When Syd Barrett and David Gilmour got arrested for busking in Saint-Tropez
By 1967, Pink Floyd was already one of London’s most prominent psychedelic rock exports, alongside Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. This spell underpinned Pink Floyd’s transient tenure with Syd Barrett as bandleader. However, the group’s history can be traced back even further, to 1963, when bassist Roger Waters met drummer Nick Mason, a fellow architecture student at the London Polytechnic at Regent Street.
After discovering a shared passion for rhythm and blues, Waters and Mason formed a band with fellow students Keith Noble and Clive Metcalfe and Noble’s sister Sheilagh. Richard Wright, a fellow architecture student and bonafide keyboard whizz, joined later in 1963 to complete the six-piece known as Sigma 6.
This early assemblage practised in a tearoom in the basement of the Regent Street Polytechnic and, during various small function gigs, covered songs by The Searchers and material written by their manager, fellow student Ken Chapman. After renaming themselves the Tea Set amid line-up re-shuffles, Waters welcomed his childhood friend Syd Barrett.
“In a period when everyone was being cool in a very adolescent, self-conscious way, Syd was unfashionably outgoing,” Nick Mason remembered in Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. “My enduring memory of our first encounter is the fact that he bothered to come up and introduce himself to me.”
Barrett’s gregarious nature had acquainted him with many fellow students in his hometown of Cambridge from a young age. Crucially, he befriended Waters and Gilmour while attending Perse School from age 11. Waters, three years Barrett and Gilmour’s senior, left for college first but kept in touch with his musically inclined friends from home.
In a 2006 interview with Mojo, Gilmour remembered meeting Barrett for the first time in his mid-teens. “He was someone people pointed out in the street, he had that charisma and magnetism,” he said. “He was funny. Witty. Nothing slipped by him. He was up to date on everything, well read, a very sharp cookie.”
Gilmour and Barrett both moved to Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology following their O-Levels. “I’d hang out with him, go round to his place, and when I moved to Cambridge Tech, we used to meet up in the art school most lunchtimes and play Bo Diddley and ‘Come On’ by The Rolling Stones,” Gilmour remembered.
In 1962, Gilmour joined the local blues rock band Jokers Wild. Meanwhile, Barrett began to focus on visual art, eventually enrolling at Camberwell College of Arts to study painting in 1964. In 1965, the year Barrett joined Pink Floyd, he and Gilmour took a short trip to France, where their musical passions got them in a spot of trouble.
“In the summer of ‘65, I think, while my parents were away in America again, I hitchhiked down to the South of France, and Syd came down in a Land Rover with a friend, and I joined them in a campsite near St. Tropez Bacon and eggs on the Primus for breakfast – fantastic,” Gilmour recalled to Mojo. “We went busking in St. Tropez and got arrested.”
Although the young lads played their Beatles covers with the best intentions, France has somewhat stricter busking laws than the UK. After settling the score with the Saint-Tropez authorities, the group set off to Paris, where they took in the scenery and bought some controversial literature.
“On the way back home, we stopped off in Paris and bought all those naughty books that used to be banned in England,” Gilmour continued. “The Naked Lunch and the Story Of The Eye. What was that publisher called? [Wistfully] Green covers… I remember sitting in the campsite reading these things by torchlight. We had a great time.”
Over the next two years, Barrett would become a legend in the London psyche-rock scene, especially with the arrival of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967. Later that year, Waters would ask Guilmour to join the band too, but with Barrett’s concurrent mental decline and drug problems, it wasn’t such a blissful reunion. By Apil 1968, Barrett had been completely ousted from the band, with Gilmour taking over as lead guitarist.
Listen to ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, the only Pink Floyd song to feature all five core members of Pink Floyd, below.
