Syd Barrett
And Pink Floyd
Robert Sandall
Three decades and 140 million albums later, the sheer familiarity of the
Pink Floyd phenomenon obscures the strangeness of it all. Unlike any of their contemporaries,
for whom drastic changes in line-up have normally spelled disaster, The Floyd are well into their third coming. They opened their account
as the Syd Barrett band, hoisted themselves into the
international superleague as the Roger Waters quartet,
and having survived the successive departures of two inspirational leaders and
principal songwriters, are now continuing to hold their own as the David
Gilmour trio. Small wonder the accepted wisdom holds that with Pink Floyd it is
the sights and the sounds that matter; that for them, personnel are little more
than technicians servicing a vast, high-tech son et lumiere
spectacle, or perpetuating a brand name. The band endorse and encourage this
view of themselves as a personality-free zone, to the point of giving only one
interview to mark the release of their new album, The Division Bell. "We
don't have to promote a Bono or a Mick Jagger,"
drummer Nick Mason tells me. "The thing you have to remember is, we're so wonderfully boring."
What this thoroghly English remark conceals
though is an equally English history of childhood friendships and teenage
alliances, casting long shadows over the lives and careers of a group of young,
now middle-aged, men. Most accounts of the origins of Pink Floyd begin at
Regent Street Polytechnic,
It is no coincidence that the band's three leaders, Barrett, Waters and
David Gilmour grew up together in Cambridge, in fairly comfortable middle-
class circumstances. Their mothers, according to Gilmour, all had connections
with Homerton, the nearby teacher's training college.
But the key to their knowing each other was the man whose ghost still hovers
above the band: Syd Barrett. Waters and Barrett
shared the same primary and grammar schools, and were drawn to each other,
despite the age difference, partly because each had lost his father. Gilmour
and Barrett, both a couple of years younger than Waters, became friendly aged
14, and ended up at Cambridge Tech together, studing
'A' levels. "We would hang around the
In the summer of 1964 the pair went busking in
San Tropez, playing Beatles songs from the Help album on the streets of the
fashionable resort, before getting thrown in gaol by
the French police. "The thing with Syd was that
his guitar playing wasn't his strongest feature. His style was very stiff. I
always thought I was the better guitar player. But he was very clever, very
intelligent, an artist in every way. And he was a frightening talent when it
came to the words, and lyrics. They just used to pour out."
There was never any doubt that Syd Barrett
constituted the guiding spirit of the early Pink Floyd. The year after St.
Tropez trip, he was down in London painting and studying fine art when Waters
asked him to join a blues band called, rather unpromisingly, The Tea Set. At
the time, Waters was an all purpose strummer, more interested in the idea of
the group than in mastering any specific instrument, let alone the bass guitar.
Mason, the drummer, was his best mate at college. Wright supplied what little
musical expertise they had. One of Barrett's first contributions was a proper
name, decided at half time during a gig at RAF Uxbridge, there being two Tea
Sets on the bill that night. With a typically swift and esoteric flourish,
Barrett combined the Christian names of a couple of is favourite
bluesman, Pink Anderson and Floyd Counsel.
Particularly delighted to have Barrett aboard was Rick Wright, the
group's keyboard player, who had dumped architecture and was now
moonlighting at the London College Of Music. "It was great when Syd joined. Before him we'd play the R&B classics,
because that's what all groups were supposed to do then. But I never liked
R&B very much. I was actually more of a jazz fan. With Syd
the direction changed, it became more improvised around the guitar and
keyboards. Roger started playing the bass as a lead instrument, and I started
to introduce more of my classical feel."
Together, they led Pink Floyd into the swirling psychedelic dawn of
1966, where the band's reputation for uncompromising weirdness soon turned them
into the darlings of the English underground, then centered on clubs like Joe
Boyd's UFO, located in the basement of an Irish pub on Tottenham
Court Road. The idea of incorporating a light show Mason attributes to a
lecturer from Regent Street Poly, Mike Leonard, whose house in Highgate they all lived in. "Mike thought of himself
as one of the band. But we didn't, because he was too old basically. We used to
leave the house to play gigs secretly without telling him."
Syd permed his hair and
they all took to wearing patterned satin-y shirts. By the summer of 1966, Pink
Floyd had acquired a couple of young managers, Peter Jenner
and Andrew King, and a strong London-based following. "You must never
underestimate hown unpopular we were around the rest
of England," Mason insists. "They hated it. They would throw things,
pour beer over us. And we were terrible, though we didn't quite know it.
Promoters were always coming up to us and saying, I
don't know why you boys won't do proper songs. Looking back on it, I can't
think why we persevered."
Syd was much of the reason. Encouraged by Jenner, he was beginning to write songs which adapted the
melodic approach of The Beatles to the harsher sounds and spacey electronic
atmospheres that dominated Pink Floyd's rambling live shows. Early in 1967 EMI
signed the band for an advance of 5,000 [pounds], a princely sum by the
standards of the day, but less significant than a contract which, for the first
time, required the artistes to deliver albums rather than just singles. And
whatever they did, Pink Floyd could, for a while, do no wrong. Their Games For May concert at the Festival Hall introduced the world's
first quadrophonic sound system, built for the group
by the boffins at EMI. Arnold Layne, See Emily Play,
and the first album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
were all rapturously received.
Six months later, the brightest hopes of the British psychedelic
movement were in trouble. Barrett's fondness for LSD had always been a little
worrying, since he wasn't the most stable character to start with. "You
could see the occasional girlfriend with bruises," one old friend recalls.
By the end of 1967 he had been made virtually catatonic through a regime of
daily tripping. The Floyd had had to field substitutes before, notably when
Dave O'List, the guitarist of The Nice, stepped in to
cover for Barrett on a couple of dates during their British tour with Jimi Hendrix. As 1968 came around, the
were looking for a full-time replacement. Jeff Beck was considered, but
rejected on the grounds that he would be too expensive and couldn't sing. The
only other serious candidate was Dave Gilmour, whose Cambridge-based band
Jokers Wild had previously supported the Floyd, at Syd's
request.
The original plan was for the Floyd to continue as a five-piece, on the
model of the Beach Boys, with Barrett cast in the roll of Brian Wilson, mainly
staying home to write songs. Syd, in his more lucid
moments, had other ideas, urging his partners to hire two sax players and a
girl singer. [ouch!] By the spring, and after a number
of chaotic appearances as a quintet, it became clear that Pink Floyd had a new
line up, and that Syd Barrett wasn't part of it.
"I loved the first album, but I thought the gigs were pretty
interminable," Gilmour recalls. "It was too anarchic. I was all for musicking things up a bit. I definately
considered myself a superior musician and I remember thinking that I could
knock them into some sort of shape." The problem was Roger Waters. The
pattern of the next 12 years, according to Mason, the band's resident diplomat,
boiled down to "Dave's desire to make music, versus Roger's desire to make
a show". In the early stages thought, the relationship was even simpler;
it was pure Cambridge: "I was the new boy. Not only that, I was two years
younger than the rest of them, and you know how those playground hierarchies
carry over. You never catch up. Roger is not a generous spirited person. I was
constantly dumped on. And to get my point across I had to make increasingly
histrionic, stubborn gestures."
Wright, who was to become progressively isolated from the other members
of Pink Floyd during the 1970s, felt Barrett's departure more keenly than was
ever recognized. As well as losing a musical foil, he
lost his only ally in a band which, as Gilmour robustly points out - and he
should know - "was never a jolly bunch of friends. Things between the four
of us were always pretty rocky". Long before Waters called for Wright's
resignation in 1979, the two were at loggerheads. They began arguing at
college. "We would never have been friends if it weren't for the
band." As personalities, the two were clearly ill matched. Waters, abrasive and assertive; Wright, sensitive and slightly
dithery. In addition, as Peter Jenner points
out, "Rick was Roger's real rival. He was better
looking and he had the better voice." The other non-Cambridge Floyder, Mason, stuck close to Waters, the college friend
whose bolshy spirit of independence he, initially
anyway, admired.
That left Gilmour, considerably more reasonable than Waters but equally
hardheaded. All in all, the discovery that Wright nearly left the band when
invited to do so in the spring of 1968 seems hardly surprising. "Peter and
Andrew (Jenner and King, Floyd's managers) thought Syd and I were the musical brains of the group, and that we
should form a break-away band, to try to hold Syd
together. He and I were living together in a flat in Richmond at the time. And
believe me, I would have left with him like a shot if
I thought Syd could do it."
The most telling evidence of the enduring power of Barrett's charsimatic talent and personality lies in the intense respect he still inspires in his childhood friend, Roger Waters. "Syd was the only person I know who Roger has ever really liked and looked up to," says Peter Jenner. Long after Waters had stopped talking to the others, and was attempting to claim the credit for most of what Pink Floyd accomplished in the '70s, he was unstinting in his praise for Barrett. "I could never aspire to Syd's crazed insights and perceptions," he told in 1987. "In fact for a long time I wouldn't have dreamt of claiming any insights whatsoever. I'll always credit Syd with the connection he made between his personal unconscious and the collective group unconscious. It's taken me fifteen years to get anywhere near there. Even thought he was clearly out of control when making his two solo albums, some of the work is staggeringly evocative. It's the humanity of it all that's so impressive. It's about deeply felt values and beliefs. Maybe that's what Dark Side Of The Moon was aspiring to. A similar feeling."