Inside Out Page 3
Storm Thorgerson remembers Syd as an interesting, but not necessarily the most interesting, member of a talented set of friends living in Cambridge, all enthused by the elegance and culture of the town and the countryside around. Syd was good-looking, charming, funny, played a bit of guitar and smoked the occasional joint. Certainly when he joined our band in London, there was no sudden transition in our musical tastes. Syd was quite comfortable with the Bo Diddley, Stones and R&B cover versions that formed the bulk of our repertoire. Storm also recalls that Syd adored the Beatles, at a time when most of his friends preferred the Stones.
Just as Stanhope Gardens solved our rehearsal problems, the Poly was a ready-made performance facility. The impression I have is that we actually had to do quite a lot of work at the college. The architectural course required significant amounts of studying outside the class, and evenings at home – and later in the flats we lived in – were spent working, or at least trying to despite any other distractions. There was little, if any, going out to clubs or bars during the week, but come Friday night we could relax in the pub, and at weekends there were regular events within the Poly. These took place in a large hall that had the feel of a gym. There was a stage at one end, where various functions and occasional theatrical productions took place. The hops were straightforward dances, with a record player blasting out the latest hit parade, but once in a while a live band would be booked.
As the only house band we managed on a few occasions to support the main act. This was quite a significant development for us, and we must have hustled hard to get the opportunity. We would probably have got paid, but not much; it was the prospect of playing that was exciting. We were not daunted by the thought of performing – in any case, we were only going to get up and do some cover versions for people to dance to – but we were overwhelmed by the professionalism of the full-timers. The way they did their set underlined what a gulf there was between a band playing regularly for a living and a part-time student group like ours.
I particularly remember supporting the Tridents, who at the time featured Jeff Beck on guitar. The Tridents was Jeff’s first band of any commercial note, and they had established a reasonable reputation; more significantly when Jeff left the Tridents, it was to take over Eric Clapton’s role in the Yardbirds, and enhance his reputation as one of the great blues rock guitarists, but one who was also able to create that dancing-round-the-handbag party classic ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’.
Around Christmas 1964, we went into a studio for the first time. We wangled this through a friend of Rick’s who worked at the studio in West Hampstead, and who let us use some down time for free. The session included one version of an old R&B classic ‘I’m A King Bee’, and three songs written by Syd: ‘Double O Bo’ (Bo Diddley meets the 007 theme), ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Lucy Leave’. These became our staple demo songs, on ¼” tape and a limited vinyl pressing, and were invaluable since many venues demanded these prior to live auditions.
Curiously enough, around this time Rick had a song called ‘You’re The Reason Why’ published and released as a B-side on a single called ‘Little Baby’ by an outfit known as Adam, Mike & Tim, and so he received a publishing advance of £75 years before any of the rest of us knew what ‘rip-off’ really meant…
We managed to land a residency later in the spring of 1965 at the Countdown Club, a basement at 1A Palace Gate, just off Kensington High Street. The Countdown Club was below a hotel or a block of flats, which of course led to problems about the level of noise emanating from the club. The Countdown had no particular thematic decor or moody ambience. It was a place set up for music, with a relatively young clientele, and the drinks were quite cheap. I think the idea was that, given the lack of advertising, the owners expected groups like ours to bring along a large bunch of friends for support, who would refresh themselves at the club’s bar.
We played from about nine at night until two in the morning with a couple of breaks. Three sets of ninety minutes each meant we started repeating songs towards the end of the evening as we ran out of numbers and alcohol affected the audience’s short-term memory. It was also the beginning of a realisation that songs could be extended with lengthy solos. We started to assemble a wider variety of songs as well as a small but loyal following. Although initially using amplification, we had only done two or three successful nights when the club was served with a noise injunction. We were so desperate for the work (this was our only paying gig at the time) that we offered to perform acoustically. Roger somehow acquired a double bass, Rick dusted off the upright piano, Bob and Syd played acoustic guitars and I used a pair of wire brushes. I know the repertoire included ‘How High The Moon’, one of Bob’s showcase tunes, and ‘Long Tall Texan’, but the other numbers have long since been forgotten.
At the same time, we auditioned for two potential career openings. One was as a support act at a club called Beat City. They had advertised for bands in the Melody Maker, the weekly paper that – until it closed in 2000 – carried information on ‘Musicians Available and Wanted’ (‘A Able Accordionist…’ was the opener for years). We saw the ad for Beat City and along we went, performing a selection of our own songs. They turned us down.
Another audition was for Ready Steady Go!, which was the definitive music show of the day, where groovy young people could be seen dancing to groovy young bands. Broadcast on ITV, the still comparatively new commercial channel, it could be a little more radical than the BBC would have dared. Regrettably even the Ready Steady Go! producers found us rather too radical for the general viewer, and suggested they would like to hear us again, this time playing songs they were more familiar with. But at least they had shown some interest, and had the decency to invite us all back to be in the studio audience the next week. This gave me a good reason to head off to Carnaby Street and buy a pair of hound’s-tooth black and white check, flared hipster trousers, as the audience were to be seen flouncing about in front of the cameras. It was also an opportunity to see bands like the Rolling Stones and the Lovin’ Spoonful live.
Another cracking idea to launch our career was going in for rock contests. We entered two. One was a local event at the Country Club in North London. We had played here a couple of times, and had a small knot of fans, so we got through to the finals without too much difficulty. At this point however we hit a snag. We had also entered a grander event, the Melody Maker Beat Contest (Beat was a heavily over-used word that decade). Anxiously we had sent off our demo tape along with band photos taken in the back garden of Mike’s house, and notable for our band uniform of tab-collar shirts and blue Italian knitted ties, all from Cecil Gee’s in the Charing Cross Road.
The demo and the knitted ties seemed to do the trick. Having gained our entry to the contest we then found that our heat was to take place on the same night as the final of the Country Club contest. The final couldn’t be changed, and nor could our heat, since the Melody Maker contest was an elaborate device allowing a promoter to make money by selling quantities of tickets to each band’s supporters in an attempt to stuff the ballot box. Eventually we managed to negotiate with another band to let us go on first. This was without doubt the worst possible slot (and although it didn’t make any difference, our banner was misspelt Pink Flyod). Our later slot went to the winners, the St Louis Union, who couldn’t believe their luck – and who eventually won the national first prize. After playing, we rushed to the Country Club, only to be disqualified from any chance of first place by our late arrival. This left a band called the Saracens to take the honours and grasp the career opportunities.
Bob Klose left the band during the summer of 1965 at the insistence of both his father and his college tutors. He did surreptitiously play a few more times with us, but even though we were losing the person we considered our most proficient musician, it didn’t seem like a major setback. This remarkable prescience – or sheer lack of imagination – was to become something of a habit.
I was about to start a year of work experience worki
ng for Lindy’s father, Frank Rutter, at his architectural office near Guildford. I have Roger to thank for getting me this far through the course, since he coached me through the mysteries of structural maths when I was in danger of failing the exam re-take. Roger on the other hand was held back a year, and told to get some practical experience, in spite of receiving a commendation from an outside examiner. I think the staff were finally responding to long-term exposure to Roger’s disdain, coupled with his increasing lack of interest in attending lectures. Their decision was either pure revenge, or it could be that they simply needed a break from Roger.
Frank was a good, practical architect, but was also an admirer of the new movement, and had a strong sense of the culture and history of architecture. In a way, he represented something of a role model for what I might have aspired to had I stuck with architecture as a career. He had recently finished the university in Sierra Leone and was just starting work on a university in British Guiana, which was the project I worked on when I arrived as the most junior of juniors. Although my involvement was pretty low-grade, it brought home to me that I had completed three years of architectural training but had no idea about how to transform the plans on the drawing board into reality. It was something of a confidence blow.
I stayed at the Rutters’ house in Thursley, south of Guildford, which was big enough to house the drawing offices for Frank’s large practice, as well as extended family and guests. The substantial grounds allowed us the rather civilised option of playing croquet on the lawn during the lunch-break. By coincidence, Frank later sold the house to Roger Taylor, the drummer with Queen.
Throughout the autumn we played on, usually under the name the Tea Set, but we now had an alternative name, created by Syd. The name had come about under duress. We were playing, as the Tea Set, out at an RAF base, probably Northolt just outside London, when, lo and behold, we found that, extraordinarily, there was another band called the Tea Set booked to appear. I’m not sure if the other Tea Set had precedence because they were on first or later, but we rapidly had to come up with an alternative. Syd produced, with little further ado, the name the Pink Floyd Sound, using the first names of two venerable blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Although we might have been aware of them on some blues imports, the names were not ones we were particularly familiar with; it was very much Syd’s idea. And it stuck.
It is extraordinary how a spur-of-the-moment decision can become a permanent, comfortable fixture, with long-lasting and far-reaching implications. The Rolling Stones came up with their name in a pretty similar situation, when Brian Jones had to give Jazz News the name of his band, and he looked down and saw the track ‘Rollin’ Stone Blues’ on a Muddy Waters album. Out of that emerges decades of merchandising, puns and associations. In our case, when we became one of the underground’s house bands, we were fortunate that the very abstraction of the combination Pink and Floyd had a suitable and vaguely psychedelic suggestiveness that a name along the lines of the Howlin’ Crawlin’ King Snakes might not have offered.
We would very occasionally head out of London for gigs that actually paid for us to perform. We played at one event in a large country house called High Pines at Esher in Surrey, and in October 1965 at a big party in Cambridge for the 21st birthday of Storm Thorgerson’s girlfriend, Libby January and her twin sister Rosie. Among our co-performers that night were the Jokers Wild (featuring one David Gilmour) and a young folk-singer called Paul Simon. Storm remembers that this party represented the polarised split between the generations at the time. Libby’s parents had organised the party and invited lots of their friends, who were there in lounge suits and cocktail dresses. Libby and her sister’s friends, mainly students, were in loose, proto-hippy gear, and preferred their music loud. Some time shortly afterwards, Libby’s father, disapproving of the young Thorgerson, in fact offered Storm a blank cheque to absent himself – permanently.
Although it wasn’t obvious at the time, our next important break was landing a gig at the Marquee in March 1966. Prior to this our reputation had been based on the combination of Syd as our front man and our connection with the intriguing goings-on at the light and sound workshop at Hornsey College. We can’t have had more than four or five original songs, most of which had been recorded when we’d made the demo at Broadhurst Gardens.
The only gig that might have brought us to wider attention had been at Essex University. At their rag ball, we shared the bill with the Swinging Blue Jeans, who did appear, and Marianne Faithfull who was billed as appearing – if she managed to return from Holland in time. It didn’t sound hopeful. We were still called Tea Set at the time although we must have given the impression of being in transition to psychedelia, since in spite of having ‘Long Tall Texan’ in our repertoire, where we all sang to the accompaniment of acoustic guitars, somebody had arranged oil slides and a film projection. I imagine that someone who was there or subsequent word of mouth was responsible for leading us on to the Marquee …
We saw this booking at the Marquee as a great opportunity to break into the club circuit, although it transpired that the gig was a function called the Trip, a totally separate event for which the club had been booked privately. It took place on a Sunday afternoon and certainly no regular Marquee punter would have dreamt of attending.
I found the whole event pretty strange. We were used to playing R&B parties where the entry fee was a keg of bitter. Suddenly we were performing for a ‘happening’, and being encouraged to develop the extended solos that we’d only really put into the songs to pad them out during our Countdown Club residency. The organisers asked us to come back to the Marquee for some similar Sunday afternoon events, which subsequently became known as the Spontaneous Underground. This was fortuitous, since otherwise we would never have met Peter Jenner.
Peter had recently graduated from Cambridge, although he did not encounter any member of the Pink Floyd crowd during his time at the university (there was still a significant divide between town and gown). He was working at the Department of Social Administration at the London School of Economics, teaching social workers sociology and economics, and also involved in a record label called DNA. He was, in his own words, ‘a music nut’, into jazz and blues in particular and had set up DNA with John Hopkins, Felix Mendelssohn and Ron Atkins, to reflect their broad range of musical interest: ‘We wanted DNA to be an avant-garde thing, avant-garde anything: jazz, folk, classical, pop.’
At the end of the academic year Peter was marking a pile of papers one Sunday, and had reached the point where he needed to get out for a breath of fresh air. He decided to head out from the LSE in Holborn across to the Marquee Club in Wardour Street, where he knew there was a private gig happening. He knew this through an acquaintance called Bernard Stollman, whose brother Stephen ran ESP, an arty American label, which included acts like the Fugs, and which had been an inspiration for the setting up of DNA.
Peter recalls, ‘DNA had done some work with the free improvisation group AMM, recording an album in one day in Denmark Street. The deal was rotten: 2 per cent out of which the studio time, and probably the artists, had to be paid, and as an economist I came to the conclusion that 2 per cent of a £30 album was only 7d, and that it would take an awful lot of 7ds to earn £1,000, which was my idea of a fortune. I decided that if DNA was going to work we had to have a pop band. That’s when I saw the Pink Floyd Sound at the Marquee Club that Sunday. I did think the “Sound” part of their name was pretty lame.
‘I remember very clearly seeing the show. The band were basically playing R&B, things like “Louie Louie” and “Dust My Broom”, things everybody played at the time. I couldn’t make out the lyrics, but nobody could hear the lyrics in those days. But what intrigued me was that instead of wailing guitar solos in the middle, they made this weird noise. For a while I couldn’t work out what it was. And it turned out to be Syd and Rick. Syd had his Binson Echorec and was doing weird things with feedback. Rick was also producing some strange, long, shift
ing chords. Nick was using mallets. That was the thing that got me. This was avant-garde! Sold!’
Peter wanted to get in touch with us, and was given a contact by Bernard Stollman. He came round to Stanhope Gardens to see us: ‘Roger answered the door. Everybody else had gone off on holiday, as it was the end of the academic year. So we agreed, “See you in September!” The record label was a whim of mine, a hobby, so I had no problem waiting. Roger hadn’t told me to fuck off. It was just “See you in September” …’
When Peter came round to Stanhope Gardens, I was away on a low-budget first trip to the States. My trip to America was seen as part of my continuing architectural education, a chance to go and see some of the great buildings in the USA, rather than a rootsy musical pilgrimage. Lindy was out in New York – training as a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company – which was another good reason to go, as she would have some time off in the summer recess (Juliette, Rick’s girlfriend, was also out there at the same time, by chance).
I flew out on a PanAm 707 and spent a couple of weeks in New York. There was some cultural and architectural sightseeing – the Guggenheim, MOMA, the Lever Building – but I did also get to see some live music. I saw the Fugs, and went to see some jazz acts like Mose Allison and Thelonious Monk live at the Village Vanguard and the other Greenwich Village jazz clubs. I spent a certain amount of time going to record shops. A lot of music was unavailable on import, and the stiff American album sleeves, which looked very fancy in comparison to their rather flimsy British equivalents, were prized trophies.
For $99 Lindy and I then acquired a Greyhound bus ticket giving us unlimited travel for three months, and headed west on – for us – a gigantic journey of 3,000 miles coast to coast, non-stop apart from the occasional refuel and refreshment break. On the bus we got to know a newly married American couple – the groom was about to head off to Vietnam, which meant little to us in 1966; the full significance only hit me later on, and I still occasionally wonder if he survived.