Original subtitles

Nick, Rick and I were all in

the first year of the diploma of architecture course

at the Regent Street Polytechnic

in 1961 or 1962, something like that

and I remember my individual meetings with both of them very clearly.

Whether they will bear me out on these reminiscences, I've no idea

because obviously we're all quite old now

and can't really remember things very well.

But, yeah, Nick as I recall...

I discovered that he had an Austin 7 Nippy

which was a fish-tailed Austin 7

and showing remarkable balls,

I asked if I could borrow it to go down to Corsham Court

where my then girlfriend was studying art

at the Bath Academy of Art, for the weekend.

And I remember him making up some weird story as to why I couldn't

rather than just saying "Are you fuckin' insane?

"Of course you can't borrow my car. I don't even know you."

And I'd be very interested to know if he has a similar memory.

Rick was slightly different.

Already by that time, had been addicted to smoking cigarettes for many years

and I used to smoke Senior Service

and I'd run out in the middle of a particularly awful building construction lecture.

And so I sort of looked round the room to see if anybody else was,

A - smoking cigarettes, cos you could in those days, people smoked everywhere,

or B - smoking Senior Service.

And I spotted somebody with a pack of 20 Senior Service

and it was flat pack, you probably don't remember,

and you had ten on this side and ten on that.

And he had 1 4 or 15 cigarettes left

so I barged up to him in a quiet moment and said,

"I've run out of fags, could you give me one?"

"Till the... Cos..."

And he went, "No".

And I went, "No, you don't understand, I just want a cigarette now

"cos I've run out and l'm gasping".

"And if you give me, I'll pay you back" and he went, "No".

That was Rick. And he never did give me the cigarette.

And... So that was an interesting first encounter.

I seem to recall that there was a sort of room downstairs somewhere

that was called the Student Union

and how I gravitated towards it, I have no idea

but I think I did.

There was a guy there called...

I have no idea whether he was in the School of Architecture -

called Ken Chapman

who fancied himself as a songwriter, I think.

And he wanted people to demo copies of the Moonlight Sonata

with bad lyrics put to them.

And I think we got involved in that, slightly, in different ways

and then there were other people, but certainly Rick was there

and Rick's wife Juliette was there

although she wasn't studying Architecture, not sure what she was doing there.

And there were various other people.

A guy called Keith Noble who was in DA1 and his sister was involved.

There were a ton of people sort of hanging around

and nobody could really play anything or do anything.

I certainly couldn't.

I played the harmonica a bit as I recall.

But somehow it turned into a pop group

that I think originally was called The Sigma 6 or something like that.

That's sort of all that I can remember.

I have very vivid memories of that.

Mike had various cats

and I became very, very attached to brown Burmese cats when I was there

because he had a cat called Brownie McGhee,

named after the famous musician obviously,

who was the most fabulous cat I'd ever met

and he had another one that he stole off the street in a run.

He found this stray Siamese which he called Tungee and he had these two cats.

I have a number of abiding memories of that house.

A lot of abiding memories

but I remember being with Mike one day

and a pigeon flew in through the window

and he leapt from his chair and slammed the window shut

and the cats then chased this pigeon around his apartment

for what seemed like hours

before they finally cornered it and tore it to shreds

and I was somewhat slightly aghast.

And I remember Mike looking at me and going,

"How would you feel if a nice fillet steak flew in threw the window

"and someone picked it up and threw it back out again?"

And I thought, "The man has a point."

But he was very idiosyncratic in his treatment of his pet cats.

For instance he used to get...

Food for them would be like a bit of raw chicken or half a chicken

and he had Hessian walls all round

and he would rub the chicken all over the walls

and then nail it to a wall somewhere

and then put the cats where he'd started

and they'd scrabble around the apartment

all over the walls till they found this bit of raw chicken.

And then they'd eat it on the wall.

So, it was a very different sort of pet experience than most of them are.

Bob was obviously not just one of the nicest people you'd ever meet

but also an incredibly talented guitar player.

I don't know why I never run into him, but I never do.

I liked him enormously and I liked his parents as well.

I think his dad was called Helmut

and he worked in a laboratory in Cambridge for the University.

l'm not sure what he did there

but I know in his spare time he made Spanish guitars

and was obviously an extraordinarily accomplished craftsman.

And Bob's mum was very warm.

I like to think she had plaits, l'm sure she didn't,

but she probably had some sort of plaited thing hanging down the back.

She was good peasant stock.

She sort of smelled of clogs and...

l'm not meaning to be insulting.

lt was incredibly kind of attractive, the whole vibe

at the Klose household was very...

Sadly or not, I don't know whether it was sad or not,

because it might well be that we would've never have progressed

if Bob had stayed in the band cos he was too good

and there was no need to experiment cos he was so good at playing the guitar

that we could play Elmore James, Lonnie Johnson all night.

Not just copy things if he wanted to,

but he had a real thing with the guitar.

So that was Bob. But I think he failed the first year of DA1

and so Helmut and whatever his mum's name was

sort of forced him to sell the sky blue Stratocaster

and go get a proper gig at a proper college studying...

I think he went and studied photography, as I recall.

He might not have done because I can't remember these things very clearly.

How after he left... I guess...

l'm trying to think if he left before Syd arrived from Cambridge.

Syd and I had had these grandiose conversations in Cambridge

about how we were gonna have a band when he came up to London

which he did a year later than I did.

And I remember sitting drawing pictures of amplifiers on small pieces of paper.

"This one is for the base and the lead vocal

"and this one's for the lead guitar and the rhythm guitar"

and I think that was it.

Our aspirations were like two VOX AC 30s and that would be enough.

I was talking to Stevie Winwood the other night

cos he and Eric played here last Thursday

and I reminded him that I went to see them at the Manor House back then

you know, Keep On Running, the first hit,

Spencer Davis Group at the Manor House.

And it was a room about this size

and they had a PA and I'd never seen one before

but what the PA was, it was two whittled speaker cabinets.

When I say cabinets, they were this big.

Each one had one ten-inch dual-concentric speaker in it

and there was one on each side of the stage

and it was like a complete revelation.

I thought "Wow, this sound is so loud and crystal clear and so fabulous".

lt's extraordinary how things have changed since those days.

Again, Nick will correct me if l'm wrong, cos he's the great archivist

I think the first gig that we ever got paid for

was somebody's birthday party at a house called High Pines in Escher...

Where the hell did I remember that from?

And two things stick out about that gig.

One is that we had purchased, at great expense, a big white plug

that would plug into any socket

so it would do a 15 amp round pin or 5 amp round pin

or 13 amp square pin or whatever.

So we thought "Wow, this is the greatest thing in the world.

"This means we can do a gig anywhere".

Because we could plug everything in with this plug.

And I think also at the time there was this guy in the band

who was in the RAF called Chris somebody or other

and he always used to say things like "The next number is called

"Looking Through The Knotholes ln Granny's Wooden Leg."

He was a bit of a comic. lt was Chris Dennis.

Chris Dennis was a bit of a comic.

But he did have a PA so we put up with his jokes.

Now, how we ever got from that, through that thing at the Marquee to...

well, probably, to give them due credit, through Peter and Andrew.

Cos Peter Jenner was also, a bit like Syd,

he was interested in what was going on on the West Coast.

And...

lt may well be that they had some kind of an input into...

the things that started to happen around us

at the Marquee Club and after that.

But it's really hard to find any path that you could...

find footprints in.

Yeah, so I remember Norman in the Albert Hall.

We did Saucerful Of Secrets

with a big chorus and with Norman conducting it

in a tail-coat

and with Rick thundering away on the pipe-organ in the back there.

And I remember standing there playing bass and looking up

and thinking "Wow, this is great".

And Norman had tears rolling down his cheeks.

And I remember...

saying later "l'm not sure if it was the smoke from the cannons".

1812 cannons that we borrowed or whether it was emotion,

but I think it was emotion.

I think he was genuinely moved to be there and doing this thing.

Although he had told us "You got away with it this time,

"but after this album you're gonna have to really knuckle down,

"write some three-minute pop-songs,

"get some hits, otherwise you're dead".

And he was wrong about that, but he was right about a lot of things

and I remember him with enormous affection.

The Games for May concert,

yeah, was...

lt was important for a number of reasons.

Not least that it was an expression of Peter Jenner and Andrew King's

grand idea that popular music in general, but Pink Floyd in particular,

could become important musically, in general terms.

Not just "That's pop music and here's the rest of music".

So, the idea that... l'm trying to remember what the promoter's name was.

I can't.

That we should perform in the Queen Elizabeth Hall,

which was really for chamber music, you know, and for serious music.

This was the idea that popular music could be serious in some way.

lt was an idea that nobody had ever grasped hold of before

and Peter and Andrew did that.

And you were speaking earlier about working away in little rooms.

I remember renting. I rented a basement somewhere off the...

I can't remember the name of the road. A horrible, damp, dingy basement

where I sat with my ferrograph

speeding up tapes to make things that sounded like bird song

and recording edge turns of gongs and things

cos we made the very first quadraphonic tapes to play as an adjunct.

That was the first time we ever set up a quadraphonic sound system.

And a lot of it was very stupid in a kind of avant-garde way.

But quite light hearted, I remember during the show

having those little cars with a flywheel in them and you go...

doing that and rushing across the stage following one of them with a microphone.

So that was... Which the humour of it kind of appeals to me now.

And I think we were banned from ever performing in the Hall again

because we threw flowers and this was considered completely beyond the pale.

I wish I could remember the guy's name who produced this.

Doesn't really matter.

So, I think in a way Games for May was important

because it had those pretensions.

But they came really from Peter and Andrew, not from us.

I mean, if we were here talking about Grosvenor Square

and tearing up cobblestones, and being run down by police horses

and heads split open with batons or...

or if we were in the Rue des Beaux Arts

facing the CRS and the riot police in Paris in 1968

then that's an entirely different thing, but we weren't.

We were just, you know, just kind of going...

lt wasn't that special. I don't think anyway.

I mean, I really enjoyed it.

l'm not trying to belittle what Syd did, or the music or anything,

but I think that trying to pretend

that it was a sort of important movement, I find...

wrong.

I think this is really looking at history now.

And there is a sort of pattern or if not a pattern, there's a theme to it

which is about a young generation

having the power through making money, really, because prior to that,

most young people did an apprenticeship and worked their way through

and finally make money later on,

but suddenly you were having young actors, photographers, designers, whatever

who actually had careers of their own.

And then of course the part where we really get involved

is the point at which musicians

actually start making money at the end of the '50s

and the birth of rock and roll was not full of very rich people.

Most of them were sort of...

lt was seen as entirely ephemeral.

The only people who had a permanent job

were the agents and managers and Tin Pan Alley.

The theory was you took some long-haired teenager off the railways

and he warbled a few tunes and then went back to the railways.

And this all changed completely in the later '60s, with the Beatles.

Yeah, Mike Leonard was a great character.

I mean he was enormously influential on the band's development

because although we sort of rather laugh about the fact that...

he was one of the band members at one time, playing keyboards.

ln fact he was the introduction

to the Hornsey College of Art, light/sound workshop

that actually was really, very much an important part of the band...

really the band sort of getting off the ground.

That connection with the light and sound

was something that was picked up by the media

and consequently that brought us to the attention of the record companies

and gave us that first step on that ladder.

At the time, if you looked at the hit parade, soul was the huge thing.

One of the first gigs we did outside London was a rave

and it was all about soul bands and dancing.

And so when a band came on and played arrhythmic music with funny lights,

the audience in general were puzzled and disappointed

and occasionally were angry at this

and made their feelings felt.

And I have to say, my sympathies are with them.

To just put it in perspective,

when, in '67 I think it was, we played a show

at Bulb Auction Hall in Spalding

and there was line-up that included Cream,

Jimi Hendrix and The Who as far as I remember.

But the top of the bill was Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band.

That was who was on last.

I think Games for May was very important.

Even though, it was probably too early in a way

because it set the scene for a number of facets

that we would continue to do for the next 40 years.

Although we didn't do very much of it in the next two or three years.

What we talked about was the idea of it being a concert rather than a gig.

Because everyone was seated, they were listening to us,

there wasn't a support act

and it had all sorts of other elements to it.

lt had the multimedia, the lights, the quadraphonic sound.

lt was where we wanted to go.

What actually happened was

we didn't manage to get going down that route for the next two or three years.

I think it was a big influence, because it affected a lot of writers, so...

I mean, a lot of writers took acid

and a lot of them got something from it which comes out in the writing,

certainly in the graphics that were done around the period.

lt was definitely influential.

lt is a rather curious drug because it's about...

There's a sort of exploration there rather than most other drugs

which are geared to just sort of making you more wired or more relaxed.

This was something else.

lt was treated in the '60s in a very different way.

lt wasn't like going to the disco and popping the pill.

lt was all about having a guide.

There was a quasi-religious element to all this.

A lot of interest in magic mushrooms and the sort of South American view

of it being the religious trip rather than being just a bit of fun.

I think people are still influenced by things that happened in the '60s.

I think maybe it sort of tends to be looked at

through rose-tinted spectacles now.

But musically there's some giants who are still around.

That's what's nice about it. There's still Eric Clapton.

Hendrix - he may have died 30-something years ago

but, my God, any child you see now playing the guitar

almost certainly can play the beginning of Purple Haze.

You know, that's a good thing to come out.

That shows that there was some real value there at some level.

Of course, some of the ideas now are bizarrely naive or whatever

but there's nothing wrong with optimism.

He was very easy, charming, fun, creative.

I hung out with him, we smoked dope and had a nice time.

and listened to music,

talked about music, talked about things.

And Andrew and l encouraged him to write songs.

He was writing a lot of songs.

Nearly all the songs that he wrote for Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

were all written within three or four, five months.

They were all being written in the last half of '66, beginning of '67.

A lot of them hadn't been written beforehand.

The songs he'd written beforehand were things like Effervescing Elephant,

and the songs that went on Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

were the latest things that he'd written.

The earlier song book,

I don't know whether Dave or someone still has a copy of that

but it's really quite interesting

and I hope someone has got it and it is looked at.

Even though you don't know what the tunes were, he had tunes for them,

but they were much more childlike and sort of nursery rhyming almost.

Sort of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll childhood thing.

Looking back to childhood or innocence and Pre-Raphaelite.

Pre-Raphaelites were very fashionable around then as well,

so that was also probably part of what was in there.

He was an art student so he'd be very aware of what was happening.

Art students were very aware of what was happening.

Art schools were great places back then.

One of the great sources of British music

was the Art Schools of the '50s,'60s and 70s

where you got a grant and you didn't have to pass any A Levels.

You just had to have a good folio of your work, whatever it was.

And they let you do what you liked.

You got a grant and went to college for three years

and no one really cared what results you got.

And there was a mixture of all these creative people

who made films, were painters, you know...

who were painters, sculptors, musicians.

And a lot of the people would pretend to be painters

whereas in fact making pop music, cos you weren't allowed...

There was nowhere for you to train to be a pop musician.

So you got paid to go to art school

and that's where you know, you got the Rolling Stones, Zeppelin...

Most of them, you know.

Clapton went to art school, the Floyd.

A lot of those seminal British bands of the '60s and '70s

came out of that art school experience.

And Syd as well, from that sort of thing.

And it was very wide. lt was about Art. So you've got fashion designers...

So I think that the underground was a reflection also of that

which is why you had that link with all these posters and the clothing

and they were all part of the same thing

and the lighting and the films and so on.

So it was all really very much the same thing.

You could see it also as the idea of a collage.

You'd have collages within all the areas.

When you think about there was collage art, collage music, collage writing.

Collage everything.

There was a lot of cross-fertilisation going on.

lt was a very exciting time.

And I think it was particularly exciting

because there was a certain amount of money...

time and money available for people to explore.

And there was no problem about getting a job, that's another thing.

Everybody... The only question was what job are you going to have?

lt wasn't whether you were gonna get a job.

And if you were at art school, you got paid.

lf you were at university, you got paid.

lt didn't really matter too much whether you went...

Certainly at Oxford and Cambridge, whether you went to your...

You had to be really deviant to get thrown out.

You had to really do unbelievably little

and be very visibly doing unbelievably little to lose...

doing unbelievably little to get thrown out.

The idea that, you know...

I think that was a very important part of it that we were allowed to run...

They hadn't worked out what to do with young people

after they got rid of national service.

So, we were given enormous freedom, I think, to sort of move around

and we were very lucky in the respect.

And back to the Floyd. They were also a reflection of that.

They were studying architecture

but really Roger and Nick probably wanted to be in a band.

Syd was at art school.

Every now and then you'd see a painting, but really he was being a pop star.

and he was still allegedly going to art school.

Rick was probably the only one who was doing what he was meant to be doing

cos he was going to music college and there he was playing his music.

I remember one of the UFO gigs,

Syd playing just one note all the way through.

I don't know whether that's what he actually did,

but that's what it sounded and felt like.

We began to start worrying that Syd was getting a bit weird.

But then how far was that a good thing,

because we were experimenting, we were psychedelic.

lt was expanding our horizons, our minds, we were exploring our brains,

we were exploring new territories.

So there was a sort of ambivalence in my mind about that sort of thing.

But then when we did the Hendrix tour,

Syd didn't turn up at one or two of the gigs and we had to get a dep.

He became more and more difficult and more and more unreliable.

But I think the time when I became aware there was...

that we really had a serious...

a problem rather than just he was just being a bit odd,

was when Andrew came back from America,

cos he'd gone with him to America

and that tour was some sort of nightmare.

And Andrew is a person people haven't talked to enough.

Andrew went on that tour and it was the time at which...

When he came back, it was like "How did it go, Andrew?" and it was like...

lt was clearly a nightmare.

And there were some things where...

stuff had to be done for the record label which didn't get done

or were very difficult to do.

Everything... lt got a bit too weird for words.

And that I think was in the autumn of '66...of '67.

And from that point on we realised that there was a problem

but at the same time, commerce was driving us on.

We needed a new single

because the business was very much driven by singles.

So we were pushing for a new single.

EMI was pushing for a new single.

Because the album has sold well,

but no one really worried about album sales.

lt was very odd.

To this day, I can remember getting single positions,

we were number three and all that stuff with See Emily Play.

But I can't remember ever getting an album position.

I don't think there was an album chart then.

So I never really knew what we'd sold.

lt was very hard to know. And that included the record company.

So, what we needed was another single to get us on radio and get the gigs going.

Cos as I've said, the gigs were driven by your hits.

And if you didn't have a hit, it was harder to get gigs in the traditional circuit.

And the new college circuit which was beginning to come together

was still very patchy and was not very coherent.

And the same with getting European exposure

depended on having another hit.

So there was a lot of pressure on Syd to write singles during that period,

the end of '66.

And it was becoming clear he was finding that difficult,

the songs weren't as good

and it even got to the stage were we decided that...

that was when we started bringing Dave in,

because we thought of the idea that we could have Syd be like Brian Wilson.

He could write the songs and Dave could go out and sing the songs

and play the guitar and join with the other three

because when they came back from America

it wasn't just Andrew obviously,

it was also the band saying how difficult it was working.

And as it went on after that period,

it was becoming an increasing strain for them.

And Andrew and l were trying to get them stay together

to sort of go with it, try and find a way of working with Syd, to be understanding.

We all tried to be sympathetic with Syd and we tried various approaches

of how we could go into it and how we could deal with it.

Most of which were unsuccessful.

All of which were unsuccessful

in terms of really... of helping Syd to function again

in a way which was appropriate.

Syd disappeared into...

We never knew quite where he was living.

But we were very unwilling to be authoritarian

or to be like parents,

or to be "Where were you out last night?" "What are you doing?"

The idea of being disciplined and expecting some sort of discipline

was so hostile to the whole underground ethos.

"Hey man, you just gotta do your thing", you know.

So if Syd's "thing" was not turning up to a gig,

we had to get to learn to live with that "thing"

cos that was "doing your thing".

So the contradictions between the Floyd who were out on the front line

trying to do gigs in a commercial environment

and coping with this "Let's just do our thing" aspect

was a strain that we did not manage to resolve.

Dave came in and the other three found it so easy working with him

that it was like "Gosh, maybe we can now finally do it".

And slowly it became clear that we, Andrew and myself,

couldn't see how the band could go on without Syd.

And they said that to us and we agreed that that was the case we couldn't see...

We'd spent a lot of time trying to keep the four of them together

and it was clear that the three couldn't work with Syd.

lt became unanswerable that that was the case

that was a reasonable, sensible decision.

You couldn't work. lt wasn't workable.

We hoped to go on working with Syd.

And that really didn't happen. We did a few sessions and things

from that early solo stuff.

Then nothing much happened from them

and then cut to three years later I did some more

and then later on those things got sort of rescued by Dave and Roger

who managed to put it together.

Malcolm Jones from EMl also did some stuff with Syd

but it all became very difficult

and at the same time we at Blackhill were becoming quite successful.

We had T.Rex, and we had started an agency

and we were hot people in town and we could do what we...

We got on with our lives,

the Floyd then started working and rebuilding...

because we were half way though the second album, more than half way through.

We'd done a lot of the second album.

And it was the inability to get songs from Syd that could be used, you know.

So, the songs that Syd ended up writing in that period

were, I think, these magnificent songs of a sort of totally frightening

and sort of far too...

no way pop songs but very important pieces of work.

To me, they're like... those late Van Gogh's paintings.

The songs which... Jugband Blues which did come out,

Vegetable Man and Scream Your Last Scream which are very hard to find

but if you dig around on the internet, you'll probably find them somewhere

because they were very powerful,

very disturbing songs which I think were very important

in terms of being very...

very powerful works of art.

They weren't things that you could happily consider pop songs

but they were very sort of...self-revealing.

They were like... walking naked down the street.

And, you know, it was like... they never got put out.

And I think the Floyd really felt they were too much.

They were too revealing. They were too...

How can you cope with them? I mean, what can you do with these?

But they're great songs. And l'm sure they will in the end come out

and they will be available.

I hope so, because they are very important, I think.

I can remember them very well. I can remember them better

than I can remember the songs on Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

Well, I have two thoughts about drugs.

I think... On one hand, I didn't take that many drugs.

You know, I smoked a bit of hash and took acid a few times

but I wasn't a regular or intensive consumer of drugs.

But I loved the Pink Floyd.

I loved Soft Machine, you know.

I didn't need to be high to enjoy it.

However, having said that, I think...

the music that you heard was certainly...

you could feel it in the music.

You could feel, you know, you look at Tomorrow or The Pretty Things

and listen to them in the autumn of '66

and listen to them in the autumn of '67

something very dramatic had happened to their music.

Look at The Beatles.

You go from Rubber Soul to Revolver to Sgt. Pepper.

Something was going on.

And the fact that you could look at parallel developments

in a number of different groups and detect stylistic similarities

in the changes that they were going through

and you also knew the drugs they were taking were different.

They weren't just getting drunk or smoking the odd joint.

They were actually taking a psychedelic substance.

And...

the audience, again, certainly,

a lot of people who came to UFO were tripping.

There's no getting around it.

So you can't really avoid drugs in the history of that period.

lt was a huge transforming factor.

I think it shaped the music that was made

and it shaped the way audiences responded to that music.

And...

But I also think that with popularity...

you know, the scene exploded.

So suddenly, instead of like a few hundred people in London

chasing a few tabs of acid around, you know, in 1966,

you suddenly had thousands and tens of thousands

and maybe hundreds of thousands looking to buy the same stuff

a year or a year and a half later.

And inevitably, supply and demand... the quality goes down.

People start, you know, cutting it with amphetamines or white sugar

or different...I mean whatever... different things.

And so the experience changed.

And also people's attitude to the experience changed.

People were not looking for...

I think people, initially, were looking for a transformative,

possibly even spiritual experience.

By the end of 1967, by '68, I think most people were looking to get ripped

in an interesting way or a fashionable way.

lt's very difficult to analyse the legacy of the sixties

because so many things that, you know, were leading up to the sixties

so many things that led away from the sixties.

The one thing that you know for sure.

I mean, the one thing that l'm very comforted by or at least inspired by,

the one thing about the sixties is...

whenever I see a right-wing commentator use the word "the sixties",

they always are very, very annoyed and angry about it.

And so, I always figure we can't have done too much wrong

if those are the people that we've annoyed.

I do think that a lot of things that we take for granted now,

you know, human rights movement, environment movements,

women's rights movements, civil rights, all kinds of...

things you would have to put on the one big heading of "non-deferential"

came out of the sixties.

Part of it came out of the Civil Rights Movement in America.

I think that was a hugely empowering thing

for underdogs everywhere.

For people to realise that, you know,

you could only get something by making a noise.

And...so I wouldn't really necessarily want to take too much credit,

you know, for the psychedelic underground in London,

to take it away from Martin Luther King

or from people who were going up against the police in Chicago.

You know, I mean it was... that was a bit more serious.

England was a bit more of a sheltered side-issue.

But, having said that...

you know, things that happened in Britain in '66-'67

reverberated all over the world, whether it's Sgt. Pepper

or the Pink Floyd or... lots of things,

aesthetically, culturally but also socially.

I think...you...

just as much as you can't... lay claim to things that...

whose credit really belong in more serious political movements,

I think you also can't underestimate the transforming effect

that a lot of the things that happened in the sixties had.

And the way people's views about sexuality, about freedom,

about what's permitted, what's not permitted...

You know, the Britain that existed in the early sixties was a Britain

in which the prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley trial could ask the jury:

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, would you seriously want your wife

"or your servant to read this book?"

And that Britain didn't exist ten years later.

And I think we have to take some credit.

ln June of '67...

not only was UFO becoming more popular, crowds were bigger...

but it was also becoming more of a focus for police

and people would queue up outside the club

and the police would go up and down the queue and search people

and arrest people who were holding drugs.

And then, we would end up passing the bucket to try and raise money

to pay for lawyers' costs, things like that.

And Michael X who was the head of the Black Power movement in Britain

and who used to come down quite regularly.

He had been involved...or friendly to the Free School and knew everybody.

And he...this was after Hoppy had been sentenced to prison...

So it suddenly became a lot more serious.

Everything was suddenly... We were under siege.

They were really serious threats to what was going on.

And...

Michael said, "Look, black people have been under siege

"ever since we arrived in this country.

"Now, you guys, hippies, you're under siege.

"You have to get organised".

And so there was a meeting called at... that he organised, I think.

And a lot of people came and...

to talk about setting up a permanent organisation to defend ourselves.

And he called me, I think, the afternoon of the meeting

and he said: "Look, I know this girl.

"She doesn't... she's not anybody you know.

"She's never...she's not from a particular organisation or anything.

"And she's just a painter.

"But I think she could be useful.

"Her boyfriend, she had a boyfriend who was busted, a West lndian guy.

"He was busted and she worked really hard to try and get him off.

"And she knows the process. She knows about courts.

"She knows... She's been through this in a way.

"ls it OK if I invite her to come along?"

And I said, "Sure".

And so at the first meeting, somebody says,

"OK. We have to get in touch with the National Civil Liberties Union.

"Somebody. Who's going to do that?" And she'd go, "I will".

And then we said, "OK. We have to get some statistics about busts.

"Who's going to do that?" "I will", says Caroline.

And everything that came up... everybody was busy, you know.

Peter Jenner was trying to manage the Pink Floyd.

I was trying to run UFO and do other things.

Everybody had agendas, you know.

And she was the one who said, "l'll do that".

And we came back for another meeting a week later

and they said, "OK, so last week we said what we need is this".

She said, "Right". She brought a piece of paper and said,

"I talked to the Civil Liberties Union". Tick.

"I did this." Tick.

Everything...she did.

And that's the way it went on from there, basically.

She had the energy. She had the determination.

She had the intelligence. She just did it.

And so very quickly, Release became...

something quite different from the London Free School

which was full of big ideals

but not a lot that related directly to the ideals that was happening on the ground.

Release said, "OK, we're gonna have a 24-hour hotline.

"So, anybody who's busted, no matter what time of night,

"you get one phone call. Call Release.

"And we'll get you a lawyer."

By somewhere... at some point in July,

there was a 24-hour hotline that was actually answered.

Cos I used to be on duty sometimes

and I had to answer a few calls and call up a few lawyers

and that's about the most I did. I didn't do much.

Caroline quickly got a rotation of people

who were really good at it and then did it.

And it became a hugely effective...organisation.

And once it got up and going and that was around the time

that we were moving to the Roundhouse,

I agreed that we would give a percentage of the door to Release.

And so when we...when UFO closed,

that was a big blow to Release because it was...

a main source of funding.

And in the wake of UFO closing

other promoters started using the Roundhouse

including Middle Earth which had been a club in Covent Garden

and a guy called Dave Howson who died recently.

He cooperated and he gave a percentage to Release.

But there were problems in the underground,

political problems in the underground.

People...there was a guy called Mick Farren.

He was in this group, The Social Deviants,

a group that I would never book at UFO.

And Mick was a kind of confirmed anarchist in general,

hell-raiser and sort of radical.

And...

He didn't like Caroline. He didn't like her attitude.

He didn't like the fact that she spoke well.

He was a working-class guy

and she was a well-educated middle-class girl.

And other people didn't like her because she...

I think one of the reasons is because she was so effective.

Because she was actually a rebuke to all the rather shambolic things

going on in the underground.

The underground had such...

many of the ideas got absorbed into the mainstream

but that was the idea after all, was to promote these ideas.

And coming out of that scene in '66-'67

were a number of key things.

I think the ecology movement pretty much has its beginning there.

The Dialectics of Liberation conference

at the Roundhouse in '67 for instance.

Gregory Bateson, the expert in whale language,

gave a whole big talk about global warming

and predicted it would take 25 years

before the effects would start to be shown.

And he was just dismissed as a complete crank but...

There were a lot of these people who were very prescient

and who were starting to discuss these things

and it grew and grew from there.

The beginnings of the women's movement, again, came out of that period.

And many of the activists in

the turn of the decade through 1970-7 1

when Germaine Greer's book came out

were all involved with the underground press.

I mean Caroline Coon and Germaine.

Germaine was very much involved with Oz magazine, for instance.

Caroline Coon had started Release back in '67.

Many of the other women who were involved in the women's movement, their...

early history was as part of the underground press.

Most of the women who started Spare Rib for instance,

in fact all of them, I think, had worked for the underground press

before going on to start their own feminist magazine.

You have tremendous changes

in the acceptance of homosexuality in this country

which the law was first changed in '67

when it was made legal for people over 21 , I think it was.

And now, of course, it's down lower.

At the beginning of the sixties

there were literally still separate housing for unmarried mothers, you know.

The whole attitude towards sex and...

the position of unmarried people in society

was changed absolutely dramatically

by the sixties hippy culture if you want to call it that.

Just ideas, not necessarily just by hippies.

I mean, the whole business of sort of... Mary Quant and dolly birds

and all the other sort of more commercial side of it

that went on earlier on all helped contribute.

But the dramatic changes in British society throughout the sixties

were really sort of magnified, I think,

by this focus in the very centre of all these ideas

just exploding out of... mainly out of the youth culture of the sixties.

Music, of course, never was the same again.

lf you compare 1960 to 1970, musically in Britain,

I mean, it's a world apart.

Somebody like Hendrix would have sounded almost unlistenable to in 1960.

He would have been too weird.

But, by 1970, he was the norm, pretty much.