Inside Out (14 page)

To coincide with the Hendrix tour, we released a single called ‘Apples And Oranges’, another attempt to create a hit. This
was another of Syd’s whimsical compositions, and would have made a great album track, but it was probably not really suitable
for the job. However, under pressure, we tried to turn it into a hit, with Norman Smith’s help, adding overdubbed choruses
and echoes. I don’t remember playing it live much, if at all. It is possible that there was a certain amount of US pressure
to release it to tie in with our tour, but we had no time to do any real promotion out there. This was a case of trusting
the advice we were given, and learning that sometimes, if not always, it was best to stick with our
own instincts, and make our own decisions.

The tour finished and we played a show at Olympia in December 1967, an event called ‘Christmas On Earth Continued’. Syd was
completely out of it yet again, and the rest of us were finally reaching breaking point. It was time to come out of denial.
We had tried to ignore the problems, and willed them to go away, but even our lust to succeed could no longer obscure the
fact that we could not continue with Syd in this state, coupled to which it just was not fun any more – and doubtless no fun
for Syd either. We did not want to lose Syd. He was our songwriter, singer, guitarist, and – although you might not have known
from our less than sympathetic treatment of him – he was our friend.

Our initial idea was to follow the Beach Boys’ lead. This was a solution suggested by the stories we had heard about Brian
Wilson: apparently incapable of live performance, he was effectively a home-based writer. We thought we could augment the
band with an extra guitarist to take the pressure off Syd. Jeff Beck’s name was mentioned, which would have been an interesting
(and spectacular) experiment. I don’t think any of us would have had the courage to make the phone call at the time. Roger
eventually managed it twenty-five years later.

But we knew someone we could call: Roger and Syd’s old friend from Cambridge, David Gilmour.

O
UR FIRST
discreet overture to David Gilmour had come about when I spotted him in the audience at a Royal College of Art gig at the
end of 1967. The RCA, next to the Albert Hall, was at the time the closest thing we had to a home venue following the demise
of UFO. We had friends in a number of the departments at the college, which led to a certain amount of cross-pollination between
poster design, sleeves, photography and music, as well as the continual use of RCA facilities for extra-mural activities.

As David was not a student, I assumed he was there to check us out. During a break I sidled up to David and muttered something
about the possibility of him joining us as an additional guitarist. This was not a unilateral recruiting drive on my part,
just the first chance any of us had had to broach the subject with him. David was certainly interested, mainly, I imagine,
because although he thought of us – correctly – as less experienced than his previous band, Jokers Wild, we had acquired all
the trappings that they had never been able to: an agent, a record deal and a couple of hit records.

Jokers Wild had been one of the most highly rated bands in the Cambridge area. They were all seen as accomplished musicians.
Willie Wilson, who replaced the original drummer Clive Welham, resurfaced with Tim Renwick in Sutherland Brothers and Quiver,
and later formed part of the shadow band we used on the live shows of
The Wall.

I now can’t recall the first time I met David. We had certainly both played at the same venues, including at Libby January
and
her sister’s party, and we had clearly encountered each other in some social settings, since I was able to pick him out in
the crowd at the RCA.

As a native of Cambridge – his early musical encounters with Syd had been at the Cambridge Tech – David had found plenty of
work around for Jokers Wild either locally, playing to US airmen awaiting World War III, or on the occasional foray to London.
However, David had ventured further afield following a busking holiday in the south of France with Syd and some friends in
August 1965. He decided to return to the Continent with Jokers Wild, and they had stuck it out for a year or so including
the ‘Summer of Love’, pragmatically re-christening themselves the Flowers. That band had finally broken up and at the time
I saw him at the Royal College of Art David was at something of a loose end, driving a van for the designers Ossie Clarke
and Alice Pollock, who ran the Quorum boutique in Chelsea.

We approached him formally just before Christmas 1967, when we proposed that he join as the fifth member of Pink Floyd. Syd
had been talked into agreeing that David joining was a good idea. We went through the formalities of a highly reasonable band
meeting, but it must have been made clear to Syd that disagreement was not an option. David accepted our offer, and we promised
him a salary of £30 a week, omitting to tell him the real take-home pay was a quarter of that. Steve O’Rourke, who by now
had become our primary point of contact within the Bryan Morrison Agency, provided a room in his house, which was equipped
with a Revox tape recorder and some free sandwiches, where David mastered our entire repertoire in a matter of days.

A far more taxing problem for David was establishing himself within the existing band. Officially he was the second guitarist
and additional vocalist. But Syd saw David as an interloper, while the rest of the band saw him as a potential replacement
for Syd.
However, we took yet another opportunity to avoid articulating this to David, happy to avoid the harsh truth. With these unclear
signals, David had to make the best of an awkward situation.

Events thereafter moved quite quickly. There was a handful of gigs in early 1968 where we tried playing as a five-piece. What
Syd was experiencing at these shows we can only guess at: he was probably completely confused, and angry that his influence
was being steadily eroded. On stage, he put the minimum of effort into his performance, seemingly just going through the motions.
This lack of contribution was probably his refusal to take part in the whole charade. As he withdrew further and further,
this merely convinced us that we were taking the right decision.

The clearest example of Syd’s attitude was a rehearsal session in a school hall in West London, where Syd spent a couple of
hours teaching us a new song he’d titled ‘Have You Got It Yet?’ He constantly changed the arrangement so that each time we
played the song, the vocal chorus of ‘No, no, no’ was guaranteed to be wrong…It was one final, inspired demonstration of all
his anger and frustration.

Things came to a head in February on the day we were due to play a gig in Southampton. In the car on the way to collect Syd,
someone said ‘Shall we pick up Syd?’ and the response was ‘No, fuck it, let’s not bother’. To recount it as baldly as this
sounds hardhearted to the point of being cruel – it’s true. The decision was, and we were, completely callous. In the blinkered
sense of what we were doing, I thought Syd was simply being bloody-minded and was so exasperated with him that I could only
see the short-term impact he was having on our desire to be a successful band.

Considering we had never previously rehearsed together as a four-piece, the performance worked well musically, with David
covering all the vocal and guitar parts. It was an indication of how
little Syd had been contributing to the recent gigs, but even so, it is astonishing how blithely confident we must have been
to take this step. Most importantly, the audience didn’t ask for their money back: it was clear that the absence of Syd was
not a critical drawback. We simply didn’t pick him up again.

Although we had conveniently forgotten to inform the management of our modified line-up and new travel arrangements, Peter
and Andrew – and Syd, naturally – rapidly realised what was going on. The matter would have to be resolved. Since what we
had at the time was a six-way partnership, Roger, Rick and I didn’t even have a majority to claim the band name, and with
Syd’s added importance as the main songwriter, his claim was probably stronger.

Surprisingly, perhaps, this was never an issue. Just as the partnership had been set up as an eminently equitable arrangement,
so too dismantling it was conducted in a civilised manner. A meeting was held with everybody, including Syd, at Peter’s house
in early March. Peter says, ‘We fought to keep Syd in. I didn’t really know David, although I knew he was a talented guitarist
and a very good mimic. He could play Syd guitar better than Syd.’ However, Peter and Andrew conceded, and after only the odd
outbreak of recriminations, the partnership was dissolved. Syd’s suggestion for resolving any problems, by the way, was to
add two girl saxophone players to the line-up.

We agreed to Blackhill’s entitlement in perpetuity to all our past activities. The three of us continued as Pink Floyd and
Syd left the band. Peter and Andrew clearly felt that Syd was the creative centre of the band, a reasonable point of view
given our track record up until that point. Consequently, they decided to represent him rather than us. ‘Peter and I deserved
to lose Pink Floyd,’ says Andrew. ‘We hadn’t done a good job, especially in the US. We hadn’t been aggressive enough with
the record companies.’
Andrew thinks that none of us – David apart – came out of this phase with flying colours. And he makes the point that the
decision to part company was definitely a shock to Syd, because he had never considered the rest of us (as others might have)
to be effectively his backing band – ‘he was devoted to the band.’

‘It was a natural parting of the ways,’ says Peter. ‘We wanted to develop Blackhill, so we couldn’t have Pink Floyd as partners
if we were concentrating on other acts. Pink Floyd questioned whether we could look after them without Syd. And Andrew and
I might always have been harking back to the Syd days.’ His view was that if Syd was taken away from the pressures of being
in the band and given more space and time, he would become more stable. Peter says, ‘I wish I knew what happened. I wish I
had not let it happen. We all wanted to help, we all tried and we could not find the solution. If Syd is unhappy about what
happened, I feel bad about my share of the fault. If Syd is not unhappy, then he achieved a state of reclusive peace and tranquility.
I would love to know the answer.’

Following the break-up of our partnership with Blackhill, and lacking the obligatory management, it seemed logical to ask
Bryan Morrison to take us on. We went to see him, and he agreed to supply Steve O’Rourke’s services to manage us. Bryan would
continue to develop his publishing empire, while Tony Howard would handle the bookings. Steve remained our manager for the
rest of his life.

Both Andrew and Peter think that Bryan and Steve were able to see the possibilities of exploiting the situation we had created
together. Bryan remembers lecturing Steve on the benefits of sticking with us rather than attempting to discover new talents.
Andrew recalls sitting with Steve in the Speakeasy Club (the influential music business club off Upper Regent Street) long
before the split, and Steve telling him, ‘Do you realise how
important and influential Pink Floyd will be on millions of kids?’, and also observes that Steve always took the job of managing
us very seriously. He was never flippant about it, as Bryan could sometimes be.

Steve came from a very different background to the band. His father Tommy was a fisherman on the Aran Islands, off the west
coast of Ireland; when the great American documentary maker Robert Flaherty made his film
Man of Aran
about life on the islands in the 1930s, Steve’s father was one of the featured characters. Tommy was then persuaded to come
to England to seek his fortune in films, and although the outbreak of war and conscription put paid to his chances of screen
glory, he settled in London, where Steve was born.

With his previous background in sales, and techniques honed at the Bryan Morrison finishing school, Steve brought a harder
edge to our management. He exuded a sense of confidence, was a tough negotiator, and attired in his dark blue suit he looked
like he meant business. It remained his preferred style of management, only the quantity of suits multiplied. We learnt that
as a pet food salesman he would whip out a tin of the product, dip in a spoon and eat it. We found this commitment to his
clients both admirable and seriously alarming, and Steve probably regretted going into such detail about his sales technique,
since Roger was prone to dredge it up in conversation in later years.