Read Online Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd by Mark Blake - Free Book Online Page A

signed up to study architecture at Regent Street Poly. Years later, he would admit that ‘being an architect never really interested me’.
    Not owning a keyboard at the time, Wright’s role in the band was dependent on whether a piano was available at the venue. Bookings were mostly student birthday parties and private functions in and around the Poly. With Sheilagh Noble gone, Wright’s girlfriend Juliette Gale, then also studying at the Poly, stepped in as an occasional singer.
    ‘Juliette was lovely and she sang brilliantly,’ remembers Clive Metcalfe. ‘She’d sing blues, things like “Summertime”. Rick Wright was just incredibly quiet. I don’t think I ever really got to know him.’
    By the end of the year, the group had acquired a manager and sometime songwriter in another student, Ken Chapman, who’d push his own compositions on to the band to fit in with their repertoire of R&B numbers. (‘There was one that was set to the tune of Beethoven’s Für Elise ,’ recalled Waters.) Chapman also hustled an audition with Gerry Bron, then a music publisher and later the founder of Bronze Records. ‘He said the songs were quite good but to forget the band,’ remembered Nick Mason. ‘I think if we’d listened to anyone who had any taste at the time we’d have folded up right there and then. But we were so egocentric we just carried on.’ Throughout the coming year there were many name changes, including, supposedly, The Megadeaths and The Screaming Abdabs (later shortened to The Abdabs). Interviewed for an article in the student magazine, The Abdabs were photographed posing awkwardly beside a lamp-post in Great Titchfield Street, Waters - denouncing rock as ‘beat without expression’ - wearing his regulation Dylan-style black leather box jacket and best sneer.
    ‘I struggled with Roger,’ admits Clive Metcalfe. ‘Nick Mason was very easy-going but I found Roger rather acerbic, and I was an easy target. I’d grown up in the country and had had a rather sheltered background. Roger didn’t suffer fools gladly, and I’m afraid he could make a fool of me rather easily.’
    ‘I’m not sure if I was aware of being menacing,’ Waters explained later. ‘Although I think that in my insecurity I probably tried cultivating it. I was so frightened of everything as a young man that I became quite aggressive.’
    At the same time as he was attending the Poly, Wright was taking private lessons in musical theory and composition at the Eric Gilder School of Music, but realising architecture was not his vocation, he jumped ship (or was pushed, according to some sources) at the end of his first year.
    ‘I gave up in boredom,’ he later explained. ‘So I started going abroad to places like Greece, and then came home to earn a bit of money in jobs like interior designing and private decorating. But I was very unhappy and turned to studying music.’ Wright eventually enrolled at London’s Royal College of Music.
    Meanwhile, Waters and Mason struggled to apply themselves to their studies. Waters, especially, seemed as frustrated with his teachers at the Poly as he had been with those at the County, clashing repeatedly with his Architectural History lecturer. ‘I must have been horrible to teach,’ he admitted years later. ‘I was very bolshie. It was just like school, and I hoped I’d escaped all that.’ Yet there were two lecturers that didn’t attract Waters’ withering contempt. The first, his head of year, encouraged him to bring his guitar into class, and allowed him to play it during study time. The other was architect Mike Leonard, who taught part-time at the Poly and at the Hornsey College of Art. He was an accomplished pianist and, although some fifteen years older than his pupils, shared an interest in the more avant-garde areas of music. Much to Waters’ curiosity, Leonard was also experimenting with lighting effects; designing and building contraptions out of glass and Perspex, and