A financial disaster of a live show, which featured Pink Floyd and John Lennon, has fans suggesting The Beatles member stole the show.
The 14 Hour Technicolour Dream was held at London’s Alexandra Palace and featured Pink Floyd as the headline act in a show seemingly forgotten by attendees and fans alike. Organiser John Hopkins would go on to call the event, which saw the likes of Yoko Ono and Soft Machine on the bill, a “disaster”. While it would feature an early years Pink Floyd performance, the event was mired by missing tickets and attendees who hadn’t paid for their ticket. A bit of a nightmare, given the day of music was set up to offer aid to the dwindling counter-culture paper, The International Times. Instead, the Jimi Hendrix-attended event did little more than eat away at money and ride the “crest of a wave” for the drugs scene in the United Kingdom.
Hopkins said: “The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was a big event and a financial disaster. Most people were on drugs of one sort or another. It was a crest of a wave. It wasn’t fully understood, but it was a landmark event.” Despite the failure of the event, those who have seen footage of the performance believe Lennon “steals the show” with his appearance.
One fan recalled their memories of attending the show, which occurred just a short while before Pink Floyd released their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. They wrote: “I was certainly there that evening, but couldn’t spot myself in this film. I helped (the previously unheard of) Yoko Ono with her ‘happening,’ snipping off the first fragments of the model’s dress with a pair of nail scissors.
“However, the only evidence that I was ever there is that the model on the step ladder is wearing my hippie sunglasses.” Another person suggested Lennon’s appearance at the show was the best part of the night.
A fan wrote: “A great group, a great song, a great event, and once again John Lennon steals the whole show.” Lennon can be seen in the footage, linked below, with John Dunbar and Terry Doran.
Barrett would not be a part of Pink Floyd for much longer after this show, with a decision made by the rest of the band to remove him from the group. Waters, speaking to Radio Bogota, said: “Everybody starts trying to write, that’s all that happens. Bands live and die by whether they have someone, or more than one person, who can write. Writing is the fundamental cornerstone of any music.
“It has to be written, and if you haven’t got somebody in the band who can write it’s gonna be a very short-lived enterprise. So we had to find out whether we did. And we did, and so it became a long-lived enterprise.”
The band would create some of their all-time best records following Barrett’s departure, including The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Waters would then leave the band himself in 1985, though reflecting on it decades later, suggested he regretted how he left.
