Myths grew up about the drugged antics of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. The reality was far more poignant, writes Sean O’Hagan
In November 2001, the BBC broadcast Crazy Diamond, a documentary about Syd Barrett, the lost genius of English pastoral psychedelic rock. It featured interviews with members of Pink Floyd, the group that, having jettisoned the troubled guitarist and songwriter in 1968, went on to become one of the biggest acts in the world.
- Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head
- by Rob Chapman
- 464pp,
- Faber and Faber,
- £12.99
- Buy Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head at the Guardian bookshop
Barrett went on to become an unsuccessful solo artist and then a recluse, dogged by mental health problems until his death from cancer in 2006. He watched the documentary in his sister Rosemary’s house in Cambridge. “He just said, ‘It’s very noisy. The music’s very noisy,’” she tells Rob Chapman, in one of many poignant moments in this fitfully illuminating biography, adding: “He didn’t enjoy it. No. Another life, another person.”
Barrett’s story has often shaded into mythology. Chapman aims to put the record straight. He pinpoints journalist Nick Kent’s epic 1974 NME feature, “The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett” as the beginning of the myth of Syd. Among the second-hand stories that Kent passed on was the one about Barrett appearing on stage with his hair smeared in Brylcreem and ground-up Mandrax tablets that then melted over his face under the stage lights. That story, like the one about an acid-addled Syd locking his girlfriend in a cupboard and feeding her water biscuits, were both made up but went unquestioned over the years. Both speak of our need to embellish the lives of even the most extreme characters.
Chapman has unravelled the skeins of rumour, exaggeration and anecdote that have been wound so tightly around Barrett. He questions, for instance, the received wisdom concerning the momentum of Barrett’s descent into mental turmoil and offers persuasive evidence that his many acts of sabotage with the suddenly famous Pink Floyd in 1967 were designed to derail what he saw as the group’s artistic compromise.
In Chapman’s words: “Syd was exploring sardonic gestures of defiance.” These included his insistence on playing one note constantly during live shows and the recording session in which he introduced a new song called “Have You Got It Yet?”, the structure of which he kept changing each time he played it to them.
Nevertheless, the Floyd were driven to distraction by his increasingly disruptive presence and announced his departure in April 1968. They had, in fact, left Syd behind – quite literally – a few months earlier when, on their way to a gig in Southampton, someone took the decision not to pick him up. For a time, he remained unaware of the full extent of their deceit. “It got really embarrassing,” Rick Wright, the group’s keyboard player and Barrett’s then-flatmate, said years later. “I had to say things like, ‘Syd, I’m going out to buy a packet of cigarettes’ and then go off and play a gig. Of course, he worked out eventually what was going on.”
As an example of a peculiar kind of English upper-middle class dynamic in which ruthless ambition is coupled with emotional ineptitude, this, as Chapman points out, takes some beating. But Barrett’s betrayal by his bandmates was only one element in a pyschodrama that had much to do with his solitary personality and his fragile sense of self, both of which were assailed by the LSD and downers he took in copious amounts over the preceding year or so.
Barrett carried some heavy adolescent baggage too, though. The product of a solid middle-class family, his youth in Cambridge ended abruptly when his father, Max, died from cancer the week before Barrett’s 16th birthday. His friends and associates from the 60s attest to his friendliness and his aloofness, the sense that, even when he was the charismatic centre of things, he was always somehow apart, inside himself. More than one suggests his temperament might have been more suited to painting, his first love, which he returned to briefly but unsuccessfully when he was ejected from Pink Floyd. This, as Chapman says, is one of the many great “what ifs?” of the Syd Barrett story.
Chapman is very good on the array of almost exclusively literary influences that made Barrett such a singular – and definably English – songwriter, citing his debt to Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc, Kenneth Grahame and even James Joyce, whose strange love poem, “Golden Hair”, Syd turned into a kind of narcotic dream-song. Despite Chapman’s pleading on his behalf, I suspect that all but the best bits of Barrett’s small body of work remain intriguing rather than essential listening.
If Chapman overstates the case for Barrett’s songwriting genius and sometimes writes from the point of view of an obsessive on a mission to rehabilitate his hero, A Very Irregular Head is a consistently illuminating, and often surprising, read. Like most things to do with Syd Barrett, though, it inevitably suffers from his absence – and that of Pink Floyd, all of whom declined to be interviewed for the book.
Syd is a looming presence here, an elusive to the point of spectral figure, who haunts the pages of this, the best book yet about him. It sent me back to the music, to songs such as “Dark Globe” with its almost unbearably plaintive final refrain: “Won’t you miss me, wouldn’t you miss me at all?” In the grain of Syd Barrett’s intensely troubled voice, you can hear the darkness descending and his terrible awareness of the same. It is the sound of a man not shining like a diamond, but sinking like a stone.
