Another Floyd scan

For in their early days the Floyd were in the only real sense, a folk group.

In December 1970, the perceptive American rock critic Jon Landau - one of the first to realise how debilitating was the idea of rock as art -pointed out what made the rock of the Sixties different from what came before, and from what came after: 'It was a folk music - it was listened to and made by the same group of people. It did not come out of a New York office building where people sit and write what they think other people want to hear. It came from the life experiences of the artists and their interaction with an audience that was roughly the same age.'

Landau was writing about America, in, ironically, Rolling Stone, the single publication most responsible for the rock-as-art theory which has so led the music down a blind alley. The comment applies to Britain at that time, too.

It is one of the hallmarks of a true folk art that doesn't travel well; if it is taken out of its natural environment, like a Norfolk pub singer at the Festival Hall, it either dies, or, to survive, it becomes something entirely different. The Scottish tinker lady, Jeannie Robertson, metamorphosed into a gypsy queen after she had been 'discovered' by the folk scene, was a magnificent person, able to chat on equal terms with the real H. M., and a commanding presence until her death, but far from the gentle singer of the original field recordings.

So with the Floyd, nurtured by the environment of the Tuesday night 'sound/light workshop' at the London Free School in Netting Hill Gate, which grew into UFO in the basement of the old Blarney Club in Tottenham Court Road, and expanded into the Roundhouse, eventually to expire when Joe Boyd called in the hard men of Michael X's black mafia to act as bouncers. They paid their dues, as the saying goes, once they ventured out to tour for what Nick Mason called 'a daily dose of broken bottle'. As Rick Wright commented: 'When we started in UFO it was a beautiful place to play, but when we went outside London nobody wanted to know. People used to throw bottles at us.'

'Actually,' recalls Roger Waters, 'the worst thing that ever happened to me was at the Feathers Club in Haling, which was a penny, which made a bloody great cut in the middle of my forehead. I bled quite a lot.

'And I stood right at the front of the stage to see if I could see him throw one. I was glowering in a real rage, and I was going to leap into the audience and get him. Happily, there was one freak who turned up who liked us, so the audience spent the whole evening beating the shit out of him and left us alone . . .'

That was at first. Then, when they began to achieve some chart success, with appearances on Top of the Pops, the punters couldn't understand why they wouldn't play their singles, and why they kept on droning on with the 'freak outs', long modal improvisations upon a single chord.

Waters commented: 'We get very upset if people get bored when we're only halfway through smashing the second set. Then all of a sudden they hear 'Arnold Layne' and they flip all over again. It's sad when an audience isn't always with you.

'At the UFO Club in London, the people there are so blase that they are bored to death with 'Arnold Layne' because it's become a pop song. Yet in other clubs this song is the only song of ours they know and enjoy. Some don't like the song because they think it's a smutty idea for a man to run around pinching clothes from washing lines . . .'

Another time, he said: 'We're being frustrated at the moment by the fact that to stay alive we have to play lots and lots of places and venues that are not really suitable ...

'We've got a name, of sorts, now among the public, so everybody comes to have a look at us and we get full houses. But the atmosphere in these places is very stale. There is no feeling of occasion.

'There is no nastiness about it, but we don't get re-booked on the club or ballroom circuit.'

What they were thinking of doing, he said, was to take a circus Big Top on the road, and thus export the atmosphere of UFO, where they were truly the 'house band of the underground', in Nick Mason's phrase.

Although I was at UFO dozens of times when Floyd must have played, I can't remember hearing them there specifically. I remember Kenneth Anger's film, 'Fireworks', Jeff Nuttall's People Show, and individual lone groovers like the guy who danced backwards, barging into people and accepted with the sort of amused tolerance I wasn't to experience again until the heady days of early punks pogo-dancing at the Roxy ten years later. I remember the way vertiginously circling sparks of light on the stairway down, reflected from a spot by an old-style ballroom mirror-ball, created a disorientation that was no less powerful for being non-chemical, and therefore legal (a technique the Floyd themselves were to employ on a much larger scale in their Earls Court and Rainbow shows in 1973).

More than this, I remember a melange, a flavour, a totality which was more than just the sum of individual parts, in which music and slides and films and theatrics and audience antics added up to become something quite unique.

'It's got rosier with age,' recalled Nick Mason, 'but there is a germ of truth in it, because for a brief moment it looked as though there might actually be some combining of activities. People would go down to this place, and a number of people would do a number of things, rather than