By Barry Egan
Sunday July 16 2006
PINK Floyd's 1975 tribute to Syd Barrett on Wish You Were Here said it all: "Remember when you were young, You shone like the sun. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Now there's a look in your eyes, Like black holes in the sky. Shine on, you crazy diamond ."
Two weeks ago in Cork, Roger Waters dedicated the song to Syd. Images of a young Syd, the prodigiously talented founder of Pink Floyd in 1965, were displayed on the backdrop behind the stage as the song was performed. He seemed so young and fragile and so full of life, the leader of Floyd, the visionary at the epicentre of the radical psychedelic scene in Sixties London (and, by definition, the world).
Perhaps this was the best way to remember Syd. When the DJ Nicky Horne doorstepped him in 1982, Barrett's reply was possibly the closest to the truth anyone ever got: "Syd can't talk to you now."
Barrett, as Waters once said, was the "goose that had laid the golden egg". But his goose was long since cooked, fried to a frazzle by LSD in 1967. Waters made an appointment with psychiatrist RD Laing in 1968 but he remembers "Syd wouldn't get out of the car. What can you do?" What indeed?
Syd Barrett died peacefully aged 60 last week. The cause of his death was not disclosed. In a statement, Pink Floyd said: "The band are naturally very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett's death. Syd was the guiding light of the early band line-up and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire."
"I can't tell you how sad I feel," said David Bowie, who covered Barrett's See Emily Play in 1973.
"Syd was a major inspiration for me. He was so charismatic and such a startlingly original songwriter . . . His impact on my thinking was enormous. A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed."
He became a huge star, a supernova, at the age of 21. Within three helter-skelter years, he could barely perform or function as a human being due to an irreparable breakdown of sorts caused by addiction to powerful psychedelic drugs. He was lost in his mind. He went to the dark side of the moon and never came back. He released his two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett - both of which were produced by Dave Gilmour - in 1970. One critic describedthem, rather generously, as "as eternally eloquent as Van Gogh's cornfields". Bollocks. They were rubbish.
In the Seventies, there were stories of him rambling around London all night, homeless, directionless. He returned to Cambridge and his worried mother Win. The Sex Pistols tried to contact him to produce their first album. No one was really ever able to contact him in any meaningful way. He was a lost soul in just about any sense of the word you care to mention. He reverted to his birth name, Roger Keith Barrett, and spent much of the rest of his life living reclusively and in near-total seclusion in Cambridge. He was the Howard Hughes of space rock. His former bandmates made sure Barrett continued to receive royalties from his work with Pink Floyd. (Roger Waters's mother Mary found Barrett a gardening job with some friends at one point. It was alleged that during a thunderstorm he threw down his tools and left, never to return.) At last summer's concert in Hyde Park when Gilmour, Waters, Mason and Wright reunited Pink Floyd for Live 8, Waters dedicated an acoustic version of Wish to Barrett.
"It's quite emotional standing up here with these guys," he said. "We're doing this for everyone who's not here. And particularly, of course, for Syd."
In reality, Syd hadn't been there, or thereabouts, for a long time. In the early Eighties, he was admitted to Fulbourne Psychiatric Hospital and administered Largactyl. There were also spells in the Chelsea Cloisters (he apparently heard the voice of freedom and walked back to Cambridge and sat on his mother's doorstep) and two years in a charitable institution, Greenwoods, in Essex.
The international release of Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd passed without Syd seeming to notice or care. He watched the BBC's Omnibus documentary about him but thought the film "a bit noisy". He answered the door to the Observer in 2002 in his Y-fronts and said nothing. He was later observed gardening in his semi-detached Cambridge home.
Writer Jonathan Meades told the News of the World in the Eighties about his memories of Syd in the mid-Sixties.
"This rather weird, exotic and mildly famous creature was living in this flat with these people who to some extent were pimping off him, both professionally and privately," said Meades. "There was this terrible noise. It sounded like the heating pipes shaking. I said, 'What's that?' and [they] sort of giggled and said, 'That's Syd having a bad trip. We put him in the linen cupboard.'"
Friends of Syd were quick to defend him: "Pete Townshend used to come there, and Mick and Marianne," said one. "It was an incredibly cool scene. Jonty Meades was a hanger-on, a straight cat just out of school. I'm sure we told him that version of events - but only to wind him up."
Whatever the coolness or otherwise of that scene, the undeniably tragic truth was that Syd Barrett's life was destroyed by drugs. Another friend of Barrett's, Sue Kingsford, recalled that in 1967 he regularly visited her to buy LSD from a "heavy" drug dealer called Captain Bob in the basement of her flat in Beaufort Street in London.
Future Floyd member Dave Gilmour, who would replace Syd in the band, mused that: "Syd didn't need encouraging. If drugs were going, he'd take them by the shovelful."
Rogers once said that "Syd was being fed acid". There are reports of Syd locking his then lover and flatmate Lindsay Corner in her room for three days, feeding her biscuits under the door before hitting her over the head with a guitar.
There were other reports that Syd suddenly failed to recognise people he had known for years. (Ironically, when a fat and eyebrowless Syd turned up unannounced at Floyd's recording sessions for 1975's Wish You Were Here , his former bandmates didn't recognise him at first.) During the band's American tour in '67, Syd went into total meltdown. In the dressing-room at the Cheetah Club in Santa Monica, Barrett demanded a jar of Brylcreem and poured it on his head. Waters remembered that "as the gunk melted, it slipped down his face until Barrett resembled 'a gutted candle'". Syd then produced a bottle of Mandrax, crushed them into the heap on the floor before taking the stage. According to reports, Syd, under the lights, looked like he was "decomposing on stage". His mind was certainly going. And it was only the beginning of the slow death of Syd Barrett's mind.
On the hugely popular shows American Bandstand and the Perry Como Show , the founding member of Pink Floyd, the genius, the godhead of the Sixties, did not move his lips to speak or mime. Syd was by now contributing virtually nothing to the band. He was a liability. On January 3, 1968, Pink Floyd asked Dave Gilmour to try out for the band, who were about to go on tour in England. Four shows were played with Barrett; according to different sources, he "contributed little" and was "rather pathetic".
By the time of the fifth gig, the rest of the band were driving across London from a meeting when "one of them - no one remembers who - asked, 'Shall we pick up Syd?' 'Fuck it,' said the others. 'Let's not bother.'"
The Observer wrote: "Barrett, who probably didn't notice that night, would never work again with the band that he had crafted in his image. And they never quite put him out of their minds." Nor ours. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
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28.01.2009, 18:00
[psychedelic/rock/metal] V/A — Like Black Holes In The Sky: Tribute to Syd Barrett - 2008
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