Tomorrow grew out of The In-Crowd. I joined The In-Crowd when the original Fairies from Colchester came to a grinding halt. Even though we were doing a few gigs, we just weren't going anywhere.
Steve Howe and Keith West came to see me play one evening at the Cafe des Artistes in London. At the end of the evening Steve Howe asked me if I would join The In-Crowd because their drummer had left. I saw them play before and I thought they were amazing. They were an R&B/Soul band. It was great. So I just jumped at the opportunity and gave my notice to The Fairies that night and became the drummer for The In-Crowd the next day.
There was a change in music going on at that time. I was living in Chelsea, at the heart of the new fashions and music. By luck I was living there. The rest of the guys in The In-Crowd were living with their mums and dads at the time. I was hanging out with the people from Granny Takes a Trip and they were turning me onto this new psychedelic wave of interesting things. They told me I should go to the UFO Club and see The Pink Floyd. I was mesmerized by the whole thing. It was fantastic. I told the rest of the guys about what was going on and that we needed to play there because it was the place to play. This is about late '66/early '67.
We tried to get a gig at the UFO Club but they refused to book a band called The In-Crowd. By the time we were approaching the UFO Club to play, our music was changing, we were doing extended guitar solos, more free form experimentation with the music, and we started writing our own material. We decided we needed a complete overhaul. The atmosphere demanded it. We weren't opposed to it. So we agreed to change our name to Tomorrow. I took everyone along to Granny Takes a Trip and kitted them out with Granny clothes at a very special discount, and the rest is history. We got the gig at the UFO Club and we became kind of the resident band after The Floyd."My White Bicycle" was written out of what was actually going on in Amsterdam. One of the owners of Granny Takes a Trip, Nigel Weymouth, had gone there and come back with a Provos badge which he gave to me. They were kind of like a student anarchist group that believed everything should be free. In fact, they had white bicycles in Amsterdam and they used to leave them around the town. And if you were going somewhere and you needed to use a bike, you'd just take the bike and you'd go somewhere and just leave it. Whoever needed the bikes would take them and leave them when they were done.
Nigel told me about this and I told Keith West (lead singer) this and a bit later we went to Amsterdam and he wrote a song about it. So "My White Bicycle" comes out of that Provo thing.
The main guitar theme of "My White Bicycle" comes from what we were listening to at the time. We were listening to Ravi Shankar and Gabor Zarbo at the time. So our influences were Indian mainly. Steve may have picked up on that with the riff or he may have just pulled it out of the air, I don't know. It's like a droning sitar sound.
We recorded the album at Abbey Road Studios starting in the Spring of 1967. The Beatles were working on ST. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND. Our album was released in early 1968.