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

a lot of tut tuts from my father and lots of “For God’s sake, Anthony, what are you doing?” ’
    As well as coming from highly academic families, many of the group had another thing in common. Storm’s father, like Nigel’s, was separated from his mother. Meanwhile, Syd, Roger Waters and John ‘Ponji’ Robinson had lost their fathers. ‘There was,’ as John Davies explains, ‘a lot of us with fathers that were physically or emotionally absent. Or both.’
    ‘Almost all of us had parents that had gone through World War Two,’ elaborates Anthony Stern. ‘My father suffered from a complete inability to talk about his experiences in the war. Added to this was the fact that in Cambridge you were surrounded by this enormous weight of history and all these brilliant people. My parents were also academics at St John’s College. So as the children of academic parents, as was Syd, we grew up feeling as if nothing we did was ever going to be considered good enough. I think many of us suffered from what I now call “The Cambridge Syndrome”.’
    Left to his own devices, Storm Thorgerson’s bedroom at Earl Street became, as one of the crowd described it, ‘a fuelling station’ for the aspirant beatniks. ‘The main event of the evening was to go to Storm’s place,’ explains Emo. ‘You could just about fit ten people in his bedroom, and we’d all be sitting on the floor, smoking, trying not to wake his mother - asleep next door.’
    ‘Storm had this amazing room,’ recalls Po. ‘It was covered in graffiti and montages of surreal pictures cut out of magazines, and that sort of thing was absolutely unheard of back then. But then Syd’s room was amazing, too. Syd’s was full of paintings and little model cars and model aeroplanes, and all sorts of things you might associate with a typical art student. But then I went there one day and there was this dodecahedron, quite big, about eighteen inches across, made out of balsa wood, and then another one, nine inches across, and another smaller, all just hanging from the ceiling. He’d made them himself - these absolutely perfect models.’
    Po was similarly intrigued by Syd’s appearance and manner. ‘I always have this memory of him in his room, walking around barefoot, but standing in this weird way of his on his tip-toes, sort of hovering, with his hair hanging down and a cigarette in his hand. Almost elf-like in a way. He had this style of dressing, terribly arty. He’d turn up in the pub wearing some blue and white matelot shirt, looking as though he’d just walked out of Montparnasse in the 1920s.’
    Yet Barrett could be as elusive with his old schoolfriends as he was with his newer art school companions.
    ‘He could be with a crowd of people and then suddenly disappear - gone,’ says Po. ‘He wouldn’t tell you where he was going, and then you’d be with a crowd of people later on and he would suddenly appear. I don’t think it was deliberate. I think he got easily bored and liked to go off and do his own thing. He had a great sense of humour but he could also suddenly withdraw from everything. One minute you’d be sitting in a room, getting stoned, and then the next minute he’d disappear.’
    Libby Gausden recalls Barrett’s disappearing acts: ‘Instead of going to all the things we’d been invited to, he’d drive off and just sit in the Gog Magog hills. As soon as he bought his first car, he was always taking me to look at rivers and hills, which at the time I thought was all terribly boring. But Syd was into nature, when all the trendy people weren’t.’
    By late 1962, David Gilmour had joined a local band called The Ramblers, which already included rhythm guitarist John Gordon and ex-Mottoes’ drummer Clive Welham. ‘We were a semi-pro band, playing and earning,’ says Welham now. ‘Dave had come on a hell of a lot. I’d seen him playing about a year before and he wasn’t up to it then, but you could tell he’d put a lot of work