DARK GLOBE
WHEN I first met Syd, he was the most charming and outgoing guy. He had come to London to go to Camberwell School Of Art, and he moved into the flat in Stanhope Gardens, Highgate, that Roger and I had rented from Mike Leonard. Mike was the fifth member of the band for a little while back then.
This was the beginning of Pink Floyd. When we were Sigma 6, before Syd joined; we were a little bit jazzy and a little bit Top 20 – we played “Long Tall Texan”, things like that. It carried on like that when Syd joined, but only for a little bit. The idea was that with Syd on board we could really start being a proper band – and being a proper band excluded Mike.
“The big thing was the Binson Echorec…”
NICK MASON
We were rehearsing at Stanhope Gardens at this point, and also in a pub, The Gatehouse, which was walking distance from there, on the main road. They had an upstairs room which we hired for the evening for a fiver or a tenner. Syd wasn’t a virtuoso, none of us were. You know that thing about 10,000 hours, and once you’ve done that you’re probably going to be OK at something? Well, when we started we’d probably done about 50 hours! It wouldn’t have been more than 100 – we’d have done a number of rehearsals, two hours apiece, a few gigs and that was it. What you need is enough time to get away with it all, until you learn how to do it.
We had begun to see that the way forward was to have original material. No-one else but Syd had written anything. Maybe Rick had, but it never got recorded by the band or even
