An impossibly rare ticket/invitation card for the third of the Spontaneous Underground afternoons at London’s Marquee Club—the first of those afternoons to feature The Pink Floyd Sound, as the band was still calling itself.  The authoritative Pink Floyd Archives lists this March 13, 1966 appearance as the band’s eighth show using a variant of the Pink Floyd name.

The Spontaneous Underground was organized by New York-born Steve Stollman, in London on behalf of his brother Bernard’s uncompromising avant-garde record label ESP-Disk. While there he launched a short series of Sunday afternoons at the Marquee early in 1966, some of the first properly psychedelic gatherings in Britain — part concert, part happening, invitation-only, and passed hand to hand rather than advertised. The bills mixed the unmixable: the folk singer Donovan on one afternoon, the free-improvising group AMM under composer Cornelius Cardew on another, a rock band, a jazz trio, poets. The name itself reached print only once.

That is why the card names no one — not The Pink Floyd Sound, not AMM, both of whom played the afternoon it announces. In place of a bill it invites the bearer to ‘TRIP bring furniture toy prop paper rug paint balloon jumble costume mask robot candle incense ladder wheel light self all others march 15th 5 pm’.

These Sunday afternoons are where Pink Floyd stopped being a student R&B outfit and began turning into Pink Floyd, and where the people who would run their working life saw them. Peter Jenner and Andrew King — shortly to manage the band as Blackhill Enterprises — came to the Marquee to check them out, and signed them up. The same narrow underground that these happenings did so much to summon into being soon supplied the rest of it: Joe Boyd, who would produce their first record, and John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, who would find them their rooms at the London Free School and then at UFO. The band’s entire early apparatus was drawn, in effect, from this handful of Sunday afternoons.

Ephemera from invitation-only events that were never advertised seldom survives. One of the earliest surviving artefacts of the Pink Floyd Sound, from the afternoons where the band and the whole world that would carry it first came together.

Printed on card stock; in overall Excellent condition, with some very minor creasing. 5″ x 3 1/4”