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

an atheist, and I didn’t start suddenly believing in God, but the claims were that it accessed parts of your brain that were not normally accessible, and the first couple of times I took it, I found it to be a very deep experience.’
    For some of the Cambridge set, taking LSD would lead to that quasi-religious experience. ‘Everyone seemed exciting at that time,’ recalls Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘There were several very charismatic characters around, not just Syd, but people like Andrew Rawlinson and Paul Charrier. Syd was just one of them.’
    It was Charrier that would engineer a sudden, dramatic split in the group, and one that had a significant impact on Barrett. ‘Paul was an energetic, bombastic, fat, loveable fellow,’ says David Gale. ‘But something happened to him while he was on that trip in my parents’ garden. He went into the toilet and found a book called Yoga and the Bible , and, while having a shit, had this revelation that this book was where it was at. He came out of the toilet and announced that he was now going to India to find this guru. We thought it was the acid talking, but in his case it transformed his life. Within a few weeks he was off to Delhi, and came back after six weeks, having been initiated into this guru’s outfit and given a series of spiritual tasks. He cut off his hair, bought a suit off the peg at Burton’s, became depressingly ordinary-looking, and began proselytising like mad, at which point Andrew Rawlinson, Ponji Robinson and other key figures converted and fucked off to Delhi as well. Then they all came back, proselytising again, and converted a whole load more people. But the other half of us - me, Storm, Seamus - were all going, “This is bollocks!” ’
    The Sant Mat sect that so enraptured Charrier and friends was an offshoot of the Sikh religion, and dated back to thirteenth-century India. The guru in question was Maharaj Charan Singh, referred to as ‘Master’ by his followers, who were known as satsangi . The peace-and-love ethos of Sant Mat was perfectly pitched for the times. There were four main principles: abstinence from sex outside of marriage; a strict vegetarian diet; no drugs or alcohol; and a general catch-all instruction to lead a moral life. Initiates were also expected to undertake at least two hours of meditation a day. Over the course of the next twelve months, various members of the Cambridge set would find themselves drawn to Sant Mat.
    ‘We’d all gone so far into ourselves with LSD that we wanted the journey to continue without drugs,’ explains Emo. ‘Paul Charrier went off to India, and when he came back and told us about the Master he was absolutely amazing. Then Ponji went, and when he came back, he had a sit-in in Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon’s room when he was living in London, where he also told us what it was like. Dave Gilmour was there and said if he had the money he would have got on an aeroplane and flown out there and then. Syd also wanted to follow the path.’
    ‘Syd would have read the book and have been forced to do so by Paul Charrier,’ believes David Gale. ‘Paul was insufferably full of it: “This guru is God. What are we waiting for?” According to Storm, Syd was quite impressed and wanted to meet the Master, who used to come to London now and again to meet his British followers, some of whom were quite ancient and were coming from the back end of the Raj era. The Master would check into a Bloomsbury hotel and give an audience - this pleasant enough bloke in his sixties with a big beard and wearing a turban. And Syd went along, met the Master to see if he could be initiated, and the Master told him he wasn’t ready for it. So did the Master see in Syd something we were not yet seeing? Storm thinks that Syd was quite upset at not being considered spiritually ready.’
    ‘To some extent I think it may have been a problem,’ says Storm Thorgerson. ‘In hindsight, you think all sorts of things about his fragile