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late 1965 and began moving along the musical trajectory that would define their first career chapter. Like most groups of their era, they were partial to beat-group standards like ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Road-runner’, but they would use such songs as book-ends to extended passages when, led by Barrett, they would step away from three-chord orthodoxy and begin to improvise. It is not hard to draw a line between such flights of musical fancy and Barrett’s drug habits: certainly, though his colleagues were not nearly as quick to ingest illicit substances, it’s a matter of record that by the time of the Pink Floyd Sound’s first manoeuvres, Barrett was well acquainted with both cannabis and LSD.

      In the summer of 1966, Peter Jenner, then a young economics graduate, chanced upon a Pink Floyd Sound performance at the Marquee, the London club where The Who had cut their teeth. ‘I was very into the idea of the young, groovy avant-garde,’ he recalls. ‘And I thought this would be a young, groovy, avant-garde show. I got there and I saw the Floyd, and I thought they were remarkable, because I couldn’t work out where each noise was coming from. The Marquee had a stage that kind of stuck out, and I was endlessly walking around it, just trying to figure it out.

      ‘They were playing these really lame old tunes, like “Louie Louie” and all these hackneyed blues songs – not much of Syd’s stuff. But in the middle, there were all these weird bits going on: what I subsequently discovered were one-chord jams. Instead of there being a blues solo, there was a weird solo. And I liked that. I couldn’t work out where the noise was coming from: whether it was guitar, or organ, or what. I just thought, “Christ, this is interesting.”’

      By 1966, a close-knit crowd of Londoners was beginning to coalesce into what would become known as the Underground. They formed a network of young creative people, plugged into a variety of cultural currents: the thrilling sense of possibility embodied by the recent – and unprecedented – success of English rock groups, led by the Beatles and Stones; a burgeoning drug culture; a thawing of social strictures that would soon be embodied in the legalization of abortion and homosexuality; and an economic climate that had given rise to full employment. Of no less importance were a slew of influences taken from the United States: the Beats, Bob Dylan, and most importantly of all, the freshly-born West Coast counterculture – news of which had recently crossed the Atlantic.

      Suitably inspired, those at the centre of London’s bohemian milieux were starting to set up their own equivalent. The first issue of a weekly countercultural newspaper, International Times (aka IT), would be published in October 1966. Soon after, a late-night weekly event called UFO began in the unlikely environs of an Irish-themed London establishment called the Blarney Club. Elsewhere, art galleries, bookshops and music events were adding to the sense of a slow-building cultural upsurge.

      The philosophical threads that held it all together were as varied as its constituent elements, but the Underground was unquestionably characterized by a shared agenda. Whereas previous radical movements had focused on the wish for change enacted on a grand scale – this being Great Britain, social class remained integral to most critiques of society – the sixties generation placed a new emphasis on the freeing of the individual, who would be liberated, according to the Underground’s louder voices, by embracing the kind of multi-coloured hedonism that defined London’s hipper social circles.

      According to Richard Neville, the Australian émigré who contributed to London’s counterculture by editing the magazine Oz, ‘The aim of the alternative culture was to shake up the existing situation, to break down barriers not only between sexes and races and God knows what else, and it was also to have a good time … to enlarge the element of fun that one had occasionally in one’s own life and to make that more pervasive – not just for you but for everyone. I was quite keen to abolish this work/play distinction. There was something incredibly oppressed about the mass of grey people out there. I just thought that people on the whole looked unhappy: they seemed to be pinched and grey and silly and caught up with trivia, and I felt that what was going on in London would bring colour into those grey cheeks and those grey bedrooms. With a bit of sexuality and exciting music and flowers … somehow the direction of society could be altered.’

      If Syd Barrett’s lifestyle implicitly allied him with the Underground’s thinking, Peter Jenner was closely tied to some of its most crucial players. Together with John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, a co-founder of International Times, he had established a record label called DNA – and, thrilled by what he had seen at the Marquee, Jenner initially approached the Pink Floyd Sound with a view to releasing their records. Led by Roger Waters, they persuaded him to take on the role of manager. In partnership with his longstanding friend and sometime employee of British Airways, Andrew King, Jenner thus founded the grandly-named Blackhill Enterprises and began to assist his new clients. His first move was inspired: suspecting that the Pink Floyd Sound lent them an unbecoming air of vaudevillian corniness, he convinced them to trade as The Pink Floyd.

      Via Jenner’s connections, the group were rapidly placed at the heart of the Underground. In September 1966, they played the first of several fundraising shows for the Notting Hill Free School – a countercultural educational experiment in which Peter Jenner was integrally involved – which took place at the Tabernacle, a church hall in West London. The next month, they appeared at the launch party for International Times. Two days before Christmas, they were the headliners at the first night of UFO, inaugurating a relationship whereby The Pink Floyd were the club’s house band, soundtracking its perfumed murk with music that seemed custom-made for that purpose.

      Indeed, The Pink Floyd’s outward aesthetic seemed designed to achieve a perfect fit between the band and their new audience. As strait-laced cover versions were supplanted by Syd Barrett originals, the wildly improvisational element of their show had been built up to the point where it begged the voguish word ‘psychedelic’ (indeed, ads for the Free School shows were straplined with Dr Timothy Leary’s maxim ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’). And inspired by what little they knew of cutting-edge rock shows in the United States, the group now played their shows on stages flooded with the projections from home-made lighting equipment.

      The result, according to those who had followed their progress from the start, was little short of revelatory. ‘They’d start a song like “Astronomy Domine”,’ says Aubrey Powell, ‘and work themselves up into a frenzy, and then it would all die down, and there’d be these long, almost embarrassing moments: you really wouldn’t know what was happening. Syd would be playing weird sounds – there were real moments of tension in there. Then suddenly they’d get back to the song, and it would be concluded. It was amazing what Syd was able to do. There was something very unsettling about it. It really wasn’t like watching any other band.’

      Outwardly, Pink Floyd seemed to number among the Underground’s aristocracy. Aside from Barrett, however, they cautiously kept their distance – happy to play the shows, but surprisingly indifferent to either the substances or beliefs that tended to go with them. ‘The gigs that we played thanks to all that were great,’ says Roger Waters. ‘It was tremendous fun – going on at the Tabernacle and playing “Louie Louie” for fifteen minutes. There were some of Syd’s early songs in there, but a lot of what we did then came from the length of time we were expected to be onstage: sometimes, we’d play three sets in a night.

      ‘But I never really knew any of those people that well. And to this day, I still don’t know exactly what a lot of that stuff was actually about. You’d hear the odd thing about revolution, but it was never terribly specific. I don’t know … I read International Times a few times. But, you know – what was the Notting Hill Free School actually all about? What was it meant to do?’

      ‘There’s a great quote from that period: “They were all stoned, and we were drunk,”’ says Nick Mason. ‘I think the association with the Underground was certainly a Flag of Convenience. I think we’d all concede that. But as usual with these things, there was good stuff there, interwoven with an enormous amount of absolute guff. There were some good ideas, and some very forthright liberal views – but the period was full of an equal number of people with tarot cards and crystals. The number of love beads that one accumulated … I never really thought it was a good way of designing one’s future.’

      In

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