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

nonsense. Syd didn’t have to be stoned to play the music he did.’
     
    The summer holidays found Barrett back in Cambridge and hooking up with his old friends. While the Floyd were far from ‘drug-sodden’, the cliques along the River Cam had found a new obsession: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, known as LSD, the then still legal hallucinogenic, whose greatest advocate was the American writer and psychologist Dr Timothy Leary. The co-author of The Psychedelic Experience , published in 1964, Leary expounded the merits of the drug as offering ‘a journey to new realms of consciousness’.
    By 1965, dope had been smoked by some in the circle for at least two years, and one of the crowd had also acquired a subscription to a medical journal, unavailable to the general public, which listed various legal pharmaceuticals and outlined their effects when taken in excess. The exact circumstances of LSD’s arrival in Cambridge in the sixties are still the subject of speculation. Anthony Stern first took LSD in 1963, with an acquaintance then studying at Cambridge who had acquired the drug through contacts in America. ‘He sat with me in our house in Fisher Street and prepared me for what was going to happen, and, boy, when it happened . . . Cambridge was a wonderful place to take LSD, as there were loads of fascinating places you could go. We used to wander through the Fitzwilliam Museum, staring at the exhibits, and many an acid trip culminated in the Kings College chapel, which had this extraordinary medieval ceiling.’
    ‘At that time, we’d all begun to read about Timothy Leary and the emergence of this wonder drug, and all wondered how we could get hold of it,’ adds David Gale. ‘Without very much effort, people simply brought it down from London. It was usually on blotting paper, and each blot had 500 micrograms, which was quite a whack back then.’
    In truth, it was a British scientist, Michael Hollingshead, who had first turned Timothy Leary onto the drug in 1961. Four years later, Hollingshead opened the World Psychedelic Centre in a plush Mayfair flat, attracting a networked set of old Etonians, Oxbridge alumni and well-connected musicians and poets, including William Burroughs and Paul McCartney, eager to discuss the merits of the new drug.
    It was through the Hollingshead connection that Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, now studying at the London School of Film Technique, took his first trip. ‘I first tried LSD in London in March 1965,’ he recalls. ‘My first trip was absolutely ghastly, my second one much better. After that I started selling it on to other people, I was evangelical about it - selling it for a quid a trip and not making very much money.’
    As well as LSD, it was discovered that the seeds of the Morning Glory flower contained a rough strain of the hallucinogenic drug when taken in sufficient quantities, and chewed to a pulp. Florists in Cambridge reported a boom in the seeds’ sales, though the plant had its drawbacks. As Emo explains: ‘You had to endure two hours of the most excruciating stomach cramps and nausea before you started tripping.’
    That summer, David Gale’s parents disappeared to Australia for six months, leaving him free run of the family home. Among those to take full advantage was Emo, who had, in Gale’s words, ‘become the working-class jester in a group of largely middle-class dopeheads’. Emo promptly commandeered a room in his friend’s house, from which, according to Gale, ‘he used to go down the Mill, bring a girl back, shag her, then go back and get another one.’
    One afternoon, Emo, Barrett, Storm Thorgerson and another friend, Paul Charrier, convened in Gale’s parents’ garden. Emo is convinced that, on this occasion, both he and Syd had taken Morning Glory. David Gale maintains that some of them were tripping on liquid LSD that they’d taken in droplets on a row of sugar cubes. In a previous experiment with phials of the drug, Emo had made the discovery that