Pigs Might Fly Page 5

  In the autumn, Barrett moved to London and began his degree course at Camberwell, where he was remembered as an enthusiastic, if single-minded student, surprising his tutors and other pupils with his insistence on using the same-sized brush for all his paintings. Among his compositions from the summer of 1964 was a portrait of pop singer Sandie Shaw, which he lovingly sent to her record company, only to hear nothing in response. London was exciting, but regular trips back to Cambridge brought him into contact with his old sparring partners.

  Back at home, Andrew Rawlinson had become involved in staging some ‘happenings’ at the Round Church. Integral to these events was the participation of the audience. In the same spirit, Rawlinson bought a large map of the world, traced the outlines of fifty countries onto sheets of paper and then sent them out to other like-minded individuals with the message, ‘Decorate this how you like and send back to me’.

  Syd was sent Russia, which he duly painted blue and returned. He later sent Rawlinson a book he’d crafted called Fart Enjoy. Comprising seven sheets of cardboard taped together, its contents included snippets of poetry, doodles, pictures torn from magazines, a possible spoof letter entitled ‘Dear Roge’. (‘How did the group get on at Essex?’) A photo of a bare-breasted model is scrawled with the words ‘Fuk, Suk and Lik’. Rawlinson described it as ‘a mixture of austere bordering on the abstract and blazing whimsy’.

  However committed Syd may have been to his art, he still found himself drawn back to his old musical haunts in Cambridge. During the summer holidays, he began playing guitar with The Hollerin’ Blues (sometimes known as Barney and The Hollerin’ Blues), during a return trip to Cambridge. Here, he came into contact with sixteen-year-old Matthew Scurfield, the half-brother of Ponji Robinson and a school-friend of The Hollerin’ Blues’ harmonica player, Pete Glass.

  Scurfield would go on to become a theatre, TV and film actor. ‘My father was what you might call “a romantic socialist”, and sent me to a very rough secondary modern school in Cambridge,’ he says now. ‘I’d failed my 11-plus and ended up almost dropping out. My aunt was a very prominent psychiatrist in the area and I ended up at the Criterion, peddling pills that I’d taken from her medicine cabinet.’

  Through what Matthew describes as ‘the trafficking of medical contraband’, he came into contact with Pip and Emo. They introduced him to Syd one evening in the Criterion. ‘We clicked straight away because we were both interested in theatres, and Syd and I discovered we’d both built our own model theatres. Ponji and I both became good friends with him. I didn’t even know he was a musician until I went to see The Hollerin’ Blues at somewhere like the Dorothy Ballroom and there was Syd on guitar. He wasn’t the best player in the world, but he certainly had an aura about him.’

  By early 1965 The Hollerin’ Blues had turned into Those Without, and Syd was back, playing guitar during the holidays. ‘We played a couple of our best gigs ever with Syd, at the University Cellars and the Victoria Ballroom,’ recalls drummer Stephen Pyle. ‘He was on a visit from London and he’d got himself kitted out with a new Fender and a big Vox amp. The Kinks’ single “You Really Got Me” had come out and Syd was thrilled with that. He kept playing it over and over again during band practice.’

  Meanwhile, David Gilmour was making his own plans. If he passed his A- levels, it would mean going to university, which would take him away from the local music scene. Gilmour chose to drop out halfway through his exams. By now, his parents had returned permanently to the US and he was living alone in a flat in Mill Road. He’d also helped form a new band, Jokers Wild, which had coalesced around Gilmour, John Gordon and Clive Welham.

  While Syd upped sticks to London, Gilmour stayed put. Jokers Wild’s forte was five-part harmonies. ‘We came together in the first place because we could all sing,’ says Welham. Their set centred around songs by The Four Seasons, Sam and Dave, and The Beach Boys, performed in as many clubs, parties and neighbouring airforce bases as would take them, including a regular Wednesday night booking at Les Jeux Interdits, a club in Cambridge’s Victoria Ballroom, popular with foreign students from the neighbouring colleges. ‘I think at one time we all had foreign girlfriends,’ recalls Clive.

  The line-up originally comprised Gordon, Welham, keyboard player and saxophonist Dave Altham, and bassist Tony Sainty, later replaced at odd times by either Rick Wills or David’s brother Peter.

  Gilmour may have come across as shy and unassuming, but his appearance got him noticed. ‘Dave was always more clean-cut than Syd,’ remembers John Gordon. ‘He had a collegey look, a style of American dress – a bit preppy – with white Levi’s. It went down well with the women.’

  ‘All the girls absolutely drooled over him,’ says Christine Smith (formerly Bull), who first encountered the band as a seventeen-year-old in Cambridge. ‘We used to call him the Adonis.’ With Gilmour’s parents overseas, Christine’s family would welcome David and Peter into their home, including a Christmas Day evening ‘when they brought round their guitars and kept us entertained for hours’.

  A personal ad in a mid-sixties issue of the pop magazine Rave offers a glimpse of Gilmour’s popularity at the time. Placed by Libby Gausden’s schoolfriend Vivien Brans (known by the nicknames Twig and Twiggy), it read: ‘Last June I met a boy called David Gilmour in Cambridge. He played in a group called Jokers Wild. He said he planned to go to London, and always wore blue jeans with patches on them. If anyone knows where he is, please tell him to write to the girl with long blonde hair who pushed his van up Guest Road to get it started. Tell him Vivien is anxious to hear from him, if he remembers her.’ (Vivien had previously gone out with Barrett, and would later meet up again with Gilmour.)

  The guitarist’s growing reputation was also enough to attract the attention of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who sent a talent scout to the Victoria Ballroom. Epstein decided not to sign him, but, with his reputation preceding him, Gilmour was the obvious understudy for other players on the circuit. Hugh Fielder, now a music critic, but then singing with Cambridge band The Ramblin’ Blues, hired Gilmour when his own group’s guitarist dropped out at the last minute for a gig at a local girls’ school in 1965. ‘We’d had girls screaming at us before,’ recalls Fielder. ‘And we really didn’t want to miss out on it again. Gilmour was fantastic.’ There was, it transpires, only one problem: ‘Unfortunately, he charged us as much for his services as we were getting for the whole gig.’

  For Roger Waters, the arrival of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had thawed his resistance to rock music. One evening, he and Barrett had travelled to London to see a package rock ‘n’ roll show featuring The Rolling Stones, Helen Shapiro and Gene Vincent, at the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn. The brooding, leather-clad Vincent had none of Elvis’s pretty boy charm. An alcoholic who’d permanently damaged his left leg in a motorcycle crash and walked with a pronounced limp, stories circulated of Vincent being rolled up in a carpet by his bodyguard and forcibly carried on stage after he refused to perform. Maybe something about Vincent’s outsider image and damaged persona made its mark on Barrett and Waters. Whatever the catalyst, on the train back to Cambridge, the two sat together, sketching a picture of the amps they would need when they started their own rock ‘n’ roll group. Yet by the time Syd arrived in London, Roger was already part of a band.

  Without Barrett’s flair for painting or Gilmour’s for playing guitar, Waters found himself pondering his next move on leaving the County. When he saw Syd perform with The Mottoes, Waters would talk later of ‘wanting to be a bit further towards the centre of things’. After abandoning plans to study Mechanical Engineering at Manchester University, he submitted to a series of aptitude tests for the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, who suggested he might be cut out for a career in architecture.

  As a precursor, Waters spent a few months working in an architectural office in neighbouring Swavesey, before enrolling on a degree course at Regent Street Polytechnic in London’s Little Titchfield Street, near Oxf
ord Circus. Waters brought his guitar and billeted himself in a number of downmarket student houses, including a cold-water squat near the Kings Road. As one of his future bandmates would later explain,

  ‘Roger wanted to free himself but he didn’t know how to do it.’ By the spring of 1963, though, Waters had drifted into the orbit of a group of like-minded fellow students, which included a drummer, Nick Mason, and a keyboard player, Richard Wright.

  Nicholas Berkeley Mason was born on 27 January 1944 in Edgbaston on the outskirts of Birmingham. His father, Bill, was a Communist Party member and former shop steward for the Association of Cinematographic Technicians. Accepting a job as a documentary film director, he moved with his wife Sally to Downshire Hill in Hampstead Garden Suburb, North London, when Nick was aged two. Three daughters, Sarah, Melanie and Serena, completed the family.

  Bill collected vintage cars, and was a motor racing enthusiast who competed at an amateur level. On a similar theme, his early film-making credits included Le Mans, a 1955 documentary about the French sports car race. The Masons’ car collection wasn’t the only evidence of their wealth. Like the rest of his future bandmates, Nick’s upbringing was comfortable. Though, in his case, a little more comfortable. As Pink Floyd’s first manager Peter Jenner recalled, ‘I remember being amazingly impressed that Nick’s parents had a swimming pool.’

  Nick’s musical education also began with Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and regular scanning of the airwaves in search of Radio Luxembourg. He learned to play the violin and piano, but showed no great aptitude at either. A drum kit followed later, and Mason became part of an ad-hoc school group called The Hot Rods, whose repertoire rarely extended beyond tireless renditions of the Peter Gunn TV theme.

  At the age of eleven, Mason was enrolled at Frensham Heights, a co-ed boarding school near Farnham in Surrey. Today, the school prides itself on ‘No uniforms, no competition, teachers and pupils all on a first-name basis.’ And even in the 1950s, compared to Waters’ experiences at the strait-laced, boys-only Cambridge County, Nick’s time at Frensham Heights was a good deal more relaxed. ‘I enjoyed my time at Frensham,’ he wrote in 2004. ‘It was fairly traditional, in terms of blazers and exams, but it had a far more liberal approach to education.’

  Mason didn’t apply himself quite so vigorously to his academic work as might have been expected. At Frensham, his interest in music was stirred by the modern jazz and, later, bebop records played in the school common room. By the time he was fourteen, he was playing drums again, albeit on his own terms. ‘I never had any formal training,’ he said later. ‘And I think that was a big mistake. The easiest way to learn something properly is to be taught it.’

  After leaving school, Nick ‘drifted into a five-year architecture course’ at Regent Street Poly in the spring of 1962. Perhaps tellingly, Frank Rutter, the father of Nick’s then girlfriend and future wife, Lindy, was an architect of some note. Even then, while drumming again, he seemed to share none of David Gilmour’s burning ambition to become a musician. As Mason would tell one interviewer some years later: ‘I’m a very bad example of how things can still go right without trying – how you can still get lucky.’

  More than architecture or music, Nick’s passion was cars, one of which, a 1930 Austin ‘Chummy’, he used to drive himself to and from the Poly. Mason wrote in his 2004 book that this car was the reason Roger Waters first ‘deigned to speak to me’. Waters wanted to borrow the vehicle; the protective Mason refused, claiming it was currently out of action. Shortly after, Roger spotted Nick behind the wheel. Nevertheless, when the two were given a shared assignment, they struck up a friendship.

  In September 1963, Poly students Keith Noble and Clive Metcalfe were casting around for like-minded students and placed a notice on the college noticeboard. ‘It said, “Anyone want to start a group?” ‘ recalls Clive Metcalfe. At the time Noble and Metcalfe were already some way ahead of their new rhythm section. ‘Keith and I used to sing together in a bar in Albemarle Street in Piccadilly. We were doing everything from The Beatles to Peter, Paul and Mary, R&B, twelve-bar blues. I was actually at the Chelsea School of Art, but at the time it was being rebuilt so they put us into Regent St Poly.’ Keen to expand beyond a duo, Noble and Metcalfe began rehearsing in the student common room with ‘the people that saw our notice and turned up’. These included Mason and Waters (then playing rudimentary guitar), and Keith Noble’s sister Sheilagh.

  ‘Sheilagh used to sing with Keith, but I don’t remember her doing very much with us,’ says Metcalfe. ‘Roger wasn’t very well developed as a musician, so although I originally played lead and rhythm guitar, when we realised we needed a bass player, I switched to bass.’

  The band took the name of The Sigma 6 after expanding to a sextet with the arrival of another Poly student, pianist Richard William Wright. Born on 28 July 1943, Wright was the son of a biochemist, Robert, who was employed at the local Unigate Dairies, and his wife Daisy. The Wrights lived in Hatch End, Pinner, North London. Pinner was also home to Reg Dwight, who would become Elton John, and, much later, Duran Duran’s future lead singer Simon Le Bon.

  After a stint at the local prep school, St John’s, Richard was enrolled at Haberdashers Aske’s, a fee-paying grammar school, then located in Hampstead. (It later moved to Elstree.) By the time Richard reached his teens, he’d learned trombone, saxophone, guitar and piano, and was a frequent visitor to trad jazz gigs at the Railway Tavern in neighbouring Harrow and Wealdstone, where The Who would later launch their career. ‘I wasn’t into pop music at all,’ he said later. ‘I was listening to jazz. The music I first listened to that made me want to be a musician was back in the days of Coltrane, Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy.’

  A brief stint as a messenger boy for the local Kodak factory in Harrow and Wealdstone ensued, but, unsure of what he wanted to do with his life, Richard sheepishly followed his careers master’s advice and, in 1962, signed up to study architecture at Regent Street Poly. Years later, he would admit that ‘being an architect never really interested me’.

  Not owning a keyboard at the time, Wright’s role in the band was dependent on whether a piano was available at the venue. Bookings were mostly student birthday parties and private functions in and around the Poly. With Sheilagh Noble gone, Wright’s girlfriend Juliette Gale, then also studying at the Poly, stepped in as an occasional singer.

  ‘Juliette was lovely and she sang brilliantly,’ remembers Clive Metcalfe. ‘She’d sing blues, things like “Summertime”. Rick Wright was just incredibly quiet. I don’t think I ever really got to know him.’

  By the end of the year, the group had acquired a manager and sometime songwriter in another student, Ken Chapman, who’d push his own compositions on to the band to fit in with their repertoire of R&B numbers. (‘There was one that was set to the tune of Beethoven’s Für Elise,’ recalled Waters.) Chapman also hustled an audition with Gerry Bron, then a music publisher and later the founder of Bronze Records.

  ‘He said the songs were quite good but to forget the band,’ remembered Nick Mason. ‘I think if we’d listened to anyone who had any taste at the time we’d have folded up right there and then. But we were so egocentric we just carried on.’ Throughout the coming year there were many name changes, including, supposedly, The Megadeaths and The Screaming Abdabs (later shortened to The Abdabs). Interviewed for an article in the student magazine, The Abdabs were photographed posing awkwardly beside a lamp-post in Great Titchfield Street, Waters – denouncing rock as ‘beat without expression’ – wearing his regulation Dylan-style black leather box jacket and best sneer.

  ‘I struggled with Roger,’ admits Clive Metcalfe. ‘Nick Mason was very easy-going but I found Roger rather acerbic, and I was an easy target. I’d grown up in the country and had had a rather sheltered background. Roger didn’t suffer fools gladly, and I’m afraid he could make a fool of me rather easily.’

  ‘I’m not sure if I was aware of being menacing,’ Waters explained later. ‘Although I think that
in my insecurity I probably tried cultivating it. I was so frightened of everything as a young man that I became quite aggressive.’

  At the same time as he was attending the Poly, Wright was taking private lessons in musical theory and composition at the Eric Gilder School of Music, but realising architecture was not his vocation, he jumped ship (or was pushed, according to some sources) at the end of his first year.

  ‘I gave up in boredom,’ he later explained. ‘So I started going abroad to places like Greece, and then came home to earn a bit of money in jobs like interior designing and private decorating. But I was very unhappy and turned to studying music.’ Wright eventually enrolled at London’s Royal College of Music.

  Meanwhile, Waters and Mason struggled to apply themselves to their studies. Waters, especially, seemed as frustrated with his teachers at the Poly as he had been with those at the County, clashing repeatedly with his Architectural History lecturer. ‘I must have been horrible to teach,’ he admitted years later. ‘I was very bolshie. It was just like school, and I hoped I’d escaped all that.’ Yet there were two lecturers that didn’t attract Waters’ withering contempt. The first, his head of year, encouraged him to bring his guitar into class, and allowed him to play it during study time. The other was architect Mike Leonard, who taught part-time at the Poly and at the Hornsey College of Art. He was an accomplished pianist and, although some fifteen years older than his pupils, shared an interest in the more avant-garde areas of music. Much to Waters’ curiosity, Leonard was also experimenting with lighting effects; designing and building contraptions out of glass and Perspex, and experimenting with oil slides. Leonard’s house in Stanhope Gardens, Highgate, was large enough to double as a rehearsal space, but he also needed tenants to help pay the mortgage. Mason and Waters were the first to move in.