A few of the gigs, though,
were
memorable. Our Scottish tour of 1967 was fairly typical. It consisted of only five shows, the first two of which were at
Elgin and Nairn up in the north of Scotland, where our Sassenach invasion was swiftly repelled. In the
Moray, Nairn and Banff Courant
we achieved equal billing with a local fruitcake contest, and a typical critique of our work by the audience was ‘Do ye ken
I could sing better in ma wee bath?’
Nearer home the reception was little better. At the California Ballroom in Dunstable the balcony above the stage was an ideal
spot for the audience to express their disapproval by pouring their drinks directly onto the heads of the band members. As
Roger philosophically remarked afterwards, ‘They can’t have disliked it that much, at least they held on to the glasses.’
However, at the Feathers pub in Ealing, Roger took a direct hit to the forehead with a pre-decimal copper penny, a not insubstantial
projectile. I particularly remember this because the rest of the gig was spent with Roger looking for the bloke who threw
it. It was fortunate that Roger failed to find him, since without doubt the perpetrator would have had more and larger friends
there than we did. As it is, we would probably have suffered more abuse had not one truly devoted fan unwisely and audibly
revealed his appreciation of our talent. This gave the crowd someone easier to pick on, so they beat him up instead.
There was also an unforgettable performance on the Isle of Man during Scots Fortnight, the two weeks in July named in honour
of all the Glaswegians who would head there for some serious holiday fun. The stage in this particular venue was high enough
above the dance floor to prevent even the tallest Celt from grabbing a limb and dragging the performers into the mêlée. The
promoter dolefully suggested that in his experience it was best to carry on playing whatever happened in the hall, to keep
the house lights full up, and to forget about our own light show. We should have heeded his advice. His warnings were as nothing
compared to the omens revealed as I took my seat behind the drums. I couldn’t fail to note the pool of blood where the previous
band’s drummer had been sitting a few minutes earlier. He had clearly been found wanting and had taken a direct hit.
As we started to play, and dimmed the lights, the audience fell silent in astonishment. Initially we thought our music and
light show had captured their attention, but an eerie rumbling soon indicated otherwise. In fact the darkness had given them
the opportunity to fall on each other in a raging fury. Belatedly following the promoter’s advice, we fulfilled our contract
by providing a psychedelic musical accompaniment to the sound of the holiday Scots knocking merry hell out of each other.
As our good friend Ron Geesin was fond of announcing, ‘The next dance will be a fight.’
Strangely, these experiences did not dampen our enthusiasm. Like a platoon under fire, our band spirit was strengthened by
the sheer horror of some of the gigs, and the bombardment of abuse. As part of some strange cathartic therapy, we even managed
to laugh about them on the way home, convincing ourselves that the next gig would be better.
We frequently came up against one particular technical problem in these ballrooms, which, under the influence of
Saturday Night At The Palladium,
had decided that revolving stages were a sophisticated way of changing the acts during the evening. But as our sound equipment
and light rig increased in quantity, the scene when the stage began to rotate was one of complete chaos. As the speaker leads
were stretched to breaking point, quivering towers of equipment would plummet to the floor.
Amid this remake of the
Last Days Of Pompeii,
as speaker units tumbled around us, the road crew scrambled frantically to replug the electrics. The final lurch as the stage
shuddered to a halt made the band, standing gamely in position throughout all of this, look like the crew from
Star Trek
taking a direct hit from a Klingon warship.
By now we did have the semblance of a road crew, although we tended to get other bands’ cast-offs when it came to the roadies
who lugged our gear around. In one instance we rather naively thought that anyone arriving from a career as Cream’s roadie
must be terrific. What we hadn’t done was ask for any sort of reference. The reason this particular roadie had left Cream’s
employment was his complete failure even to set off for one gig, due to a hangover. He and his accomplice simply crept around
to the manager’s house, posted the keys to the van through his letter box and skulked off into the night. In our case, he
managed to arrive at the gigs, but some extraordinary discrepancies between the milometer readings and the fuel bills he was
claiming – clearly indicating a diversion between London and Brighton involving a trip to the Balkans – meant his stay with
us was eventually brought to an abrupt end.
A subsequent roadie was scarcely more successful. He eventually had to go when we found out why we’d been having endless problems
with our WEM speakers. We had set up a sponsorship deal with Watkins Electronic Music (‘Wham!! It’s WEM’), but neither we
nor Charlie Watkins could understand why the damage to our speakers was so extensive and so frequent. We discovered that our
less-than-loyal retainer had been carefully substituting the new replacement cones with the old blown ones, and then heading
off down to the West End to sell the new speakers to the electrical shops in Lisle Street. Small wonder we had a unique sound.
Given the unpredictable quality of the crew, it was a requirement for everybody involved with Blackhill – band, management
and support staff – to muck in and put in long hours. In one night the crew, however makeshift, might have to set up for a
doubleheader in the early evening out in Norfolk, and then cart everything down to London for a UFO appearance at two in the
morning. Eventually the road crew did become more organised, particularly after the arrival of Peter Wynne Willson.
Peter was an experienced theatre lighting man. He had been expelled from Oundle school for taking part in an Aldermaston march,
and moved into local, then provincial, and finally West End theatre work. He had a flat in Earlham Street in Covent Garden,
with his girlfriend Susie Gawler-Wright (known as ‘the psychedelic debutante’), which Syd came to live in – Susie had spent
some time in Cambridge and knew a lot of the same circle of friends.
At the time of our All Saints Church gigs, Peter had sporadically come to see us. Joe Gannon was looking after our lighting
at the time, so when Peter joined our crew he took on the responsibilities of road manager. However, he had one particular
handicap for this role – no driving licence. So Rick would drive the van while Peter manhandled the equipment. Peter then
took over the sound (not, by his own admission, one of his strengths), before – following Joe’s departure – running the lighting,
assisted by Susie.
Peter inherited Andrew King and Peter Jenner’s cobbled-together lighting rig, which, although to Peter’s professional mind
‘extremely dodgy’, functioned surprisingly well until one art college gig, where the weird wiring linked two phases, sending
a sudden surge of 440 volts coursing through the lighting system and destroying it in a blaze of glory. Peter concentrated
on building a more advanced system based around three 1000W Rank Aldis projectors, and began experimenting with different
ways of treating the light, by putting it through polarisers and
stretched membranes made of latex. The colours created were ‘spectacular, but very dim’. Peter found that the best polarised
stress patterns were produced by using condoms. This led to the occasion when the van and our road crew were pulled over by
the police one night. The officers of the law were intrigued to find one of the crew, John Marsh, cutting up a pile of condoms
on the front seat of the van. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ said Peter calmly. ‘That’s our roadie – he’s mad.’
Another way of treating the light was to set a mirror at an angle of 45 degrees in front of the end of a long lens. This mirror
was then vibrated to make Lissajou patterns. Inserting chopper and colour wheels into the gate and playing with the speed
of the wheels created what he describes as ‘worms of colour’.
One of Peter’s other creations used a movie light, pushed beyond the recommended limits to achieve maximum brightness. In
front of this was mounted a coloured glass wheel spun at extremely high speed by a motor. This apparatus was mounted in a
box about two by three feet in size, and angled up at the band on some large rubber feet Peter had sourced. As there were
no specialist suppliers, Peter raided the government surplus shops on the Edgware and Tottenham Court Roads for military-quality
equipment, cables and connectors – which were particularly robust and able to be driven round the UK in an era before flight
cases.
The effect of Peter’s device was spectacular. With two wheels the possibilities were not just doubled but squared. By adjusting
the speed of both wheels colours were produced that could only be sensed – ‘silvery purple metallic colours. Nick’s arm would
trail rainbows on the back projection screen in a delightful way.’ But the uneven temperatures, the shaking and banging, and
the wildly spinning colour wheels, meant the glass had an alarming tendency to run out of control and shatter noisily, sending
vicious shards of
glass flying into the band at very close quarters. We had to carry round rafts of spare glass – we should really have had
a paramedic’s first aid kit too. Roger and I dubbed these machines ‘the Daleks’ in tribute to their robotic nature and their
obvious hostility to humanoids. The lights were now an integral part of our show, and in one
Melody Maker
interview of the time, I solemnly intoned ‘the lighting man literally has to be one of the group’, although clearly not intending
this to extend to a share of any royalties.
On the road economies were made wherever possible. We would buy any alcohol in advance at a roadside off-licence to avoid
inflated bar prices. Hotels were ignored in favour of a long drive home, which precluded all the wild living every other band
was apparently enjoying. Thanks to the knack the Bryan Morrison Agency had of booking gigs that required a constant criss-crossing
of the country, it felt as though we were permanently in the van. To add to the excitement, we lived in constant fear of running
out of petrol since the roadies would only go to garages that offered a minimum of quadruple Green Shield stamps – the original
customer loyalty system.
Money was generally tight: despite the increased work, we were still in a spiral of debt, since we were constantly upgrading
our equipment. We were in theory paying ourselves a salary of £30 a week, but in fact only managing to extract £7 10s, and
consequently, to supplement this income, moneymaking schemes were always popular. Much later, on some ferry crossing to the
Continent, John Marsh offered to crawl from one end of the boat to the other barking like a dog if Roger would give him £20,
a deal Roger found irresistible, and the other passengers troubling. John completed his side of the bargain and, enthused
with the success of this profit-making scheme, offered to jump off the side of the ferry mid-Channel and swim back to England
in exchange for
Roger’s house. Roger, a gambling man, was seriously tempted. He knew the odds were that John would not make it. But since
this would also mean we wouldn’t have had a light show for the rest of the trip, reason finally won the day.
In between the endless journeys, we occasionally had a home fixture at UFO, although only once a month or so after January
1967. However, two major dates in the spring helped keep us in touch with our original audience. The ‘14-Hour Technicolour
Dream’ on 29th April was an all-night event at Alexandra Palace, with acts including Alex Harvey, Soft Machine and Arthur
Brown, the whole thing organised by Hoppy and the
IT
crowd to raise more funds for the magazine following a police raid. ‘Chaos, but it worked,’ Andrew King recalls. For many
people this lingers in their memory as a seminal psychedelic event, the pinnacle of that whole phase, with bands and acts
playing through till daybreak. Peter Jenner, for example, says, ‘The “Technicolour Dream” symbolised everything. It was the
pinnacle of pure amateur psychedelia, the crowning ceremony, the last big event of the gang. By the time the Pink Floyd came
on in this somewhat dilapidated hall, it was dawn, the light was streaming through all the old stained glass windows, and
people were climbing up the scaffolding around the Ally Pally organ. Virtually everybody was tripping, apart from the band,
though Syd might have been. A great gig – though God knows what it actually sounded like.’
But others found the whole thing just too commercial, the musical end of the underground movement dominating because it was
the most profitable element – the ‘Technicolour Dream’ was really just a big rock concert. Miles recalls the band the Flies,
who’d earlier urinated on the audience to establish their proto-punk credentials, standing at the side of the stage while
we were playing yelling abuse and shouting ‘Sell-outs!’ I don’t remember this, but if they did, they might have had a point:
the whole event
was a sell-out. And our loyal UFO audience, used to enjoying shared experiences, found themselves faced with security notices,
a ten-foot stage, and a role as exhibits in a freak show.
From our point of view the ‘Technicolour Dream’ was more of a logistical nightmare. That night we had been playing at a gig
in Holland in the early evening, finished the show, packed up, been driven through the night at high speed by over-excited
Dutchmen to catch the last flight out, and rushed madly over to North London to make our appearance. Given this itinerary,
the chances of enjoying any benefits of a psychedelic love-in were remote. Syd was completely distanced from everything going
on, whether simply tripping or suffering from a more organic neural disturbance I still have no idea.