Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  In 1966, Lon Goddard was an American expatriate living in London. He ran what he describes as a “sandwich and lager bar” and recalls walking to Middle Earth, a nearby club in London’s Covent Garden. There, he saw Pink Floyd for the first time. “There was a lot of incomprehensible noise coming from a very small stage,” he says. “Because at that time, Pink Floyd was so experimental that I think [the music] was mostly within their heads.”

  The free-form music bore little resemblance to the short songs the band would soon record for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. “There was no conventional structure to what they were doing,” Goddard says.

  Peter Jenner recalls his first encounter with Pink Floyd, in March 1966. Then twenty-one, Jenner was a lecturer at the London School of Economics. After a long day of grading exams, he decided he needed a break. “Some acquaintances of mine were putting on a ‘happening’ in the Marquee, which was then a jazz club in Oxford Street,” he says. “And so I thought I could get on the guest list, which I did.” Once there, he found a somewhat unusual scene. In addition to poets reading their works, he witnessed “girls who were highly naked or scantily clad in colored jelly or something. It wasn’t like a standard gig where you have a beer, and one band comes on, and then you have a few records, and then another band comes on.”

  Eventually the group—then billing itself as The Pink Floyd Sound—came on to perform. Jenner says that at first the band played a few standard blues numbers, like “Dust My Broom” (“I don’t know if they actually played that,” says Jenner, “but they played things like that”). He does recalls that the band definitely played “Louie, Louie.”

  But Jenner was nonetheless intrigued because some of the familiar tunes didn’t have the then-obligatory guitar solo. “Instead,” Jenner explains, “there were these strange noises going on. And I wandered around the stage trying to work out how and where they were coming from.” He eventually sorted out that what he was hearing was the combined sound of Richard Wright’s Farfisa organ and Syd Barrett’s electric guitar, both sounds processed through a device called a Binson Echorec, with incredible amounts of sustain.

  “Instead of there being a blues break,” Jenner says, “there was this sort of instrumental sound thing going on.” At the time, he suspected—but wasn’t sure—that much of what he was hearing was improvised. “In hindsight, it was probably just a sort of one chord thing, just sort of waffling on one chord,” Jenner says, noting that what Barrett and Wright were doing was similar to the sounds the Doors were making more than 5,000 miles away in Los Angeles.

  But at the time, the London music scene was still somewhat insular; Jenner explains that while people in Great Britain might have heard about underground acts like the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish, they were far less likely to have actually heard their music. So while the then-new idea of “psychedelic” music was understood to mean that the bands “wore psychedelic clothes and took drugs,” Jenner still felt that the music he was hearing from Pink Floyd was itself psychedelic.

  By this time, Jenner and some of his friends—among their number John “Hoppy” Hopkins, Felix Mendelssohn, and American expatriate producer Joe Boyd—had decided to start a record label. “I decided this band playing this weird improvisation stuff was something that we should have on our label.” He decided to pay the band a visit. “I went out to find them in their house in Highgate, knocked on the door, and I said, ‘Are you the Pink Floyd Sound?’” One of them—probably Roger Waters, Jenner recalls—said yes. “I said, ‘Well, I would like to have you all on a label. I have an underground label and I’m very interested in what you’re doing.’ And they said, ‘Well, great, but we’re going on holiday now. See you when we get back.’ They slammed the door.”

  Jenner returned a month later, again finding Waters. He made his pitch, but Waters replied that the band wasn’t interested in signing to a label. But they were looking for a manager. Jenner was interested, so he contacted another friend, Andrew King. “I said to him, ‘Why don’t we manage this band?’ He said, ‘All right,’ because he was just leaving his job. He also had a little bit of money that an aunt had left him. I still had my job at the LSC.”

  Jenner and King began the work of lining up live dates for the band. Jenner’s father was a clergyman in London’s working-class districts, so Jenner knew a thing or two about fund-raising events featuring live music. He and his friends were supporters of another underground venture, the London Free School. “It needed money for the new autumn term coming up,” he recalls, “so we should do a fundraiser.” Pink Floyd was booked to perform at a church hall in London’s Notting Hill, and Jenner says that Hoppy “somehow got a hold of some draft-dodging Americans who had a light show.”

  “We did a gig, and it was really successful,” says Jenner. “So we did another one, and people were being turned away.” The now ongoing series of events was moved to a larger venue—“a ballroom, a sort of really old Irish bar/dance hall,” Jenner recalls—dubbed by the event’s organizers as UFO. “And that’s where things took off,” he says.

  Thanks in large part to the success of the Beatles, it was becoming less fashionable for groups to play “covers.” Original material was a mark of quality for performing bands. “I knew that Syd had written some songs,” Jenner says. “I said, ‘Do you know any more songs?’ Syd said yes, and from that point on, they started doing their own songs.” Jenner believes that Barrett’s new focus on songwriting would enhance Pink Floyd’s ability to land a recording contract with a record label. And though in subsequent years it would become a non-issue, the band’s visual style circa 1967 was a selling point—part of the whole package—as well. “The key was Syd writing songs and singing them,” Jenner says. “He was also the one who had the best taste in clothes, which was becoming very important. But Roger had appalling taste in clothes, and we all were embarrassed by that.”

  Jenner makes an important distinction between Barrett being the face (and songwriter) of the band and being Pink Floyd’s guiding force. “It was his band,” Jenner says, “but in no way was he the band leader.” He strives to clarify his point. “Creatively, he was. But not in any organizational things, you know, ‘What gig are we doing tomorrow?’ He was more, ‘Just pick me up, tell me what we’re doing,’ and then he’d do it. Roger was always the most organized one.”

  That quality of Pink Floyd’s bassist would prove essential to the band’s survival in a few months. But for the time being, the band was at the peak of its powers with Syd Barrett as its front man.

  Chapter 4

  Reaction in G

  While set lists of the earliest Pink Floyd live performances are all but nonexistent, it is known that by October 1966 the group was performing songs that would eventually surface months later in studio versions on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. And though popular lore among fans holds that Pink Floyd’s live sets of 1967 bore little sonic resemblance to the music on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in fact the band performed every song from Piper live onstage at least once.

  A set list from an October 14, 1966, concert at All Saints Church Hall featured at least six songs destined for Piper, including “The Gnome,” the group composition “Interstellar Overdrive,” Roger Waters’s “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk,” “Matilda Mother,” “Pow R. Toch H.,” and “Astronomy Dominé,” all Syd Barrett compositions except as noted. Curiously, the nearly two-year-old tune “Lucy Leave” (from the Decca sessions) was included in the set as well. “Let’s Roll Another One” was also performed, as were some other titles: “Pink,” “Gimme a Break,” “Stoned Alone,” “I Can Tell,” “Snowing,” and “Flapdoodle Dealing.” While no songs with those titles would be recorded by Pink Floyd, the band’s early—and long-held—practice of changing song titles as they went along may well mean that the songs from the All Saints gig appeared on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn under other names.

  Recording sessions for “Lucifer Sam”—originally called “Percy the Rat Catcher”
—had only begun around April 11, 1967, but within days the song became part of Pink Floyd’s live set; the first documented performance dates from an April 15 concert at the Kinetic Arena on the West Pier in England’s seaside resort city of Brighton.

  In fact, some time after Barrett’s departure, portions of at least two of the songs from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn would be reworked and incorporated into a larger thematic work, the 1969 live presentation known as “The Man and the Journey.”

  But seemingly as quickly as Piper songs were added to the group’s live set, most were dropped. The only tunes from Pink Floyd’s debut album to remain in the band’s live set for more than a short while were the more atmospheric cuts like “Pow R. Toc H.,” “Interstellar Overdrive,” and “Astronomy Dominé.”

  By this time, Pink Floyd was attracting the notice of music critics and well-admired musicians. As of January 1967, guitarist Jimi Hendrix—who had come to England to get his solo career started—hadn’t yet seen or heard the group live. His impression of the band would seem to have been secondhand, but it still provides an insight into the skepticism that greeted Pink Floyd at most every turn. Speaking to Steve Barker, reporter for West One, a student publication of the Regent Street Polytechnic, where several members of the Floyd had attended, he said, “I’ve heard they have beautiful lights but they don’t sound like nothing.” Writing about Pink Floyd for IT, Barry Miles (usually known simply as Miles) sniffed that “the melodic line has gone and been replaced by feedback.”

  That same month, a Melody Maker story with a Chris Welch and Nick Jones byline quoted Nick Mason. “We don’t call ourselves a psychedelic group or say that we play psychedelic pop music,” he said. “Let’s face it, there isn’t really a definition for the word ‘psychedelic’. It’s something that has all taken place around us—not within us.”

  For his part, in a January 1967 interview for the CBC, Syd Barrett admitted, “you can’t sort of walk around the kitchen humming to The Pink Floyd.” And if you did, he said, “you’d probably scream.” He described the band’s onstage approach this way: “We just sort of let loose a bit . . . sort of hitting the guitar a bit harder and not worrying quite so much about the chords.” But in an April interview with Melody Maker, Barrett backpedaled just a bit, saying, “If we play well on stage I think most people understand that what we play isn’t just a noise.”

  While in interviews, managers Peter Jenner and Andrew King would sometimes compare Pink Floyd to innovative artists like Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, the band members would only take the jazz references so far. Waters believed that what Pink Floyd was doing was even more free-form than jazz, though it’s reasonable to assume he was thinking of “trad jazz” (known in the United States as Dixieland) when he contrasted Pink Floyd’s music with jazz.

  “If you’re improvising on a jazz number,” Waters explained in an interview, “if it’s a 16-bar number, you stick to 16-bar choruses and you take 16-bar solos.” But when Pink Floyd played live, they might play 17½ bars. “And then it will all stop happening when it stops happening: maybe 423 bars later, or 4.”

  In that same interview, Barrett and Mason expressed the difference in a much more down-to-earth fashion. “And it’s not like jazz, because . . .” began Barrett, “. . . we all want to be pop stars,” said Mason, finishing Syd’s thought for him. “We don’t want to be jazz musicians.” Taking a cue from his band mates, Waters summed things up. “We don’t really look upon ourselves as musicians as such.”

  An event billed as the “14 Hour Technicolor Dream” was an April 29, 1967, concert “happening” that would become the stuff of legends. A benefit concert to fund the counterculture publication IT, the event featured an eclectic lineup of nearly four dozen performers, including The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, former Moody Blues vocalist Denny Laine, Yoko Ono, The Move, Tomorrow (featuring guitarist Steve Howe, later of Yes), and a future Pink Floyd collaborator, Ron Geesin. Pink Floyd was the headlining performer at the event, staged at the Great Hall of the Alexandria Palace in London.

  Pink Floyd wouldn’t take the stage until early morning; the band had only just arrived straight from an engagement in Zandam, the Netherlands, where they had played “Arnold Layne” for a Dutch television program. Steve Howe was at the show from the beginning, but the specific details of the event are largely lost to time. “Let’s not deny: everybody was pretty flipped out at that point,” he explains. Howe does recall that since Pink Floyd was the headliner, use of the band’s favored brand of amplifier, WEM, would be required of all performers. Howe notes that he “really, really didn’t like” WEM gear. “It was 100 watts, and I was a 50-watt guy,” he says. With little choice, he plugged in. “I guess I got some sort of noise I could recognize,” he says.

  In May 1967, the group staged its most high-profile performance to date. Dubbed “Games for May,” the concert took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. The show featured one of the first uses of some new audio technology. Nick Mason described it in an interview later that year with a Record Mirror reporter. “We worked out a fantastic stereophonic sound system whereby the sounds traveled ’round the Hall in a sort of circle, giving the audience an eerie effect of being absolutely surrounded by this music.” He was forthright as he summed up the debut of the so-called Azimuth Coordinator. “Our ideas,” Mason admitted, “were far more advanced than our musical capabilities.”

  At least three audience recordings of Pink Floyd in its Syd Barrett–led lineup do exist; while the audio quality on these is less than optimal—the vocals are all but inaudible—they do provide a sonic window into the band’s onstage musical character. “We’ve had problems with our equipment and we can’t get the P.A. to work because we play extremely loudly,” Waters told Chris Welch of Melody Maker in an August 1967 interview. “It’s a pity because Syd writes great lyrics and nobody ever hears them.”

  The 2016 box set, The Early Years, features a recording of a Stockholm, Sweden, concert, the second show in a five-night Scandinavian tour. Alongside four tunes from Piper (which had been released a month earlier), the set includes an unreleased song, “Scream Thy Last Scream.” The live arrangement is quite close to the studio recording (the latter of which wouldn’t see official release for some forty-nine years) but focuses more on a hard, insistent rhythmic groove that underpins an exploratory guitar solo from Barrett.

  A highlight of that Stockholm show is a seven-minute track the compilers of The Early Years call “Reaction in G.” The title’s provenance says a lot about Pink Floyd’s attitude toward live performance; reportedly frustrated at repeated calls from the audience to play their popular singles, the band launched into a free-form improvisation in the key of G major. Remarking in a 1970 Georgia Straight interview about the fact that some people came to Pink Floyd gigs to dance, Roger Waters quipped to the interviewer, “We cleared more ballrooms than you’ve had hot dinners.”

  Eventually, “Reaction in G” became a featured part of the band’s live set, though—save for a very brief snippet on a BBC session, “Reaction in G” would not be attempted in the studio. Confusingly, two other audience tapes from the era feature an opening tune labeled “Reaction in G,” but while those sound somewhat like each other, they bear no resemblance to the so-called “Reaction” on The Early Years.

  Yet perhaps the most notable song from the Stockholm performance is a Roger Waters composition, the spooky, minor-key “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” An example of Pink Floyd road-testing a song before committing it to tape, the Stockholm recording shows that the hypnotic, increasingly malevolent arrangement was fully developed before the group entered the studio to record it in October 1967. Built around two chords—E minor and A—“Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” features near-whispered vocals from Waters, mallet and tom-tom work by drummer Mason, and celestial organ runs from Richard Wright. Barrett’s guitar is limited to some subtle strumming. Notably, the version of the song as eventually released on the ba
nd’s second LP, 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets, would not feature Syd Barrett (or if it did, his contribution is subtle to the point of inaudibility). His rapid mental decline resulted in greatly diminished participation in the Saucerful sessions; in the end, he’d only appear on two tracks.

  One other show from the Scandinavian mini-tour was captured on tape by a fan; the third of a three-night run at Copenhagen, Denmark’s Starclub featured a similar set list, but does contain one rarity: the only known (or at least only recorded) version of a song known as “One in a Million.” Yet another Waters lead vocal, its presence suggests that the band was already making adjustments to compensate for Barrett’s growing onstage unreliability. Built upon a repetitive bass line, “One in a Million” has little in common with the Barrett-penned Piper material; its doom-laden demeanor is much more of a piece with the band’s post–Syd Barrett output, and presages the “tribal psych” of twenty-first-century psychedelic revival groups such as Austin, Texas’s Black Angels.

  Another unreleased fan recording of the era was made at the Hippy Happy Fair in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in mid-November 1967; Pink Floyd appeared on the third night of a four-day festival that also featured the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Soft Machine, and Tomorrow. The most notable performance from the Rotterdam tape is a more than eleven-minute reading of “Pow R. Toc H.” In a 1970 interview conducted while Pink Floyd was on tour in New York City, Nick Mason recalled the genesis of the tune. “One geezer went up to the microphone and started [vocalizing], and then everyone picked up on it and put the other things in it. And then the drums picked up and . . . that was more or less that, wasn’t it?”