A Very Irregular Head

In April 1967 AMM played a gig at the Commonwealth Institute in London. It was to be oboist Lawrence Sheaff ’s last. In a unit as volatile and self-analytical as AMM there were bound to be what Eddie Prévost called ‘tensions and uncertainties about the line and direction we were taking’. In particular, the task of prioritising collectivism and collaboration in a cultural climate where individualism and ego were paramount was a factor that constantly threatened to undermine the band’s idealism. Lawrence Sheaff felt this tension as keenly as his fellow band members, and found himself increasingly questioning not just his method of musical exploration but the very nature of the quest itself.

‘AMM, in a natural way, opened me to inner experience,’ he says. ‘This allowed me to connect to Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation. I began the regular practice of TM in 1966 while I was still a member of AMM. By 1967, a year later, the experiential and philosophical frameworks that had been operating in AMM began to make me feel a little uncomfortable. I felt at odds with them. I wondered if the group would shift direction. It didn’t. I think the ethos of the group sensed my discomfort and that ethos in turn felt discomfort with me. When that discomfort came to the surface it seemed to be to do with personalities. But it wasn’t really. They were my brothers. Still are. The feeling-at-odds wasn’t a superficial thing: it was on a deep level. The strict egalitarian nature of AMM’s structure meant that one’s individual ego had to always be expanding to encompass the whole group. I think this posed a continuing challenge to the members, all of whom were strong personalities. But in performance, whenever that unity was fully actualised as a living flow, it was invincible. Nothing could deny the authority of that wall of sound. When I saw individual members beginning to lay some claim to certain territories of sound, it signalled on a deeper level that it might be time to move on.’

Anti-individualism had always fuelled what Eddie Prévost called AMM’s ‘desire to break away from an emulative way of playing’, but when personal tensions surfaced in the band they centred on Lawrence’s relationship with the rest of the unit. Prévost recalls, in the sleeve notes to the CD reissue of AMM’s debut album, ‘a somewhat painful discussion - which typically English hated getting to the point’. Things came to a head at the Commonwealth Institute gig where, according to Prévost, ‘Lawrence sat crouching immobile and silent over his cello. I don’t think he ever played again. In effect he had been banished.’

‘In retrospect, I see the “territories of sound” phenomenon as a natural thing,’ he says. ‘Specialisation enhances clarity of expression. Thus, even in aspiring to absolute freedom in relation to expression, values of order always become, and inevitably so, a concomitant factor. There can be no freedom without order: likewise, there can be no order without freedom. Life is a balancing act between these two: mastering that balancing act is called wisdom. At the time, however, I read this hint of an encroaching order as restrictive. So, after a while I very reluctantly left the group. Even if it were perhaps for the wrong reasons, and even though I never played music again, it was absolutely the right thing for me to do.’

It is important to relay this story in detail because it parallels what happened to Syd Barrett in 1967. AMM were the conscience of the underground, the band that rose above rhetoric and actually meant it. Syd Barrett meant it too and, although his artistic quest propelled him into a more popular arena, he was for an all-too-brief period just as idealist and just as driven by the very impulses that guided AMM. The moment those instincts encountered the full force of the music industry, Syd began to play up. ‘Always accustomed from a boy to go my own way uncontrolled, I cannot help fearing that I should run rusty and sulky by reason of retinues and routines,’ said Edward Lear a hundred years earlier, and there was something of this in Syd too. This unwillingness to conform to expectation manifested itself in the three Rs of anti-stardom: reluctance, recalcitrance and refusal, until finally Syd too was effectively banished, or banished himself, from his own band. The crucial difference between Syd’s disengagement and Lawrence Sheaff ’s was that Sheaff’s was sudden and clear-headed and driven by purity of intent. Syd’s was messy, painful, prolonged and debilitating. Sheaff found peace of mind in transcendental meditation. Syd would find no such peace of mind.

Until the Beatles broke the mould with the recording of Sgt Pepper, EMI’s strict working practices and procedures had always been adhered to. Recording sessions ran from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., 2 p.m. until 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. until 10 p.m. and were observed meticulously to comply with Musicians’ Union payment rules. Production staff wore white lab coats and, observing the principles of scientific management and union agreements, there was rigid demarcation between the roles of recording artists and technical staff. Although they were not the first EMI artists to be allowed to break the 10 p.m. deadline, the Beatles made late-night sessions the norm while recording Sgt Pepper. Pink Floyd commenced work on their debut LP just as the Beatles were putting the finishing touches to their landmark album, and immediately followed suit. The recording of ‘Matilda Mother’ ran from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., and was to be the first of several all-night sessions.

As well as taking full advantage of the loosening up of recording schedules, Pink Floyd benefited considerably from EMI’s five-star facilities. Abbey Road had its own on-site maintenance department and engineers were able to re-jig the studio on request to facilitate new ideas. The band members were given access to a wide range of miscellaneous instrumentation, as well as material from EMI’s substantial library of sound effects, which they were encouraged to embellish and augment to their hearts’ content, For someone of Syd’s impulsive temperament, though, adhering to the disciplined procedures of Abbey Road proved to be a mixed blessing. His relationship with Norman Smith, the record producer assigned to the band, proved to be particularly fractious.

Smith’s pivotal role in the recording of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn would prove to be a major source of antagonism. For a producer he was very ‘hands on’. It was Smith, for example, who played the drum-roll which introduced the closing theme on ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ when Nick Mason proved incapable. He also proved to be a skilful embellisher, often fleshing out the band’s basic ideas with suggestions for vocal and instrumental arrangements. It was Smith’s idea to append the wordless choral coda to ‘Matilda Mother’, and he also had a hand in the instrumental outros on ‘The Scarecrow’ and ‘Chapter 24’. He encouraged the band to use sound effects on ‘The Scarecrow’, ‘Bike’ and ‘Flaming’, and can even be heard singing backing vocals on some tracks.

‘It was good for the band,’ maintains Peter Jenner, defending Norman Smith’s mode of operation. ‘I suspect the slightly intimidating lab-coat aspect of EMI made them more professional. I think that what Norman did was give them discipline and an awareness of what you could do in the studio. Joe Boyd would have given them freedom, but he wouldn’t have given them the musical help, and I don’t think he would have made such a big record. I think there would have been a danger of them getting lost in self-indulgence a lot earlier on. If it had all been ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ - which it could well have done if we’d had our own way - it would have been a darling of the in-set but it wouldn’t have been a big hit.’

From its opening moment when Syd slid a plastic ruler up and down the frets of his guitar, ‘See Emily Play’ sounded like a hit. This time round the pirate station Radio London didn’t have a fit of moral panic, and they played the record on constant rotation. ‘See Emily Play’ was released on 16 June, entered the charts on 1 July at number 28 and spent five weeks in the Top Ten. Pink Floyd were now fully fledged pop stars. ‘See Emily Play’ was in the charts at the same time as Cream’s ‘Strange Brew’, Traffic’s ‘Paper Sun’, Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ and the Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’, one of the great psychedelic moments from the summer of love. Poignantly, though, ‘Emily’ represents the last occasion when Syd Barrett’s creative impulses were in harmony with the demands of the marketplace. When the band was asked to play Top of the Pops his recalcitrance came to the fore. ‘That’s when he started to get difficult,’ remembers Andrew King. ‘We did three Top of the Pops. First one was fine. Second one was very difficult. Third one was awful. We couldn’t find him. We had to go and look for him.’ Norman Smith remembered things differently and maintained that there was trouble from the band’s very first appearance on the programme.

What had been unique about Pink Floyd up to this point was the way they took radical experimentation out of the rarefied confines of the underground and into the mainstream. Syd’s creative instincts were after all, both populist and avant-garde. He was a full-on sonic explorer and sound-painter who could also write three-minute pop hits. In that respect he was a one-off. But even in the everything-up-for-grabs context of the times this was a problematic combination, and the band was ill equipped to deal with it. ‘I don’t know how conscious they were of wanting to take it anywhere,’ says Duggie Fields. ‘They were just doing it and then suddenly they got this huge response. The response really was from nowhere. Shockingly suddenly they were the underground band. Then suddenly they were on Top of the Pops, which I don’t think they were prepared for. And the repetition that was necessary they weren’t prepared for either. Syd certainly wasn’t.’

‘I think Roger Waters might have thought that it’s all very well to be knock-kneed with excitement at the prospect of success, but that’s actually not good enough. The thing is to work hard,’ says David Gale. ‘I remember Nick Mason saying Syd really didn’t realise what being a pop star means. That you do actually have to get up in the morning and that they’ve scripted you lots of interviews and you’ve got to talk to money people all the time. You’ve gotta do studio work, you’ve gotta sign photographs - and this goes on and on and on. And then in the evening you get to play. And Nick Mason thought that Syd was quite shocked by that, and that this was a side of the coin he hadn’t foreseen.’

‘He was the most facilely gifted person,’ emphasises Andrew Rawlinson. ‘I’m not using facile in a pejorative way. I just mean for him it was, “Let’s see if we can make this work. Ooh, blimey, it does!” I think that was normal for him. I don’t think he had to work at it. That’s one of the differences between Roger and Syd. Roger had to pick up the reins because Syd had let them drop and he applied himself to it and learned how to do it and turned out to be an outstanding lyricist. Musically, though, he’s nothing special and I don’t think he would claim to be, whereas Syd was. Syd came up with all that feedback stuff and was influenced by avant-garde musicians. He just absorbed things because his antennae were up.’

Increasingly, however, as the year went on it became abundantly clear that Syd’s antennae were no longer up, or at least no longer finely attuned to the idea of commercial success. As a result he began to recoil from the taxing and unseemly business of being a pop star. The great irony, perhaps the greatest irony of all in this whole story, is that during the second half of 1967 Syd blossomed into the most beautiful-looking creature. Once he ditched the pencil moustache and the Hendrix perm that Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and several others briefly adopted, he reverted to the hip instincts of ‘Syd the beat’. He grew his hair long and shaggy and he took on the look and bohemian aspect of a nineteenth-century Romantic poet. Like Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix he draped himself in scarves and shawls, silk and velvet, and wildly clashing colours. It was a slightly dandified look, androgynous but never camp. Unlike Hendrix or Sgt Pepper-period Beatles Syd never went for the military jackets or overt Victoriana. No beads, no bells, no kaftans. Like everything else he had done up to that point, his dress sense was executed with style and panache. ‘It was only Syd who could really pull it off. The others always looked slightly uncomfortable,’ says Barry Miles.

‘Men dressed up in frilly shirts and had a very feminine way of presenting themselves,’ says Hester Page. ‘Syd was into decking himself up because that’s what the girls did. So [he’d] put on a bit of eye-liner at the same time as we all were, [and] we used to draw eyelashes on him, and draw roses on our cheeks - so if he’s witnessing all that just before he’s about to go and play a gig, he’d grab a pencil and put some on. It wasn’t being gay or anything like that. It was to do with the time. It was a decorative time.’

‘It’s not just what he wore, it was the way he wore things,’ says Anthony Stern. ‘And he had this extraordinary “lolloping” way of walking, as if he were some character out of Peter Rabbit. He was almost like a fairy-tale, dancing joker kind of character in a pantomime, imitating some animalistic way of being; he would bounce along in the most extraordinary way. And that’s what you most were struck by, his energy and lightness of touch and his self-mocking sense of humour. No sort of pomposity there - didn’t even know what the word meant.’

‘I used to go to Portobello Road every Saturday, because we all used to dress in the stage clothes that were on sale up at the far end, velvet cloaks and fancy dresses and amazing fabrics,’ remembers Hester Page. ‘Syd used to give me money to buy him stuff to wear on stage. He liked little - sort of - boleros to go over his shirts or something sequinned or an old-fashioned frilly shirt. He loved all that stuff and had a great sense of style. He used to go through the sack that I brought back with half a dozen things in it, take whatever he liked and then Lindsay and I would share the rest. Then we’d go and see Syd play in all his finery.’

This was not entirely true. The Tabernacle Club in Stockport, where the Floyd played two days before the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream event, was a hip venue that played host to all of the top underground groups of the late 1960s, including the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, Family and Led Zeppelin. There was the Moulin Rouge in Southport, where the band played on 3 May, which despite boasting a ‘Teen Room’ where you could ‘wine, dine, dance, and have a gay time’ attracted an appreciative art school crowd. However, it was a different story at the Benn Memorial Hall in Rugby on 22 April, where the review in the local Rugby Advertiser noted ‘the 45-minute stint was about all the average onlooker could take’. At the Wellington Club in East Dereham in Suffolk, on 29 July, Nick Mason recalls pint pots being thrown at the stage. It wasn’t down to narrow-minded provincialism. The band didn’t necessarily fare any better when they played the London suburbs. At the Blue Opera Club at the Feathers pub in Ealing, two days after the Rugby gig, Roger Waters was cut on the forehead by a penny thrown from the hostile crowd who then, according to Waters, proceeded to vent their aggression on the lone hippie in the audience and gave him a sound beating.

It’s perhaps hard to understand now just how obliged bands were to go out on the road to play these unrewarding and often unlucrative gigs. No one questioned it. It’s just how things were done back then. There’s probably no better way to illustrate the point than by mentioning that on the weekend of the legendary, and legend-making, Monterey Pop Festival, manager Robert Stigwood had Cream playing at former boxer Billy Walker’s Uppercut Club in East London. The Beatles were the lone exception in getting off the treadmill of touring.

All of this pressure began to take its toll on Syd. On 28 July, the day before the East Dereham gig where pint pots rained down on the stage, Pink Floyd had been booked to record a session for the BBC Light Programme’s Saturday Club, to be aired the following week. Syd walked out shortly after the band arrived at the BBC’s Playhouse Theatre. In his Barrett sessionography, Random Precision, David Parker quotes producer Bernie Andrews as saying: ‘I still have a copy of the letter sent to Peter Jenner from Patrick Newman the “Light Entertainment Booking Manager” asking for an explanation as to why a member of the group left the studio . . . without completing the recording of the first number.’ The letter was dated 3 August and received an apologetic reply from Peter Jenner on the 14th, citing a ‘nervous collapse’.

It was during this period that stories about Syd’s increasing unreliability and erratic behaviour began to flourish. David Gilmour remembers being invited to Sound Techniques studio on 21 May to attend the ‘See Emily Play’ recording sessions, and being greeted by blank stares and indifference from Syd. Joe Boyd recalls a similarly fraught encounter at UFO. Boyd hadn’t seen Syd for a few weeks and was shocked at his appearance as he squeezed past him in the crowded entrance to the Blarney Club dressing rooms. He noted that where previously Syd had always possessed a twinkle in his eye and a bounce in his step he now seemed vacant and detached. Boyd’s account has been elevated to universal truth over the years, supposedly capturing the defining moment when Syd’s lights went out. The generally agreed date for this encounter is 2 June. If this is the case then Syd’s decline must have been sudden and cataclysmic, for only two weeks earlier he could be seen clear-eyed and amused on BBC television as he endured a bizarre grilling from musicologist Hans Keller on the arts programme The Look of the Week. And just days before that he had played what many consider to be Pink Floyd’s finest gig at the Games for May concert. A week later, he was at his creative zenith recording ‘Bike’ and ‘See Emily Play’. Joe Boyd’s story makes more sense if we assume that the actual date of the encounter was the Floyd’s next, and what turned out to be their last UFO appearance on 28 July. This was by common consent a lost weekend for Syd.

The day after the Saturday Club debacle and Pink Floyd’s final UFO performance (where, according to Melody Maker, Roger Waters kept things together and ‘gave the group a powerful depth’) the band was pelted with beer mugs by farm boys in East Dereham and then travelled back to London for the International Love-In at Alexandra Palace. The event was supposed to be a reprise of the legendary 14 Hour Technicolor Dream three months earlier. In fact it merely compounded a growing suspicion that the game was pretty much up for the underground. Syd, apparently tripping his brains out, was barely capable of performing. After another lacklustre gig at Torquay Town Hall on Monday, 31 July, the band cancelled all live performances for the following month, including prestigious appearances at the Festival of the Flower Children at Woburn Abbey and the Seventh National Blues and Jazz Festival at Windsor, the forerunner to the Reading Festival. Under the headline ‘Pink Floyd flake out’, the Melody Maker of 19 August reported that Syd was suffering from ‘nervous exhaustion’.

Many would argue that Syd Barrett was in permanent decline from this moment on, but what becomes apparent when examining his uneven trajectory during the second half of 1967 is just how selective Syd’s recalcitrance could be. He certainly didn’t act up when the Floyd recorded two further BBC sessions for John Peel’s Top Gear in September and December 1967; in fact he turned in some of his best work. But then Peel wasn’t perceived to be part of the establishment. He had always been a massive supporter of the band, playing rough acetates (and noticeably different mixes) of their debut album weeks before it was released on his Perfumed Garden show on Radio London. Those early Peel sessions had a sympathetic producer in Bernie Andrews, whose temperament and approach were far removed from the BBC house style - so far removed, in fact, that they eventually got him sacked. Saturday Club however was a different kettle of light entertainment altogether.

In the days before Radio 1 Saturday Club was the BBC’s flagship pop show. It had started on the Light Programme in the 1950s as Skiffle Club and had retained that programme’s chummy ‘youth club of the airwaves’ ambience. Presented by Brian Matthew, who introduced himself as ‘your old mate’, the show had a typically BBC ‘one size fits all’ approach to pop. As with Juke Box Jury everybody and everything, product and performers alike, were equal under the auspices of commerce. This approach was a hangover from the late 1950s and early 1960s when Saturday Club drew its guests from trad jazz bands, balladeers and derivative English rock ’n’ rollers. As an approach to programme-making, it still held sway during the beat group era, when the Troggs and the Swinging Blue Jeans of this world were expected to perform alongside singers such as Helen Shapiro or Susan Maughan who hailed from the previous era. By 1967 that ‘one size fits all’ approach was no longer tenable and guest line-ups became increasingly incongruous and anachronistic in their diversity. On 8 July, three weeks before Pink Floyd’s non-appearance, the guests were ex-Yardbird Jeff Beck, Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours and Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. The following week’s main guest was balladeer Matt Monro. The week before the Floyd session the guests were the Shadows and Tom Jones. Given that the BBC’s policy for recording sessions was far more regimented than EMI’s, and that the Floyd would have been allowed to play no part in the mixing process, is it any wonder that Syd walked?

In the late summer of 1967 Syd and Lindsay Corner moved out of Earlham Street and into 101 Cromwell Road. Many of the stories regarding Syd’s unhinged behaviour emanate from this infamous address. Cromwell Road had changed somewhat since the high point of 1965-6 when Donovan mentioned it in song and David Gale remembered it as a salon for the hip crowd. Now darker forces were at work. ‘There were still some culturally powerful, influential people moving through but there were also some quite damaged people,’ remembers Gale. ‘People who couldn’t stop talking, people who couldn’t stop shooting heroin, people who rolled over on their babies and smothered them ’cos they were on smack.’

‘The extent to which Syd picked up, or was intoxicated by, the irrationality of those around him is, I think, important,’ reasons David Gale. ‘It’s important to an explosive and highly experimental culture at that time. Whether these were noble experiments is neither here nor there. The times were feverish and Syd was a creature of those times. He subscribed up to the hilt almost, apart from a certain amount of satirical attitude. All that ferment - he really wanted to be part of it. You have to remember that the systematic and wilful suspension of rationality was widespread.’

‘I knew a woman called Carol Mason,’ recalls Pete Brown. ‘Her real name was Carol Masonovitch. She was a Liverpool person, a friend of Brian Patten’s. And she was around Earlham Street when Syd lived there. I remember going up there with her once, only once, as far as I can remember. It was a sort of semi-grotty, semi-psychedelic hippie pad. I remember him kinda holding court in it a little bit. He was surrounded by sycophants. There were some friends there, but a lot of hangers-on too. I don’t remember him being particularly out of it.’

‘He’d come up from Cambridge as a country boy almost,’ says Hester Page. ‘Played with a group of friends that he liked. Then someone gives them a gig, playing to a small crowd. I felt that was always Syd. He was not into the big time. He didn’t have ambition in that way. He was too private. And, yes, he took lots of drugs and lots of acid like everybody else did at that time. But no more or no less than anybody else. We basically all lived on it for two or three years. But I think that he felt he was being swept in to another world because of the popularity of his music and managers coming in to the situation. And he went along with it because he was easy-going, but I think that must have started disturbing him more than the drugs ever did. You know, when you feel your life’s going in a direction you don’t particularly want it to go in but your friends are going that way - so you go along with it for a while, but I think he just got more and more wound up about it and started to retreat into himself.’

David Gale also attributes many of Syd’s problems to the unwanted attention that came with fame. ‘I can remember groupies coming to the door of Egerton Court, which was the next place we all lived in South Kensington, where I lived with Syd and Storm and others. And Syd lived next door to my room with Lindsay Corner. But groupies would come to the door bearing frilly shirts that they had sewn together for Syd. And I realised it was this kind of industry of cock-sucking nubile girls, making gorgeous shirts out of unusual fabrics for rock stars. There’d be these girls coming into Syd’s room, he’d try on all these shirts with massive frills, ballooned cuffs and things and I got a brief glimpse there of the kind of attention paid to rock stars.’

‘He was getting the acclaim from the beginning,’ agrees Duggie Fields. ‘Syd was the charismatic one, the good-looking one. Syd was also the charming one. Sitting in a group at home, Syd could be the centre of attention, just like that. He was witty. He was talkative. But he did start retreating even before the band became successful. He would be the one closed off in his room with people knocking on his door. So Syd retreated, overwhelmed by people wanting his attention. That was before any pop fame, before any real performing fame. He was already the one drawing in the attention and at the same time pushing himself away from it.’

‘He had many facets to his personality, a very strong gothic presence,’ says poet Spike Hawkins, who first got to know Syd during this period. ‘There was this incredible energy that flowed from Syd. Although to look at him you would think he was about to pass out. Women were attracted to him by his distance. That’s what I meant by his gothic presence. One couldn’t reach the centre of it. There were many women who wanted to bed him. He gave the impression of being extremely silent and deep. He was deep but he was far from being silent. I found with Syd that he was trying to get out of a room. He was screaming at the top of his voice to get to the outside world. It’s an odd metaphor but he was rotating inside. Inside he was a dynamo of energy.’

Photographer Mick Rock had known Syd since 1965 and similarly remembers a quiet undemonstrative spirit, not given to excess or eccentricity while on acid. ‘It was really quite a light relationship. Maybe I didn’t impose any identity on him-I simply liked him and got on with him. I took an acid trip with him once and I have taken acid with a number of different people in those years, and there were certainly some pretty fucking weird people out there. But Syd was not that strange on a trip - at least, not compared with some of the people I’d known. On that trip we sat around and played music, got a little higher, played Go, probably read the Psychedelic Review. And maybe just drew and painted.’

The one aspect of Peter Jenner’s statement that can be questioned is the extent to which Syd was, in his manager’s words, ‘buttercup sandwiches’. Donovan was buttercup sandwiches and went on being buttercup sandwiches long after everyone else had stopped. What is noticeable about Syd’s output is that the fairy-tale imagery he is best known for constitutes only a small part and a relatively short-lived aspect of his work. Syd was arguably only ‘buttercup sandwiches’ during that brief, fruitful flourish in 1966-7 when he was writing songs like ‘Matilda Mother’, ‘Flaming’ and ‘The Gnome’. Pink Floyd rarely performed any of these songs on stage, and after the summer of 1967 they didn’t perform them at all, favouring lengthy instrumentals. The songs that Syd did write in the second half of 1967 got darker, more sardonic, more abstract. Once the Floyd had finished recording their debut album there was a complete sea-change in his songwriting style. There would be no more trite ditties about gnomes. No more recitations of the I-Ching. No more buttercup sandwiches. The extraordinary series of songs that Syd wrote and recorded with Pink Floyd during the latter half of 1967, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream (Old Woman with a Casket)’, ‘Vegetable Man’, ‘Jugband Blues’ and ‘Apples and Oranges’, are not like anything he, or indeed anyone, had ever written before. They mark the end of his juvenilia and the beginning of a new stage of experimentation in his writing.

Unfortunately, by now any genuine critical appreciation of Syd’s lyrical gifts had taken a back seat to speculation about his mental state. His fragile psyche rather than his muse became the dominant concern as evaluation of Syd the songwriter took a back seat to speculation about Syd the casualty, as if somehow his increasingly complex and convoluted imagery was merely a symptom of mental decay. Such crude and deterministic criteria do Syd the songwriter - and for that matter Syd the casualty - few favours. This is not to make light of Syd’s subsequent problems, which were indisputably severe and lasted a lifetime, but to reduce his post-Piper output to a mere ‘effect’ of psychological imbalance does scant justice to the extraordinary sequence of songs he wrote in the late summer and autumn of 1967.

The first of these songs, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream (Old Woman with a Casket)’, was recorded on 8 August, a week after Syd had been deemed incapable of live performance (although not, it would appear, incapable of fulfilling an obligation to a studio booking at Abbey Road.) ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ is a dark and disturbing nursery rhyme that treads a fine line between linearity and abstraction. As with the Fart Enjoy booklet Syd takes elements of the Mother Goose rhymes and other traditional fairy tales - ‘A Tisket, a Tasket’, ‘There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe’, Little Red Riding Hood - and reconfigures them in an altogether more eerie landscape. Despite remaining unreleased for over forty years, and clearly in need of further work, the whole thing hangs together with an inner coherence all of its own, propelled beautifully by its own unsettled and unsettling momentum, skipping effortlessly in and out of waltz time to emphasis the warped lilt of the lyric.

Nick Mason sings lead vocal, enunciating the lyric in a clipped accent over layers of speeded-up backing voices, provided by Syd. Syd’s only vocal contribution in ‘real time’ is an audibly wasted ‘She’ll be scrubbing bubbles on all fours’ and a seemingly sarcastic ‘Oh, sock it to me’ during the instrumental break. There is nothing wasted about his guitar-playing, though, which is deft and incisive throughout, as are Rick Wright’s cluster chords and wah-wah effects on the Farfisa. The whole thing fades into a hazy swell of children’s playground voices and the ringing of a school bell. Only two takes of the song were ever completed.

To accompany ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’, poet Spike Hawkins devised an equally strange promotional film. ‘I saw this overcoat hanging up and I thought, “That’s a sinister thing. It’s dark. I can’t see the arms.” This wonderful poet called Ted Milton lent me the overcoat, and it was rigged up - do you know those isolated little alleyways at the back of Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street? We had the overcoat move and filmed it and it still looked sinister in these dark Victorian alleys where anything could happen. Then we had an office set up with two telephones, typewriter, girl sitting there doing her nails and suddenly she sees this overcoat, face on. Then the Floyd roared in and rescued this girl. Unfortunately we didn’t have sound but the Floyd were going to use it for a single they were going to bring out called “Scream scream scream” [sic]. I thought it was bloody great. The film as it was made was paced by the song, but even as a black-and-white silent film it was spectacular.’

If the imagery of ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ skirted the very edges of coherence and comprehensibility, ‘Vegetable Man’, recorded two months later, was an altogether more sharp-edged affair. Often misleadingly interpreted as an autobiographical account of Syd’s descent into madness, the song’s aura of hollow-headed vacancy has generally been emphasised at the expense of its sheer sardonic onslaught on the superficiality of fame. ‘Vegetable Man’ is worthy of Bob Dylan at his most contemptuous - the Dylan of ‘Positively 4th Street’ and ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window’ - full of self-parody (‘In my Paisley shirt | I look a jerk’) and dripping in contempt for the whole process of stardom (‘It’s what you see | It must be me’) and the vagaries of fashion (‘So I change my gear | And I find my knees | And cover them up with the latest cuts’). Written as a spontaneous response to Peter Jenner’s request for new material, specifically a follow-up single to ‘See Emily Play’, it is essentially a song about having to write a song in two minutes, and a significant portion of its ire is directed at that very practice. Penned at Jenner’s flat moments before they set off for a recording session, ‘Vegetable Man’ was written in the time it takes to sing it. That’s a painter’s conceptual response as much as it is a songwriter’s emotive response. The fact that the lyric is based on what Syd was wearing and thinking at the time is almost secondary to the circumstances of its creation.

‘Vegetable Man’ may be an uncomfortably direct portrait of a man losing his sense of self and his self-worth, but it is no mere exercise in debilitation. It is self-referential only in as much as it is about process as much as end-product. Its delivery is assured and its lyric is carefully weighted and almost wholly parodic in nature. Syd sounds uncannily like Soft Machine’s Daevid Allen, as he sings the ‘ha-ha-ha-has’ that lead into the middle eight. That middle eight, ‘I’ve been looking all over the place | For a place for me | But it ain’t anywhere’, could be read as the testimonial of a drowning man adrift in an ocean of despair if it wasn’t for the fact that Syd sounds more wistful and resigned than anything else.

The irregular metre of the lyrics is underpinned by ‘Taxman’style rhythm guitar stabs on the offbeat and tonal coloration provided by innovative use of effects pedals. The ringing trebly tone of Syd’s wah-wah playing, understated but bristling with menace on ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’, is applied with great delicacy here. Fred Frith, writing in NME in 1973, called ‘Apples and Oranges’ ‘my favourite wah-wah playing of all time - incredibly incisive and articulate’. Frith observes the way that ‘he makes the pedal hang always on the edge of feedback, which eventually breaks through as the final sound of the song’ and notes that ‘overall, the guitar acts as a fixed entity in an excellent construction, giving coherence to all the various departures. Considered in detail it’s great the way the lines which underpin the first part of each verse are made up of tiny units, each contributing to something which becomes greater in concept than any of them.’ Frith concludes by saying, ‘The playing not only reveals an acute perception of sound, but explores a little exploited region and menacingly undermines the apparent harmless and half sense lyric.’

‘It reads just fine BUT it’s in the context of articles written specifically and only about guitar-playing. So that’s what I’m talking about,’ says Frith when presented with his words half a lifetime later. ‘In fact, I’m much more interested in the song itself, of which the guitar-playing is an important part, but only a part. It wasn’t really his playing that was the centre of my interest, though he was obviously great at it. I was interested in the songs, and the arrangements of the songs, the sound of them. Syd was first and foremost a songwriter, and in his own way he was every bit as revolutionary as the Beatles. - And it WAS pop music,’ he adds in an echo of what Duggie Fields said when he first encountered the band.

The stop-start lyric of ‘Apples and Oranges’, like the wah-wah work that Fred Frith so greatly admired, is delivered with a dexterity that seems to pivot permanently on the edge of collapse but never quite descends into chaos. The song itself is full of neat verbal twists. The opening staccato salvo (‘Got a flip-top pack of cigarettes in her pocket | Feeling good at the top | Shopping at shops’) would have looked great stencilled or speech-ballooned on to a Richard Hamilton canvas. This tongue-twister suddenly melts into the elongated acid-vowel distortion of ‘sheeees walking’. A similar derailing device occurs in the second verse’s ‘She’s on time again | and then’, as Syd once again displays an effortless capacity to expand and contract, truncate and time-stretch, seemingly at will, in a way that enhances and never detracts from the momentum of the song.

The middle eight (‘I love she | She loves me | See you | See you’) is almost contemptuously facile in its simplicity. Although supposedly written about Lindsay Corner, it is equally evocative of Syd’s earlier ‘I love Lib | Ad Lib ad Lib’ billet-doux to Libby Gausden. As the wah-wah pedal finally spills over into feedback at the end, Syd launches into a spot of music-hall scat (doo-dooloo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-loo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doodla- dah!’). You half expect to hear Pete Townshend shouting ‘I saw yer’ as he does at the end of ‘Happy Jack’.

‘Jugband Blues’ was written and recorded during the same period that produced ‘Vegetable Man’ and it is out of a similar mould, sharing much of that song’s sardonic humour. In ‘Vegetable Man’ the sarcasm is directed at the pop process and at Syd himself. In ‘Jugband Blues’ it is aimed directly at those within Syd’s immediate orbit. With almost disdainful mock-politeness Syd puts particular emphasis on the phrases ‘awfully considerate’ and ‘most obliged’, as he thanks everyone for ‘making it clear that I’m not here’. Most interpretations of ‘Jugband Blues’ as an essay in schizophrenia seem to hinge on that line, and the subsequent ‘and I’m wondering who could be writing this song’. It is never entirely clear though who or what Syd is waving goodbye too. Himself? His career? Or simply the persona of ‘Syd’ the pop star? Before we’ve had time to make up our minds the scathing contempt of the opening verse gives way to the disarming simplicity of the second. ‘I don’t care if the sun don’t shine | And I don’t care if nothing is mine.’ This is carefree unburdened Syd. The Syd of ‘The Scarecrow’. The Syd of ‘Whoopee | you can’t see me’. The next line, ‘I don’t care if I’m nervous with you’, suggests the coquettish Syd of ‘Ooh, you know I’m feeling frail’ rather than a fragmented and turmoil-ridden soul. Indeed, once you discard the cultivated sarcasm of the opening lines and the Carrollesque quality of the closing couplet ‘And what exactly is a dream | And what exactly is a joke?’, the remainder of the song is remarkably robust. A Salvation Army Band interlude in the middle section injects a playful element into proceedings, but this unfortunately was merely the catalyst for another run-in between Syd and producer Norman Smith. When Smith enquired as to what Syd wanted the band to play, he replied ‘I don’t care. Let them do what they like.’ Once again Syd’s wilfully anarchic approach was in direct conflict with the regimented working methods of an unsympathetic producer. When the Beatles approached George Martin with similar whims and ill-thought-out ideas for ‘Penny Lane’ and the end of ‘A Day in the Life’, Martin went away and scored a distinctive piccolo-trumpet figure for the former and presented the orchestra with helpful structural parameters for the later which they fashioned into one of the most iconic song-endings of the 1960s. When Norman Smith was presented with a similar creative quandary, he complained about studio costs, session fees and Syd’s irresponsible and directionless approach.

By now Syd’s every last utterance was being interpreted as symptomatic of a deeper malaise. Even Peter Jenner subscribes to the view that Syd was fast becoming a lost cause. ‘I think they should be released,’ he says of ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ and ‘Vegetable Man’. ‘I think the Floyd and his family should OK them. They are a self-description of what he was feeling. On “Vegetable Man” the description of the person in there is him, what he was wearing, what he was becoming. I was with him in the room when he was writing it. He was in one corner and I was in the other, and then he read it out and it was a description of him and what was going on in his head. “Scream Your Last Scream” was very disturbing but a powerful, powerful song. And “Jugband Blues”. They are three amazing songs. If you put them up against “Bike” and “Scarecrow”, you think, “Well, OK, those are all right, but these are powerful disturbing art.” I wouldn’t want anyone to have to go as mad and disturbed as Syd did to get that, but if you are going to go that disturbed give me something like that. That’s great art. “Jugband Blues” is an extraordinary song. “I don’t know if I’m here”, you know. I think every psychiatrist should be made to listen to those songs. I think they should be part of the curriculum of every medical college along with those Van Gogh paintings like The Crows.’

Several other tracks were worked on at Abbey Road during August and September 1967. The instrumental ‘Reaction in G’ was devised as a defiant riposte to all those indifferent and uncaring live audiences who just wanted to hear the hits. Although it became a regular fixture in the band’s live act, often opening the set, a satisfactory recorded version was never completed. Also abandoned was ‘In the Beechwoods’, a song inspired by the wooded area in Fulborne Road, Cambridge, where Syd’s Scout troop used to have regular camps. The four-and-a-half-minute backing track minus vocals which has appeared on numerous bootlegs reveals a punchy and atmospheric tune, propelled by Syd’s ‘Taxman’-style rhythm guitar and Rick Wright’s trademark ethereal keyboard, heavy on the treated wah-wah.

The day after ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ was recorded Pink Floyd began work on Roger Waters’ ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’. This track was effectively the blueprint for how the Floyd’s sound would develop over the next couple of years, and was Waters’ first substantial composition of note. It immediately became a staple of the band’s live act and gave the first real indication that the creative momentum within the Floyd was shifting away from Syd. During this period the band also recorded two Rick Wright compositions, ‘Remember a Day’ and ‘Paintbox’. Wright was still Syd’s closest kindred spirit in the band at this point and both songs are affectionate pastiches of Syd’s wistful writing style. ‘Remember a Day’ would eventually turn up on the Saucerful of Secrets album with Syd playing beautifully delicate slide guitar. ‘Paintbox’ ended up on the B-side of ‘Apples and Oranges’.

Latham’s creative life drew upon a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, film, environmental installations, performance and conceptual art. He participated in many of the key underground events of the 1960s including the Wholly Communion Poetry Reading and the basement happenings at Better Books with Jeff Nuttall and Bruce Lacy. Latham had been an original faculty member of the Anti-University, the forerunner to the Notting Hill Free School, and in September 1966 took part in a series of events for the Destruction in Arts Symposium held at the Free School Adventure Playground with Gustav Metzger, Yoko Ono and her then husband Anthony Cox, and Pete Townshend. Speak, Latham’s ten-minute 1962 animated op-art film made up of stroboscopic coloured discs, dots and concentric rings, was frequently projected during the Floyd’s performances at the Free School and UFO. The Floyd also collaborated with Latham on the Music in Colour show at the Commonwealth Institute in January 1967, the same venue where Lawrence Sheaff made his final definitive gesture of silence with AMM.

Pink Floyd were asked to provide soundtrack music for the Speak film, but the session was aborted and nothing further came of the association. For Syd, this abandoned venture was a salutary reminder of how far he had drifted from the intellectual rigour and exploratory ethos of his art apprenticeship. Both men had trodden parallel paths up to this point. One of Latham’s tutors at Chelsea School of Art, where he studied between 1947 and 1950, was Robert Medley, later head of art at Camberwell. Latham, like Syd, utilised both figuration and abstraction in his painting, and had a similar disregard for being bound by genre or the requirements of the marketplace. Both men embraced immediacy, and in their respective endeavours attempted to get beyond what Latham called the ‘event-surface’. Here, unfortunately, the similarities end. In the art world radical gestures are the norm, the enfant terrible and the agent provocateur are actively encouraged and indulged. The pop scene had no such tradition of dissent. What was commonplace in the art world was treated as aberration in pop music.

‘The rock world is very conservative and very conventional,’ says Anthony Stern. ‘Musicians have to funnel themselves through the bottleneck of normality that the A&R men from record companies represent. It’s always the people in record companies who act as a kind of tiny little orifice through which the creativity has to fit, so it can be chopped up into convenient little sausages which can be marketed. That’s the dilemma of the rock world, whereas with an artist you don’t have that situation. You might have an agent or a representative, or a gallery that represents you, but in the music business, you’ve got to fit through this little gap, so that you can be marketed.’

John Latham eventually added his own soundtrack to Speak, placing a contact mike on the floor to pick up the rhythmic beat of a motor-driven circular saw as it gouged its way through a series of books. When Syd later presented the engineers at EMI with a cassette full of similar machine-noise recorded from the back of a friend’s motorbike, he was met with bemusement. His suggestion that a saxophonist, two female singers and a banjo player be added to Pink Floyd’s line-up was similarly greeted as the behaviour of a mad man.

Latham, like Syd, was versed in the tradition of cut-up and collage. The two men shared a legacy: Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Robert Rauschenberg. In the literary world both men were drawn to James Joyce and Bob Cobbing. But while Latham moved in the same circles as many of his influences, befriending Alexander Trocchi and William Burroughs as he sought collaborators and kindred spirits for his textual and contextual experiments with process and form, Syd was having his dark nursery rhymes rejected by his producer, record company and band mates for being too weird. While Latham questioned the dominance of space over time in art-making, and forged a fresh language out of collage and text, Syd was asked to come up with a follow-up to ‘See Emily Play’. And when he did his endeavours were considered not good enough or not suitable for the singles market.

Latham’s most notorious artwork, remembered by Andrew King as having a seminal impact on Syd, was entitled Still and Chew/Art and Culture in 1966-67. In August 1966, while lecturing at St Martin’s School of Art, where Syd had failed to gain entry two years earlier, Latham borrowed a copy of Art and Culture, Clement Greenberg’s 1961 collection of essays, from the college library. Working with sculpture student Barry Flanagan and a small group of specially invited guests Latham ripped out several of the book’s pages, chewed them and placed them in a vial. These were then distilled in sulphuric acid until the solution turned to sugar. When the college library sent Latham an ‘overdue’ notice in May 1967 he returned the vial full of fermented solution and labelled it ‘the essence of Greenberg’. He was immediately sacked from his post.

Still and Chew, John A. Walker maintains, was John Latham’s ‘sardonic gesture of defiance against a pedagogy and a critic’. Such gestures recurred throughout Latham’s career. In 1961 he had produced a work called ‘The Life and Death of Great Uncle’ for critic Lawrence Alloway’s short-lived Gazette magazine. Believing that the artist should not have to explain his work, his contribution to Gazette was itself a protest against elaboration, and consisted of typed repetition of the words ‘the same’, first in lower then upper case. These gradually mutate into ‘the sime’ and then ‘the seme’ before ending in a spray of dots generated by the full stop key of the typewriter. Next to this typographic mantra is, what John A. Walker calls ‘a jocular meta-text’ purporting to ‘explain’ the piece, but which merely adds another layer of parody by satirising explanation itself.

Syd was also exploring sardonic gestures of defiance at this time, both in the satirical lyrics of ‘Vegetable Man’ and ‘Jugband Blues’, and in a legendary recording session where he attempted to teach the band a new song called ‘Have You Got It Yet?’ which he kept changing every time they played it. Even Syd’s increasing and well-documented tendency to play one note throughout a live set around this time can be seen as purposeful, rather than, has been so often suggested, the consequence of drug-fuelled incapacity. Had such behaviour merely been a result of the latter, it is unlikely that Syd would have been capable of taking to the stage at all, and had he made it that far any attempt to play would have resulted in incompetence and embarrassment. To play one note constantly hints at some sort of striving for purity, the paring down of things to their essence. Such gestures, intentional to the point of bloody-mindedness on Syd’s part, echo the rapid-fire purity of Latham’s series of one-second paintings which he executed with a spray gun. When Latham pursued such gestures he was seen to be challenging the boundaries of conceptual art. When Syd did it, he was seen to be sabotaging the career prospects and commercial viability of his band.

Central to Latham’s working practices was a process he called the ‘least-event’, the utilisation of spray paint being merely one of many ways in which he attempted to capture the ‘zero moment’ on canvas. Latham drew upon Rauschenberg’s black-on-black and white-on-white canvases and John Cage’s ‘4’ 33’ to give credence and validation to his methodology. He even evoked Leonardo da Vinci when he discovered an entry in Leonardo’s notebooks that read, ‘Among the great things which are found among us the existence of Nothing is the greatest.’ Syd was now cut adrift from any comparable aesthetic. He was deemed merely irresponsible.

According to Chrissie Iles, John Latham’s ‘unprimed canvases and spray-gun or action-based mark-making raised fundamental questions about the end of painting and the dissolution of the body. Figures emerging out of void-like surfaces evoked the ethereal body prints of Yves Klein, dispersing the image into a dematerialized state that questioned the very basis of representation.’ Syd had explored the same anti-gestural possibilities with his guitar within the amoeba blobs and hypnotic pulses of the light show. ‘It’s quite a revelation to have people operating something like a light show while you’re playing as a direct stimulus to what you’re playing,’ he told CBC radio in 1967. ‘It’s rather like audience reaction except it’s on a higher level.’ Exiled from these impulses and the kinetic energy of UFO Syd was thrust into the unforgiving glare of the music industry’s spotlight, where he visibly wilted.

Pink Floyd’s aborted American tour of November 1967 is seen by many, including Peter Jenner and Andrew King, and his fellow band members, as Syd’s tipping point, the moment everyone realised that something was seriously wrong and that drastic remedies had to be sought. ‘We were fighting a losing battle from the word go,’ says Andrew King. ‘Everything that could go wrong went wrong. From the very first gig, which was the old Fillmore West in San Francisco, Syd was starting to do nothing on stage. He was blowing a referee’s whistle at one gig.’

Nick Mason is completely unambiguous in his assessment of the American tour, claiming in his autobiography that ‘Syd went mad’ and that ‘he detuned his guitar on stage at Venice LA and just stood there rattling the strings’. In fact, as Peter Whitehead’s studio footage from late 1966 confirms, Syd had been radically detuning his guitar during performance for some time. A year earlier such AMM-inspired experimentation was tolerated, encouraged even. Now it was seen as a symptom of madness. Pink Floyd were trying to ‘break America’ and Syd was fucking up.

Despite this apparent handicap, several live gigs were received favourably. The Los Angeles Free Press, for instance, spoke in glowing terms of the band’s performance in Santa Monica, describing ‘a hurricane of sound bringing total sensual involvement of audience and performers’. The real problems arose when the band made their TV appearances. On 6 November they mimed ‘See Emily Play’ on CBS’s Pat Boone Show. The following night they mimed ‘Apples and Oranges’ on the legendary ABC show Dick Clark’s Bandstand. Time and myth have conspired to transform these performances into celluloid testimonials to ‘Syd the casualty’. He is variously said to have stood open-mouthed, eyes rolling back in his head, arms limp by his side during both performances, refusing to mime and meeting his hosts’ attempts at an interview with a catatonic stare. No footage has yet come to light to confirm the Pat Boone incident but the ‘Apples and Oranges’ section of the Dick Clark’s Bandstand appearance has turned up on the internet in recent years and refutes all suggestions that Syd was either unhinged or incapable. On the contrary, the visual evidence reveals a clear-eyed Syd staring directly at the camera as he lip-synchs a significant portion of the song, including the tongue-twisting opening verse. At the end he answers Dick Clark’s banal questions with customary Cambridge politeness. During the performance he looks no more embarrassed to be miming than the rest of the band. Rather than speculate over Syd’s state of mind on that American tour, perhaps the real question that should be posed is this: what the fuck were Pink Floyd doing on the Pat Boone Show in the first place?

In refusing to kow-tow to the strictures of network television, Syd was simply ahead of the game. Within a couple of years Led Zeppelin would show that you didn’t have to make concessions of any kind to these mainstream outlets. In the meantime the Box Tops and Lemon Pipers and Electric Prunes of this world continued to file on to Where the Action Is or the Merv Griffin Show, to be introduced with corny references to their name, mime their latest single and then be subject to patronising interviews from their host. Even Cream at the height of their fame were reduced to miming ‘Anyone for Tennis’ on American pop shows while prancing about inanely with tennis rackets. The Who mimed half an hour of ‘Tommy’ on the German show Beat Club. Syd sensibly took one look at all this shit and opted out.

Shortly after he returned from the American tour Syd met up with old girlfriend Libby Gausden. ‘I’d just got engaged and Syd came in to where I was working,’ she remembers. ‘He was still very funny then. I can see him now, standing there, laughing himself sick. Telling me how everyone was saving and buying houses and he was spending every single penny he’d earned. He’d bought an expensive American car and was having it shipped over here. He was smiling and laughing about it, thin as a rake in green corduroy trousers. My boss said, “What’s that, a blade of grass?” I told him who it was. He said, “I hope you’re not thinking of giving up your fiancé for that.”‘

It was becoming increasingly obvious by now that Syd could no longer reconcile his creative energies with the requirements of the music business. Duggie Fields lays the blame for his disenchantment squarely at the feet of the industry. ‘I saw one of their tour schedules and I thought, that’s the maddest thing I’ve ever read. The way they’d be performing around England, they’d be going up here then coming down here then going over there then going back up there day after day in crappy transport, staying in crappy places, playing to people who didn’t have any clue what they were trying to do. Then they must have had the conflict between performing the same thing the way they did before or performing it differently. Throw drugs into that and you’ve got a big cause for stress, if nothing else.’

Commencing at the Royal Albert Hall on 14 November and concluding at the Glasgow Playhouse on 5 December, the Hendrix-Move-Pink Floyd-Nice-Amen Corner-Eire Apparent -Outer Limits show that trawled the Winter Gardens, Theatre Royals and Guildhalls of Great Britain was to be the last of the great 1960s package tours. As with the BBC’s one-size-fits-all approach to pop programming, the package tours were an idea that had had their day. Earlier in 1967 the Jimi Hendrix Experience had set off on a similar jaunt around the Gaumonts and Granadas with Engelbert Humperdinck, Cat Stevens and the Walker Brothers. It seems incongruous in hindsight, but it was part of the prevailing ‘it’s all showbiz’ ethos of the time. Just as the Hendrix-Floyd-Move tour was commencing, the Who were just winding up a similar UK tour with Marmalade, the Tremeloes and the Herd.

By the end of 1967 the sheer physical toll was beginning to tell on Syd. Photos from the late summer through to the American trip reveal a tousle-haired youth with the beauty of a Romantic poet. A group photo from the Hendrix package tour shows a frazzled-looking Syd with a penetrating and unsettling stare. And by now more disturbing evidence of Syd’s decline was beginning to surface too. ‘Egerton Court was the flat where we first started to hear thumping noises coming from downstairs,’ says David Gale. ‘It transpired that Syd would tickle Lindsay to the point of her desperation. She’d be screaming at him to stop and he wouldn’t. And he would bang her head on the floor. And Syd started to beat Lindsay Corner up.’

An accumulation of several factors seems to have brought about this unsavoury situation whereby the previously sweet, charming and twinkle-eyed Syd was now by all accounts turning into a deeply unpleasant and anti-social human being. In addition to the intolerable pressures of pop stardom and a tendency to self-medicate with powerful hallucinogens, another crucial factor to take into account was the laissez-faire and non-judgemental ethos that prevailed at the time. Syd may or may not have been frying his brain, but in the main friends and onlookers alike were too damned cool to do anything about it.

It was through his own connections with Laing and Cooper that Gale attempted to get help for Syd. ‘I rang up R. D. Laing and said, “I want to talk to you about Syd Barrett, because myself and his friends think he’s in deep trouble and would benefit from seeing you.” So Laing said, “Well, y’know, no therapy can ever take place unless the patient wants it to.” He said, “You’ve got to make him want to come and see me.” And I said, “Well, can we make an appointment, and then in the interim”, I said, “we’ll get to work on him. And then if we can’t, and he won’t come, we’ll cancel the appointment.” So he said, “Sure. Why don’t you come next Wednesday at three o’clock?” So we hired a cab which pulled up outside Egerton Court, and we said-I think we hadn’t done it well - “Oh, Syd, we’ve arranged for you to go and see R. D. Laing.” We didn’t really build it up, maybe we should’ve done, but we thought we would get rebuffed. And he point-blank refused - would not go. And that was that.’

It is worth looking in detail at this evidence, as all of it casts doubt on the notion that Syd was no longer able to function. From the recording of ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ on 7 August 1967 to footage shot in December 1967 for a feature on Mike Leonard’s light show, which was shown on the Tomorrow’s World TV programme in January 1968 - the very period when Syd was supposedly in irreversible freefall - there is substantial material to counteract the myths, namely the four compositions that have already been considered (‘Scream Thy Last Scream’, ‘Vegetable Man’, ‘Jugband Blues’ and ‘Apples and Oranges’) and the band’s performance on Dick Clark’s Bandstand on 6 November. To these can be added widely circulated bootleg recordings of live performances at the Starclub Club in Copenhagen on 13 September and the Hippy-Happy Fair in Rotterdam on 13 November, the two BBC sessions for John Peel’s Top Gear recorded on 25 September and 20 December and a promotional film for ‘Jugband Blues’ shot in December.

The Rotterdam concert on 13 November took place one day after the Floyd had aborted their American tour with a gig at the Cheetah Club in New York. One therefore might expect to hear a substandard performance from a burned-out Syd. In fact, the band’s energy levels are frantic and brutalising. One is struck, not only by the searing intensity of it all, but by the realisation that the band went out and did this 137 times during 1967. As much as anything else it’s worth considering how anyone could achieve that kind of intensity every night without burning out. If anything, it is Waters and Mason who sound uninspired. The Rotterdam version of ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ cruelly exposes the shortcomings of the Floyd’s rhythm section, while Waters delivers some spectacularly out-of-tune vocals on ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’. Rick Wright is the musical force behind most numbers, laying down subtle textures over which Syd thrashes wildly. During the lengthy middle section of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, now unrecognisable from the Morse blips and clicks of early versions, Syd sends out shards of machine-metal noise into the night, but on ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ (announced by Waters as ‘Old Woman with a Casket’) he plays the nifty changes with great delicacy. This, remember, is a man who was supposedly ga-ga on American TV a few days earlier.

The first of the band’s Radio 1 sessions was recorded on 25 September 1967 and aired on the very first Top Gear programme on 1 October, the second day of broadcasting from the BBC’s new pop service. The band, probably out of obligation, play a selection of the shorter poppier tracks from the Piper album - ‘Flaming’, ‘The Scarecrow’, ‘Matilda Mother’ and ‘The Gnome’ - which remain largely faithful to the recorded versions (although Syd gets the words wrong on ‘Flaming’). ‘The Scarecrow’ and ‘The Gnome’ are both taken at a languid pace, giving them a lighter, airier feel than the augmented album versions. On ‘The Scarecrow’ the instrumental outro is less busy, the song’s rurality more pronounced. On ‘The Gnome’ Syd’s vocals are less forced than they are on the album, his enunciation less awestruck when he sings ‘Look at the sky, look at the river’. Both performances give credence to those who contend that the subtlety of these songs was swamped by over-production on the LP versions.

Syd’s guitar playing on ‘Vegetable Man’ is all tonal coloration, with leitmotif pedal work that permanently hovers on the brink of feedback. The band camp it up on the ‘Vegetable Man - where are you?’ refrain and vamp like crazy on the ‘Batman’ outro. Everyone sounds like they are having a ball. ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ similarly has impressive tone and texture from Syd and his playing in the higher register evokes the best nights at UFO. ‘The incredible sound of the Pink Floyd along with Ray Barrett,’ gushes a splendidly clueless Tommy Vance at the end of the track, momentarily confusing Syd with the Australian-born TV actor of that name.

The Top Gear version of ‘Jugband Blues’ is slower than the one that eventually appeared as Syd’s curtain-call on the Saucerful of Secrets LP. Rick Wright plays churchy organ, and the band sing harmonies on the closing section, adding warmth to Syd’s plaintive eulogy. Stripped of its Sally Army band section, Syd’s astonishing abstract sound palette comes to the fore, while the appearance of a kazoo - that universal signifier of derision utilised by everyone from Bela Bartok to Frank Zappa - blows a raspberry in the face of this supposed anthem to schizophrenia.

Syd looks far more relaxed in a five-minute item filmed in December 1967 and transmitted on the BBC’s popular science programme Tomorrow’s World on 17 January 1968. The item featured a display of Mike Leonard’s latest light projector, or more precisely ‘a piece of apparatus for designing light machines ... part of a circuit controlled by relays based on the logic system of a computer’. The light effects are shown being tried out on the Christmas edition of Top of the Pops while the Tremeloes perform their number 1 hit ‘Silence is Golden’. The piece then cuts to Pink Floyd who play a languid bluesy version of ‘Green Onions’. Syd, in candy-striped shirt, is seated with his right foot resting on his Binson Echorec. He demonstrates some nifty slide work, while deftly manipulating the wah-wah pedal to the brink of feedback. At one point he glances lazily up at the camera. There is no catatonic stare. He looks entirely relaxed.

Only on the ‘Jugband Blues’ promo film does Syd look unengaged and a tad frazzled. In the rest of the material considered here (some dozen or so items, if we include the post-Piper recording sessions) he is still clearly capable of inspired performance. Should any previously unseen evidence come to light that shows Syd acting like a babbling maniac then clearly a little reassessment will be in order. In the meantime, on the evidence available, it would appear that the stories about Syd’s supposed intransigence and incapacity during his final months with the Floyd have been somewhat exaggerated, and that the circumstances of his departure from the band have as much to do with pragmatism and hard-nosed commercial decisions as anything else.

‘To me the problems became obvious on the Hendrix tour and when Andrew came back from America,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘I never got the full story but it got to be too much. It became clear that there was a problem. Then it got to be an ongoing struggle to try and see if we could keep the band together and make it work. And the answer was, we couldn’t. I kept on trying to find excuses and reasons and how we could understand it. We had to do this and the band had to do that and everything would be all right. But it just went on getting worse and in the end it was unarguable. They had to get someone in to cover for him.’

By the end of 1967 Syd’s days in Pink Floyd were numbered. Almost exactly two years after he had mooted the idea in his letters to Libby Gausden the band sent for ‘Fred’. David Gilmour was invited to join the group and made his live debut with the short-lived five-piece line-up on 12 January 1968 at Aston University in Birmingham. The band played four gigs as a quintet, at Aston, Weston-super-Mare, Lewes and Hastings, and then simply didn’t bother to pick Syd up for the next one at Southampton. Or the one after that . . .