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

in since.’
    ‘Dave and Syd were two of those guys you couldn’t miss,’ remembers Rick Wills, who would play bass guitar in one of Gilmour’s later groups. ‘I used to run into Dave at Ken Stevens’ music shop. We’d both be trying out guitars and making a bloody nuisance of ourselves. Dave had an air about him, though - quite arrogant sometimes, an air of “I know it all”. Syd had a look that was all his own. To be frank, I never took him seriously. He was one of those arty types who walked around with a Bob Dylan LP under one arm. Not a proper rock ’n’ roller, I thought.’
    However, others, including Mick Jagger, disagreed. Libby Gausden accompanied Syd to a Rolling Stones gig in a village hall in nearby Whittlesey. ‘It must have been something the Stones had been contracted to do before they became famous,’ says Libby. ‘After the show, Mick Jagger came straight up to us out of everybody in the crowd. I remember it because he had this awful, put-on voice, and being from Cambridge we all spoke properly. He was asking about my clothes but he was also fascinated by Syd. He thought Syd looked like a very young Bill Wyman - the same dark hair and very thin.’
    At a Bob Dylan show at London’s Festival Hall, fashion designer Mary Quant, also in the audience, was, as Libby now puts it, ‘very taken with Syd’. Back in Cambridge, older women at the parties they attended would be enchanted by Barrett, and pass him their telephone numbers. ‘He used to ring them up,’ admits Libby. ‘But we’d both listen to what they said, and laugh ourselves silly when he arranged to meet them, then didn’t turn up.’
    At the same time, Gilmour was also moonlighting with another local group, The Newcomers, previously Chris Ian and The Newcomers, until Chris Ian quit and vocalist Ken Waterson took over. ‘Dave had a poxy old Burns guitar and a crappy amp, but you could see he’d got it even then; he was bloody good,’ Waterson later recalled.
    With Syd Barrett’s stint at the Cambridge School of Art coming to a close, his future plans still involved art rather than music. ‘But I always thought his art was something to do while he was waiting for something to happen with his music,’ says Libby Gausden.
    In the summer of 1963, Syd travelled to London to attend an interview for Camberwell School of Art, even though it meant missing a Beatles gig. The sacrifice paid off and he was accepted. ‘Syd desperately wanted to go to Chelsea art school but he couldn’t get in,’ reveals Libby. ‘Then he found out that Camberwell was even trendier.’
    That summer, he and Anthony Stern had staged an exhibition of their work above the Lion and Lamb pub in nearby Milton. Now studying at St John’s College, Stern had been granted the use of a studio space by the provost of the neighbouring Kings College. ‘They were friends of my parents, so I was immensely privileged,’ says Stern. ‘Having this room offered me another chance to escape from my parents and gave me the opportunity to meet girls.’
    Unfortunately, the exhibition was less successful. ‘Syd’s paintings were wild abstracts and still lives in oil on canvas; mine were rather feeble attempts at psychotic surrealism. We didn’t sell anything.’
    However, Stern’s makeshift studio would provide a bolthole for Barrett to escape to. ‘Syd and I would spend ages in there, having endless conversations about the nature of film and art and music. There was a man at Kings College called Reg Gadney, who made light boxes in his room. He showed us these things - they were like huge television screens behind which there were a series of mechanical gadgets and light projections. These were the sort of ideas that later became part of psychedelia, and which the Floyd used in their light shows. Syd and I were fascinated.’
    Syd had previously experimented with home-made light shows with his art school friend John Gordon. When John moved into a flat in Clarendon Street,