Inside Out by Nick Mason Page B

There
     was a brief pause, then the whole room burst out laughing, and the guy at the door peeled the money off a huge wad of notes
     from his back pocket. As Andrew turned away, the partying resumed.
    The two henchmen who had accompanied Bryan on his visit to Sound Techniques to check us out were his assistants Tony Howard
     and Steve O’Rourke. Tony, a Hackney lad, had started his working life as an office boy for the
New Musical Express,
as his original intention had been to make it as a music journalist. Briefly sidetracked into a career as a nightclub croupier
     and bingo hall caller, he had come across Phil May of the Pretty Things, who put Tony in touch with Bryan. Tony was persuaded
     to come and work for Bryan’s agency.
    Steve O’Rourke, after training as an accountant, had worked as a salesman for a pet food company. His employers eventually
     dismissed him when they discovered he was racing his company car at Brands Hatch every weekend and delegating his rounds to
     other salesmen so he could spend time running a club called El Toro in the Edgware Road. A subsequent three-month stint with
     another booking agency provided him with more than sufficient experience for Bryan to consider him fully qualified.
    With Bryan as our agent we were finally getting the quantity of gigs we had always wanted. This was, however, something of
     a poisoned chalice, as the bookings represented a total mismatch of musicians and audience. This was particularly true of
     the Top Rank chain of ballrooms, where audiences only wanted to dance to a soul act or be dazzled by the stars they had seen
     on
Top Of The Pops.
Not only did we fail on both counts but the Top Rank also operated a dress code – to keep out undesirables – that required
     a jacket and tie, no long hair and
no jeans.
This not only meant we were prevented both from going to the bar for a drink andmingling with the natives, but also that our own small band of supporters would never have made it beyond the doorman.
    For the Top Rank audience, watching Pink Floyd must have been a confusing experience. With no TV exposure until ‘See Emily
     Play’ was released, we were a totally unknown quantity to almost everybody there. The one Top Twenty hit we had had, ‘Arnold
     Layne’, was not at all representative of the rest of our set, and in any case had received limited radio play and no airing
     on TV. One promoter came up to us after the show and said, ‘What a shame, boys, if only you could get some decent songs…’
    Confronted with an hour of weird and frightening music, and a half-invisible, un-screamworthy band, their reactions ranged
     from the uninterested to the violent. This was our first exposure to punters who were not guaranteed to be supportive, and
     if we hadn’t had an agent to insist on receiving the cheques in advance, we probably would never have got paid at all. Luckily
     there were enough new venues to keep us in work. The concept of rebooking was unknown, so we just kept moving one step ahead
     of the incomprehension we left in our wake. In 1967 we couldn’t even rely on a sympathetic student audience. At the time there
     was no university circuit as such, partly because there were fewer provincial universities, and partly because organising
     gigs was apparently not deemed a suitable recreational activity for students. Consequently we were sentenced to working the
     rounds of clubs and ballrooms.
    A glance at a list of the gigs we played in 1967 reveals a sudden increase from twenty gigs in the latter part of 1966 to
     well over two hundred the following year. This does not include our first tour in America, trips to Europe for TV promotions,
     or the time required to record three singles and an album. Not surprisingly all these gigs tend to merge into a featureless
     amalgam of dimly lit dressing rooms and A-roads leading to the home straight of theM1 from Birmingham back to London. The Blue Boar services at Watford Gap were where all the