Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd Read Online Free PDF

actually took lessons from me, but I can remember the two of us listening to that Pete Seeger record and scrambling around listening to Radio Luxembourg. We’d hear a record, and think: How do you play that? And then set about trying to find out. The Ventures’ [1960 hit] “Walk Don’t Run” was one of those. David instantly picked up how to play it, while it took the rest of us much longer.’
    Klose was also a pupil at the County: ‘At that time, your life is totally bound up in school. Syd was the year below me and Roger Waters was the year above. We all had similar musical tastes. For a while I was very much into jazz, but only jazz made up until 1935! Then Django Reinhardt. Roger was really into Jimmy Dufree. Discovering the blues, though, was a real moment of epiphany. I remember going into a record shop after school and finding a record by Leadbelly. I didn’t know what it was. I just liked the name, so the guy in the shop let me take it into the booth and listen. And it was like the essence of everything I’d ever liked in music - but more concentrated.’
    While Leadbelly would become a shared favourite for Klose, Gilmour and Waters, the latter found his musical interests went unappreciated at home. From the age of twelve, Roger had regularly attended jazz concerts at the local Corn Exchange, but, unlike Syd’s mother, Mary Waters had little time for music.
    ‘She claimed to be tone deaf,’ her son recalled. ‘She had no real interest in the arts. She was very political. Politics was more important than anything else. I certainly didn’t feel encouraged in music either at home or at school.’
    In 1961, the same year that Syd Barrett lost his father, Gilmour’s home life underwent a major upheaval. As part of what was commonly known as ‘the brain drain’, in which British academics were lured abroad by high-paying teaching posts, Doug Gilmour was offered a position at New York University, where he was eventually appointed Professor of Genetics. He and Sylvia announced their decision to go for a year. Gilmour’s ten-year-old brother Mark went with them, while his siblings stayed in England; sister Catherine was already attending university. The fifteen-year-old David was invited to the States, but, already fired up by the musical possibilities around him, he chose to stay in Cambridge, where he lodged with a family in Chesterton. Left unsupervised, Gilmour still found it easy to sneak out to attend gigs instead of studying for his O-Level exams. Waters, Barrett and Gilmour, with their shared academic backgrounds, all now had absent fathers, and were striking out independently, muddling towards the beginnings of what would become Pink Floyd.
     
    If Gilmour was the first to embrace rock ’n’ roll, his future Floyd partners weren’t slow in seeking out a rebellious antidote to the strictures of Cambridge school life, even without Elvis to encourage them. If Waters’ meticulous raid on the Cambridge County orchard seems more like an art prank than a simple act of vandalism, then it’s little wonder. As a university town, Cambridge was perfectly placed to welcome the influence of a new school of non-conformist American underground writers and poets, ‘the Beat Generation’. The writers in question - Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs - always balked at the title, frequently protesting, ‘Three friends does not make a generation.’ Nevertheless, they shared enough of a like-minded vision to warrant the comparison. Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956) and Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch (1959) both gained widespread over-exposure after running up against obscenity laws. Yet it was Kerouac’s On the Road , finally published in 1957 in the wake of the Howl trial, that helped establish the Beat Generation’s wider popularity. The story of a poetic drifter, hitching lifts and jumping freight trains across America, popping pills and enjoying casual sex to a soundtrack of bebop