only accentuated by the churning, discordant music that made up its backing track.
On all four songs, the sense of inspired exploration that had been the hallmark of The Piper at the Gates had evaporated. Now, it seemed, Pink Floyd were simply tumbling into chaos.
By the end of 1967, Pink Floyd (the ‘The’ would continue to crop up on posters and handbills until mid-1969, though its use was evidently on the wane) was at an unenviable career juncture. It was clear that Barrett’s role was untenable; and yet the group’s management was adamant that a future without his creative input was inconceivable. The one Roger Waters composition released thus far was ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’, a musical makeweight that amounted to Piper’s one glaring flaw; Rick Wright had contributed ‘Paintbox’, as the B-side of ‘Apples and Oranges’ – the breezy tale of a night on the town that was so lacking in any of the group’s customary experimentalism that it skirted dangerously close to the dread category of Easy Listening.
To Peter Jenner and Andrew King, all this amounted to clear evidence that Barrett had somehow to be kept in the band. Waters, however, was adamant that he had to leave. ‘Roger was the leader of the “Syd Must Go” faction,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘He was saying, “We can’t work with this guy any more. It’s impossible for us to go to a gig and have him turn up, or not turn up, and not give us a set list – it’s making us look like prats.” He was out there on the frontline, whereas I was back in the office being intellectual about it. But he was aware that they were killing their career by doing these gigs with Syd, because they were turning off the punters. It was a complete mess. And I think the worst thing was the demand for another record, when there were no songs coming from Syd. It was, “What the fuck are we going to do?” But the Syd faction – myself and Andrew – had no confidence in any of them writing without him.’
By way of a compromise, it was suggested that the group should recruit a second guitarist, leaving Barrett to appear as and when he was in sufficiently good shape, and continue to write the group’s songs. They thus made renewed contact with an old acquaintance from their days in Cambridge: David Gilmour, then making frustratingly little headway in a London-based trio called Bullitt. He accepted the offer of a new job, he later recalled, largely thanks to the prospect of ‘fame and the girls’. On the former count, at least, he did not get off to the most promising start. By the time of the announcement of his recruitment in the music press, the group’s stock had so fallen that the story was not exactly headline news: the NME gave it one small paragraph, and spelled the new member’s surname ‘Gilmur’.
In January 1968, the five-man incarnation of Pink Floyd played four shows, in Birmingham, Weston-Super-Mare, and the Sussex towns of Lewes and Hastings. Aubrey Powell clearly recalls seeing at least one of those shows, and quickly succumbing to absolute bafflement. ‘Syd wasn’t doing anything really,’ he says. ‘He was just sitting on the front of the stage, kicking his legs. It was very, very odd.’
‘My initial ambition was just to get them into some sort of shape,’ Gilmour later recalled. ‘It seems ridiculous now, but I thought the band was awfully bad at the time when I joined. The gigs I’d seen with Syd were incredibly undisciplined. The leader figure was falling apart, and so was the group.’
It did not take long for Pink Floyd to bow to the inevitable. In David Gilmour’s recollection, Barrett’s ejection from the group was confirmed as they drove from London to an engagement in Southampton. ‘Someone said, “Shall we pick up Syd?”’ he later remembered, ‘and someone else said, “Nah, let’s not bother.” And that was the end.’
So it was that Pink Floyd dispensed with the figure on whose talents their reputation had been built. ‘We carried on without a second thought,’ says Nick Mason. ‘It didn’t occur to us that it wouldn’t work. In retrospect, I find that very curious.’
Hanging On in Quiet Desperation
Roger Waters and Pink Floyd Mark II
With Barrett gone, the creative leadership of Pink Floyd initially seemed to be up for grabs. The first recorded work they released in the wake of his exit was Rick Wright’s almost unbearably whimsical ‘It Would Be So Nice’, a single whose lightweight strain of pop-psychedelia – akin, perhaps, to the music of such faux-counterculturalists as the Hollies and Monkees – rendered it a non-event that failed to trouble the British charts; as Roger Waters later recalled, ‘No one ever heard it because it was such a lousy record.’ Waters’s own compositional efforts, however, were hardly more promising. ‘Julia Dream’, the single’s B-side, crystallized much the same problem: though the band evidently wanted to maintain the Syd Barrett aesthetic, their attempts sounded hopelessly lightweight.
As 1968 progressed, though Rick Wright continued to add songs to the group’s repertoire, it was quickly becoming clear where power now lay: with Roger Waters, the figure who, even when Barrett was around, had always had pretensions to being the band’s chief. ‘From day one, he always seemed to be the leader of the band,’ says Aubrey Powell. ‘He had a commanding presence. He could be quite brusque – rude.’
‘Roger was always the organizational person,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘If I wanted anything done, I had to fix Roger. He always had the good ideas: he always knew what he wanted to do. He was the bossy one: the one I had to persuade, always, because he could also be obstructive. He was the strongest personality in that sense.’
If such a character sketch suggests a mind with pretensions to omnipotence, Jenner also saw weaknesses in Waters’s initial contribution to the band: his apparently stunted musical talent, and his failure to satisfy the Underground’s codes of cool. ‘Roger was the worst musician,’ he says. ‘He couldn’t tune his guitar, he was tone deaf, and he also had some of the most awful sartorial things when they started becoming psychedelic. The worst thing were these red trousers that he put some dingly-dangly gold trim on, along the bottoms: the kind of thing you put on curtains. And he had a cigarette lighter in a sort of holster, dangling from his belt. He was terribly [naff], Roger. Terribly naff. But he thought he was groovy.’
Despite their friendship, the differences between Waters and Syd Barrett had tended to make them look like the occupants of completely different worlds. Barrett’s ’67-era personality was detached, non-materialistic, increasingly astral; Waters, by contrast, affected a hard-headed drive. One had become a living embodiment of sixties counterculture; the other chose to guardedly keep his distance. Perhaps most tellingly of all, whereas Barrett’s drug intake was disastrously prodigious – not simply in terms of his fondness for acid, but also when it came to marijuana and the downer Mandrax – Waters was a drinker who rarely consumed anything illicit.
‘I always remember being at the UFO club one night,’ recalls Aubrey Powell. ‘Syd was there, and Roger was there, backstage, and in walked Paul McCartney. It was a great revelatory moment: “Fuck me – a Beatle’s come to see the Pink Floyd.” Really something else. He was smoking a joint, and he passed it on. And Roger, who I’d never seen smoke before, took a huge hit of it. He knew when to play the game.’
By his own admission, Waters took acid on no more than a couple of occasions: most memorably, on a trip to Greece in 1966, with a party of friends that included Rick Wright. ‘I didn’t not do it again because I had a bad time particularly: it was more to do with how powerful it was,’ he says. ‘I’ve since heard my kids talk about taking acid and going out, and I was thinking, “Going out? You don’t go out!” Acid came out of the bottle: it was very much a case of taking your 600 milligrams or whatever and making sure that you stayed in. It was a sufficiently powerful experience that was your