In comparison, I think ‘Games For May’ a fortnight later was one of the most significant shows we have ever performed, since
the concert contained elements that became part of our performances for the following thirty years. Peter and Andrew had set
up the event at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the arts complex on London’s South Bank through Christopher Hunt, the promoter
who had arranged for us to play at the Commonwealth Institute. Once again Christopher’s classical music credentials proved
invaluable, as he was one of the few people who could engineer an entrée into this prestigious venue.
Although we had little time for preparation or rehearsal to fill our two-hour slot, we did manage to conceive the evening
as a Pink Floyd multimedia event. Unlike our regular gigs, there were no support acts, so we were able to control the environment
and create a particular mood. The audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall were seated, so the intention was clearly that, uniquely
for a rock concert, they should listen and watch, rather than dance. A large part of this show was improvised. We had our
usual repertoire of songs, and premiered ‘See Emily Play’ (‘You’ll lose
your mind and play free games for May…’), but most were chosen as vehicles, like ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, to act as a framework
for constantly changing ideas. Everyone remembers Syd for his songwriting, but he probably deserves equal credit for his radical
concept of improvised rock music.
We had some extra lights and a bubble machine, as well as the domestic slide projectors, which had to be installed right in
the middle of the stalls to get any sort of light throw. This required some technical and legal improvisation, since at the
time lighting and sound mixing was controlled from the side of the stage. It was some years before it became standard practice
to have the sound and lighting desks in the middle of the auditorium.
IT
reported that the event was ‘really good thinking … a genuine twentieth-century chamber music concert. The cleanness of presentation
of the hall itself was perfect for the very loose mixed media.’ It’s just a shame we couldn’t capitalise on this reception
and avoid the next year of drudgery fulfilling endless routine gigs.
The Azimuth Co-ordinator, which had its first outing at ‘Games For May’, was a device operated by Rick, which we had commissioned
from Bernard Speight, a technical engineer at Abbey Road. There were two channels, each with a joystick, one for his Farfisa
organ, the other for sound effects. If a joystick was upright the sound was centred, but moving it diagonally would dispatch
the sound to the speaker in the equivalent corner of the hall. Rick could send his keyboard sounds swirling round the auditorium,
or make footsteps – supplied from a Revox tape recorder – apparently march across from one side to the other. Nobody remembers
who came up with the name of the device, but the Oxford English Dictionary defines an azimuth as ‘the arc of the heavens extending
from the zenith to the horizon, which cuts it at right angles’. It seemed rather well put, I thought.
We were also banned from ever performing again at the Queen
Elizabeth Hall, not because of over-excited fans ripping up the seats but because one of the road crew, dressed as a full
admiral of the fleet, tossed flower petals into the aisles. The hall authorities deemed this a potential safety hazard for
the less sure-footed of the audience…
This was typical of the disrespect, and often downright hostility, that existed between rock bands and venue management. On
matters of safety and lighting, they would impose innumerable petty rules, some justified, many purely to indicate their disapproval.
One that particularly annoyed us was when venues would demand higher levels of auditorium lighting for rock bands than for
other forms of entertainment, especially damaging for us, as the impact of our light show would be severely diminished. An
air rifle was occasionally employed to make sure the house lighting was modified to our liking. It was in fact de rigueur
to be banned from all major venues, and as Andrew King says, you always told everyone you were banned even if you hadn’t been.
I think like virtually every other group we were banned from the Albert Hall ‘for life’ for a short while…
‘Arnold Layne’ had also received a ban, from the pirate radio stations Radio London and Radio Caroline, as well as the BBC,
which really did make it difficult to promote since there was only a handful of radio stations broadcasting at the time. The
ban was due to vague references in the lyrics that could be construed, if you tried really hard, as a celebration of ‘sexual
perversion’. Of course, not long afterwards, the BBC completely – and with a charming naivety – failed to notice anything
sexual in the lyrics of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk On The Wild Side’. It seems absurd now – and wonderfully old-fashioned given the
ultra-explicit nature of lyrics in the twenty-first century – but at the time there was still great sensitivity to censorship.
The Lord Chamberlain had retained power over the London theatres until 1967, and even as late as
1974 we were still expected to get clearances for the films accompanying our live concerts from the British Board of Film
Censors (including, bizarrely, getting a special dispensation not to have to show the censor’s licence on screen before the
films, which would rather have spoilt the effect).
In any case, getting played on the radio was difficult, as available airtime was still very limited. The Musicians Union had
negotiated a deal with the BBC that restricted the amount of records that could be broadcast on the radio to forty hours a
week. This left hours of music to be performed by the jobbing musicians who made up the radio orchestras. This was fine when
the songs were a nice bit of crooning with a trumpet solo, but when they tried to recreate ‘Purple Haze’ it was the aural
equivalent of a one-armed paper hanger.
Faced with these obstacles one option open to us – and any other band hoping to enjoy Top Twenty success – was to hype the
record. In an age before electronic point of sale data, the system was very simple: it was fairly well known which shops supplied
their returns to indicate record sales, and various persons would be sent in to the relevant outlets to buy the chosen single
incessantly. Apparently you had to be very careful in one hyper’s office. An inadvertently opened cupboard could cause serious
injury as a cascade of unplayed records came spilling out. One particular specialist, in return for £100, would load up his
sports car with flowers and chocolates and set off around the record shops to convince the girls behind the counter to adjust
the sales figures, which they were delighted to do.
‘Arnold Layne’, released in March 1967, had reached Number Twenty in the UK charts. For the follow-up, ‘See Emily Play’ was
chosen, and we tried recording it at Abbey Road. However, we just could not reproduce the sound of ‘Arnold Layne’, and so
we all trailed back to Sound Techniques to recreate the magic formula, which gave Joe Boyd a certain wry pleasure.
By the time ‘Emily’ came out, we had gained some additional benefits from the banning of ‘Arnold Layne’. I think the stations
were a little shamefaced, and it looked as though their street cred might take a turn for the worse if they were not seen
to be accommodating the new bright young things. All the radio stations played the record and we reached Number Seventeen
after two weeks. This Top Twenty chart position entitled us to an appearance on
Top Of The Pops.
This marked an important new rung in the upward ladder, and gave us real exposure. Being seen by a national television audience
would directly affect our drawing power and thus our earning capacity as a live band. ‘AS SEEN ON TV!’ was worth at least
another hundred quid a night.
Most of the day was spent with run-throughs, make-up, pressing of fancy clothes, hair washing and trimming, all at the BBC’s
well-equipped facility at Lime Grove. What the road crew quickly found out was that since the hair and make-up departments
did not know who any of the new bands were, they could also go in, chat up the girls, and get their hair washed, trimmed and
blow-dried. Rarely have I seen such deliciously gleaming road crew as those roaming the corridors of the BBC that night.
However, I felt the show itself was pretty much of an anticlimax. Miming feels pretty daft at the best of times, and this
was not even the best of times. It was always a chore to mime, especially for a drummer. To keep the sound level down you
had to avoid hitting the drum skins completely or just use the drum sides. Both methods looked very awkward. In later years
the whole ghastly exercise included using plastic cymbals and pads. In addition, you had all the adrenalin of performance
with no physical activity or real audience response to absorb it. Compared to the show, though, the complete lack of excitement
afterwards was soul-destroying. I suppose I expected the world to change after being on the telly. Surely we were now real
pop stars? But it
seemed not. The world carried on as before, and off we went to yet another dreadful venue where the audience still hated us,
but I suppose at least they hated us ‘AS SEEN ON TV!’
The following week the record was up to Number Five so we went and did it all over again. A third appearance was planned,
but Syd threw a spanner in the works, refusing to do the show, and giving an indication of the trouble that lay ahead. He
articulated the reason as ‘If John Lennon doesn’t have to do
Top Of The Pops,
why should I?’
Any chance of the record reaching Number One was out of the question. Procol Harum had ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ out at exactly
the same time, and it would not budge from the top spot. Each week we looked despairingly at the chart assuring ourselves
that everyone must have bought a copy of ‘Whiter Shade’ by now – but clearly even if they had they suffered from poor short-term
memories or wanted two copies. (Procol’s Gary Brooker was reviewing singles for
Melody Maker:
he spotted ‘Emily’ straight away. ‘The Pink Floyd. I can tell by the horrible organ sound…’)
Commercial success was appealing to all of us, apart from Syd. Norman Smith – who was now our official EMI producer – remembers
that when there was talk about picking a follow-up to ‘Arnold Layne’, and that maybe ‘See Emily Play’ should be the single,
Syd reacted as if the word ‘single’ was a nasty concept. Although he was happy to chip in with catchy musical ideas, he hated
the idea of anything being ‘commercial’.
Norman Smith had been dispatched by EMI to oversee the recording of ‘See Emily Play’ at Sound Techniques, and to produce the
recording sessions for our first album,
The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn,
which were held at Abbey Road, starting in March 1967. After trying, in his words, ‘to become a famous jazz musician’, Norman
had applied for a job at EMI after seeing an ad in
The Times
for apprentice engineers. The age cut-off was twenty-eight,
and Norman was in his mid-thirties, so he pruned six years off his age, and, to his surprise, was asked back for an interview,
along with over a hundred other applicants. Asked by one of the interviewers what he thought of Cliff Richard, who was just
emerging at the time, Norman was far from complimentary about Cliff. The interviewers, again to his surprise, tended to agree.
And Norman was appointed as one of three new apprentices.
From then on he was set to sweeping floors, being told to nip out and get a pack of cigarettes or make some tea, and occasionally
pushing a button on the orders of an engineer. Then one day ‘these four lads with funny haircuts came along’. The Beatles
had arrived at Abbey Road, and, by pure serendipity, Norman was assigned to record their test – after which he thought to
himself, ‘That’s the last we’ll see of you boys, because they weren’t terribly good, to put it mildly.’ The Beatles had other
ideas, and Norman recorded them up to the end of
Rubber Soul.
Norman had always had aspirations to be a producer, and after George Martin left EMI to set up AIR studios, he was asked to
take over the Parlophone label. In response to his initial flurry of letters of introduction, he had got a call back from
Bryan Morrison asking him to take a look at a band called Pink Floyd. Norman and Beecher Stevens – who had just joined EMI
as head of A&R – did not see eye to eye, and were both trying to carve out their own territory. The fact that they both wanted
to sign us to EMI probably played into our hands as they independently hustled hard for us to join the label. Norman remembers
that the hierarchy took a while to be convinced about this unknown group, and the £5,000 advance was a tremendous amount at
the time. When they finally agreed, they told Norman – possibly in jest – that he could sign us but his job was on the line.
I think Norman saw us as his opportunity to do a George Martin. He was interested, like us, in using studio facilities to
the
full, was very good-natured and a capable musician in his own right. Most important of all for us, he was happy to teach us
rather than protect his position by investing the production process with any mystique.
For our recordings, Norman was assisted by Peter Bown, an experienced EMI house engineer, and again a man who had been at
the studios for years, seen it all, and done most of it himself. At one early session, urged on by Peter and Andrew, we ran
through our repertoire to select a number to start recording and to impress our new comrades. Regrettably they had all been
on late sessions the day before. After thirty minutes Peter Bown had fallen asleep across the console, and Norman remembers
that he followed suit a short while later.
Given our lack of experience in the studio, we were extremely lucky to have someone like Norman. It was still rare for musicians
to be allowed anywhere near the mixing desk, and not unknown for session players to be brought in to save on studio time:
the Beatles had begun changing this, as their success convinced record companies to interfere less and less. Virtually every
subsequent band owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Beatles for creating an attitude where popular music was made by the
artists, and not constructed for them.