Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

by: John Cavanagh

Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.

“We didn’t start out trying to get anything new, it just entirely happened. We originally started as an R&B group,” Roger Waters told a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), around the turn of the year 1966–67. Syd Barrett continued, “Sometimes we just let loose a bit and started hitting the guitar a bit harder and not worrying quite so much about the chords…” Roger: “It stopped being sort of third rate academic rock and started being intuitive groove.” Syd: “It’s free-form.”

By that time, Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett, Nicholas Berkeley Mason (known as “Nicky” at the time), George Roger Waters, and Richard William Wright were only weeks away from signing a record deal with EMI and had rapidly built up a fanbase for their live shows where improvised sound and light melded together. According to the (sadly nameless) girl who compiled the CBC feature, they had “stupefied audiences… [with] an array of equipment sadistically designed to shatter the strongest nerves…” She pondered, “Is this the music destined to replace the Beatles? Are the melodic harmonies, poetic lyrics, and soulful rhythms of today to be swept into the archives, totally undermined by a psychotic sweep of sound and visions such as this? Large pockets of enthusiasts from all over the country are determined that it shall, despite the powerful opposition of the majority of leading disc jockeys.” On hearing this remarkable piece of prose, Canadian radio listeners could easily have been forgiven for thinking that Pink Floyd were causing anarchy on British streets, although listening now I ask myself why these powerful DJs would be so opposed to a band who had, as our trusty reporter says, “yet to make their debut on records”?

What the Pink Floyd were doing live was a unique evolution for a band who had started playing R&B covers. Two songs recorded in 1965 and widely circulated among Floyd fans illustrate their early sound with lead guitarist Bob Klose. “Lucy Leave” is an original composition, with a strong vocal by Syd Barrett; the other title is the old Slim Harpo number “I’m a King Bee”, which the Rolling Stones covered. Bob appeared on Crazy Diamond, a BBC TV documentary devoted to Syd Barrett in 2001 and recalled:

“You heard the early things, you thought maybe it’s the Stones… and you recognize Syd’s voice, but it’s not Pink Floyd sound yet. It needed me to leave to do that. You know, that was quite an important step.”

With Bob Klose off the scene (and pursuing a career as a photographer) Pink Floyd gradually moved away from jamming on “Louie Louie” to create highly original new sounds. David Gale had grown up with Syd Barrett and Roger Waters in Cambridge: “I was present in Syd’s bedroom in Hills Road, before we moved up to London, when he produced a Zippo lighter that he may well have got off an American serviceman and began running it up and down the neck of his guitar and saying, ‘What do you think of that?’ He was not playing as if it were a bottleneck. In Cambridge people were already taking LSD in the nexus that circulated around Storm Thorgerson’s house and Syd was among the people doing that. It may be that that made him impatient with doing Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley covers and made him experiment with other ways of getting sounds out of an electric guitar. He had two areas in which he could be experimental: Guitar playing and painting. His painting had certain affinities with the pop art that Jim Dine was doing in the States, cloth appliquéd to canvas and heavily treated with oil paint.”

Pink Floyd played at four events, a series of happenings called the Spontaneous Underground, held at the Marquee Club on Sunday afternoons between late February and early April 1966. John “Hoppy” Hopkins, photographer and key figure in the emergent counterculture, had his first experience of the band at one of these shows: “A lot of people who were around at that time were open to new or experimental sounds, pictures and movies, whatever was going down. They had a light show of sorts and the combination of that and the sound they were making really was very exciting. They were playing sheets of sound, sometimes similar to the way that AMM were treating the boundary between sound and music.”

AMM were—and remain—a particularly innovative improv group with a floating lineup. Their first album, AMMUSIC 1966, was made by DNA, a small production company which involved both Hoppy and the man who was about to become Pink Floyd’s co-manager, Peter Jenner (in partnership with his friend Andrew King). AMM took their cue from artists like Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement, dispensing with conventional ideas of technique. Even today, guitarist Keith Rowe neither rehearses nor tunes his guitar, preferring to apply different objects to the pickups and strings and use it as a sound generator.

Duchamp and Dada aside, it seems Pink Floyd’s transformation had more practical roots. Bob Klose had been, in conventional terms, the most skilled musician in the lineup. Without him it was difficult to achieve a good standard repertoire for live shows. Better R&B bands were in abundance, so the competition was hot. Storm Thorgerson was one of the Cambridge boys who moved to London to study art. He told me: “When they were playing at the Marquee, they were booked in for longer than they had a set. In order to get paid properly, they had to play longer. They extended their songs in a rambling kind of fashion and it turned out very popular and got more people! They stopped doing blues and Syd was instrumental, literally, in turning them around.”

John Whiteley, a former Buckingham Palace guardsman, was living at the same address as Syd in late 1966: “We went to see them at the Hornsey Art School and I’d expected a really super together band, but Syd was on stage shouting the chords to play to the other guys!” In July 1967, Peter Jenner talked to Disc and Music Echo magazines about the way Pink Floyd had arrived at their style: “My guess is that this was not even intentional. They are a lazy bunch and could never be bothered to practice, so they probably had to improvise to get away with it.” Reflecting on their evolving style, Hoppy said, “I was trying to figure out what the pathways were and one of the key people in that was Joe Boyd. Joe was their first producer, he also produced the Incredible String Band and the recording that we made of AMM. The people in the Floyd were part of the receptive participant audience for everything else that was going on, as we were to them. John Cage had come over round about that time and he had a show at the Saddle Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. Cage used silence as much as he used sound and we were all up for it, ready and excited, the place was full. The general context of people being ready for it, by some magical confluence of energies, is what a lot of that rests on: All the cross-influences.” Peter Jenner: “I think that things like AMM had an influence and, just generally, improvised music, whether it was jazz or whatever, but in songwriting, the influence was much more pop songs.” Anna Murray was a close friend of Syd’s. She says: “We were listening to the Beatles, Doors, Bob Dylan, and then a lot of blues and jazz… Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Cha
rlie Parker…”

“The next time I saw them, after Spontaneous Underground,” says Hoppy, “was in Notting Hill. We called ourselves the London Free School. For my sins, I was the person paying for the printing of the newsletter and we were so disorganised that I was getting more and more in debt. I decided to hold a benefit at the local church hall [All Saints, Powis Gardens]. One of the bands that played was the Floyd and a few people turned up. The following week, the Floyd played again and a few more people turned up, and by the third week it was quite obvious that we were sitting on some kind of tinderbox, because the queues were round the block! I have a muted memory of some sort of pleasure to do with having solved my financial problems, so the benefit was successful.” Pink Floyd played ten London Free School shows between the end of September and late November 1966. Duggie Fields attended these events: “A group of friends was their audience first, then suddenly they got an enormous following within a very short space of time, shorter than it took for the Rolling Stones to happen.”

Watch: “Astronomy Domine” [at youtube.com]