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

the band’s name still further, Barrett’s Cambridge art school friend, Richard Jacobs, is adamant that Syd had coined the name as early as 1963. ‘I distinctly recall him coming into the common room one afternoon and telling me he had a name for the band he was going to start - Pink Floyd. He said it as if he’d had some revelation in his lunch hour.’ By 1967 the story had changed again and Syd was spinning yarns to gullible interviewers that the name had been transmitted to him from a flying saucer while he was meditating on a leyline.
    Yet there were further changes afoot. Unhappy with the spoof song titles Chris Dennis created for their blues standards, Waters insisted that Bob Klose fire him. Before he had the chance, the singer announced that the RAF had posted him to Bahrain. ‘I wouldn’t have stuck with them for much longer anyway,’ he claims. ‘When I came back from Bahrain, there was a Pink Floyd LP in the shops. When I heard it, I didn’t relate to it at all. The kind of music Syd would end up doing came as a complete surprise to me.’
     
    With Dennis gone, Barrett was reluctantly pushed into the role of frontman. Through a contact of Richard Wright’s the band scrounged some free time at a West Hampstead recording studio to record a demo. Alongside Slim Harpo’s ‘I’m A King Bee’ were Barrett’s own ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Double O Bo’ (a barely disguised tribute to Bo Diddley) and ‘Lucy Leave’, which, with its stolid Rolling Stones groove, gave little indication of the fanciful wordplay and outré musicality that lay ahead.
    Then again, the wider musical competition was daunting. ‘I can remember seeing The Who on Top of the Pops doing “My Generation”, and thinking: Yes! Now that’s what I want to do,’ recalls Mason. ‘That would have been in 1964, but I couldn’t have imagined that it would have been possible with what we were doing.’
    Chris Dennis wouldn’t be Pink Floyd’s only casualty that year. By the summer of 1965, Bob Klose was gone. ‘Bob was a far better musician than any of us,’ said Richard Wright. ‘But I think he had some exam problems and felt he ought to apply himself to work, whereas the rest of us weren’t so conscientious.’
    ‘Bob heard those dreaded words from his mother and father: “Finish your exams and then do it”,’ recalls Libby Gausden.
    ‘I felt adrift and I needed to get to grips with things,’ says Klose now. ‘Syd had just begun to write and was coming through with these songs of his own. At the time, though, it was like, “Oh, Syd’s written a song.” But it was only later on that I was able to hear the originality of it. Roger would lay these fantastic concepts before us - and later he would make them happen. The grandness of his vision was extraordinary then. But the music we were playing before was influenced by the fact that I was such a facile guitar player - always whizzing around. Syd writing gave them the push to stop doing R&B covers and go off in a more original direction.’
    ‘It was a major switch when Bob left the band,’ said Mason. ‘That sent us spiralling into another direction. Syd and Roger were listening to John Mayall and Alexis Korner, but, somewhere along the line, Syd had discovered writing songs, and his songs were not in that vein at all.’
    ‘Bob Klose was a man with a great wealth of blues runs in his head,’ explained Waters. ‘And when he left we hadn’t anyone who had any blues knowledge, so we had to start doing something else. Syd took over on lead guitar, and I’m sure it was the noises that Pete Townshend was making then, squeaks and feedback, that influenced Syd. So we started making strange noises instead of the blues.’
    Later, claims would be made that Klose was uncomfortable with the psychedelic direction the band’s music was starting to take. ‘That’s way too glib,’ he insists. ‘Also the idea that Syd and the Floyd were a drug-sodden shambles is an absolute