The UFO Club — birthplace of psychedelic London

The UFO Club operated in the basement of 31 Tottenham Court Road in London — beneath a building in Fitzrovia that had previously housed an Irish dancehall — from December 23, 1966 to July 28, 1967: seven months in which it became the nerve centre of the British psychedelic underground. Joe Boyd and John 'Hoppy' Hopkins founded it as a weekly event, and Pink Floyd were the first act to perform in the series and its most frequent house band. The combination of the band's live electronics and Syd Barrett's guitar and songwriting with the venue's light shows and its atmosphere of collective experimentation produced something that felt genuinely new.

The UFO Club was the social and artistic context in which Pink Floyd's early identity was formed. The audience — art students, musicians, journalists, the overlapping worlds of pop music and the fine arts that London was briefly able to sustain in the late 1960s — expected something more than a conventional rock show and got it. Barrett's songs about gnomes and scarecrows and Emily playing sat alongside longer improvisations in which the band used the possibilities of amplification to dissolve conventional rock structure. 'Astronomy Domine', the entire early Pink Floyd catalogue is comprehensible only in the context of rooms like the UFO.

The club closed in July 1967 following a police raid and the arrest of Hopkins on a separate matter. The basement on Tottenham Court Road returned to other uses. The seven months of its operation encompassed the peak and the beginning of the decline of Syd Barrett — who was already showing signs of the mental deterioration that would force him out of the band in 1968 — and the formation of a London underground that briefly felt like it was changing the world. The building still stands on Tottenham Court Road.