be playing weird sounds – there were real moments of tension in there. Then suddenly they’d get back to the song, and it would be concluded. It was amazing what Syd was able to do. There was something very unsettling about it. It really wasn’t like watching any other band.’
Outwardly, Pink Floyd seemed to number among the Underground’s aristocracy. Aside from Barrett, however, they cautiously kept their distance – happy to play the shows, but surprisingly indifferent to either the substances or beliefs that tended to go with them. ‘The gigs that we played thanks to all that were great,’ says Roger Waters. ‘It was tremendous fun – going on at the Tabernacle and playing “Louie Louie” for fifteen minutes. There were some of Syd’s early songs in there, but a lot of what we did then came from the length of time we were expected to be onstage: sometimes, we’d play three sets in a night.
‘But I never really knew any of those people that well. And to this day, I still don’t know exactly what a lot of that stuff was actually about. You’d hear the odd thing about revolution, but it was never terribly specific. I don’t know … I read International Times a few times. But, you know – what was the Notting Hill Free School actually all about? What was it meant to do?’
‘There’s a great quote from that period: “They were all stoned, and we were drunk,”’ says Nick Mason. ‘I think the association with the Underground was certainly a Flag of Convenience. I think we’d all concede that. But as usual with these things, there was good stuff there, interwoven with an enormous amount of absolute guff. There were some good ideas, and some very forthright liberal views – but the period was full of an equal number of people with tarot cards and crystals. The number of love beads that one accumulated … I never really thought it was a good way of designing one’s future.’
In February 1967, The Pink Floyd signed a contract with EMI, receiving an advance of £5000. Their first single, released on 11 March, had been recorded early in the new year under the supervision of Joe Boyd, the émigré American who was responsible for the musical aspects of UFO.
‘Arnold Layne’, the embodiment of a pop-minded economy that lay in polar opposition to the band’s approach to performance, nonetheless managed to fill its three minutes with the sense that its authors were pushing their music into uncharted territory. The combination of Barrett’s droning, distracted vocal, the song’s subtle denial of a strict verse/chorus structure and its subject matter – the lifestyle of a kleptomaniac transvestite, placed at the centre of a very English picaresque – lent it the sense of the pop form being very cleverly subverted. When it crept onto the charts, sitting alongside singles by the Monkees, the Turtles and the Dave Clark Five, the point was made explicit.
In the meantime, the group was the subject of a flurry of press attention, focused chiefly on the single’s subject matter (‘Meet the Pinky Kinkies!’ ran one headline) and the allegedly mould-breaking nature of their shows. ‘The Pink Floyd offer a total show consisting of 700 watts of amplification, weird droning music (largely improvised) and lighting and slide projections using melting oil paints,’ said Disc and Music Echo. ‘On stage, the Floyd themselves become completely lost in their music and they aim to absorb the minds of their audience too, which isn’t easy with the usual cool atmospheres around London.’
Crowds in the capital, however, were soon proving to be the least of their worries. With the muted success of ‘Arnold Layne’ – it eventually rose to twenty-one in the UK singles chart, despite being excised from radio playlists on account of its risqué lyrics – Pink Floyd were inducted onto the circuit of regional British ballrooms that would define much of their lives for the next six months. Here, the group’s pushing of the musical envelope counted for nothing: thought the habitués of UFO and the Tabernacle might have thrilled to the band’s extended experiments, outside London, people expected an altogether more orthodox kind of entertainment – music to dance to, and the simple pleasure of hearing the same hits that had recently blared from their radios.
‘The industry was fundamentally different back then,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘Basically, you made your money gigging. That was your job: being a band meant you did six gigs a week – or if you were lucky nine, with double headers at the weekend. It was all about getting in the van, going off with your gear, and doing a gig. And then you would do a record – maybe if you did well, you did a single. And if you were lucky, that was a hit, and your fee went up.’
‘We’d do anything; we’d go anywhere,’ says Roger Waters. ‘You’d get in the van and look forward to the fifty quid. And it was hard work. I can remember a run of gigs that started in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, and then went on to Norfolk, and the next day we were playing Elgin in Scotland. That is a lot. They could be vicious gigs, too: balconies that overlooked the stage, and people dropping pints of beer on us. And, of course, they’d all want to hear the hits. We often refused to play them.’
‘The one that really sticks in my mind is the Queen’s Hall in Barnstaple: an old-fashioned ballroom that would have pop bands on,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘This place had a balcony around the top – and people were pouring beer on them. We needed the money, but there was a real conflict between the market they were playing into – a Top Twenty market – and what the band were playing: this really avant-garde stuff. We got the same problems every time they went out of London. It was all right when they were in the colleges: everyone would turn up with bells around their necks, carrying incense. But when you went elsewhere, it was difficult for them. They got a very hard time.’
For now, the group’s momentum was maintained, though the pressures of the band’s schedule, exacerbated by his drug use, were beginning to exact their toll on Syd Barrett. In March 1967, they entered the hallowed environs of EMI’s Abbey Road studios to work on their first album. According to the terms of their contract, they were to work with a staff producer named Norman Smith, whose résumé at least contained one implicit recommendation: he had been chief engineer on every Beatles album up to Rubber Soul. Thanks chiefly to Barrett, however, his relationship with his new charges quickly proved to be rather fraught. ‘It was sheer hell,’ he later recalled. ‘There are no pleasant memories. I always left with a headache. Syd was undisciplined: he would never sing the same thing twice. Trying to talk to him was like talking to a brick wall, because his face was so expressionless … he was a child in many ways: up one minute, down the next.’
For all Smith’s trials, in Peter Jenner’s estimation, he pulled off a commendable artistic feat: teasing out Barrett’s sense of pop aesthetics from the instrumental tangle that defined Pink Floyd’s performances. ‘What he did,’ says Jenner, ‘was to say, “Well, you’ve written these jolly good pop songs – so let’s have those, and some weird instrumental breaks.” So instead of being blues songs with weird instrumental breaks, it became pop songs with weird instrumental breaks.’
Notice of the abiding idea was served by the opening track, ‘Astronomy Domine’: from Barrett’s supremely sinister opening growl of guitar, it is obvious that havoc is about to be played with the period’s standard musical norms, but the song’s exploratory, improvisational core is book-ended by passages that betray both a tight sense of musical control, and an intuitive grasp of the melodic demands of pop. Even ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, the instrumental mission-statement that found the spirit of their live shows being poured on to tape, is ultimately a showcase for the group’s ability, having let loose chaos, to purposefully rein it back in. For all the lysergic abandon that takes root inside its first minute – punctuated by the kind of musical tension that Aubrey Powell found so compelling in the band’s live shows – its central riff is the essence of both control and streamlined strength: certainly, when it gloriously re-enters the picture after eight and a half minutes, one gets a sense of the band single-mindedly returning to earth.
Piper’s other most notable aspect was Barrett’s lyrics. Whereas the music betrayed both power and sophistication, his words were recurrently
