RR: Eventually, the Floyd recorded an album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn that was Syd Barrett’s artistic zenith. His songs have stood the test of time, despite many imitators, because no one has ever been able to write a lyric or a tune quite like him. In 1967, when the debut album came out, did you have enough time to stop and appreciate what he and the band had accomplished?
PJ: No, I certainly didn’t think that I would be talking about the album 43 years later. That never crossed my mind. Indeed, the first contract we signed with EMI, they only got royalties for 25 years. We all thought, “Well, that’s not a problem. We’re 24, and that’s a lifetime away.” (laughter) I mean, that part changed.
You’re absolutely right. I think the thing was that people in America don’t realize, perhaps, was how very English that stuff Syd was writing. It came very much out of that tradition of Lewis Carroll and A.A. Milne and other children’s writers of the 19th century who had a history of a sort of whimsy writing for young kids. I think that had a lot of influence on the way we all thought. That was a form of children’s writing that we would have all been brought up on in the 40s—me and Syd. In a sense, it was harking back to a lot of that memory of a bucolic past, which never really existed because we were children of the war. We were children born during the war, or just after the war, brought up in a really quite drab, very drab way—in the context of what life is like now. There were a lot of shortages, and so, by the 60s, things were beginning to open up. You could get things.
Even in the 60s, we never got to hear the music from the West Coast because the records from America were by no means necessarily released in the UK. We heard about things like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, but hadn’t heard anything. We read about them. There was an awareness that something was going on, but very little of it came over to the UK on that underground thing. And Hendrix came and lived here. That was a bit later, but you know. Things like, through the underground, I heard early Velvet Underground tapes. That came to me on a cassette. A friend of mine had it, and we listened to it, and I said, “That’s a great band. They’d be great to work with the Floyd.” I phoned up John Cale because someone knew John Cale’s number. So very small things, there were links, but there wasn’t much contact. I tried to get to manage them. I said, “Oh, let’s manage him, as well. This management line’s a good one; let’s manage the Velvet Underground.” And they said, “Oh, no, we have a manager.” And I said, “Oh, O.K.” But it was this naivety that you could just phone someone up (laughs), and manage them, and they might say yes. They might not. But, hey, this is it; we just do it.
There was a freedom going through in that era—unlocking of lots of doors with what was happening with the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Kinks and all these bands showing that British bands could take on the world. That was really new. That was really new and that was an exciting time in that sense, and presumably, I just got caught up in it as a music fan. I’d been a jazz fan, and then I got into R&B and, then, there was something that was more interesting, which was the psychedelic stuff. We heard the Fugs and there were a few things that came through, but not much. There was a lot that we’d read about like free concerts and things like that.
RR: Right. And before the Floyd, you had DNA Records. How did that all play out?
PJ: DNA Records? You know about that? Oh, you’ve been doing your homework. DNA. In London Free School, it was myself and Hoppy [John Hopkins], who was the key person, and Felix de Mendelsohn and Ron Atkins. Ron was interested in jazz, Felix had more of a classical background, and I was interested in blues and rock ‘n’ roll and jazz and so was Hoppy. One of our blokes, one of our geezers in our group, in the London Free School was Joe Boyd who was doing stuff for Elektra Records. He was the only person we knew in the music industry. So, we thought, as we were doing all of this revolutionary small art, cultural stuff, let’s see if we could do a record. I had forgotten who knew AMM [an improvisational jazz band which would go on to influence Floyd, among other experimental outfits]. I think it was Ron. We met AMM and Cornelius Cardew was involved, and it somehow had to do with Stockhausen, John Cage, and Ornette Coleman, and all these things. I met my wife [Sumi]—alas, now, passed away some years ago—she was in England (she was Japanese-Canadian) with her friend who was Ornette Coleman’s girlfriend. So it was Ornette Coleman and there was that scene, and there was the Poetry Olympics and [Allen] Ginsberg, and there was a huge amount of stuff going on. Yoko [Ono] started appearing and the Beatles stuff was getting more and more interesting and the gaps between the music silos were breaking down.
DNA was an attempt to have a progressive label, which would have avant-garde pop, avant-garde folk, avant-garde jazz, and avant-garde classical. In other words, breaking down those barriers. Subsequently, I looked at the figures and realized (laughs) that the deal we got from Elektra was so shitty —which, of course, we hadn’t looked at; we just thought, “Great! We’ll make a record.”—and that we would never ever make a penny. It wasn’t a question of getting rich. It was a question of just being able to afford to do it to make more records. And to make it viable, we would have to have a pop act because we would have to have something. Pop acts sold lots of records. I mean, very naïve. If you have a pop act, you’ll sell lots of records. I didn’t realize really that most pop acts didn’t sell many records. (laughs) I subsequently discovered that to my cost frequently. That was, in a way, what drove me towards the Floyd, as you said, with DNA—it was finding a pop band to put on DNA.
RR: Let’s jump forward in time (or back to the Barrett strand in this interview), and discuss the circumstances, which led to Syd’s departure from Pink Floyd. Essentially, this transition period built a bridge to the solo material, which appears on An Introduction to Syd Barrett. The thought at the time was that you and Andrew King would work with Syd with the hope that he’d have room to breathe on his own as an artist, and you would also work with other acts for Blackhill Enterprises?
PJ: Yeah. Yes, there was an economic problem. Originally, the Floyd and ourselves were setup as a six-way partnership. At that point, because we were so hot, things started coming to us like T. Rex, or Tyrannosaurus Rex at that time. The question was “would we have to clear with them everything we did in the management company? And would they have to clear everything with us?” Like what to do about Syd—they’d have to clear with us. So there was an awareness, in some sense, that there was a management company growing, and there was a band that was growing, and I don’t think we analyzed it and saw it in those terms. I wish we had. We didn’t really work out how we could cope with it; it was all sort of muddled up. It made sense for us to suggest “well, look, if we’re going to break up, well, then, we’ll go on looking after Syd because Syd’s the one who writes all the songs and sings and plays the guitar and he’s the founder of the band, and you three guys couldn’t get on and be the Pink Floyd. And who knows? Bryan Morrison thinks he could work it with you—great.” In a way, it was incredibly non-angst-y. They said, “We don’t think we can work with Syd.” We finally agreed, having struggled against it for some time, and we began to see it. “You’ve tried, we’ve tried, we’ve all tried in various ways of working with Syd. It’s not working. You go ahead and do your thing—go on being the Pink Floyd, and Syd and us will get on with it.”
Now, I don’t think anybody really explained this to Syd. It wasn’t easy to explain things to Syd. (laughs) I don’t think it ever was clear to him that that was the deal. And I don’t think he probably would have minded, either, if he did know. It all just flowed through. That’s what happened.
RR: During parts of 1968, you went into the studio and recorded tracks with Syd. Was that material being considered for a solo album, or was it an opportunity to take Syd into the studio and see what happens?
PJ: Yes. I mean it was definitely EMI and ourselves who thought “wouldn’t it be great to get an album from Syd, so let’s just go and see.” We knew he had lots of bits and pieces of songs, and that he had some old songs that maybe he could use and all the rest of it. And, “hey, he can write some more songs because he writes these great songs.” And it would never cohere. I could never get him to play that song, or play that song again, or “what about that song?” We would look through the books of his songs. I could never work with him in some sort of coherent, logical fashion. He didn’t seem to quite understand, or I didn’t communicate properly. It was always a very sort of…he would play some stuff and I’d try and capture it and try and get him to play it again if it was good. There’d be a bit of a song there or a bit of a lyric there and a bit of tune there and see. All of it was just let the tapes go to see what comes through.
RR: He was incapable of taking a linear path on any one thing at that point?
PJ: Well…(laughs) I could certainly not get anything out of him. That was for sure. Who knows what someone else might have been able to do. I’m humble enough to know that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
No Comments comments associated with this post