by Mark Blake
‘When he became distracted from reality, you would not want to be in a car with Syd,’ remembers Emo. ‘He’d suddenly lose all concentration, stop driving and just get out. One time while driving he just stopped in the middle of the road and started messing around with his shoelaces. Or else he’d get out of the car, just disappear, and leave you to deal with all the irate drivers backed up behind. It was as if he just forgot he was driving.’
Despairing of Syd’s behaviour, Duggie briefly moved out to stay with another friend, but came back when he found his new housemate’s behaviour even more erratic. Within months, Syd had disappeared back to Cambridge. Gala followed suit, returning to her parents’ home in Ely. It was left to Duggie to dismiss the various groupies and drug monkeys that had billeted themselves in the flat.
Barrett found himself back at 183 Hills Road. His mother had continued to let the vacant rooms to lodgers and Syd felt that his former practice space and dope-smoking retreat at the front of the house would bring him too close to the strangers occupying the family home. Instead, he moved into the cellar. Accessible only by a trap door positioned in the hallway, the L-shaped hidey-hole, with a tiny window that peeked out on the back garden lawn, was big enough for a mattress, Syd’s record collection and books.
‘Then Gala rang, to tell me the news,’ laughs Duggie. ‘She and Syd had gotten engaged and Syd was going to become a doctor.’ Nothing would come of it. Gala began working as a housekeeper for drummer Jerry Shirley. A jealous Syd accused her of having an affair. The engagement was over. Though not before the couple had amassed a number of engagement presents from well-wishers. One day, a crestfallen Syd led Gala down the stairs to the cellar, where the presents were laid out. ‘Gala told me it was like something out of Great Expectations,’ recalls Sue Kingsford. ‘Like Miss Havisham. I think it rather freaked her out.’
Libby Gausden, now married with a baby, visited Syd and Gala in the basement room. Libby’s mother was still in close contact with Win, and he had asked to see her new son. ‘Syd was gone, completely gone,’ remembers Libby sadly. ‘He even thought the baby was his. He was with this beautiful girl, Gala, and I remember the look on her face, as if to say, “Oh God”…’
Before long, Gala, too, would be gone.
When they weren’t nursing their estranged frontman, Waters and Gilmour still had their day jobs to attend to. Ummagumma’s sales had reassured EMI that there was a market for, as the group called it, ‘our weird shit’. In the meantime, the Morrison Agency had kept Floyd out on the road, plying their wares to the faithful, especially in Germany, France, The Netherlands and Belgium. Floyd’s gig sheet included repeat visits to the likes of Amsterdam’s Paradiso, a psychedelically painted theatre that modelled itself on America’s hip Fillmore West. ‘They seemed to pick up on what we were doing very quickly,’ said Nick Mason. ‘They made us feel very welcome.’
Back on home turf, they still played every university refectory, Top Rank ballroom and hippie hotspot that would take them. In September 1969, Floyd mucked in with Free, The Nice and Roy Harper at the Rugby Rag’s Blues Festival in Warwickshire. The event had been organised by The Rolling Stones’ old tour manager, Sam Jonas Cutler, who, a year earlier, had introduced Nick Mason to his friend, the musician, poet and composer Ron Geesin.
Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, Geesin learned to play the violin and the banjo, and began his musical career with a jazz band, The Downtown Syncopators, in 1961. Living in Notting Hill, he had recorded sessions for John Peel and had shared the bill with Pink Floyd at ‘The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream’ in 1967, by which time he’d made his own album, A Raise of Eyebrows. ‘I’d barely heard any of the Floyd’s music, though,’ he says now, ‘and when I did, I described it as “astral wandering”.’
By 1969, Ron and his wife, Frankie, had become friends with Nick and Lindy Mason. Geesin was now recording incidental music for TV advertisements and documentaries. In October, Mason introduced Geesin to Roger Waters. The two later booked a game of golf, with Waters demonstrating his keenly competitive edge on the course, though, as Geesin noted later, ‘I was slightly better than him at the time.’ From here on, Ron was drawn into the Floyd’s orbit, also spending time with Rick and Juliette. ‘Rick was particularly interested in modern jazz, and I was into the vintage jazz,’ recalls Ron. ‘We spent many an evening with him and Juliette, eating dinner, listening to music, but whenever any pot-smoking started, we stayed out of it. I was always a pint-of-beer man.’
Waters and Geesin collaborated for the first time at the end of the year on the soundtrack to a documentary, The Body. Based on writer Anthony Smith’s book of the same name, the film was a glorified biology lesson, narrated by actors Frank Finlay and Vanessa Redgrave. John Peel had recommended Geesin to the film’s producer Tony Garrett. Realising that Garrett required specific songs as well as background music, Geesin asked Waters to help. ‘Nicky Mason was a very nice chap and a good friend,’ said Ron, ‘but he didn’t have that manic flair to do something crazy and make it a piece of art. You could tell Roger was the creative force in Pink Floyd.’ The two worked on their music separately; Geesin in his ‘padded cell box’ in Notting Hill, Waters at home in Islington, and, later, in London’s Island Studios.
Geesin’s cello, violin and piano-led compositions shared space with four Waters-sung numbers and a couple of collaborative sound effects efforts. In the grand Floyd spirit of recycling, many ideas in The Body would reappear on their own albums, including the use of female backing vocalists and a repeat of the lyric ‘breathe, breathe in the air …’ on Dark Side of the Moon. Inevitably, the rest of Pink Floyd were bundled into the studio to give an uncredited performance on one track, ‘Give Birth to a Smile’.
It came as little surprise then when Waters asked Geesin to collaborate on Pink Floyd’s next studio album. After the previous year’s The Massed Gadgets of the Auximines, the band were still taken with the idea of a single lengthy composition, split into individual movements. Early in 1970, they premiered a piece then titled ‘The Amazing Pudding’, for which Gilmour had been the original catalyst, devising a chord sequence on the guitar that reminded him of Elmer Bernstein’s theme music to the 1960 Western movie The Magnificent Seven.
The presence of a choir and orchestral players during ‘The Final Lunacy’ at the Royal Albert Hall had triggered Waters’ interest in using the same on a Pink Floyd album. By 1970 many rock groups coveted the highbrow status of classical musicians, making the idea of performing with orchestras a fashionable pursuit. The Nice, The Moody Blues and Deep Purple (EMI Harvest’s other great white hopes) had all taken the plunge, with variable results. Now it would be Pink Floyd’s turn.
Gilmour’s movie theme intro now prefaced over twenty minutes of music. ‘It sounded like the theme to some awful Western,’ recalled Waters, interviewed in 1976. ‘Almost like a pastiche. Which is why we thought it would be a good idea to cover it with horns and strings and voices.’ Waters asked Ron Geesin to help out, before the band began another US tour.
‘They went off to the States and left me to get on with it,’ says Ron now. ‘They handed me this backing track, and I wrote out a score for a choir and brass players, sat in my studio, stripped to my underpants in the unbelievably hot summer of 1970. All I had was a rough mix of what they’d put down and edited together, but one of the problems was that the speeds didn’t always match up.’ Waters and Mason, never the most virtuoso of musicians, had recorded the backing track in just one take, hampered by a new EMI ruling which rationed supplies of tape, thereby prohibiting too many takes. As the piece was over twenty minutes long, this resulted in a wavering tempo. As Mason dryly explained, ‘It lacked the metronomic timekeeping that would have made life easier for everyone.’
Aside from Waters, the band had expressed only the sketchiest of ideas to Geesin before disappearing on tour. ‘As far as I can remember,’ says Geesin, ‘Rick came round to my studio one morning and we went through a few phrases, but that was it. I still have al
l the scraps of paper from those meetings with the band, and there are no notes at all from my meeting with Rick. With Dave, I still have a scrap on which I jotted down his suggestions for a theme, and on the other side the theme I came up with.’
On returning from the US, the band were presented with the score and booked into Abbey Road. This time, Norman Smith would be listed on the finished album as executive producer only. ‘A neat way of saying that he didn’t actually do anything,’ said Gilmour. ‘I told them it was time they produced themselves,’ insists Smith now, ‘and that they should call me if they got stuck. I only received one phone call for that album, so it was clear they could look after themselves.’ One of Norman’s jobs, though, had been to book the classical session musicians. But there were problems. Mason revealed to Geesin that the first beat of the bar was absent from his score, rendering it virtually unplayable by the hired musicians.
‘I was also not a conductor,’ admits Ron. ‘I made the mistake of giving the brass players more credit for thinking than they deserved. I’d been working with the top players from the New Philharmonic Orchestra on some TV commercials, and they would give you their ideas about a score. The EMI players were quality session musicians, but you’d ask them a question, and it was all: “You tell us”; “What do you want here?”; “I don’t understand!” One of the horn players was being especially mouthy. I was getting distraught. I thought: Fucking hell, I’ve wrecked myself doing this work, and it deserves to be done properly. Eventually, when I went to hit him, they had me removed.’
Geesin’s replacement was John Aldiss, a highly experienced conductor and King’s College Cambridge alumnus, whose choir had already provided some ethereal vocals on the Floyd epic.
‘That was fine by me,’ says Ron. ‘Except the way I’d envisaged the playing was a lot more percussive and punchy. I was very much into black jazz, like Mingus and Ellington, and my score reflected that. But John Aldiss hadn’t a bloody clue about jazz, so the way he got them to play it was a bit wet.’
Considering its bungled score and uppity session musicians, Atom Heart Mother’s six-part title track hangs together better than might be expected. The orchestrated overture, ‘Father’s Shout’, does, as Waters suggested, inspire images of cheroot-smoking high plains drifters, compounded by the sound of whinnying horses, but the whole thing plods rather than canters. The second section, ‘Breasty Milk’, is better, with the choir complementing Wright’s organ fills and Gilmour’s sleepy guitar solo. It’s Gilmour that saves ‘Funky Dung’ from living up to its title, his staccato fills and lazy riffs almost a dummy run for Dark Side of the Moon’s instrumental ‘Any Colour You Like’, before the choir return with some eerie Gregorian-style chanting. ‘Mind Your Throats Please’ suggests Waters, hank of hair hanging over his face, cigarette smouldering between his fingers, hunched over the console at Abbey Road, teasing out as many shivery sound effects as he can, including the noise of a crashing vehicle later reprised on Dark Side of the Moon. The closing ‘Remergence’ gathers together all the earlier strands in the fashion of a classical music coda, with frantic brass and strings and Nick Mason’s plodding drums limping over the finishing line.
An inquisitive A&R man nosing around the sessions fell for Waters’ sense of humour when the bass player and Geesin hid a record player under the desk and played a crackly 78rpm disc through the studio speakers, telling him it was ‘the new stuff ‘. In truth, opinion on the real thing was divided.
‘It wasn’t how I envisaged it, but it was a good compromise,’ says Geesin now. ‘I wanted more punch, but then again the Floyd always seemed to need that pastel wash on their music, even on the punchy stuff.’
As early as the mid-1970s, Waters and Wright were publicly expressing dissatisfaction with the album, while in the nineties Gilmour would dismiss it as ‘probably our lowest point artistically’. But, as Geesin suggests, ‘that could be because Dave had the least to do with it.’
Tirelessly vilified by lazy music critics for being progressive rock at its worst, Atom Heart Mother is less self-indulgent than its reputation suggests. While Harvest’s prog-rock pioneers The Moody Blues and Barclay James Harvest would forge entire careers out of orchestral rock, Floyd only flirted briefly with the genre. ‘I think it’s significant that I took all of the band, except for Roger, to see Wagner’s Parsifal at Covent Garden,’ says Ron, ‘and they all fell asleep.’
The album’s second half makes fewer demands on the listener, though, as Geesin says, ‘they were just scraps that they scraped together.’ Roger Waters’ solo composition, ‘If’, seemed to pick up where his own ‘Grantchester Meadows’ had left off on Ummagumma. Waters’ vocal sounds incredibly fey (‘prissy and English’ as he would later describe some of his own work) as he enunciates over the daintiest of melodies. The lyrics were less pastoral, addressing some soon-to-become-familiar issues, such as the threat of madness that would be explored in greater detail on Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. Meanwhile, lyrics mourning the loss of a friendship and references to ‘the spaces between friends’ were construed by some to refer to Syd Barrett. Syd showed up at the studio unannounced during the album sessions, accompanied by old Cambridge pal Geoff Mottlow, but, according to Ron Geesin, ‘he spun out again as quickly as he spun in’.
When asked in an interview in 2004 about Nick Mason’s recent book about the band, Roger Waters expressed his surprise that ‘there wasn’t more sex in it’. What to make then of Richard Wright’s ‘Summer ’68’, a song about the band’s second US tour in which its composer sings of the spiritual emptiness following an encounter with a groupie. Real or imaginary? ‘In the summer of ’68, there were groupies everywhere,’ said Wright, years later. ‘They’d come and look after you like a personal maid, do your washing, sleep with you and leave you with a dose of the clap.’ The song was a welcome exploration of human emotions after four years of interplanetary musings and psychedelic whimsy.
Gilmour’s contribution, ‘Fat Old Sun’, is similarly grounded, betraying the influence of hip new West Coast act Crosby, Stills and Nash, even if the vocalist’s unmistakably English tones and the ‘distant bells’ and ‘new-mown grass’ in the lyrics suggest bucolic, summer evenings by the Mill Pond in Cambridge rather than on a hippie ranch in Laurel Canyon.
Only ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’, the group-credited closing contribution (in reality, the work of Nick Mason), seems tied to the old Floyd tradition of sound effects for their own sake. To a backdrop of gentle piano and guitar-led jamming, the piece unfolds with the mouth-watering sound of Floyd’s chief roadie, Alan Styles, preparing a breakfast of cereal, toast, eggs, bacon and coffee, complete with amplified crunching, chewing, sizzling and gulping (tapes from the sessions typically began with the likes of ‘Egg Frying Take One’, followed by a startled ‘Whoops!’). At various intervals, Styles’s East Anglian tones drift across the stereo channels (‘I like marmalade …’) before the track closes with the sound of an hypnotically dripping tap recorded in Nick Mason’s kitchen. Harmless fun, but the joke runs dry over thirteen minutes. Gilmour would later declare ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ as ‘the most thrown-together thing we’ve ever done’. Nevertheless, it was performed live, and made a minor star of the titular roadie.
Alan Styles was a Cantabrigian who’d once worked the punts on the River Cam. His long hair, moustache and fashionably tight jeans belied the fact that he was several years older than the band. Alan had been in the Merchant Navy and became a physical training instructor while doing his National Service in Germany. An accomplished musician in his own right, he had played sax in the Cambridge band Phuzz alongside Pink Floyd’s future saxophonist Dick Parry.
‘Alan was a real character,’ recalled Nick Mason in 1973. ‘But he got to be such a big star that we were afraid to ask him to do things like lifting gear. In the end, we had to fire him.’
Styles chose to remain in the United States while on a Pink Floyd tour. He quit the music industry completely and eventually
built his own houseboat, last moored in San Francisco. He still lives in California.
Pink Floyd’s new composition had already made its way into the group’s setlist by June that year, some four months before the album’s release. Still called ‘The Amazing Pudding’, it was performed in full at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music in Shepton Mallet, a three-day shindig that also featured Led Zeppelin and Fairport Convention. The event was blighted by interminable traffic jams and a shortage of edible food. It’s a testament to the hardiness of the seventies rock fan that any were still there when the band appeared on stage five hours late at around 3 a.m. Even more extraordinary is that the John Aldiss Choir and the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble lasted that long to join the group for the grand finale.
In the audience was BBC producer Jeff Griffin. When Blackhill staged its second free festival in Hyde Park in July, Floyd were announced on a bill with Kevin Ayers and the Edgar Broughton Band. Steve O’Rourke agreed to Griffin’s request for a Floyd in-concert session, a few days before the Hyde Park gig, as it would also double up as a much-needed rehearsal for the show. ‘When Steve told me they needed a twelve-piece brass section and a twenty-piece choir, I nearly fell over,’ recalls Griffin now. ‘First of all there was the cost, and, secondly, the technical feasibility of recording the whole lot at somewhere like the Paris Theatre.’ Nevertheless, Jeff found the money and John Peel compered the show.
‘But there was still the issue that the piece didn’t have a title,’ says Griffin. ‘John wandered out to get an evening paper, and I think it was Roger who was looking over his shoulder. Peely was like, “Come on, what’s the name of this piece? I bet you find something in the paper.” And there in the Evening Standard was this story about a woman who’d been fitted with a nuclear-powered pacemaker. Roger was like, “That’s it – Atom Heart Mother.” Which had nothing whatsoever to do with the piece of music. We were saying, “Why?”, but the band were like, “Why not?”’
