Young Turks of psychedelia we might be, but we were as stunned by the display of hardware as we were by the band itself. I
drooled over that champagne-sparkle Ludwig drum kit while the others lusted after the stacks of Marshall amplifiers as Eric
Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger launched into the opening of ‘NSU’. We were even impressed when the curtains closed again almost
immediately as they decided to try and fix various technical problems. The fact that Jimi Hendrix later came on to guest on
a couple of numbers – his first appearance in England – was the icing on the cake.
For me that night was the moment that I knew I wanted to do this properly. I loved the power of it all. No need to dress in
Beatle jackets and tab-collar shirts, and no need to have a good-looking singer out front. No verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-chorus-end
structure to the songs, and the drummer wasn’t at the back on a horrid little platform… he was up at the front.
This simply reinforced what passed for our master plan: a desire to get more work, buy more equipment and land a record deal.
At the end of 1966, a combination of timing and luck was starting to work for us, and with Syd’s distinctive songwriting and
our improvisational style, we did have a rather rough but definitely original musical approach to offer the record companies.
Events moved very quickly in this period. Our desultory contact with Peter Jenner either side of the summer vacation had snowballed
through the autumn, and during the winter things, in Peter’s phrase, ‘took off like a rocket’. There was substantial interest
in this new phenomenon from record companies, publishers and agents.
Melody Maker
ran a feature on what was happening,
Harper & Queen’s
antennae twitched. Peter recalls a moment when he realised that there was something afoot. He was
on his way to UFO on Tottenham Court Road, and when he came into Oxford Street there were ‘all these kids with bells round
their necks. I thought, “Fucking hell, this is really starting to happen.” Unbelievable.’
Lindy came back to England after finishing her dance training in the States and saw us at an event called ‘Freak Out Ethel’.
She can still remember her surprise at our swift transformation from student covers band to psychedelic frontiersmen. In Andrew’s
words, ‘We didn’t realise it, but the tide was coming up the beach, and the Pink Floyd were right on top of the wave.’ In
his view, what we actually played, and whether we could play, was much less important than being in the right place at the
right time.
As well as running UFO, Joe Boyd was still involved in A&R and production, but his former boss at Elektra, Jac Holzman, only
offered us a rather grudging one and seven-eighths percent. We would not go with this because at the time Elektra was known
only as a small folk label – though they would go on to sign the Doors. We wanted a proper company. Joe was still desperate,
as we were, to see us signed somewhere. Polydor were prepared to offer quite a good deal, which would allow Joe to act as
an independent producer. As the deal looked like closing, Joe set up his own company, Witchseason Productions, to make it
happen.
A recording session was arranged for us in January 1967 at Sound Techniques in Old Church Street off the Kings Road, with
Joe producing and the studio owner John Wood engineering. All the recordings – including ‘Arnold Layne’, a song we’d been
playing live for a while, and a version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ – were made on a four-track tape machine, for mono reproduction.
We recorded bass and drums on one track, guitar and the trembly Farfisa Duo keyboard on two other tracks. Any effects such
as the drum repeats on ‘Arnold Layne’ were added as these three tracks were bumped down onto a fourth track, and the vocals
and any
guitar solos were added as an overdub. A final mix of the song was then mastered onto a mono tape.
A professional recording studio always made you sound great. At the studios in West Hampstead, the first time we heard ourselves
in playback, with some echo on the drums and vocals, and a decent mix, had sounded terrific. Sound Techniques was a step up
again. The studios boasted the then state-of-the-art Tannoy Red speakers, the definitive speaker of the period. Clad in a
veneered walnut finish, they stood about five feet tall, and compared to what we were used to, packed an incredible bass punch.
Listening back to ‘Arnold Layne’ now, and other songs from the same phase, I notice that I do not find myself cringing. I
am definitely not embarrassed by our juvenilia. It all sounds pretty professional, even though it would have been recorded
relatively quickly. With a limited number of tracks, you had to make decisions early on about which instrument would go on
which track and then you mixed down. But the music genuinely doesn’t seem to have suffered.
‘Candy And A Currant Bun’ was originally called ‘Let’s Roll Another One’, including the lyric ‘I’m high, don’t try to spoil
my fun’. Since this was deemed to be pushing our luck on a tape due to be taken into the still very conservative record industry,
a complete alternative set of lyrics had to be cobbled together.
For some reason we were also convinced that we needed a promotional film for ‘Arnold Layne’. Although TV programmes like
Top Of The Pops
rarely used film unless it was for some American act that couldn’t possibly make it over to England, we already saw ourselves
as a multimedia band. Derek Nice – an acquaintance of June Child, and the only film director anyone knew – was commissioned
to make the film, and we set off to the Sussex coast to start work.
I think we chose Sussex because my parents lived nearby and
rather conveniently were away. This sorted out the accommodation, and provided the suitably bizarre setting of the English
seaside in the middle of winter. Although crude by the video standards of today, and borrowing the feel of A
Hard Day’s Night,
the black and white film is surprisingly undated and relatively humorous, featuring the four of us on the beach with a fifth
band member who turns out to be a shop-window dummy. We shot the whole thing in one short grey day and in fact were leaving
the car park of East Wittering as the police car drew up to put an end to the fun. Given the notoriety of another local resident,
a Mr Keith Richards, and his pals, I think the law were hoping for another big bust. With our most innocent middle-class faces
we maintained that we had seen nothing of a suspicious nature, but would of course inform them immediately should we note
anything in the least untoward. It’s lucky really that they didn’t search the car. In it was the mannequin, nude save for
a policeman’s helmet.
Everything seemed set. We had an offer from Polydor, a producer, some recordings, even a promo. However, as frequently happens
in the music business, someone had to be ejected from the lifeboat. And in this particular instance, it was Joe Boyd who lost
out. The reason was that Bryan Morrison had intervened. Bryan, who ran his own booking agency, had hired us – although he
had never heard or seen us perform – for a gig at the Architectural Association, having seen the coverage and the feedback
we were getting. He wanted to see this hot new band for himself, and had turned up at one of our rehearsal sessions for ‘Arnold
Layne’. Joe remembers that his heart sank immediately, because Bryan started asking about the deal with Polydor and saying
that we ought to be able to get a better one. Bryan, who had good contacts with EMI, funded the Sound Techniques recording,
took a copy of the demo tape, and talked us up to the EMI executives, who didn’t know much about us other than that we
were the current buzz word. But Bryan had a way with words. They decided they wanted to sign us.
The insurmountable problem – certainly for Joe – was that EMI disliked using outside studios or producers. They owned Abbey
Road after all. They wanted their own man, Norman Smith, who had recently been promoted from being the Beatles’ engineer,
to be our producer. That was the deal on offer, and we acquiesced – partly because the deal was better than Polydor’s, and
also because EMI were
the
big label, courtesy of the Beatles. There was no question about whether to go with EMI or not. They were the UK’s dominant
record company of the period, along with Decca – Polygram was not yet coming up on the rails. And Peter got on well with Beecher
Stevens at EMI and his colleagues. They were offering a £5,000 advance, a serious deal – or in Andrew’s words, ‘a shit deal,
but a thousand times better than the Beatles’ [deal]’ – and studio costs.
Peter Jenner was given the disagreeable task of breaking the news to Joe Boyd. Peter professes some guilt to this day about
blowing Joe out, and behaving with a certain amount of insensitivity. Andrew says ‘The alacrity with which Peter and I left
Joe standing was shameless.’ But in those days you did not sign with the company and then bring along your pet producer. So
we were now EMI recording artists – and unlike most bands we came with a ready-made recording.
Shortly after signing we headed to a gig at the Queen’s Hall in Leeds, formerly the garaging depot for the city’s trams, and
now the venue for 5,000 loon-panted Northern fans, seeing what all the fuss was about at a ten-hour rave headlined by Cream
and Small Faces, and described by the
Daily Express
as ‘the night Carnaby Street moved north’.
Our own progress north proved sluggish. We left London in the early afternoon since we didn’t really know where Leeds was,
the M1 stopped at Coventry – Britain’s first stretch of motorway had
only opened in 1959 – and we had Andrew King’s old Renault as our unreliable transport. By the time we got back in the early
hours of the morning I couldn’t even make it into college just to sign the register. (At the Queen’s Hall I decided to experiment
with stage names. I thought Noke Mason would be a rather entertaining variant, and announced this to the local paper who duly
printed it below our picture. This is not a ploy I have ever repeated.)
After that particular gig, I knew I couldn’t continue combining course work and band life. I was still ostensibly studying
architecture, but of course I was spending virtually all my time rehearsing, performing or on the road. Even with Jon Corpe
doing all my class work for me, I was falling behind. Apparently degrees were not handed out on the basis of signatures in
the register alone. Jon also remembers that I gave the impression of never being particularly interested in architecture.
According to Jon, I always felt it was a job best left to architects. But help was at hand.
To my eternal gratitude my year tutor, Joe Mayo, suggested it would actually be a good idea for me to take a year’s sabbatical
from college. He assured me that he would let me back in the following year if I wanted. He didn’t say it, but I think he
recognised that I was shaping up to be a really mediocre architect. I’m sure he felt time spent living a different life would
either provide me with a better career or at least make me a better designer. The head of school was less helpful, and wrote
me a letter full of dire warnings about giving up a promising training, so I didn’t bother to show that one to my mum and
dad. I left college, expecting to return one day, but I haven’t managed to make it back yet.
I was the last of the band to spot the writing on the wall. Roger was only too anxious to give up his job with Fitzroy Robinson
and Partners designing vaults for the Bank of England. I believe he was required to sign the Official Secrets Act and promise
not to reveal the specifications of the amount of concrete required to protect
the money. It would be nice to feel that the designs he did were even now sheltering our ill-gotten gains. Rick had long decided
to devote himself to music full-time, and Syd had stopped turning up at Camberwell College of Art.
EMI had one particular concern about this band they’d just signed, a concern that was to exercise their press department all
year. They had acquired a band with a ‘psychedelic tag’, and although we could deny any knowledge of a drug connection, albeit
in a rather shifty way, and maintain that the pretty lights were no more than all-round family entertainment, there was no
doubt that the whole movement that had launched us could not be sworn to secrecy. Indeed some of them were filled with an
evangelical zeal to turn on the world. This was a period where the idea of some crazed hippie putting LSD in the water supply
was a popular nightmare – or dream, depending on your point of view.
We did various mealy-mouthed interviews denying we really even understood the meaning of the word ‘psychedelic’. There clearly
was a lot of confusion out in Top Rank land, because in one interview we felt it necessary to explain that a ‘freak out’ should
be relaxed and spontaneous, rather than ‘a mob of geezers throwing bottles’, in Roger’s words. A typical response of mine
in a
Melody Maker
interview was, ‘You have to be careful when you start on this psychedelic thing. We don’t call ourselves a psychedelic group
or say that we play psychedelic pop music. It’s just that people associate us with this and we get employed all the time at
the various freak-outs and happenings in London.’ To which Roger added, ‘I sometimes think that it’s only because we have
lots of equipment and lighting, and it saves the promoters from having to hire lighting for the group.’
We also had to fulfil one more EMI obligation by performing a 30-minute ‘artist test’ or audition. This was something every
new act had to do, but was a futile exercise in our case, since we had
already signed. Our next task was to provide the company with a single, and of course we just happened to have one we’d prepared
earlier. On 11th March, ‘Arnold Layne’ (b/w ‘Candy And A Currant Bun’), from the original pre-EMI Sound Techniques sessions
produced by Joe Boyd (an attempt to re-record it had not improved on the original) was released. Just six months after our
summer break, and the start of our involvement with Peter Jenner and Andrew King, we were professional recording artists.
A couple of months after we signed with EMI we had been treated to a full-scale record company shindig with a host of EMI
luminaries, including Beecher Stevens who actually signed us (and shortly afterwards parted company with EMI – no connection
I’m sure). A stage was erected at corporate headquarters in Manchester Square, our light show brought in, and we mimed ‘Arnold
Layne’. Everyone had canapés and champagne in quantity, and a few of the guests enjoyed a small side order of chemicals.