Bob Klose - Early Career

Early Career

During his architecture studies, Klose started playing lead guitar in a band with Roger Waters (guitar), Richard Wright (rhythm guitar), Nick Mason (drums), Clive Metcalfe (bass guitar), and Keith Noble and Juliette Gale (vocals). The band performed rhythm & blues under various names ("Sigma 6", "The Meggadeaths", "The Abdabs" and "The Screaming Abdabs"), during their run with manager Ken Chapman, who also wrote some early material for the band.

Metcalfe, Noble and Gale left the band (though Gale would go on to marry Richard Wright in 1969). By the time they left, the line-up included Syd Barrett (rhythm guitar and vocals) and Bob Klose (lead guitar and vocals), with Roger Waters on bass and vocals, Richard Wright on organ and vocals and Nick Mason on drums. This new group used various names, often fluctuating between "Tea Set" and "The Pink Floyd Sound" (named after two old Carolina bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). The word "Sound" was dropped from the band's name, with the definite article disappearing a few years later.

Klose was more focused on his studies than on the band and was more interested in jazz and blues than Barrett's psychedelia and pop, so he left the band sometime around July 1965. Barrett assumed lead guitar, lead vocals, and the bulk of the songwriting, while Klose went on to become a photographer and print maker.

'While we were at the Poly (Regent Street Polytechnic) we had various people in and out of the band and one particular, very good guitar player Bob Klose. He was really a far better musician than any of the rest of us. But I think he had some exam problems and really felt that he had to apply himself to work, whereas the rest of us were not that conscientious. And so he was sort of out of the band and we were looking for another guitar player and we knew that Syd was coming up to London from Cambridge and so he just, well he was just co-opted into the whole thing.' — Richard Wright