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

personality. But Syd’s character was very mercurial. He tended to go into things with great gusto and then drop them.’
    While the path being taken by his peers may have intrigued Barrett and Gilmour, their future Pink Floyd colleague was less enchanted. Still on the fringes of the hipster group and unimpressed by LSD or Indian mysticism, Roger Waters was, as Andrew Rawlinson recalls, ‘a committed atheist, who took no interest in it at all’.
     
    Whatever spiritual setbacks Syd may have been experiencing, 1965 also brought him back into contact with David Gilmour. That summer, in a break from Jokers Wild, Gilmour had hitchhiked through France to stay with friends near St Tropez. Syd and a contingent from Cambridge showed up in a Land Rover and set up home on a nearby campsite. During the two-week sojourn, Barrett and Gilmour got drunk, had fun, played their guitars and were arrested for busking.
    That October, their paths would cross again when Jokers Wild and The Tea Set were booked on the same bill, performing at the twenty-first birthday party of Storm Thorgerson’s girlfriend, Libby January, and her twin sister Rosie, at a country house in Great Shelford. Arranged by their father, Douglas January, a prominent local estate agent, the bands performed on two stages at either end of a marquee. Also playing that night was an unknown American singer-songwriter called Paul Simon.
    ‘Paul Simon sang in the living room,’ remembers Jokers Wild’s new drummer (and Clive Welham’s replacement) Willie Wilson. ‘Nobody knew who he was, and he was a pain in the arse. He came up and said, “Can I play with you?” And we were like, “You’re an acoustic folk singer; we’re a rock ’n’ roll band.” He said, “I can do ‘Johnny B. Goode’.” So we eventually let him get up and have a go.’
    Dope was smoked surreptitiously, as the partygoers inevitably fell into two camps. ‘There were the young farmers and all those with money up one end of the marquee and us lot up the other end,’ says Emo. ‘Then Syd tried to pull a tablecloth off, and you’ve never seen so many expensive crystal glasses going everywhere.’ Emo’s sidekick, Pip Carter, jumped on stage to accompany Jokers Wild on the bongos. Not wishing to be left out, Emo followed suit. ‘I actually got up with The Tea Set and did a Bo Diddley song, but I didn’t know the words, so I sung them after Syd had sung them, until I fell off the stage, drunk, and came to, with Mr January standing over me.’
    ‘It was the night I realised that everything was changing,’ offers John Davies. ‘I remember being very stoned, but very aware that we were all now heading off on our own personal journeys. I’m not sure we were such a unique group, but sometimes it felt as if we had to wait until 1967 for the rest of the world to catch up with us.’
    As Cambridge’s ‘gang of very hip boys’ undertook their own personal journeys, Barrett and Waters would have to wait another two and a half years before Gilmour came back into their lives. Four years later, the Januarys’ country house would reappear in the Pink Floyd story, its lawn and French windows immortalised on the cover of the band’s album, Ummagumma . By then, unknown to all at the time, Pink Floyd’s charismatic and beguiling frontman would be replaced by one of his best friends.

CHAPTER THREE
    A STRANGE HOBBY
‘Turn up, tune in, fuck off!’
    Roger Waters
     
     
     
     
     
    ‘ What a rave! A man crawling naked through jelly. Girls stripped to the waist. Offbeat poetry. Weird music . . .’ Sixties gossip magazine Titbits was quick to recount the ‘Spontaneous Underground Happening’ in February 1966. The event took place at the Marquee club on Wardour Street, in the heart of London’s Soho. Within weeks, one of the bands providing the music would be The Pink Floyd Sound, as they were now commonly billing themselves.
    The year of 1966 would be a causal one for rock music and popular culture