Modern Mask - I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives

Commentary:

I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives:

My narcissistic infatuation with Syd Barrett

Hugh Hales-Tooke

I first read about Roger "Syd" Barrett in an article written by Nick Kent for the New Musical Express (NME) in 1974. For the next thirty-two years he didn't record a single note of music. And yet, his death made headline news on America Online (AOL), even though I’m guessing, few subscribers would recognize anything that he had ever done. How did this happen? When you think of the quantity of music produced by Bach, Mozart or even the Beatles, Syd hardly did anything—only a mere two hours of recorded music in a lifetime—and even in his heyday with Pink Floyd, he was far from being a household name.

Part of my initial attraction to Syd was that in 1974 he was an esoteric figure. In reading Kent’s article, I felt as if I was being initiated into the small circle of people who had even heard of Syd Barrett. This is what the NME did at a time when there was a sense, post-1960s, that there wasn’t too much worth writing about—along with poking fun at sacred cows like Marc Bolan, whom they branded "the glitter chipolata" (a type of sausage), and savaging teenyboppers like the Osmonds, whose father they dubbed George "Magic Dick" Osmond.

Checking the Syd Barrett Archives website, I see that a few articles appeared before Kent’s. Syd was interviewed on a couple of occasions in the relatively productive period between leaving Pink Floyd in April 1968 and releasing his two solo records in 1970. Skimming Kent’s article again for the first time in thirty plus years, I see that it is a collection of stories about Syd Barrett. He didn’t actually interview him. If the list of articles in the Syd Barrett Archives is comprehensive, after a 1971 interview in the English music paper Melody Maker, Syd was interviewed on only a handful of occasions in the remaining years of his life. Even by 1974, Syd had almost completely withdrawn from the world. This is what allowed the legend to flourish. The number of stories—even about Syd’s days with Pink Floyd—have increased over the ensuing decades, and through regular repetition and with no one to contradict them, or even offer a fresh perspective, the stories have calcified into the Syd Barrett legend.

Syd Barrett was the leader and main creative force in Pink Floyd, who used lengthy improvisations (and a lightshow) to take rock shows away from a succession of three or four minute songs into the direction of multi-media performance. He brought effects boxes, such as delay, into rock music, steering Pink Floyd towards a unique sonic palette. Part of the inspiration came from Syd’s early use of LSD and a desire to translate the experience into sound (it is also claimed that he experienced synaesthesia as a child). Unfortunately, Syd didn’t just experiment with LSD; he was never not taking it. His behavior became increasingly strange and he became totally unreliable. When Pink Floyd toured America for the first time in October 1967, he refused to mime to a backing track on "American Bandstand," and when interviewed by the host on "The Pat Boone Show," answered by staring straight through him. After writing two successful singles and their first album, Syd contributed only "Jugband Blues" (an overt swansong) to Pink Floyd’s second record. He officially left in April 1968. Despite very erratic behavior, some of which is captured on the record, he managed to complete The Madcap Laughs, released in 1970 and record a second album, Barrett, released the same year. But after that, despite a great deal of interest, he didn’t record again.

Had Pink Floyd not gone on to such astonishing success after Syd left, keeping his name and legend alive, he might well have slipped into obscurity. No doubt, largely as a result of their later success, the royalties from Pink Floyd’s early recordings provided Syd with a good livelihood. But apart from this, fate might have been kinder to him had it not decided to reward Pink Floyd so extravagantly for Dark Side of the Moon, their 1973 record about insanity. The record remained on the album charts in both the UK and the US for 741 weeks. By 2004, it had sold over 40 million copies, turning Pink Floyd into one of the most successful bands in rock history. With "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" on Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here, Syd Barrett the "martyr" was enshrined and the legend promoted to millions of people:

That Syd was insane was the core of the legend. Had he left the band and gone on to do other things, there wouldn’t have been one. Of course, it also depended on Syd being "a genius"; otherwise his fall wouldn’t have been so poignant. But the majority of Syd stories are about how crazy he was, and not about what he accomplished as a songwriter or musician. Appropriately, the setting for the crazy Syd story to top them all was the Abbey Road recording studios where Pink Floyd was recording "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." I have heard Roger Waters, their bass player, tell it, and recently heard it attributed to Nick Mason, their drummer, so it is better corroborated than most. In neither version do I remember a description of exactly what was going on in the studio at the time or where the band was positioned. Perhaps they were concentrating on playing their instruments, looked up, and saw an enormous man with a bald head sitting next to the recording engineer - but the way the story was told suggests the massive man with a bald head materializing out of thin air.

This was startling in itself, but even more astonishing was the realization that the man was Syd, appearing out of the blue just as they were recording a song about him. I've often wondered how such an enormous intruder managed to make his way unnoticed past the front desk at a prestigious recording studio, and into the studio occupied by the then mega-successful Pink Floyd. I fantasize that someone connected with the band smuggled Syd in with the intention of giving the band a reality check, but if this is what happened, the bombastic recording suggests that the effort proved ineffective.

Syd’s sister Rosemary was interviewed by his biographer Tim Willis in a Sunday Times article published just after Syd’s death. It is entitled "My lovably ordinary brother Syd." As the title suggests, it is an attempt to set the record straight on the question of Syd’s sanity. Willis writes that for much of her working life Rosemary was a nurse (he doesn’t specify if she was a psychiatric nurse or not), and "therefore sees no stigma in mental illness."[2] But in attempting to paint a picture of her brother as "lovably ordinary," what Rosemary says about Syd’s life in recent years describes a man only just about able to cope: cook, shop, and get on a train to London to see an exhibition every now and again. He evidently needed day-to-day supervision. Making a point of saying that Syd was never hospitalized or treated - in other words, arguing that he wasn’t ever mentally ill per se - suggests that Rosemary did see a stigma in mental illness. Whatever the clinical diagnosis might have been, Syd was an extremely vulnerable, damaged person.

According to his sister, Syd "simply couldn’t understand"[3] the continued interest in him. But Willis’ description of a visit to his house a few years ago suggests something very different: "When I knocked on his door while writing my book he greeted me in his underpants and avoided conversation by saying that he was just looking after the house - but the idea that he 'didn't recognize that he was Syd' is nonsense. His troubled years had been so painful that even thinking about his former incarnation upset him, so he made a conscious effort to avoid the trap."[4] Rosemary was evidently very protective of Syd – perhaps overprotective she says, and this might be why her description of her brother’s life sounds so euphemistic.

The last thing I’d heard about Syd before news of his death was a few months ago in a radio interview on NPR with the author of a recent biography. To be truthful, it shocked me far more than his death. Apparently, Syd had recently lost one (or was it several—I was too shocked to absorb the information) of his fingers to diabetes. Was this because, as Rosemary put it: "He was so interested in his thoughts, he often forgot about the mundane chores essential to comfort."[5] In the fairly recent picture of Syd accompanying the Sunday Times article, he is adjusting the groceries in his bicycle basket very gingerly with gloved hands, the little finger on one hand curled back a little—not unlike when people are making fun of the upper-crust English drinking tea.

Pictures of Syd were always important to me. I was so struck by one of the photos accompanying Kent’s article that I made a life sized mural on my bedroom wall of Syd’s face coming out of a tree. I often pored over album cover photos from his Pink Floyd days checking for signs of latent insanity. Sometimes he had an LSD stare, "like black holes in the sky." In other pictures he looked joyful and cheeky, but my most salient impression was just that he looked really great. A photo from the Kent article is reproduced on the Syd Barrett Archives website. I was surprised to see that Syd’s hair wasn’t particularly short. It had seemed strikingly so at the time—perhaps because everyone else had such long hair. I remember it seemed intriguing, giving him an ascetic look.

I now realize how much of a role the photos accompanying the article played in romanticizing the idea of Syd Barrett. Had Syd looked like Brian Wilson, who was also touted as an insane rock genius, I don’t think I would have become so infatuated with him. At the time, I wasn’t aware or didn’t admit that Syd’s appearance meant anything to me, and neither was I aware of it featuring in the legend in any way, so I was interested to read this quotation from Jenny Fabian, "the leading groupie of the day"[6] in Robert Sandall’s Sunday Times article: "Syd was so beautiful. I only sort of lay beside him. I just liked looking at him and his violet eyes."[7] On the cover of The Madcap Laughs, Syd was still sporting a mop of hair, and looking pretty much the same as he did when he was the leader of Pink Floyd a few years before. He was stripped to the waist, still youthful and lithe, crouching on a floor painted with broad stripes in an odd pose that reminded me of the kind of thing you did at the beginning of Cub Scout meetings.

For the last thirty years I have been convinced that the cover picture was taken in the basement of Syd’s mother’s house in Cambridge - my hometown. From my point of view, Syd living in Cambridge was the most important part of the legend. It was rumored that he lived in the basement of one of the big, redbrick houses on the Hills Road, near to the sixth form college (this had formerly been the County High School for Boys on which Pink Floyd's The Wall was based). I rode along Hills Road on my bicycle twice a day on the way to my school, always hoping to catch sight of Syd. On rereading Kent’s article, I was amazed to discover that he doesn’t say anything about Syd living in Cambridge.

The strange thing is that Syd did eventually come back to Cambridge and live at his mother’s house, but according to Willis, this was not until 1981, several years after I’d left. Stranger still, my thinking Syd lived in Cambridge was a popular misconception. In 1978 a band called the Television Personalities released a single, "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives":

By the time the song came out, I had been swept up by punk rock and no longer cared about where Syd lived or if he was sane or not. My younger brother and his friends were swapping stories of Syd sightings around town. It seemed that someone always knew someone who knew the nurse that accompanied him to electro-shock treatment. Another of the rumors was that Syd had become so crazy that he wandered the streets muttering to himself, like Cambridge's very own "Vietnam veteran". Ironically, it was only now that I no longer cared about him that I caught sight of Syd for the first time.

Even at the time, I didn’t think there was much of a resemblance to any of the pictures of Syd, but I didn’t expect there to be, and a string of poetic sounding, non-sequiturs issuing from the man standing on the Silver Street bridge - apparently directed to me and my fellow drinkers at the Anchor pub on the riverbank below - left me convinced that I'd finally seen him. When I saw the recent picture of Syd on his bike, I knew I had been mistaken. Syd was bald, but unlike the Syd of the "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" story, who, for some reason I always pictured as the hulking Marlon Brando character at the end of Apocalypse Now, the face in the recent picture, you could tell, was the same as that of the young Syd Barrett in the vintage picture that also accompanied the article—I was also startled to see how much he looked like me.

Having read the headlines about Syd’s death on AOL in the middle of the week, a surprise turn of events had taken me back to Cambridge. By the weekend I was reading the Sunday Times in my mother’s back garden. As soon as I turned to the page with the Syd articles and saw the little picture of his bike and the one of his house next to it, I had the urge to go and find it. It was a lot smaller than the houses on the Hills Road - not a grand Cambridge house, but a between the wars, semi-detached house that you might see on working-class housing estates all over the country. It looked very much like a row of houses just around the corner from my mother’s house, and I very nearly threw the paper to one side and leapt out of my chair. I might still have gone even after reading that the house was in a suburb of Cambridge (Cambridge isn’t very big and doesn’t really have "suburbs" to speak of) but in the end I was persuaded that the intrusive interest of fans like me had caused Syd so much pain, the idea of going to gawk at his house seemed in poor taste.

It has only been while writing that I realize how much Syd has meant to me, and how much I have identified with him, rather than his far more successful former band-mates, not just when I was young and better looking, and when he was a romantic figure, still young, good looking, and somewhat productive, but as a middle aged man, adrift in my life, feeling the distance from past accomplishments. One of the most painful discoveries in rereading the 1974 NME article was that as recently as the week before it was written, Syd had surfaced to collect a royalty check. Kent tells the story partly to show that Syd was in orbit and that he wasn’t either completely crazy or totally reclusive. On the contrary, Kent notes humorously, because of an obsession with buying guitars, Syd was in touch a little too often. What happened to that obsession?

Rosemary makes no mention of Syd playing music. Was picking up a guitar too closely associated with what Willis calls "his former incarnation?"[9] Did it cause him too much pain? I am not convinced by his sister’s portrayal of Syd as a man who had found satisfaction in the small things in life and peace within himself. In my view, defensible though it is as artistic practice, I even find the description of his approach to painting disturbing – a perpetual, symbolic self-destruction: "His passion was painting, he would photograph a particular flower and paint a large canvas from the photograph. Then he would make a photographic record of the picture before destroying the canvas."[10]

This brings to mind “Jugband Blues” the final track on, and Syd’s only contribution, to Pink Floyd’s second record, A Saucer Full of Secrets: