Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake

LSD could be absorbed through the skin, when he accidentally handled impregnated sugar cubes, resulting in ‘hours of fucking chaos and us not having a clue which cubes you could trip on and which ones you couldn’t’.
    Whatever he’d ingested that day, Barrett’s imagination was gripped by a matchbox, a plum and an orange, which he’d found in David Gale’s kitchen, and spent the next four hours contemplating, until, depending on who’s telling the story, Charrier stamped on the fruit or Emo ate it.
    ‘That was when Paul and Syd then went into the house, and started jumping up and down in Dave Gale’s bath shouting, “No rules, no rules!” ’ recalls Emo. ‘Syd always had this thing about breaking free of rules. He thought that when he joined a group and made it, there’d be no rules and he could come and go as he pleased. But, of course, once he got there, he found it was the same as anywhere else - one of the things that probably screwed him up.’
    In the meantime, Syd’s frequently on-off relationship with Libby now seemed to be permanently off, though they remained friends. She began seeing artist Pablo Picasso’s son Claude (‘He loved Syd, and would often suggest we go and visit him on a Sunday’), and went to Germany that summer to study. Barrett continued to visit Cambridge at weekends. His hometown was still full of interesting distractions, some of which were evident when he returned to London.
    ‘I never touched acid, scared stiff of it,’ says Seamus O’Connell. ‘But I remember when we were in Tottenham Street, Syd had been back to Cambridge for a weekend and had some strange drug experience there at the Arts Theatre with one of his mates. When he came back to London, one of his eyes looked dead. He had very lively eyes, normally, very bright, but one of them wasn’t quite right. We all remarked on it, and he came out with some fanciful explanation.’
    That same summer, with Libby gone, Syd began seeing Lindsay Corner, another ex-pupil of Ely Grammar School for Girls, whose father had been a friend of Dr Barrett’s. Their mutual friend Po had introduced the pair at the Dorothy Ballroom. Lindsay was also more sympathetic to Syd’s ‘consciousness-expanding’ adventures. At this time Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon filmed Syd purportedly tripping on magic mushrooms. Nigel had borrowed an 8mm camera from college and headed for a disused quarry near Cambridge’s Gog Magog Hills, with his wife Jenny, Syd, Roger Waters’ friend Andrew Rawlinson, David Gale, Rawlinson’s girlfriend Lucy Pryor and future Floyd lighting tech Russell Page.
    The footage is grainy, the camera angles sometimes unsteady, but a surprisingly dapper-looking Barrett, in white shirt and blue raincoat, is clearly visible, striding purposefully around the quarry one moment, before slipping into quiet contemplation the next. Later, he’s seen pondering the leaf of a plant, bawling silently at the camera and appearing, rather self-consciously it seems, with mushrooms placed over his eye sockets and mouth. The film concludes with footage of a bonfire started in the quarry and some shaky footage of his co-conspirators. Now widely bootlegged and freely available to view on the Internet, the film was misleadingly given the name Syd’s First Trip .
    ‘We were just fucking around with a camera,’ says David Gale. ‘That film has a certain nostalgic charm. But we really were making it up as we went along. It certainly wasn’t the first time Syd took a trip, and I’m not convinced that his first time was in my parents’ back garden, either. Legend has moved in on that one. But it’s quite possible that he’d taken it before in London. I wouldn’t be surprised.’
    David Gilmour would also try LSD that year. ‘There were a lot of people experimenting with it as a way of finding a greater consciousness,’ he said. ‘The intention was to have a quasi-religious-cum-scientific experience, and I rather concurred with that. I’m