The psychedelic, chaotic and experimental ones of founder Syd Barrett, who would have turned eighty today
Post, G.L Scaffidi
Syd Barrett in 1967 (Michael Putland/Getty) Photos
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Pink Floyd fans love to speculate about what might have happened if Syd Barrett—the band’s founder and first guitarist, born eighty years ago today on January 6—had not left the group. The question often comes up on discussion forums frequented by die-hard Pink Floyd fans, where two opposing camps inevitably form. According to the first, Pink Floyd released their best records after 1968, when Barrett left the band, his place was taken by David Gilmour, and creative control gradually shifted into the hands of Roger Waters.
The other camp argues the opposite: that the Barrett era, which lasted just over two years and was marked by a far more psychedelic, free and instinctive approach to songwriting, was the most creatively fertile phase of Pink Floyd’s history. After his departure, the band took a different—and in some respects more conventional—artistic direction, even though they went on to become one of the most beloved and important bands in the history of rock.
The enduring affection and high regard many fans still have for Barrett are remarkable, considering that Pink Floyd released their most famous and celebrated albums—The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall—after he was no longer part of the group.
In fact, Barrett represents only a tiny portion of Pink Floyd’s discography. He joined the band in 1964, when he was an eighteen-year-old art student with a strong passion for the wordplay of Lewis Carroll and the abstraction of Paul Klee.
His contribution was essential in bringing Pink Floyd beyond the clubs of London’s underground scene. He chose the band’s name by combining the names of two blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, and he wrote the group’s first two singles, “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play.” Fundamentally, however, he released just one album with the band: their debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
It came out in 1967, a couple of months after the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and according to many critics it rivals that album for the title of the best psychedelic rock record of the decade. Although Roger Waters (bass), Nick Mason (drums) and Richard Wright (keyboards) were already part of the group, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was above all Barrett’s album: he is credited as the author of 8 of its 11 songs.
Pink Floyd in 1967: from left, Nick Mason, Richard Wright, Roger Waters and Syd Barrett. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Barrett was the main writer of both lyrics and music, following a creative approach that—aside from a few exceptions—Pink Floyd would never return to in later years. It is an imaginative, hallucinatory and dissonant album, with very few concessions to easy listening. The songs differ so much from one another in development, length and structure that they almost seem disconnected, as if they came from different albums.
Looking at Pink Floyd’s entire discography, even the lyrics of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn can feel like an anomaly. After Barrett left the group, Waters began to favor the concept-album format, in which all the songs are tied together by a single theme and have an explicit, easily interpretable meaning.
The writing on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, by contrast, is far more inaccessible and fragmented, partly because Barrett was famously fond of nonsense and wordplay. He had an in-depth knowledge of the European artistic avant-gardes, and the artists he admired most shared a tendency to produce anything but conventional works. Edward Lear, an author he had loved since childhood, was known for his limericks—short poems in verse that are apparently delirious and often accompanied by ink illustrations.
When writing songs, Barrett started from premises similar to those of limericks: not from observation of reality, nor from the expectation that listeners should identify with his lyrics. On the contrary, constructing meaning was his lowest priority. His main sources of inspiration were folk tales and science-fiction stories; he had a strong fascination with space and a certain talent for describing altered mental states—something he also knew quite well from direct experience.
“The Gnome,” for example, describes an imaginary world populated by gnomes; “Bike” strings together a sequence of disconnected objects and images; “Matilda Mother” quotes parts of fairy tales that Barrett’s mother used to read to him as a child; and “Pow R. Toc H.” is an instrumental track featuring a series of nonsensical vocal sounds.
Musically, Wright’s keyboards (including the ever-present Farfisa organ) already played a central role in shaping the band’s sound, but the main difference from later Pink Floyd albums lies in the guitar. From 1968 onward, with the arrival of David Gilmour, the band focused on long, recognizable guitar solos—impeccable in execution, with great attention to melody and development.
Barrett, however, approached the instrument very differently. His priority was not so much to line up the “right” notes or create memorable phrases, but to extract a wide range of sounds from the guitar. He conceived of it less as a solo instrument and more as an “atmospheric” one, using it to produce timbres, noises and variations in intensity, with extensive use of feedback, echo and repetition.
He often relied on somewhat eccentric tricks to achieve this effect. For instance, to get harsher, more “metallic” sounds, he would sometimes run a Zippo lighter along the guitar strings. “Astronomy Domine,” the opening track of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is a good example of Barrett’s guitar approach.
In the early years of Pink Floyd, Barrett was also the band’s leader in terms of image. He frequently attracted attention for his wild and unpredictable live performances, encouraged by his frequent use of LSD.
There are countless anecdotes. One of the most often repeated tells of a concert on an American tour where, at a certain point, he seemed hypnotized onstage, staring into space, detuning his guitar strings and obsessively playing a single note. By the end of 1967, the situation had become unmanageable. His mental health problems became increasingly evident, and Barrett often forgot to show up for concerts or rehearsals.
The band therefore decided to bring in a second guitarist, his friend David Gilmour, and in the spring of 1968 they ultimately decided to fire him. Barrett did manage to take part in the writing of some songs on A Saucerful of Secrets, Pink Floyd’s second album and the last of their so-called “psychedelic” phase, which came out a few months later. The extent of his contribution is unclear, but the credits for “Jugband Blues,” the album’s closing track, are attributed to him.
Gilmour’s arrival profoundly changed the band’s sound, and before the era of the great concept albums it temporarily steered Pink Floyd toward progressive rock, with albums such as Atom Heart Mother (1970), Meddle (1971) and Obscured by Clouds (1972).
In the following years, Barrett tried to pursue a solo music career, but with little public success. In 1970 he released two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, both of which had extremely difficult production processes. The first was produced by several musicians including Waters and Gilmour, while the second was produced by Gilmour and Wright. At the time they went largely unnoticed, but over the past fifty years they have become cult records among fans, including those who do not particularly like the rest of Pink Floyd’s output.
In 1972 Barrett put together a new band, the Stars, which broke up after just a few concerts in England. He abandoned music entirely in the mid-1970s—the same years in which Pink Floyd became one of the most celebrated and acclaimed rock bands of all time.
According to one of the most famous anecdotes in rock history, on June 5, 1975, while Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason were recording Wish You Were Here at Abbey Road Studios in London, a bald, heavyset man with shaved eyebrows walked into the studio. The band members struggled to recognize him, but it was Barrett. One of the album’s best-known songs, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” is dedicated to him.
After this period, Barrett’s psychiatric problems—worsened by drug use—became more severe. He returned to live in Cambridge, in his family home, where he withdrew completely from the music industry, abandoned all artistic projects, gave very little news about himself, and devoted his time to photography and painting. He remained there until his death on July 7, 2006, from complications related to pancreatic cancer.
In general, little information is available about Barrett’s life, since he was active as a musician for only a few years and stopped speaking to the press as early as 1971, when his public appearances began to dwindle. More details emerged last year thanks to music journalist Mark Blake, one of the leading Pink Floyd experts, who in his book Shine On – The Definitive Oral History published for the first time a series of letters Barrett wrote between January and September 1965 to Jenny Spires, his girlfriend at the time.
In one of these letters he talked about his first recording session with Waters, Wright and Mason, which went very badly. He wrote that he hated the sound of his own voice, as well as the small studio in West Hampstead where they were rehearsing at the time. In others, he expressed his worries about the future, from his decision to drop out of the art school he was attending to his fear that, sooner or later, Waters and Mason might give up music to focus on their “real” jobs as architects.
There is also a letter in which he described sharing a run-down London apartment with Waters: “Roger can be unbearable, but he’s a good friend,” he wrote.
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