It was only a few months back that a friend told me he’d seen Syd Barrett drifting down Charing Cross Road, looking in guitar shops. His hair was long again, and he was back to wearing his old snakeskin boots.
Such a revelation may not mean much to a lot of you, but to hardcore Pink Floyd fanatics, even the possibility of his return is cause enough for celebration. Barrett – the guitarist/songwriter who shaped the early image of Pink Floyd through such vehicles as Arnold Layne, See Emily Play and Interstellar Overdrive – had been in his post-Floyd obscurity the object of a cult-level adoration; a genius who almost was.
He flashed back briefly last year, forming a band called Stars with Twink, the mildly notorious ex-drummer of such luminaries as Tomorrow, the Pretty Things and Pink Fairies, and some bashful nonentity known as Syd Monk on bass. The ill-fated Stars lasted long enough for one gig: a one-off venue in Cambridge, backing up the MC5.
Barrett seemed ever-distant on stage, reduced to playing vague fragments of theme, inane guitar doodles and glimpses of songs. It appeared to be just another exercise in Barrett’s own bizarre and confusing brand of pointless cacophony. After the gig Syd disappeared again, eventually to return to the basement of his mother’s house in Cambridge, where he’d passed the majority of his time since the break from Pink Floyd in 1968.
That’s but one further episode in the Barrett chronicles, and it exists amid numerous half-chewed anecdotes and tall tales of his various post-Floyd misadventures. Like the one about our hero, his head shaved in a reformatory crop, appearing nervously backstage after a performance by his old mates in their hometown, whispering an agitated plea: “Remember me? I’m Syd … I used to play in your group…”
Or the tales of his acid-casualty excesses, his freakouts, disappearing acts and general weirdness. He’s a genuine eccentric, one of those people that people just love to wonder about. He joins in that category the likes of Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan (vintage 1966), Lou Reed and Iggy Pop (before their respective resurrections) and Brian Jones. Heavy company, to be sure, but Syd has earned his keep.
It was Barrett who more or less transformed the Abdabs, another wearisome student combo who specialised in playing Roadrunner and little else, into a decidedly more intriguing project. The Pink Floyd (name derived from old jazzers Pink Gingham and Floyd Cramer) quickly became the darlings of London’s dilettante “avant-garde” culture, then holed up in Arts Labs and clubs like the UFO. Their first publicity shots – four clean-faced youths disguised in Jim McGuinn specs, posed in front of a rather tepid light show – seem almost as lame now as, say, the Seeds’ first flower-power flack photos. The magic was the fact that they were the first English band to assimilate the waves of emerging psychedelia sent off by the raga-rock Byrds and the Tomorrow Never Knows experiments of the Beatles. Their light show, however ragged, was still the first in the British Isles.
After the Floyd came a motley crew indeed, including (in decreasing importance) the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Tomorrow, and Hapshash and his Coloured Coat. But Pink Floyd were unquestionably the heavyweights; Paul McCartney took some time off from the recording set of Sgt. Pepper to drop by and bestow his papal blessings, the English music press nodded in assent, and the band backed it all up splendidly with two hit singles, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play.
The strange and sinister quality of the former gave way to the contemporary Edward Lear-styled psychedelic whimsy of See Emily Play. It was a unique marriage: the English nonsense tradition pioneered by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame (the title for the first Floyd album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, came from a chapter heading in Wind in the Willows) and some (then) new-fashioned chemical nonsense as well. “Our main musical influences are the Byrds, Mothers of Invention and the Blues Magoos,” stated Syd to the press. What, no Coltrane, Stockhausen or Penderecki?
In the meantime, Barrett was getting an overt reputation for … how you say it … instability. His mammoth chemical indulgences were legend, and his material slowly came to be the first definitive statement on acid-casualty music: songs that disintegrated for no apparent reason (witness Jug Band Blues on the second Floyd album, a distorted piece of absurdity and as good an explanation as any for Barrett’s absence on the rest of the record) or bouts of manic one-chord strumming which made the Velvet Underground’s Sister Ray sound like a rock opera. Unfortunately for Barrett aficionados, his really powerful twilight rantings like Vegetable Man and “Scream your last scream, old woman with a basket” were never committed to wax and are now lost forever.
One day Syd showed up with a new song called Have You Got It Yet? that he would spontaneously change whenever the rest of the band attempted to follow him. He’d sing “Have you got it yet,” and they’d scream back “No!” It was a joke they didn’t get for hours.
Stories about his final shot with Pink Floyd are vague and often contradictory, but the most credible (or at least the most oft-repeated) version follows. At a job at London’s Saturday Club, Barrett showed up and was unusually (even for him) uncommunicative. The band attempted to go into Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, but Syd could only repeat a single chord over and over, with no variation in tone or intensity. The band tried every trick at their disposal to break his pattern, but it was as if Syd was flying on automatic pilot. No comprende.
There were other problems as well. While the band was attempting to introduce David Gilmour into the band as a second guitarist, Barrett had a couple of borderline buddies – one on banjo, the other saxophone – slated to join up as well. This didn’t set especially well with the other members, and they tried to convince him that his position in the group would be strengthened if he played it like Brian Wilson: a non-touring member that would write material and make a studio contribution. When this line was rejected, there was very little choice but for the partnership to be dissolved. Pink Floyd’s management at the time – Blackhill Enterprises – decided to go with Syd, a decision that has yet to see a return.
A solo album was floundering when Roger Waters and David Gilmour stepped in, and their presence (as producers) may have been a decisive factor in EMI’s decision to even let him finish the record. The album, The Madcap Laughs, was superficially more low-key than the brash stamp of his Pink Floyd work, and yet somehow farther away. He recorded another solo album, Barrett, whose cult acceptance matched that of the previous record. But apparently that acceptance wasn’t deemed strong enough to warrant pursuing the matter further, and neither record was released in America. The word is passed by subterranean means, however, and you can usually find both albums at any good import shop.
Pink Floyd, meanwhile, struggled on manfully. They marshalled their resources and released what certain old-liners would have you believe to be the only respectable post-Barrett album to date, Saucerful of Secrets. But the musty odour of Barrett’s influence hung over the creation, with the grandiose constructions somehow more vacuous than Barrett’s earnestly authentic brain jangles. Still, you have to give ‘em their due. Pink Floyd staunchly stood their ground while everyone else was desperately trying to learn the rudiments of pedal-steel guitar, and their commercial explosion with Dark Side of the Moon is the payoff for that perseverance.
And Syd Barrett, the man Roger Waters still contends to be “one of the three best songwriters in the world”, is working as a part-time gardener in Cambridge.
© Nick Kent, 1973
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