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

with the band in a local pub, had no desire to become a pop star: ‘I was a bit too old and didn’t have the right image.’ Instead, he was content to encourage the band while marvelling at Barrett’s practical jokes and fumbled attempts to cook Sunday lunch: ‘Half an uncooked cabbage would end up on your plate.’ The band briefly adopted the name Leonard’s Lodgers in their landlord’s honour.
    Having taken a break from his studies, the briefly absent Richard Wright was soon back playing keyboards on a permanent basis. He had also enjoyed a musical breakthrough of his own, selling one of his own songs, ‘You’re the Reason Why’, to Liverpudlian harmony trio Adam, Mike and Tim, for the princely sum of £75.
    Nevertheless, the role of a proper lead singer was still unfilled. Juliette Gale had left the Poly to attend university in Brighton. Barrett and Klose muddled through on lead vocals, but soon realised that they needed a proper frontman. Syd approached Geoff Mottlow, but he’d just had a hit with The Boston Crabs, and turned them down. At Klose’s suggestion, they sought out another Cambridge refugee.
    Chris Dennis had sung in a local band called The Redcaps, worked as a technician for the RAF, and had the rare distinction of having sung with Malta’s first electric group, The Zodiacs, during a posting on the island. He was older than his penniless student bandmates, and had the benefit of owning a Vox PA system.
    ‘It was very much a case of me joining them,’ says Dennis now. ‘They wanted to play strictly blues - Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf - stuff that was unheard of in the UK at the time. I was much more into rhythm and blues after seeing The Rolling Stones at the Rex Ballroom in Cambridge. That was much more my style.’
    Dennis attended rehearsals at Mike Leonard’s place and stuck with the group for six months, playing around a dozen gigs, including an opening slot for Jeff Beck’s group The Tridents. ‘With a lot of bands you find there’s someone in the group who’s there only because they’re a friend, and, at first, I thought Syd was surplus to requirements. He used to sing some numbers, like Chuck Berry’s ‘No Money Down’, but he didn’t have any presence. Roger was the leader. It was Roger who told me what to sing and what songs to learn.’
    Subsequently, the band have claimed that Dennis’s jokey stage banter, including announcing his own made-up song titles for the likes of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’, became a problem. Dennis takes a different view. ‘They didn’t have much of a sense of humour,’ he insists. ‘But a lot of those old blues songs are funny. They used to tell me not to make up song titles, that we should tell people exactly what they were. And I used to say, “Why? They don’t know what it is anyway.” To be honest, I don’t think audiences then were ready for stomping blues with weird lyrics.’
    It was during Chris Dennis’s tenure in the group that they assumed a variation on what would be their lasting name. Syd had spliced together the monikers of two North Carolina bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, also utilised as the names of his two pet cats, Pink and Floyd. At various points during 1965 and early ’66 the group were said to have been called The Pink Floyd Blues Band, The Pink Floyd Sound and The Tea Set, sometimes spelled T-Set.
    ‘I don’t ever remember us being called The Tea Set,’ insists Chris Dennis. ‘But I do remember Syd coming down to rehearsals and telling us he’d come up with a name - Pink Floyd. I didn’t like it at first. I got used to it later, but to start with, I didn’t think it rang true.’
    It’s widely believed that the first gig performed by the band under the Pink Floyd name, in whatever variation, was at the Count Down, in Palace Gate, Kensington in February 1965. The band performed three ninety-minute sets and landed a pitiful £15 fee. To cloud the issue of