Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake Read Free Book Online

offer a thinly disguised account of the author and his friends’ experiences in Cambridge at the time.
    ‘Syd always thought Dave Gale was a bit of a lad, and he worshipped Nigel Gordon,’ recalls Libby Gausden. ‘I think that lot all thought we were a bit of a teenybopper crowd because we were a bit younger. But they were all very taken with Syd.’
    The group’s favoured haunts included Miller’s music shop, the El Patio and the Guild coffee bars, the Criterion pub (known locally as ‘the Cri’), the Dorothy Ballroom and varying spots along the River Cam. Between 1963 and 1965, as John Davies recalls, ‘we made the transformation from schoolboys to aspiring beatniks’, swapping school uniforms for black polo necks and leather jackets, listening to Miles Davis, riding Vespas and smoking dope purchased from American GIs on the neighbouring airforce bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall.
    ‘The El Patio was one of the first expresso bars,’ explains Anthony Stern. ‘I bunked off school at the Perse to do a washing-up job there, as I wanted to rebel. The idea of growing up normally was off the case. So we would spend a lot of time doing things that were likely to annoy one’s parents. That’s how we developed this fascination with the blues. It was the rebellious aspect that appealed. Ah, good! Another way to twist the knife into our parents.’
     
    ‘In 1962 we were all into Jimmy Smith,’ explained Storm Thorgerson. ‘Then 1963 brought dope and rock. Syd was one of the first to get into The Beatles and The Stones. Syd used to take his guitar and busk at parties.’
    ‘I was a couple of years older than Syd and at the Perse,’ recalls David Gale. ‘By the time I was sixteen, Syd and I were on nodding acquaintance. The thing to be in those days was to look bohemian - which Syd did very well. There were two or three cliques that went down to the river during the school holidays. Each clique would have their favoured spots, but there would be commerce between the camps. We’d be on the green near the Mill Pond, next to two pubs - the Mill and the Anchor. Storm’s crowd used to go further up near the men’s bathing sheds on Sheep’s Green where there were some banks and willow trees. The thing to do was hire a punt at one of the boatyards at the Mill and take it down to Grantchester Meadows.’
    Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell would go on to form the Hipgnosis design company with Storm Thorgerson. He had been educated at King’s School in neighbouring Ely, and had first encountered County and Perse boys Storm and David Gale during inter-school cricket and rugby matches.
    ‘Later we had a mutual friend in Cambridge, a Liverpudlian drug-dealer named Nod,’ recalls Po now. ‘Which is how I got to know those guys again.’ On leaving school, he took a tiny room in the same Clarendon Street house where John Gordon had been living. ‘There were loads of people in and out of there,’ he remembers. ‘The comedian Peter Cook’s sister, Sarah, had the basement flat, so we used to hang out with her. Storm’s mother’s house was next door in Earl Street, so there was a little enclave where we used to congregate.’
    Storm Thorgerson’s mother, Evangeline, was a potter and schoolteacher at Ely Grammar School for Girls, and a friend of Mary Waters. She was separated from Storm’s father, and, like Syd, Storm enjoyed the run of the family home. He had spent the early part of his life in the highly liberal Summerhill Free School in Suffolk, an establishment later dubbed by the media ‘The Do What You Please School’. ‘This meant that Storm always seemed terribly advanced for his years,’ recalls one of his peers.
    ‘Storm used to make films, using his friends as actors,’ recalls Anthony Stern. ‘He made one called The Meal which he shot at my parents’ house. It was a surreal fantasy, and at one point Nick Sedgwick got “eaten”. So there was Nick’s semi-naked body lying on my parents’ table, which raised