Footnotes

The title of this event is eerily apposite, the date being that on which Pink Floyd effectively sacked Syd Barrett. His increasingly drug-related erratic and difficult behaviour through 1967 and the band's evolving musical direction led them to seek another guitar player. At the end of that year they brought in one of Syd's friends, David Gilmour, and the band played a handful of gigs as a five-piece in January 1968. In his book, Echoes: The Complete History Of Pink Floyd, Glenn Povey writes: "Syd Barrett was clearly never going to come back to the real world, and his role within Pink Floyd was all but over. One solution the band thought of was to use him as an off-stage songwriter in the same way that the Beach Boys retained Brian Wilson. But almost at once they realised that this was an impossibility." Travelling to Southampton for this gig, the band simply decided not to pick Syd up en route.

Those who attended this event had real value for the ticket price and were treated to an eclectic mix of music, from the psychedelia of Pink Floyd and the mystic folk of the Incredible String Band and Tyrannosaurus Rex, to the West Indian-influenced Jimmy Cliff and the blues/rock of Chicken Shack and Nelson's Column. As MC/DJ for the evening, this poster was kept as a souvenir by John Peel. It is thought this is the first example of the poster ever to appear at auction and it may possibly be a unique survivor of the small number that would have been put up around the University campus to publicise the concert.

Literature:
Povey, Glenn, Echoes: The Complete History Of Pink Floyd, Mind Head Publishing, 2007.