SYD BARRETT
Jul 20th 2006
Roger "Syd" Barrett, leader of Pink Floyd, died on July 7th, aged 60
TO THOSE who were young then, the late 1960s were the best thing since
1789. All that followed paled by comparison. This was the time of the
Paris riots, with students hurling cobbles and the FLICS hurling
tear-gas back; the first convulsions over the war in Vietnam; the
Prague spring, quickly crushed by Soviet tanks; and everywhere the
sense that the young, by sheer numbers, could overthrow the established
order and make the world again.
If they failed to remake it, this was largely because they were out of
it on one illegal substance or another. For many of them, the drug
scene was a quick, soggy spliff behind the bike sheds, or a reverential
division of a cake of greenish powder, washed down with a glass of
Liebfraumilch and covered up with burning joss sticks. Yet at the
highest levels of culture the new gods of rock music tripped on much
more dangerous stuff, and sang about it. They did not find truth
exactly, as much as yellow walruses, purple fields, kaleidoscopic skies
and melting buildings, all of which were evoked in music and light
shows so new and peculiar that the best way to appreciate them was by
being prone and stoned yourself.
Syd Barrett was the very exemplar of this wild universe. As the leader
of Pink Floyd, the highly successful psychedelic band that he
christened in 1965, he wrote and sang of "lime and limpid green", of
Dan Dare, of gingerbread men and, in the band's first hit, "Arnold
Layne", of a transvestite who stole underwear from moonlit washing
lines. His weird words and odd, simplistic melodies, sent through an
echo-machine, seemed sometimes to be coming from outer space.
Yet there was also something quintessentially English and middle class
about Mr Barrett. His songs contained the essence of Cambridge, his
home town: bicycles, golden robes, meadows and the river. Startlingly,
he sang his hallucinations in the perfect, almost prissy enunciation of
the Home Counties. He made it possible to do rock in English rather
than American, inspiring David Bowie among others. The band's first
album, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" (1967), made Mr Barrett
central, plaintively calling up the new age from some distant and
precarious place.
Yet the songs were already tipping over into chaos, and by January
1968 Mr Barrett was unable to compose or, almost, to function. Dope,
LSD and pills, consumed by the fistful, overwhelmed a psyche that was
already fragile and could not bear the pressures of success. At
concerts he would simply play the same note over and over, or stand
still in a trance. If he played, no one knew where he was going, least
of all himself. The band did not want to part with him, but could not
cope with him; so he was left behind, or left them, enduring drug
terrors in a cupboard under the stairs in his London flat. Casualties
of "bad trips" usually recovered, with stark warnings for the unwary.
Mr Barrett, famously, went on too many and never came back.
Friends, especially his Pink Floyd colleagues, tried to encourage him
to resurrect his career. Their attempts were heartbreaking. At various
times in 1968 and 1969 microphones were put in front of him and he was
persuaded to sing and play. Cruelly, the recordings of his solo
efforts, "The Madcap Laughs" and "Barrett" (both 1970), caught
everything: the nervous coughs, the desperate riffling of pages, the
cries of frustration ("Again? I'll do it again now?"), the numbers of
takes. The sleeve of "Madcap" showed a naked girl in attendance--there
had been any number of those--but Mr Barrett oblivious to her, his face
masked by long hair and mascara, crouched shivering on the floor.
Cambridge, where he had learned to play banjo and had proudly covered
his first guitar with mirror-discs, seemed the best place to retreat
to. He went back to live in his mother's cellar, boarding up the
windows, and returned to the painting for which he had trained at
Camberwell School of Art. Ambushing journalists were told that his head
was "irregular", and that he was "full of dust and guitars".
Mr Barrett was now the most famous recluse in British rock. Slight as
his oeuvre had been, it proved impossible to forget. His death, from
complications of diabetes, brought an outburst of regret from rock
stars and fans who were still following him. Tom Stoppard's play "Rock
'n' Roll", which was playing at the Royal Court when he died, made him
a metaphor for revolutionary music: in 1968 a Pan-figure piping
liberation, in the 1990s a tired, grey man spotted in a supermarket.
SHINING LIKE THE SUN
His band last saw him in 1975 as they recorded, in "Shine on you Crazy
Diamond", a tribute to him that sounded like yet more encouragement.
("Come on you raver, you seer of visions/Come on you painter, you
piper, you prisoner, and shine.") Mr Barrett wandered in, fat and
shaven-headed and hardly recognisable. As his friends sang "You shone
like the sun", he seemed to laugh sarcastically. He stayed a while in
the studio, and then went away.
On the recording, a guitar player drifting in space walks through a
door and finds himself in a loud cocktail party. Managers and promoters
come up and flatter him, cajole him into working for them, but at last
he escapes again. This time, nobody can catch him.
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