Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake

he and Syd would delight in projecting images on to the windows of the house opposite.
    Through Anthony, Syd would make contact with another aspiring artist that year. Recently graduated from the university, Peter Whitehead was renting a studio in Cambridge’s Grange Road. Later, as a film-maker, he would shoot the defining footage of the Syd-era Pink Floyd. For now, though, Barrett and his musical friends were simply ‘the nameless group’ that rehearsed in the room next to his studio. ‘I think Syd was having an affair with the daughter of the owners of the house,’ says Peter now. ‘The louder his group rehearsed, the louder I put on my Bartók, Janáček and Wagner albums. I didn’t like pop music. When Syd discovered I was a painter, he used to drift in and chat and ask me what I was listening to. I had no idea our paths would cross again.’
    In the autumn, Barrett moved to London and began his degree course at Camberwell, where he was remembered as an enthusiastic, if single-minded student, surprising his tutors and other pupils with his insistence on using the same-sized brush for all his paintings. Among his compositions from the summer of 1964 was a portrait of pop singer Sandie Shaw, which he lovingly sent to her record company, only to hear nothing in response. London was exciting, but regular trips back to Cambridge brought him into contact with his old sparring partners.
    Back at home, Andrew Rawlinson had become involved in staging some ‘happenings’ at the Round Church. Integral to these events was the participation of the audience. In the same spirit, Rawlinson bought a large map of the world, traced the outlines of fifty countries onto sheets of paper and then sent them out to other like-minded individuals with the message, ‘Decorate this how you like and send back to me’.
    Syd was sent Russia, which he duly painted blue and returned. He later sent Rawlinson a book he’d crafted called Fart Enjoy . Comprising seven sheets of cardboard taped together, its contents included snippets of poetry, doodles, pictures torn from magazines, a possible spoof letter entitled ‘Dear Roge’. (‘How did the group get on at Essex?’) A photo of a bare-breasted model is scrawled with the words ‘Fuk, Suk and Lik’. Rawlinson described it as ‘a mixture of austere bordering on the abstract and blazing whimsy’.
    However committed Syd may have been to his art, he still found himself drawn back to his old musical haunts in Cambridge. During the summer holidays, he began playing guitar with The Hollerin’ Blues (sometimes known as Barney and The Hollerin’ Blues), during a return trip to Cambridge. Here, he came into contact with sixteen-year-old Matthew Scurfield, the half-brother of Ponji Robinson and a schoolfriend of The Hollerin’ Blues’ harmonica player, Pete Glass.
    Scurfield would go on to become a theatre, TV and film actor. ‘My father was what you might call “a romantic socialist”, and sent me to a very rough secondary modern school in Cambridge,’ he says now. ‘I’d failed my 11-plus and ended up almost dropping out. My aunt was a very prominent psychiatrist in the area and I ended up at the Criterion, peddling pills that I’d taken from her medicine cabinet.’
    Through what Matthew describes as ‘the trafficking of medical contraband’, he came into contact with Pip and Emo. They introduced him to Syd one evening in the Criterion. ‘We clicked straight away because we were both interested in theatres, and Syd and I discovered we’d both built our own model theatres. Ponji and I both became good friends with him. I didn’t even know he was a musician until I went to see The Hollerin’ Blues at somewhere like the Dorothy Ballroom and there was Syd on guitar. He wasn’t the best player in the world, but he certainly had an aura about him.’
    By early 1965 The Hollerin’ Blues had turned into Those Without, and Syd was back, playing guitar during the holidays. ‘We played a