If you see Syd, tell him

It's more than 30 years since Jenny Fabian shared a mattress with Syd Barrett. But she still misses Pink Floyd's acid-fuelled genius

Tuesday November 13, 2001
The Guardian
 

It was 1967 and the Summer of Love was early. There he sat, in the corner of a manky dressing room, wild-haired, pale-skinned and beautiful. To lie beside him and soothe his acid-fevered brow was my mission. I was backstage at the Blarney Club, Irish dance hall and transient home of the UFO "happenings" in the 1960s. Syd Barrett was lead guitarist, singer and songwriter for Pink Floyd and every pre-Raphaelite chick's dream. He was the archetypal doomed romantic genius, the visionary creator of the first authentic music of acid consciousness. He was burning too bright and too hard, and I could see from his eyes that he was already slipping away. He'd been overdoing the sacrament morning, noon and night, and it was a wonder he still knew how to breathe.

I first saw Syd playing with Pink Floyd at All Saints Hall, Notting Hill, the year before. The Floyd were on their way to becoming the premier underground group, soon to headline at UFO and the Roundhouse. With our perception of time changed by mind-altering substances, we didn't want two-minute pop songs. Dressed in their Thea Porter silks and lit up like wondrous gargoyles by coloured blobs of oil and water, the Floyd brought us the musical free-fall that we craved. The dark rumble of Interstellar Overdrive would curdle in our blood and lift us into infinite space, and instrumental improvisations could last 40 minutes - in real time. In between these cosmic journeys there were Syd's exotic ditties about gnomes, mice and the I Ching.

By April 1967, playing at the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, Syd had turned into Icarus. Drug-filled eyes blazing, his mirror-disc Telecaster reflecting the sunrise, he took off into the pink dawn, spreading sound and light over the audience. Soon afterwards, at an Oxford university May ball, I saw straight college chicks go weak at the knees at their first sight of such acid glamour. It was freaky watching them bounce around in their ballgowns to the supernatural sounds of Astronomy Domine while their boyfriends in dinner jackets went ballistic with the bread rolls.

After his disintegration and exit from the original Pink Floyd in 1968, the mythic element of Syd took over. He had let us into some secret place for a brief moment of time before he transcended the real world. We didn't want to let him go; we kept wondering about him, what was he doing, why had he turned his back. Was it a Faustian pact, to bring enchantment at the price of a mind fragmented? Were we all just one trip away from joining him? It was like he'd died for us without dying.

By the beginning of 1968, with Syd increasingly erratic on stage, refusing to sing, standing like a zombie, or even lying down, David Gilmour, who had known Syd since he was 14, had been brought in to cover for him and play rhythm guitar. Sometimes, Gilmour recalls in a forthcoming documentary, he found himself on stage at the same time as Syd, not knowing whether to play, sing, or do nothing. Drummer Nick Mason tells of the day it became pointless to go on picking Syd up for gigs. Apart from the distress of seeing their friend the way he was, "the thought of losing the flow of songs was disastrous," said Roger Waters, Pink Floyd's former bassist.

Pink Floyd released their first two singles, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, in 1967 some months before the LP Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Arnold Layne had such weird lyrics it was banned. There was an ominous deep rhythm to the music. "No American would think of writing about sniffing girls' panties in back yards," says producer Joe Boyd. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is the essential Syd Barrett. Waters says the way Syd allowed the lyric and the rhythm to attach to each other was "both poetic and musical". Although Syd contributed to the next Floyd LP, Saucerful of Secrets, he was already having an identity crisis. On Jugband Blues he sings, "I wonder who's singing this song."

Before Syd finally left London in the mid-1970s to become a recluse in his family home, those that still believed in him had cajoled and helped him with two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. The music had become too jagged. Peter Jenner, who managed the group in those days, describes the later songs as "open sores". Once Syd turned up when the Floyd were playing in their new incarnation and just stood at the front of the audience watching them. Then he disappeared again.

No one in the group had seen Syd for seven years when he appeared during the Wish You Were Here sessions, while they were recording the song Shine On You Crazy Diamond. He said he had come "ready to do his bit". "Seven years of no contact, and to walk in at that moment... Call it coincidence, karma, fate - it was very, very powerful," remembers Floyd keyboard player Rick Wright. Unfortunately, no one recognised him.

The last time I saw Syd was in 1970. It was in the flat he shared with his artist friend Duggie Fields. Fields still lives there, and the documentary shows him standing in that very room, now transformed into a colourful hothouse of art. Fields is brightly suited with Dracula eyebrows and an elongated kiss curl. He remembers that Syd used to lie on his mattress interminably. "While he lay there he had the possibility of doing anything in the world that he chose, so he lay there as long as he could, with an unlimited future but a very limited present."

I lay on that mattress with Syd. He had painted the floorboards of his room without any logical plan and the mattress was marooned on an island of unpainted floor. His thoughts were like currents in the air: they had the endless dimensions that come from boiling one's brains in acid. His voice was soft and gentle, and he smiled a lot to himself. Each sentence seemed to die after he had spoken it, and he found it hard to remember what he had said. No soothing of acid-fevered brows would bring him back now. He was on another plane of existence. He was also on a fairly constant diet of Mandrax sleeping pills. It was the end of a dream. Syd seemed to encapsulate a time when we really believed we could change the world by opening our minds. In the last interview he gave in 1971 he said, "I'm disappearing. I'm full of dust and guitars."

� Jenny Fabian is the author of Groupie. Omnibus: Syd Barrett, Crazy Diamond will be broadcast on BBC2 on November 24. Echoes: the Best of Pink Floyd, which includes five Barrett tracks, is out now on EMI.