by Mark Blake
Alongside Dick Parry, Floyd were now joined by backing singers Venetta Fields and Carlena Williams, collectively known as The Blackberries.
The tour opened on 4 November with two dates at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall. The set would comprise just five pieces: ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, ‘Raving and Drooling’, ‘You Gotta Be Crazy’, Dark Side of the Moon and an encore of ‘Echoes’. The visual extravaganza would begin with Dark Side of the Moon. For ‘Speak to Me’, an image of the moon was projected on the huge circular screen, growing bigger and bigger with each heartbeat, until it filled the entire screen. ‘On the Run’ would be illustrated with aircraft landing lights and flashing police lights before switching to swooping bird’s-eye footage of a city landscape and various explosions. Airborne clocks accompanied ‘Time’, George Greenough’s magnificent surfer appeared for ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, and a quick-fire display of Lear jets and banknotes flashed up on the screen during ‘Money’.
The logistics of such a big production brought with it another set of problems. ‘The equipment was pretty unreliable,’ recalled Wright. ‘The film would break or the projector would break. There were a lot of missing cues and trying to get back in time. We were always getting snappy with the technicians.’ A review in New Musical Express of the opening night complained about the malfunctioning sound system, too much feedback and ‘David Gilmour’s dreadful singing on the new material’.
Floyd’s refusal to play the media game is best summed up by Gilmour’s recent explanation: ‘Once we realised we could sell records and tickets without having to talk to the press, we chose not to.’ Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth sidestepped the band’s refusal to give him a ticket for the Edinburgh show by buying one from a tout and talking his way into a post-gig supper with the band. The day after, he managed to get an interview with Richard Wright, much to the displeasure of the rest of the group, especially Roger Waters, who was still smarting from a comment made by the keyboard player in a previous interview, suggesting that the Floyd’s lyrics weren’t that important.
Wright’s remarks in the subsequent Melody Maker article suggested a very insular attitude, even by Floyd standards: ‘I don’t listen to what is being played on the radio. I don’t watch Top of the Pops. I don’t watch The Old Grey Whistle Test. I don’t even know how the rock business is going …’
An even greater shock to Charlesworth was the news that the band were choosing their hotels on the basis of how near they were to decent golf courses. ‘I recall being astonished that Waters played golf,’ he later wrote. ‘It seemed the unlikeliest of pastimes for a man whose lyrical pre-occupations were space flight, insanity and death.’ As well as golf, Waters was also a keen squash player, with Gilmour his closest challenger in the band.
In his own memoir, Nick Mason (the band’s worst squash player, according to some) was admirably frank about the problems now besetting the Floyd. ‘We seemed to be more interested in booking squash courts than perfecting the set,’ he wrote. ‘We were demonstrating a distinct lack of commitment to the necessary input required.’
After the glamour and glitz of New York’s Radio City Hall, a trawl through Great Britain’s provincial theatres in a cold, wintry November must have seemed less enticing. Meanwhile, in the real world, the IRA blew up a pub in Birmingham a couple of weeks before the band were due in town, ramping up the paranoia and general unease. Inside the Floyd bubble, there was uncertainty about the new material, frustrations with their own or others’ performances, and a sense that the visual rather than musical aspect of the show was now becoming too important.
In early 1974, cinema projectionist Pete Revell answered an ad in Melody Maker, and found himself being interviewed by Arthur Max for the job of projectionist in the Floyd’s road crew. (‘I was shocked to discover it was for Pink Floyd, as it was the smallest, cheapest ad you could possibly buy.’)
‘There was always a vibe around Roger,’ says Revell now. ‘Everybody felt it on that tour, even, I think, the band. David was a real gentleman and Rick was away in his own quiet world, but Roger was so bloody aloof, so far up his own arse.’ Nick Mason was also well liked, though Revell recalls that the drummer’s request to a crew member to buy him a half-inch drive socket set during an afternoon off in Bristol went ignored. The crew spent the day in the pub, wondering why Mason needed a half-inch drive socket set for his drum kit. Later, the penny dropped, when the drummer screeched up to the band’s hotel in his new toy, a second-hand Ferrari.
Problems within the crew were also having an impact. The band’s newly acquired mixing desk proved a temperamental beast, and front-of-house sound engineer Rufus Cartwright was let go after just a few dates. Order was restored by his replacement, Brian Humphries, who had worked at Pye Studios and engineered the More soundtrack. But Arthur Max, the band’s brilliant, if fiery-tempered lighting wizard, would also find his days numbered, as the fractious atmosphere took its toll.
Day after day they would be confronted with new stories about Max’s run-ins with crew members and venue officials. ‘I walked out twice – told him to shove the job,’ recalls Pete Revell of the friction amongst the crew (often involving Arthur). ‘They sent Steve O’Rourke round to my house to talk me into coming back.’
Max’s last Pink Floyd gig would be at the Sophia Gardens Pavilion in Cardiff. His deputy, the more emollient Graeme Fleming, would take his place. After Fleming’s debut at the Liverpool Empire, Waters would inform the crowd that this had been the best gig of the tour. ‘The Liverpudlians thought it was something to do with them,’ says Revell, ‘but really it was because they had all stopped rowing.’ The Floyd’s outspoken lighting designer would eventually go on to a glittering career in Hollywood as a movie art director, winning an Oscar nomination for his work on Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Gladiator.
While some equilibrium had been restored by the time of the Liverpool Empire show, the band had still received their fiercest dressing down yet in the music press. The 23 November issue of New Musical Express included a detailed critique of the band’s Wembley Empire Pool gig a week earlier, written by their star writer Nick Kent. In it, Kent castigated Pink Floyd for their musical lethargy (‘Floyd, as always, let the song sprawl out to last twice as long as it should’), their indifference towards the audience (‘they wander on like four navvies who’ve just finished their tea break’) and the perceived hypocrisy of Waters’ latest lyrics (‘I cannot think of another rock group who live a more desperately bourgeois existence in the privacy of their own homes’). Its opening salvo was especially cutting about David Gilmour: ‘His hair looked filthy there on stage, seemingly anchored down by a surfeit of scalp grease and tapering off below the shoulders with a spectacular festooning of split ends.’ A comment that caused some amusement with laid-back, American backing singers Venetta Fields and Carlena Williams who rather enjoyed challenging the band’s painfully English reserve.
‘The hair thing was a low blow on my part,’ admits Nick Kent now. ‘But I still stand by what I wrote. The Floyd’s whole attitude that night was like, “Oh fuck, I suppose we better do this now”, as if it was all too much trouble. They really did remind me of workmen, wandering on to dig up the road. Like it was a job that had to be done. I saw Rick Wright after that piece came out and he actually thanked me for it. He said he didn’t like what I’d written, but at the same time it stimulated some kind of intra-group discussion, because as a group they had become so detached from each other. He said it actually brought them together.’
Kent’s colleague Pete Erskine interviewed a furious David Gilmour a few weeks later. (In a rare example of conviviality between Pink Floyd and a rock critic, Erskine, a sometime builder and carpenter, would end up living in one of the band-owned flats on McGregor Road.) Naturally, Gilmour defended the band’s position to the hilt. Kent had taken umbrage at a line in the new song ‘Gotta Be Crazy’ – ‘Gotta keep everyone buying this shit’ – believing that it was sneering at the band’s fans. But Gilmour cla
imed that Waters’ lyrics were directed as much at the band as their audience. ‘I’m cynical of our position,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone on our level feels deserving of the superhuman adulation number.’ Gilmour explained that Sunday Times writer Derek Jewell’s gushing appraisal of the same Wembley show had irritated them also, as it was ‘probably the worst [show] we’ve done on the whole tour’. Yet the guitarist couldn’t maintain a united front against all of the charges, admitting that there was laziness in the group and confessing that Dark Side of the Moon had ‘trapped us creatively’. Privately, Roger Waters found himself acknowledging more than a little truth in some of Nick Kent’s observations. Always fearful of complacency, he had a nagging sense that something needed to change.
By the end of the tour in December, Waters was dedicating some of the performances of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ to ‘Sydney Barrett’. Meanwhile, EMI/Capitol had reissued the group’s first two albums, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets, as a double LP package entitled A Nice Pair. Hipgnosis’ packaging included various images relating to the album’s title and similar catchphrases, including ‘a nip in the air’ and ‘a kettle of fish’. However, an attempt to run a photograph of the boxer Floyd Patterson ran aground when he demanded $5,000. Patterson was substituted by a picture of the Pink Floyd football team, in which all four members, plus Steve O’Rourke, the now departed Arthur Max and Hipgnosis’s own Storm Thorgerson could be seen posing. Gilmour later recalled a particularly bloody defeat at the hands of the North London Marxists in which the guitarist nearly bit off part of his tongue. For the title, A Nice Pair, Hipgnosis went for the very literal, including a pair of naked breasts and a photograph of court jester Emo wearing a nice pair of Peter Wynne-Willson’s cosmonocles. The gaps in Emo’s teeth, visible in the picture, would soon be rectified, thanks to the generosity of his old friend Gilmour.
‘Dave sent me to his dentist four times,’ admits Emo. ‘The first new set of teeth I had done, I got beaten up about a day later in a pub on the Kings Road, and Dave had to pay to have them done again.’ Gilmour’s largesse would extend to others in the Cambridge fraternity, paying for ex-roadie Pip Carter’s drug rehabilitation, and, over the years, quietly helping out with mortgage payments and tax bills for those friends finding themselves in dire financial straits.
In 1974 Syd Barrett emerged again from his Cambridge hidey-hole. A year before, several months after the Stars débâcle, Barrett had been seen playing guitar alongside former Cream bassist Jack Bruce in a Cambridge church hall. Royalties from the Pink Floyd compilation Relics had started coming in, and Barrett again moved to London. After a spell at the Park Lane Hilton he took out a lease on two flats in Chelsea Cloisters, near to Sloane Square. He filled the first sixth-floor apartment with guitars, amplifiers and other possessions, while living in a two-room flat on the ninth.
In April 1974, Nick Kent had written an article about Barrett in New Musical Express, interviewing former associates, including David Gilmour, and drawing together the wealth of anecdotes about the former Floyd singer, many of which subsequently passed into legend: the Mandrax-in-the-hair tale; the meltdown on American TV …
‘Tony Secunda, who used to manage The Move, told me the story about Syd rubbing Mandrax into his hair,’ says Kent. ‘Then someone else told me the same story. As is the case with after-the-fact gossiping, it seemed to me that maybe 70 per cent of these stories were actually true.’ These stories also included the claims that ‘Barrett may or may not have worked in a factory, as a gardener, tried to enrol as an architecture student, grown mushrooms in his basement, been a tramp, spent two weeks in New York busking, tried to become a Pink Floyd roadie …’
Seven months before his scathing live review in NME, Kent found David Gilmour an obliging interviewee: ‘We met in a pub in Covent Garden and he was totally candid about the Syd situation and didn’t try and whitewash it. Gilmour had this everyman quality about him. Totally unpretentious. He was with an American girl then, Ginger, who kept bugging him throughout the interview to go to a restaurant with her. She kept fidgeting and saying, “How long is this going to go on, Dave?” And he was only there for forty-five minutes.’
As well as suggesting that some of Syd’s problems were attributable to his father’s death and that ‘his mother always pampered him – and made him out to be a genius of sorts’, Gilmour also wisely pinpricked the mystical aura already surrounding Barrett: ‘He functions on a totally different plane of logic, and some people will claim, “Well, yeah, man, he’s on a higher cosmic level”, but basically there’s something drastically wrong.’
In his article, Kent mentioned that Barrett was now living in Chelsea, and frequently visited the Morrison Agency. Bryan Morrison owned Lupus Music, Barrett’s publishing company, who took care of his royalties. Kent also mentioned that EMI were keen to get Barrett back into the studio. Between July and August that year, Syd returned on several occasions to Abbey Road, at Bryan Morrison’s behest.
Engineer John Leckie, then working with singer-songwriter Roy Harper, was present when Pete Jenner brought Syd in. ‘The plan was that Syd was going to make another album by himself,’ says Leckie. ‘He was going to make the album by doing different things every day – piano one day, drums the next, bass the next. I remember he came in with a load of new guitars. But we never got that far. I don’t think we made it to the piano.’
The idea was for Barrett to be recorded playing whatever he wanted, and for Jenner to listen through the tapes, and take anything worth-while, onto which a bass and drums could be overdubbed. A handful of scraps emerged. But the sessions were a disaster. Syd hadn’t written any new songs, and, according to one observer, turned up one day without any strings on his guitar.
‘Bryan Morrison was there,’ continues Leckie. ‘Bryan always smoked a cigar and was in evening wear. He was a big guy who went on to play polo with Prince Charles. Morrison kept pushing Syd – “Come on, Syd, come on, Syd, get it together” – but it was no use. He didn’t have anything.’
Morrison’s anxiety may have been exacerbated by another incident involving Syd from around the same time. Barrett had turned up at Lupus Music and demanded a royalty cheque. When he was told that he’d been in a day before and had signed for his cheque then, Syd began shouting. Morrison came out of his office to reprimand him and Barrett bit Bryan’s outstretched finger, drawing blood.
At Chelsea Cloisters, Barrett installed a huge colour TV set, and splashed out on expensive hi-fi equipment and clothes, most of which were stashed in the sixth-floor apartment and rarely touched again. His frequent haunt became the neighbouring Marlborough Arms, where he’d sit alone, polishing off pints of Guinness. Over the course of a few months, he retreated back into himself, cutting off all his hair again, gaining a vast amount of weight, and donating his possessions randomly to the porters at Chelsea Cloisters. At least one eyewitness from the time remembered seeing Barrett in Sloane Square wearing a woman’s dress underneath his overcoat.
‘After my article came out, I kept encountering people who knew Syd from the Cambridge days,’ says Nick Kent. ‘There was always someone saying, “Oh, I was his girlfriend for two months” or “I used to roadie for one of his groups”, and they all spoke about how much he’d changed physically.’
John Whiteley, Syd’s occasional flatmate from Earlham Street nearly ten years before, was among those who spotted him in London that year. ‘I saw him on the Kings Road,’ says Whiteley. ‘It was shocking, because he’d been such a handsome boy. Now he was so overweight, and he’d shaved his head, but he was still walking on his tip-toes, in the way that he did. I stayed on the other side of the road. I couldn’t speak to him.’
Whiteley’s impressions were echoed by others. The sightings soon had a depressing familiarity: the bloated, bald man incongruously dressed in a Hawaiian shirt or huge overcoat, hanging around Earls Court or South Kensington, walking the same way, up on his toes.
Storm Thorgerson and
Aubrey Powell would also encounter Syd that year. A few weeks after the NME article, EMI reissued Barrett’s two solo LPs as a double album package. Storm and Po went to Chelsea Cloisters to try and take a new photograph of Syd for the album sleeve. They knocked on the door of his flat. ‘Finally, he called to us through the door, “Who’s there?”’ remembers Po. ‘I said, “It’s Storm and Po. Can we come in and have a chat?” And he just said, “Go away!” That was the last time I ever spoke to him.’
‘Part of me was angry,’ admits Storm. ‘I thought: Screw you, I’ll be off. Here I was knocking on the door of someone I’d known since I was fourteen and he wouldn’t let me in.’
David Gilmour’s confession in NME that Dark Side of the Moon had left the band ‘creatively trapped’, was still pertinent when Pink Floyd gathered at Abbey Road in January 1975.
‘After Dark Side we were really floundering around,’ said Gilmour years later. ‘I wanted to make the next album more musical. I always thought that Roger’s emergence as a great lyric writer on the last album was such that he came to overshadow the music.’
Waters wanted to make another themed album, this time dealing with the idea of emotional absence; the concept of people being there but not really there, into which Waters’ reflections on the music industry and the band’s general state of mind could also be filtered. Gilmour simply wanted to record the tracks they’d already written and steer clear of another grand concept. Meanwhile Wright struggled with Waters’ ideas, as he simply didn’t share the bassist’s preoccupation with the evils of the music industry. ‘Roger’s view wasn’t necessarily my view,’ he said.
