APRIL | ME, MYSELF & I
After leaving Cambridge
University, I freestyled my
career. I wasn’t even building a
career. I fell into it by mistake.
I was involved in social issues at
the time, in a hippy world when
the whole underground thing was
growing. I got involved with the Floyd
and they got successful. Then EMI got
involved, and they seemed to like me.
Peter
Jenner
Access caught up with Pink Floyd’s
ex-manager to talk music and event
production
I go to very few gigs, when I do go it’s
often same old same old indie bands
singing about how no one loves them.
I’m too f**king old for that.
I’m sure there are still plenty of
musical geniuses. I expect Stormzy is
the genius now. Geniuses will come
from among the kids who hate all
the old stuff . They often come from
the scenes people wouldn’t expect
them to come from. I listen to various
genres, and hear things on the radio. I
like to travel and listen to things that
aren’t ‘same old, same old’.
If people want to see legacy acts that’s
fi ne. They’ve often had fi fty years of
building their audience, and I expect so will Stormzy if he’s around
in fi fty years time.
The Floyd were not a super good looking band. Syd was, I suppose,
but then he disappeared. The rest were very anonymous and still
are. Even today Roger Waters could walk through here and no one
would recognise him. Pink Floyd wasn’t a ‘starry’ band. At the time,
The Beatles, and Cliff Richard and that sort of thing were around. We
focused on the music, the vibe and the light show and all that. The
hippy vibe.
Production-wise, Pink Floyd are an organic expansion of what
happened at the UFO Club. To start with, very early on, we decided
Pink Floyd would be a multimedia, psychedelic experience. It
sounded great and read great as a concept, but it didn’t really exist.
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My partner at the time, and
I built the Floyd’s fi rst light
show, which was fi lled with
fi xed open spot lights which
were attached to lumps of wood
and which were driven by electric
wiring from Woolworths that had
light switches on them. The fi xed
spots had very little range, so had
to be close to the ground. Behind
the band was a fi reproof sheet
which had shadows moving along
it as you dipped the light switches.
The sets grew from there, from
a homegrown perspective. We
made 20 quid from the gigs and
thought ‘this is great’. It went on
to reach achievements far beyond
my wildest expectations.
Pink Floyd were doing it for fun,
and that’s what they were selling.
A psychedelic light show turned
into pigs fl oating above Battersea
Power Station, and by then they
were making so much money that
the possibilities were endless.
Ultimately, you had to consider why would people go to a Pink Floyd
show. Because it all dies if the audience doesn’t like it.
A big gig when I started was a 1,000 capacity show at a university.
The industry needs healthy groundswell of acts coming in.
Some things just have to come from the people organically. Early
psychedelic shows were put on for the community. The music
industry needs to be very careful to help small community gigs,
media, local music and record shops, because these will keep a scene
afl oat and help create it. Conversely, a big corporate push will make
it die quicker.
I’m far too old to know if the music industry needs saving. Things go
on. Events get bigger. But the local community is more interesting
than global.