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Pink Floyd · S1 E7
The Countdown Club
Early gigs in London pubs and clubs. The band is loud, chaotic, and unlike anything else on the circuit. Syd begins experimenting with feedback, echo, and slide guitar. The sound of Pink Floyd starts to take shape
Early 1966, a basement club in Palace Gate, Kensington. The audience is small, the ceiling is low, and the band is so loud that plaster dust drifts down from above.
Pink Floyd, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun. The closest recording to what those early improvised sets sounded like: a slow, hypnotic pulse that builds for eight minutes without ever exploding.
“We had nowhere to play. Nobody wanted to book us because we were too loud and too strange. The Countdown Club was one of the few places that would have us.”
— Nick Mason
The Countdown Club
Starting in 1965, the band begins playing regular gigs at the Countdown Club, a small venue in the basement of a building at 1a Palace Gate in Kensington. The club gives the band a stage when almost nobody else will. The sets are raw, dominated by extended improvisations built on top of blues standards and Barrett originals that grow longer and stranger with each performance.
TAP TO REVEAL: What unusual equipment did Syd Barrett use at early Pink Floyd gigs?
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Pink Floyd (1968)
From A Saucerful of Secrets, the only Pink Floyd recording to feature all five members: Barrett, Gilmour, Waters, Wright, and Mason. Roger Waters wrote the lyrics by borrowing phrases from Chinese and Japanese poetry. The song is built on a single hypnotic pulse that breathes in and out for eight minutes.
The Countdown Club
Palace Gate, Kensington, London W8. The basement venue where Pink Floyd developed their live sound in late 1965 and early 1966. The club no longer exists, but the building still stands in one of London's most expensive residential streets.
A Saucerful of Secrets, Pink Floyd
From A Saucerful of Secrets (1968). One of the first post-Barrett Pink Floyd songs, written by Roger Waters, but still carrying the experimental DNA of the Countdown Club era. The pulsing bass line and Wright's swirling organ echo the extended improvisations the band developed in that Kensington basement.
What Italian-made device became central to Syd Barrett's guitar sound in the early Pink Floyd?
A handful of people in a Kensington basement have heard something new. Two men named Peter Jenner and Andrew King are looking for a band that sounds like the future, and they are about to walk into a Pink Floyd gig and change everything.
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To be continued
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