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

couple of our best gigs ever with Syd, at the University Cellars and the Victoria Ballroom,’ recalls drummer Stephen Pyle. ‘He was on a visit from London and he’d got himself kitted out with a new Fender and a big Vox amp. The Kinks’ single “You Really Got Me” had come out and Syd was thrilled with that. He kept playing it over and over again during band practice.’
     
    Meanwhile, David Gilmour was making his own plans. If he passed his A-levels, it would mean going to university, which would take him away from the local music scene. Gilmour chose to drop out halfway through his exams. By now, his parents had returned permanently to the US and he was living alone in a flat in Mill Road. He’d also helped form a new band, Jokers Wild, which had coalesced around Gilmour, John Gordon and Clive Welham.
    While Syd upped sticks to London, Gilmour stayed put. Jokers Wild’s forte was five-part harmonies. ‘We came together in the first place because we could all sing,’ says Welham. Their set centred around songs by The Four Seasons, Sam and Dave, and The Beach Boys, performed in as many clubs, parties and neighbouring airforce bases as would take them, including a regular Wednesday night booking at Les Jeux Interdits, a club in Cambridge’s Victoria Ballroom, popular with foreign students from the neighbouring colleges. ‘I think at one time we all had foreign girlfriends,’ recalls Clive.
    The line-up originally comprised Gordon, Welham, keyboard player and saxophonist Dave Altham, and bassist Tony Sainty, later replaced at odd times by either Rick Wills or David’s brother Peter.
    Gilmour may have come across as shy and unassuming, but his appearance got him noticed. ‘Dave was always more clean-cut than Syd,’ remembers John Gordon. ‘He had a collegey look, a style of American dress - a bit preppy - with white Levi’s. It went down well with the women.’
    ‘All the girls absolutely drooled over him,’ says Christine Smith (formerly Bull), who first encountered the band as a seventeen-year-old in Cambridge. ‘We used to call him the Adonis.’ With Gilmour’s parents overseas, Christine’s family would welcome David and Peter into their home, including a Christmas Day evening ‘when they brought round their guitars and kept us entertained for hours’.
    A personal ad in a mid-sixties issue of the pop magazine Rave offers a glimpse of Gilmour’s popularity at the time. Placed by Libby Gausden’s schoolfriend Vivien Brans (known by the nicknames Twig and Twiggy), it read: ‘Last June I met a boy called David Gilmour in Cambridge. He played in a group called Jokers Wild. He said he planned to go to London, and always wore blue jeans with patches on them. If anyone knows where he is, please tell him to write to the girl with long blonde hair who pushed his van up Guest Road to get it started. Tell him Vivien is anxious to hear from him, if he remembers her.’ (Vivien had previously gone out with Barrett, and would later meet up again with Gilmour.)
    The guitarist’s growing reputation was also enough to attract the attention of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who sent a talent scout to the Victoria Ballroom. Epstein decided not to sign him, but, with his reputation preceding him, Gilmour was the obvious understudy for other players on the circuit. Hugh Fielder, now a music critic, but then singing with Cambridge band The Ramblin’ Blues, hired Gilmour when his own group’s guitarist dropped out at the last minute for a gig at a local girls’ school in 1965. ‘We’d had girls screaming at us before,’ recalls Fielder. ‘And we really didn’t want to miss out on it again. Gilmour was fantastic.’ There was, it transpires, only one problem: ‘Unfortunately, he charged us as much for his services as we were getting for the whole gig.’
    For Roger Waters, the arrival of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had thawed his resistance to rock music. One evening, he and Barrett had travelled to