A Very Irregular Head

The Madcap Laughs sold modestly, but encouragingly enough for EMI to commission a second solo album from Syd. Produced by David Gilmour and simply entitled Barrett, the LP suffered from none of the delays and indecisions that beset The Madcap Laughs. Unlike its predecessor, which took the best part of two years to complete, Barrett was recorded in fifteen sessions between 26 February and 22 July 1970. The only interruptions occurred in March, when Pink Floyd were working on their Atom Heart Mother LP, and in late April and May when they toured the USA. Either side of these breaks, a settled musical line-up of Gilmour on guitar, Rick Wright on keyboards and Jerry Shirley on drums ensured a degree of cohesion and continuity that was largely absent from Syd’s previous album.

Gilmour was a sympathetic choice as a producer, and perhaps the only person who could get the best out of Syd by this stage. Their relationship went all the way back to the days when they swapped guitar licks in the tech college canteen and their friendship had survived the fact that Gilmour had effectively been brought into Pink Floyd to replace Syd. Gilmour at the time was a neighbour of Syd and Duggie Fields in Earls Court and both Barrett and Fields were frequent visitors. Perhaps more importantly, Gilmour was a huge fan of Syd’s later music, preferring it to the pop hits and fairy-tale songs that Syd is best known for. ‘I’m not sure that I would say that it was the best song writing necessarily,’ he said of the Piper album to John Edginton. ‘I think I like the subsequent stuff better. Even “Jugband Blues”, which was recorded before I joined the band, is a better song than most of the ones on Piper. It’s a very, very personal song about him and his condition, which is very raw and strange. I think it’s quite brilliant. And some of the other ones that are quite excruciatingly recorded on The Madcap Laughs are absolutely brilliant songs. I’m not sure if the polish of the Piper mix makes me think that the subsequent ones are better. It’s very hard to judge. But for me, the better stuff comes later.’

Two conflicting tendencies are at work on Barrett. On the one hand, the presence of David Gilmour and Rick Wright gave the sound fluency and a strong commercial identity throughout. There is little of the uneven nature and juxtaposition of styles that characterised The Madcap Laughs. On the other hand, Syd was becoming an increasingly reluctant guest at his own party, and there is evidence from some of the material recorded that the muse was beginning to run dry. Half a dozen songs on Barrett (‘Dominoes’, ‘Wined and Dined’, ‘Wolfpack’, ‘Baby Lemonade’, ‘Gigolo Aunt’ and ‘It Is Obvious’) are as good as anything Syd ever wrote. The worst tracks contain some of the most half-hearted and forgettable lyrics he ever committed to paper.

Because of Gilmour and Wright’s involvement several tracks are pleasantly reminiscent of the Floyd’s own late 1960s style and offer a poignant reminder of what the band might have sounded like had Syd stayed with them. Gilmour’s contribution is crucial throughout. Simply on work-rate alone it is as much his album as it is Syd’s. In addition to playing lead and twelve-string guitar Gilmour added drums, bass and a second keyboard to several tracks. His main contribution, though, remains largely uncredited. It was Gilmour who galvanised and cajoled an often uncertain and unenthused Syd into turning half-formed ideas into finished tracks. Gilmour often had to map out and build entire songs from Syd’s simple guitar and voice sketches. Without him it is questionable whether the LP would have been completed.

The first song recorded for the Barrett album set the tone for what was to come. ‘Maisie’ was a simple blues jam designed to get Syd’s creative juices flowing. It has a certain understated charm, and its muttered croaky lyric delivered over a snail’s-pace twelve-bar contains the occasional couplet worthy of the Syd of old (e.g. ‘His illuminous grin | Put her in a spin’) but the fact that this loose jam found its way on to the album at all hints at the paucity of quality material generated during the sessions.

There is a telling moment during the recording of the Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, witnessed by Jack Nitzsche, where a wasted and befuddled Brian Jones says to Mick Jagger, ‘What can I play?’ ‘I don’t know. What can you play?’ replies Jagger witheringly. There was something of this about the Barrett sessions. A palpable Mandrax blur hangs over proceedings like a fog upon LA. It’s audible in the dry-voiced downer-slur of Syd’s pre-song comments, and it’s evident in his singing too, whenever an otherwise passable melody is stymied by the wasted or wayward delivery. What becomes abundantly clear when listening to the Barrett album is that the breezy eloquence and well-rounded enunciation of yore is beginning to flatten out into breathless mumbles and monotony.

What is equally noticeable is that Syd’s musical gifts are atrophying. No fewer than seven songs, ‘Love Song’, ‘Gigolo Aunt’, ‘Dominoes’, ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’, ‘Effervescing Elephant’, ‘Dolly Rocker’ and ‘Milky Way’, adopt the same dance-band shuffle in A, with only minimal variation in tempo, that had been used on ‘Love You’. By the time of his second album it’s become Syd’s all-purpose lick, his underpass busker strum.

With its evocation of drizzle and despair, and its palette of greyness and fog, the opening track ‘Baby Lemonade’ establishes the dominant mood of the album. ‘In the sad town | Cold iron hands | Clap the party of clowns outside’ sings Syd with melancholic detachment tinged with just a hint of despondency. One immediately gets a picture of someone ‘stood very still by the window sill’ watching a crowd of midnight revellers in the street outside, or perhaps sarcastically applauding the antics of a bunch of pissheads in the beer garden of a provincial pub, as glimpsed morosely through a bar-room window.

Throughout the song there is an overwhelming sense of someone killing time, amusing themselves to distraction with oddball acts like putting a clock in the washing machine or sending a cage through the post (Matthew Scurfield does indeed recall seeing Syd put a clock in the bath and tape-recording the sound while he was living at Earlham Street), and there is an indication for the first time that Syd’s capacity for weirdness is starting to sound self-conscious and strained. By the time we reach the pared-down telegram prose of ‘Come around | Make it soon | So alone’ it sounds like a heartfelt plea for someone to save his sanity.

Rick Wright’s warm Hammond washes are a feature of the album and on ‘Baby Lemonade’ they underpin Syd’s distant and distancing observations with soulful substance. On ‘Love Song’, Wright’s harmonium and tack piano add bounce and colour to a charming but slight lyric about a fondly remembered ex-girlfriend. ‘Love Song’ is imbued with the kind of whimsy that Syd used to be able to conjure up in his sleep. Here he sounds like he’s singing it in his sleep. For all its throwaway qualities, ‘Love Song’ would have sat perfectly well on side two of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother or Meddle albums. If nothing else, it shows that Syd even at his most semi-detached was still more than a lyrical match for his former band mates.

During those brief moments when Syd is enthused and inspired, the album really takes off. On the second day of recording, the day after the laboured jam of ‘Maisie’ and the tentative sketching out of ‘Baby Lemonade’, Syd demoed ‘Wolfpack’, ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’, ‘Living Alone’ and ‘Bob Dylan Blues’. The band then recorded fifteen takes of ‘Gigolo Aunt’, a jaunty and jocular item, based on Jeff Beck’s ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’, replete with the same A to D chord progressions and subject matter (groovy people go to the beach) as Beck’s 1967 hit. Lyrically, ‘Gigolo Aunt’ is full of typically deft Syd touches, elliptical syntax (‘Thunderbird shale’), qualified empathy (‘I almost want you back’) and unashamed punning (‘in tin and lead pail, we pale’). The twisting momentum of a jeep winding down a beachside track is niftily conveyed in both music and lyrics, one of the few occasions on the album where the band played together and nailed it through sheer perseverance.

As on its predecessor certain lyrical themes recur throughout the Barrett album. Momentum in all its guises is there again on Barrett; the breezy and bouncy ‘Grooving around in a trench coat’ and ‘Jiving on down to the beach’ in ‘Gigolo Aunt’, the ‘stumbling, fumbling’ and quicksand legs of ‘It Is Obvious’, the hovering and swirling of ‘Wolfpack’, the crazed ‘Top the seam he’s taken off’ of ‘Rats’, the distress signalling of ‘Waving My Arms in the Air.’ On these songs Syd is once again driven by the velocity of his own inner propulsion, the embodiment of Spike Hawkins’ perception of a man rotating inside.

Gerard Manley Hopkins might not seem at first glance to be the most appropriate comparison, but he is fact an entirely kindred spirit. The nineteenth-century poet had his Jesuit faith. Syd was arguably denied his by Maharaj Charan Singh Ji in 1966, although he clearly didn’t lack subsequently a sense of the transcendental. Hopkins had something else that Syd lacked: a failsafe system, a metaphysical principle of ‘one-ness’ he called his inscape. Syd dabbled and delved but he never developed a consistent aesthetic, although again one could say he hardly lacked inscape. Syd’s lyrical abstractions are arguably one long inscape. More in keeping with Syd’s mode of operation is what Hopkins called his ‘new rhythm’, which he defined as ‘scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables’. These rhythms, as Hopkins acknowledged, and which Syd frequently adopted, were commonplace in music and nursery rhymes, but not so common in poetic metre.

By the time Syd wrote ‘Wolfpack’ the elisions overlap and image, scansion and syntax fold in on themselves like Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower. A pack of wolves and a pack of playing cards merge in the first two lines. Puns (‘Bowling they bat’) follow ellipses (‘light misted fog’) upon ellipses (‘the fighters | Through misty the waving’). Distance (‘Far reaching waves’, ‘Beyond the far winds’) is juxtaposed with constriction (‘All enmeshing’, ‘Gripped with blanched bones’) and stop-start momentum (‘Short wheeling - fresh spring’). Images spill out in a blurring whirl that hints at sense and is at the same time beyond all sense.

No one else in the pop era could have created a song like ‘Wolfpack’, or a line like ‘this life that was ours | Grew sharper and stronger away and beyond’ with its simultaneous suggestion of microscopic closeness and something hurtling towards the outer reaches of some far distant universe. How can a life grow ‘sharper and stronger’ while disappearing over the horizon? In a way it doesn’t mean anything. On the other hand, it means everything. Some ungraspable truth all too briefly glimpsed as it hurtles by. It has something of William Cowper’s ‘Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong’ about it, or the John Clare fragment written late on in his madness that begins ‘The cataract whirling to the precipice’ and ends ‘horrible mysteries in the gulph stare through, roars of a million tongues, and none knows what they mean’. ‘Wolfpack’ inhabits the same maelstrom of spiralling tempests and swirling vortex - momentum dragged to new dizzying heights and tumultuous depths.

Momentum and stasis are again frequently juxtaposed on Barrett. The ‘So high you go, so low you creep’ of ‘Octopus’ is echoed on the Barrett LP in ‘Waving my arms in the air | Pressing my feet to the ground’. ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’ represents everything that was going wrong with Syd. What had once sounded childlike now begins to sound infantile and regressive. In certain sections (‘no care | No care’) melody and sentiment combine to mimic a child’s ner-ner ner-ner ner. Numerous unsuccessful takes of the song were attempted and David Gilmour had to assemble the finished track painstakingly by editing together the few salvageable sections from each verse. Not an uncommon practice even with the best of artists, but with ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’ it is debatable whether the effort was worth it. The lyric barely rises above the banal and contains some of the most depressingly unimaginative couplets that Syd ever committed to vinyl.

One of Syd’s strengths as a songwriter was that even at his most unruly and wayward, intent was satisfyingly married to structure, momentum adhered to metrical logic with effortless precision. It’s still there in bursts on Barrett, in the rambling narrative of ‘It Is Obvious’, the nimble zigzagging of ‘Gigolo Aunt’ and the crazed poetry broth of ‘Rats’. But on ‘Waving My Arms’ the muse deserted Syd completely and he delivered a sequence of limp and second-rate rhymes bereft of charm or eloquence.

There is still substantial evidence on Barrett of a supremely gifted wordsmith, able to conjure unique images from an equally unique inscape, but most of the time he seems to be battling through quicksand and fog to deliver them. In the circumstances, Syd’s continued compulsion to create, impaired though it was by increasingly insurmountable psychological forces, makes the effort even nobler in its execution. All too often, though, this energy sounds like it’s floundering in some impenetrable brain haze, fighting unsuccessfully to root itself in clarity and reason.

As on the Madcap LP stasis and ennui are frequently channelled through a dreamlike sense of someone plummeting or rooted to the spot, wistfully so in ‘I’ll lay my head down and see what I see’ on ‘Love Song’ and the ‘Creep into bed when your head’s on the ground’ of ‘It Is Obvious’, less wistfully in the ‘Everything is down’ refrain of ‘Let’s Split’, or ‘Senses in the gravel’ on ‘Dolly Rocker’. In the ‘I lay as if in surround’ of ‘Wolfpack’, the grounding is elliptical and oblique, the sense difficult to grasp. In ‘Rats’ it is taunting and maniacal. ‘Rats rats lay down flat | We don’t need you we act like that,’ rants Syd over a mutated Bo Diddley riff that alternates between 7/8 and 9/8 time. Almost everything about the perturbing rant of ‘Rats’ is driven by hurtling descent, most tellingly in the repeated ‘I like the fall that brings me to’. Its impossible to tell whether that ‘brings me to’ refers to being revived and shocked out of slumber, or whether it signifies some deeper elliptical arriving - brings me to what? brings me to where? - that lies beyond reason or understanding. Also evident in malevolent flashes in ‘Rats’ is the sardonic mocking tone that surfaced in lines like ‘How I love you to be by my side, they wail’ on Madcap. ‘If you think you’re unloved | Then we know about that’ sings Syd, without making it clear who the ‘you’ is. If he’s referring to himself then it’s a savagely astute piece of self-loathing, written at a time when he had jettisoned or alienated many people from his past.

Images of longing, sorrowful recollection and regret are as present on Barrett as they were on The Madcap Laughs. ‘Seems a while | Since I could smile the way you do’ on ‘Milky Way’, ‘In my tears, my dreams’ on ‘Dominoes’, ‘Remember those times I could call | Through the clear day time | And you would be there’ on ‘It Is Obvious’, ‘It’s been so hard to bear with you not there’ on ‘I Never Lied to You’ - all indicate an overwhelming sense of poignancy and anguish.

The song that best conveys these sentiments is ‘Wined and Dined’. Written in Formentera, it simultaneously evokes Mediterranean evenings (‘musk winds blow’) and the familiar haunts of Syd’s childhood (‘Chalk underfoot | Light ash of blue’). It is a summer-of-1970 rendition of a song that was composed the previous summer and which looks back to summers before that. Retrospection is heaped upon recollection until time and place evaporate in a dream like heat haze. The shimmering tableau in ‘Wined and Dined’ of beach parties and opulent sunsets is beautifully embellished by Rick Wright’s soulful organ. The German band Faust later based their track ‘Lauft’ (featured on the album Faust IV) on Wright’s opening chords.

By now the frieze songs were becoming freeze songs. Momentum may have outweighed stasis on The Madcap Laughs but now the latter begins to cast its shroud over memory and evocation alike. Stasis underpins the observations of the careworn and jaded narrator of ‘Baby Lemonade’. Stasis pervades ‘Dominoes’ with its unspecified ‘You and I’ who play their games, while ‘The day goes by’. ‘Dominoes’ is an essay in the art of idleness. ‘Musing when my mind’s astray’ sings Syd, never making it clear whether he’s playing dominoes with a girlfriend or an elderly relative. ‘Dominoes’ seems an entirely appropriate game to be playing in order to ward off boredom. Joining the dots to make a pattern. Progress dependent on simple equations. Eliot had his coffee spoons. Syd measures out the slow tick of the clock with domino pieces, the way he once would have done with Go or the I Ching.

The song’s inscape, all cloying claustrophobia and domestic boredom, is complemented by the description of the weather outside. ‘A day so dark so warm’ evokes a close summer day with thunder beckoning. Syd always described weather well, but usually with neutrality and a precise painterly eye. On the Barrett album climate takes on a more symbolic air. ‘The softness, the warmth and the weather in suspense’ serves as a denouement to the lovers’ actions, or inaction, in ‘It Is Obvious’. ‘Rain falls in grey far away’ on ‘Baby Lemonade’ encapsulates the mood of the entire album.

All that time spent doing nothing at Wetherby Mansions reaps its barren harvest on Barrett. Having witnessed his flatmate’s lengthy bouts of ennui on a daily basis, Duggie Fields is uniquely qualified to comment on Syd’s state of mind: ‘I’d say it was a creative vacuum. Void and avoid. He’d avoid doing something because that limited him. He would lie in bed for hours and hours. He couldn’t decide what to do with himself. He’d got no pressure. No commitments. He had no income pressure. He was getting money. Not a great deal I’m sure but he was getting money. So motive was going. He didn’t have any rituals that he could hang on to and no structure. But if you lie in bed thinking, “I can do this and this and this”-I think this was what was going through his head. “If I decide to do this I’m limiting my options.” Action is actually limiting. You just vegetate if you think like that, so Vegetable Man he became.’

Cora Barnes, who had started working for Syd’s publishers, Lupus Music, in the autumn of 1969, got used to him drifting into the office in a slightly semi-detached state. ‘In those days he was still a beautiful and good-looking young man and utterly charming. He would come in and say hello, and sit around my office for three hours sometimes. Every time you made a coffee - do you want a coffee Syd? Yeah. He’d have a coffee. You couldn’t explain why he was there. He didn’t explain. He just liked being somewhere. He just sat at the desk opposite to me and chatted, obviously not completely compos mentis, but just in a vacant sort of way. You might ask him a question. He might not answer it, but then answer it a bit later. I’d never say to him, “Syd, what do you want?” It was just, “Hi, Syd.” Then eventually he’d get up and say, “I’m going now.” “Bye, Syd. See you soon.” It was almost childlike. He came in once with a little Harrods bag and I said, “Oh, what have you got in there Syd?” And he brought out all these French shampoos, called Frenchy’s, all these lemon shampoos in sachets. Not like an ordinary sachet. Very fat plump sachets. He had about twenty of them. I said, “Why don’t you buy a big bottle?” He said, “Oh no, these are much nicer, don’t you think?” ’

‘The guy who lives next door to me paints, and he’s doing it well, so I don’t really feel the need,’ said Syd in his 1970 interview with Giovanni Dadomo, applying a curiously warped logic to his predicament. ‘He didn’t have anything he needed to do. That was the problem,’ agrees Duggie Fields. ‘He didn’t need to do anything except eat, and that wasn’t a big deal either. Compare that with what life was like in the Pink Floyd, where it was all doing, and all action and all go-go-go. In the end the going got too much for him and the doing got too much.’

On Tuesday, 21 July 1970, Syd went into Abbey Road Studio 3 and commenced work on the last two songs he would ever record. Only one take was ever attempted of ‘Word Song’. Five versions in all, including four on 22 July, were attempted of ‘It Is Obvious’. It is somehow fitting that the last two songs Syd Barrett ever gave to the public were an exercise in semantic Scrabble that drew upon word games inspired by Bob Cobbing and Spike Hawkins, and a wistful look back to happier days in Cambridge.

One of the central tenets of what became retrospectively known as the metaphysical school of poets was the idea of ‘strong lines’, and in particular strong opening lines: abrupt scene-setting conveyed via direct statements and philosophical exposition. Lines such as John Donne’s ‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love’ or ‘Here, take my picture, though I bid farewell’, for instance, or Andrew Marvell’s ‘Had we but world enough and time’ or ‘See with what simplicity this nymph begins her golden days’. From ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’ through to ‘Terrapin’ and ‘Dark Globe’, Syd’s songs were abundant in strong opening lines. The directness of ‘It is obvious, may I say, oh baby | That it is found on another plane’ could be a summary of his entire artistic quest. Once again, the qualities that made Syd Barrett such a consummate English writer are all there. The archly mannered interjection of ‘may I say’ into the middle of a cosmic treatise recalls ‘It’s awfully considerate’ and ‘I’m most obliged’ from ‘Jugband Blues’. As with the Dan Dare reference in ‘Astronomy Domine’, Syd is always grounded in the colloquial even when projecting on to the astral plane.

As well as conveying personal eccentricity (‘I can creep into cupboards | Sleep in the hall’) ‘It Is Obvious’ rehearses Syd’s entire stylistic repertoire, from simple internal rhyme (‘She held a torch on the porch’) to the clever ellipsis of ‘Mog to a grog’ which shrinks going for a drink after a visit to the hills. It also contains some of Syd’s most lyrical depictions of love (‘My legs moved the last empty inches to you’) and landscape (‘A velvet curtain of grey | Marked the blanket where sparrows play’) all of which merges in the line ‘The softness, the warmth and the weather in suspense’.

As so often with Syd, the ‘it’ is indeterminate. Is ‘it’ nature’s own inner logic? A merging of poetic voice and landscape? The transference of the physical to the metaphysical through the life-force flow of blood? Whatever the explanation, it’s worthy of Dylan Thomas or John Clare. The imagery evokes both a child snagged on briars and rescued by a mother and a messy interlude during an acid trip. The call through the clear day time could also equally be to a mother and a lover. In Syd’s ‘mindshot’, it’s both.

The first take of ‘It Is Obvious’, the one recorded on 21 July, was the version that made it on to the Barrett album. Gilmour fleshes out Syd’s basic acoustic guitar and voice track with organ, bass and piano overdubs, embellishing the song’s simple A to E changes with unfussy root chords on the keyboards, and giving the song a rambling feel entirely in keeping with its lyrical essence. With the help of judicious tape-editing Gilmour also tidies up Syd’s uneven bar lines, bringing consistency to the song’s sense of metre without detracting from its flow. On take one Syd does the lyric justice with his delivery, sounding engaged and full of wistful passion. The following day he attempted four more takes. On the first he attempts a disjointed rhythm on electric guitar. Unable to match, or perhaps to counteract, the complexity of the guitar figure in his vocal delivery he locks into a repetitive monotonous melody, which flattens out the lyric’s subtle nuances and changes in phrasing. It grows tiresome to listen to long before the end. On the next take Syd adopts the riff to Muddy Waters’ ‘I’m A Man’ which was later utilised by David Bowie on ‘Jean Genie’, and delivers the vocal in a low growl, similar to the one he adopts on ‘Maisie’. It is excruciating to listen to. Before commencing the final take Gilmour can be heard gently cajoling Syd to ‘do that rhythm you were playing just then’. ‘Which one?’ asks Syd, unable to retain any sense of momentum. He then attempts to sing the song in an inappropriately high register, adopting an airier tone and more sensitive phrasing, but it’s all to little avail.

Once again, as with so many tracks on the album, Gilmour had little choice but to go back to the first attempt as the only usable one. On Madcap Syd occasionally executed a perfect first take, on ‘Terrapin’ and ‘Here I Go’, for example. Other tracks, ‘Octopus’ and ‘Golden Hair’, were worked on extensively until he nailed it just right. On the Barrett album, unless everything fell into place straight away there was rarely any point in persevering. Syd was seemingly unable to sustain concentration or enthusiasm long enough to attempt multiple takes. The painstaking construction of ‘It Is Obvious’ is illustrative of everything that was going wrong by 1970. A magnificent song rescued from fraught circumstance by sheer diligence on Gilmour’s part.

‘Word Song’, untitled at the time and unreleased until the Opel compilation of out-takes in 1988, is a seemingly arbitrary and unrelated list of words, recited over a slow-tempo version of Syd’s all-purpose busker strum in A. Logic and linearity are wryly implied with a delightful bridge of clipped notes that Syd plays between each of the three verses, before embarking on the next list of random vocabulary. ‘Word Song’ springs from the same experimental lexicography as Fart Enjoy’s ‘Typical . . . Topical . . . Tip Up . . . Political ...’ and the fun he had with Spike Hawkins’s poetry broth. The sequences briefly adhere to alphabetical or alliterative groupings but overall there is no pattern or purpose, just a simple celebration of phonetics for phonetics’ sake.

‘I think he was a profound aesthete,’ says Graham Coxon. ‘He loved words and he loved being playful with them and making up meanings. That’s the great thing about the English language, you can be very adventurous with words and you can cut and paste them or just entertain yourself with them. I think that’s what he was doing. That’s what the ‘Word Song’ is, just this list of really nice words. You use your energy and your love of playing with words as your own personal idiosyncratic thesaurus. He did write such incredible words and they don’t always make sense but it’s a sort of poetry all the same.’

The issue of what was left off the final album is not as contentious as it was with The Madcap Laughs, where the absence of ‘Opel’, the questionable track sequencing and the inclusion of one or two inferior takes puzzled Malcolm Jones and remains a source of controversy for Barrett fans. Here David Gilmour made do with what he could salvage. Even the apparent disappearance of ‘Bob Dylan Blues’ for over thirty years should not be viewed conspiratorially. Time has turned it into a charming and amusing curio. Had it been released at the time the perception might have been different. Who, in 1970, would have been interested in a parody of Dylan’s folk-protest style? Barron Knights fans? Benny Hill? Actually the Benny Hill connection is not as absurd as it might at first appear. Hill released a single in 1965, at the same time as ‘Bob Dylan Blues’ was being written, called ‘What a World’. It contained a verse which directly satirised a certain folksinger ‘who came from America to sing at the Albert Hall’ and tells of how he sang his protest songs before driving ‘back to his penthouse in his brand new Rolls-Royce car’. Given Syd’s penchant for all forms of English satire it is not beyond the realms of possibility that he took his cue from Hill’s own barbed missive. Whatever the source, though, the fact remains that by 1970, when Syd finally recorded the song, most Dylan followers were waiting for him to make another ‘Blonde on Blonde’, not another ‘Emmett Till’.

The other notable out-takes from the Barrett sessions, ‘Dolly Rocker’, ‘Milky Way’, ‘Let’s Split’ and ‘Birdie Hop’, all suffer from being underdeveloped or under-rehearsed, or are simply good ideas badly executed. ‘What’s this one called?’ asks the engineer. ‘Dolly Rocker. It’s called Dolly Rocker,’ says Syd in his dry-mouthed mumble. ‘It’s an old make of dress,’ he explains. ‘Well, months old, you know, that sort of thing.’ The fuzzy logic of the elaboration reveals that Syd still has a wit as parched as his palette. It’s the way he tells them.

Despite some uncertain phrasing and wavering pitch, ‘Dolly Rocker’ begins promisingly. The ‘she done’ references hark back to the blues pastiching of ‘Lucy Leave’, while the premise and set up - his girlfriend sees a dress she likes - were perfect subject matter for a three-minute pop song. Unfortunately that’s as good as it gets. The song is marred by a truly abysmal middle section - because of Syd’s inconsistent bar lines one can hardly call it a middle eight, a middle ten maybe? - and the rest of the song lapses into the regressive babble of ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’. There is a good song struggling to get out here, but ‘Dolly Rocker’ comes across as a poor rewrite (or perhaps even prewrite) of ‘Love You’.

Perhaps the strongest contender for inclusion on the album was ‘Let’s Split’. Written at Wetherby Mansions about his often fractious relationship with girlfriend Gayla Pinion, the song is full of tension and strife and angrily strummed descending chords which complement the terse atmosphere perfectly. The song’s title and chorus line make great use of ambiguity, ‘let’s split’ referring simultaneously to ‘let’s split up’ and ‘let’s go out’. When Gayla Pinion moved into Wetherby Mansions she brought her West Highland terrier, Sasha, with her, and it proceeded to crap all over the flat, much to Duggie Field’s disgust. Syd refers to this in the ambiguous refrain of ‘hound, hound, hound’, which implies being nagged as well as the presence of canines. ‘Let’s Split’ reeks of nagging, bad temper and disharmony. At two minutes twenty, after a nifty bit of whistling, Syd gives up the ghost completely, as if utterly undone by the negativity of the song. ‘Hold it can you . . . That’s all, cheers,’ he says tetchily, breaking off suddenly from the most sustained anti-love song he ever recorded.

‘Birdie Hop’ is sung in a tremulous high pitch, which along with the simple two-note melody mimics the actions and call-song of its subject matter. Again it begins promisingly before lapsing into half-realised ideas and slapdash lyrics. The song’s repeated refrain of ‘I see the flies’ and the fact that the cover of the Barrett album features a series of Syd’s drawings of flies has encouraged some biographers to contrive a spurious link between the psychedelic band the Flies and flies as a foreboding motif in Syd’s lyrics. The story goes that the Flies, a particularly punky and uncompromising unit, took to standing at the side of the UFO stage yelling ‘Sell out!’ at the Floyd soon after they signed their EMI contract. They supposedly repeated the gesture during the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream. In fact, insects and animals are recurring images throughout Syd’s solo lyrics. And why wouldn’t they be? He grew up surrounded by Fen countryside, absorbed in pastoral pursuits and Arcadian literature, and frequently drew upon nature for the subject matter for his artwork. His father was a keen amateur botanist and the entire family were taken for Sunday morning jaunts to the Cambridge Botanical Gardens. The experience would have been ingrained and absorbed from an early age.

Plant life and wildlife are abundant in Syd’s solo songs and the species count is formidable. Fish in ‘Terrapin’, birds in ‘Dark Globe’, the caterpillar hood in ‘No Good Trying’, leopards in ‘Long Gone’, crabs in ‘Feel’, leeches in ‘If It’s in You’, bulls in ‘Maisie’, squirrels in ‘Dolly Rocker’, eagles, bears and raccoons in ‘Swan Lee’, grasshoppers, kangaroos and drones in ‘Clowns and Jugglers’/‘Octopus’, rats and spiders in ‘Rats’, cats and dogs in ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’, antelopes, camels, birds and flies in ‘Birdie Hop’, flies in ‘Opel’, larks in ‘Dominoes’, sparrows in ‘It Is Obvious’, wolves in ‘Wolfpack’, just about everything in the jungle in ‘Effervescing Elephant’. In fact imagery drawn from the natural world appears to be one of the few consistent thematic threads in Syd’s lyrical output.

On the recorded version of ‘Effervescing Elephant’ animal imagery drawn from the classical world provides the song’s introductory motif. Its opening tuba passage quotes directly from The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns. ‘It was Syd that wanted it on there, in fact he moaned that it wasn’t a bit longer - eight bars instead of the three that I put on there,’ says David Gilmour. ‘Unfortunately the tuba player was unhelpful and refused to play even those few notes by ear - refused to play anything unless it was properly written down on sheet music - so within a three-hour session we had to get blank music-stave paper - write the very short melody down on it, which was tough as I couldn’t read or write music, get him to play it, then rewrite it several times until it sounded correct. I think we finally got it in the last three minutes. And in those days, at the second the three hours were up, they would stand up, pack up their stuff and walk out of the studio.’

Released on EMI-Harvest on 6 November 1970 the Barrett album was book-ended by two radio sessions, one for John Peel’s Top Gear recorded on 24 February at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios and another recorded on 16 February 1971 for Bob Harris’s Sounds of the Seventies show. For the Peel session Syd, along with David Gilmour and Jerry Shirley, performed ‘Terrapin’, ‘Gigolo Aunt’, ‘Baby Lemonade’, ‘Effervescing Elephant’ and the Wright-Barrett composition ‘Two of a Kind’. The presence of Shirley on bongos rather than drum kit gives the session an ambling folky feel reminiscent of Steve Took-era Tyrannosaurus Rex. Syd clearly hasn’t finished writing ‘Gigolo Aunt’ yet and the song only has its opening verse which he sings three times. ‘Baby Lemonade’ is augmented by some beautifully soulful organ playing by Gilmour, although Syd’s slide solo is tentative and uncertain, and he transposes the ‘Cage through the post | Name like a ghost’ lines in verse two. ‘Terrapin’ and ‘Two of a Kind’ are pleasant strumalongs, Syd singing ‘a move about’ rather than ‘the move about’ on the former and detouring into some ill-advised barber’s-shop raga on the fade-out of the latter. ‘Effervescing Elephant’ is more nimble than the album version, where Syd’s delivery is flat and uninspired. Performed solo, minus the tuba that graced the recorded version, he sounds animated and brings out the sheer whimsical joy of the song.

On 12 January 1970 Syd had played guitar on sessions for Kevin Ayers’ first solo single after leaving Soft Machine. Originally titled ‘Religious Experience’ it was eventually released, minus Syd’s contribution, as ‘Singing a Song in the Morning’. On the released version Ayers does a pretty convincing job of imitating Syd’s lead guitar style. During this period Ayers even briefly entertained ideas of forming a band with Syd. ‘I went to see him at that flat that was on The Madcap Laughs cover,’ he says, ‘but he was [Ayers adopts a comatose posture] . . . gone.’

Also in 1970 Syd made the briefest of forays into live performance, at the Extravaganza ’70 Music and Fashion Festival, which took place in the entrance lobby of the Kensington Olympia. Accompanied by David Gilmour on bass and Jerry Shirley on drums, Syd performed just four numbers, ‘Terrapin’, ‘Gigolo Aunt’, ‘Effervescing Elephant’ and ‘Octopus’. The truncated set was plagued throughout by a bad PA which made the lyrics all but inaudible; it is only on the final number, ‘Octopus’, that the vocals can be heard at all. Legend and hindsight have turned this event into a shambling farce. In fact, the bootleg evidence available suggests that the band, although clearly under-rehearsed, sound perfectly adequate. They performed ragged versions of ‘Terrapin’ and ‘Gigolo Aunt’ and a frantic ‘Effervescing Elephant’ before Syd brought the performance to a sudden halt at the end of ‘Octopus’. The brevity of the set, and the rapidity with which Syd left the stage (leaving his colleagues to pad the song out before bringing proceedings to a messy conclusion), gave clear indication that Syd was reluctant to return to the live arena. After the Barrett album was completed David Gilmour proved equally reluctant to repeat the experience, receiving only a brief but heartfelt thank-you from Syd in the lift at Wetherby Mansions as he dropped him off for the last time.

‘I veer away from those solo albums,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘I find them very disturbing. I don’t like to listen to them. There’s a certain ghoulishness about people’s enjoyment of them. There’s some good stuff in there if you know where to dig, and no disrespect to Dave and Roger who were trying to do something good, but it wasn’t what I’d heard in the studio and it was a shadow of the Syd I knew. He was such a delightful charming person. That’s why we were all so upset when the fog set in.’

Perhaps the most quietly despairing of all the lyrical images on Syd’s solo albums is the disabled and debilitated momentum conveyed in the line ‘We under all | We awful, awful crawl’ on Madcap’s ‘No Man’s Land’. This is the cry of a man who is beginning to embrace entropy as a permanent condition. ‘The last time I saw him was in 1970 when he was out of the Floyd and definitely not the old Syd,’ says Andrew Rawlinson who was by now a devoted follower of Maharaj Charan Singh Ji. ‘The Master came to London and Syd came in and sat down and said hello. I looked at him and thought, “What’s happening Syd?” I didn’t get chance to talk to him because there was a lot going on. He was subdued and he wasn’t sunny any longer. He was under water in some way.’

This sense of submergence was by now apparent in almost every aspect of Syd’s life. It is audible on the Barrett album and it was becoming increasingly evident in his reluctance or inability to forge a meaningful pop career. The fact that Syd should even turn up at a talk given by Maharaj Charan Singh Ji gave hope that he hadn’t entirely forsaken his spirit of enquiry; then again it could equally have indicated that he just wanted to be among friends, no matter how remote he had become from many of them. That much is conjecture. What is indisputable is that from 1970 onwards Syd was in permanent and irreversible retreat from fame and ambition. There was no official retirement, no grand gesture or dramatic disappearance, just a gradual dwindling from view, punctuated by sporadic and ill-fated attempts to stoke the dying embers of a wayward muse.

Hitchcock adopts an appropriately painterly analogy to describe what happened. ‘It was undiluted talent. Most people dilute their talent. They thin it with a bit of turps. They have an idea, then they make that idea into a song, the way they think a song should go. Some people are good at writing songs they think a million people will like. Barrett didn’t dilute his talent, so he squeezed the tube dry. It was empty much faster. Most of us put a little bit of talent in and fix it up with whatever else you need to accomplish the painting. It’s like there was no gap between Barrett and his art. It’s unfiltered. He was just like a kid who got hold of the song tube and just squeezed them out and went, “God, look at those colours” and then went, “Oh. It’s empty. Oh well.” That’s it. Game over. Like he couldn’t really help it. It all went out very intensely. Then it was gone.’

In an interview with Michael Watts for Melody Maker in March 1971, Syd indicated that there would be a third album and that he already had four tracks in the can, but there never would be a third solo album, and apart from one brief and disastrous attempt to get him back into Abbey Road studios in August 1974, Syd never recorded again. The flight from fame had now begun in earnest and Syd increasingly sought out the familiar physical and emotional certainties of his childhood. As soon as the sessions for Barrett album were completed in July 1970 he began to spend less time at Wetherby Mansions with Duggie Fields and more time back in Cambridge.

On 8 January 1971 Seamus O’Connell married his partner Victoria at Fulham Broadway Registry Office. ‘Syd and Roger Waters both came,’ he remembers, ‘not to the ceremony but to the reception afterwards in the flat where we were living at the time. David Gale and Mick Rock were the wedding photographers. Syd seemed fine. I don’t ever remember seeing him behaving particularly peculiarly. He’d always got on well with my mother, and the two of them and a few others slipped off to the pub after the wedding.’

Away from the pressures of the music world, among old friends and in familiar surroundings, Syd was in good spirits. Seamus’s wife Victoria had been one of the Homerton Ladies College girls who had lodged at 183 Hills Road, and remembered Syd well. Seamus’s mother, Ella, was another person who offered emotional anchorage and the image of Syd and Ella slipping off to the pub to catch up on old times sharply conflicts with some of the more distressing stories from this period.

‘I don’t think Syd had ever travelled very far or lived anywhere else, so, like a homing pigeon, if he started to feel a bit out of it he went back to where it was familiar and he was safe,’ says Hester Page. Hester, like many others, had noticed Syd’s tendency to retreat even at the height of his fame. ‘Syd wasn’t ambitious. I think he lived inside himself a hell of a lot. His music was inside himself and his words were too. A lot of his words were about his daily perceptions, sitting and looking around. When I listen to a lot of his songs I can see him sitting there, watching someone and thinking, “They’re doing that and that bird’s singing and I’m thinking this.” And that’s how he put it together. I think he was quite simple and uncomplicated in that way. And that’s why he had to go home. The world was getting too untrustworthy and complicated for him. A lot of his friends had gone off and were busy doing other things so that base of the Cambridge crowd wasn’t as easily accessed. He wasn’t in the middle of it any more.’

Most of Syd’s friends were by now forging ahead in their respective careers. Storm and Po at Hipgnosis were turning out some of the most distinctive sleeve art of the era. Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon and Anthony Stern were making films. David Henderson had finished his master’s degree at the Royal College of Art and was exhibiting. So was Duggie Fields. Pink Floyd weren’t doing badly either. Everybody was busy planning, producing, creating. Everybody except Syd.

‘Syd is seen as an acid casualty, and there were many of those around, but they were far outnumbered by people who are alive and well today, and perfectly all right,’ says Gale. ‘As to whether Syd was an acid casualty is, of course, another piece of stereotyping, which may need to be addressed, because I think it was a mixture. LSD probably blew out the basement, and then Mandrax loosened the fabric, or something like that. It was probably more attractive for us to see him as an acid casualty, ’cos that’s heroic - whereas Mandrax is a bit sad.’

Duggie Fields however maintains that Mandrax use was not the issue. ‘I don’t think Mandrax [was] that harmful. I had a Mandrax prescription for years. I don’t even remember his Mandrax intake being that high. I think what’s harmful is not particular individual drugs. It’s multi-drug use. That’s where drugs can get really harmful where the effects of one drug are mixed with the effect of another drug, and some things don’t go together very well. Mandrax and alcohol are lethal. That can be a killer. We all know that people overdosed on that combination at the time. I’ve always been Mr Conservative. I’d take half of what anybody else took. People would be [saying] “Loosen up, Duggie. Take some of this, man.” And I have a group of friends who are dead now because I didn’t “Loosen up Duggie” and have what they had.’

Duggie Fields concedes that Syd’s final months at Wetherby Mansions were fraught with tension. The hangers-on continued to use the flat as a crash-pad and scrounge-pad. Girls continued to pound on Syd’s door, craving his attention. He had three girlfriends during this period, Iggy the Eskimo girl who appeared naked on the cover of the Madcap Laughs album, Quorum boutique girl Gilly Staples and Gayla Pinion, a friend of Lindsay Corner’s from Ely. Fields would hide away in his room and paint. Syd would just hide away. When he did emerge his behaviour was often belligerent or menacing.

‘Looking back there were incidents that ought to have worried one more than they did,’ says Fields. ‘And there were instances that one should have reacted more strongly to than one did because one was trying to be cool. Like Syd would smoke a cigarette and throw the stub across the floor and it would still be burning but nobody would pick it up and put it in an ashtray. It was disturbing because it’s dangerous to throw a lighted cigarette around. But the act of danger was not as important as the not wanting to be uncool, uncool being a sin in those days. And now I think how did I do that? Why did I do that? How did I blank out the danger?’

Fields was also party to Syd’s occasional bursts of physical violence. ‘I remember him picking up this girl’ - believed to be Gilly Staples - ‘who was his girlfriend at the time and just flinging her across the room because she just wanted to stay in bed and we were all supposed to be going to Dave Gilmour’s. And it was, “No, that’s my bed” and just literally throwing her. No one reprimanded him for it. I don’t remember reprimanding him. Perhaps I should have done.’

‘That was of course the other side of the business in Egerton Court, where I lived next door to Syd’s room, where it was indeed that hippie laissez-faire which prevented us from intervening,’ says David Gale. ‘I mean on one occasion he was found squashing Lindsay between the wall and the lavatory door and she was screaming. And it’d be a very small group of people who’d tell him to stop it. Eventually we did start saying Lay off.”‘

The members of Syd’s old band had exactly the same dilemma, of course. Gilmour, Waters and Wright had all participated in the making of the Madcap album and Gilmour and Wright had been largely responsible for keeping the Barrett album, and arguably Syd himself, together musically, but now they were forging a successful career as one of the biggest bands in the world. Despite this they were unable to shake off the legacy of their former guiding spirit. Syd’s spectral presence continued to cast a long shadow well into the 1970s.

‘I think the Floyd had an incredible dilemma and suffered incredible guilt from it too,’ says Duggie Fields. ‘They must have questioned whether they could have done things differently and whether it would have made a difference. But it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. You’ve got that circumstance of someone who’s hypersensitive, which Syd was, and you’ve the whole “everyone wants a bit of you”. Who copes with that well? He didn’t.’

Fields even moved out of Wetherby Mansions at one point, because he could no longer cope with Syd’s erratic behaviour. ‘But where I moved to was even more difficult, it turned out, so I came back. I had moved into Alice Pollock’s flat, the founder of Quorum and the employer/partner of Ossie Clarke. Alice was the one who gave Ossie his platform, but she was also a real talent in her own right; however she would step out of the limelight to give it to other people. I’d met Alice’s brother, Robbie, at architecture school. Sadly he’s been a “casualty” ever since they threw him out a few years later. It wasn’t just drugs, for him I think it was almost like he thought insanity was a career move. If he couldn’t be an architect, an artist, an actor, writer, a poet or a film-maker, he could be mad. Robbie had come round one day and said that he’d been to visit Alice, and she’d met their dead father’s reincarnation, now her current boyfriend. He’d gone in and she’d said, “I want you to meet daddy,” and there was Frank Zappa sitting there! After just two nights living at Alice’s, I decided I’d rather come back and live with Syd. I thought, “Who’s the maddest in this world?”‘

Nigel and Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon had also encountered many people who by their own admission were far further ‘out there’ than Syd ever was. By way of illustration Nigel recounts an incident from a weekend spent in Andrew King’s Welsh cottage back in 1967. ‘Stash de Rollo wore black velvet with gold brocade and high-heeled shoes,’ he remembers. ‘We told him we needed more wood for the fire so he went across the yard to the barn to get the wood and came back covered in mud with two cans of oil, and we said, “What are we going to do with this and look at you. You’re covered in mud.” And Stash proclaimed, “Let all mud be velvet.”’

‘Stash’s father, the painter Balthus, owned a chateau, and we were all going to go and live in that,’ recalls Jenny. ‘Stash had wanted us to love unconditionally. He wanted us to transcend and just go to the world of pure love. We had a fire going and he wanted to get on the fire and burn himself. He thought he wouldn’t burn because he was full of pure love. He had a long Victorian nightshirt on that he’d bought in the Portobello Road. He kept saying to me, “Jenny, you’ve got to have the faith.” The local policeman had already been round to see what the hell was going on and we didn’t want him coming back again and asking what had happened to our dead burnt friend. Stash got very cross with me because I hadn’t got the faith. I managed to stop him from burning himself.’

‘Syd could be very difficult,’ concedes Duggie Fields. ‘It was sad, but it wasn’t as bad as my friend “Neon” who was an acid casualty who lived over the road who decided that he was going to martyr himself to show the body could overcome pain. He had to be held physically to stop him pouring a pan of scalding water over himself. So a doctor came and put him in a straitjacket. He really was an acid casualty in a way that Syd wasn’t.’

‘I think he was very affected by drugs, totally genuinely, and he thoroughly enjoyed them,’ says Libby Gausden. ‘He did see them as a good thing not a bad thing. Not as a rebellious thing, but as something as interesting to explore, like a painting or a piece of music. I’m a total control freak. I like to be in control. I wasn’t interested in “let yourself go”. But they did take him somewhere else. He wasn’t one of those who’d go, “Oh look, the fire looks blue and yellow.” They opened his mind. They finished off his mind, of course, as well.’

‘It was the same old thing with all of them,’ says Robyn Hitchcock. ‘Their self-control was shot by drugs. They all became victims of their own minds, which is what happens if you get stoned a lot. You are at the mercy of your muse. Your mind is set to a randomiser. Our grandparents couldn’t have fought the war on acid, or built the empire. Boy, no wonder the Americans lost in Vietnam. And people might say, “Why should you fight wars, man? Take drugs.” But it doesn’t make you peaceful. It just makes you incompetent. I set myself back no end by taking drugs and I didn’t take anything super-powerful. I’d seen what had happened to those Sixties people so I didn’t dip myself in the acid bath for too long. You get the idea on drugs but you never have the “sustain” to write it down. You could open the door and think, “Wow, open door, that’s a poem.” Then you pick up the pen and think, “Hmm, open door, what’s so great about that? Oh, I’m hungry. Oh no, I think I need to have sex. Oh God, I hate myself.” It doesn’t work. But for a brief period it enhances, and I think that’s the Faustian thing with all those guys. But also I think it was the momentum of the times. People are still discovering pot and acid but they aren’t becoming great explorers because it’s already been visited. There was a sense of possibility in the air. It wasn’t love and peace and life wasn’t necessarily any better back then. There were still the same political messes. People were still being slaughtered and ripped off and bullied and demoralised like they are now. It wasn’t a golden age at all, but there was a window where it felt like anything might happen. One of the great things in Barrett’s songs is that sense of potential. It’s a sense of manic potential and by the end it’s a feeling of potential that’s gone. He’s only twenty-three or twenty-four but there’s a real feeling like an old man looking back with sadness. You know he’s resigned from life. It’s a quick ride from teenage angst to midlife crisis and you really get there in a snap of a finger, but he really did seem so wistful on the Barrett album, already looking back at a life that had gone.’

As so often there was historical precedent for this among Syd’s literary forebears. Embarking upon a similar flight from obligation a century earlier Edward Lear wrote to Emily Tennyson in May 1865:

Even if I get enough tin to cover all expenses, the method of doing so is harassing and odious - seeing the vapid nature of swells, & the great amount of writing; & the close confinement to the house . . . The walking - sketching - exploring - novelty perceiving & beauty appreciating part of the Landscape painter’s life is undoubtedly to be envied: - but then the contrast and the money tryingtoget, smokydark London life - fuss - trouble & bustle is wholly odious, & every year more so.’

Cambridge is a relatively small place, a city in name only from its university status. It has a compact centre and a lack of sprawl. In the early 1970s many of Syd’s old school friends, Tech friends, teachers and former band mates were still living there. It had a thriving local music scene, with Arts Lab activity, regular free concerts in Grantchester Meadows and on Midsummer Common, informal jam sessions at the Catholic Mission Hall at Fisher House, and impromptu gigs in the city’s numerous cellar bars and vegetarian cafes, and anywhere else where the ‘head’ population gathered in numbers. Syd was largely absent from all of this although he did became a familiar figure in the landscape again, often seen striding out with purpose, incongruously dressed in his pop-star clothes, burning off hyperactivity and the accumulated frustrations of an increasingly wasted creative life.

The one constant in his life was Gayla Pinion, Syd’s last serious girlfriend, their relationship having somehow survived the madness and chaos of Wetherby Mansions. Back in Cambridge Syd and Gayla discussed marriage, Syd showing the same penchant for old-fashioned courtship values that he had once entertained with Libby. Gayla found a job at Joshua Taylor, the Cambridge department store, and the pair got engaged in October 1970. An announcement was even placed in the local paper.

Unfortunately Syd chose a joint family gathering to celebrate the engagement as the opportunity to first throw tomato soup over Gayla, and then later during the meal to disappear upstairs and cut off his long hair. With that immaculate sense of English reserve that Ionesco had so savagely pinpointed in The Bald Prima Donna, none of those present acknowledged the incident as anything other than normal when Syd returned from the bathroom freshly shorn. Peter Jenner referred to the hair shearing as a ‘goodbye to all that’ gesture, a symbolic shedding of the last vestiges of pop stardom. Syd’s dismayed and embarrassed brothers and sisters might have viewed the incident somewhat differently.

‘He gave me all his diaries when I was married in 1967 and I went to meet him when our son was born in 1970 and took the diaries back,’ says Libby. ‘And he burnt them all unfortunately. I should have kept them. His girlfriend phoned me and said, “He’s burnt them. You should have kept them.” Each page was ledger-size with his tiny writing. He filled pages every day. Everything he ever did. What he thought. What he was reading. I shouldn’t have taken them back. It was a real last-minute decision. I thought, “I don’t need them. It would be nice for him to have them.” I had my diaries and they were lovely to look at and think, “Heavens, was I that naive?” or whatever. In the middle of these Pink Floyd things I’d write about what we had for lunch. He had things like that and it’s nice to remember those times, but, no, they went.’

It might seem fanciful to suggest that in burning his diaries Syd was acting out some kind of auto-destructive variant on John Latham’s Skoob Towers, but in many ways that’s exactly what it was. Bereft of ambition or the need to justify himself to others Syd resorted to a form of nihilism that threw Latham’s more purposeful creative strategies into sharp relief. In one pyromaniacal instance, up went treasured memories, random recollections, lost songs, doodles, sketches, trivia and profundity alike, all reduced to ashes.

The best that can be deduced from Syd’s immolation of his past was that he was making some kind of gallant gesture to Gayla, destroying memories of youthful indiscretion, past flings, love expressed to old girlfriends. The more worrying conclusion that can be drawn is that he was erasing his old self to such an extent that soon there would be nothing left to build on. The destruction of his diaries indicates a degree of disregard that borders on the self-loathing.

It was another ex-girlfriend, Jenny Spires, who was chiefly responsible for Syd’s last real attempt to get a band together. By now she was married to Jack Monck, the former bass player with Carol Grimes Delivery, and it was partly at her behest that Monck and former Pink Fairies drummer Twink called upon Syd at 183 Hills Road to see if he would be interested in playing guitar with them. Stars, the short-lived group that emerged from this initiative, would be Syd’s last.

The Stars venture, which lasted barely a month from January to February 1972, occurred during a brief period when Syd felt sufficiently inspired to venture out in public for the occasional jam session. On 26 January Jenny Spires had taken him to a gig at King’s College Cellars featuring the American bluesman Eddie Guitar Burns. Syd participated in a freeform jam with Monck and Twink for about half an hour after Burns’ set. The following night at a Cambridge Corn Exchange gig, headlined by Hawkwind, Syd participated in another jam with the self-explanatory Last Minute Put Together Boogie Band with Monck, Twink, Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith and future Steamhammer guitarist Bruce Payne. Audio evidence exists which confirms the event. Syd was personally introduced by the compère about halfway through, although it appears that he was happy to noodle away in the background, playing mainly blues riffs.

‘Rehearsals were difficult, because Syd had pretty much lost any capacity to focus,’ says Frith. ‘Everyone was in awe of him, and we wanted him to lead us in a way, but he couldn’t. Jack kind of took charge and we did the best we could, but at the only concert that I did with them, Syd played “Smokestack Lightning” or variations thereof in every song, and didn’t really sing at all. To say I was hugely disappointed is maybe the wrong way of putting it. I was shocked, angry, devastated, that it had come to that. I didn’t know what to do or how to be in that situation. I always had a lot of difficulty being around “famous” people and especially famous people who I really looked up to, and this was even by my own standards of social ineptitude, a painful experience, and overwhelmingly sad.’

‘As for his stock in the local community, there was a lot of whispering, and a lot of soul-searching about how it happened and whether it could happen to anyone,’ says Frith. ‘But we knew that the light had gone out, and that it wasn’t going to get switched back on. It was only a couple of years since I had been a regular volunteer nursing assistant in a mental hospital, and I think that made it even more haunting. I just knew that I didn’t want to put myself through that again, and I had the deepest respect for Jack, who was the true hero of the Cambridge scene in those days, in attempting to keep making it happen.’

Syd, Twink and Jack Monck rehearsed in the cellar of 183 Hills Road and played an impromptu gig, little more than a glorified rehearsal in fact, at the Dandelion Health Food Café in nearby East Road on 5 February. The makeshift band played further low-key shows at the Dandelion and Petty Curry, just off Cambridge Market Square. With no pressure or expectations on his shoulders Syd enjoyed the opportunity to jam the blues and perform rudimentary versions of half a dozen tracks from his solo albums. On the strength of these appearances local promoter Steve Brink booked Stars to appear at Cambridge Corn Exchange on Thursday, 24 February, on a bill that also included Skin Alley and the MC5. The flyers for the event billed Stars democratically as ‘Barrett Alder and Monck’. No fuss. No first names. And despite the band name, no star trip either.

Skin Alley’s well-received set of mellow progressive rock was followed by the incendiary presence of the MC5. Although a couple of years past their ‘kick out the jams’ prime the Michigan Panthers played a blistering set which went down a storm. There was then a lull of nearly an hour, during which time the energy of the crowd dissipated considerably, and people began to drift away to catch late-night buses, trains and burger vans. It was gone midnight, and the hall was at best a quarter full, when with little fanfare Stars trooped on to the stage. Syd looked fantastic in velvet trousers and snakeskin boots; his hair had grown out from his suede-head crop of the previous year and was long and curly again. He was now sporting a beard, which only served to emphasis the gaunt angularity of his face. The set began with a version of ‘Octopus’, which was noticeably slower than the one on record. It became immediately apparent that the PA and the monitors weren’t up to the task and Syd’s vocals were almost inaudible. I was positioned at the lip of the stage, no more than three or four yards from where Syd was standing stage right, close enough to hear his unamplified voice as he struggled to be heard.

The band also performed ‘Baby Lemonade’, ‘Gigolo Aunt’, ‘No Man’s Land’, ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’, and an impressively tight version of ‘Lucifer Sam’. These were interspersed with a couple of ragged and formless blues jams, which petered out inconclusively in the style that jams often did in those days. The only times Syd spoke were to introduce ‘Octopus’ at the beginning of the set and to remark, ‘I don’t know what that one was called,’ after ‘Gigolo Aunt’. At one point a girl in a long hippie dress entered from the wings, stage right, and began dancing in that hippie floaty way that hippie girls danced in the early 1970s. Syd acknowledged her with a faintly alarmed glance and she soon beat a retreat.

In a perfectly observed detail that seemed to summarise the anti-climatic nature of the event Melody Maker journalist Roy Hollingsworth noted that towards the end of the set the house lights went on and a Corn Exchange employee wheeled a heavy wooden barrow noisily across the floor in readiness for the Friday morning market. Had he done that when the MC5 were pummelling out their powerhouse riffs no one would have heard it, but so meek was the sound of the PA when Stars played that the market barrow vibrated the floor and all but drowned out the sound on stage. It was at that moment that I glanced round for the first time and noticed that there were probably no more than thirty people clustered around the stage and no more than fifty or so in total remaining in the hall.

Contrary to what has been claimed over the years by people who weren’t there, Syd didn’t appear to have trouble remembering his lyrics. His guitar-playing was, though, extremely sketchy and tentative at times, particularly during the blues jams, and he did, as Roy Hollingsworth noted, frequently retire to his amp at the back of the stage as the set progressed. Whether in retreat from the sorry spectacle of it all, or simply because he couldn’t hear himself it’s hard to say, but this clearly was not the Syd Barrett of the UFO days, hardwiring his synergy to the Binson Echorec as he foraged into new sonic pastures. This was Syd regressing into blues runs and insecurity. Eventually Jack Monck’s bass amp packed up and the set fizzled out soon after.

At the end of the performance Syd didn’t retire backstage like a rock star but came down on to the Corn Exchange dance floor where, surrounded by a coterie of beautiful women, he stood smiling graciously and exchanging polite small talk with anyone who approached him, including myself. Close up, the one thing that signified that all was not well was his shell-shocked eyes. Even when he smiled they registered alarm and who knows what inner turmoil? They told a different story entirely from the pop-star clothes and the glamorous entourage.

The band supposedly played a much better set with better sound two nights later at the same venue, supporting Nektar and the Groundhogs, but there have been no plausible first-hand accounts to verify this. I hitchhiked down to the University of Essex in Colchester the following Friday on the understanding that Stars were going play on a bill with Kevin Ayers, Nektar and Dick Heckstall-Smith, but about halfway through the night a compère announced that Stars would not be appearing. This information elicited an audible low groan from a packed hall, many of whom had come on the off chance of seeing the former Pink Floyd legend. By this time Roy Hollingsworth’s review of the Cambridge Corn Exchange gig had appeared in Melody Maker. This piece is said to have dismayed Syd and has been widely credited as the reason Stars broke up, but Jack Monck told me a few months later that Syd had just got ‘cold feet’ and the Melody Maker review, which was in fact almost wholly complimentary, had been just one factor among many that had undermined Syd’s already fragile confidence.

In the summer of 1972 Syd started to visit London again with increasing regularity, hanging out with Steve Took in Ladbroke Grove and occasionally jamming with the former Tyrannosaurus Rex man. The two men’s paths had previously converged when Took contributed conga drums to the initial Madcap Laughs sessions in 1968. Took had been an integral part of the original Tyrannosaurus Rex duo, delicately augmenting Marc Bolan’s songs with an array of exotic instrumentation and unique vocal effects, but his career and life went into freefall when Bolan ruthlessly jettisoned him from the band in 1969 in order to pursue his dream of pop stardom.

A Melody Maker interview in January 1972 found Took residing in hedonistic squalor in a squat near the Westway flyover, and financially dependent on occasional handouts from Essex Music, publishers of Tyrannosaurus Rex’s output, money which Took promptly spent on drugs or big blow-out meals for his Ladbroke Grove friends. Move manager Tony Secunda began representing him around this time, securing an advance of £30,000 from Warner Brothers with the aim of turning the perennially untogether Took into an unlikely underground superstar. During the latter part of 1972 and early 1973 the basement flat of Secunda’s Mayfair home became Freeloader Central as Took and what seemed like half the hippy population of W11 decamped there intent on having a good time at Warner’s expense. Unsurprisingly, the ensuing recording sessions, which took place in the basement flat’s recording studio invariably descended into uncoordinated jams and glorified drug binges. It was during this period that Syd is said to have played on sessions for the ill-fated Warner LP. Secunda did little to dispel the rumours and although there is no firm evidence to connect Syd to any of the recordings that were completed he certainly participated in numerous jam sessions at the Mayfair flat and does appear to have been the direct inspiration behind one song, later released as ‘Syd’s Wine’.

It was also around this time that journalist Nick Kent, then writing for Frendz magazine, met his hero at the underground magazine’s headquarters at 309 Portobello Road. ‘I’d seen Syd Barrett in 1967 when I was fifteen years of age,’ he told me. ‘I remember looking at him and, even though he was clearly in a bad state, they weren’t even playing one of his songs live and he was just standing there and retuning his guitar for about fifteen minutes - but he had such incredible charisma . . . when I started writing for Frendz, which would be five years later, I met him. He was being managed by the guy who was the so-called financial assistant at Frendz. He was still very good-looking, but very haunted, unforgettably haunted. His eyes were kind of scary to look at. I remember asking him, “Syd, I hear you’re getting a group together.” And he said, “I ate eggs and bacon for breakfast this morning,” in this sort of whisper. I asked him again what he had for breakfast and he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French,” and then just walked out of the room. To go from being the person in my wildest dreams I couldn’t imagine myself being in 1967 to this really sad human being ...‘

Exchanges like these became increasingly common, as Syd hid behind non sequiturs and vagueness in order to ward off friends, fans and music-biz contacts alike. Even Duggie Fields was subject to the ‘put on’ on one of the last occasions he saw Syd, at the Speakeasy. ‘I was with Marc Bolan and June, but I wasn’t sure that Syd recognised me, or if he was just playing at it. You weren’t always sure with Syd whether he was winding you up. But he did do that when he was at his best. It was a witty, fun thing for him to do. He liked challenging people. Even when he was playing, Syd was always challenging. He was the one who would push the free form and you never knew what he was going to do. That was where the excitement came. But I think he had to put up the barriers. The “keep out” sign went up.’

Throughout the early 1970s Syd’s cult status continued to grow in inverse proportion to his availability. Interest was further buoyed by a plethora of re-issues. A compilation on EMI’s budget label Starline, entitled Relics, was issued in May 1971. In December 1973 the first two Pink Floyd albums were repackaged as a double set, A Nice Pair, on the Harvest label. Syd’s reputation was also considerably enhanced in November 1973 by the inclusion of a version of ‘See Emily Play’ on David Bowie’s Pin Ups LP. Sustained by the royalties that these releases generated he began spending money like it was going out of fashion. At one point he was turning up regularly at Lupus Music and asking for money to buy a new guitar, a compulsive gesture that was finally curtailed by Bryan Morrison when he had about thirty.

‘He came into the office one day and said something about the hotel,’ says Cora Barnes. ‘I said, “What hotel Syd?” and he said, “I’m living at the Penta Hotel now,” which was a big hotel in the Cromwell Road. I said “What are you doing at the Penta?” He said, “Oh, its great there. You pick up the phone and ask for something and they bring it.” I said, “Syd, have you any idea how much this is costing you?” He said, “Oh, I think I can afford it.” I said, “Syd, this is crazy,” so I went out and found him a flat for £20 a week in Chelsea Cloisters in Sloane Avenue. I organised a van to go and pick up some of his stuff and all his guitars. When he came in a month or so later I said, “How’s the flat?” He said, “It’s great, Cora. I’ve got all my guitars in there.” I said, “Well, that’s good. Are you enjoying living there?” He said, “Oh, I don’t live there. I still live at the Penta!”‘

In what would turn out to be a last-ditch attempt to get some return on his investment, Bryan Morrison sounded out Peter Jenner about the possibility of getting his client back into the studio again. Syd seemed agreeable to the notion and on Monday, 12 August 1974, Jenner, along with engineers John Leckie and Pat Stapley, returned to Abbey Road studios to produce what would turn out to be his last-ever recording dates. The sessions went on for four days, until Thursday, 15 August, and were an unmitigated disaster. Despite still looking every inch the haunted romantic poet/pop star, and turning up with an impressive array of brand new equipment Syd proved to be singularly incapable of producing anything that was usable.

‘I was so excited at the thought of going back with Syd and I was so disappointed that he hadn’t come back,’ says Jenner. ‘I was hoping he had emerged from the fog but he was still in the fog. He didn’t seem happy in the studio. He wasn’t happy doing it. He’d do a bit, chug along a bit then he’d leave. Sometimes he’d come back and sometimes he didn’t. I can’t remember how many days we spent there but it wasn’t an awful long time. There wasn’t a lot of contact. I don’t think he knew why he was there or what he was meant to be doing. I tried. The engineers tried. We just ran the tape to try and see what would come out. There would be bits and pieces and we’d try to capture them. “Do that bit again, Syd. Try to make it a bit longer,” y’know. And then it was gone again. It was the most frustrating elusive thing. It was like a cut-up, a collage of bits and pieces, then mess. No coherence at all that I could detect. There might have been an internal coherence that I didn’t detect.’

Listening to the recordings that have survived from these sessions it’s impossible to disagree with Jenner’s assessment. Syd played lead and rhythm guitar and occasionally dubbed on a bit of bass, but nothing of substance emerged. In fact anyone who thinks that there was anything left in the tank by 1974 should be allowed to listen to the meagre scraps that have surfaced on bootleg from those final desperate days in Abbey Road. Arbitrarily named by Jenner, Leckie and Stapley, primarily for studio cataloguing purposes, the working track titles are as perfunctory as the dispiriting efforts that were being logged. Eleven pieces were recorded in all. ‘If You Go’, ‘Don’t Be Slow’ (takes 1 and 2), ‘Boogie #1’, ‘Boogie #2’, ‘Boogie #3’, ‘Chooka-Chooka Chug Chug’, ‘Slow Boogie’, ‘Fast Boogie’, ‘John Lee Hooker’, ‘Ballad’ and ‘Untitled’.

If the sessions reveal anything at all it is that Syd had been listening to a lot of twelve-bar blues, but by now he couldn’t even execute a few basic blues licks particularly well. Within four years the busker strum of the Barrett album had ossified. Syd’s sense of timing, never his strong point, was now pretty much shot. Just occasionally there are glimpses of something vaguely worthwhile on the tapes, a pretty melody line here, a competent bit of wah-wah playing there, hints of riffs and spacey lead runs that with a lot of perseverance, maybe, just maybe could have been worked up into something usable. Most of the time, though, Syd just churns out blues riffs in a variety of erratic tempos. Jenner and his fellow engineers did the best they could with the material available, dousing Syd’s rudimentary efforts in echo, getting him to double-track where they thought they detected a hint of an idea. But ultimately no amount of studio trickery could disguise the paucity of inspiration on display. Syd wouldn’t show his lyrics to anybody, and pretty soon it became obvious that he hadn’t actually written any. On one occasion the studio was set up for a vocal take and Syd simply clammed up and refused to sing. More worryingly he took to unplugging his guitar while playing. This was no longer the gesture of a man given to making radical art statement. This was now reticence to the point of self-eradication.

One of the engineers noticed fairly early on in proceedings that if Syd turned left when he walked out of the studio he was going to the canteen and would eventually return and resume the session. But if he turned right it was safe to assume he wouldn’t be back. On the fourth night Syd turned right one last time and didn’t come back again. Ever. He retired to the seclusion of Chelsea Cloisters to close the curtains and confront the long dark night of his soul. In his absence the legend flourished.