Pink Floyd Learning to Fly
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Roger Waters met
Nick Mason while they were both studying architecture at the
London Polytechnic at Regent Street.
[1] They first played music together in a group formed by Keith Noble and Clive Metcalfe with Noble's sister Sheilagh.
Richard Wright, a fellow architecture student, joined later that year, and the group became a sextet named Sigma 6. Waters played lead guitar, Mason drums, and Wright rhythm guitar (since there was rarely an available keyboard).
[2][nb 1] The band performed at private functions and rehearsed in a
tearoom in the basement of the Regent Street Polytechnic. They performed songs by the
Searchers and material written by their manager and songwriter, fellow student Ken Chapman.
[4]In September 1963, Waters and Mason moved into a flat at 39 Stanhope Gardens near
Crouch End in London, owned by Mike Leonard, a part-time tutor at the nearby
Hornsey College of Art and the Regent Street Polytechnic.
[5][nb 2] Mason moved out after the 1964 academic year, and guitarist
Bob Klose moved in during September 1964, prompting Waters' switch to bass.
[6][nb 3] Sigma 6 went through several names, including the Meggadeaths, the Abdabs and the Screaming Abdabs, Leonard's Lodgers, and the Spectrum Five, before settling on the Tea Set.
[7][nb 4] In 1964, as Metcalfe and Noble left to form their own band, guitarist
Syd Barrett joined Klose and Waters at Stanhope Gardens.
[11] Barrett, two years younger, had moved to London in 1962 to study at the
Camberwell College of Arts.
[12] Waters and Barrett were childhood friends; Waters had often visited Barrett and watched him play guitar at Barrett's mother's house.
[13] Mason said about Barrett: "In a period when everyone was being cool in a very adolescent, self-conscious way, Syd was unfashionably outgoing; my enduring memory of our first encounter is the fact that he bothered to come up and introduce himself to me."
[14]Noble and Metcalfe left the Tea Set in late 1963, and Klose introduced the band to singer Chris Dennis, a technician with the
Royal Air Force (RAF).
[15] In December 1964, they secured their first recording time, at a studio in West Hampstead, through one of Wright's friends, who let them use some down time free. Wright, who was taking a break from his studies, did not participate in the session.
[16][nb 5] When the RAF assigned Dennis a post in Bahrain in early 1965, Barrett became the band's frontman.
[17][nb 6] Later that year, they became the resident band at the Countdown Club near
Kensington High Street in London, where from late night until early morning they played three sets of 90 minutes each. During this period, spurred by the group's need to extend their sets to minimise song repetition, the band realised that "songs could be extended with lengthy solos", wrote Mason.
[18] After pressure from his parents and advice from his college tutors, Klose quit the band in mid-1965 and Barrett took over lead guitar.
[19] The group first referred to themselves as the Pink Floyd Sound in late 1965. Barrett created the name on the spur of the moment when he discovered that another band, also called the Tea Set, were to perform at one of their gigs.
[20] The name is derived from the given names of two
blues musicians whose
Piedmont blues records Barrett had in his collection,
Pink Anderson and
Floyd Council.
[21]By 1966, the group's repertoire consisted mainly of
rhythm and blues songs and they had begun to receive paid bookings, including a performance at the
Marquee Club in March 1966, where
Peter Jenner, a lecturer at the
London School of Economics, noticed them. Jenner was impressed by the sonic effects Barrett and Wright created, and with his business partner and friend
Andrew King became their manager.
[22] The pair had little experience in the
music industry and used King's inheritance to set up
Blackhill Enterprises, purchasing about £1,000 worth of new instruments and equipment for the band. It was around this time that Jenner suggested they drop the "Sound" part of their band name, thus becoming the Pink Floyd.
[23][nb 7] Under Jenner and King's guidance, the group became part of London's
underground music scene, playing at venues including All Saints Hall and the Marquee.
[25] While performing at the Countdown Club, the band had experimented with long instrumental excursions, and they began to expand them with rudimentary but effective light shows, projected by coloured slides and domestic lights.
[26] Jenner and King's social connections helped gain the band prominent coverage in the
Financial Times and an article in the
Sunday Times which stated: "At the launching of the new magazine
IT the other night a pop group called the Pink Floyd played throbbing music while a series of bizarre coloured shapes flashed on a huge screen behind them ... apparently very psychedelic."
[27]
