All language subtitles for Tecnicolor Dream

And my only really vivid memory
is being out on the lawn

outside Alexandra Palace
in the morning, in the dawn.

I think my senses were probably
a little elevated

but I do remember seeing these crowds

streaming out of the hall
and down the hill

and thinking...

"This is it, we won." You know.

"It's all over. We're in charge now."

"This is so big."

Of course that was a fantasy
but that was the feeling you had that night.

It was a feeling like
this is really central, really big.

It was all sort of mad and wilful
and experimental.

I remember it was great to be young
and good-looking and playing music

and that's about all I remember.

It was like a 1 4-hour orgasm in some way.

It was like a second coming together
after the Albert Hall poetry reading in 1965.

Then stretching your arms,
then he couldn't make it.

The 1 4-hour Technicolor Dream
was a culmination point.

I would say that was
the major underground event

that the underground proper put on.

That was pretty much it, I think.

It had a two-year life
before it got too commercialised.

ln Victorian times there was
the Great Exhibition

in the great Crystal Palace

with all the wonders of the world there,
it was rather like that.

The 1 4-hour Technicolor Dream.

A legendary party, seen by some
as the high point of the '60s

and of the '60s underground
in particular.

And the headline act that evening,

the group most considered to be the house
band of the underground movement -

Pink Floyd.

Fronted by the mercurial talent,
Syd Barrett.

At that time Syd would be rolling

ball bearings up and down
his guitar strings or...

all that stuff with the Zippo lighter, going...

I can't remember but I imagine
a lot of people who were very stoned

stood in front of the stage like that

while we did all this nonsense.

Beyond that, I really...

There were probably
things being projected

but I don't have any
very clear memory of it.

As far as I remember,
there were fairground rides

or there was a helter-skelter or something
in the middle of it

which probably gave
a fantastic feel to the occasion.

For me it was always going to be
coloured by the fact that we were

undergoing a fragmentation at the time

and so I have a rather jaundiced view of it.

It was the underground as a sort of
bold, brave community effort

and it was when it was clearly

the beginning of it becoming
a major commercial enterprise.

The Floyd subsequently
went on to fall apart.

I don't think they fell apart that night
but that was probably symbolic

of what was going to come.

With Syd on acid and it all being
very chaotic and, you know,

the other members of the band
who weren't on drugs

wondering what the hell was going on.

Pink Floyd's performance
at The Technicolor Dream

is remembered as one of the seminal
moments of 1967 and the Summer of Love.

But the paper trail that leads to that event

takes in most of
the iconic happenings of the decade.

The CND marches of the early '60s.

The poetry reading
at the Albert Hall in 1965.

The London Free School,

The UFO Club

and the lnternational Times.

These were all landmarks
of the underground movement.

And one figure,
who seemed to be heavily influential

in all of these landmarks.
was John Hopkins

best known as Hoppy.

I think the word "underground"
was actually an importation from the US.

For instance, John Wilcock,
who started The Village Voice

was using the word "underground"
in the early '60s.

And he was one of the people
that gave us the inspiration

to get on with our own culture,
which we also called "underground".

My connection with the underground
started when I arrived in London in 1964

as the tour manager with Muddy Waters
and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Melody Maker sent a photographer down
to take photos

and his name was John Hopkins.

The underground in London
was only a couple of hundred people

but at the centre of that there were
a couple of dozen activists really.

A lot of it centred around
Hoppy's apartment.

A lot of the people who lived there
went off and did other things.

Joe Boyd, for instance,
when he first came to Britain,

would often stay there, he was certainly
always hanging around there.

He was just one of those guys
that everybody loved,

everybody responded to.

Without Hoppy there would have been
no underground.

He was full of ideas,
full of initiative.

He was one of those people that you'd say,
"What about doing this?"

And the next afternoon he was doing it.

I think he made a huge difference
in such a fleeting period.

He became pretty much a focal point

and got other people active as well,

like a kind of buzzing electron,
he energised all the electrons around him.

A lot of the more artistic people
on the scene

were very "untogether",

whereas Hoppy would have a list
of priorities, of practical things to do.

lf you're going to bring out a magazine
you have to get it printed.

The cheapest way is offset litho,
let's buy an offset litho machine.

The next day he calls up
and he's got one for 80 quid.

No one else would have done that,
only Hoppy.

As the '60s progressed,
we saw there were more and more people

who seemed to be into the same sort of
cultural pursuits as ourselves.

It was like the psychedelic equivalent
of a mass movement.

There were mass movements
going on at the time, notably CND -

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament -

who every Easter used march
from Aldermaston,

where the weapons were made,
to Trafalgar Square.

ln 1962 12,000 CND campaigners
demonstrated in Trafalgar Square.

ln the 1963 rally in Hyde Park

the numbers had escalated to 30,000.

And 90% of the CND protesters

were under 21 .

It was the beginning of dissatisfaction
with the establishment.

The beginning of realising that...

the British police weren't wonderful

and we didn't have
the best press in world

and all the other myths
that we'd been taught.

It didn't work. That was the point.

ln the late '50s and early '60s
the CND marches were huge

but it made no difference.

And I think that was one of the things
which pushed everything

towards the politics of the individual,
of individual behaviour.

We needed still to change the world

and that whole youth movement,
which had gone through CND,

then went into other things.

The CND movement,
which started way into the '50s,

and which I always felt sympathetic with

just on the grounds
that I wanted to stay alive.

It took on all sorts of things
like old anarchists, old intellectuals,

and the younger people
that were coming along

that realised there was a very serious threat

to what was becoming
quite an enjoyable life.

It was a bit austere after the war,
as you know,

but then it had gradually mellowed out
and a lot of nice things were happening.

It was probably the best standard of life
that we had,

in the early-mid '60's.

That was a good time.

It was really the first time
young people had any money.

They didn't have the kind of money
that you can buy houses with or cars.

But there was enough to buy records
and books and clothes particular.

And also to buy drugs and hang out
at late-night clubs and listen to music.

My generation had
the luxury of having the space

to hold different attitudes to their parents.

Youth has always been rebellious

but when there starts to be money around

and things get a little bit more prosperous
than the poverty level

then that gives opportunity for

young people to do more
of what they want to do.

ln the '40s and the '50s
young people tried to look middle-aged.

From the '60s on middle-aged people
tried to look young.

And that's really important,
it started setting that new agenda.

Also, there was a tremendous
dissatisfaction for...

the way things had been.

The British way of life
in the early '60's was still...

the businessmen still walked around
in bowler hats with furled umbrellas.

Post-war London was a very
kind of stuffy, grubby, dusty...

lots of greasy spoons

and coffee bars were
the height of social achievement.

Going to the coffee bar.

We knew we could do better,

life could be more exciting and interesting
and fulfilling than this.

What was great was
for the first time in history

you had a younger generation
fighting back

and saying, "We don't really want
wars and bad food

"and we don't want all that shit."

There was a kind of feeling of
unification of people

coming together of that generation
that I was talking about.

People questioning their betters,

or their supposed betters.

Saying, "Why do we have to
have this set of rules?"

And the bands were the kind of glue.

The bands like Soft Machine
and Pink Floyd.

They were like the marching bands,
they provided...

the rhythm, the energy.

But then people that wanted to be creative

who were discouraged in the '50s

began to think, "We're gonna risk it."

Yes, we did believe
we could change the world

We thought that when this
whole revolution had unwound

and the power had gone out of it

that we would be left in a different place.

I'm gonna be a musician,
a writer, a poet.

The '60s marked that break
with the Victorian heritage.

Piss off, Victoria.

One of the major inspirations
for the underground movement

were the American Beat Generation

and the epicentre of beat literature
in London was Better Books

in the Charing Cross Road.

At the beginning of '65 I took over from
Bill Butler who moved out to Brighton.

And I took over as manager of the shop.

My interest was slightly different from Bill's.

I was still very interested in poetry,

which was a great strength
of Better Books.

I was very interested in
what was going on in the States,

particularly with the Beat Generation.

It was just big

for young English boys or girls

and just made us examine our lives more

and our lifestyles and our teachings.

I mean, you're talking about
things like Howl.

That's an amazing piece of work.

No one had done that in England.

So it was stunning...

for us, together, in the face...

A lot of it, in fact, Miles had a hand in,
on the English end

because he managed to import

literary works by the Beat Generation -

Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti;
those people -

long before anybody else
really knew anything about them.

My particular interest was the Beats
and so in July or June,

when Allen Ginsberg came to London,

I immediately put him on
as a featured reader.

We didn't even have to put up a sign,

the place packed out,
you couldn't even get in.

And then Allen Ginsberg said that
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was in Paris

and on his way over to Britain.

It also turned out that Gregory Corso
was in ltaly and on his way to Britain.

So we were having very much
a Beat Generation summer.

One day we were talking about
all these Beats going to be in London.

Allen had an on-off girlfriend
called Barbara Rubin

who just simply said,
"Where's the biggest place in town?"

And my wife said, "The Albert Hall."

And so Barbara literally went over to the till,
got hold of the phone,

and booked the Albert Hall
in ten days' time.

Of course, as soon as
the Hall was booked...

How are we going to fill 7,000 seats?

And this is when Hoppy came into the act

to help organise daily press releases

and photo shoots at the Albert Memorial

outside the Albert Hall.

Running all kinds of little squibs
in the different newspapers

and finding ways to of drawing attention to it

so that it not only sold out
but people were turned away.

I was really sceptical that something
like that would fill the Albert Hall.

But not only did it fill it,
but by the time we got there

the only space we could squeeze into
was in the gallery, right at the top.

The spirit of adventure,
the spirit of discovery,

that was boiling in London at that time

found an expression at the Albert Hall.

The fact that the Albert Hall
was absolutely filled

was a tremendous impetus
to the counter-culture of the time

because we could see
that we were not alone.

It was very daunting
to get to that many people,

it was a landmark in my career for sure.

And it turned into a party, really.

The reading itself
wasn't actually all that great.

There were 1 7 poets,
many of them fairly mediocre.

But the key thing was,
in all of the boxes in the Albert Hall

there was a party going on.

People brought picnics, wine,
they were smoking pot.

The whole thing was
an extraordinary event.

It really was a happening,
it was like poetry rave or something.

Then Ernst Jandl came on

and did this sound poem

based on the opening line of

the gospel according to St John
in German.

"lm Anfang war das Wort..."

And he started to break it down

and before long it became this
deafening, cacophonic sort of noise,

just amazing stuff.

The poet Harry Fainlight,

who was, by the look of it to me on speed,

was trying to read a deep poem
about the LSD experience.

I very much remember Harry Fainlight

because he so wanted to read his poems

and Allen Ginsberg said,
"Let him read his poems."

But he said he'd taken
a lot of amphetamine,

so his mouth was all...

like that all the time.

And he was quite upset about that.

Fresh wildernesses

Resurrected from the raw, broken concrete
at the airfield's edge...

For me that stands out a lot
because here's a crazy man,

standing in front of
all these thousands of people,

revealing and exposing these fearful things
that were going on in his head.

I was quite amazed by it

and quite shocked that people were
prepared to shout him down.

Simon Vinkenoog was actually Dutch.

He was a Dutch poet and he was very much
acclaimed on the Beat scene.

He was there
and he had done a reading earlier

and had taken mescaline

and was really opening his heart
to the audience

and his first poetry reading
was very well received.

When Harry was struggling
Simon suddenly burst out with,

"Love!"

It didn't actually help Harry.
Strangely, I thought it would.

He was saying, "love".

This whole thing,
what we poets are driving at, is love.

Eventually, Alexander Trocchi
had to take Harry off the stage

because he was being booed.

For some reason the audience
erupted against Harry.

And in the end he just fell into
Allen Ginsberg's arms.

It was very sad and I don't think Harry
ever fully recovered from that rejection.

There was a lot of alcohol flowing
in the poet bowl there

and there were a lot of bars up there

and a lot of the poets
did drink too much.

Ginsberg himself got very drunk
and did a pretty bad reading.

I have to read slowly
so that people understand.

"..it will come out of the mouth of the pilot

"the dry lipped diplomat..."

And I know for a fact that afterwards
he was very regretful of that

and felt that he had missed an opportunity

and that he could have done better.

Was fairly scathing, I think,
about some of the British poets.

Whereas the British poet Adrian Mitchell
really hit the mark.

I smell something burning,

Hope it's just my brains

They're only dropping peppermints
and daisy-chains

So stuff my nose with garlic

Coat my eyes with butter

Fill my ears with silver

Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies...

about Vietnam.

The Albert Hall reading
was definitely the catalyst

for the whole London underground scene.

That was really the first time
the community got together

and recognised each other
and saw each other for what they were -

some kind of counter-cultural group

which later on the press dubbed
flower children or hippies.

We thought the energy given off
by this crowd is so fantastic

we want to somehow use that
to change things in Britain.

One of the channels for the energy
that emerged in the autumn of 1965

after the poetry reading at the Albert Hall

was the London Free School
in Notting Hill.

The London Free School was an idea

that was populated by a variety of people -

from Michael X on the one hand,

through to Pete Jenner and Andrew King
on the other.

The London Free School
was about changing society

it was about changing the world
in which we live.

lf there was any ideology behind
the London Free School

it was to do with what I would call
the politics of information.

The general idea was that

there were a lot of people around
with different skills and abilities.

There were also a lot of people around,
particularly in the Notting Hill neighbourhood

who, if they could acquire
some of those skills and abilities,

would be able to have a better time
living their life.

A simple proposition.

They had some premises in Notting Hill

that Michael X had been using
as a casino,

an illegal casino
that he was no longer using.

So that became the headquarters.

It was I think in a way
an expression by some people

who realised that they had been
very lucky and privileged

to help the rest of their community.

And I think it was quite a classic
middle-class attempt

to help the condition
of the benighted working classes.

There was a Lady Bountiful aspect to it
without any question, in hindsight.

I used to think that it was
the London School of Freedom.

People giving classes in Existentialism.

And all kinds of weird
philosophers' spaceships, UFOs,

and all that stuff.

It really took off at that point.

ln practical effect
one thing that happened was

getting the local people
who were dealing with the government

on a number of issues like benefits,

rights of various kinds.

Encouraging them
to stand up for their rights

and showing them how to do it
and how to fight city hall.

On Friday evenings we used to
go round the street

and knock on people's doors

for a flower from their garden.

And then we used to make nosegays
put them in water overnight.

Next day I used buy a dozen lndian flutes
and go out about 2:50

when the procession was meant to start.

Collect up loads of little boys to get them
to play the flute in the procession

and they could keep the flute afterwards.

So lots of musicians turned up

and we used to rampage up
Portobello Road

every Saturday at 3 o' clock.

Little girls throwing nosegays.

We used to go up beforehand
and give all the costers a streamer each

and so as we went past
the coster would throw the streamer,

it was beautiful.

And this went on through the summer.

The idea of a procession
was just an idea.

And that idea may have triggered
other people to continue

on a larger scale.

And it was so close, the ending of
the processions of the Free School

and the beginnings of the Carnival
and it's a kind of grey area.

The London Free School
was like an idea

that seemed to grab the imagination
of a lot of people. For instance...

it was the crucible out of which
the modern version of

the Notting Hill Carnival came.

The key thing which came out of
the London Free School

was they decided to revive
the Notting Hill Fair,

which hadn't happened for over 100 years.

So, this was a way of getting
the community together in Notting Hill

and particularly of trying to overcome
the racial prejudice in Notting Hill

because this is not long
after the big race riots in Notting Hill.

So, they started the idea of
a Notting Hill street festival,

which grew and grew over the years
and has now become carnival.

The Notting Hill Festival,
which is the biggest festival in Europe.

I don't think what we talk about now

as the London underground scene
in 1966-67

would have taken place
without the Free School.

The lnternational Times started there,
which was obviously...

That started as a sort of mimeographed
gestetnered or whatever

news from the London Free School.

So that even though it didn't actually train

a lot of locals to become

film-makers or whatever,

it had a lot of other effects,
which were very concrete and very real.

What became UFO started as a fund-raiser

for the London Free School.

And from that came the whole idea
of underground music.

Because for some reason
I got to have my name

on the letterhead as the secretary of it,

I had to pay the bills.

I could see I was quickly
running out of money.

I knew that how you made money
to pay for things, as a vicar's son,

was that you had socials.

And so what we had at the beginning of
UFO in the Church Hall,

All Saints' Hall in Paris Square,

was a social to raise funds

for the parish of the London Free School.

It was a sort of Vicar Of Dibley,
1960s style, with a lot of dope.

And the band they chose to put on
at the Free School fund-raiser

were Pink Floyd.

Pete Jenner, their eventual manager,

had first seen the Floyd
earlier in 1966

at the spontaneous underground events
at The Marquee.

And I got in there and there was
all these lights going on -

it's probably not that many
in the context of now -

but at that time it seemed like all these
lights and I think girls rolling around in jelly.

Then the band was playing

and I couldn't work out
who was playing what.

I remember walking round the stage,

trying to work out where the noise
was coming from.

And where the noise was coming from
which had caught my ear,

really it was Syd and Rick
both improvising on these songs

with lots of reverb,
lots of repeat echo.

So there was all these sustains
almost into feedback.

And it sounded to me
pretty avant-garde.

When I first heard The Floyd
it was in early 1966

in the Marquee Club
on a Sunday afternoon

where a guy called Steve Stolman

put on this event called
The Spontaneous Underground.

And I remember walking into there
for the first time

and there were coloured lights flashing,

it wasn't a light show, it was the step
before a light show, I suppose.

And there was this music
which seemed like a wall of sound.

There were musicians
who were jamming in there,

they were jamming to a theme.

The theme gradually became apparent,

lnterstellar Overdrive
or one of those long jam tunes.

And at the first London Free School event
in the Church Hall

not that many people were there.

ln fact very few,
only about 1 7 or something.

And The Pink Floyd took
questions afterwards

and it was all very serious.

Light and sound mix and everything.

The next time they came,
somebody else came,

some people from Leary's Place

in upstate New York, Millbrook.

They had a projector with them
and they were doing a light show.

Something else which
we hadn't seen before.

The explosion came when the light show
was projected onto the band,

which was three different things
we hadn't heard before.

And then that scenario
started to be very popular

to the extent that after a few weeks
we were running benefits regularly

and there were queues around the block.

Pink Floyd became known
as the house band of the underground

and their singer and front man,
the brilliant Syd Barrett,

is an artist who has become synonymous
with both the creativity

and the worst excesses of the '60s.

The gestation of Pink Floyd
is really a two-parter.

There are big connections.

The first is the Cambridge connection

which involved Roger,
David Gilmour, Syd Barrett.

Syd lived just round the corner from me.

My mum knew his mum.

God knows why, maybe we went to
the same primary school.

But at primary school we might not
have known each other because...

I'm two years older than he is.

We both used to go on Saturday mornings
to a teacher training college on Hills Road

called Homerton College.

But I don't remember
any particular friendship developing

until we were 13 or 1 4 years old

and beginning to pretend that we read
Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac.

We might pretend that we knew somebody
who once smoked a joint,

that sort of thing.

Why has it got to be so loud?
So amplified?

Well, I don't guess it has to be
but that's the way we like it.

We've only done two concerts in fact

because the main scene with pop music,

which I guess is what we are
at the moment

is that you play gigs round ballrooms
and dance halls

and this sort of scene
because that's how it works at the moment.

I harboured fantasies about being rich
and fucking women

and owning sports cars
and things like that.

So I never... Even though I couldn't
play anything or do anything

I never let go of that, the dream.

Everybody listens, we don't need it
very loud to be able to hear it.

- Some of it is very quiet, in fact.
- Right.

I like quiet music
just as much as loud music.

My mum's still got photos, I think,

of Syd and I sitting around
in the front room at our house,

fantasising about what life might be like.

The extraordinary thing is that the fantasies
by and large came true.

Well, there it is. I think you can
pass your verdict as well as I can.

My verdict is that it is a little bit
of a regression to childhood.

But, after all, why not?

Syd was a little bit younger than us

but had been to school with Storm

and knew and moved
on the fringes of our circle.

He was just one of those
creative, inspired people.

He had this kind of fey,
fairy-like quality about him.

Kind of strange aura, you didn't quite
know where he was coming from.

You did not quite know
what was making him tick.

He had an enchanting way about him

and a strange, bouncy way of walking -
walked off his toes all the time.

Everybody paints exactly
the same picture of Syd.

He had an extraordinary bounce in his step.

And the way he walked was sort of
the way he lived.

It was all a bit sort of...

bouncy.

He was very Tigger-like.

You know, if one could borrow
from A. A. Milne.

Obviously a lot brighter than Tigger

but nevertheless,
he had that kind of "boing" to him.

And he brought that to the forefront
not just in his song writing

but in his general attitude towards
pop groups in general

and our pop group in particular.

He was the kind of person
who knew who Love were.

Now, Love were some, you know,
band on the West Coast...

I've still no idea who they were,
I couldn't give a shit, you know.

I wasn't really that interested in music.

But Syd was, he was interested
in what was going on.

He was a great student, I think,
of rock and roll.

ln the summer of 1964 Syd Barrett joined
the other members of the band in London.

When he came to London he moved into
the apartment at Mike Leonard's house

that we were already sharing,
Nick and Rick and l.

And went off to Camberwell every day,
to start with anyway, to paint.

I think first impressions was
that this was a really nice guy.

Easy, charming, fun.
Creative.

Here was a guy who was actually doing
all the creative work.

He was writing songs,
fronting the thing

and being the guitar player,

who actually was really easy to work with.

When one looks back on it,

there was never any sense
of Syd directing the band.

He would provide the songs

and more or less everyone played whatever
they thought was right for the piece.

So Syd was the sort of creative heart.

I think Rick helped articulate it musically.

And Roger and Nick had a good time.

You know what I mean?

It was great. They were in a band
and they did what they did.

They were close and I think they helped
create a rhythmic thing of theirs

which was probably based on
exploiting their limitations.

Really, the development of the band

was a number of things
coming together at the right time.

The first was, we actually got
some management

in the shape of
Peter Jenner and Andrew King,

which gave us a sort of sense of
applying ourselves a bit harder

to whatever we were doing.

And so Syd was writing,

the more Syd wrote,
the more we were developing that.

We'd started extending the pieces as well.

It definitely became part of
the whole set-up

to have the lights and have this
slightly different version

of a rock performance.

It wasn't quite about dancing
and it wasn't quite a concert thing,

it was about a mixed media event.

And then, in October of '66,

came the launch of the lnternational Times

which was put together
by John Hopkins and Barry Miles

who was involved
with another of the key sort of institutions

involved
with the underground, which was lndica.

The paper and lndica are related
in that I"m a director of both

and the aims and ideas
of the shop and the paper

are more or less the same.

There was an lndica bookstore
and an lndica gallery.

John Dunbar was more involved
with the gallery

and Barry Miles was involved
with the bookstore.

lndica was run by a company called MAD -

Miles, Asher and Dunbar Ltd.

I was the Miles.

Peter Asher,
he was half of Peter and Gordon -

the rock and roll duo.

And the Dunbar was John Dunbar,

who was then married to Marianne Faithfull

and had been The Scotsman"s art critic.

The bookshop is the centre,
the collecting point of information,

and the disposing point of information.

It"s the communication centre.

It was a chance to combine the bookshop
activities I'd been involved with -

poetry readings,
selling obscure, little literary magazines -

with avant-garde art.

The whole system is here.

We have our own publishers,
film-makers, theatres, nightclubs.

It's a complete society.

lndica was really like
a little paradise of things

that you couldn't find anywhere else.

ln those early days
lndica would sell records too.

It was mainly the ESP albums,
which you just couldn't get.

So it was like The Fugs and Albert Ayler

and other kind of avant-garde jazz
and everything.

As well as underground papers
from New York -

you could get the Village Voice in there.

And a whole range of esoteric books

you just couldn't get anywhere else.

But the importance for me was that
in the basement of lndica books,

that's were lnternational Times
first got going.

The reason for IT was really because
there was an information gap

left by the straight media.

There was a lot
that they weren't covering.

And what we'd seen,

for instance with the 1965
poetry reading in the Albert Hall

and subsequent events.

There seems to be an awful
lot of people around

whose informational needs
were not being serviced.

So, I look at it on the level of
the politics of information.

The lnternational Times
fits into the underground scene

by being a communications medium.

We don't have a radio station
or a television station.

We just have a newspaper.

Using Simon Vinkenoog, Lebel

a guy called Alex Gross
who was reporting from Berlin,

we started lnternational Times.

Very much our own counter-cultural paper

to cover the kind of areas that
the British press just didn't touch on.

And that, of course, included
rock and roll at that point

because no one had taken that seriously.

The kind of interviews I did with people like
McCartney and Mick Jagger

had never been run
in any of the British press.

Because we were doing them Q and A,

just exactly as they were in reality

without a whole lot of guff surrounding it
and giving some kind of angle or twist on it.

And so all that this gang of people
from lnternational Times, lndica

and the whole scene is trying to do

is see where we are now.

There was a whole raft of literary stuff

from writers like William Burroughs

and Ferlinghetti and those sort of people
were writing.

Then there was drug information.

What was the price of drugs on the street,

what was the range and the quality?

They're talking about things
that are a bit new

and they're talking about things which

people don't know too much about yet.

And so, people put them down a bit and say,

"weirdo psychedelic" and things.

But it's really just what's going on around
and trying to look into it a bit.

For me, there had been quite an
important moment in the summer of '66,

when the lnternational Times
had started mentioning us.

Once again because they'd almost certainly
been sent a press release

by Blackhill Enterprises.

I first saw the Pink Floyd playing
at the Spontaneous Underground

at the Marquee on Sundays.

But their first big exposure was probably

the launch party for lnternational Times
at the Roundhouse,

which was the first time the Roundhouse
had actually been used for a gig.

You had to enter through this
real dodgy little door

up some inaccessible steps

that were planted on the side.

And it was actually a really filthy hole.

The Roundhouse was...

totally shitty.

It was a tip.

It was very, very cold.

It was very, very dirty.

As far as I remember
there was no power in the building.

Power had to be brought from somewhere
else on a 13-amp extension lead.

So when we had some lights,
just a few projectors,

and the band playing

the lights kept going out,
the power kept blowing.

The electricity blew,
the motorbike fumes wouldn't go away.

It was chaotic but in a sense it was
a sort of large-scale happening.

We tried to launch the paper with a party.

Many things went wrong
but a lot of things went right.

The essence of a happening is that you
don't really know what will happen next

and I think that despite
our best efforts in planning

that was how the evening turned out.

It was the first time
they'd played to a big audience

and then after that,
they began to play at the UFO Club.

The launch of IT was in October of '66

and UFO began in December '66.

UFO sort of went...

and then it was over.

It just became a thing
that you did on Friday night.

Just people floating around in and out.

People reading poetry in one corner.

"They come to trip, to dance,
and chew the psychedelic fat."

"Oh, Nigel, the boat is rocking."

And I knew exactly what he meant.

"It's Saturday night at UFO,
this is where it's really at."

Hoppy was focusing all of his energies into

The lnternational Times,
the London Free School,

none of which was really bringing in money.

And we were sort of pondering
what to do about it.

And we decided that
we would start a once-a-week event.

lnstead of having a benefit
for these high-minded organisations,

we have a benefit for ourselves.

Joe found the Blarney Club
in Tottenham Court Road,

which was an lrish dance hall
in a basement.

And that's where the first UFO happened.

There were two names we were toying with.

We were gonna call it the Night Tripper,

or we were gonna call it the UFO.

So we put them both on the first flyer.

Basically, the UFO club
was the centre of the underground.

It was the Albert Hall poetry reading again,
only every Friday night.

It was a basement club, very low ceiling.

A friend of Hoppy's who had a light show

set up in one corner.

It didn't matter what group played
or what was going on in the club,

there was always a light show
going on in one corner.

People were kind of moving around
and looking at their hands.

Our night at UFO was different from
a lot of gigs we'd played up till that point.

One of the reasons being that you went
there yourself for a good time.

Maybe tripping a little bit,
you suddenly realise, "Actually, we're on."

And you'd go and play your set,

and you still hang out afterwards
and watch the next.

And it wasn't like you were performing,
you were part of an evening.

It was a really different experience.

Yoko Ono came down
and gave happenings of different kinds.

We had avant-garde jazz groups,
Oriental music.

I don't think I ever left UFO
before the sun came up.

It was a bit like being a vampire,
you weren't seen out in the daylight.

Yeah, you had about an hour window
to get home before the commuters started.

And that was pretty terrifying,
being on Charing Cross Station

with them all rushing past you while
you're still coming down from an acid trip.

Basically, it started 10:30, went all night
until the tube started running.

Then once the sun was up
and the tubes were running,

we kicked everybody out and went home.

UFO was very elite.

The psychedelic thing
had not quite reached the general public.

You know, it was a crowd of freaks

who were astonished
there were so many other ones.

And everybody was very happy
to see everybody else.

On the same bill you could get the Floyd,

you could get something like me
just doing poetry and jazz.

The Pink Floyd, once called
the underground's house orchestra,

on Friday nights they and other groups
play at UFO, U-F-O,

unidentified flying object,

a night-time environment
where films, projections and music

make the underground's nightclub
a huge entertainment scene.

You would have the light shows,
which actually were run by Mark Boyle,

and were very, very good.

A friend of mine, Joe Gannon, was one of
the early people who did the light show.

He was experimenting with all these

mixture of oil-based and water-based
colouring and inks and all the rest of it,

applying some heat and they'd just bubble,
start moving all over the place.

The slides still, I have to say,
to this day look great.

There is something fantastic
about the way these things work,

where you put these dyes and oil
between glass plates.

Then, of course, what you do
is you take a blowlamp and heat them up.

Glass and blowlamps, not a good mix.

Every now and again
there would be a sort of...

well, a muffled scream
from the lighting tower.

And these were projected
onto the Pink Floyd,

so that the band actually disappeared.

The band were...

virtually lost in the light show.

Pink Floyd were not a band
that put their faces forward.

They were anonymous makers of sound.

They were playing the sort of
standard blues material of the time,

Dust My Blues,
"Oh, my God, there's Dust My Blues again."

Louie, Louie.

You know,
there seemed to be about 30 songs,

everybody played the same 30 songs.

But instead of having
wailing guitars going on,

The Floyd had this weird noise going on.

They were playing,
you know, seven-minute songs

instead of three-minute songs.

And they were, you know, playing the song,

the song that you would recognise
would be about two minutes,

and there would be about three,
four minutes of waffle in-between,

and that was what was interesting,
that was what was unique was that waffle.

And I think, as I recall,

lnterstellar Overdrive was Syd's riff.

It's very simple, but...

it's actually even simpler than a 12-bar.

You know, because basically it's...

it's a sort of chromatic riff.

And you do that twice and then you don't
change chords again for ten minutes,

and you do whatever you want,

so it's sort of free form over a single,
probably minor, chord

for like 10, 15...

However long you want to go on, really.

And then you'd sort of go, "Are we done?

"All right. Here we go." And you'd play
the riff again twice and it's over.

So it was sort of reducing the form of music

to absolutely its simplest possible terms.

And that... But that wasn't...

We didn't stay there all that long,

but certainly during the UFO period,

that basically, that's sort of what it was,

sit on a minor chord for a long time.

Syd Barrett's guitar technique was taken
not so much from jazz,

but from AMM and Keith Rowe
the guitarist there

who had previously been
with the Mike Westbrook band.

He was the guy who started doing things
like rolling ball bearings

up and down an electric guitar.

The AMM was a band which was...

very free form, very improvisational.

And Syd got very into that
and began using all those techniques,

the ball bearings, the...

Even the detuning.

When he got quite bad
towards the end of his mental breakdown,

he would get on stage and just detune
his strings until they all sagged,

and he couldn't play them at all,
they would just rattle.

And he would stare at the audience.

And Syd Barrett was incredible.

I mean, I have to say, when you're talking
about songwriters and stuff like that,

Syd Barrett was wonderful.

And I love everything he did.
And he was magic.

Except when he was completely out of it,
unfortunately,

which became more and more so.

You know, he was a real spirit.

Syd was a strange mixture of the two things,

he was an avant-garde
improvisational musician,

and on the other hand,

he still had an attraction to the idea
of the Sixties rock and roll god,

you know, with the tight crushed velvet
loon pants and the frilly shirts,

and having all the groupies, basically,
which he did indeed get.

You know, I think Syd's songs
are really wonderful, really original, really...

you know, English music hall in a way,
more than blues.

Syd's writing came very much
from Edward Lear

as much as it came from,
you know, the blues.

The British tradition of
sort of Lewis Carroll and Lear

was very much in a lot of his writing,

a very sort of childlike
sort of view of the world.

Really, it was only Syd...

who had the same sensibility
as the rest of the underground.

I think the other members of the band
really didn't share those values, particularly.

They were... They were much
too sort of middle class, I think.

People projected that onto them and that
was what they were, the house band.

Yes, we were the house band
because we had management

who actually were busy promoting us.

And Peter, Andrew, as Blackhill,
along with Joe Boyd,

we had virtually all the major players
in the London underground promoting us.

And so, yes, we were at UFO,

yes, we were at the IT launch.

And yeah, because we were there
and available,

and being pushed in that direction.

I have no memory of the underground at all.

When people talk about it, I have no idea
of what anybody's talking about.

Even at the time I remember they were
talking about the London Free School.

I never saw any evidence of any schooling,
you know. At all.

There was some rather
daring dope smoking

for which Hoppy eventually
went to prison for, I think,

but I don't remember anything
fundamentally revolutionary in any way.

I think it was...

That's not to put any of it down,
I just didn't notice it, you know.

I didn't see any of that happening.

Maybe because I was too busy...

along with the rest of the band,

poncing around in Oliver Goldsmith
winter sunglasses

and putting fringes
on the bottoms of my trousers.

Whatever, you know.

Hanging around the front of
Granny Takes A Trip

pretending that we could afford
those awful brocade jackets.

So l'm not sure about all this
being the house band for the underground.

Maybe we were, but as I said before,

I never really knew
what the underground was.

With the success of their residency at UFO,

the next logical step for Floyd
was to produce a single.

The first contact we had, obviously,
was with Joe because we knew Joe,

and he was all part of the gang.

With the help of Bryan Morrison,
we recorded the first single,

probably I think in late '66.

And that would be Arnold Layne.

Joe definitely saw the potential.

I think he'd been introduced through Peter
and Andrew. There was a whole connection.

We recorded at Sound Techniques
in Chelsea,

which was a sort of very easy experience.

We got a deal with EMI and EMI put it out.

They licensed or they bought the track
from Morrison,

and they put that out as the first single.

I produced Arnold Layne,
which was the first single.

And it was banned by the BBC

for being unsuitable.

And... But it was a hit nonetheless.

It was not a big hit, but it was a Top 20 hit

and put them on the map.

When the record was banned,
I mean, it was a real surprise.

And I think we were probably truly shocked,
thinking,

"Oh, yeah, I suppose there
is a slightly quirky take to this song."

Yeah, when Arnold Layne came out,
it certainly had an impact.

I think, in many ways, the instrumental bit of
Candy And A Currant Bun

was what caught me because
that was unlike anything else.

Arnold Layne was almost...

You know, you could say
The Who could have been capable of it

or maybe The Kinks,
but it had taken it a step further.

There were instrumental passages
in there that no one was doing.

On the 9th March, 1967,

the offices of IT were busted
on an obscenity charge,

leaving the IT staff
urgently in need of funds.

The way that society works

is to persecute and try to rub out something

that is considered dangerous
by the power-holders.

And sure enough, when something like
the underground press starts up,

and it starts to heat up and expand,

this is something which is threatening
to the establishment.

The actual details of the IT bust
I'll gloss over,

but basically it was
on the basis of obscenity.

The police came into lndica one day with
a warrant and they took everything away.

And it was a classic piece of
police-state intimidation, really.

It would have closed any other newspaper
down, of course,

but we weren't any other newspaper.

We weren't running for profit, after all,
no one was making any money.

We, the editorial staff decided
that we would have to...

It was like double or quits,

that we would have
a giant fundraising event.

And I remember cautioning Hoppy,

"You gotta be careful because you may
end up losing, not making money."

I was a bit sceptical about it.

And after we got busted,

the idea of possibly a major court case

and a lot of legal fees,

Hoppy took time off from the newspaper

and became full-time organiser
for the 1 4 Hour Technicolor Dream.

And in the past,
when he was a jazz photographer,

he had been to all-night raves
at Alexandra Palace,

which was where they would have
all-night jazz things.

And so he managed to book that

for an extended version of the UFO Club,
basically.

The Technicolor Dream was the celebration
of the coming of age

for the post-war generation.

The Technicolor Dream
was that clear manifestation

that it was different.

And a lot of people sort of stood there for
hours on end spaced out, listening to...

There were all sorts of things
going on all the time,

people doing light shows in corners.

I remember thinking,

"It's all happening now, boy,
this is really something big."

Now it was different, it was changed,
and it would never be the same again.

I can remember we actually
went up on the Northern line,

went up to Wood Green on the tube.

We got out at Wood Green,

and we were walking up the hill
to Alexandra Palace,

and I can remember just the smell of
incense from people carrying joss sticks.

There were bells.

There was all kinds of amazing clothes.
People had old Edwardian clothes, gowns.

There were some of
the first kaftans appearing.

And just this amazing kind of carnival of
people dressed in weird, strange clothing.

I felt at home. This is what I'd been
looking for, even though I didn't know it.

I got there pretty early and I remember
as soon as the doors opened,

there was a guy called Norman Pilkington

who stood on the door and shook hands
with everybody as they came in,

and was chatting to them
and would take their address.

But over the next couple of months
he had 50 people visited him,

who still had his address.

These completely unknown people would
show up and spend some time with him.

When I arrived there, I just sort of...

wandered up the stairs of
that wonderful building.

And that again was like walking into

another temple with that
huge stained glass window at the back,

and the big organ and all these people
wandering around,

dressed in a wonderful way.

And I think the first person
I remember seeing on arrival

was a guy called Nigel Waymouth,

who was then part of
Hapshash And The Coloured Coat

who ran Granny Takes A Trip,

the fashion shop in the World's End,

who I'd already befriended before that.

So I suddenly realised
this was home for the night.

What would you describe
as the purpose of this evening,

The 1 4 Hour Technicolor Dream?

Well...

I think that there's a new period, a new era.

I reckon it's bloody mad.

They're all mad. What do they get out of it?

All these long dresses and baggy...

And half the blokes that
are walking around here need a good bath.

There was two stages, one at each end.

One just underneath
where the organ placement was,

and then the other at the other end.

People were just wafting round and there
were lots of different things happening.

And 41 bands offered their services.

Well, they weren't all bands,
a lot of them were sort of happenings,

dance troupes and things like that.

But it was enough so that the only way of
getting all these people in

was to have two bands simultaneously,
one at each end of the Alexandra Palace.

The noise was horrible, banging around
so you couldn't really hear anything.

And then there were two bands playing at
the same time, banging around together.

It was all kind of moulded together,
there was no kind of break.

There was no set list as such.

People were playing free form.

John Dunbar had forgotten
about the evening

and had gone out to take some acid
with John Lennon out in Weybridge.

And the event was actually so newsworthy,
it was on the BBC television news,

which they happened to have on.

The organisers of
this country's first major psychedelic event

chose May Day eve for their all-night ritual,

and Alexandra Palace as their temple.

They offered the Queen
and the prime minister free admission,

and charged 7,000 other people £1 a head.

Suddenly realised what they were missing,

called the chauffeur,

were driven in splendour

to the Alexandra Palace,
and you can tell by the TV footage of them

that they were certainly completely out of it.

All the other things that I remember
were pretty good.

Spent a long time with my girlfriend
Suzy Creamcheese.

- My name is Suzy Creamcheese.
- What do you do for a living?

Well, sometimes I dance for a living.

Sometimes I run switchboards.

Sometimes I work with...

sick children.

Sometimes I just live.

I remember Lennon came in
and a lot of other people.

They had a helter-skelter.
There were lots of minor events.

Yoko Ono did an event

where a young woman's clothes
were successively cut off and cut to pieces

by people with scissors.

So it's got elements of rape, of feminism.

As far as I remember,
the scissors were amplified,

so it had an audio quality to it as well.

Whether John Lennon saw that or not,
I don't know.

But I don't think they talked even though
they had met each other before.

It was during the time
when they were repairing the pipe organ,

"they" being the proprietors of Ally Pally.

And there was scaffolding up around the
organ pipes that went right up to the ceiling.

And, of course,
as soon as the event started,

people started to climb up the scaffolding.

Come midnight, I could see
that the scaffolding was rocking,

and it obviously wasn't properly secured.

It was very, very amateur,

and that was what was beautiful about it
and what was praised.

People were climbing on the scaffolding
out of their minds.

It's amazing that no one fell off of something
and broke their back or anything like that.

There were so many things going on,
so many friends,

and a lot of the time we just laid there
looking at the ceiling,

watching people walk past,

smoking plenty of spliffs
and just being part of the furniture, really.

I remember the Floyd arriving
and doing their thing very late.

I think they started to play

just as sunlight was coming through
the building or the sun was already up.

But I remember the place
being full of light at that time.

The hall was filling with a new day,
a new dawn and a new daylight.

That's how it felt to me, anyway.

The legendary event, of course,

is The Pink Floyd coming on
as dawn came through the rose window,

and Pete Jenner and Syd were both on acid.

l'm sure Syd played very badly,

but the actual effect of the sun just breaking

and coming in through the window
and shining off of Syd's guitar,

which had a Melinex, a silver front on it,

so there would be beams of light going up.

It was literally quite magical. And the stage
was very high, it was about 7ft high,

so everyone had to look up at them.

And behind them was the rose window,

and it was all very moving.

The thing I remember most about it,

which probably has a lot to do with
what was happening with the chemicals,

was the light coming up.

There was the night-time
and then it was the dawn.

And it was as the dawn came up
The Floyd played,

and that somehow was very sort of crucial,

literally very psychedelic experience.

What they played that night was basically
a series of very long improvisations.

I think we did a double-header that night.

I think we played a gig in Holland
and then flew from Holland back to England.

But I could be completely wrong about that,
that may be something else.

I have no idea how the band played.

I don't think they probably had any idea
how the band played.

It must have been very difficult.

l've heard that Roger found it
a bit of a nightmare and l'm not surprised.

I remember the Ally Pally,
I remember it was a big space,

I remember a lot of people milling around
and there was more than one stage,

and twiddling a knob
on a thing called a BFO,

a beat frequency oscillator,

that really was just a tone generation,
so it went...

And then, magically,
if you went the other way, it went...

Or you could make it go...

You know, it was like an...

extraordinary, stupidly primitive
musical instrument.

I tend to take a slightly jaundiced view of it

because at the time
we were going through...

Syd was beginning to fall apart.

For us that sense
that this was all a bit bigger

and this was a very different size of venue

to what we'd been used to

as far as the underground was concerned.

So, you know,
I tend to look back on it and go,

"Yeah, well, it wasn't that great."

I was still there when it finished

and the sun was up and it was
a fantastic spring morning, I remember that,

it was a beautiful day.

And I remember lying on the grass
outside Ally Pally...

and watching the hordes of people

streaming down the hill...

and thinking there really were enough
people and, boy, is this thing taking off.

Yes, I think it has been a great success

because the people who came here

have been really turned on
by what's happened here.

And they've gone away saying,

"What a beautiful thing,
we must have more like this."

After the Alexandra Palace party,
the next big step for the Pink Floyd

was a recording of their seminal album,

The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

When I left Elektra,
I set out to try and find them a deal.

And I got them a deal with Polydor.

But before the deal could ever be signed...

the agency that had come in
to represent them,

said, "Oh, no, we can get you more money
from EMl."

Then the whole deal sort of collapsed
and they ended up going to EMl,

and I ended up producing just one record.

And then they did the rest of the LP
with a different producer,

with an in-house producer at EMl,
which was EMl's policy.

Peter and Andrew went to Bryan Morrison.

Bryan Morrison, who became our agent,

had got us all this work
that we were desperate for.

We'd sort of hooked into EMl.

EMI were not interested in
taking on an outside producer,

so Joe inevitably got sort of pushed out.

The Piper album was eventually recorded
at the famous Abbey Road studios

with the EMI producer, Norman Smith.

He'd been an engineer with The Beatles
and he was hoping to be, you know,

the next George Martin, really,
and do it with us.

And, you know, he had quite an influence
on a lot of the recording.

I don't think he was sort of great for us
making that first album

because I think he was very surprised
by Syd's songs.

Norman Smith maintains that it was
already very difficult dealing with Syd.

I don't actually remember that.

I would have thought we got through tracks
in a few days,

rather than months,
which is how we ended up working.

The Floyd were the first band
with a major label to get an album deal.

And I think the cleverness of Norman Smith
was to make sure that the band

did produce lots of three-minute songs
on that first album,

but did make sure, and I think we insisted
on it, that there was a long song,

which was like what they would do live,
and that was lnterstellar Overdrive.

It's a tribute to Abbey Road
and quality of engineering

that something that was made 40 years ago
is still actually,

you know, it's not a sort of grinding...

like listening to those old wax cylinders.

It's quite a nice mix of things,

there are various different elements to it
that I think are quite interesting.

Chapter 24 is the I Ching,
there's this whole interest in philosophy,

and alternative religions and things like that.

There's the thing about
the whimsical scarecrow.

It's sort of English poetry almost.

And then there's lnterstellar Overdrive
which is about very loud rock and roll,

but mixed in with quite lengthy sections
of pure invention,

and rhythmic breakdown, which was
unheard of in rock and roll up till that point.

The Sixties and the career

and subsequent breakdown of Syd Barrett
from early '67 onwards,

is inexorably connected with LSD
and its effects.

My personal view is that Syd
was going to go down the road

towards schizophrenia that he went down...

in my view in any way.

My understanding is that Syd took LSD
on a number of occasions

and quite often had bad trips.

From everything I heard at the time,
he was doing far too many drugs,

far too much acid,
and I think it scrambled his brain.

lf you're becoming ill, taking acid at all,
but certainly in large quantities,

it's probably the worst thing you can do,

and it's likely to exacerbate the symptoms

of whatever is going wrong in your brain.

I think there was a connection to
whatever sort of philosophy

he was interested in at the time.

And the two things, in a way it was a cocktail
that went particularly bad.

But I think he was also experimenting
and being artistic,

and he saw the acid as opening his mind
to new ways of expression.

It was very difficult,
not least because we expected

an enormous amount from Syd.

He was the creative leader, you know,

he was the only guy writing songs, really.

He was also the lead guitar player
and he was also the singer,

so he was like a pretty fundamental,
you know, bit of the puzzle.

Well, I think we were very aware
that things were starting to go awry,

but I maintain that
we absolutely went into denial.

You know, if Syd was behaving in
a particularly peculiar way,

we'd sort of assume
this was tiredness and stress

and that we should have one day off
and go straight back to work.

He definitely was an artist
and saw himself as an artist,

and I think he was very ambivalent
about the whole pop scene.

He decided that this was not
what he really wanted to do,

he didn't want to be a rock and roll band,
actually,

with a whole commercial element to it.

And I think he was very experimental

and I don't think he was very interested
in being a pop star,

and I think he found that being a pop star
was quite disturbing,

people asking him the meaning of life.

The consensus view, really,

is that Britain was pretty beige
in the Fifties and early Sixties,

there wasn't much colour, you went through
various shades of grey and beige.

It was a fairly dreary place.

What LSD and, to a lesser extent,
cannabis did,

was that the world kind of
exploded into primary colours.

What we see in pop music,

both the lyrics and the sound,

fashion, art, poster design, photography,

all the kind of major artistic endeavours
going on in London in the mid-Sixties,

I think were very much a product

of the visions and experiences
that people had as a result of LSD.

Turn on.

Tune in.

And drop out.

The first time I did LSD
was with a few friends,

Ted Milton and, I think, Andrew King,
later one of the co-managers of The Floyd.

Speaking for myself,
I only ever did acid twice in my life.

And the first time it was
an extraordinary profound experience.

But l'm not talking about what I hear

people of successive generations
talking about,

"Oh, we did a tab of acid and went out
and did this, that and the other."

Not if you were taking this kind of,
you know...

pharmaceutical stuff out of a bottle
that was pure whatever,

and you had a drop of it on your tongue.

You didn't go out and do anything
for at least a couple of days.

It was very powerful and weird.

I think the first time you take acid,
if you're well prepared for it,

which happily we were.

We'd read Aldous Huxley's Heaven And Hell
and The Gates Of Perception and...

had some sort of...

regard for what we were doing,
which wasn't just entertainment.

I remember being in a club in Frankfurt

and we'd all dropped a tab of acid
about two in the morning,

and I went downstairs to wash my hands,

have a pee and wash my hands,
and as I turned the tap on,

blood came out of the taps.

You wash your face with the water,

you look in the mirror,
you're covered in blood.

But you know it's not blood,
you know it's cool.

It's a wonderful experience.
You look at your hands. It's great.

And then you go back upstairs
and you're sitting in the bar,

and there's this bald German

and suddenly the top of his head
grows into a point.

And you know it's not real,
but it's just a wonderful experience

because you've got a kind of control knob

and if it starts to get a bit scary
you can turn it down a bit.

I mean, I never had a bad trip,
I had fantastic trips.

I felt absolutely no desire to do it again.

Not that it was a terrible experience,
it wasn't,

it's like wanting to live
an entirely different life,

which I didn't want to do.

A lot of what happened to Syd happened
after they stopped playing regularly at UFO,

and after I stopped working with him
in the studio,

so I didn't witness it close up.

I did run into him once in the West End
one evening,

and his girlfriend said he'd been taking acid
every day for a week.

And clearly he was pushing the boundaries.

I remember one of the UFO gigs,

Syd playing just one note
all the way through.

The Floyd came back
to play at UFO in June,

and he just...

stood there on stage
with his hands at his side,

sometimes didn't sing the song,

and was obviously deeply changed
in some way.

And one began to start worrying

that Syd was getting...

was getting a bit weird.

But then how far was that a good thing
because, hey, we were experimenting,

we were, you know, psychedelic.

It 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.

I mean, I can talk about his behaviour,

the behaviours that came out of that time
and all the weird stuff.

You know, when we were doing
Top Of The Pops, so this is like '67,

and, you know, Syd started getting...

grumpy about having to go on television.

Which he did.

And I think I remember him
saying at one point,

"John Lennon doesn't have to do this."

"What the fuck are you talking about?
What's that got to do with us?"

You know, "This is what
we've always dreamed of."

So I don't know.

And then obviously he became
sort of less and less attached...

to what we perceive to be reality,

and it all slowly fell apart.

I think we only realised when
we really, really had to face up to it,

when Syd wasn't actually performing
any more,

he wasn't actually really playing the guitar
in a real way,

he was detuning the strings
or just standing there looking lost.

And finally we actually had to face up to it.

I don't think it was choice, I think
he became incapable of playing,

but he would kind of cover that
by acting mad, you know.

Famously, at Winterland, which was
one of our very first gigs in the States,

if not the first gig, when we were
playing on the bill with Big Brother,

with Janis,

and Richie Havens,

but we were the first act on.

And he just... Everybody knows this story,

but he literally strummed the opening strings
on the guitar,

and then loosened them

in order from the E string down through
the A, D, G, B, E until they all fell off.

And then he was done.

Which is pretty Dada,

and really irritating if you were in our band

cos then what do you do
for the rest of the performance?

There wasn't a great deal we could do.

Everybody blames Pink Floyd
for sacking Syd Barrett,

but in fact the guy just couldn't stand up
any more.

He couldn't...

keep it together.

No, I think it was too many drugs...

too quickly and...

I think he had a medical problem, anyway,
which I know nothing about.

And...

he just lost it, lost control.

I thought he was quite brilliant.

One of these comets that burst,
like Hendrix, you know.

Just something that when it comes out
it's too bright to live.

Towards the end of the Sixties,

Syd Barrett gradually moved away
from the music scene altogether.

And another iconic figure
from the underground, Hoppy Hopkins,

also seemed to realise
that things had changed.

When he went, it fell apart.

I mean, it was extraordinary
when the police took him away.

I mean, he was bust because we were
becoming too influential, too powerful.

I always thought he was put away
to shut him up.

And...he was never
the same power afterwards.

Whether because he realised that
he'd crossed the line and he didn't...

"No way l'm going back
in that f-ing place again."

So he never came back into
the underground after he'd done his time.

Yeah, we had the Summer Of Love,

we had Sergeant Pepper's
coming out in June,

we had Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
in August,

but then what happens later on in the year...

Brian Jones is busted
for the second time that year,

Brian Epstein dies.

The Rolling Stones bring out
a substandard psychedelic album.

And it's kind of winter.

I certainly felt that things were changing
by the end of the summer of '67,

that the spirit that was there
all during '66 and the spring of '67...

began to be eroded inevitably
because it got too popular.

You know, when it becomes a mass thing,

Britain is a country that
can turn anything into a fashion,

and it becomes a pop fashion
much more than a serious movement,

and that's inevitable, you know.

Quite honestly, by the end of '69,

everybody I knew was just tired.

I mean, no one had had enough sleep
for years.

They'd taken too many drugs,
they were just absolutely exhausted.

I don't think there was a particular event,

everyone just like finally had to crash
and go to bed.