Not since the death of George Harrison in 2001 has the passing of a rock star captured the headlines and the public imagination the way the news about Syd Barrett did last week. Which, on the face of it, was a bit odd. Whereas most of us can call to mind at least one of the late Beatle’s tunes, few can name any of the dozen or so songs Syd recorded with his band Pink Floyd.
In cultural terms Barrett always stood for more than just the music. He was revered as one of rock’s most gifted Icarus figures, a man whose unbridled spirit of adventure led to his drug-induced downfall and forced him into retirement at the age of 22.
His was the great cautionary tale of the late 1960s — an era of fabled grooviness and pharmacological excess that still casts a hypnotic spell over those who, for one reason or another, were never quite in the right place at the right time. For the best part of two glorious years, Barrett was never anywhere else.
Between 1966 — when he first emerged with his £20 perm leading a band of less interesting-looking art and architecture students — and 1968 when he departed the scene, an LSD-addled wreck, Barrett was the poster boy of the English psychedelic movement.
In an age that professed to worship “beautiful people” he really was one. Jenny Fabian, the leading groupie of the day, was so smitten that she hardly dared touch him. “Syd was so beautiful. I only sort of lay beside him. I just liked looking at him and his violet eyes.”
Barrett’s group was the house band of London’s underground scene, a regular fixture at all-night “happenings” at clubs such as UFO.
So fashionable had Pink Floyd become by the summer of 1967 that while they were in Abbey Road studios recording their first album, Paul McCartney took time out from the Sgt Pepper sessions in the room next door to stop by and introduce himself.
In concert Pink Floyd were an engagingly shambolic jam band, noodling away for hours behind a swirling light show for the benefit of stoned “heads”. On record, by contrast, they played concise pop songs, written almost entirely by Barrett, which placed a distinctly English frame around the psychedelic experience.
Unlike American bands, which tended to focus on extreme mental states and the horrors of the Vietnam war, the early Pink Floyd sang of gnomes, scarecrows, bikes, a mouse called Gerald, a Siamese cat called Lucifer Sam and a little girl, Emily, who dressed up in gowns that touched the ground. As much as Barrett liked to sound cosmic occasionally on tracks such as Interstellar Overdrive, he preferred to retreat to a fantastical childhood world he had read about as a boy growing up in Cambridge.
He was fully aware of his literary antecedents. The title of Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was taken from a chapter in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. In one of the album’s most poetical tracks, Barrett described a small child being read to by his mother whose ability to interpret the words on the page, the boy feels, makes the “scribbly black” shine.
Elsewhere his lyrics veered towards nonsense verse or psychedelic nursery rhymes. The album ended with a chorus of electronically accelerated voices that sounded suspiciously like a hallucinatory version of those kiddies’ favourites from the 1950s, the Chipmunks.
Following bands such as the Kinks and the Small Faces, Barrett refused to adopt a transatlantic accent when he sang, giving his songs an even more pronounced English flavour.
Long after he had lapsed into silence, his influence could be heard in the work of others: the early Genesis album Nursery Cryme for instance, and the vocal mannerisms of David Bowie — who turned up at the Albert Hall only last month singing the Floyd’s debut single, Arnold Layne. While the punks affected to despise the grandiosity of 1970s-era Pink Floyd, they had a soft spot for Syd.
Towards the end of his brief spell in the limelight Barrett’s life was about as far removed from the charmed innocence he evoked in his songs as could be imagined. Contrary to the impression given in the media of a metropolis swarming with hippies, London’s underground scene in 1967 was a small set of interlocking cliques. Addresses where drugs could be consumed without arousing the suspicions of neighbours and police were few and far between.
One such, 101 Cromwell Road, was where Barrett started to fall apart. The Floyd’s manager, Peter Jenner, recalled it as “a catastrophic flat run by heavy, loony, messianic acid freaks. Acid in the coffee every morning. Syd had a cat and they gave the cat acid. Everyone knew that if you went round to see Syd, never have a cup of tea or glass of water unless you got it yourself from the tap”.
Jenner eventually got Barrett out of Cromwell Road and installed him in a mansion block opposite South Kensington Tube with the Floyd’s album cover designers, Hipgnosis.
By then, it was too late. The writer Jonathan Meades was visiting a friend there one day when he heard “this terrible noise. It sounded like heating pipes shaking. I said, ‘What’s that?’ and my friend sort of giggled and said, ‘That’s Syd having a bad trip. We put him in the linen cupboard’. ”
June Child — who used to be the Floyd’s road manager before she married the glam-rock god Marc Bolan — would often get woken up at 5am by a mud-covered Barrett after he had climbed onto the roof of the youth hostel in Holland Park out of his mind on a cocktail of drugs, including the barbiturate Mandrax.
She later compared Barrett to her husband. “They both had that fragile quality, like a candle that was about to be snuffed out any minute.” But, unlike Bolan, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and the rest of rock’s pantheon of prematurely deceased twentysomethings, having lived fast Syd didn’t die young. True to the regressive spirit of his songs he went back to Cambridge and lived with his mum. A true rebel.
