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The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream by Julian Palacios ‘JOIN THE Underground/ That night the Pink Floyd were top of the bill at the
multiband extravaganza known in the lore of the Underground as the The 14
Hour Technicolor Dream. ‘JOIN THE Underground/ A Gathering of 10,000 /
free speech benefit/ Alexandra Palace April 29th-30th 8pm’ stickers had been
pasted all up and down the underground tube stations. Hoppy had
organized a group of his girlfriends to stand in Regent Street and pass out
fliers, dressed in miniskirts ten inches above the knee (horror!) and in
matching shirts with the letters ‘U’, ‘F’, ‘C’ and ‘K’ until bobbies moved
them further down the road. Later, in an MG convertible, the same
flower and fancy dress contingent dropped off an invitation to the Dream for
the Queen at Buckingham Palace. The Technicolor Dream had been envisaged as a ‘giant benefit
against fuzz action’ of the sort that had arrested Hoppy and tried to shut
down IT. The Technicolor Dream was to raise funds for the International
Times legal defence fund. Miles, Hoppy and Jim Haynes sat down and
worked out the event as a benefit for underground venues, outlets and
media. Word of the event spread throughout London for weeks, and
expectations ran high with the handbill hinting at big names appearing who
could not be named ‘for contractual reasons’. Like the 1965 Albert Hall
poetry reading, the event marked a turning point in the London
Underground. An estimated 7,000 punters crowded into the vast Alexandra
Palace in London, hired out for the night by Hoppy and Dave Howson of Middle
Earth. Renting out the Ally Pally had been germinating in Hoppy’s mind
since he had photographed an explosive show by the Rolling Stones and John
Lee Hooker in 1964. Hoppy stood in the wings taking photographs of
Brian Jones in all his ascendant glory, awed by the sheer dimensions of the
Great Hall. The Alexandra Palace was a series of Victorian glass and steel
halls built in 1875 crowning the top of Muswell Hill, overlooking London like
an aerie. The Great Hall had an awe-inspiring vaulted roof and 30-foot
tall glass windows surrounding a space that could hold 12,000 people with
2,000 more seated in the orchestra stalls. The massive Willis Organ,
driven by steam engines and vast bellows, was under scaffolding for
repairs. The Dream started at 8pm and went through the night until 10
in the morning. Many groovers had been up since the night before at
UFO, when Jimi Hendrix jumped up to play bass with Tomorrow. As dusk
fell, the organisers set off a volley of fireworks to alert the underground
to get ready. The armies of the nascent underground going overground
congregated at the gates and filed in. Many arrived in black ties,
blazers, and evening dress befitting attending a cultural event. Crowds
milled about at the entrance, looking at a slight loss. A generous
assortment of caftan and bell wearing ravers flowed through them, bursting
into the Palace in high spirits. For many, the Dream was an epochal experience, as a ripple of
recognition spread through the crowd, amazed at how many full-fledged freaks
there were in London, and how many they knew. The event, from dusk fall
right until first light, was to some the Eden that all psychedelia aspired
to; where nostalgia for childhood merged with a blissful sense of a future
filled with promise. This was the high water mark for the Underground;
a party the Underground threw to celebrate itself. The Underground and
the vibe cultivated at UFO went overground that night, gathering momentum,
though some would argue, losing integrity. The small London coterie
would send out ripples that would affect youth culture the world over in the
coming years, though this was to be the grand night of all nights for the
Underground. A show of force, as Wholly Communion had been, by simple
virtue of having so many young people under one roof. An event which
would galvanize the Underground and bring diverse pockets of ‘freaks’ out of
the woodwork, the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream brought in everyone else too.
The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream brought the movement out into the open,
propagated its core ideas, and then imploded, in the manner of mass cultural
movements. Dudley Edwards of art ensemble Binder, Edwards and Vaughn
says, ‘For anyone who was privileged to be there, that was the event of the
sixties. There was such a good feeling in the air that everybody tuned into
it. The huge interior space was lit with big film arc lights turning night
into day. There was a feel of a medieval market place with stalls and people
in harlequin costumes, acrobats here and jugglers there, a helter skelter;
Simon and Marijke from the Fool read cards and told fortunes in a booth.’ Paying their one-pound admission at the door, crowds streamed
into the Hall. The scaffolding around the pipe organ looked like a
baroque reliquary, and the battery of spotlights accentuated vast
shadows. Three film crews filmed the proceedings. Peter
Whitehead, filming sequences for Tonite Let’s Make Love in London, fought for
vantage points with a film crew from the BBC. The BBC presented a live
airing on the 10 o’clock news as well as filming a presentation for the
popular Man Alive! series. An Italian crew optioned the broadcast
rights, and rounded out the lot, trailing a mound of equipment in their
wake. Indica gallery owner John Dunbar was at John Lennon’s home that
evening, snorting cocaine and dropping acid: ‘...we were watching TV and
suddenly saw this thing was going on. So we thought, fuck it, let’s go!
We ended up at this place where everybody I’d ever known in my life swam
before my eyes at one time or another. All eyes were vaguely on us
because we were with John and I literally saw people I’d last seen at
kindergarten and hadn’t seen since.’ Inside the cavernous Palace, two stages faced the other on
opposite ends, often with two bands playing at once. Bands soon found
that by playing loud enough, they could drown out the sound from across the
Palace, the length of a football pitch. Nick Jones of Melody Maker
noted, ‘There was (much) noise, and the Alexandra Palace wasn’t the best
place for acoustics, most of the sound echoing up into the high dome and
away.’ For the better of the night and morning, two bands played
simultaneously on the two stages, often causing an unexpected merger of
styles but also a headache as sound resounded off the vaulted roof. A smaller centre stage on the wooden floor was designated for
the carnival-like contingent of the Underground who gave it distinct flavour
- poets, performance artists and dancers, clowns and jugglers. David
Medalla and the Exploding Galaxy dance company took over the central floor
space for a riotous performance. Medalla and a half dozen nubile
dancers in flowing scarves and gauze danced freeform pirouettes under
powerful lights that cast stark shadows of the dancers across the assembled
throng. To the tune of the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, they
performed a ballet of sorts they dubbed the ‘fuzz death ballet’, symbolising
forces of oppression versus the Galaxy’s Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom.
Night stick wielding bobbies chased nymphs and Medalla, with silver
reflective discs like the ones on Syd’s guitar affixed to his legs and bum.
The larger stage for the main events was built along the back
wall, flanked by the large glass windows of the Palace. Jack Henry
Moore and a small army of technicians dashed from one spot to another, fixing
speakers threatening to fuse and rewiring light fixtures on the verge of
collapse. Fluted columns rose forty feet above the wooden floors to the
high ceiling like giant lilies out of an Aubrey Beardsley drawing.
500,000 watts of light shows galore lit up every inch of available wall space
from a massive light gantry in the centre of the hall. Underground
films, including the New York underground camp drag show that is Jack Smith’s
Flaming Creatures, were screened overhead. Projectors beamed onto
billowing white sheets taped with electrician’s tape to the scaffolding
housing the Victorian organ. Kate Heliczer cavorted onscreen above the
punters, as Jack Smith’s transvestite mob gambolled in garish makeup.
The centrepiece was a 70-foot tall helter-skelter slide rented for the night,
which people clambered to the top of and spiralled down all night long.
This was all no doubt exhilarating on acid, of which there was never again to
be such an abundance of, both in quality and quantity. Some bright spark of a chemist down in Ladbroke Grove had
synthesized a massive batch of the legal designer drug DET (diethyltryptamine)
which was given out free. Hoppy, among hundreds of others, sampled the
tablets. A mild tryptamine psychedelic, DET lasted 3-4 hours. The
drug gave an urge to wander, giving the user just enough awareness of where
they were and where they wished to go. The discoverer of the drug,
chemist Alexander Shulgin, described it thus: ‘The mask-like faces of the
persons, the dream-like mysteriousness of the objects in the room gave me the
feeling that I had arrived in another world, entirely different and queer and
full of secrecy and mystery. It seemed to me as though this period
might be an entire epoch, filled with events and happenings, but I knew that
only several minutes had passed.’ What DET did do was create a
collective amnesia about the event. For such a grand event, few can
remember but a few glimpses and they are all different. The mood was positive, as smiling, colourful dressed people
milled with endless chemical quicksteps from corner to corner of the vast
building. There was a ritual lighting of joss sticks, which filled the
Palace with sickly sweet smoke. Silvery globes reflected half-dozen
light shows across the hall. A wire igloo with mosquito netting was set
up in one corner, where banana skin joints, touted for their hallucinogenic
effects, were handed out. A bitter after-taste was all it left one
with, though the idea was more of an intentional put-on anyhow. One had
to laugh at the incongruity of standing among this mad, milling throng
smoking a banana peel! When not being used for banana smoking, the
igloo made for an excellent snog-spot, and couples grappled in the igloo all
night.
Dudley Edwards of art ensemble Binder, Edwards and Vaughn
says, ‘It was more ad lib, we arrived with our gear but the scaffolding tower
was already in place, and somebody was using the top deck for
spotlights. We set up in the middle.’ Cambridge student Peter
Russell and his light show tam, dubbed ‘117’, occupied the top tier while BEV
cast overhead watch glass projections on sheets ringing the hall.
Russell says, ‘I was in main tower too. There was also Mark Boyle, so it was
quite crowded at times. 117’s shows used mainly thin liquid films
sandwiched between slides, using either heat or pressure (and sometimes
injection) to move them. Some early Polaroid work as well.’ Edwards says, ‘We worked with shallow glass bowls, acquired
from old grandfather clocks because unlike dishes they had no rim/ridge at
the base. We would proceed to inject different colours using oil, glycerine
and water as these did not mix and therefore held their own space. The bowls
rested on the glass of powerful overhead projectors, we then rocked, spun and
shook the bowls in rhythm with the music. While injecting fresh colours or
starting with another colour scheme for each number depending on the mood.
However, I have to admit that towards the morning we were that stoned we
didn't know what we were doing.’ Edwards descended from the scaffolding to take in the scene.
‘It was all so relaxed; Denny Laine was just sitting on the floor strumming
his acoustic guitar with no one paying any heed. John Lennon and John Dunbar
just strolling through the crowds without interference, and whenever there
was a break between the live acts someone pulled the masterstroke of playing
the Courtly Dances from Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana performed by the
Julian Bream Consort. This evocative Elizabethan dance music set the theme.’ Though obstruction from the Musician’s Union blocked a
performance by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, there were enough
bands to pile drive through to the dawn. (The brilliant, if mystifying,
titled) The Utterly Incredible Too Long Ago to Remember Sometimes Shouting at
People. Blues-rock was covered at tortuous length by Alexis Korner,
Champion Jack Dupree, and the Graham Bond Organisation. Ginger Johnson
and his African conga drummers played brilliant polyrhythmic rhythms, also
amply contributing to festivities with their sideline in exceptional Nigerian
dope. Sam Gopal pattered away on amplified tablas, with Mike Hutchinson
improvising Indian music with jazz and blues thrown over the top. John’s Children took the stage in their matching white Levi’s
and t-shirts and played 25-minutes of shrieking feedback during ‘Arthur
Green’. Future glam star Marc Bolan was in a sullen mood and stalked
around the stage with his guitar over his head, while Andy Ellison showered
the audience with sacks full of feathers. The Pretty Things, about to
begin recording SF Sorrow, went one better than John’s Children. Their
contribution to flower power was a broken down piano, filled with flowers,
and microphones stuck inside. Drummer Skip Alan took a pickaxe and
destroyed the piano on-stage, with a cataclysmic shattering
sound. The freak contingent was well represented by hardcore
underground band The Flies whom Miles cited as the world’s first punk
band. With vocalist Robin Hunt sky-high on acid, draped in a sheet
stolen from the light show, the Flies launched into their ferocious freak
beat version of ‘(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone’. Their retinue of scary
Soho stripper girlfriends incongruously dubbed the Vestal Virgins, bumped and
grinded on the stage in miniskirts, flashing their knickers for the BBC’s
cameras. Hunt even managed to urinate on the audience as they rampaged
through a gruesome cover of ‘Purple Haze’. (Miles: ‘The Flies
pissed on the audience, even Johnny Rotten never managed that. They
were absolutely appalling.’) The audience was far from impressed until
the erstwhile Virgins took three dozen bags of flour and hurled them out over
the crowd. The somewhat blasé audience responded with an enormous flour
fight. UFO psych had a raw anarchic edge, and the Deviants and Flies
typified the more street edge of the movement. The Flies also hated the
Pink Floyd because of a shared bill where they lent the band equipment and
never got it back. Like the Brothers Grimm, the Flies formed part of
the UFO cadre that shouted the Pink Floyd had sold out. Jug band loons the Purple Gang shambled and busked their way
through one of the classic songs of the time ‘Granny Takes a Trip’, with lead
singer Peter Walker (aka ‘Lucifer’) clad in magician robes. The Crazy
World of Arthur Brown made an electrifying performance with a sprightly
Arthur Brown in full makeup, prancing like a shaman on ayahuasca with
his head dress in flames, shouting ‘I am the God of Hellfire!’
Miles filed a telling report for New York underground
newspaper the East Village Other: ‘An estimated 7000 to 10000 people,
beautiful neo-Elizabethan promenading people, arm in arm, bowing; only the
dancing and meaning differed. Men in braided uniforms, cowboy hats,
medals, wearing huge fur coats to the ground, false beards, real beards,
wearing flared Indian paisley-print frock coats, cloaks of all sizes and
shades, wearing chain necklaces and flowers, wearing spats, with artificially
curly hair, with Medieval turned up toes and even a few (very few) in
suits. (The greys, they call them.) The chicks wore lace dresses
with nothing underneath; other wore net dresses with little underneath.
They had painted faces, gold paints and in almost every case a very short
mini-dress or mini-skirt – often so short as to not cover underwear (also
mini) or even to not cover not underwear.’ ‘The dancing, talking, films-light-music-dreaming continued
until long after dawn. People crawled into bushes in the garden, swam
in the fountain, smoked the free banana joints, smoked real cannabis ones,
tripped out, ate breakfast, ate candy floss, burned incense, burned candles
and tapers, made love, slept, played drums, whistles, flutes, guitars,
collected autographs, met old friends. They walked about, danced all
night and were relaxed and beautiful and warm. Even at dawn if someone
bumped into you they would turn and say ‘I’m sorry man’’. The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream marked the height of Underground
fashion. The full range of uniforms prevalent in sixties culture was in
evidence. Here a phalanx of pea-coated beatniks, there a Kings Road
fashion maven in a 1940’s satin dress with a chinchilla wrap. A pack of
hostile Muswell Hill Mods wandered aimless, looking in vain to start trouble,
but were outnumbered by their own metamorphosing colleagues, sporting French
haircuts grown long and telltale coloured silk scarves knotted around the
neck as ties. As proof of the Beatles dominance in sartorial influence,
everywhere were men with trimmed beards, rather than the bog-brush beards of
the later sixties. John Lennon grokked the scene clad in a sheepskin
Afghan coat and granny specs. Some spent the whole night in one corner, watching the light
shows, or climbing on the scaffolding. Others decamped to one corner,
where they laid their coats on the hard floor and stared at acid-induced
arabesques, or chatted, slept or groped each other. An Underground
luminary recalls, ‘One of the organizers, who was gay, spent the whole time
under one of the stages having sex with his motorbike boys, for hours and
hours.’ Joe Boyd said, ‘The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was great, though
I don’t remember it too clearly. The Alexandra Palace was a big open
hall. I was a bit stoned and had been up all-night because we had had
UFO the night before.’ One bored punter, Desmond Spalding, decided to scamper fifty
feet above the crowd and casually walk along a narrow parapet. Some in
the crowd chanted ‘Jump!’ Hoppy had to stop the bands and ask him to
kindly get off! For his part, Hoppy ran through the crowd waving a
giant Union Jack while a fur-coat clad Suzie Creamcheese bounding barefoot
alongside. ‘Just go where it’s going!’ she exclaimed to the bemused BBC
camera crew. When queried what the Underground was against, Suzie said,
‘Wars, blood...income tax!’
The Pink Floyd, meanwhile, made their way back from
Heathrow. Stopping in at Edbrooke Road, Jenner and Syd each dropped a
tab of LSD before driving up to Muswell Hill in a convoy of Bentley and
Transit van. Peter Jenner said, ‘That was the most psychedelic
experience that I’ve ever been to. At least half the audience was doing
acid. I was doing acid. We’d had to take a long drive to get
there from a gig in Holland, and I did the last bit of the drive in the
van. We dropped in at home and I did some acid before we went. By
the time I got to Alexandra Palace the old acid was beginning to go and
trying to drive the van was getting exciting. It started coming
on as we were being directed in. I had to steer the van in through
something tiny with people wandering around absolutely out of their
crust.’ They arrived at the Alexandra Palace and 3 am and Syd wandered
through the crowd, tripping on LSD, having already smoked strong weed in
Amsterdam earlier in the day with Po Powell and Wynne-Willson. Syd and
Mick Rock climbed the scaffolding to peer into the pipe organ bellows.
The pair entertained themselves by pelting Yoko Ono with bits of wadded up
paper as she performed her Happening in the style of the Fluxus events she
had been involved with in New York. With a working title of ‘A Pretty
Girl is a Manifesto’, Ono’s happening got under way. Model Carol Mann
sat on a stepladder dressed as a nun with a blazing spotlight shining on
her. Audience members were handed a pair of scissors, outfitted with a
contact microphone plugged into the sound system, and instructed to snip off
her clothes. Bit by bit her clothes fell away, as a crowd of bemused
male punters swarmed around her. Some looked on lecherously, though
others seemed embarrassed. The sound of the amplified scissors echoed
across the hall until Mann sat, in all her glory, nude. Keith Rowe, who performed that night with AMM, says ‘I
remember the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream as violent. There was violence
towards Yoko and her models often when she performed those pieces with the
men ripping away her pants. I found it unpleasant, a powerful
emotion. Ono had racism and sexism against her, and the violence shown
to her was out of order. Even today it would probably be illegal to go
on-stage and take someone’s clothes off, but with a pair of amplified
scissors, it’s possible!’ Syd drifted off into the crowd, and swept slow and curious up
and down the vast, airy expanses of the Alexandra Palace, their voices
echoing up and away. The acoustics of the vast hall made for long
pealing echoes and bursts of transient noise cascading from one side of the
hall to the other. They watched an installation of light bulbs wrapped in
a billboard around the central lighting gantry, read out handy sound bites in
lights. ‘Vietnam is a sad trip’ and ‘Batman is queer’ flashed by, as
well as the ever popular ‘£.s.d’ (pounds, shillings, pence) standing in for
LSD. At the 70-foot tall helter-skelter slide in the centre of the
hall, Syd climbed to the top and watched the lights flickering on the dancers
and bands at either end of the cavernous hall, an ocean of people undulating
below. Standing atop the helter skelter, taking in the scene, Barrett
cast a sparkling eye on the massive crowd. King of all he surveyed, Syd
was Piper of the Underground. Whether he was satisfied was another
question. Mason wrote in Inside Out of his band mate that night, ‘Syd
was completely distanced from everything going on.’ UFO groover Beverley Firdsi ran into Syd that night and says,
‘Syd was adorable, spacey as hell, and interesting.’ I saw that footage
at UFO one night and almost shit my pants when everyone pointed at me. I was
onscreen wearing a black hat sitting on a folding chair. I then toppled off
the chair. There was other footage of me in a semi interview where I
really pissed off the BBC cameramen. They were speaking to me as if I was an
idiot, so I let them have it. I went with two friends who were from Brighton
and not used to the London scene at all. I gave them both acid and spent the
night introducing them to all the pretty people.’ ‘I don’t have good memories of the 14 Hour Technicolor
Dream,’ says Peter Wynne-Willson. ‘I can’t quite picture the scene, I
can remember being up scaffolding there and someone doing watch-glass
overhead projections. I can remember taking equipment up, but I don’t
remember doing any lights there. Roger Waters was in a bit of a state
about something. There was fairground stuff, drugs, a lot of
drugs. The drug situation had got extremely messy and perverted because
there were people completely in a state because of drink and drugs. It
seemed to me to be a real falling apart; I didn’t like it at all.’ Miles says, ‘The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was boring by
virtue that it went on for 14 hours. There is a limit to how many dodgy
bands you can listen to, and it was cold. There weren’t many things to
do, and there was nowhere to sit except on the floor. Not nice, but it
was a heavy socializing scene. The more people you know the better time
you had. I knew a tremendous number of the people there, so I had a
tremendous time. It has improved with age; at the time, I never saw it
as anything fantastic. Only later did it start to take on a life of its
own, whereas the Albert Hall poetry reading was a significant event.
The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was no different from UFO, only a big one and I
would have preferred UFO any time.’ When Soft Machine took the stage, Daevid Allen wore a miner’s
helmet with a lamplight on top, Kevin Ayers sported oracular makeup, and
Robert Wyatt cut his hair short, wore a suit and tie, and set his drums
sideways. The band played their joke number ‘We Did It Again’, which
repeated the title over one monotonous groove for up to 40 minutes at a
stretch. Barrett would soon adopt a variant of this as one of his own
avant-garde gestures. ‘Soft Machine were good fun’ in Barrett’s
estimation. Daevid Allen said, ‘After we had finished I wandered about
among the huge crowd. All my life I had felt an outsider, a freak,
totally at odds with my time. Now, suddenly, I realized for the first
time that I was not alone. I was surrounded by thousands of other
versions of myself. I was part of a tribe, a movement, and a gigantic
soul. We looked around and saw ourselves reflected in multiples and we
felt our power to change the world. This was the beginning of a
peaceful revolution!’ Allen also noted that, paradoxically, he never
felt more alone in his life. ‘As this realization took hold of my
entire being, I became aware of a celestial orchestra playing over a slow
beat. I was drawn to the far stage where, unopposed by a simultaneous band,
a group of slightly embarrassed musicians played symphonic slide guitar under
the camouflage of vividly hypnotic light projections. From the edge of
the stage I watched, fascinated, as a young guy with mad staring eyes stroked
his guitar with metal objects. The music thus created was almost
Wagnerian in its emotional power. It welled up, expanding through the
swirl of liquid light.’ This was a life changing moment for
Allen, who adapted Barrett’s glissando technique, refined over a 40-year stretch
with various incarnations of Gong. The most direct remaining link to
Syd, Barrett’s guitar style and quasi-mystical approach tempered with a
strong dose of humour all lived on in Gong, long after Pink Floyd decamped to
the stadia of America to make their millions. Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine said, ‘The Floyd played at 4 in
the morning. It must have been one of the greatest gigs they ever
did. Syd played with a slide and it blew my mind, because I was hearing
echoes of all the music I’d ever heard, with bits of Béla Bartók and
god-knows-what. I don’t understand why nobody else has ever attempted
to do it since. Anyway, I thought I’d better investigate
it.’ Barrett took the strains of Bream’s Courtly Dances, filtered
through acid and exhaustion, and played a stunning glissando guitar finale. The band wanted to go take the stage as dawn was breaking,
with light filtering through the ornate coloured panes of glass at the
Palace. They took the stage dressed in psychedelic finery bought down
the Kings Road, having sorted out their look. Waters in a cape, Wright
in brocaded gold and blue caftan and Mason in a fake-fur lined orange
patterned coat. In contrast, Barrett appears rather ordinary, dressed
in black and green like his proverbial scarecrow, with silk shirt buttoned up
to ward off the cold. In the mystic traditions of the Golden Dawn,
black and green were called ‘flashing colours’, designed to draw energy from
the atmosphere to Earth. With Barrett as the ground for the atmosphere
of the Underground, one can imagine the toll it took on him. The Pink Floyd at the Dream was the high point of the
psychedelic era in Peter Jenner’s estimation. ‘A perfect setting,
everyone had been waiting for them and everybody was on acid; that event was
the peak of acid use in England. Everybody was on it: the bands, the
organizers, the audience, and I was. It was a bit hairy at times, an
intense experience. There was a bit of a worry about getting paid, but
we'd done the gig and we needed the money.’ To a fanfare of ‘Mars’
by Gustav Holst, the band took the stage. Colin Turner, the footloose
Mod who had found a portal into a new world at UFO, was on hand, ‘The dawn
arrived in a triumphant pink hue, the light came cascading in from the huge
windows and amidst this awesome display of nature Pink Floyd took the
stage. They were wearing outfits with flared trousers and satin shirts
that I had not seen them wear before. People began to awake and hold
hands as the first notes of ‘Astronomy Dominé’ echoed through the massive hall.
The atmosphere was electric. There was an extraordinary connection
between the band and the audience. Then the magic happened. Syd’s
mirror-disc Telecaster caught the dawn’s pink light. Syd noticed this
and with drug-filled eyes blazing, he made his guitar talk louder and louder,
higher and higher as he reflected the light into the eyes of his audience and
christened those of us lucky enough to be there, followers of Pink Floyd for
life.’ Chris Beard of the Purple Gang said, ‘Towards the end of the
night (but not the gig) I wanted to get my spot, so I sat down with a few
others in a meditation group. I can still smell the dusty floorboards,
hash, incense, body odour, hear that big-hall reverb, crowd-din and swirling
band noise, and drum crashes. The Floyd roadies began to get the gear
organized and the light show people took over. The dawn was at the
gates and everyone was getting a bit tired now and shouting for the band to
get their asses on-stage. On they trooped, looking unhappy I
thought. A bit of tenseness there, I was glad we’d gone on earlier so
we could enjoy the gig. The shafts of dawn light were now beaming
through the high windows and were caught and reflected back off Syd’s
mirror/effect guitar. Something was not right and Syd was not up to it,
just standing there out of his tree I suspected. It seemed apparent the
Floyd were allowing for this, as Roger Waters seemed to take over. I
admired Waters for this and was not happy that Syd had now drifted
off.’ In a photograph from the event, Barrett looks as though viewing
things from a slight remove, as though already absent. Acid had
accentuated his offbeat charisma, such that he seemed to be in retreat even
as the band approached fame.
Miles wrote, ‘Then there was a movement through the crowd and
everyone turned to look at the huge east windows. They were glowing
with the first faint approaches of dawn. At this magic moment of frozen
time, the Pink Floyd came on. Their music was eerie, solemn, and
calming. After a whole night of frolicking and festivities and acid
came the celebration of the dawn. People held hands with their
neighbours. The Floyd was probably not that good but in the moment,
they were superb. They gave voice to the feelings of the crowd.
Syd’s eyes blazed as his notes soared up into the strengthening light as the
dawn was reflected in his famous mirror-disc Telecaster. Then came the
rebirth of energy, another day, and with the sun a burst of dancing and
enthusiasm.’ The songs they played at the Dream were slow, and with good
reason, Syd was tired and tripping too. He spent a good bit of the
performance turned towards his Selmer amp and Binson, sliding his Zippo along
the frets in cascades that echoed down the length of the Hall. Daevid
Allen spoke of the eerie vibe as the Pink Floyd cascaded to a close: ‘the
glissando guitar stroker looked as though he was not there. It wouldn’t
be long before he wasn’t.’ Peter Whitehead recalls, ‘Syd looked
shadowy and ghostly at the Dream. Syd was already starting to cultivate
this as a deliberate image. It was the way he functioned with people
and a means of self-protection. He never found it easy to communicate
with people.’ Syd’s mystical vibe was the glassy eyed distance of the
cannabis and LSD head, though also a strategy to beguile while creating
distance. Miles says, ‘Syd wasn’t that different from other people
around at the time until he started to burn himself up with acid. There
were a lot of people around like that by that time. Acid was Syd’s drug
of choice. He had a real twinkle of the eye, which later came to be a
bit mystical. That became quite a common thing.’ Daevid Allen
said, ‘Mostly Syd Barrett sat around looking manic with staring eyes.
It was fashionable for everyone to sit around with staring eyes, like
everyone was demented and totally out of their minds.’ The Move
were on-stage at the Dream that night singing about such a notion in ‘Fire
Brigade’: ‘Notice that my eyes have been in a mystic place since
Saturday’. Author Alex Trocchi wrote of drug users being ‘cosmonauts of
inner space’, an unfortunate integer in the mythology of drug culture, giving
a romantic veneer to burning your brain out. Outside the rarefied
atmosphere of academia or middle-class comforts, the realities of street
life, paranoia and fear of the police made acid trips an altogether more
difficult experience. Timothy Leary and William Burroughs had come from
the ivory tower of academia, with a rational system of inquiry in place
before they launched out into inner space under the influence of drugs.
Peter Whitehead said signs of Syd’s impending breakdown ‘had been evident for
a while, especially as I got the whole inside story from Jenny Spires, a bit
cagey but it was clear to us all that he might not hold it together. He
was just out of it, around the clock, every day. When it reached his
stage efforts, it was clearly the beginning of the end.’ The 14
Hour Technicolor Dream was the last time Whitehead ever saw Syd. Whitehead strolled around with his camera, capturing vignettes
of the new hip aristocracy. Chelsea aristocrats Michael Rainey and wife
Jane Ormsby-Gore swan through the crowd, cool and poised, looking impossibly
chic and soi-disant in their luxurious Hung on You garments. The doomed
Suki Poitier, the luscious model whose boyfriend Tara Browne had died six
months earlier, wandered through the crowd looking lost. Also vivid
images of a lovely Sue Kingsford with a giant daffodil, which she twirls
under her nose, eyes wide with placid stoned contentment, heavy with
mascara. She embodies the naive, fleeting purity of flower power at the
Dream - blooming in explosive colour and beguiling. The threat they may
be trampled into dust later detracts nothing from their beauty; rather
emphasizing their ephemeral fragility, their fleeting exquisiteness.
Forty years on, the image of Sue frozen in time raises the question of where
did the flower children went. Did she finish her studies, drop out and
follow the hippie trail to Marrakech or Kathmandu, marry a stockbroker,
become a feminist or a radical, overdose alone? Seeing her on the
street today, would she be at all recognizable as the gentle flower child she
was then? With her, she took the spirit of the times, and one wonders
what she did with it. Does she reach for it when she opens a box in the
back of her closet, where the Rolling Stones’ High Tides & Green Grass LP
sits alongside a faded puce scarf from Biba, or in the yellowed pages of the
Oz ‘Magic Lantern’ issue, a pressed daffodil, dried and preserved, with a
shadow of glory. As morning broke, sun streamed through the tall windows,
lighting up the hall in ghostly white angles. The crowd streamed out of
the Hall into a bright and clear golden dawn. With the finale of the
Gloriana on the sound system, two dancers from the Exploding Galaxy performed
an impromptu graceful Elizabethan dance in bare feet. Efforts to
inflate a 40-foot long plastic inflatable tube collapsed when the punters
wound it round themselves instead, collapsing on the floor in fits of
laughter. ‘Beck’s Bolero’ blasted through the Palace as the last of the
punters filed out, leaving a sea of rubbish in their wake. Hoppy and
Suzy Creamcheese stood at the door and, in their inimitable style, shook
hands and said good morning to everyone as they filed out into the
light. Hoppy’s court trial was four weeks away. Outside, on a glorious spring morning freaks sat on the grass
surrounding the Palace, fanning themselves with copies of Oz, coming down off
DET trips, coupling in the tall grass. Dudley Edwards says, ‘In the
early hours people sat on the grassy bank outside the palace, watching the
dawn break. An open backed truck drove up the hill to the entrance of the
Palace, someone was stood on the back despatching loaves of bread and bananas
to all those present. Peace reigned and all was well with the world.’
With London stretched out below, the world seemed theirs for the taking, a
revolution in the making. International Times summed up the event: ‘The beautiful scene at the benefit at
the Alexandra Palace on the 29th seems long ago when considered in the light
of all that has happened since then. One became aware, through the
collecting of all these people, of just how much beauty and force there is
here. Since the benefit there is a difference in London, people are
speaking to people whom they only stared at before. We all know what
they are talking about, and it’s not pop music or dances and all night
raves.’
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The completely revised,
expanded and amended, second edition of 'Syd
Barrett: Lost in the Woods' is out on 18 November 2008 by Plexus
Publishing Ltd. Click here to get on
the mailing list. For questions, please send correspondence to the
author, Julian Palacios. |
