Pink Floyd in the 1970s

By Georg Purvis

It may have all started with Syd Barrett, but the persistence and creativity of Roger Waters, Rick Wright, Nick Mason and David Gilmour meant that Pink Floyd went from one of England’s top underground psychedelic bands to one of the biggest rock bands on the planet — all thanks to an album wondering if there really was a dark side of the moon. Pink Floyd in the 1970s: Decades focuses on the band throughout the 1970s — undoubtedly the peak of their success — from the weird brilliance of Atom Heart Mother to the epic, autobiographical storytelling of The Wall. In between, the band achieved tremendous success with Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon, yet struggled to come to terms with their place in the pantheon of rock music on Wish You Were Here and Animals.

The decade of Pink Floyd’s greatest successes was dominated by shifting musical trends and a balance in power in the band changing from democratic equality to Waters calling most of the shots. These factors, and the looming spectre of Barrett, their erstwhile founder, inspired some of the greatest albums of all time. The book explores the music, the defining moments and the personality clashes that very nearly destroyed the band.

The author: Georg Purvis is the author of Queen: The Complete Works, currently in its third edition. While Queen was his gateway band, he has come to appreciate all kinds of music over the years and considers himself lucky that his first-ever concert, at the age of 10, was on Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell tour at Veteran’s Stadium on June 2, 1994. He has since turned his love of writing about music into a hobby, with several unfinished manuscripts collecting dust on an external hard drive. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Meredith, and their two cats, Spencer and William.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sonicbond Publishing
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789521160

Georg Purvis

Georg Purvis is a writer, amateur photographer, musician, avid music collector, and leading historian of Queen. He lives in Philadelphia.

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Sonicbond Publishing Limited

www.sonicbondpublishing.co.uk

Email: [e-mail]

First Published in the United Kingdom 2020

First Published in the United States 2020

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright Georg Purvis 2020

ISBN 978-1-78952-072-9

The right of Georg Purvis to be identified as the author of this work

has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Sonicbond Publishing Limited

Typeset in ITC Garamond & ITC Avant Garde

Printed and bound in England

Graphic design and typesetting: Full Moon Media

This book is dedicated to friends, family, and loved ones who are no longer with us but whose memories will never be forgotten:

To Donald Hawk, who gifted me my first-ever CD,

Dark Side of the Moon, and my grandmother, Margie:

‘How I wish you were here.’

and to Finn:

‘That cat’s something, I can’t explain.’

Without Whom …

This book is the culmination of almost 30 years of appreciation, admiration, and (occasional) devotion for Pink Floyd. Thanks to Stephen Lambe for this opportunity to write this book, and for his immense passion and appreciation for good music.

Thanks to my friends and family who helped and supported me along the way: Scott Armstrong, Patrice Babineau, Chelsea Bennett, Bob Bingaman, Raoul Caes & Jess Roth, Mark Costello, Mike Czawlytko & Julia Favorov, Jacob Carpenter, Cameron Cuming, Joe & Danielle DeCarolis, Anthony DeLuca, Nick, Nikki and Mia DiBuono, Alex Docherty& Sam Baker, Daniel Douglass, Marissa Edelman, Rachael Edwards, Liz Evans & Chris Rattray, Eileen Falchetta, Matt Gorzalski, Dave Grow & Michelle Scott, Julia Green & Phil DeBiasio, Betty & Chris Hackney, Jim, Louise & Penelope and Jordan Kent, JD Korejko & Su-Shan Jessica Lai, Kristen Kurtis, Steph Larson, Dan Lawler, John Mahlman IV & Alessa Abruzzo, Brad McGinnis, Jeremy, Maria & Grant Nagle, Steve Orenshaw, Nick Prestileo, Kelley Riley, Kyra Schwartz& Syd Steinberg, Steve Sokolow, Eleni Solomos, John Dougherty & Valentina, Erin Tennity & Randy Richard, Amy Young, and Eric Zerbe. Incalculable thanks to Lori, Hugh, and Edward McGovern, as well as all members of the Hedrick, Purvis, Ransford, and Zimmerman families. Additional thanks to Philip Brooks for advice and for getting me through some tough times.

Special thanks to:

My father, Georg, for taking me to my first-ever concert (2 June 1994 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia) and allowing me to wow all my music-appreciating friends by telling them that Pink Floyd was my first concert;

My mother, Lynn, for buying The Wall for me on cassette so that I had some idea of what to expect at the concert, and for enduring me blasting the rest of their discography, and even trying to learn some of it on drums;

My sister, Leah, for humouring me;

And finally, my wife, Meredith, for her undying love and support, and for keeping William and Spencer out of my hair as I was trying to finish this book up.

Contents

Introduction: …We Came In?

Chapter One: 1970

Atom Heart Mother

Chapter Two: 1971

Relics

Meddle

Chapter Three: 1972

Obscured By Clouds

Chapter Four: 1973

Dark Side Of The Moon

Chapter Five: 1974

Chapter Six: 1975

Wish You Were Here

Chapter Seven: 1976

Chapter Eight: 1977

Animals

Chapter Nine: 1978

Chapter Ten: 1979

The Wall

Postscript: Isn’t This Where…

Books

Articles & Interviews

Internet

Introduction: …We Came In?

While studying architecture at the London Polytechnic in 1963, classmates Roger Waters and Nick Mason met and joined a band with mutual friends Keith Noble, his sister Sheilagh, and Clive Metcalfe. The quintet was augmented later that year by Richard Wright and finally given the name Sigma 6, with Waters on lead guitar, Mason on drums, and Wright on rhythm guitar. The band stuck to a repertoire of old Searchers songs and newly-written tunes by their manager and fellow classmate Ken Chapman, performing at private functions while honing their set in a tearoom at the Polytechnic. Waters and Mason immediately hit it off as friends, and moved into a flat together, eventually welcoming Bob Klose in the following year. Klose, a guitarist, was recruited into Sigma 6, and Waters switched over to bass, but as the band’s members fluctuated, so too did their name. Sigma 6 eventually became the Meggadeaths, which eventually became the Abdabs, then the Screaming Abdabs, then Leonard’s Lodgers, then the Spectrum Five, before they finally settled on the Tea Set.

Metcalfe and the Nobles departed late in 1963, just as Syd Barrett, Waters’ childhood friend, was invited to join on guitar. Mason recalled, ‘In a period when everyone was being cool in a very adolescent, self-conscious way, Syd was unfashionably outgoing; my enduring memory of our first encounter is the fact that he bothered to come up and introduce himself to me.’ Chris Dennis, a technician with the RAF, was introduced to the band by Klose and became the Tea Set’s lead singer, and, through connections with Wright, the band secured some recording time at a studio in West Hampstead. Dennis’ tenure with the band was brief: he was assigned a post through the RAF in Bahrain, leaving Barrett to become the lead vocalist and frontman. This marked a transitional period in the Tea Set’s career. Klose was pressured by his parents to abandon music, with Barrett now the sole guitarist. Additionally, the band became the resident band at the Countdown Club near Kensington High Street, where they would play three sets, each lasting upwards of 90 minutes. With their repertoire still very much in a nebulous state, the realisation struck them that they could fill out these sets by extending songs with lengthy solos, or, as they would later become known, instrumental freak-outs. Significantly, Barrett changed the band’s name late in 1965 when they discovered another group, also named the Tea Set, was to perform on the same bill as them. Thus, Barrett renamed themselves as the Pink Floyd Sound, an homage to Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, two bluesmen whose recordings were regularly spinning on Barrett’s hi-fi.

The band continued to build a strong following, and it was in December 1966 that Peter Jenner, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, spotted them at a performance at the Marquee Club. Impressed by the band overall, but especially the noises that Barrett and Wright produced, Jenner introduced himself to the band and suggested he and his business partner, Andrew King, become their manager, to which they agreed. The first order of business was to shorten their name to simply the Pink Floyd; the second was to acquire them new instruments, spending £1,000 (a princely sum, equivalent to £18,300 in today’s money) through Jenner’s inheritance. Blackhill Enterprises was also set up, allowing Jenner and King to take on additional clients.

The Pink Floyd developed their sound further, and incorporated rudimentary but especially striking light shows into their set, which was almost primarily lengthy instrumental freak-outs. They also continued to write new material. While Waters had penned two songs by this point, ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ and ‘Walk With Me, Sydney’, both of which were hardly worth the plastic they were pressed upon (and not at all indicative of the masterful wordsmith Waters would eventually become – but we all have to start somewhere, right?), Barrett had emerged as the dominant songwriter, coming up with evocative and thoughtful songs that hinted at a fragile mind who could take some of the most inane, everyday items (cats, bicycles, scarecrows) and turn them into truly magnificent works of art. There were also hints of drug use – one early song, ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’, was initially titled ‘Let’s Roll Another One’ – that seemed innocent enough, though Barrett had, by this point, become an avid user of LSD and other psychedelics, which not only broadly influenced his songwriting, but also his mental state of mind.

By the end of October 1966, a recording session was booked to prepare demos for Jenner and King to shop around for a record deal. Jenner recalled with awe the progress the band had made: ‘That was the first time I realised they were going to write all their own material; Syd just turned into a songwriter, it seemed like overnight.’ It helped that the band had the opportunity to road-test a lot of the material in the London underground music scene. One such venue, the UFO Club, became their regular stomping ground, and it was here that the venue’s manager, Joe Boyd, discovered the band and financed a recording session for them. On 29 January 1967, the Pink Floyd entered Sound Techniques to record their first single, ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’; three days later, the band signed a record deal with EMI and received a £5,000 advance.

‘Arnold Layne’, despite its brilliance as a pop song, was never going to be an easy sell for record promoters and radio play, considering its liberal allusions to cross-dressing, which led to a ban by several radio stations; realising that controversy was a huge seller, retailers were nevertheless able to spin the controversy into sales, and the single peaked at #20 in the UK. The follow-up single, ‘See Emily Play’, was an even bigger seller, charting at #6 and allowing the band to appear on the influential television program Top of the Pops. Unfortunately, by this point, Barrett had increased his intake of LSD, which meant that live performances were often erratic. Television appearances were even more chaotic, with Barrett often refusing to play the game by miming to playback recordings of the song. Mason later noted that the band noticed a significant shift in his demeanour around this time and that he was ‘completely distanced from everything going on’.

Barrett was still lucid enough to participate in the recording sessions for the band’s first album, released in August as The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, its title taken from chapter seven of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In the Willows. Sessions stretched out between February and May 1967, with producer Norman Smith (who had cut his teeth as an engineer on several of the Beatles’ albums), and were recorded at EMI Studios, later rechristened Abbey Road Studios. (The band even met the Fab Four, having been invited to a recording session of ‘Lovely Rita’; John Lennon also attended a concert at London’s Alexandra Palace on 29 April 1967, dubbed ‘The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream’, which Pink Floyd headlined.) Significantly, the band were given unlimited studio time at EMI, in exchange for a lower royalty percentage, which allowed them to experiment as much as their creativity allowed them.

While Mason later contended that the sessions were relatively easy, Smith countered this by saying that Barrett was already starting to show signs of mental health issues and that he was unable to take constructive criticism or suggestions. As the album soared up the charts, securing its final place at #6, Barrett was descending into mental illness, compounded by his almost daily use of LSD. Waters realised something was amiss and attempted to get Barrett to receive counselling, but Barrett refused to attend. A stay in Formentera with another doctor was met with a similar fate; the band had hoped that Barrett’s breakdown would solve itself, but Jenner was uncertain that it was simply a phase.

Regardless, Pink Floyd continued to build their sound and reputation and headlined a special concert on 12 May at the Queen Elizabeth Hall titled Games for May (‘a space-age relaxation for the climax of spring – electronic composition, colour and image projection, girls, and the Pink Floyd’). It was here that the use of found elements and everyday objects were introduced, and would become a staple of the band’s sets and studio albums for most of the rest of their career. It also introduced the Azimuth Coordinator, a primitive surround sound mixer that was essentially a joystick that, when moved, would pan sounds around the venue. More mundanely, ‘See Emily Play’ was written specifically for the event, and was initially titled ‘Games for May’.

The band’s reputation had been built up so much by the autumn of 1967 that a North American tour was booked. A rigorous schedule was drawn up, including television appearances on shows hosted by Dick Clark and Pat Boone. The band appeared to promote ‘See Emily Play’, but Barrett’s mental state had deteriorated so much that he refused to mime to the playbacks, and, when interviewed by the shows’ hosts, Barrett simply responded by staring off into space. Jenner and King immediately cancelled the rest of the tour, citing mental exhaustion on Barrett’s part, and sent the band home so that they could support the Jimi Hendrix Experience on a tour of England. This didn’t help matters, and by the end of the year, Mason, Waters, and Wright realised that Barrett had reached the point of no return, and they needed another guitarist and vocalist to help them out.

David Gilmour had been a friend of Barrett’s since the early 1960s: the two attended Cambridge Tech and would often perform as a duo, even hitchhiking to the south of France where they busked on the streets (and were later deported due to their lack of visas). In 1965, Gilmour’s group, the Jokers Wild, was on the same bill as the Tea Set, and Gilmour immediately took a liking to their sound. Almost three years later, he was recruited by Jenner and King to become Pink Floyd’s fifth member; the initial idea was for Barrett to continue writing songs for the band, with Gilmour, Mason, Waters, and Wright performing the songs. Just before Gilmour joined, the band held recording sessions for their third single, with several contenders – ‘Jugband Blues’, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’, ‘Vegetable Man’, and Wright’s ’Remember a Day’ and ‘Paint Box’ – ultimately being discarded in favour of ‘Apples and Oranges’, a chaotic, radio unfriendly single that was reflected in its complete failure in the hit parade.

Things reached a head in January 1968 when the band were on their way to a gig, and someone asked if they should pick up Barrett. According to Gilmour, the response was a simple, ‘Nah, let’s not bother.’ Their frustrations were compounded by Barrett’s latest song, ‘Have You Got It Yet?’, which the songwriter attempted to teach to the others, but which was really just a lengthy prank: Barrett kept changing the words and the structure, making the song impossible to learn, to which Waters simply set down his bass and walked out of the session. Waters would later recall of Barrett, ‘He was our friend, but most of the time we now wanted to strangle him.’

Two months later, a band meeting was held where it was agreed that Barrett would leave the band, with Jenner and King managing him, while Pink Floyd would be managed by Steve O’Rourke. His departure was announced to the press on 6 April 1968; a week later, the band’s fourth single, Wright’s ‘It Would Be So Nice’ (backed with Waters’ ‘Julia Dream’), was released and promptly stiffed in the charts. Undeterred by their fortunes in the hit parade, the band continued work on their second album, revisiting material that had been started but abandoned during their debut album sessions, as well as some of the rejected material from the sessions for ‘Apples and Oranges’. Several new songs were also written, including a lengthy, twelve-minute instrumental freakout that wasn’t so much written as it was drawn (Gilmour later recalled the method, instigated by Waters and Mason, as looking like ‘an architectural diagram’).

A Saucerful of Secrets was released in June 1968 and peaked at #9 in