This page contains all the articles that match the Malcolm Jones-tag, chronologically sorted, from old to new.
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The so-called Lost
in the Woods movie, that was part of the Knebworth pre show
documentary, is a mix coming from different people, at different places,
on different occasions. The Church quotes archbishop Dark Globe, who has
scrutinized the movie before:
There's footage of Syd larking around in a garden with friends in 67,
the 'lilac shirt' footage of Syd (late 67/68?) in which Lyndsay Corner
also appears, and the blue suit/yellow ruffled shirt footage of Syd in
the woods with two girls (Iggy and a mystery brunette) from 69.
The home movie footage is multilayered and you can catch glimpses of
different footage superimposed on top of the main footage.
During the bit of Syd in the woods with Iggy, there's some footage of
Syd with an acoustic guitar (at least that's what I can see). The
flashbacks movie only shows tantalising glimpses of the Syd home movie
footage. (taken from Late
Night.)
The home movie snippets are used twice in the Knebworth documentary.
The documentary starts with Pink (Langley Iddens) pouring a glass of
wine. For the next 39 seconds several vintage clips, taking no longer
than a couple of frames, will be intercepted with shots from the actor.
The first home movie scenes have already ended when the documentary is
just one minute old. The main bunch seems to be filmed at a garden party.
The second home movie scenes arrive about 10 minutes later and will go
on for 42 seconds. The main footage has Syd walking in a park with Iggy
and a mysterious brunette, Syd and Iggy climbing trees, the two woman
running hand in hand, Syd acting funny with a stick in his hand… The
park footage is intercepted a few times by other home movies from other
occasions…
Part 1: Garden fun – blowing bubbles
Several garden shots have been used in this compilation. There is a
scene with a girl on a swing, people blowing soap bubbles and generally
having fun, Syd eating a - very hard to spot - banana…
The Church tried to identify the people in the movie with the help of
the worldwide web, posting screenshots at several anorak fora, and Dark
Globe took it upon him to show these pictures to David Gale and Matthew
Scurfield after a reading at the City Wakes festival this year.
Hester Page. It could be that screenshots 1 and 2 depict the
same person. She remained unidentified until Dark Globe showed the
pics to David Gale who recognised picture 2 as ‘Hester’. Barrett fan
julianindica could narrow this down to Hester Page. Hester Page gets
mentioned in the Syd Barrett biography by Julian Palacios, aptly
called Lost In The Woods, as part of the 101 Cromwell Rd incrowd.
That two-storey flat in Kensington was the place for many
Cantabrigians to sleep, meet and greet. Syd Barrett and Lindsay
Corner lived there for a while and Pink Floyd used the place to
rehearse (much to the annoyance of painter Duggie Fields). It was
also somewhat of an LSD epicentre and a ‘critical nexus for
Underground activities of every shade and stripe’.
David Gale. This man is David Gale. To quote his own words at
the City Wakes – it’s the hooter that gives me
away. Gale was a schoolmate of David Gilmour and a friend of Syd. In
1965 David’s parents went to Australia for a 6-month period leaving
the house and its garden in the safe hands of their son. It didn’t
take long before the Cambridge jeunesse would meet there and there
is a chance that the first part of the Syd Barrett Home Movie has
indeed been shot in the garden of David Gale’s parents. Nigel
Lesmoir-Gordon and Storm Thorgerson had film cameras so one of them
may have shot the footage (NLG made the iniquitous Syd’s First Trip
movie where David Gale can be seen). It was also at David Gale’s
place that Syd Barrett had a cosmically encounter wit a plum, an
orange and a matchbox, as witnessed by Storm Thorgerson who would
later use this for a record sleeve and for a concert movie.
Lyndsay Corner. David Gale and Matthew Scurfield identify the
girl on a swing as Lyndsay Corner.
Part 2: the Lost In The Woods footage
Mick Rock. When Syd and Iggy are walking in the woods a face
is superimposed. It is Mick Rock who has (probably) shot the movie.
Iggy is wearing the same necklace as on the Madcap Laughs photo
sessions and (perhaps) the same clothes. Syd however has another
shirt than in the Psychedelic Renegades book. The Lost In The Woods
scenes have been edited on the Knebworth documentary and carry parts
from at least 3 other home movies.
Unknown. Syd and another man walking & talking in a garden
in front of a house. Identity Unknown.
Unknown. Syd and a girl blowing bubbles in a park. Identity
unknown.
Lyndsay Corner. Close-up of Lyndsay Corner (in a park).
Mysterious brunette. 3 people can be identified on the Lost
In The Woods movie: Syd, Iggy and Mick Rock. In several shots with
Iggy and Syd we see a second woman, the mysterious brunette, whose
identity we don’t know yet.
Update: on second thought, she could be Hester Page (see
first picture above), although it is a wild guess. JenS,
however concludes that the girl is not Hester Page. Gretta Barclay
does not recognise her either: "I do not recognise the brunette –
the name Jennie Gordon came to mind, but in truth, I simply have
no idea of who she is."
Radiocarbon dating
Pop-art painter Duggie Fields, who still lives in the same apartment,
and Mick Rock have testified that Iggy only stayed at Syd’s place for a
couple of weeks. When Mick Rock showed Syd the pictures of the photo
sessions for the cover of The Madcap Laughs she was already long gone….
According to Duggie Fields, a homeless and drug-addicted couple, Greta
and Rusty, took the vacant place, much to the aggravation of the painter
who had to bring Greta to the hospital after an overdose.
Update 2010: in an exclusive interview to the Church
Margaretta Barclay absolutely denies the above. Please consult: Gretta
Speaks and Gretta
Speaks (Pt. 2)
Neither Mick Rock nor Storm Thorgerson give the exact date when The
Madcap Laughs photo shoot was made: the closest thing they can come up
with is Autumn 1969. Syd Barrett and David Gilmour met at the studio on
the 6th of October to sort out the running order of the album. Other
studio work, that didn’t need Syd’s presence, was done the same month:
banding the LP master (9 October) and cutting the LP (16 October). After
hearing the master Malcolm Jones ordered a recut early in November. The
record was officially released on the second of January 1970.
Malcolm Jones recounts:
One day in October or November I had cause to drop in at Syd's flat on
my way home to leave him a tape of the album, and what I saw gave me
quite a start. In anticipation of the photographic session for the
sleeve, Syd had painted the bare floorboards of his room orange and
purple. Up until then the floor was bare, with Syd's few possessions
mostly on the floor; hi-fi, guitar, cushions, books and paintings. In
fact the room was much as appears on the original 'Madcap' sleeve. Syd
was well pleased with his days work and I must say it made a fine
setting for the session due to take place.
Based on this information most anoraks radiocarbon the photo shoot date
in the second half of October, although November is also a possibility.
The Lost In The Woods home move with Syd, Mick, Iggy and the mysterious
brunette should thus be pinpointed to that period (this was written
in December 2008).
Update: But... as the Holy Church would find out the next year
(January 2009) the above photo shoot date appears to be wrong. It is
pretty sure that Iggy left Syd in April 1969. Further analysis of the
Madcap pictures show that several details point to spring 1969, rather
than autumn. For a complete report please consult: Anoraks
and Pontiacs.
(This is the second part of the Love In The Woods post. Part 1 can be
found here: Love
in the Woods (Pt. 1))
Sources (other than the above internet links): Blake, Mark: Pigs
Might Fly, Aurum Press Limited, London, 2007, p. 141. Jones,
Malcolm: The Making Of The Madcap Laughs, Brain
Damage, 2003, p. 13. Palacios, Julian: Lost In The Woods,
Boxtree, London, 1998, p. 241. Parker, David: Random Precision,
Cherry Red Books, London, 2001, p. 154-158.
Hello, I would like to try and clarify a couple of things about Ig. She
was a girlfriend of mine.
The above message reached the Reverend a couple of weeks ago. It was
written by JenS, a Cambridge friend of Roger Keith Barrett. She
is the one who introduced Iggy to the Pink Floyd founder exactly
40 years ago.
What follows is her rendition, as told exclusively to The Church of Iggy
the Inuit, and now published for the first time. Her rememberings are
only slightly edited here and there and re-arranged a bit per subject.
Some explanatory notes have been added.
Meeting Iggy
I first met Ig in the summer of 1966. I saw her again in spring 1967 at
Biba. She admired a dress I was wearing and invited me to a party that
night. From then on we used to go clubbing. She was a lovely, sweet,
funny girl and was always on the scene at gigs and events.
Biba,
where Iggy first met JenS, was without doubt the single most important
boutique of London. The shop features in the IN
Gear documentary that also has Iggy.
The first really important customer to favour Biba was Cathy McGowan,
the Ready Steady Go! presenter who (…) quickly made a new Biba dress a
staple of her weekly wardrobe for the show.
This meant that every Saturday morning ‘teenage girls from all over the
London area would race over to Abingdon Road and the piles of new,
inexpensive clothes that awaited them’.
Ig was not known as Iggy the Eskimo.
She was simply Ig or Iggy and probably picked up the nickname along the
way at school or something. I think she was a Londoner.
She was quite a lot older than us and had been around a while on the
London Club scene. She invited me once to a party with Dusty Springfield
and crew. Later she started hanging out at Granny’s (Granny
Takes A Trip, FA) and turning up at UFO.
Update 2011: It was revealed in March 2011 that Iggy is born in
December 1947, making her a bit younger than Syd Barrett. See The
Mighty Queen.
One important player in Dusty
Springfield’s crew was Vicki Heather Wickman, who managed Dusty and
co-wrote You
don’t have to say you love me that became a number one hit
in 1966. Vicky had been a booker-writer-editor-producer of the weekly Ready
Steady Go! shows for many years. Dusty Springfield herself had been
a (part-time) presenter of the RSG!-show and that is probably where she
met her future manager (Update: not quite true - they knew each
other from 1962 and even shared a flat together, see also From
Dusty till Dawn).
Wickham and her team ‘scoured the trendiest clubs looking for good
dancers and stylish dressers to showcase’. The Church has a hunch
feeling that Iggy may have been – during a certain period at least – a
regular at the RSG! Show, especially as she was spotted, in November
1966, at an RSG!-party by New Musical Express (cfr. article: Bend
It!).
It will be a ginormous work but the Church is planning to scrutinise
several Ready Steady Go! tapes from that period to see if Iggy can be
found in the public or amongst the dancers.
Iggy’s Parents
After our hypothesis that Iggy was probably not Inuit (cfr. article: Eskimono),
the Church received several mails trying to string Iggy’s features to a
certain culture. One of the countries that keep on popping up is
Singapore that was a British colony between 1824 and 1959. Here is what
JenS has to say about Iggy's heritage:
I have no idea about who her parents were. She was a war baby and may
have been Chinese. There was a large Chinese community in London at the
time. Of course Ig the Eskimo is an easy assumption to make. Anyway, I
don't think I can help any further as I never discussed it with her.
Meeting Syd
Iggy became a Floydian icon when she posed on Syd Barrett's first solo
album The Madcap Laughs, but most witnesses only describe her as one of
Syd's two-week-girlfriends. JenS acknowledges this:
I took Ig to Wetherby Mansions in January or February 1969 where she met
Syd Barrett. He was 22 and she must have been about 24, 25 years old.
The point is she was never Syd's girlfriend as in a ‘relationship’ with
him. She was only at Wetherby Mansons very briefly, a matter of two or
three weeks max.
I've not seen her since but often wondered where she is.
Syd’s Appartement
Syd painted the floor of his flat in blue and orange before The Madcap
Laughs photo shoot, but did he do that especially for the photo shoot?
I was staying with Syd between the New Year and March '69. I hadn’t seen
much of him since the summer of 1968 'til then.
Anyway, at that time, the floor was already painted blue and orange and
I remember thinking how good it looked on the Madcap album cover later
on when the album was released. I didn’t see Syd again though until
1971, so it stands to reason the floor was already done when I left.
Mick Rock wrote: "Soon after Syd moved in he painted alternating floor
boards orange and turquoise." This doesn’t imply that it was especially
done for the photo session.
In an interview for the BBC Omnibus documentary Crazy Diamond (November
2001) painter Duggie Fields said that Syd painted the floor
soon after he occupied the flat, not that it was done on purpose for the
photo shoot.
It has been assumed by Mick Rock that The Madcap Laughs photo shoot was
held in the autumn of 1969 (cfr. article:Love
In The Woods)
The floor (of Syd’s flat) was not painted prior to, or especially for,
the Madcap photo shoot, which took place in March or April of 1969 and
not October as has been suggested.
I left for the States in March 1969 and Iggy stayed on at the flat with
Syd and Duggie (Fields) and there seemed to be other dropouts around
from time to time.
Ig happened to be there still when the shoot came about, which was great
because we have such a good record of her.
and:
I introduced Iggy to Syd shortly before I left, and she was around when
I left. She wasn’t there for long and generally moved around a lot to
different friends. It’s very doubtful she was still there in October or
November 1969. She just happened to be there for Mick’s photo shoot,
which is great because she was lovely girl.
This is apparently in contradiction with Malcolm Jones who wrote in The
Making Of The Madcap Laughs:
One day in October or November I had cause to drop in at Syd's flat on
my way home to leave him a tape of the album, and what I saw gave me
quite a start. In anticipation of the photographic session for the
sleeve, Syd had painted the bare floorboards of his room orange and
purple.
JenS further comments:
I remember reading this once before and being puzzled. It would seem
he’s talking about 1969. But which tape was he leaving? The 1968
sessions or the recuts (from 1969, FA)? It would seem he’s
talking about the recut. It’s a bit confusing especially to me as the
floor was painted, definitely before Christmas 1968.
The Madcap Laughs photo session had to be in the spring of 1969,
probably it occurred the first week in March. Storm and Mick say they
can only come up with the dates of August, or even October, November.
This may have been when they came together to look at the shots for the
cover, in other words when it was known the album would definitely be
released and decisions on the cover had to be made.
Part 2 of JenS's chronicle will further delve into the legendary Madcap
Laughs photo sessions, pinpointing the date somewhere in April 1969.
Sources (other than above internet links): Blake, Mark: Pigs
Might Fly, Aurum Press Limited, London, 2007, p. 141. Jones,
Malcolm: The Making Of The Madcap Laughs, Brain Damage, 2003, p.
13. Levy, Shawn: Ready Steady Go!, Broadway Books, New York,
2003, p. 112, p.194-195. Rock, Mick: Psychedelic Renegades,
Plexus, London, 2007, p. 23, p. 58.
Our thanks go to Barrett alumni Stumbling... (aka Beate S.) and
Lost In The Woods (aka Julian Palacios) from the Syd Barrett Research
Society who made this encounter possible... and to JenS for her
invaluable testimony about what really happened in those early days of
1969.
Hello, I would like to try and clarify a couple of things about Ig. She
was a girlfriend of mine.
In January or early February 1969, a mutual friend introduced Iggy to
Syd Barrett, the successful rock star who had left his band Pink Floyd.
To celebrate the fortieth birthday of this event The Holy Church of
Inuit brings you an exclusive rendition of what happened, as told by
JenS, who knew Barrett from his Cambridge and London days.
In the first part of this article When
Syd met Iggy (Pt. 1), JenS recollected how she met Iggy and how she
introduced the girl to Syd. In the second part When
Syd met Iggy... (Pt. 2) the photo shoot from The Madcap Laughs,
Barrett’s first solo album, was reconstructed.
The story so far
In December 1968 Syd moved in at Wetherby Mansions, a 3 bedroom
apartment located at the Earls Court Square, with Duggie Fields and
another dropout called Jules, who left the apartment as fast as he had
get in, if he did get in at all.
Syd’s hectic LSD days at 101, Cromwell Rd. were over and his close
friends thought that this was the ideal situation for him to calm down
and to organise the rest of his life. Some money was still coming in
from The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, there was no immediate hurry
to get on the road or in the studio again and there were a couple of
months left to sort things out and to start a brilliant solo career,
based on the abandoned, and rather catastrophic, recording sessions from
the past year. (David Parker lists Syd’s last recording session on 20
July 1968, the session before that dates from 27 June 1968.)
Syd was now involved with ‘silly’ Gilly Staples, a model from Quorum,
the boutique that had given a Pontiac away at New Year 1969, won by
Mickey Finn who, on his turn, had given it to Syd. (Side note: it is the
Church’s first quintessential credo that all things Iggy are related.)
Also Gala Pinion, who had taken the third (empty) bedroom, was a steady
girlfriend and for a couple of weeks, so was Iggy. On top of these
affairs and according to Duggie Fields there were dozens of groupies
around, all the time, all over the place.
Although Syd had, in the eyes of several friends and colleagues, relaxed
a bit, others described him as a typical apathetic acid casualty. And
already a new (legally obtained) drug would replace his LSD intake:
Mandrax.
JenS’s story, as has been depicted on the Church for the past few weeks,
has re-thrown the dices somewhat. Up till now it was believed that Iggy
stayed with Syd during the autumn of 1969, at the end or after he had
finished most of The Madcap Laughs sessions.
But as Iggy was apparently around in April 1969, she may have witnessed
the fresh start of the sessions of Syd’s first solo album. Malcolm
Jones, who happened to be A&R of EMI’s brand new progressive rock label
Harvest, wrote it down as follows:
One day, late in March, 1969, I received a message that Syd Barrett had
phoned EMI's studio booking office to ask if he could go back into the
studios and start recording again.
As nobody was apparently very hot to work with Syd Barrett, Malcolm
Jones was more or less forced to produce the record himself but the
songs that were presented to him by Syd at his apartment were good
enough to start with the project. The first session in studio 3 at Abbey
Road took place on Thursday, 10 April 1969 at 7 in the evening. But
recording really started the next day when Syd recorded 3 classic tracks
in two hours time. When they stopped the session at half past midnight 6
tracks had been worked on.
This was Syd at full tilt! At this session Syd was in great form, and
very happy. No matter what people may say to the contrary, Syd was very
together, and this was his first session with the new songs.
From the last article we know that the sleeve pictures were probably
taken between the 14th and 21st of April. Shortly after that Iggy
disappeared. Did this have an effect on Syd’s recording output?
Malcolm Jones recalls how Syd wrote a ditty love song ‘Here I Go’ during
the 17 April sessions in a matter of minutes. That song happens to be
the Reverend’s favourite for many decades now and it makes the Church
wonder if it has been written with Iggy in mind.
Dark Globe
When friend and would-be photographer Mick Rock showed his pictures to
Syd, Iggy was long gone. The rock star grabbed one of the pictures and
started scratching it (although the Church wants to stress the fact, for
Freud’s sake, that he scratched around her - cf. top left picture of
this post).
Long Gone was one of the songs that were premiered on the 12th of June
1969 with David Gilmour as producer. David Gilmour and Syd Barrett were
back on speaking terms (after David had taken Syd’s place in the band
there had been some frictions). Syd and Malcolm, who lived at Earls
Court Square as well (but not in Syd's house), had been a few times to
David Gilmour’s place, just around the corner, to lend an amplifier for
The Madcap Laughs sessions and David had inquired a few times how the
sessions had been going.
Syd had been signalled backstage at a Pink Floyd show to chit chat with
the old gang and after a while David Gilmour proposed to Malcolm Jones
to produce the rest of the album with Roger Waters. Malcolm Jones did
not protest, he had enough on his plate being the boss of Harvest and
probably, although this is not mentioned in his memoirs, it would be a
nice commercial add-on as well to have two members of Syd’s original
band on the record.
Jones’s last session with Syd had been in early May and Syd had been
pissed that the next session, with David Gilmour, would only take place
a month later. But right now David and the rest of the band were busy
mixing Ummagumma.
Next to Long Gone, a haunting track about a lost love, Barrett also
premiered another song about the same theme of absence: Dark Globe. The
track has some enigmatic lines that go as follows:
I'm only a person with Eskimo chain I tattooed my brain all the way... Won't
you miss me? Wouldn't you miss me at all?
Now that we know that this song was probably written just after Iggy's
disappearance out of Syd’s life, is there a possible correlation between
both facts?
Gre(t)ta and Rusty
When Iggy left the mansion Greta and Rusty, a couple of ‘speed freaks’,
took the vacant spot for a bed. All biographies, up till now, spell
Gretta’s name wrong, according to JenS:
It should be Gretta. Double T.
Duggie Fields remembers Gretta as follows: “I didn’t want them around.
Greta did a lot of speed and was quite manic.” But JenS, who knew the
couple as well, has a different story to tell:
Rusty and Gretta were not drug-addicted. They never were. They were two
art school kids who drank too much and at a later date, probably goofed
out on Mandrax. Duggie Fields was always very together and a real
gentleman. Their chaos probably fazed him - well, waking to that every
morning would.
Rusty was a pretty good guitarist and Syd enjoyed playing with him.
Rusty and Gretta were both pretty talented in their way. Just goofing.
That more or less sums it up and is all we known from the couple,
although Duggie Fields recalls that Gretta went to the USA soon after
and was promptly put away in a Texas nuthouse. According to JenS this
didn’t happen:
Gretta didn't go to the States. Her sister Trina and I were friends and
she went. I'm not sure if Rusty and Gretta continued to visit Syd at
Wetherby Mansions or not. The two of them probably moved on and may have
visited him at a later date, during the summer… I think I read an
interview with Duggie once that said they had been at the flat at some
point, but I don't know when that was.
Update: in an exclusive interview to the Church Margaretta
Barclay absolutely denies the drug stories surrounding Rusty and her.
Please consult: Gretta
Speaks and Gretta
Speaks (Pt. 2).
It would be nice if someone could write the definitive account on the
so-called Cambridge mafia seeking fame and fortune in London, all
those people that have crossed Syd’s path at a certain time and
disappeared again, often without a trace…
The Church wants to apologise for the fact that this third instalment in
the JenS series is not the last as was promised last week. So there will
be no excuse not to come back next week to read further on.
Sources (other than internet links mentioned above):
Blake, Mark: Pigs Might Fly, Aurum Press, London, 2007, p.129. Palacios,
Julian: Lost In The Woods, Boxtree, London, 1998, p. 241. Parker,
David: Random Precision, Cherry Red Books, London, 2001, p.
134-158. Jones, Malcolm: The Making Of The Madcap Laughs,
Brain Damage, 2003, p. 3, p. 6. Willis, Tim, Madcap, Short
Books, London, 2002, p. 105.
The Church wishes to thank JenS for her invaluable testimony about what
really happened in those early days of 1969.
The Reverend’s last post was rather freewheeling and not always up to
par. For one mystical reason or another Iggy’s divine intervention
didn’t come through, possibly hindered a bit by an abundance of pints of
that black stuff that tastes so good by the gallon.
So it is time to clear things up, like the surge in that same glass,
although what remains isn’t crystal clear at all but rather a dark shade
of ruby.
As always, many thanks to JenS for spending her cybertime with the
Reverend and passing him the stories that happened 40 years ago. It is
obvious that any mistake and/or misinterpretation is entirely by the
hand of the author of this blog and not by his witness.
Gret(t)a and Rusty
The last post may have hinted that Gretta and Rusty were from Cambridge,
just like Syd and (many of) his friends. JenS specifies that they
weren’t.
You may be inferring that Rusty and Greta were from Cambridge but they
were from Suffolk and went to Colchester Art School (50 miles from
Cambridge and London respectively), and had only recently come to
London. They were not on the underground scene as such and later that
summer they left London and went to live in Devon where they then
married and settled.
Update: in an exclusive interview to the Church Margaretta
Barclay pointed out a mistake in the above quote: Gretta
Speaks (Pt. 2)
The importance is not how Greta (or Gretta) is spelled but that is
pronounced as with a double T.
Rusty and Greta, one T or two TT’s, it doesn’t really matter. Her name
was Margaretta.
And the allegations that they were speed freaks, is once again denied.
Rusty and Gretta were not drug-addicted. Greta may have done a lot of
speed, but she was not drug-addicted and as mentioned at the beginning.
They were goofing.
As Duggie Fields was Syd’s roommate it is logical that he has been
questioned a lot about what happened at Wetherby Mansions. But, and not
only according to JenS, his memories seem to have quite a few holes.
JenS already disproved the story that Gretta went to America in our last
post and now adds:
I think Duggie must have got these two sister muddled and at this time.
Trina was long gone. She went to America in January (1969) but didn’t
know Duggie particularly.
Update: in an exclusive interview to the Church Margaretta
Barclay absolutely denies the drug stories surrounding Rusty and her.
Please consult: Gretta
Speaks
Gayla Pinion
Wetherby Mansions was a three bedroom apartment and was originally
rented by Duggie Fields, Syd Barrett and Jules, a dropout who nobody
really seems to remember and who disappeared very shortly after they
moved in. After a while the vacant bedroom was given to Gayla Pinion
(top left picture) but this happened after Iggy had cleared the
place (who might have been using the spare bedroom as well). This adds
further proof to the theory, although in reality not a theory anymore,
that the photo sessions for The Madcap Laughs were held in spring, and
not in autumn. When JenS visited Syd Barrett…
…Gayla was not there. She moved in later hooking up with Syd in May or
June.
She was the one who dropped Syd off when he flew out to meet Emo (Iain
Moore) in Ibiza. They had known each other for a few years, as she was
an old school friend of Lindsay’s and used to visit them when they were
staying in Egerton Court.
When Gayla was around (after Iggy had left) Syd’s behaviour or mental
health deteriorated (let it be clear that the former does not imply that
these women actually triggered the situation) as has been stated in
several biographies, perhaps due to an excessive Mandrax intake. Some
events that happened then would fuel the many Crazy Syd legends
that were floating around during the Seventies and Eighties.
When Syd met Iggy
In the first instalment of this series JenS reported:
I took Ig to Wetherby Mansions in January or February 1969 where she met
Syd Barrett. He was 22 and she must have been about 24, 25 years old.
The Church, as churches do, turned this phrase into a slogan and the
reader may have been lured into the idea that January 1969 was the very
first time when Syd and Iggy met. But this might not have been the case
as JenS wishes to clarify:
This is a little misleading and it is unlikely that this was the first
time Syd had met Iggy. She was well known on the scene and it’s more
than likely he’d have come across her before. She was around all the
same venues as the rest of us, UFO, the Speakeasy, the Roundhouse,
Alexandra Palace. Whether he ever chatted to her or was formally
introduced in any way is unknown to me, but what I did was to take her
round to Syd’s new flat. And at the time she had nowhere to live, so she
stayed on.
Here I Go
Malcolm Jones once wrote how he witnessed that Syd Barrett could write a
song in a few minutes of time, referring to Here I Go, probably the
wittiest song ever by Syd. The Church wondered if this track, recorded
on the 17th of April 1969, was perhaps written with Iggy in mind.
This was an inside joke, albeit not a very good one.
Here I Go was a song that Syd Barrett had already home-recorded, on
acoustic guitar, in 1967, although it was then titled Boon Tune.
When The
Purple Gang were looking for a successor of their Granny Takes A
Trip-single Barrett, whose band Pink Floyd had shared the same
studio to record Arnold Layne, handed over the demo tape to Joe
Boyd.
When the gang looked for the tape it was untraceable and Joe Boyd
believed that Syd Barrett had retrieved the demo for use on the first
Pink Floyd record. To make a long (and incredibly complicated) story
short the Purple Gang Boon
Tune single project was abandoned.
Rumours went that The
Deviants stole the original tape out of the studio and at The City
Wakes festival someone said that it has been miraculously found back. It
would be nice if it could be issued on a new Syd Barrett record project
(that was also rumoured at The City Wakes).
Update 2014: The story of Here I Go & The Purple Gang can be
found on the following page: Hurricane
over London.
Also the Church’s musings about the songs Dark Globe and Long
Gone have to be taken with lots of grains of salt. We will probably
never know if Iggy was Syd’s muse, or not…
So far for the Reverend's confessions for this week, more to come at a
later stage because that pink Pontiac has given the Church the blues...
Until then, brethren and sistren, and don't do anything
that Iggy wouldn't have done!
Although Iggy is the prototype of the vanishing girl we know quite a lot
of her through the bits and pieces that have survived that big black
hole also knows as the Sixties.
In November 1966, when she was (about) 21 or 22 years old she appeared
at The
Bend party that was affiliated with the television show Ready Steady
Go!
And there was of course her apparition in a 1967-ish documentary, called IN
Gear, hinting that Iggy was seeking fame and fortune as a model or
an actress. Unfortunately enough it seems impossible (or at least
improbable) that the production sheets will ever surface, nobody seems
to know where the archives of the Look At Life-series, that ran for a
decade between 1959 and 1969 and added up to more than 500 episodes,
physically are, if these still exist.
The Reverend has been re-reading some older posts at this funny little
place aptly called the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit and some need
updating.
Lost in the Woods
There is a home
movie floating around with Syd and Ig walking in a park, together
with – what has been called – a mysterious brunette. Mick Rock probably
made the movie around the same period, and with period the Reverend
literally means days, The Madcap Laughs photos were made. Iggy is
wearing the same clothes on both occasions (and the same necklace), but
Syd Barrett not. The mysterious brunette may have been Mick Rock’s
girlfriend, one of the (many, according to Duggie Fields) passing female
visitors of Syd’s place or, a theory nobody has ever wondered about
before, a friend of Ig.
Thanks to the testimony of JenS
it is now pretty sure that the photo shoot took place in April 1969,
probably in the week between the 14th and the 21st, but
not on the 17th as Syd was the whole afternoon in Studio 2, recording
the eerie No Man’s Land and the ditty Here I Go.
Here is what Malcolm Jones had to say about it:
The following Thursday, as planned, I called a cab and went to collect
Syd. We dropped in at Dave Gilmour's flat round the corner to borrow an
amplifier, and set off for Abbey Road. At the studio we met up with
Jerry Shirley and 'Willie' Wilson, the musicians Syd had invited along.
The session was to be done 'live' i.e. everyone recording their parts at
the same time, including Syd's vocal and guitar parts.
This session was the last happy and shiny one although nobody would know
that beforehand of course. The next session had the motorbike overdubs
on the legendary Rhamadan, legendary because Barrett fans know it
has been lying in the vaults of EMI for over 40 years now and have been
praying and begging to release it ever since.
Update (October 2010): Rhamadan has finally been released as a
part of the An Introduction To... Syd Barrett compilation: Gravy
Train To Cambridge
The making of the track Rhamadan is one of those occasions lazy
journalists use to prove that Barrett was as mad as a hatter. The track,
an 18 to 20 minutes free-form-jam-session between Barrett, Steve Took
and some other (unidentified) session players had been recorded the
previous year, and in April 1969 Syd found that he still could do
something useful with the demo.
Of course all he wanted to do was to put some motorbike overdubs on the
track, a failed experiment as found out at the end of the day, but not
quite as mad as those lazy journalists want us to believe. Pink Floyd
would overdub motorbike sounds on Atom Heart Mother the next year and no
one has put them in straitjackets because of that.
The intrinsic value of the track is less legendary tells someone who
knows. Random Precision author David Parker is probably the only person
in the world who has a full and legit copy of the Rhamadan track in his
collection:
Of the 15-20mins that this runs for I reckon Syd plays on about 5
minutes worth. Imagine a longer and looser version of 'Lanky Pt 1' with
a lot less guitar on it. (Taken from the Syd Barrett Research Society.
Forum no longer active.)
In a, now deleted, post at SBRS Parker explained further that...
…I had to give my word to various people at EMI and Abbey Road, and sign
a scarily draconian declaration, not to give out copies…
The April sessions of 1969 had Barrett in an excellent form and Malcolm
Jones wanted to get the record done as quickly as possible. Not only he
must have been aware of Syd’s mood changes but his bosses had also
instructed him to get a move on. So it is absolutely plausible that the
order for the cover-shoot was given right after the first session.
The Church has written quite a few things about Syd’s blue Pontiac in
the past and an error sneaked in at the second When
Syd met Iggy... posting. Originally it read:
Before Syd (and Mickey Finn) got the car it was used in the 1970
British movie Entertaining Mr Sloane. The car, with its cream red
and silver interior, is featured prominently throughout the movie. The
movie is not great but the pink Pontiac gives a great performance.
The above was not correct as this information was based upon the general
belief that The Madcap Laughs photo shoot was held in the autumn of 1969
and not in April. The British
Film Institute pinpoints the making of the movie between mid August
and beginning of October 1969, four months after Syd gave the car away
to someone who admired it. If the car that can be seen in the movie is
indeed Syd’s, it was sold, given or lend to the movie crew by its new
owner.
1969 Calendar
Because the Reverend thought it might be a good idea and because a lot
of work went into coding and debugging The Holy Church of Inuit presents
you... a calendar of the year 1969. It puts some dates right, can be
generally considered as eye-candy and may be completely ignored...
Notes (other than internet links mentioned above):
Parker, David: Random Precision, Cherry Red Books, London, 2001,
p. 129-158. Jones, Malcolm: The Making Of The Madcap Laughs,
Brain Damage, 2003, p. 7.
Ig's close encounters of the photographical kind were not limited to the
Anthony Stern triptych
series alone. She can be found as well on the cover of the Syd Barrett
album The
Madcap Laughs, still available in any qualitative cd-shop what means
that it is a hell of a job to actually find it. But on top of her
picture you get some decent music as well what is a rather nice bargain.
Storm
Thorgerson from the arty farty collective Hipgnosis
claims he shot the cover, although Mick Rock more or less hinted the
same. Both photographers were present at the same place on the same day
for the same purpose. Rock writes that he was asked by Syd Barrett to do
the shoot and that Storm agreed to take him on in the team.
Syd asked me to take the pictures. We had talked about the shoot for a
while, and the day before it happened I told Storm from Hipgnosis, so he
came along because they were putting the package together.
Thorgerson probably was despatched by Harvest
director and Barrett producer ad interim Malcolm Jones and has
stated that another photographer was present as well but that he didn't
know what the fuck he was doing there, although in a slightly more
diplomatic way:
Friend and photographer Mick Rock, later famous for his Bowie photos
amongst many others, also came on this photo session, but I can’t
remember why. I think it was to help me, which seems ironic given his
subsequent lensmanship and success in the rock business.
It surely was one of Rock’s pics that was put - uncredited - on the back
sleeve of the Barrett
(his second solo) album. For the third release, a repackaging of the two
previous ones, aptly called Syd
Barrett, some other shots from that day in April
1969 were used, but it is not certain if these came from Rock's
second-hand Pentax 35mm camera, bought from that other Hipgnosis team
member Aubrey
‘Po’ Powell, or from Storm Thorgerson who also claims he
used a 35mm for the job. (Although his favourite camera at that time was
a Hasselblad 500 c, as used for the Floyd’s Ummagumma cover a couple of
months later).
There will always be an enigma surrounding the cover shoot of The Madcap
Laughs. The 1978 book Walk Away René (The Work of Hipgnosis) contains a
detailed description of every picture in the book, except for… The
Madcap Laughs. Unfortunately Storm’s negatives have been lost,
so there will never be a Psychedelic Renegades from his hand.
Psychedelic Renegades, and then we finally get to the subject of
this blog entry, is the photo book Mick Rock made in 2002. The first
edition, by Genesis,
had 320 copies autographed by R.K. Barrett that are worth a small
fortune nowadays. In 2007 a regular edition was published by Plexus
Books (European edition) and Gingko
(for the USA).
There is a possibility that the Mick Rock photo shoot took more than one
day. The pictures in his apartment were taken, together with Storm
Thorgerson. The outside pictures date (perhaps) from the next day.
Nobody can be really sure and Rock isn’t the most reliable witness to
say the least. On page 18 he writes:
We shot The Madcap Laughs in the autumn of 1969 and I don’t think that
Syd and Duggie Fields had been living in the flat that long.
The above is a contradiction as Syd moved in the apartment end 1968,
furthermore the research of JenS,
who was a friend of Syd and Ig, shows that the pictures were probably
taken in April of 1969. Rock also states that:
Syd’s car was a conspicuously bright pink Pontiac Parisienne convertible.
However the few colour pictures of the car show it was (midnight) blue.
But the Church will no longer go further in this matter, if you want you
can read all about in some previous posts, for instance When
Syd met Iggy... (Pt. 2).
About 20 pictures of the book show us a glimpse of Ig, who is described
by Rock as follows…
Known only as Iggy, the half-Eskimo girl had momentarily made her way
into Syd’s life, and flat, at the time when these photos were taken.
Though not part of the original shoot plan, Iggy was an intriguing
accomplice. With no job and little to call her own, Iggy epitomised the
free natured spirit of the psychedelic underground.
The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit is very proud to announce you 3 new
Iggy galleries: Street
Life, black & white pictures of Iggy in front of the house and
car. Bare
Flat, colour pictures of Iggy, walking around in the nude and
posing on the background in Syd's apartment. Rock
Bottom, black & white nude study of Ig.
Sources (other than internet links mentioned above):
Rock, Mick: Psychedelic Renegades, Plexus, London, 2007, p. 18,
p. 20, p. 23, p. 46. Thorgerson, Storm: Mind Over Matter,
Sanctuary Publishing, London, 2003, p. 204.
To all our sistren and brethren, hail! Might you wonder if
the Church is dead the answer is clear and simple: no! The Church is
contemplating its path and went into an early hibernation to, as the
French say, reculer pour mieux sauter.
One of the main occupations of any holy man is to study the scriptures
and that is what we have been doing so far. The next post is very
academic and thus, by definition, boring, although it starts rather
user-friendly.
Last week a professional rock memorabilia seller put some pictures for
sale that he described as:
SYD BARRETT FOUNDING MEMBER OF PINK FLOYD
4 X ORIGINAL MICK ROCK PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN AND PRINTED IN 1974 SHOWING SYD
IN HIS FLAT WITH PAINTED BOARDS, EARLY MICK ROCK PHOTOS ARE NEAR
IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND AND NOW HE PRINTS PHOTOS AT 1000 POUNDS PER PHOTO. THESE
ARE ORIGINAL 6 X 4 INCHES PRINTED BEFORE MICK ROCK BECAME FAMOUS, LONG
AFTER SYD WHO WAS ALREADY FAMOUS.
The 4 prints show Syd Barrett in his apartment and date from The Madcap
Laughs photo sessions where both Mick Rock and Storm Thorgerson showed
up.
The Church has created some controversy concerning the date of the photo
shoot. It has been published in most biographies that the pictures were
taken in the autumn
of 1969, but JenS,
who was a Cantabrigian friend of Syd Barrett and knew Ig as well,
pointed out that the pictures were probably taken in spring. The Church
further narrowed the date of the photo shoot to the week between
the 14th and the 21st of April 1969, and certainly not
1974 as the seller wrote.
The account of the photo shoot also differs from the point of view of
who is telling the story. Storm Thorgerson claims that he shot the
sleeve of The Madcap Laughs, but - in the past - Mick Rock hinted that
he was behind it all.
An unconfirmed story goes that Mick Rock was taking pictures on behalf
of Hipgnosis and gave (some of) his film rolls to Storm Thorgerson who
developed and used some of the pictures for The Madcap Laughs record
sleeve.
It takes a rascal to recognise another one. Mick Rock kept some
negatives in his back pocket and forgot these until he could show
off with his own little private project called Psychedelic Renegades.
(In retrospect this wasn’t a bad thing as Storm Thorgerson has
apparently lost
all the negatives he had in his possession.)
When, a couple of years ago, probably at The
Other Room exhibition, a fan asked Mick Rock to autograph the sleeve
picture of The Madcap Laughs he mysteriously grinned and said something
like ‘I can’t sign pictures that weren’t taken by me, can I?’ and it
still isn’t sure if his comment was ironic or not.
The Church looks at its flock in awe and admiration, which is in shrill
contrast with those other religions that take their believers for total
nincompoops, and the Reverend will let you decide for yourself after
only a tiny amount of brainwashing.
On the Madcap Laughs shooting day several photo series were made. The
series of Mick Rock may have taken two consecutive days instead of one,
but nobody, not even Rock himself, remembers it very well.
THE MICK ROCK COLLECTION
Outside pictures (B&W)
¤ Syd on and around his car, sometimes with Iggy. ¤ Syd & Iggy
on the pavement. ¤ Syd with guitar case and guitar.
These black and white pictures show Syd and Iggy in front of the house.
Syd is sitting on, standing next, leaning against the car, claimed by
Mick Rock to be a pink Pontiac, while it was naturalmente blue.
On some pictures Syd wears a necklace, on others apparently not. Some
cut-outs of these pictures can be found in our Street
Life gallery.
Inside pictures (colour)
¤ Syd with (naked) Iggy.
Syd wears a brown jacket, a yellow shirt, and reddish trousers. These
are about the same clothes as on the outside session (the shirt may be
different). Some cut-outs of these pictures can be found in our gallery: Bare
Flat.
¤ Syd without Iggy.
Syd with blue tie-dyed t-shirt, red trousers, necklace and daffodils. No
shoes. Other pictures have him sitting on the mattress, drinking coffee.
¤ Syd kneeling shirtless on the floor. ¤ Syd and his record
player.
Barrett is shirtless, wears his red trousers, has the necklace (at least
in one picture). Should you care to know, the record player in his room
is a Garrard
SP25 MK2 (thanks mrlimbo!) and the record on the player is from the
soul label Direction, a subsidiary of CBS (thanks infantair!).
(Information grabbed from Late
Night.).
A few of these pictures appear on the inner sleeve of the double album
Syd Barrett, but none have been directly credited to Mick Rock (the
credits go to Blackhill, Lupus, SKR and Hipgnosis).
Update 27 December 2012: It took some time but Göran Nyström
(from Men
On The Border) and Giulio Bonfissuto have found enough evidence to
conclude that the record on Syd's turntable is Taj Mahal's The
Natch'l Blues. They did this by comparing the tracks that are
visible on Mick Rock's pictures with the track listing of the record: "4
rather equally short tracks first and then one that is longer. This
should be the album". (Source: Göran Nyström at Laughing
Madcaps [dead link]. Other source at Late Night forum: Syds
Record Player!)
Inside pictures (B&W)
¤ Syd with record player and trimphone. ¤ Syd sitting on
mattress.
Syd is wearing a tie or a scarf, a tie-dyed t-shirt and a different pair
of trousers (dark with rows of lighter spots). A newspaper and a trimphone
are lying next to the mattress. The record player has got a different
record (the one with the Direction label is lying (unprotected)
underneath another one). There is no sign of Iggy in this series.
¤ Iggy nude study.
The (in)famous series of Ig. No sign of Syd here. This series can be
found in our gallery: Rock
Bottom.
(The Lost
in the Woods home movie, probably made by Mick Rock, has Syd walking
around in a yellow shirt and blue jacket and trousers. For completists:
the yellow shirt is not the same as the one he is wearing on some of the
pictures mentioned above.)
Syd Barrett compilation.
THE HIPGNOSIS COLLECTION
The only way to consult the Hipgnosis archives is to wade through record
sleeves and the books from Storm Thorgerson, as most of the negatives
have been misplaced through the years.
The best overview of Storm’s pictures on that day can be found on the inner
sleeve of the compilation album Syd Barrett that appeared in 1974.
Thorgerson has the following to say about its cover: "I made up the
design from photos already taken at The Madcap Laughs session and added
special insignia."
Outside pictures (colour)
¤ Syd leaning against car (with guitar case). ¤ Syd sitting on
car.
Storm Thorgerson took a few colour pictures during the outside sessions. One
of these pictures was used for the cover of A Nice Pair (Pink Floyd
compilation album, that has had different editions with slightly
different covers). Another picture can be found on the following Church
page: When
Syd met Iggy... Update 2001 02 19: Iggy has confirmed to
the Church that she took the Polaroid picture of Syd Barrett sitting
next to the car: Give
birth to a smile...
Inside (B&W)
¤ The yoga session.
Syd sitting shirtless and shoeless on the floor and showing his
gymnastic skills. Update October 2010: the Church is now of the
opinion that the yoga pictures may have been the 'real' autumn Madcap
Laughs cover shoot, commissioned by Harvest director Malcolm Jones, when
the album was in its final stages: The
Case of the Painted Floorboards
Inside (colour)
Until now we only knew the pictures that were used for The Madcap Laughs
and for the Crazy Diamond CD compilation.
¤ The Madcap Laughs front.
Syd, shoeless, in blue shirt and pink trousers crouching (daffodils in
front of him). A bigger version of this photograph can be found on Crazy
Diamond. (See also: Stormy
Pictures.)
¤ The Madcap Laughs back.
Syd with yellow shirt and necklace (in red trousers) with Ig leaning
artistically on the chair. A bigger version of this photograph can be
found on Crazy
Diamond (Syd Barrett CD box, 1993).
¤ Syd in brown jacket, sitting on the floor. Ig walking towards the
chimney. ¤ Syd with a toy aeroplane (and daffodils) in front of him.
This last picture
can also be found on A Nice Pair, but not on the edition that has the
Syd Barrett car picture (several version of the Nice Pair sleeve do
exist, as you have figured out by now).
According to the above information the four pictures that were sold on
eBay belong to the Hipgnosis collection and not to Mick Rock.
1. Picture one is the famous Madcap Laughs front-sleeve but in its
entirety. 2. The second picture, with Syd and a toy aeroplane, has
also been published before, but this version is not cropped and shows
more of the surrounding room. 3 & 4. Pictures 3 and 4 have been
unknown until now and have never been published before.
The four pictures were sold for a mere 127.00 £. The Church duly hopes
that the buyer is an authentic fan who will share hi-res scans with the
Barrett community.
Syd Barrett's Pontiac.
The seller of the pictures has previously sold one other Syd Barrett
photo from the same session. It was un unknown picture of Syd sitting on
his Pontiac, taking away, once and for all, the rumours that his car was
bright pink. The Reverend wonders if claytonpriory still has
other pictures to sell, perhaps with Ig on the background, although it
is of course regrettable that the collection is divided and sold in
separate pieces.
Did this post confuse you?
It confused the Reverend as well, especially when he found out that one
picture, entitled to Mick Rock, actually needs to be credited to
Hipgnosis. Or is it the other way round? That will be discussed in a
later post: A
Bay of Hope (update).
2022 update
December 2022 had a new update concerning Syd's record player: I
call him Garrard.
Until then, my brethren and sistren, live long and prosper
and don’t do anything what Ig wouldn’t have done.
Sources (other than the above internet links):
Thorgerson, Storm: Mind Over Matter, Sanctuary Publishing,
London, 2003, p. 204.
A new gallery, called StormWatch
has been made and contains the Madcap pictures, made by Storm Thorgerson
and discussed in this entry. Play the Storm Thorgerson or Mick
Rock Iggy picture
quiz!
In The
Purloined Letter (1845) from Edgar
Allan Poe dozens of intelligence officers search a room to
recuperate some blackmailing material but they fail to locate it. Enters C.
Auguste Dupin, probably the very first detective in fiction, who
simply picks the letter from a card-rack. It had never been concealed
but as the policemen had been looking for a hidden object they never
cared to check the paper, lying out in the open.
Paintbox
When the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit started its mission it was
generally believed that The
Madcap Laughs photo shoot had taken place in the autumn of 1969.
Why?
Mainly because every Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett related book said so and
- for over 30 years of time - nobody had ever cared to check the facts.
(Also Rob Chapman's A
Very Irregular Head biography, that has just appeared a couple of
days ago, situates the floor paint job and thus the photo shoot
somewhere between August and November 1969.)
Of course the witnesses saying that the shoot had taken place in the
last quarter of 1969 were quite privileged authorities on the life and
works of Barrett and thus their testimonies have never been questioned
(and as we will reveal later, their comments may be - partly - true).
Malcolm Jones was the Harvest manager who partly produced Barrett's
first solo album and who wrote an acclaimed (for Syd fans anyway) book
about these sessions.
One day in October or November (1969, FA) I had cause to drop in
at Syd's flat on my way home to leave him a tape of the album, and what
I saw gave me quite a start. In anticipation of the photographic session
for the sleeve, Syd had painted the bare floorboards of his room orange
and purple. (…) Syd was well pleased with his days work and I must say
it made a fine setting for the session due to take place.
And in his Psychedelic Renegades book Mick Rock writes:
We shot The Madcap Laughs in the autumn of 1969 and I don’t think that
Syd and Duggie Fields had been living in the flat that long. (…) Soon
after Syd moved in he painted alternating floor boards orange and
turquoise.
The above contains a contradiction, although Mick Rock probably isn't
(wasn't) aware of that. Syd Barrett, Duggie Fields and a third tenant
called Jules moved in the apartment in January 1969 (perhaps December
1968) and certainly not later. A while later Jules was kicked out
because he didn't pay the rent.
Duggie Fields recalls in The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story
that the floorboards were painted 'quite quickly' after they had moved
in and said in the Mojo Madcap issue:
When Jules left Iggy came soon after and she wasn't there for long.
Jenny Spires (Syd's ex) brought her round. Iggy was just around, she
didn't officially live here.
JenS
has indeed confirmed to the Church: "I took her (Iggy) to Wetherby
Mansions in January 1969." (Did the Reverend ever tell that it was
thanks to biographer Julian Palacios that the Church got in contact with
her?)
It is hard to remember things after 40 years, and even harder to
pinpoint an exact date for certain events, but JenS certainly wasn't in
England anymore in April as she had left for America, and by then the
floor boards had already been painted. "When Syd and Gretta et al went
to The Isle of Wight Trina - Gretta's sister - and I were in America and
heading for the Woodstock Rock Festival."
Also Iggy (or Evelyn, in her interview with
the Croydon Guardian) and Margaretta Barclay (in her interview
with the Church) remember the painted floorboards. But opinions differ
whether the floor boards were painted with a photo session in mind or
not.
Paint can.
Gunsmoke
Just like several (tiny) details in the pictures have given away the
possible shooting
date, the answer may lie in the pictures themselves. What most
people, including the Reverend, have neglected to do for the last 40
years was to look for the obvious. Not so for Late
Night member and Syd Barrett collector Dark Globe:
After reading Jenny Spires's claim that the floorboards were painted
when Syd moved into the flat, long before the Madcap photo session, I
had another look at some of the photos. (…)
The 'smoking
gun' for me is the can of paint and paintbrush which appears in one of
the Madcap session photos:
this would imply that the floorboards had only been painted recently.
Of
course, it could be that he was only 'topping them up' but it certainly
looks like he (and maybe Iggy) had done some painting close to the
session.
Paint can, Storm Thorgerson.
The photographic evidence is there.
The Mick Rock pictures from Syd Barrett's room not only reveal that
parts of the floor had not
been painted yet but also show that a can of (blue) paint and a big
paintbrush are hiding next to Syd's mattress, together with a coffee mug
and an empty wine glass.
At least two Storm Thorgerson pictures from that spring day show the
paint can as well. The booklet
of the Crazy Diamond Syd Barrett box shows the (partly cut off) can at
the left side of the picture and the print of the so-called toy plane picture
that was sold on eBay in November last
year has it in full. It is a pity that only a very small image of
this print exists and that its owner, if (s)he is aware of its
existence, still hasn't donated some hi-res scans to the Syd Barrett
community.
Iggy's Feet, Mick Rock.
Dancing Barefoot
Whilst Mick Rock was at it he also took some 'nude
study' pictures from Iggy but this time the Reverend will not get
exited over her churrigueresque features but over her dirty feet. Her
feet are black (or should that be: blue?) and probably she had been
walking barefoot over the wet paint.
Stating the obvious is difficult when one is too concentrated on a
subject. Church member Banjer and Sax found a simple explanation
why painting a floor in two different colours will take several days or
even weeks:
Maybe it took several days to complete the job, more than two days, and
they would not necessarily have to have been consecutive days. So maybe
days passed or even months passed between different phases of floor
painting. It seems like it could have been difficult to do both colours
at the same time.
The logical thing to do is indeed wait for the first colour to dry
before starting the second colour. But the mystery of The Madcap Laughs
photo shoot only gets bigger and, as usual, archbishop Dark Globe
is to blame:
There was more than one photo shoot though. A second photo shoot (not by
Mick Rock, but by Storm Thorgerson, FA) shows Syd doing yoga and
posing in front of one of his paintings. The floorboards are painted in
these photos so they were probably taken sometime after the session with
Iggy. Syd's hair is a noticeably longer in these photos too.
These pictures were used by Hipgnosis for the cover of the vinyl
compilation Syd Barrett. It is obvious that they were taken on a
later date: the floor seems to be completely painted, but also the room
has been reorganised. While the far left corner on the daffodil session pictures
is empty it suddenly contains some canvas and paint during the yoga
session pictures.
Perhaps Storm took some photos later in the year and maybe this is how
the legend came into place that The Madcap Laughs photo session was made
after summer.
This is not as far-fetched as it seems.
Autumn Photo Session
Mick Rock states: "This '69 session was specifically done for Syd's
first solo album, The Madcap Laughs" and Storm Thorgerson more or less
claims that Hipgnosis had been summoned by record company Harvest to do
the cover.
Newspaper, Mick Rock.
But if the daffodil photo shoot really took place, as proposed by the
Church between the 14th and 21st of April 1969, Syd
Barrett had only been at two, maximum three, recording sessions for the
album. (If only we could find out the date of the newspaper lying next
to Barrett's bed?)
It is hard to believe that Harvest would approach Hipgnosis after three
studio sessions, especially as Syd Barrett was still regarded as a
liability. Between May and July of the previous year Barrett had wasted
eight recording sessions and basically EMI had given up. Peter Jenner:
It was chaos…. (…) There were always these tantalising glimpses and that
was what kept you going. (…) I think we just came to the conclusion that
we weren't getting anywhere.
So although the April 10 and 11 sessions of 1969 had been very promising
(and the one on the 17th as well) it is unlikely that the managing
director of Harvest was already thinking he had chart material. And
quite rightly so, because the fourth session was disastrous and has been
used in books and articles to emphasize Syd's lunatic behaviour. And it
wasn't getting better...
Different people tell different stories but the bottom line is that less
than a month after the first (April 1969) recording session Malcolm
Jones simply gave up. David Gilmour, who took over the producer seat in
June, maintains until today that he was asked to salvage the sessions
from the dustbin, although Malcolm Jones has tried to minimise this and
claimed that the Madcap project had not really been shelved.
It was already August 1969 when the Cantabrigian Pink Floyd members
started (stereo-)mixing the tapes, and as the band had a busy schedule
and wanted to have some holidays as well, it would take until October
for the master tapes to be ready. Now here is what the Reverend calls an
appropriate moment for the record company to commission a sleeve.
Summer 1969. Harvest hotshots ask Hipgnosis to design a sleeve for the
album that is in its final mix. Storm Thorgerson goes to Syd's flat to
take the so-called yoga-shots,
but decides later, for whatever reason, to use the (Mick Rock
influenced) daffodil-shots instead. (Probably when Thorgerson presented
the sleeve to Harvest, he didn't tell that the pictures came really from
a photo shoot earlier in the year. That's how we know Storm.)
A legend is born.
We leave the last word to JenS who was so friendly to contact us again:
It's truly astonishing about the floor! All I can say is the floor had
already been painted when I arrived. (January 1969, FA)
There were parts of the room unfinished in the bay window and to the
right hand corner of the room and fireplace where Syd's bed was
originally and where Iggy is poised on the stool. I guess they must have
had to paint these remaining bits before the shoot. They may also of
course given it a second, more refreshing coat for the shoot.
Interesting, bit by bit a more accurate picture is emerging.
To accompany this article a new gallery has been uploaded: Paintbox.
Sources (other than the above internet links): Chapman, Rob: A
Very Irregular Head, Faber and Faber, London, 2010, p. 235. Drummond,
Paul: In My Room, Mojo 196, March 2010, p. 82. Direct link
to the scanned pdf
document (hosted at the Church). Fields, Duggie
interview in: The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story, DVD UK Ltd
2005. Jones, Malcolm: The Making Of The Madcap Laughs, Brain
Damage, 2003, p. 13. Parker, David: Random Precision, Cherry
Red Books, London, 2001, p. 136, p. 138. Rock, Mick: Psychedelic
Renegades, Plexus, London, 2007, p. 18-19, p. 58. The paint can
pictures can be found at pages 72, 76, 83 and 84. Iggy's dirty feet on
page 69.
What you see at the left is the only remaining copy in the world of an
unreleased 1967 Pink Floyd single: Vegetable
Man / Scream
Thy Last Scream. Approximate value: 10,000 US dollars,
even on a rainy day.
Part one: Holy Syd!
The songs are on an acetate
disc and without going too much into detail we can simply say that
an acetate is a test pressing of a vinyl record. An acetate has not been
made to last and every time a needle reads the groove the acetate is
gradually but irrecoverably damaged. Bands and producers often used
acetates to test how a record would sound on cheap home record
players before sending the master tape to the record factory.
This precious copy is in the hands of Saq, an American collector
in Los Angeles who acquired it about 15 years ago and has cherished it
ever since. It is, without doubt, what collectors call a 'holy grail': a
rare, valuable object sought after by other collectors. One of the side
effects of a 'holy grail' is that it can only acquire that status if
other collectors are aware of its existence, but not too many. If nobody
knows you have an exclusive item it might as well not exist. Syd Barrett
already acknowledged this in his Arnold
Layne song: it 'takes two to know'.
Holy grails can be frail, especially when they only consist of audio
material. One popular Pink Floyd holy grail are, sorry: were, the
so-called work in progress tapes of The
Wall (most people, websites and bootlegs refer to these as The
Wall demos, which they are clearly not, but that is an entirely
different discussion). Around 1999 they circulated amongst top-notch
collectors and were generally unknown to the public, The Anchor
included, until a track called The
Doctor (an early version of Comfortably
Numb) was leaked as an alt.music.pink-floyd
Christmas 2000 gift. It didn't take long before the complete set was
weeded to the fans, who were happy to say the least except for the one
of the few who had lost their priceless treasure.
Part two: the guns of Navarro
When Barrett fan Giuliano Navarro met Saq in 2009 he was let on
the secret and from this moment Giuliano became a man with a mission. He
received pictures
of the acetate and finally, on the 15th of January 2011, he proudly
announced at Late
Night:
I tried to stay in communication with him for more than a year and
begged him to at least have the tracks recorded. He agreed to do me the
favour, and sent the acetate to a professional studio in San Francisco.
(...)
After more than a year of waiting, I finally got the tracks and now I
want to share them with all of you. We are the real Syd Barrett crazies
and we all deserve to listen to his art. There should be no discovery
made that ends up back in the vaults.
Giuliano Navarro is, without doubt, a man of honour. But it helped that
Saq didn't really ran the risk that making the content public would ruin
his holy grail (as with The Wall WIP tapes). Quite the contrary: he
still has an ultra-rare acetate from 1967; is envied by collectors
from over the world and, knowing that; the value of this unique
recording can only sky-rocket.
At least that is what he thought until about a couple of weeks ago.
Part three: cracks in the ice
An uproarious bigmouth called Felix
Atagong, who also goes by the ridiculous epithet Reverend of the Holy
Church of Iggy the Inuit, proposed Giuliano to upload the sound
files to Yeeshkul.
At first the recordings were received with great enthusiasm, but after
some days the place was stirring with comments of an entirely different
nature.
Yeeshkul is a place where Pink Floyd audio collectors meet and share
files through a torrent
network. They vary from the average je-ne-sais-quoi fan to
the specialised sound freak who has the means and the knowledge to find
out whether a certain audio file comes from an earlier or a later
generation tape. And obviously this spectacular find was going to be
analysed to the bit...
Navarro received MP3 files taken from the acetate and shared
these immediately with the fans. Not unusual as MP3
is about the most popular sound format in the world, but it does
compress the sound and reduces the quality. The Yeeshkul specialist
sound brigade argue that lossless files in 24/96
(or even 24/192) should exist as well. Nobody will be that stupid to put
an ultra-rare (and very fragile) acetate on a turntable, only to convert
the audio to MP3.
16 Khz cut.
Vince666 did a spectrum analysis of the MP3 files and found that
the sound had been mysteriously cut-off at 16 Khz (see left side image).
Some members maintain that this is a typical result of MP3 compression,
but others disagree. But despite the compression and the obvious
quality-loss these mono tracks still sound a lot better than other
versions that have been circulating for decades.
Felixstrange (no relative to the Church) discovered 'something
which sounds a lot like tape damage at 0:54 during "Scream Thy Last
Scream':
The noise a minute into STLS is definitely a result of creases in
magnetic tape. However, there is definitely vinyl/acetate surface noise
present. I've been doing a lot of vinyl rips lately and I immediately
recognized the all-too-familiar clicks of debris in the grooves of a
record.
Question: How can a brand new, original EMI master show tape
damage, before it has even been used to make vinyl records out of it? Answer:
It can't.
Part four: screaming vegetables
Vegetable Man and Scream Thy Last Scream (let's shorten that to VM
and STLS, shall we?) are both unreleased Syd Barrett - Pink Floyd
gems from 1967. EMI has been tempted to put these on compilations
before, but for different (copyright) reasons that never happened,
luckily two different mixes have leaked to the public.
When (The)
Dark Side Of The Moon proved successful EMI compiled early Floyd as A
Nice Pair and put the two Barrett solo-albums together in a Syd
Barrett budget release. The selling figures (especially in the USA
where the solo albums had never been released) were important enough for
EMI to beg for a third Syd Barrett solo album. Producer Peter
Jenner soon found out that Syd Barrett really wasn't in the singing
mood and scraped the barrel in order to find some unreleased material.
On the 13th of August 1974 Peter Jenner (with a little help from John
Leckie and Pat Stapley) mixed a stereo tape of unreleased Syd Barrett
and Pink Floyd originals, including VM and STLS. This tape, with
reference 6604Z, almost immediately evaporated from the EMI
archives and re-materialised – so goes the legend – miraculously in one
of Bernard
White's cupboards.
Almost day by day thirteen years later, Malcolm
Jones compiled his personal 'Syd Barratt (sic) Rough Mixes'.
It is believed that he accidentally lost this tape just when he was
passing by the front door of an anonymous bootlegger.
Part five: check your sources
The Anchor needs to get a bit nerdy and technical here, like those Bible
scholars who combine different fourth century Greek editions in order to
reconstruct the ultimate Bible source. We are going to compare the
different versions of the tracks, so you have been warned.
Barrett fans have strong reasons to believe that the Malcolm Jones 1987
(mono) tapes are the closest to the original 1967 Pink Floyd recordings.
In 1974 Peter Jenner added extra effects, echo and reverb to the mix,
most notably on VM, and these are absent on the Malcolm Jones tape. The
Malcolm Jones mix of STLS fades out, while Jenner's version ends
abruptly with – yet – another sound effect.
That is not all. In the case of Vegetable Man there is even a third mix
- the so-called Beechwoods
tape. It has survived on tape from a 1969 radio show where Nick Mason
opened his Pandora’s box of 1967 outtakes. A fan found it back in 2001
and promptly donated it to Kiloh Smith from Madcaps
Laughing.
As the acetate allegedly dates from 1967; Vegetable Man must
sound like the Beechwoods version, and Scream Thy Last
Scream must sound like the Malcolm Jones rough mix.
Right? Wrong.
Part six: listen to the music
Yeeshkul member MOB compared all known versions and came back
with the following report.
Vegetable Man.
Vegetable Man:
The acetate mix is mono, but definitely different than the Malcolm Jones
mono mix from 1987.
The 1967 acetate mix is also different from the 1967 Beechwoods tape,
believed to be the most authentic studio version of the song. On the
Beechwoods tape, there is absolutely no echo or reverb during the
sentence "Vegetable man where are you" but they are present on the
acetate.
The only version with extra echo and reverb is the 1974 stereo mix by
Peter Jenner.
MOB concludes:
Actually, if I take the 1974 Jenner stereo mix and convert it to mono, I
have the same mix as the "acetate" mix. So to me it seems the current
mix is not from 1967 (if it was the case it should be close to the 1967
Beechwoods mix, and it's not), but from 1974.
Maybe the 1974 Jenner versions were copied, traded, with some
"mono-ization" in the lineage, then pressed as fake acetates?
Scream Thy Last Scream.
Scream Thy Last Scream:
The 1967 acetate mono mix is not the same as the Jones 1987 mono mix
(the Jones version fades out during the street noises). Instead of that,
on the acetate mix, the street noises end abruptly with an echo effect.
MOB:
Is it pure coincidence that the echo is exactly the same effect as the
one used by Jenner during his 1974 mixdown?
Again, if you mono-ize the 1974 Jenner mix, you have the current acetate
mix (minus the scratches and tape flaws). Same effects at the same
moments.
Part seven: the time-paradox explanation
Of course this all makes sense, especially in a Barrett universe, and
the contradiction can easily be explained.
Somewhere in 1967 Barrett invented a time-travelling device by combining
a clock with a washing machine. When asked to compose a third single he
hopped to 1974, stole tape number 6604Z from the EMI archives and
returned to 1967.
Thus it is perfectly logical that the 1967 acetate sounds exactly like
the 1974 Jenner mix and en passant we have solved the mystery how
the tape has disappeared from the EMI vaults.
The utterly boring explanation is that the 1967 acetate is fake, counterfeit,
a forgery, made by a scrupulous thief to rob a few thousands of
dollars from a collector’s pocket. In other words: mono-ization turned
into monetisation.
Part eight: let's get physical
The Anchor is like one of those boring Roger Waters songs: once we're in
a drive, we can't stop and we have to make extra parts of the same
monotonous melody over and over again.
Even without listening to the counterfeit acetate there still is
something dubious about it (thanks neonknight, emmapeelfan,...).
Due to their production process and their fragility acetates
are - most of the time - single sided, just like the surviving acetates
of Arnold Layne and See Emily Play. Albums were even issued on two
different single sided acetates to avoid further damage (but some double
sided acetates do exist, like the very first Pink Floyd recording with
Bob Klose in the band: Lucy Leave / King Bee [but that was definitely
not an EMI acetate]);
Engineers at EMI were invariably nerdy administrative types, who
attended recording sessions dressed in white lab coats. These cheeky
little fellows would never label an acetate without putting the name of
the band on top;
Although a pretty fair forgery the label on the record is not identical
to the 'official' EMI acetate label, there also seem to be some glue
marks that are usually not present on real acetates;
and last but not least;
Acetates are ad hoc test pressings and in the extremely rare case
of a double acetate this means that a certain relationship has to
exist between both tracks, like both sides from a single or takes from
the same session. STLS was recorded on 7 August 1967 (some overdubs were
made in December 1967 and January 1968 for a possible inclusion on A
Saucerful of Secrets). VM was recorded between 9 and 12 October
1967. They were never meant to be each other's flip side on a single, so
finding them on the same acetate simply makes no sense, unless it is a
fake, of course.
Part nine: a spoonful of charades
So basically here is what happened:
1. someone, somewhere in summertime, got hold of the Peter Jenner 1974
stereo-mixes of VM and STLS (not that weird as they have been
circulating for at least 3 decades);
2. these were copied on a tape (perhaps even a cassette for home
entertainment) but unfortunately it was damaged, trampled, eaten and
vomited out by the player (crumpled sound between 51 and 55 seconds);
3. this cassette was downgraded from stereo to mono;
4. the mono 'remaster' was cut on acetate, a fake EMI label was glued on
it, and sold to a collector (probably in the mid Nineties);
5. the acetate, believed to be genuine by its owner, was copied in a
professional studio to (hopefully) a lossless digital format (there are
vinyl record clicks to prove that);
6. the digital copy was then converted to MP3 (with a compression cut
off at 16 Khz) and torrented through Yeeshkul.
Part ten: let's add some extra confusion
It has now been established that the 1967 acetate is fake and a
mere mono copy of the 1974 stereo mix, but there is still some confusion
and a bit of hope.
Although a copy from a copy from a copy the acetate sounds better,
crispier and fuller than the Jenner mixes that are currently
circulating. To put it into technical gobbledygook: the forger has a
better sounding, earlier generation tape at his disposal than the one
that Barrett collectors have now. This is something what duly pisses
most Syd anoraks off.
Instead of sharing the tape to the fans it has been used to produce
bootleg acetates. One can assume that the criminal sold more than one
unique acetate, so there must be other collectors around who have
purchased this record, believing they had the only copy in the world.
The high-priced acetate market is not that big. Perhaps if we stick
together, we can trace the seller who must now tremble like a leaf, and
before cutting off his balls and roasting them on a fire, confiscate the
low generation tape and use it for the better.
Fake Pink Foyd 1967 acetate.
Part eleven: last words
What you see at the left is an acetate counterfeit of a nonexistent 1967
Pink Floyd single Vegetable Man / Scream Thy Last Scream. Approximate
value: 10 US dollars, not a cent more.
Let us be fair: not all is lost for Saq, the current owner.
The Anchor has got an excellent business relationship with Fine Art
Auctioneers & Valuers Bonhams. For a small 35% commission rate the
Anchor is willing to put the acetate on sale at Bonhams as they already
have a habit of selling overcharged fake Barrett memorabilia: Bonhams
Sells Fake Barrett Poem.
The Anchor wishes to thank: Saquib Rasheed, Giuliano Navarro,
Hallucalation, Vince666, Felixstrange, MOB, Neonknight, Emmapeelfan and
the other participants at Late Night and Yeeshkul.
The Anchor is the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit's satirical
division, intended for people with a good heart, but a rather bad
character. More info: The
Anchor. Read our legal stuff: Legal
Stuff.
In January of this year Mojo
published a (way too short) Mark
Blakearticle
about Iggy, who – in the Sixties - was metonymically but erroneously
described as an Eskimo. There is a realistic chance that this blog,
politically correct named the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit, would never
have seen the light of day if Iggy had been nicknamed something else.
Titled SYD BARRETT'S ENIGMATIC COVER COMPANION CLEARS UP SOME QUERIES
the article actually added to the mystery, although Mark Blake is, of
course, not to blame: Iggy is just mysterious by nature. And the more we
find out, the more mysterious it gets.
The Church was erected for just that, to reveal the enigma behind an
enigmatic woman but now that Evelyn has stepped into Mark
Zuckerberg's limelight the Church has made a deliberate step
backwards. Let it be known that the Church will be discreet about
present Evelyn. She is not Truman
Burbank and it is none of our business what she had for breakfast
this morning anyway (bacon butties and a steaming hot cup of tea, if you
wanna know, and the Reverend had some croissants and a cup of coffee).
Mark Blake also published an extended 'director's
cut' of his interview and now the time for the Church has come to
comment, amend or append on some of his poignant paragraphs. We will be
cruel and ruthless although the reader should realise that above every
line a virtual 'Well done, Mark Blake!' Church sign is blinking. A bit
like this:
NME 1037
Before long, The Holy Church Of Iggy The Inuit, a fansite in her honour,
had appeared, its webmaster, Felix Atagong, sifting through ever scrap
of information gleaned from MOJO and elsewhere with a forensic
scientist's attention to detail. Among Felix's discoveries was a
November 1966 issue of NME which featured a photo of "Iggy who is half
eskimo" dancing at South Kensington's Cromwellian club. (The Strange
Tale Of Iggy The Eskimo Pt. 1, paragraph 3)
Mark Blake.
Mark gives the Reverend too many credits here. The Church mainly rips
other people's ideas (not an uncommon practice with Churches, although
they mostly prefer to rip other people's wallets) and the November 26,
1966 New Musical Express Iggy picture
was not discovered by the Church. The scan was already floating around
on the web. Neptune
Pink Floyd, for instance, published
it in November 2006, two years before the Church started.
However the Church did trace a copy of that particular NME, hoping there
would be some extra news about Evelyn, but to our regret Iggy is not
mentioned at all in the accompanying text
(several scans of NME 1037 can be found in our gallery).
The Croydon Guardian
Believing that Iggy may have gone to school in Thornton Heath, Jeff and
Anthony contacted The Croydon Guardian, who ran an article - So Where
Did She Go To, My Lovely - enquiring after the whereabouts of the girl
"who entirely captured the spirit of the '60s". (The Strange Tale Of
Iggy The Eskimo Pt. 1, paragraph 4)
Time to pull the plug of that 'Well done, Mark Blake!' sign above we're
afraid, as The
Croydon Guardian was informed by none other than the Holy Church of
Iggy the Inuit.
After the Church was informed that Iggy had been a regular visitor of The
Orchid in Purley
the Reverend googled and found two Croydon Guardian articles about the
dance hall: In
dance hall days (9th August 2006) and We
remember the Orchid (29th August 2006).
The Church contacted Brian Roote, a historian from the Bourne
Society who had been researching the history of the Orchid, but
without success. Journalist Kerry McQueeney, author of the Orchid
articles, passed the Church mail to Kirsty Whalley, editor of the
Croydon Guardian Heritage pages. She replied the Church on the third
September of 2008:
We would like to feature this story in the newspaper next week and
hopefully it will prompt a few people to call in.
Kirsty Whalley.
Kirsty Whalley also asked the Church for a decent Iggy picture and here
is what the Reverend answered:
Probably the best way to get an (unpublished) picture of Iggy is to
contact Anthony Stern (former boyfriend of Iggy in 1966) who made a
movie with her that will be shown on The City Wakes festival in
Cambridge, so more than 40 years after it was filmed. (Taken from:
Visitor at Orchid Ballroom - 1965 – 1967, mail to Kirsty Whalley, 3
September 2008 22:04.)
Kirsty Whalley took the information, given by the Holy Church of Iggy
the Inuit, to heart (probably the first time in the Reverend’s entire
career that a woman actually listened to his advice) and interviewed
Anthony Stern who also donated a previous unpublished picture
of Evelyn, just like the Church had predicted. She then did an excellent
job by contacting Jeff Dexter (or perhaps Jeff Dexter contacted her
after having spoken to Anthony Stern) and wrote a damn fine article: Where
did she go?
It took over a year for someone to 'call in', because in February 2010
Kirsty Whalley published the very first Iggy interview in 40 years that
even took the Church by surprise (see: Little
old lady from London-by-the-Sea). What the Reverend doesn't
understand though is why the Croydon Guardian journalist doesn't like to
be reminded that it was the Church who gave her the scoop. So no pretty
blinking Church sign for you, Kirsty!
From Dieppe to Delhi
Iggy's father was a British army officer, who served alongside Louis
Mountbatten, and attended the official handover ceremony from Great
Britain to India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharial Nehru in 1947. (The
Strange Tale Of Iggy The Eskimo Pt. 1, paragraph 7)
Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas George Mountbatten.
Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas George Mountbatten,
born in 1900 and killed by an IRA
bomb in 1979, was destined to pursue a glorious military career. Like so
many of his aristocratic peers this career was not per se based
on actual military performances but on the amount of names he had been
given at birth. After a military débâcle at Dieppe
in 1942, where 3,623 out of 6,086 soldiers, mostly Canadians, were
either killed, wounded, or captured by the Germans, Mountbatten was
given a new military playground as Supreme Allied Commander South
East Asia Command. The Dieppe raid (unauthorised by the general
staff) provoked a schism between the Canadian and British army leaders
during the second world war and the mistrust would linger on for decades
to come.
In 1947 Mountbatten was nominated Viceroy and Governor-General of
India and his principal task was to lead India (separated from
Pakistan) in a peaceful way towards independence. This lead to one of
the bloodiest massacres the subcontinent has ever seen. Muslims fled
from India to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to India and
about 500,000 people lost their lives in the process (death
toll numbers vary from 200,000 to a million).
Up the Khyber
"My father also knew all about Mountbatten's wife's affair with Nehru,"
she adds mischievously. During a spell of leave, he had travelled to a
remote village in the Himalayas "where he met the woman that would
become my mother." Iggy was born in Pakistan, and attended army schools
in India and Aden, before the family moved to England. (The Strange Tale
Of Iggy The Eskimo Pt. 1, paragraph 7)
In the night of 14 to 15 August 1947 India and Pakistan officially
separated from London and because this had been supervised so well by
Mountbatten, he was entitled to another promotion. From now on he could
add the title of Governor-General of India on his business card.
In other words: Mountbatten was now the de facto monarch of the new
state.
Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Cynthia Annette Mountbatten.
Lucky there was still his wife, Edwina
Cynthia Annette Mountbatten. Her part-time job was to visit the
refugee camps her husband was so kind to fill up and to hump India's
prime minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, although there are some biographers who maintain that their
relationship was purely platonic.
But enough politics. Around that time Iggy's father, posted in Pakistan,
went for an evening stroll in the Himalaya's where his spell of leave
soon developed in a spell of love. It is believed that in March
1947 the couple did exchange something more than friendly kisses. The
Church always believed that Iggy was somewhat older than Syd Barrett
(see: When
Syd met Iggy), but this new evidence shows she is nearly two years
younger than him (and, should this be of any interest to anyone, both
Syd and Ig were born on a Sunday).
If Ig attended school in Pakistan, the family must have been there until
early 1950. Although the country was independent several hundred of
British officers stayed in Pakistan until the Pakistan army had enough
officers to take care of its own. There was a 1st Battalion Wiltshire
Regiment at Rawalpindi (Pakistan), with Indian bases at Amritsar,
Calcutta, Jhansi, Jullunder (Jalandhar) and Lahore (Pakistan) but the
Church's research couldn't link Ig's father to this battalion.
The Wiltshire Regiment left the Indias in October 1947, but her father
stayed in Pakistan for a couple of years longer.
Update March 2018: Iggy's mother, so was confirmed to us, wasn't
from Pakistan, but from Mizoram, situated at the North-East of India,
sharing borders with Bangladesh and Myanmar. Probably that is where Iggy
was born and went to school. The 'evening stroll' of Iggy's dad did not
take place in the Himalaya's, but at the Lushai Hills, a mountain range
in Mizoram and Tripura, India.
Map of Aden.
The garden of Aden
It is not that weird either that the family was dispatched to Aden.
Before 1937 Aden was an (overseas) part of British India and after that
it became a separate British Crown colony, much to the enjoyment of
philatelists from all over the world. It would stay under British reign
until 1963 and in 1967 it was absorbed by the People's Republic of South
Yemen.
Kids could go to the Khormaksar
primary and secondary school (close to the RAF airport base), but there
was the (Roman-Catholic) Good
Shepherd Convent School for girls as well, the Isthmus
School and the Selim
Girl's School that was badly damaged in the anti-Semitic pogroms from
1947.
There are quite a few blogs and forums
about Aden with hundreds of pictures of the fifties and sixties, but the
Reverend couldn't find Iggy back, yet. The Mojo article has a picture
from Ig at Worthing Beach, in the early Sixties, so around 1963 they may
have returned to England.
London Underground
In January 1969 Iggy met Syd, thanks to their common friend Jenny
Spires. The outside world didn't always realise that Ig and Syd became
an item. Ig was unaware that Syd had been a pop star, but then one day:
He [Syd] then said, 'Would you listen to this?' And he bought out this
big, old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder, and said, 'Tell me what
you think'." Syd then played her the songs that would end up on The
Madcap Laughs. One track, Terrapin, made an immediate impression. "I
said, 'That's quite catchy', and, of course, I don't think Syd was
really into catchy...It was a long tape, and he didn't demand any
opinion, but just asked if I thought it was OK. At the end he said
'Someone at EMI - I cannot remember the name - wants me to make a
record. How would you feel about having a rock star boyfriend?'" (The
Strange Tale Of Iggy The Eskimo Pt. 1, paragraph 12)
This may have happened in the weekend of 12 and 13 April 1969 after
Malcolm Jones and Syd had started working on the new album:
During the tea break we discussed going back to some of the songs
started the previous year, in particular 'Golden Hair', and perhaps
'Late Night' although the original version of that had been destroyed,
it seemed. We returned to the studio and started work on another new
song, 'Terrapin'. In one take Syd laid down a guitar and vocal track
that was to be the master! At my suggestion Syd double tracked his vocal
part, and that was it!
One day Syd Barrett disappeared from the flat and Iggy, in a jealous
mood, fearing he was seeing another woman, tracked down her friend in
David Gilmour's appartment, just a few blocks away.
"I went in, shouting, 'OK, where is she?' thinking there was a woman
hiding in one of the rooms. But, of course, the meeting had been with
Dave about the record they were making together." Barrett left Iggy with
Gilmour, but rather the worse for wear, she knocked the stylus on his
record player accidentally scratching his copy of Pink Floyd's brand new
album. "I have no idea what album it was, only that it was their new
album," Iggy sighs. (The likely candidate seems to be Soundtrack From
The Film More) "So Dave threw me out..." (The Strange Tale Of Iggy The
Eskimo Pt. 2, paragraph 3)
Here is again an excellent opportunity to grab the Church's copies of
Glenn Povey's 'Echoes' and David Parker's 'Random Precision'. According
to David Parker Barrett had his last recording session with Malcolm
Jones on the 3rd and 4th of May, while the David Gilmour sessions
started a month later (see our 1969 calendar).
On the 6th of May however 'a set of rough mixes' of the album was made,
presumably to be handed over to Gilmour (and Waters), who had promised
to finalise the album (it is significant that on that tape Opel, Swan
Lee and Rhamadan are still present).
But probably Barrett, Jones, Gilmour and Waters had been discussing
about all this before. The Church has always believed that Iggy left Syd
somewhere in April and up till now Ig's visit to Gilmour's apartment
fits nicely into that scheme.
Mark Blake wisely deducts the scratched record has to be 'More'.
More was released on Friday, the 13th of June 1969, but of course
Gilmour may have had a copy some weeks before. Another, but more
unlikely, candidate is 'Ummagumma'.
Although only released in November the Floyd had already been recording
some pieces for this album in January and February, together with the
'More' sessions, so perhaps Gilmour and Barrett could've listened to an
acetate instead. And of course the live tracks of that album must have
been circulating amongst the band members as well.
But there is still another possibility. Margaretta Barclay told the
Church she has a postcard sent to her and Ig at Wetherby Mansions in
June 1969 so perhaps Ig's departure took place after More had been
officially released (see: Gretta
Speaks 2).
Notes (other than internet links mentioned above): Parker,
David: Random Precision, Cherry Red Books, London, 2001, p.
139-158. Jones, Malcolm: The Making Of The Madcap Laughs,
Brain Damage, 2003, p. 7. Povey, Glenn: Echoes, the complete
history of Pink Floyd, 3C Publishing, 2008, p. 104-112.
The Church wishes to thank: Adenairways.com, Mark Blake, Jenny Spires,
Natashaa' and the beautiful people at Late Night. ♥ Iggy ♥
The Anchor's editor was kindly asked, although summoned would be a more
appropriate term, to do an independent review of an interview of the
Reverend of the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit that recently appeared on
the extraordinary Spanish Barrett blog Solo
en las Nubes (Alone in the Clouds).
Run by Antonio Jesús the blog is a mix of information and
fun, containing several references to La Sagrada Iglesia de Iggy La
Esquimal, that could be without doubt a title for one of the weirder Pedro
Almodóvar movies. Quite recently, in a dark corner of The
Anchor, dimly lit by a dripping candle in a bottle on the rough
wooden table, I bend over to the gorgeous black-haired girl sitting in
front of me, slowly whispering 'La Sagrada Iglesia de Iggy La Esquimal'
in her ears (actually, in one ear only as it is quite infeasible to
whisper in two ears at the same time, except for Mick Jagger perhaps).
Oh Alex Fagotin baby, she passionately sighed with heaving
breasts, say that to me one more time, but unfortunately my hair already
had caught fire by then.
One very interesting part of the Spanish Barrett blog are the so-called self-interviews
(or autoentrevista) and so far Antonio has persuaded Duggie
Fields and Laughing Madcaps front-man Kiloh Smith to reveal
their souls in these autobiographical Rorschach
tests.
Titled 'Felix Atagong: "Un hombre sincero"' the latest
self-interview has provoked roars of hysterical laughter from the Åland
Islands to Wallis
and Futuna. We reveal no real secrets if we tell you that the
Reverend has left a trail of female victims from Oslo to Tarzana
and rumour goes there will be more to follow despite many international
warnings.
The Reverend's self-interview can already be described as absolute
rock-bottom and without doubt it will be voted the all-time-worst-entry
at the - otherwise excellent - Spanish Barrett blog. Time to let you
decide for yourself what a kind of pompous pathetic pumpernickel that
Reverend of the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit really is. Ladies and
gentlemen, the Anchor presents, but not too proudly: Felix Atagong: an
honest man...
Solo en las Nubes.
Felix Atagong: "Un hombre sincero"
Even the roads of rock are unfathomable.
Felix Atagong, from Belgium, has created a blog dedicated to Iggy, the
model of The Madcap Laughs album. Nobody knew her whereabouts for almost
forty years. The coincidence of life, meaning that it is not
coincidental at all, has lead this case to an unexpected but
long-awaited path.
Publius Enigma.
In his self-interview, Mr. Atagong, the Sherlock Holmes of the Floydian
world (he even helped to clarify the Publius Enigma) and always
committed to the truth he slowly peels the layers of the story of his
blog, and more... (introduction written by Antonio Jesús)
1. What is the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit?
The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit is a blog for Syd Barrett fans dealing
with the – very short – period in 1969 when Syd's alleged girlfriend
Iggy lived with the singer. Apart from some unverified rumours about her
Eskimo roots nobody really knew something about her, nor what happened
to her after her sudden disappearance in 1969.
2. How did it all start?
The Church more or less started as a prank. Discussing the (theoretical)
possibility of a Barrett religion on the Late Night forum I mentioned a Saint
Iggy Congregation in 2007 and when, in March 2008, DollyRocker
recognised Iggy acting in a 1967 British documentary, I jokingly announced
the Church's birth. But the idea still ripened for five months before
any blog post appeared.
3. What were your intentions?
These were quite ambiguous by design.
Obviously the Church frame, lead by an all-knowing Reverend who
addresses his flock in a swollen and theatrical language, is satirical.
I wanted to imitate those overzealous fans, who can't stop arguing that
Barrett is the world's most underrated musical genius and graphical
artist and who painstakingly, almost in religious stupor, scrutinize
every minute of his life.
But while I was developing the blog I soon realised that I was
painstakingly, almost in religious stupor, collecting all available
puzzle pieces that lay shattered over the net, on blogs, in forums, that
were published in different articles and biographies, thus creating the
ultimate Iggy repository.
Both concepts share an an osmotic relationship and - by being what it is
and what it pretends to be – the Church has evolved into a meta-concept,
although that thin ironic line is probably completely ignored by the
people who visit it.
4. But the Church did trigger an Iggy revival, didn't it?
Not really. Every avalanche starts with a couple of snowflakes and by
sheer luck the Holy Church happened to be on the right place at the
right time. After nearly 40-years of silence several people
simultaneously remembered Iggy. Most of the time the Church was not
involved but has been monitoring and commentating these events. What
nobody expected, except perhaps for the Holy Igquisition, is that it
resulted in some sort of Iggymania.
Iggymania started when Mojo magazine put Syd Barrett on its cover in
2010. Of course that cover story was all about The Madcap Laughs 40th
birthday but the Church had clearly inspired one of the articles. Not
only did this boost the hits on the website but a few days later The
Church could reveal that Evelyn (Iggy) had been found back as well and
that thanks to Mojo.
Beginning of this year Pink Floyd biographer Mark Blake could finally
interview Iggy and that is when Iggymania fully exploded.
5. Not bad for something that started as a joke.
Syd and Iggy - Spring 1969.
The Church had already turned serious when JenS shared her memories with
us, revealing that she (probably) introduced Iggy to Syd and pinpointing
The Madcap Laughs photo-shoot date in spring, rather than in the autumn
of 1969. Some time later another acquaintance of Syd gave her first
interview ever to the Church. Margaretta Barclay and her boyfriend Rusty
were regular visitors at Syd's flat and they even tried to resuscitate
Barrett's interest in music by dragging him over to Meic Stevens, who is
still some kind of weird folk cult figure.
I find it rewarding that some of the Church theories have been reprinted
in magazine articles and biographies, so I guess we're not all rubbish
after all.
6. But finding Iggy also presented a major crisis for the Church,
isn't it?
It is the ambiguity of all organisations that have a certain goal. What
do you do if the goal has been reached? What will Greenpeace do if
no-one hunts little seals any more? The worst thing that could happen to
the Church was to find Iggy! But every time the Reverend uttered the
fear there would be lack of Iggy, something new turned up. And 2011 has
already proved to be no exception.
Thinking about the future the Church did some reorganising and will
continue developing into other areas, of course not neglecting its
primary task to inform about al things Ig. One of the new items at the
Church will be a gossip corner called 'The Anchor', named after the
Cambridge pub Syd Barrett used to visit in the early Sixties. We hope it
will stir things up as the Barrett community has become quite lethargic
lately. We're all old farts who fall asleep after our afternoon tea and
biscuits.
7. The question we are all waiting for: is Iggy aware of it at all
and what does she think of the Church?
Evelyn kept a low profile over the years, although she apparently never
hid the fact that she had been on the cover of The Madcap Laughs album.
But the path of Iggy and the path of the Barrett fan community simply
didn't converge for the last 40 years.
Recently Iggy has contacted the Church and she gave us valuable
information. However the question is what will happen when Iggymania
freezes over. I feel it a bit hypocrite to say that now, but it was
never the Church's intention to invade Iggy's privacy.
8. This interview should have at least one anoraky question,
reflecting the true nature of the Church. Does the 'eskimo chain' line
in Barrett's Dark Globe refer to Iggy?
Dark Globe is a very poignant, hermetic track and, as is the case in
many of Syd's songs, its lyrics can be interpreted in different ways. I
think Julian Palacios describes it as a lament to Pink Floyd or
something of that order. It also reads as a goodbye song to a past love
and here is where the 'eskimo chain' line fits in – or doesn't.
I'm only a person with Eskimo chain I tattooed my brain all the way... Won't
you miss me? Wouldn't you miss me at all?
Solo en las Nubes banner.
Most people who read Barrett blogs will know that Barrett recorded under
the guidance of Malcolm Jones, but somewhere in May 1969 he passed the
torch to David Gilmour (Roger Waters would join in as well on a later
date). Jones had given up in desperation, as Peter Jenner had done the
year before, that last one declaring that the sessions had been 'chaos'.
Finally it was David Gilmour who pleaded Harvest records to allow
Barrett a third and final chance to finish his solo record. Of course
this is just one interpretation and not all biographers and witnesses
agree with that. Another story goes that Malcolm Jones simply invited
Gilmour (and Waters) for marketing reasons: three Pink Floyd members for
the price of one, so to speak (four if one adds Rick Wright who might
have done some uncredited overdubs on Golden Hair). Probably the truth
lies, as is often the case, somewhere in the middle.
The first session of the third recording round took place on the 12th of
June 1969. Barrett premiered two new songs: Dark Globe and Long Gone. On
the third (and final) session (26th of July) Roger Waters joined David
Gilmour and a couple of other attempts were made of the same songs.
(this alternative version of Dark Globe, now retitled as Wouldn't You
Miss Me, was later released on the Opel outtakes album.)
It would be logical to see Long Gone and Dark Globe as an indivisible
pair as they are both sad love songs. But there is an abundance of that
theme on The Madcap Laughs. Jenny Spires told the Church: “Syd wrote
songs and not all of them were about one person or another. It was his
job. (…) Syd was not romantically inclined this way. 'I'm only a person
with Eskimo chain' refers to the evolutionary chain, not to a specific
person. He was on a very much higher spiritual plane, not so much on the
material.”
But on the other hand Syd liked to put wordplay and little nods to
reality in his texts. Pink Floyd's second single See Emily Play refers
to psychedelic debutante Emily Young and to Libby Gausden, Jennifer
Gentle from Lucifer Sam is a mixture between Jenny Spires and an ancient
English ballad called 'There were three sisters' (Jennifer, Gentle and
Rosemaree).
Dark Globe also contains the verse: “'The poppy birds way, swing twigs
coffee brands around.” At first sight this is just a nature description
set in a romantic mood but if one knows that a former girlfriend of Syd
was Vivian 'Twig' Brans it becomes quite clear that Syd has cryptically
entered her name in that line.
So while Dark Globe may have no-one specific in mind the Eskimo chain
line may have been a slight nod toward Iggy.
9. This explanation made my appetite grow for more. How can one join
the Church?
To paraphrase Groucho Marx: I don't want to belong to any Church that
will accept me as a member, so you can't. The Church does have some
loyal friends though who have helped by passing on valuable information.
Basically the Church just reaps what others have sown (a common practice
amongst churches, I might add). Many kudos go to a long list of loyal
brainstormers, informants, witnesses and friends (and I already want to
apologise for the ones I have forgotten): Anne, Anthony, Bea, Denis,
DollyRocker, Douggie, Eternal, Gretta, Jenny, Julian, Kieran, Lisa,
Mark, Paro, Prydwyn, Rod, Sadia, Sean, Vicky, our many visitors and
fans... And of course Iggy herself.
10. What is this recurring thing about the Holy Igquisition?
Nobody expects the Holy Igquisition!
Self-interview courtesy of: Solo en las Nubes (2011) - Felix
Atagong: "Un hombre sincero", introduction written by
Antonio Jesús. Self-interview written in December 2010 and updated in
January 2011.
The Anchor is the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit's satirical
division, intended for people with a good heart, but a rather bad
character. More info: The
Anchor. Read our legal stuff: Legal
Stuff.
The Holy Igquisition has got a little black book with Roger
Waters' interesting quotes in. Needless to say that this is a very
thin book, with lots of white space, but here is a phrase from the Pink
Floyd's creative genius (his words, not ours) this article
would like to begin with.
There are no simple facts. We will all invent a history that suits us
and is comfortable for us, and we may absolutely believe our version to
be the truth. (…) The brain will invent stuff, move stuff around, and so
from 30 years ago (…) there's no way any of us can actually get at the
truth.
The Reverend would – however – first want to ask one fundamental
question, of which our readers may not be quite aware of the
significance of it... If Roger Waters is such a creative genius writing
poignant one-liners criticizing his fellow rock colleagues:
Lloyd-Webber's awful stuff. Runs for years and years and years. (…) Then
the piano lid comes down. And breaks his fucking fingers. (It's
A Miracle, Amused
To Death),
...why then does he agree to release hyper-priced Immersion boxes
containing a scarf, some marbles, carton toasters, playing cards, other
debris and, oh yeah, incidentally some music as well? One can only
conclude it's a miracle. Let's just hope he doesn't get near a
piano for the next couple of years.
But probably we are too harsh in our criticism, Roger Waters has told
the press before that he is simply outvoted by the other Pink Floyd
members. This is a situation that used to be different in the past when
he reigned over the band as the sun
king, but like he will remember from his Ça
Ira days, these are the pros and cons of capitalist democracy.
Venetta Fields & Carlena Williams, 1975 (courtesy of A Fleeting Glimpse).
Remembering Games
A typical Floydian example of false memory syndrome is the visit of Syd
Barrett in the Abbey
Road studios on the 5th of June 1975. It is a mystery to us why EMI
didn't ask for entrance money that day as a complete soccer team,
including the four Pink Floyd members David
Gilmour, Nick
Mason, Roger Waters and Rick
Wright, claim they have seen, met and spoken to Syd Barrett.
Roadie (and guitar technician) Phil Taylor remembers he had a
drink in the mess with Syd and David. Stormtrooper Thorgerson
has had his say about it all but if one would give him the opportunity
he would argue – probably in yet another book rehashing the same old
material – that he started the band Pink Floyd at the first place. Other
'reliable' witnesses that day include (alphabetically sorted): Venetta
Fields, backing singer and member of The
Blackberries John
Leckie, EMI engineer and producer (but not on Wish
You Were Here) Nick
Sedgwick, friend of Roger Waters and 'official' biographer of Pink
Floyd Jerry
Shirley, Humble Pie drummer and friend of David Gilmour Carlena
Williams, backing singer and member of The Blackberries
Some say that Barrett visited the studio for two or three days in a row
and three people, including his former managers Peter
Jenner and Andrew
King, claim they spoke to Syd Barrett about a month later on David
Gilmour's wedding while the bridegroom himself claims that Syd Barrett
never showed up. To quote Pink Floyd biographer Mark
Blake: “...not two people in Pink Floyd's world have matching
stories...”, and neither do two biographies...
(A more detailed article about Barrett's visits during the Wish You Were
Here sessions, with pictures!, can be found at: Shady
Diamond.)
Iggy outtake by Mick Rock.
Amnesydelicate Matters
In his most recent, but probably not his last, picture book about Syd
Barrett Mick
Rock writes the following:
He (Syd Barrett, FA) asked me to take photos for the sleeve of
his first solo album The Madcap Laughs that autumn. At the time he was
living with yet another very pretty young lady known only as Iggy the
Eskimo. She wasn't really his girlfriend although clearly they had a
sexual relationship. But of course her presence in some of the photos we
took that day added an important element that enhanced their magical
durability.
Most biographies (all but one, Julian Palacios' Dark
Globe, in fact) put the date of The Madcap Laughs photo shoot in the
autumn of 1969 and this thanks to testimonies of Storm
Thorgerson, Mick Rock and, most of all, Malcolm
Jones. The Church, however, beliefs there is a 'misinformation
effect' in play. Researchers have found out that people will
automatically fill in the blanks in their memory if a so-called reliable
witness comes with an acceptable story. This would not be the first time
this happens in Pink Floyd history. And probably there have been 'cover
picture' meetings after summer between Harvest
and Hipgnosis,
perhaps even leading to an alternative Storm Thorgerson photo shoot (the
so-called yogapictures).
But in the end it was decided to use the daffodils session from
spring.
That the Church's theory (with the help of JenS) wasn't that far-fetched
was proven in March 2010 when the rock magazine Mojo
consecrated a three pages long article to pinpoint the date of the
shooting of The Madcap Laughs, with testimonies from Duggie Fields, Mick
Rock, Jenny Spires and Storm Thorgerson. The article and the Church's
comments can be found at Goofer
Dust [(I've got my) Mojo (working)... Part 2].
We know from JenS, Duggie Fields and Gretta
Barclay that Iggy arrived early 1969, and helped painting the floor,
but the only person who didn't comment on this was Iggy Rose herself. So
one freezing winter day The Holy Church asked her if she could have been
around at Wetherby Mansion, after the summer of 1969...
Iggy Rose: "I don't think it was that late, but I have to admit
it was almost 45 years ago. I remember I was cold, and they had a
one-bar-heater to try and keep me warm. I stayed a week here and there
and I never gave that photo shoot another thought. Later I found out
when Mick Rock came back for the second shoot he was disappointed I
wasn't there."
JenS (When
Syd met Iggy (Pt. 1)): "I took Ig to Wetherby Mansions in January or
February 1969 where she met Syd Barrett. (…) I introduced Iggy to Syd
shortly before I left (to America, FA), and she was around when I
left. She wasn’t there for long and generally moved around a lot to
different friends."
Iggy Rose: "I had absolutely no idea how mammoth he was. Syd
never came on to me as the Big I Am. In fact when he played his rough
tracks of The Madcap Laughs he was so endearingly sweet and appealing...
Even asking me whether it was good enough to take to some bloke at EMI
to record..."
Margaretta Barclay (Gretta
Speaks (Pt. 2)): "Iggy moved about and stayed with all sorts of
people in all sorts of places without declaring her intention to do so.
To my knowledge there was no ‘when Iggy left Syd’ moment. We were all
free spirits then, who moved whenever and wherever a whim took us."
Iggy Rose: "I wasn't even aware of who Syd Barrett really was. Of
course I knew of Pink Floyd. I must have seen them perform at Crystal
Palace but they were to me an obscure avant-garde underground band, who
played way-out music I couldn't dance to."
Jenny Spires on Facebook.
Jenny Spires (public conversation at Iggy Roses' Facebook
page): "Ig, Syd painted the floor boards as soon as he moved in
Christmas 68. When I moved in with him in January there were still
patches not done, by the door, in the window under the mattress where we
slept, in top right hand corner of the room. When he painted it
initially, he didn't wash the floor first. He just painted straight onto
all the dust etc... Dave (Gilmour) also painted his floor red..."
Duggie Fields (Mojo): "It was pretty primitive, two-bar electric
fire, concreted-up fireplaces... it was an area in decline. I don't
think there was anything, no cooker, bare floorboards..."
Mate (alleged visitor at Wetherby Mansions, FA): "The
three rooms all faced the street. On entering the house, the first room
was Fields', the second and largest, I guess about 25 square meters,
Barrett's. The third and smallest room was a communal room or a bedroom
for guests. Gala (Pinion, FA) stayed there. In the corridor were
some closets stuffed with clothes.
Then the floor bended to a small bathroom, I think it was completely at
the inside without a window. At the back was the kitchen with a window
to the garden. It was not very big and looked exactly like in the
Fifties. The bathroom was also rather simple, I mean, still with a small
tub. I don't remember how the bathroom floor looked like though."
Update 2016: 'Mate' is an anonymous witness who claims to have
been an amorous friend of Syd Barrett, visiting him several times in
London and Cambridge between 1970 and 1980. However, later
investigations from the Church have found out that this person probably
never met Syd and is a case of pseudologia fantastica. This
person, however, has a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of Syd Barrett and
early Pink Floyd and probably the above description of Syd's flat is
pretty accurate.
Iggy Rose: "I think Gala had the small room, Duggie the second
and Syd the largest. She had a lot of perfumes and soaps and gave me a
nice bubbly bath once... ...and tampons." (Launches one of her legendary
roaring laughs provoking a temporarily hearing loss with the Reverend.)
Still Life with stereo, tape recorder and pot of paint.
Any colour you like
Ian Barrett: "The stereo in the picture ended up at my house, and
I am pretty sure I had the record player in my bedroom for a good few
years. God knows where it is now though..."
Iggy Rose: "I wonder what happened to the old heavy tape recorder
with the giant spools. I remember Syd carrying it over for me to listen
to his rough cut of The Madcap Laughs."
Malcolm Jones (The Making Of The Madcap Laughs): "In anticipation
of the photographic session for the sleeve, Syd had painted the bare
floorboards of his room orange and purple."
Mick Rock (Psychedelic Renegades): "Soon after Syd moved in he
painted alternating floor boards orange
and turquoise."
JenS: "I was staying with Syd between the New Year and March '69.
(…) Anyway, at that time, the floor was already painted blue
and orange and I remember thinking how
good it looked on the Madcap album cover later on when the album was
released."
Iggy Rose (The
Croydon Guardian): "When Mick (Rock, FA) turned up to
take the photos I helped paint the floor boards for the shoot, I was
covered in paint, I still remember the smell of it."
Mick Rock (Syd
Barrett - The Madcap Laughs - The Mick Rock Photo-Sessions): "There
had been no discussion about money at all. Later on I did get a very
minor payment but it couldn't have been more than 50£ and I don't know
if it came from Syd or EMI."
Margaretta Barclay (Gretta
Speaks): "I remember that Iggy was involved with the floor painting
project and that she had paint all over her during the floor painting
time but I was not involved with the painting of the floor."
Iggy Rose (Mojo):
"He jumped off the mattress and said, 'Quick, grab a paint brush.' He
did one stripe and I did another. If you look at Mick Rock's pictures, I
have paint on the soles of my feet."
Duggie Fields (The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story): "I think he
painted the floor boards, sort of quite quickly. He didn't prepare the
floor, I don't think he swept the floor actually. (…) And he hadn't
planned his route out of the bed that was over there. He painted around
the bed and I think there was a little problem getting out of the room.
(…) He painted himself in."
Jenny Fabian (Days In The Life):: "He'd painted every other floor
board alternate colours red and green."
Iggy outtake by Mick Rock.
Iggy Rose: "I remember the mattress being against the
wall......Soooooo either we ran out of paint, or waited till the paint
dried, so poor Syd was marooned in the middle of the floor. (…) The
floorboards were painted red and blue.
I do remember, as the paint was on my feet and bottom. Did you know that
Syd wanted to take the colours right up the wall?"
Mate: "The planks were painted in a bright fiery-red,
perhaps with a slight tendency towards orange,
and dark blue with a shadow of violet.
Iggy is absolutely right: this was no orange's
orange. The curtains were dark
green velvet." (This witness may be a mythomaniac,
see above.)
Mick Rock: "They were long exposures because of the low light and
they were push-developed which means that you give the film more time in
the processing fluid. You can tell because the colour changes and
the film starts to break up which causes that grainy effect."
Libby Gausden: "I always thought it was orange
paint, not red." Iggy
Rose: "Careful Libs darling! People will start to analyse that, the
way they did with the dead daffodils." Libby Gausden:
"Well they had faded from red to orange
when I got there."
Jenny Spires on Facebook.
Jenny Spires (public conversation
at Iggy Roses' Facebook
page): "The floor was painted long before you arrived Ig and was blue
and orange. You and Syd might have given
it another lick of paint and covered up some of the patchiness and bare
floorboard that was under the mattress before the Rock/Thorgersen shoot.
Perhaps, he only had red paint for that,
but it was blue and orange."
Mate: "Even in 1970 there were still unpainted parts in the room,
hidden under a worn rug. I suppose the floor had been beige-white before
Syd and Iggy painted it in dark blue
with a shadow of violet and bright orangy
red . The floor boards had not been carefully painted and
were lying under a thick shiny coat. The original pitch-pine wood didn't
shine through.
In my impression it was an old paint-job and I didn't realise that Syd
had done it all by himself the year before. I never spoke with him about
the floor as I couldn't predict that it would become world-famous one
day. It is also weird that nearly nobody seems to remember the third
room..." (This witness may be a mythomaniac, see above.)
Mick Rock: "I actually went back a couple of weeks later. We
still didn't know what the LP was going to be called and we thought we
might need something different for the inner sleeve or some publicity
shots."
Iggy Rose: "I did go back afterwards and maybe Syd mentioned this
to someone. I wasn't bothered and I didn't know Syd was some big pop
star. He never lived like one and certainly didn't behave like."
When Iggy disappeared it wasn't to marry a rich banker or to go to Asia.
As a matter of fact she was only a few blocks away from the already
crumbling underground scene. One day she returned to the flat and heard
that Barrett had returned to Cambridge. She would never see Syd again
and wasn't aware of the fact that her portrait was on one of the most
mythical records of all time.
Update 2016: The above text, although meant to be tongue in
cheek, created a rift between the Reverend and one of the cited
witnesses, that still hasn't been resolved 4 years later. All that over
a paint job from nearly 50 years ago.
Many thanks to: Margaretta Barclay, Duggie Fields, Libby Gausden, Mate,
Iggy Rose, JenS & all of you @ NML & TBtCiIiY...
Sources (other than the above internet links): Blake, Mark: Pigs
Might Fly, Aurum Press Limited, London, 2007, p. 231-232. Clerk,
Carol: If I'm honest, my idea was that we should go our separate ways,
Roger Waters interview in Uncut June 2004, reprinted in: The Ultimate
Music Guide Issue 6 (from the makers of Uncut): Pink Floyd, 2011, p. 111. Gladstone,
Shane: The Dark Star, Clash 63, July 2011, p. 53 (Mick Rock
picture outtakes). Green,
Jonathon: Days In The Life, Pimlico, London, 1998, p.168. Jones,
Malcolm: The Making Of The Madcap Laughs, Brain Damage, 2003, p.
13. Mason, Nick: Inside Out, Orion Books, London, 2011
reissue, p. 206-208. Rock, Mick: Psychedelic Renegades,
Plexus, London, 2007, p. 18-19, Rock, Mick: Syd Barrett - The
Photography Of Mick Rock, EMI Records Ltd, London & Palazzo Editions
Ltd, Bath, 2010, p. 10-11. Spires, Jenny: Facebook
conversation with Iggy Rose, July 2011.