibrations, fuzzy rumblings and appealing harmonies.’
Not as whimsical as some of his other compositions on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the song was still steeped in random images from Syd and Roger’s Cambridge childhood. ‘I know which woods Syd’s talking about in “See Emily Play”,’ said Waters in 2004. ‘We all used to go to these woods as kids. It’s a very specific area – one specific wood on the road to the Gog Magog Hills.’
