While all of this was going on, Syd Barrett had disappeared and was living in a state of suspension. Within months of his departure from Pink Floyd, Syd had installed himself in the London Hilton hotel, on Park Lane. The room had three televisions, which were on constantly, plus a dozen guitars laying scattered around the room. Syd Barrett became the Howard Hughes of rock ’n’ roll, running up a weekly bill that made us look like paupers. He had made a fortune and was now spending it at a rate of knots. By the end of 1968, Syd had recovered a certain degree of his health, and was enjoying a slightly more normal existence, although he was still prone to the occasional freak out.
One day his solitary existence came to an end, he ventured out and showed up at my office in Bruton Place. He had two things on his mind that day. The first was money and, secondly, he wanted to get back into rock ’n’ roll and he needed a manager to look after his fast depleting affairs. So, I took over, and looked after him as best I could. A few weeks passed before Syd mentioned in passing that he’d written some new songs. I duly published these songs, which later made up the two albums The Madcap Laughs and Barrett.
One of the suggestions that had been bouncing around for some time was the idea of trying to get Syd to record an album. It would be a near impossible venture, but on the other hand, now was the time he should attempt it, as it was becoming abundantly clear that Syd might once again slip back into his dream world.
The songs he had written were wonderful and spoke of simplicity, with titles such as ‘Effervescing Elephant’ and ‘Terrapin’. The obvious problem was the recording of these songs, because of Syd’s short concentration span; in rehearsal he tended to sing a verse and then drift off into his reverie for minutes or even hours on end.
Anyway, EMI were very keen on making this album. Malcom Jones, head of its new Harvest label, agreed to produce it and on the appointed day in April 1969 we all arrived at Abbey Road studios and got started. The first day’s production passed fairly peacefully with Syd working away in the studio; however, my worst fears began to materialise, because Syd’s lack of concentration led to him randomly falling asleep, or just staring into space. One of the ideas that we used was to keep the tape running when Syd was in the studio, so that whenever he managed to get his act together, we could pick up a line, a verse, or maybe even half a song for posterity.
On one occasion, Syd was sitting on a three-legged stool in front of the microphone. We were observing him through the glass window of the control room, when halfway through the second verse of a song, we saw Syd slowly and surely fall asleep. As the last words came from his lips, his eyes closed for the third and final time, and Syd, the stool and the microphone went crashing to the floor. The amazing thing was that on impact, he didn’t awake – he simply lay there on the floor, peacefully asleep, for the next thirty minutes.
This process was to continue for a further two or three weeks, and all credit must be given to the producer, Malcolm Jones, for his patience and understanding, and for producing one of the most outstanding albums, made under such duress. I am aware that Malcolm has a different take on the proceedings, but I was present at many of these days spent at Abbey Road and I witnessed the above first-hand. Who knows, the tortured and pained mind that created these musical gems may one day be likened to Van Gogh and his last desperate canvasses.
The two albums that were finally salvaged from these sessions have become two classics, in my opinion: The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. The first of these albums, Madcap, was released by EMI in January 1970, followed by Barrett in November of the same year. Eventually, EMI released Syd from his record contract about two years later. In fact, sometime after that I signed Syd to a new recording deal, but by then he had given up all interest in being involved in the music industry.
One of the functions that we were to perform for Syd was as a collector and distributor of his money. He was now, because of the incredible popularity of Pink Floyd, earning a considerable sum annually. Royalties were paid twice-yearly and it was about four months into one of these periods when Syd turned up one morning at the Lupus Music office to ask me if I could advance him some cash, which could then be deducted from his next royalty payment.
This posed me absolutely no problems. However, there was one hard and fast rule that had to be adhered to, because Cora, my PA, was a stickler for recording each and every cash transaction that took place. No matter how much money Syd borrowed at any one time, he would have to sign a receipt for the same.
Over the next six weeks, this borrowing became a regular process. Each time the same ritual – on handing over the cash, a receipt was obtained and signed by Syd. Weeks later, a rather large cheque arrived from Essex Music for Syd’s royalties. The amount was more than enough to cover his advances. Cora rang him and told him of his good fortune, and that if he came in we would hand over the money.
When he eventually arrived a few hours later, I handed Syd the Essex Music cheque and asked him if he would reimburse me the money he owed. Unfortunately, at this point Syd suffered a memory lapse and adamantly denied ever borrowing or having any knowledge of the money that we had paid him over the last few weeks.
‘But Syd, we’ve got signed receipts,’ I said.
‘No, no,’ Syd insisted, ‘I never sign anything these days, I never sign anything anymore.’
‘Cora!’ I bellowed. ‘Show Syd those bloody receipts, will you?’
Each of the receipts were for between £100 and £500.
Cora produced a dozen or more receipts totalling in the region of £5–6,000. Evidently somewhat surprised, Syd seized the proffered invoices, and immediately retired into a corner of the office to peruse them, like some kind of absent-minded professor, checking his notes on the theory of relativity. Three or four minutes passed in silence when suddenly and triumphantly, Syd jumped up throwing his arms wildly in the air, waving the receipts like one of Admiral Nelson’s flagmen.
‘They’re forgeries. These are all rotten forgeries!’ he exclaimed.
I looked up from my desk.
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ came my equally emphatic reply.
‘These are all forgeries. You never lent me any money, and this proves it.’
Exasperated, I said, ‘What proves what?’
‘Well, look. These two receipts are signed in red ink and the others are in black, and I’ve never used a red pen in my whole life.’
I snatched the two receipts back. They were indeed signed in red ink. They also totalled a mere £450 of the £5–6,000 that I had lent him.
‘Syd,’ I said, ‘if I wanted to rob you, there are many easier ways of doing it, and it certainly wouldn’t be for a measly four hundred and fifty pounds.’
After all, the cheque I was about to hand over to him was pushing £20,000. A few minutes elapsed and it appeared that he finally understood the logic of this. In the meantime, Cora had been looking on incredulously at this soap opera being performed before her eyes. Syd finally wrote me out a cheque and left.
The rest of the day passed pretty uneventfully, until about seven o’clock that evening. Cora and I were about to leave to have a drink in the Guinea, when we heard a terrible row, as bumping and crashing sounds cascaded up the stairs. In an instant, someone was pounding on the door of the office. I walked over, opened it, and there was Syd, swaying but standing.
In the same moment, I realised that he was in the process of directing his right fist, with some force, towards my unprotected chin. My left hand shot up to try to deflect it as he was lunging forward when, to my absolute horror, he sank his teeth into my hand. Before you could say The Madcap Laughs, he was biting straight through to the bone of one of my fingers. I actually quite liked my fingers – all ten of them – and the thought of losing one was not terribly appealing.
‘Stop, Syd! Stop!’ I cried.
But he didn’t. By now I could feel his teeth penetrating through to the bare bone, and in that instant I decided that enough was enough, and with my free right hand, I dealt him what could only be described as a humdinger. His jaw dropped open, my finger was freed, and he collapsed, pole-axed, on the floor. In anger, I leapt on him, preparing to do some terrible damage, when Syd suddenly started laughing. Not a laugh of joy, but an ever-increasing pitch of hysteria. I froze, and poor old Cora nearly fainted.
We didn’t know what to do. He simply lay there for a few minutes, bumping up and down on the floor, foaming at the mouth. Having recovered our composure, Cora immediately dialled 999 to call for an ambulance, before we heaved him up onto a chair. Syd sat slumped for a minute or two, hardly moving, before suddenly jumping to his feet and dashing out of the office.
As much as I loved Syd, this was obviously totally unacceptable behaviour. For the second time in my business career, a fracas had taken place. I’m delighted to say that from that day to this, it has never been repeated. The next day, I ruefully sent a letter to Syd, explaining that all management and agency agreements between us were hereby terminated, although the few songs of his that I had published would remain in place.
Syd proceeded to turn up on the corner of Berkeley Square and Bruton Place for the next six months. For hours on end, he would stand there gazing into the middle distance towards our office. The sightings became less and less until he finally disappeared. He only came back to our office once, when he asked Cora if I would change my mind and once again become his manager. That was the last time either of us saw him. To the best of my knowledge, he lived a quiet and retired life somewhere in Cambridge.
It was the end of a saga that had been sometimes desperate, but at the same time thrilling for me, and so another rock ’n’ roll genius faded, or maybe not, into obscurity.
It was around this time that the whole world was getting extremely excited about the forthcoming Olympics, which were due to take place in Munich in 1972. There had been talk for some time about the Chinese playing a much larger part in this Olympics than ever before; the Chinese obviously wanting to prove to the world that they could produce great athletes, besides bloody good food and Confucius.
It occurred to me that China was not at this time a partner in the world copyright convention, which meant that any song sold or played within China earnt zilch in royalties. Also, it meant that any song written in China could be copyrighted in the West and owned by the publisher. Well, I was always on the look-out for something amusing and, in this case, possibly lucrative.
I hit on the idea that if the Chinese went to the Olympics, you could be damn sure they were going to win gold. If this was to be the case, then many of their athletes would be standing on the winners’ rostrum shedding a tear or two as their national anthem was played – and where would the world’s TV cameras be? Well, of course, watching the flag go up to the accompaniment of the country’s national anthem.
Now, music attracts PRS payments, and with hundreds of millions of viewers watching, that’s an awful lot of lucre. I don’t know the exact sum, it would depend on the length of performance and how many viewers there were, but for sure it would be in the tens of thousands. I would also have been the only person in the world owning a national anthem.
I went to Chinatown and rummaged around second-hand shops until, lo and behold, I discovered a very old, decrepit 78 rpm copy of ‘The East Is Red’, the Chinese national anthem. I immediately had the music transcribed and on 23 April 1970, I copyrighted the piece of music and sat back to wait for the Olympics.
Imagine my chagrin when, two years later, the first Chinese athlete to attain gold stood on the rostrum and the band played – however, it wasn’t my piece of music. If you can believe it, they had changed their anthem, which is probably just as well. It saved me from being chased by some geezer with a meat cleaver once they realised that I owned it.
• • •
When Syd Barrett was borrowing large amounts of cash from Bryan Morrison, he was spending much of it on new guitars. It became almost an obsession, until he had about thirty of them. One day, he mentioned to Cora Jackman that he was now living in the Penta Hotel, a massive new hotel opposite the West London Air Terminal on Cromwell Road. He told her, ‘It’s great there. You pick up the phone and ask for something and they bring it.’
When she asked how much it was costing him, he replied, ‘Oh, I think I can afford it.’
Cora rented a flat for him in Chelsea Cloisters in Sloane Avenue for £20 a week and arranged for a van to collect all his guitars and other belongings from the hotel. When she saw Syd a few weeks later, she asked him how he was enjoying the flat. He said, ‘It’s great, Cora. I’ve got all my guitars in there. But I don’t live there … I still live at the Penta!’
Barrett finally moved into his flat on the ninth floor of Chelsea Cloisters and stayed there from late 1974 until 1982, when he left London for Cambridge. Almost nothing is known about those years. In his excellent book, Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head, Rob Chapman recounts how friends who tried to visit him there were often turned away, or found his living conditions so unsanitary and his behaviour so unsettling that they had to leave. It appeared that Barrett was isolating himself from his friends, his family, and the world.
In 1982, he returned home to Cambridge to live with his elderly mother, Win, in her three-bedroom, semi-detached house in Cherry Hinton, a village four miles from Cambridge city centre. By then he had stopped using the name Syd and reverted to his real name of Roger Keith Barrett. After his mother’s death in 1991, he lived a solitary life and renewed his schoolboy interest in painting, although he did venture out on his bicycle to go to his local Sainsbury’s supermarket, or to the pub.
Barrett suffered from chronic stomach problems and he also developed type 2 diabetes. In May 2006, he was admitted to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, where he was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, and he died at his home on 7 July 2006, aged sixty.
It was only nine days before Bryan had his life-changing polo accident.