Syd Barrett
Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett (6 January 1946 – 7 July 2006) was an English singer, guitarist and songwriter who co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd in 1965. Barrett was the band's original frontman and primary songwriter, known for his whimsical style of psychedelia,[1] English-accented singing, and stream-of-consciousness writing style.[4] As a guitarist, he was influential for his free-form playing and for employing effects such as dissonance, distortion, echo and feedback.
Syd Barrett
Roger Keith Barrett
6 January 1946
Cambridge, England
7 July 2006 (aged 60)
Cambridge, England
- Musician
- singer
- songwriter
- Guitar
- vocals
1963–1974
Originally trained as a painter, Barrett was musically active for less than ten years. With Pink Floyd, he recorded the first four singles, their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), portions of their second album A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), and several songs that were not released until years later. In April 1968, Barrett was ousted from the band amid speculation of mental illness and his use of psychedelic drugs. He began a brief solo career in 1969 with the single "Octopus", followed by albums The Madcap Laughs (1970) and Barrett (1970), recorded with the aid of three other members of Pink Floyd.[5]
In 1972, Barrett left the music industry, retired from public life, and strictly guarded his privacy until his death. He continued painting and dedicated himself to gardening. Pink Floyd recorded several tributes and homages to him, including the 1975 song suite "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and parts of the 1979 rock opera The Wall. In 1988, EMI released an album of unreleased tracks and outtakes, Opel, with Barrett's approval. In 1996, Barrett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Pink Floyd. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2006.
Early life
Roger Keith Barrett was born on 6 January 1946[6] in Cambridge to a middle-class family living at 60 Glisson Road.[7][8] He was the fourth of five children.[9] His father, Arthur Max Barrett, was a prominent pathologist[7][10][11] and was said to be related to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson through Max's maternal grandmother Ellen Garrett.[10][11] In 1951, his family moved to 183 Hills Road, Cambridge.[7][8]
Barrett played piano occasionally but usually preferred writing and drawing. He bought a ukulele aged 10, a banjo at 11[12] and a Höfner acoustic guitar at 14.[13][14] A year after he purchased his first acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar and built his own amplifier. He was a Scout with the 7th Cambridge troop and went on to be a patrol leader.[9]
Barrett reportedly used the nickname Syd from the age of 14, derived from the name of an old Cambridge jazz bassist,[14][15] Sid "the Beat" Barrett; Barrett changed the spelling to differentiate himself.[16] By another account, when Barrett was 13, his schoolmates nicknamed him Syd after he came to a field day at Abington Scout site wearing a flat cap instead of his scout beret, because "Syd" was a "working-class" name.[17] He used both names interchangeably for several years. His sister Rosemary said: "He was never Syd at home. He would never have allowed it."[15]
At one point at Morley Memorial Junior School, Barrett was taught by the mother of future Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters.[18] Later, in 1957, he attended Cambridgeshire High School for Boys[19] with Waters.[7] His father died of cancer on 11 December 1961,[14][20] less than a month before Barrett's 16th birthday.[21] On this date, Barrett left the entry in his diary blank.[14] By this time, his siblings had left home and his mother rented out rooms to lodgers.[20][22][23]
Eager to help her son recover from his grief, Barrett's mother encouraged the band in which he played, Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, a band which Barrett formed,[14] to perform in their front room. Waters and Barrett were childhood friends, and Waters often visited such gigs.[7][14][24] At one point, Waters organised a gig, a CND benefit at Friends Meeting House on 11 March 1962,[7] but shortly afterwards Geoff Mott joined the Boston Crabs, and the Mottoes broke up.[14]
In September 1962, Barrett took a place at the art department of the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology,[25] where he met David Gilmour.[26] In late 1962 and early 1963, the Beatles made an impact on Barrett, and he began to play Beatles songs at parties and at picnics. In 1963, Barrett became a Rolling Stones fan and, with then-girlfriend Libby Gausden, saw them perform at a village hall in Cambridgeshire.[26] He would cite Jimmy Reed as an influence; however, he remarked that Bo Diddley was his greatest influence.[27]
At this point, Barrett started writing songs; one friend recalls hearing "Effervescing Elephant" (later to be recorded on his solo album Barrett).[28] Also around this time, Barrett and Gilmour occasionally played acoustic gigs together.[29] Barrett would refer to Gilmour as "Fred" in letters to girlfriends and relatives.[30] Barrett had played bass guitar with Those Without in mid-1963[29][31] and bass and guitar with the Hollerin' Blues the next summer.[29] In 1964, Barrett and Gausden saw Bob Dylan perform.[26] After this performance, Barrett was inspired to write "Bob Dylan Blues".[32] Barrett, now thinking about his future,[29] decided to apply for Camberwell College of Arts in London.[33] He enrolled in the college in the summer of 1964 to study painting.[29][34]
Death and tributes
Barrett died at home in Cambridge on 7 July 2006[23] aged 60, from pancreatic cancer.[145][146] His death was reported a week later on 12 July.[147] He was cremated at a funeral held at Cambridge Crematorium on 18 July 2006; no Pink Floyd members attended. In a statement, Wright said: "The band are very naturally upset and sad to hear of Syd Barrett's death. Syd was the guiding light of the early band lineup and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire."[147] Gilmour said: "Do find time to play some of Syd's songs and to remember him as the madcap genius who made us all smile with his wonderfully eccentric songs about bikes, gnomes, and scarecrows. His career was painfully short, yet he touched more people than he could ever know."[148]
NME produced a tribute issue to Barrett a week later with a photo of him on the cover. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Barrett's sister, Rosemary Breen, said that he had written an unpublished book about the history of art.[149] According to local newspapers, Barrett left approximately £1.7 million to his four siblings,[150] largely acquired from royalties from Pink Floyd compilations and live recordings featuring Barrett's songs.[139] A tribute concert, "Madcap's Last Laugh",[151] was held at the Barbican Centre, London, on 10 May 2007 with Barrett's bandmates and Robyn Hitchcock, Captain Sensible, Damon Albarn, Chrissie Hynde and Kevin Ayers.[152] Gilmour, Wright and Mason performed the Barrett compositions "Bike" and "Arnold Layne", and Waters performed a solo version of his song "Flickering Flame".[153]
In 2006, Barrett's home in St. Margaret's Square, Cambridge, was put on the market and attracted considerable interest.[154] After over 100 showings, many to fans, it was sold to a French couple who knew nothing about Barrett.[155] On 28 November 2006, Barrett's other possessions were sold at an auction at Cheffins auction house in Cambridge, raising £120,000 for charity.[156] Items sold included paintings, scrapbooks and everyday items that Barrett had decorated.[157] His small, paperback copy of cambridge 2005 [sic] has the handwritten inscription "RB '06" inside the front cover.
A series of events called The City Wakes was held in Cambridge in October 2008 to celebrate Barrett's life, art, and music. Breen supported this, the first series of official events in memory of her brother.[158] After the festival's success, arts charity Escape Artists announced plans to create a centre in Cambridge, using art to help people with mental health problems.[159] A memorial bench was placed in the Botanic Gardens in Cambridge and a more prominent tribute was planned in the city.[160]
Legacy
Compilations
In 1988, EMI Records (after constant pressure from Malcolm Jones)[161] made an album of Barrett's studio out-takes and unreleased material recorded from 1968 to 1970 under the title Opel.[162] The disc was originally set to include the unreleased Barrett Pink Floyd songs "Scream Thy Last Scream" and "Vegetable Man", which had been remixed for the album by Jones,[161] but the band pulled the two songs[163] before Opel was finalised.[164] In 1993 EMI issued another release, Crazy Diamond, a boxed set of all three albums, each with further out-takes from his solo sessions that illustrated Barrett's inability or refusal to play a song the same way twice.[165] EMI also released The Best of Syd Barrett: Wouldn't You Miss Me? in the UK on 16 April 2001 and in the US on 11 September 2001.[166] This was the first time his song "Bob Dylan Blues" was officially released, taken from a demo tape that Gilmour had kept after an early 1970s session.[166] Gilmour kept the tape, which also contains the unreleased "Living Alone" from the Barrett sessions.[167] In October 2010 Harvest/EMI and Capitol Records released An Introduction to Syd Barrett—a collection of both his Pink Floyd and remastered solo work.[168] The 2010 compilation An Introduction to Syd Barrett includes the downloadable bonus track "Rhamadan", a 20-minute track recorded at one of Syd's earliest solo sessions, in May 1968. In 2011, it was announced that a vinyl double album version would be issued for Record Store Day.[169][170]
Bootleg editions of Barrett's live and solo material exist.[171][172] For years the "off air" recordings of the BBC sessions with Barrett's Pink Floyd circulated, until an engineer who had taken a tape of the early Pink Floyd gave it back to the BBC—which played it during a tribute to John Peel on their website. During this tribute, the first Peel programme (Top Gear) was aired in its entirety. This show featured the 1967 live versions of "Flaming", "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", and a brief 90-second snippet of the instrumental "Reaction in G". In 2012, engineer Andy Jackson said he had found "a huge box of assorted tapes", in Mason's possession, containing versions of R&B songs that (the Barrett-era) Pink Floyd played in their early years.[173]
Health
Members of Barrett's family denied that he was mentally ill.[9] Asked if Barrett may have had Asperger's syndrome, his sister Rosemary Breen said that he and his siblings were "all on the spectrum".[9][226] She also stated that, contrary to common misconception,[227] Barrett neither suffered from mental illness nor had he received treatment for it since they had resumed regular contact in the 1980s.[228] Breen said he had spent some time in a private "home for lost souls"—Greenwoods in Essex—but that there was no formal therapy programme there. Some years later, Barrett agreed to sessions with a psychiatrist at Fulbourn psychiatric hospital in Cambridge, but Breen said that neither medication nor therapy was considered appropriate.[228] Breen also denied Barrett was a recluse or that he was vague about his past: "Roger may have been a bit selfish—or rather self-absorbed—but when people called him a recluse they were really only projecting their own disappointment. He knew what they wanted, but he wasn't willing to give it to them."[229] In 1996, Wright said that Barrett's mother told the members of Pink Floyd not to contact him because being reminded of the band would make him depressed for weeks.[230]
In the 1960s, Barrett used psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, and there are theories he subsequently had schizophrenia.[96][231][232] Wright asserted that Barrett's problems stemmed from a massive overdose of acid, as the change in his personality and behaviour came on suddenly. However, Waters maintains that Barrett suffered "without a doubt" from schizophrenia.[9] In an article published in 2006, Gilmour was quoted as saying: "In my opinion, his nervous breakdown would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I'll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don't think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it."[233] According to Gilmour in a 1974 interview, the other members of Pink Floyd approached psychiatrist R. D. Laing with the "Barrett problem". After hearing a tape of a Barrett conversation, Laing declared him "incurable".[234][235]
In Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, author Nicholas Schaffner interviewed people who knew Barrett before and during his Pink Floyd days, including friends Peter and Susan Wynne-Wilson, artist Duggie Fields (with whom Barrett shared a flat during the late 1960s), June Bolan, and Storm Thorgerson. Bolan became concerned when Syd "kept his girlfriend under lock and key for three days, occasionally shoving a ration of biscuits under the door".[236] A claim of cruelty against Barrett committed by the groupies and hangers-on who frequented his apartment during this period was described by writer and critic Jonathan Meades. "I went [to Barrett's flat] to see Harry and there was this terrible noise. It sounded like heating pipes shaking. I said, 'What's up?' and he sort of giggled and said, 'That's Syd having a bad trip. We put him in the linen cupboard'".[237] Storm Thorgerson responded to this claim by stating "I do not remember locking Syd up in a cupboard. It sounds to me like pure fantasy, like Jonathan Meades was on dope himself."[237]
Other friends state that Barrett's flatmates, who had also taken LSD, thought of Barrett as a genius or a deity, and were spiking his morning coffee every day without his knowledge, leaving him in a never-ending trip. He was later rescued from that flat by friends and moved elsewhere, but his erratic behaviour continued.[9] According to Thorgerson, "On one occasion, I had to pull him [Barrett] off [his girlfriend] Lindsay because he was beating her over the head with a mandolin".[238] On one occasion, Barrett threw a woman called Gilly across the room, because she refused to go to Gilmour's house.[128]
Solo albums
with Pink Floyd