Chapter Eight
Proverbs and Sobs
Poor Ratty did his best, by degrees, to explain things: but how could he put into cold words what had mostly been suggestion? How recall, for another’s benefit, the haunting sea voices that had sung to him, how reproduce at second-hand the magic of the Seafarer’s hundred reminiscences? Even to himself, now the spell was broken, and the glamour gone, he found it difficult to account for what had seemed, some hours ago, the inevitable and only thing. It is not surprising, then, that he failed to convey to the Mole any clear idea of what he had been through that day.
THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS KENNETH GRAHAME
For anyone seeking rhyme and reason in Syd Barrett’s brief performing career, or explanations for his disenchanted withdrawal from the pop life, there are clues to be found in the interviews that he gave between 1967 and 1971. One can plot a logical route through Syd’s various public pronouncements that broadly mirrors his trajectory as a musician. In his initial encounters with the media he is effusive, eager to please, sometimes compliant to the point of blandness. In later interviews he can be as unlinear and obtuse as the songs on his solo albums. Generally though he is polite, thoughtful and as candid as circumstances permit. He is unfailingly sincere about his intentions, his ambitions (or lack of), his motivation (ditto) and his failings. He is in turn wistful, regretful, open, honest and painfully self-analytical.
Syd was, of course, far more than the sum of his public pronouncements. He never actively sought out the glare of publicity any more than he did the glare of the spotlight while on stage. Interviews, like much else he encountered in the pop world, were an obligation to be endured. One frequently detects a diffident shrug or a bemused and quizzical tone in Syd’s responses to questions, as if to say, ‘What has any of this got to do with me, or my creativity?’ Having said that, it is extremely instructive to look at what Syd did say in his interviews because they do much to demystify the man. A train of logic can usually be found even in his most gnomic utterances, which offers useful insights into the way he thought and felt and experienced the world.
The first time Syd was directly quoted in an interview was in a feature on the emerging underground scene, made in January 1967 by the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Syd’s explanation of the band’s musical transition from R & B covers to sonic voyagers is refreshingly matter-of-fact and not in the least bit media-savvy. ‘Sometimes we just let loose a bit and started hitting the guitar a bit harder and not worrying quite so much about the chords,’ he says. Roger Waters states, ‘It stopped being sort of third-rate academic rock and started being intuitive groove,’ to which Syd adds, ‘It’s free form. In terms of construction it’s almost like jazz, where you start off with a riff and then you improvise.’
Syd is more enthused when talking about the sensation and spectacle of the light show than he is about the mechanics of musical technique. ‘You can respond to the lights and the lights will respond back,’ he says. This is the authentic response of a man who lives for the moment, hardwired to the ‘direct stimulus’ as he calls the light show. ‘Freedom is what I’m after,’ he told Disc and Music Echo in April 1967. ‘That’s why I like working in this group. There is such freedom artistically.’
Asked to explain his songwriting he is given to mundane generalities that shed little light on his methodology. ‘ “Arnold Layne” is nothing but a pop record, it wasn’t meant to represent anything in particular,’ he told Nick Jones of Melody Maker. ‘I thought Arnold Layne was a nice name and fitted well into the music I had already composed. I pinched the line “moonshine washing line” from Roger, our bass guitarist, because he had an enormous washing line in the back garden of his house. Then I thought, “Arnold must have a hobby,” and it went from there.’
In the same interview he is defiant when discussing the moral implications of Arnold’s ‘strange hobby’. ‘Arnold Layne just happens to dig dressing up in women’s clothing. Lots of people do, so let’s face up to reality,’ he told Jones. ‘About the only lyric anyone could object to is the bit about “takes two to know”, and there’s nothing smutty about that. But then if more people like them dislike us, more people like the underground lot are going to dig us, so we hope they’ll cancel each other out.’
A mixture of bemusement and prickliness can be detected in these responses, derived in equal measure from the ridiculously censorial attitude from Radio London who had recently banned ‘Arnold Layne’, and from the general air of scepticism and ridicule that had greeted Pink Floyd’s arrival on the pop scene. In early 1967 the pop papers were full of comments from the likes of Dave Dee and the Tremeloes, who dismissed the band’s music as a gimmick and took a high moral tone about its supposed drug connotations. ‘The Pink Floyd are supposed to be a progressive group, yet from what I’ve heard, they are just using all these gimmicks to help get a rather bad stage act across to the audience,’ the Tremeloes’ Alan Blakely told Disc and Music Echo. Such diatribes from the established pop stars of the day were commonplace throughout the first half of 1967 and the majority of comments from the readers of the pop weeklies were generally in accord with these sentiments. The letters pages of NME, Disc, Record Mirror et al. carried fulsome endorsement of such views, condemning ‘the Beatles, and their ilk, for deserting their fans to pursue this flower power nonsense’.
In the notionally more sympathetic Melody Maker Procol Harum pianist Gary Brooker witheringly dismissed Pink Floyd in the paper’s ‘Blind Date’ feature with the words: ‘The Pink Floyd. I can tell by that horrible organ sound.’ A somewhat disingenuous comment from a member of a band that had swapped R & B covers for cloaks and kaftans only a few months earlier and had immediately been dismissed as arrivistes by the notoriously snobby UFO crowd.
Pink Floyd made their first major television appearance on the BBC2 arts programme The Look of the Week, on Sunday, 14 May 1967, two days after their critically lauded Games For May concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Made by the corporation’s presentation department, presented by Robert Robinson and produced by Lorna Pegram, the programme was a spin-off from the channel’s daily arts strand, Late Night Line Up.
The previous week’s edition of The Look of the Week had been given over to art critic Robert Hughes’ report on Florence, six months after the flood which had destroyed much of the city’s valuable art treasures. The week following Pink Floyd’s appearance, the programme featured a discussion with Mick Jagger and Professor John Cohen entitled, ‘The relationship between artist and audience and how this is changing’, partly based around Peter Watkins’ controversial and provocative new film Privilege, which featured ex-Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones in the lead role.
Everything about that evening’s BBC2 schedule seemed to guarantee Pink Floyd a rarefied and privileged platform more in keeping with high art than the usual programming procedures and context of a pop show. The night Pink Floyd appeared on The Look of the Week, the programme followed a repeat of a one about Vincent Van Gogh in the Contours of Genius series, which had first been shown in March 1966, and was followed in the schedules by the solemn opening of the new Roman Catholic cathedral in Liverpool.
The five-minute interview with the band was the opening feature of the programme. On the same show author Christopher Isherwood talked to Robert Robinson about his novel about sexuality and spirituality, A Meeting by the River, and painter Dame Laura Knight talked about her life and work on the eve of a major retrospective at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries.
In such company, Pink Floyd, notionally at least, were guaranteed a sympathetic hearing. The band’s avant-garde leanings would have been understood and indulged by the programme-makers, and would have fitted comfortably into the corporation’s overwhelmingly middle-class milieu.
Having said that, The Look of the Week was by no means an elitist programme. Previous editions of the show had featured items as diverse as the state of light entertainment comedy, featuring Dick Emery, Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd, and Benny Hill, a preview of Roland Petit’s new ballet Paradise Lost, featuring Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, an undersevens children’s poetry competition, sponsored by the pre-Murdoch Sun newspaper, with the winning entry read by Judi Dench, and a preview of Danny La Rue’s new stage show.
When Pink Floyd appeared on The Look of the Week, the release of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album that would do most to ‘respectabilise’ pop and bring it to the wider attention of the cultural intelligentsia, was still three weeks away, and although it had been four years since William Mann, in typically florid prose, had written in The Times of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘pandiatonic clusters’ and ‘flat sub-mediant key-switches’, pop music had rarely received the kind of prestigious television patronage that Pink Floyd were now being granted.
The feature was presented by musician, lecturer, writer and broadcaster Hans Keller. The son of a successful architect father and a gifted amateur musician mother, Keller fled Nazi-ridden Vienna in 1938 when he was nineteen. A proficient violin and viola player, he became music advisor to the British Film Institute and an eminent music critic responsible for an innovative wordless method of musical critique called functional analysis. Keller was also a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and had a keen interest in Freudian psychology and the psychoanalysis of music. In 1959 he joined the BBC’s music division and became head of Music Talks.
The Look of the Week’s producer Lorna Pegram, then aged forty, went on to produce the groundbreaking modern art series The Shock of the New, and in 1967 was fast developing a track record in innovative arts programming. No doubt she thought that the pairing of the idiosyncratic Keller and Pink Floyd would lead to a lively televisual encounter. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out like that.
Keller possessed a confrontational interview technique to match the abrasive style of his music writing, and if the BBC’s programme-makers were hoping this meeting of musical worlds would pay off they were to be sadly disappointed. Keller comes across with a mixture of bemusement, condescension and contempt.
‘The Pink Floyd. You’re going to hear them in a minute and I don’t want to prejudice you,’ he says disingenuously. ‘Hear them and see them first and we’ll talk about them afterwards. But four quick points I want to make before you hear them. The first is that what you heard at the beginning, that short bit, those first few seconds, are really all I can hear in them, which is to say to my mind there is continuous repetition and proportionately they are a bit boring. My second point is that they are terribly loud; you couldn’t quite hear that because, of course, from your sets it isn’t as loud as it is in the studio and as it was in the Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday. My third point is that perhaps I am a little bit too much of a musician to fully appreciate them, and the reason why I say this is that, four, they have an audience and people who have an audience ought to be heard. Perhaps it’s my fault that I don’t appreciate them.’
Pink Floyd are seen performing two numbers. At the outset of the show there is a brief extract from ‘Pow R. Toc H.’; Syd and Roger Waters are in flickering close-up, their mystique considerably enhanced by Peter Wynne Wilson’s towering back projections. After Keller’s introduction the band perform a somewhat perfunctory version of ‘Astronomy Domine’. The vocals are mixed too low throughout and there are a couple of hesitant chord changes after the introductory verse. Again the cameras are drawn to Barrett and Waters. Rick Wright is mostly in silhouette apart from one brief close-up towards the end. Nick Mason is glimpsed equally briefly, resplendent in sheepskin coat. Syd’s choreographed raised arm gestures during the song’s descending ‘whoo-oooo’ vocal sequence look forced, possibly even scripted. He was never this demonstrative on stage at UFO and clearly isn’t lost in the music, like he is in the German TV documentary or Peter Whitehead’s footage from Sound Technique studios. On a couple of occasions he appears to be warily tracking where the cameras are.
After the truncated performance of ‘Astronomy Domine’-a shade under four minutes - Waters and Barrett put their guitars down and sit on high stools next to Keller. Roger Waters clears his throat nervously as Keller asks his first question. Syd adopts the slightly gauche posture - hands on hips - of a man who is not fully at ease in the formal setting of a TV studio. There are a couple of moments during the interview where, eyes ablaze with passionate intensity, he gives considered and thoughtful answers to the questions that Keller puts to him. During much of the encounter though he wears an expression of benign amusement.
‘Well, if I may first turn to Roger,’ says Keller. ‘I want to ask one fundamental question, of which our telly viewers may not be quite aware, of the significance of it, because they didn’t hear all of it. Why has it got to be so terribly loud? For me, frankly, it’s too loud, I just can’t bear it-I happen to have grown up in the string quartet, which is a bit softer’ - at this point Syd smiles broadly and looks to Waters supportively - ‘so why has it got to be so loud, so amplified.’
‘Well, I don’t guess it has to be,’ says Waters, in impeccable middle-class tones. Any viewers whose previous encounters with pop stars on television had been restricted to the provincial twang of the Beatles or the Animals, or Adam Faith politely bluffing his way through John Freeman’s Face to Face would have been immediately alerted to the fact that, despite the apparently atonal caterwauling of the pop racket they had just heard, here was proper art show material, well-scrubbed middle-class boys with well-rounded grammar school vowels. ‘But, I mean, that’s the way we like it and we didn’t grow up with a string quartet, and I guess that could be one of the reasons why it is loud. I mean it doesn’t sound terribly loud to us,’ concludes Waters.
‘Yes,’ counters Keller, with the dismissive tones of a headmaster. ‘Actually, not everybody who hasn’t grown up in a string quartet turns into a loud pop group, so your reason is not altogether convincing, but I accept that you like it.’ And with those world-weary words Keller’s air of authoritarian disdain is stamped on the exchange from the outset. It could only have been enhanced in televisual terms if Keller had some paperwork he could have been absently attending to while Waters, R., and Barrett, R., of the lower fifth sat staring at their feet in the headmaster’s study. ‘What I’m saying is that if one gets immune to this kind of sound one may find it difficult to appreciate softer types of sound. Syd? Yes? No?’ continues Keller.
‘I don’t think that’s so,’ replies Syd earnestly. ‘I mean everybody listens, we don’t need it very loud to be able to hear it, and some of it is very quiet in fact. I personally like quiet music just as much as loud music. We play in large halls and things where obviously volume is necessary and when people dance they like volume.’
‘Well, that’s interesting,’ says Keller, apparently amazed that pop musicians are capable of appreciating both quiet and loud music. ‘When people dance,’ he repeats. ‘You did start, if I’m not mistaken, as a group, which accompanied dancing. Is that it? And how did you turn into a concertising group, if I may use the American term?’
Syd smiles at the use of the term ‘concertising’. ‘Well, we’ve only done two concerts in fact,’ says Waters, ‘because the main scene with pop music, which I guess is what we are at the moment, is that you play gigs round ballrooms and this sort of scene, because that’s how it works at the moment. But we felt that there was no real reason, you know, why we shouldn’t do an organised concert in a large hall, where people came and sat and actually listened to what we do. Because dance halls generally speaking are not very good places to actually listen to the music - most people come along, and the music for most of them, as been, over the past few years anyway, just a sort of background noise that they can jig about to.’
Keller asks Syd if the two concerts were successful. ‘Yes, I think so,’ he says. ‘When we play-I think the way the act’s developed in the last six months has been influenced rather a lot by the fact that we’ve played in ballrooms necessarily, because, you know, this is obviously the first market. But I think at concerts it’s given us a chance to realise that maybe the music we play isn’t directed at dancing necessarily like normal pop groups have been in the past.’
‘Have you encountered any hostility towards your creation?’ asks Keller. ‘Well, yes, we have,’ says Waters. ‘But, I mean, I guess there’s been quite a lot of hostility going on in odd places in the country. I mean, the only hostility we’ve actually seen of course is that which has hit the national press and things. The sort of professional knockers like Robert Pitman and people who’ve had a go at us.’
‘Do you in turn feel aggressive towards the audiences?’ asks Keller. ‘No, not at all,’ respond Waters and Barrett in unison. ‘In spite of all the loudness you don’t?’ queries Keller. ‘There’s not many young people who dislike it,’ says Barrett with a hint of hurt in his voice. ‘There’s no shock treatment intended?’ asks Keller, incredulously. ‘No, certainly not,’ counters Syd, his wounded tone clearly evident. ‘Some people think that we deliberately try and sort of shock the audience and make them, you know, by the volume and keep them quiet, sort of thing. But this isn’t so.’
‘Well, there it is,’ concludes Keller to camera. ‘I think you can pass your verdict as well as I can. My verdict is that it is a little bit of a regression to childhood, but, after all, why not?’
True to his schooling in Freudian psychoanalysis Keller hears the bird calls, scat sounds and onomatopoeia on ‘Pow R. Toc H.’, and Syd’s descending chords, mock-scary ghost noises and comic-book sci-fi imagery in ‘Astronomy Domine’ and draws his text-book conclusions. He did have a point though. The following Sunday Pink Floyd went into Abbey Road studios and recorded ‘Bike’!
Interviews with Syd at the height of his fame are few and far between and what encounters there are point to a man who was showing great reluctance to play the fame game. The 19 August issue of New Musical Express featured Pink Floyd in its regular ‘Lifelines’ column. This was a long-running NME slot, a ‘facts and info’ questionnaire typical of teen-mag fare at the time. Bands or artists (or, more often than not, their publicity agents) were required to provide details of themselves in thirty-five categories, ranging from name, date of birth and place of birth to favourite colour, likes, dislikes, star sign, hobbies, pets and car. While the rest of the band dutifully filled out most of the categories Syd left fourteen of them blank and only minimally engaged with the rest. Where Roger Waters was happy to play the whacky pop star (Musical Education - twelve years on the spoons. Favourite colour - multi) Syd only filled in the most basic details of his life. We learn that his favourite drink is Campari and soda and that he has a cat called Rover but the only entry under Brother’s and Sister’s Names is Rosemary. He offers nothing at all for biggest break in career, biggest influence on career, favourite band/ instrumentalists, favourite composers, likes, dislikes, personal ambition and professional ambition. Such refusal was virtually unheard of at the time. Even the Beatles played the game. Every straight black line against every one of Syd’s unanswered categories looked like a slash mark on the printed page. A gesture of contempt for the whole superficial charade.
Chris Welch fared a little better when Syd participated in the Melody Maker’s ‘Blind Date’ feature, but even this was fraught with problems. ‘Blind Date’, like ‘Lifelines’ for NME, was a Melody Maker regular, and its simple format has been much copied since. The journalist would play a selection of records to that week’s guest without revealing who they were by. The feature was hugely popular and on a good week revealed much about the particular guest’s likes and dislikes and the way they thought about music. It threw up occasional surprises, not to mention the occasional faux pas when a particular guest failed to recognise a good mate and criticised his latest endeavour.
‘It was a Melody Maker institution,’ says Chris Welch, who conducted the feature with Syd. ‘The Beatles had done it. John Lennon loved it. He’d been the first person to say, “That was a load of crap.” You never quite knew how people would react. Some people loved it and knew what to do. Others were awful. Chuck Berry had no idea of presentation or press. He sat there scribbling one out of ten on a piece of paper and saying, “Will that do?” How do you explain to Chuck Berry that that’s no good? You have to talk to me about the music. Syd was a lot easier than Chuck Berry.’
Syd’s ‘Blind Date’ encounter took place during the period when he was first beginning to manifest signs of discontent with the pop process. ‘There was some trepidation,’ says Welch. ‘I remember going for dinner with the Floyd at some stage in Notting Hill. It was rather a privilege, but I think they wanted someone to explain their problems to and they talked to me about Syd rather despairingly. The management, Andrew and Peter, wanted me to interview him and when I went to see Syd I think the idea was to give him a bit of therapy and encourage him. As it turned out he was very friendly. I think he was quite amused by the whole idea. It wasn’t just another sit-down “When’s the tour, what songs are you writing” interview. Being “Blind Date” I actually turned up with a rather battered portable record player and a pile of the latest singles. I was ushered into this cell of a room and locked in with Syd, I remember looking out through this darkened window and everyone was peering in to see if Syd was going to attack me or live up to his reputation. I heard someone whispering, “He’s talking to him.” I’d broken the first barrier and got him to speak.’
Syd politely played along with the format, enjoying Alex Harvey’s ‘The Sunday Song’ and the Blues Magoos’ ‘One by One’. ‘You’re going to tell me it’s the Byrds,’ he responded to the latter. ‘I really dig the Byrds, Mothers of Invention and the Fugs. We have drawn quite a bit from those groups.’
‘I played him Jim Reeves’ “Trying To Forget” and to my amazement he guessed immediately,’ remembers Welch. ‘He said, let’s see, who’s dead? This must be Jim Reeves. He knew more about pop music than he was letting on. He was playing a little game with me. All was going well, then I played him a David Bowie track, “Love You Till Tuesday”. I assumed he would like Bowie but I was wrong. His mood changed rather abruptly from being amused to being annoyed. He’d been funny up until then. “That’s a joke,” he said coldly, “but I like jokes.” He was being quite menacing. But it only occurred to me recently, I was playing Pink Floyd’s “The Gnome”, and he may have seen young David Bowie as some sort of upstart, copying his style. More quirky songs about gnomes. Maybe that’s why he didn’t like him or appreciate what he was doing.’
It has been noted that the songs Syd wrote during the second half of 1967 were getting darker and more abstract. So did his encounters with the pop press. ‘It’s better not to have a set goal. You’d be very narrow-minded if you did,’ he told Debbie Smith from Go magazine, who dropped into a post-Piper recording session. ‘All I know is that I’m beginning to think less now. It’s getting better.’
This encounter took place during the period when the Floyd were recording ‘Vegetable Man’, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ and the aborted John Latham sessions. The Go reporter responded to Syd’s desire to think less with, ‘Well, if you stop thinking entirely you might as well be a vegetable.’ ‘Yeah,’ agrees Syd.
In what would turn out to be his last interview with Pink Floyd, Syd is even more terse and to the point than he was with the journalist from Go magazine. In the 9 December issue of Melody Maker he tells writer Alan Walsh that he ‘couldn’t care less’ that ‘Apples and Oranges’ wasn’t a hit and that ‘he feels that the application of commercial considerations is harmful to the music. He’d like to cut out the record company, wholesalers and retailers. “All middle men are bad,” he says.’
‘The group has been through a very confusing stage over the last few months and I think this has been reflected in their work,’ adds Peter Jenner, with admirable understatement. Syd’s parting shot in the interview is both poignant and prescient. ‘Really, we have only just started to scrape the surface of effects and ideas of lights and music combined,’ he says. ‘We think that the music and the lights are part of the same scene, one enhances and adds to the other. But we feel that in the future groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show. They’ll have to offer a well-presented theatre show.’
These are the perceptions of a man who has endured twelve months of twelve-minute slots on package tours, pointless appearances on inappropriate TV shows, and countless badly lit, badly amplified and badly received performances in provincial ballrooms. As was the case with his reluctance to mime and his refusal to fill in inane questionnaires, Syd was once again showing that he was ahead of the game. He envisaged a future where multimedia spectacle was going to become the norm, and where light shows and other visual aspects of performance were going to have to become integrated parts of any live show. These carefully considered and lucidly articulated observations hardly fit the stereotype of the irresponsible drug-addled wreck who was supposedly so incapable of performing and so impossible to work with that he was about to be edged out of his own band.
These were the last words that the pop world would hear from Syd Barrett for nearly two years. It would be a very different Syd who re-emerged at the turn of the decade to promote The Madcap Laughs LP.
Late on in his madness the poet John Clare was taken by the watchmaker and benefactor Thomas Inskip to have tea with G. J. de Wilde, the editor of the
Northampton Mercury. Also present at the occasion was minor poet John Dalby. The encounter with Clare led Dalby to commemorate the moment in verse, one part of which read:
And we sat listening as to some fond child
The wayward unconnected words he said
Prattle by confused recollections fed,
Of famous times gone by.
There was something of this in Syd’s later press encounters. His songs had grown more tangential and convoluted and he now had an interview ‘style’ to match. As more than one interviewer pointed out, Syd’s thought processes and articulation were frequently hard to follow, but even the most obscure utterances were shot through with moments of painful confessional honesty, leavened with whimsy and humour, as he laid bare, as never before, his honest feelings about the pop process.
In the 31 January 1970 issue of Melody Maker, under the heading ‘Confusion and Mr Barrett’, Syd was interviewed by Chris Welch. Welch was a sympathetic spirit and long-time Floyd supporter who had done one of the first ever Pink Floyd interviews in early 1967. In his 1970 encounter with Syd he describes Madcap as ‘an extraordinary solo album of odd eccentric songs’ and refers to Syd’s ‘gaunt good looks and the same gentle humour as his old compatriots’. The stark black-and-white photo which accompanies the piece bears out the first part of that observation, showing Syd in half-lit profile with prominent cheekbones, dark deep-set eyes, several days’ stubble and dishevelled hair. ‘He seemed happy enough to talk this week and while it was easy enough to detect a mood of mild elation and surprise at the interest being shown in him, it was not always so easy to understand his erratic train of thought,’ says Welch. Astutely he adds ‘But he was eager to be helpful and I suspect only as confused as he wanted to be.’
In their 1967 ‘Blind Date’ encounter Welch had been quick to spot that his subject was capable of ‘the put on’ and he seemed less than phased by the more intimidating aspects of Syd’s personality. By 1970 Welch was a music journalist of some repute. His comic creation, Jiving K. Boots, his Bonzo-esque sense of humour and his frequently hilarious and irreverent singles reviews brought much needed levity to the pages of the often dour and over-earnest Melody Maker. As a result, his 1970 encounter with Syd was both relaxed and insightful. ‘I asked him if he liked the music scene and he said, “It’s great here. I never go anywhere else.” I thought that was rather charming,’ Welch remembers.
Among the pleasantries and generalities, Syd mentions that the Madcap album had been recorded at a reasonable pace, that he wasn’t over enamoured with a single (‘Octopus’) being lifted from it, and that he wasn’t particularly hard up for money. He reveals that there are vague plans to get a band together and that he has been writing fairly regularly and hasn’t been bored. On the subject of his former band he says, ‘When I was with the Floyd the form of the music played on stage was mainly governed by the records. Now I seem to have got back to my previous state of mind. With the volume used they [were] inclined to push me a little.’
Syd doesn’t reveal what this ‘previous state of mind’ is, but it can be readily assumed that he is referring to a period, pre-1967, before his creative life became weighed down by pressure and responsibility. Having said that he makes light of his latter-day problems with Pink Floyd.
‘Yes, there were hang-ups when I was with them,’ he admits. ‘Although it was not due to the travelling or anything, which you just put in the category of being a regular activity in that kind of job.’
This matter-of-fact response counteracts many of the concerns raised by management and friends alike about the sheer punishing work-rate endured by the band in 1967, and steers attention towards deeper personality conflicts within the band, as well as broader conflicts of artistic interest and intent. The reference to ‘that kind of job’ is pertinent too. An interesting choice of words.
Syd makes another telling comment when reflecting on his final days with the Floyd. ‘It’s been very exciting, especially when I went to America for two weeks before the split up,’ he says. ‘Then we came back and played at the Albert Hall, and it was very much a crescendo and I felt good. I miss playing to audiences although I haven’t missed it so much recently.’
These enthused observations counteract almost every story that has emerged about the torrid time the band supposedly endured with an increasingly unstable Syd during their American visit, and the subsequent Hendrix package tour.
Disc and Music Echo would appear to verify Syd’s account in its gushing review of the triumphant Albert Hall concert, which took place on 14 November 1967 at the start of the package tour:
Possibly the most interesting act was the Pink Floyd’s, fresh from playing hippie emporiums on America’s West Coast with what must be the best light show yet seen in this country . . . they played hard rock material with drummer Nick Mason laying down some beautiful rhythms and guitarist Syd Barrett hitting some incredible flights of fantasy . . . a very satisfying set.
Syd remains good-natured throughout the Welch interview, stating that ‘Top of the Pops is all right. You meet interesting people and there are always interesting people around [that] I know and are prepared to like me.’ He is less enthusiastic, though, about the music business as a whole. Asked if he is satisfied with his new LP he replies, ‘Well - no. I always find recording difficult. I can only think in terms of, well, I’m pleased with forty minutes of sound, but I can’t in terms of the pop industry. It’s only a beginning. I’ve written a lot more stuff.’
There it is, laid out in plain unambiguous terms, the yawning gulf between creativity and packaging. Syd can deal with forty minutes of sound. The rest is promotion and bullshit.
‘Syd occasionally laughed, seemed agitated or trailed away into silence during our conversation,’ says Welch. ‘Anything that seemed uninteresting or irrelevant merely provoked strained or disordered replies.’
In an interview with Giovanni Dadomo for Sounds magazine in June 1970 which was unpublished at the time, Syd’s answers are mostly brief and to the point, but no less revealing for it. He distances himself from any supposed spiritual immersion in the I Ching, claiming simply that when he wrote ‘Chapter 24’ ‘there was someone around who was into that’. He also rejects the idea that any of his Pink Floyd material was influenced by sci-fi. ‘Not really,’ he says ‘except Journey into Space and Quatermass which was when I was about fifteen.’ He is more willing to concede that there was a strong fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme element to his songs. ‘Fairy tales are nice,’ he says blandly. ‘I think a lot of it has to do with living in Cambridge, with nature and everything, it’s so clean and I still drive back a lot.’ More ominously he adds, ‘leaving school and suddenly being without that structure around you and nothing to relate to, maybe that’s part of it too’. This apparent afterthought tacitly acknowledges that fairy tales functioned as a security motif in his songs, providing grounding and emotional stability, a harking back to an Arcadian childhood. The great unspoken, of course, is his father.
Elsewhere he is characteristically matter-of-fact about ‘the job’ as he was with Chris Welch. In response to a question about how his art training affected his writing, Syd pares the art school influence down to the practicalities of ‘the rate of work, learning to work hard’. The equating of art school with discipline rather than philosophy or ideology is revealing. Lyrics generally came quick to Syd. This was in sharp contrast to the sheer amount of graft that he was prepared to put into his painting. Music was pure unmediated response. Art he clearly thought of as a long-term apprenticeship. He does, however, betray a poignant glimpse into the creative lethargy that had settled upon him while living at Wetherby Mansions with Duggie Fields. It was at this point that Syd came out with that ominous comment about why he didn’t paint much now: ‘The guy who lives next door to me paints and he’s doing it well, so I don’t really feel the need.’
Creeping ennui is also evident in his response to the question, ‘How’s the guitar playing?’ ‘I suppose I could do with some practice,’ he concedes. In answering the question, ‘Do you want to do other things?’, he clearly has old Cambridge mates in mind when he replies, ‘A lot of people want to make films and do photography and things, but I’m quite happy doing what I’m doing.’ Which at the time, of course, was less and less! With the forthcoming Extravaganza ’70 gig at Kensington Olympia in mind Dadomo asks if he is looking forward to singing and playing live again. ‘I used to enjoy it, it was a gas,’ says Syd. ‘But so’s doing nothing. It’s art school laziness really.’
He expresses mild dissatisfaction that the Madcap Laughs album was ‘released far too long after it was done’, and reveals that ‘I wanted it to be a whole thing that people would listen to all the way through with everything related and balanced, the tempos and moods offsetting each other, and I hope that’s what it sounds like.’
His parting shot, although relatively upbeat, seems tinged with frustration, desperation even. ‘I feel as if I’ve got lots of things, much better things to do still, that’s why there isn’t really a lot to say, I just want to get it all done.’
A year later, in March 1971, when he spoke to Michael Watts of Melody Maker there was still a lot to get done but he still hadn’t done any of it. Syd had hit limbo-land. So too, arguably, had rock music, which was still hung up on the 1960s. ‘New Beatle Klaus Goes into Hiding,’ read the teasing headline on the cover of the issue of Melody Maker that carried Watts’ Syd interview. The headline, typical of the period, was publicising a total non-story about bass player Klaus Voormann being lined up to replace Paul McCartney in a new version of the Beatles. Upon reading further it became clear that this titillating rumour, started by the Daily Mirror and roundly denied by all parties involved, was based on nothing more than the fact that Voormann had recently been staying with George and Patti Harrison at their Oxfordshire home.
‘Everyone was waiting for the Beatles to get back together,’ remembers Nick Kent. ‘Editors were always saying, “Let’s see what the Beatles are doing this month.” Were they in a restaurant together? Can we get the Beatles back together? Can we get the Sixties back starting all over again? Can Bob Dylan dress in the same clothes he wore in 1966, take a lot of speed and write the follow up to Blonde on Blonde? We younger writers generally knew that that was over.’
Syd Barrett was now as much a part of that wish list as Dylan or the Beatles. When was Syd going to rejoin Pink Floyd, dress in all his finery and bring back psychedelia? And when was he going to record that reputation-salvaging magnificent third album? That was the subtext as Syd’s absence from the public arena grew longer. Watts’ piece was no exception. ‘He is painfully conscious of his indeterminate role in the music world,’ he notes in his introduction. ‘I’ve never really proved myself wrong. I really need to prove myself right,’ claims Syd in a typical non sequitorial flourish.
Watts’ two-page interview, which featured in the 27 March issue of Melody Maker, carried a photo of the newly shorn Syd. ‘His hair is cut very short now, almost like a skinhead. Symbolic? Of what, then?’ asks Watts. The interview was carried out during the period when Syd was living back at Hills Road, during his brief engagement to Gayla Pinion. ‘I’ve been at home in Cambridge with my mother,’ he says. ‘I’ve been getting used to a family existence generally. Pretty unexciting. I work in a cellar.’
In his earlier Melody Maker encounters with Chris Welch Syd had been guaranteed a sympathetic hearing. Welch was an enthusiastic champion of both the Floyd and Syd’s solo work and wrote accordingly. Watts, however, was not such an ardent fan. ‘I am afraid I have little recall of Syd Barrett beyond what I wrote at the time, save that I now realise he was clearly mad and not merely an “acid casualty”,’ says Watts now. ‘I also fear that he was not as important as his obits suggest. He was an interesting but minor figure, whose derangement has heightened his reputation.’
Like Chris Welch, Watts makes the point in his interview that Syd’s thought processes are not always easy to follow. ‘He is very aware of what is going on around him, but his conversation is often obscure; it doesn’t always progress in linear fashion,’ he says.
‘Syd appeared just like all the other acid casualties of the time, rambling and unfocused, but he was one who never recovered,’ says Watts now. ‘In hindsight, yes, he was obviously nutso. Nothing wrong with that, but he didn’t turn it to significant artistic advantage. His early Floyd singles were better than anything on Madcap Laughs - a rather cruel and exploitative title, don’t you think? Bet he didn’t devise it.’
David Gilmour claims credit for the album title but strongly refutes any notion that it was exploitative. ‘It was my idea to lift that phrase from the lyric to “Octopus”. It seemed and seems to me that “madcap” is a word that described Syd well and is not at all the same as “madman”. “Madcap” to me is jolly, original, it is a kind word, where “madman” obviously is not.’
Despite Michael Watts’ lack of empathy, and some noticeably slack subediting (or perhaps calculated subediting in order to drive home a point), Syd’s 1971 Melody Maker encounter is one of the most revealing interviews that he ever gave.
‘What would you sooner be-a painter or a musician?’ asks Watts. ‘Well, I think of me being a painter eventually,’ says Syd unequivocally. From the outset Syd is keen to establish his credentials as an artist, responding to Watts’ gentle opening enquiry about what he has been doing since leaving Pink Floyd with a resolute ‘I’m a painter. I was trained as a painter,’ although he is honest enough to admit, ‘I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might have done.’ He acknowledges this lapse from his primary creative impulse by saying, ‘You know, it might have been a tremendous release getting absorbed in painting.’ Which begs the question, released from what? Pink Floyd? The pressures of pop fame? Obligations to the music industry? Some deeper creative or personal trauma?
For much of the interview he appears to be having an internal dialogue with himself. ‘I feel like I’m jabbering,’ he admits at one point. He is also honest enough to admit that ‘The fine art thing at college was always too much for me to think about . . . it didn’t transcend the feeling of playing at UFO, and those sorts of places with the lights and that.’ This decision, agonised over during 1966 and the early part of 1967, would come back to haunt Syd through the coming decades, but here it is laid bare, a frank admission that the rigour of academic discipline was too much for him and that he was momentarily seduced by the sights sounds and sensations of UFO and the underground. Those seductive impulses had of course withered to a fading memory by 1971. ‘What happened at Tottenham Court Road when we started was a microcosm of what happened later,’ Syd told Chris Welch in January 1970. When asked about the underground by Giovanni Dadomo a few months later he replies with indifference. ‘I haven’t been to the Arts Lab or anything so I don’t really know what’s happening. There are just so many people running around doing different things and no kind of unity. It doesn’t really bother me.’ By the time he talks to Michael Watts early in 1971 his disillusion and detachment are complete. ‘The general concept-I didn’t feel so conscious of it as perhaps I should,’ he says. ‘I mean, one’s position as a member of London’s young people’s-I dunno what you’d call it - underground, wasn’t it? - wasn’t necessary realised and felt, I don’t think, especially from the point of view of groups.’ Syd touchingly precludes these observations by claiming that it was better to be a band ‘with a silver guitar with silver mirrors and things all over it’ than to be a casualty or a down-and-out ‘who ended up on the floor or anywhere else in London’. However any hint of whimsy is buried by his final comment on those halcyon days. ‘I remember at UFO - one week one group, then another week another group, going in and out, making that set up, and I don’t think it was as active as it could have been . . . what we were doing was a microcosm of the whole sort of philosophy and it tended to be a little bit cheap.’ These are the sentiments not of a cynical fellow traveller, but of an embittered and astute idealist. ‘One thinks of it all as a dream,’ he concludes.
Syd reserves his most barbed comments for his former band mates. Asked about the contrast between his song-based material and the Floyd’s lengthy instrumentals, he responds with a withering put-down. ‘Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people, I would have thought, primarily.’
Beneath the sarcasm lies a deep and fundamental truth about the way in which Pink Floyd approached their craft once they had jettisoned their erratic and anarchic founder. The title track for the band’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, recorded entirely without Syd’s involvement, was devised by Roger Waters and Nick Mason in diagrammatic form, utilising architectural principles of form and function; mood and texture were secondary considerations, entirely subservient to structure. This marked a radical departure from the band’s approach under Syd, which was basically to follow their leader’s guiding spirit, offering colouration and embellishment where appropriate. From their second album onwards the Floyd began to build tracks in terms of blocks of sound, an approach which culminated in the architectural unity of The Dark Side of the Moon. Indeed, it can be argued that the band’s entire modus operandi after Syd’s departure was governed by structural logic.
Syd’s subsequent output on the other hand reflected his fine art philosophy and his pathological resistance to discipline. Waters, Mason, Wright and Gilmour (even sounds like a firm of chartered surveyors, doesn’t it?) were guided by caution, deliberation, meticulous attention to detail, formal principles, sequential logic, linearity. Syd was driven (and impeded, of course) by immediacy, spontaneity, unmediated response, abstraction, multiple perspectives, automatism. One approach leads to ‘Time’, ‘Us and Them’, ‘Money’, ‘Comfortably Numb’ and ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. The other leads to ‘Vegetable Man’, ‘Jugband Blues’, ‘Wolfpack’, ‘Rats’ and ‘No Man’s Land’. Syd was happy with splashy daubs. Pink Floyd were rarely content with anything less than palatial (sometimes glacial) splendour.
Pink Floyd even sought out and undertook commissions like regular architects, contributing soundtrack music to Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and Barbet Schroeder’s More and La Vallée. It is significant that on the two occasions Syd was asked to work under such conditions, for John Latham and for Peter Sykes’ 1968 film, The Committee, he failed to deliver the goods.
Syd thrived on intuition and instinct while his fellow band mates had to graft just to keep up with him, but those very gifts which had helped him sail through his youth floundered once they encountered what Edward Lear had called the ‘retinues and routines’ of discipline and responsibility.
In the Michael Watts interview Syd candidly admits that his departure from the group was chiefly of his own making. ‘It wasn’t really a war. I suppose it was really just a matter of being a little off-hand about things,’ he confesses. He also makes it clear that the split was a gradual accumulative process. ‘We didn’t feel there was one thing that was gonna make the decision at the minute. I mean, we did split up and there was a lot of trouble. I don’t think the Pink Floyd had any trouble, but I had an awful scene, probably self-inflicted, having a Mini and going all over England, and things. Still ...’
He is far more circumspect when talking about acid. ‘Well, I dunno, it don’t seem to have much to do with the job,’ he says dismissively. ‘Were you not at all involved in acid then during its heyday among rock bands?’ asks Watts incredulously. ‘No,’ lies Syd, mindful perhaps of his current domestic circumstances in Cambridge, which he alludes to in his reply. ‘I’ve always thought of going back to a place where you can drink tea and sit on the carpet. I’ve been fortunate enough to do that.’
Overall he appears sanguine about his current lack of involvement in the music scene: ‘I feel perhaps I could be claimed as being redundant almost,’ he says. ‘I don’t feel active and that my public conscience is fully satisfied.’ Any attempts by Watts to ascertain future plans elicit vaguely enthused but noncommittal responses. ‘Do you think that people still remember you?’ says Watts. ‘Yes, I should think so,’ Syd responds. ‘Then why don’t you get some musicians, go on the road, and do some gigs?’ Watts asks. ‘I feel the record would still be the thing to do. And touring and playing might make that impossible to do,’ replies Syd. ‘What’s the hang-up then? Is it getting the right musicians around you?’ asks Watts. ‘Yeah,’ says Syd.
‘What would be of primary importance - whether they were brilliant musicians or whether you could get on with them?’ asks Watts. ‘I’m afraid I think I’d have to get on with them. They’d have to be good musicians. I think they’d be difficult to find. They’d have to be lively,’ says Syd.
‘Would you say therefore you were a difficult person to work with?’ presses Watts. ‘No. Probably my own impatience is the only thing, because it has got to be very easy,’ reveals Syd, once again laying bare his aversion to rigour and retakes and rehearsal.
During these exchanges one frequently gets a sense of prevarication and avoidance. Little of what Syd says convinces the reader that he is about to reinvigorate his career. Occasionally his responses are reminiscent of the strategy (if one can call it that) adopted by Brian Wilson in later years. Everything is answered in the affirmative, yet very little is actually revealed.
After another typically obtuse observation from Syd, where he appears to hark back to his Tech college days (‘You can play guitar in your canteen you know, your hair might be longer but there’s a lot more to playing than travelling around universities and things’), the Watts interview peters out into small talk and inconsequentialities. Syd suggests that he would go out and play solo but ‘I haven’t got any blue jeans’, that ‘Slade would be an interesting thing to hear’ and he hasn’t bought much music lately but he’s been listening to Ma Rainey. Attempting to pick up the thread Watts asks, ‘Are you going into the blues, then, in your writing?’ ‘I suppose so,’ says Syd. ‘Different groups do different things.’ One can almost hear the sentence trail off into whispers. Despite this Syd ends the interview on a positive note claiming that there would be a third solo album (‘It should be twelve singles and jolly good singles’) and that he wants to produce it himself. ‘I think it was always easier to do that.’
Sharing the same page as the concluding part of Watts’ interview is a prominent advert for an up-and-coming mail order service called Virgin Records. At that time the fledgling organisation just had two record shops in Tottenham Court Road and Notting Hill, and was beginning to make a name for itself selling cut-price albums by post. A couple of pages earlier in the same issue the paper’s jazz section featured an interview with drummer John Stevens, at that time working with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. Stevens talks about the joys and strictures of free improvised music, the difference between rhythm and sound, the avoidance of familiarity and habit (which Stevens calls ‘a cul-de-sac’), of having recorded the latest SME album, Source in one take, and of his desire to ‘get beyond the machine’.
Had things turned out differently this could have been Syd talking. Similarly he might have ended up on the Virgin Records roster with kindred spirits like Daevid Allen’s Gong, Henry Cow or Faust. Imagine a rejuvenated Syd guesting on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells or Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom or collaborating with any one of the outcasts and avant-gardners who flocked to Richard Branson’s label in the early 1970s. Sadly it was not to be. By 1971 the shutters were coming down. Syd was busy closing off all options.
In an interview with Steve Turner for Beat Instrumental, published in June 1971, the recalcitrance is obvious. ‘His talk is slow and unrevealing. The answer given often bears no relation to the question being asked,’ says Turner. Syd’s responses are now beginning to fade into vapour trails and silence. ‘I mainly play the guitar,’ he says. ‘You can play it all day though and you’re not really saying much.’
According to Turner Syd is still dressed for the part, in purple satin jacket and stack-heeled boots. ‘I’m still in love with being a pop star really,’ he claims, before going off on a convoluted, and none too convincing, attempt at explaining what he still refers to as ‘the job’. ‘As a job it’s interesting but very difficult. You can be pure enough to talk about it where you can actually adapt to the grammar of the job. It’s exciting. You channel everything into one thing and it becomes the art.’ Of his newly shorn locks and his return to his home town he says, ‘Cambridge is very much a place to get adjusted to. I’ve found it difficult. It was fairly unusual to go back because it’s the home place where I used to live and it was pretty boring so I cut my hair.’
Turner notes Syd’s tendency to contradict himself, as later he says of Cambridge: ‘It’s quite fun. It’s a nice place to live really - under the ground.’ Again he plays lip service to the idea of getting a band together (‘It’d be a groove wouldn’t it?’) and expresses mild dissatisfaction with his solo endeavours so far. ‘They’ve got to reach a certain standard,’ he says, ‘and that’s probably only reached in Madcap once or twice and on the other one only a little - just an echo of that. Neither of them are much more than that.’
The occasional wry response emerges, but even these are tinged with weariness and ennui. Syd begins the interview by explaining that he’s come up to London to look for a guitar. ‘Quite an exciting morning for me,’ he deadpans. ‘I don’t really know if pop is an art form,’ the interview concludes. ‘I should think as much as sitting down is.’
Speaking of their encounter years later Turner recalled Syd’s palpable unease, mentioning that when he offered to share a taxi to a West End guitar shop after the interview Syd hastily made his excuses. When Turner encountered Syd again a short while later on a tube train he acknowledged his interviewer, ‘But it’s the frightened face I’ll always remember,’ says Turner.
Syd gave what would turn out to be his last-ever interview to Mick Rock for Rolling Stone magazine in the late autumn of 1971. It wasn’t intended to be his last, and like everything else about his gradual withdrawal from the pop world it came without fanfares, but if this was to be Syd’s final encounter with the music press then it was somehow fitting that it should be with someone he knew and trusted.
The feature in its original edited form ran to only half a page, although the full uncut transcript was later included by Rock in his book Psychedelic Renegades, as were many of the photographs shot that day. Although Rock had known Syd since 1966 he had only ever penned a few music features - he had written about David Bowie for Club International, the men’s magazine, for example - and at the time he was busy establishing himself as a photographer. The original Rolling Stone piece, published on 23 December 1971, didn’t even carry Rock’s byline, although an accompanying photo of Syd squinting into the sunlight in his Cambridge back garden did. ‘I didn’t even complain about not getting the byline. But I was almost too hip to complain,’ laughs Rock. ‘It wouldn’t have been cool to draw attention to oneself.’
Rock, accompanied by his wife Sheila, found Syd in good form, in turn enigmatic (‘I’m full of dust and guitars’), laconic (‘The only work I’ve done the last two years is interviews. I’m very good at it’), melancholic (‘I wasn’t always this introverted. I think young people should have fun. But I never seem to have any’) and defiant (‘I’m totally together. I even think I should be’).
‘He was a bit lateral in his self-expression,’ says Rock. ‘But he wasn’t foaming-at-the-mouth crazy. I knew of things that had gone on that people would talk to me about in that period between ’69 and ’71. But it wasn’t like that with him and me . . . Personally he wasn’t that strange with me. We had really friendly communication, and a lot of non-verbal, but enough verbal, that he was comfortable with me interviewing him. And, of course, it wasn’t like he was really doing any other interviews around that time. I think he did the interview because it was me. I don’t think he would’ve done it with anybody else by then. He wasn’t really in the music business any more as far as he was concerned.’
Syd’s parting shot in the interview, and by default his final public statement, lends this book its subtitle. ‘I don’t think I’m easy to talk about,’ he tells Rock. ‘I’ve got a very irregular head. And I’m not anything you think I am anyway.’
None of this, Rock assures me, was delivered with diffidence or malice. It was simply an acknowledgement that he wasn’t easily definable. There is an element of raising the psychological drawbridge behind him in the quote, but throughout the rest of the interview Syd indulges in frequent bouts of honest self-analysis.
‘I am doing little, but dimly walking on along the dusty twilight lanes of incomprehensible life,’ Edward Lear wrote to his friend Lord Fortescue in 1859. ‘I’m treading the backward path,’ Syd told Mick Rock at 183 Hills Road, Cambridge in the autumn of 1971 with the sun setting on his pop life. ‘I’m disappearing. Avoiding most things.’
In the interview Syd talks, as he frequently did, of his creative impasse. ‘I may seem to get hung up, that’s because I am frustrated work-wise, terribly,’ he says. ‘The fact is I haven’t done anything this year. I’ve probably been chattering, explaining that away like anything. But the other bit about not working is that you get to think theoretically.’
That last sentence is highly significant. For all his instinctiveness Syd always had thought theoretically. The difference now was that there was no longer any end-product to show for it. What is equally noticeable by its absence in his encounter with Mick Rock is any talk of a third album.
Instead Syd gives what is clearly meant to be a final definitive statement on what went wrong with his pop career. ‘Hendrix was a perfect guitarist. And that’s all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way. It’s always been too slow for me. Playing. The pace of things. I mean I’m a fast sprinter. The trouble was after playing in the group for a few months I couldn’t reach that point.’
Rock remembers that everything was conveyed in very matter-of-fact tones, without fuss or melodrama. ‘He was very whimsical,’ says Rock. ‘It was quite a whimsical day. He was kind of accepting the fact that, y’know, “When I was young I used to jump around a lot and have fun on stage and now I don’t have much fun any more.” It’s a bit like Pink Floyd, the band, got in the way. He didn’t wanna be structured, that’s for sure. It got too structured. I think early on, when leading up to the first album, it was pure experimentation, but I think after the release of the album, suddenly, instead of being an underground figure, he was thrown into some kind of limelight. And then there were demands for the Floyd to tour and then he had to do interviews, the whole bit. I think once it started to get structured, he very rapidly decided he didn’t really like it. In some ways he was more like a jazz musician. He just wanted to go somewhere, play guitar and jump around as he felt like it. He wanted to improvise. The minute he had to start playing “Arnold Layne” every night, I don’t think his brain could deal with that. His sensibility rebelled against that. He should’ve been born in an earlier time and been a Coltrane or something and just been able to have a context where he could just get up and just doodle around and play around and let his feelings express themselves without restraint. I think he would’ve been more comfortable.’
On the subject of Hendrix Syd says, ‘I toured with him you know. Lindsay and I used to sit up the back of the bus with him up front. He would film us. But we never spoke really. He was better than people really knew but very self-conscious about his consciousness. He’d lock himself in the dressing room with a TV and he wouldn’t let anyone in.’
The paradox was not lost on Rock. ‘The thing about touring with Hendrix and how he thought it was odd how Hendrix would lock himself away and refuse to come out of the room - that was one of the most ironic things because that’s exactly what he was doing by then.’
In marked contrast to the thousand-yard stare that Syd had begun to adopt by the time of the 1967 package tour, several of Mick Rock’s Cambridge photos capture Syd relaxed and smiling. In a couple he is wielding a tennis racket, albeit none too convincingly. In others he inquisitively examines Rock’s photographic equipment. He even takes a couple of shots of Rock and his wife. Sheila reciprocates by photographing her husband with Syd. ‘He liked to laugh,’ says Rock. ‘I mean, people paint him as being odd and the idea that most people get, because he was so reclusive, was that he was kind of a miserable personality. But he wasn’t by nature that way. I think there was a part of him that was really quite a happy person. I look at the pictures I’ve got of him and in a lot of them he’s laughing.’
Despite Rock’s affectionate recollections other photos taken that day tell a different story. In some Syd looks stiff and pensive. The smiles have a certain strained quality. In the published interview Rock himself admitted that, ‘he seems very tense, ill at ease. Hollow-cheeked and pale his eyes reflect a permanent state of shock.’
In the photos Syd is wearing a paint-spattered T-shirt turned inside out. In one he is holding a paintbrush, and the feature mentions that his cellar room is full of ‘paintings and records, amps and guitars’. ‘He still paints,’ Rock maintains in the article. ‘Sometimes crazy jungles of thick blobs. Sometimes simple linear pieces. His favourite is a white semi circle on a white canvas.’
Unfortunately the interview doesn’t make it clear if the latter piece is new. If it is, then Syd truly was ‘treading the backward path’ and had reverted to his pre-art school influences, in this case Robert Rauschenberg’s late 1950s white-on-white canvases. One painting that survives from the period, which Syd gave to Jenny Spires in 1971, is a drip painting in the style of Jackson Pollock. ‘Crazy jungles of thick blobs’ sums it up nicely. It’s part homage to abstract expressionism, part replication of a light show projection, amoebic form as glimpsed through a liquid lens. It’s not one of Syd’s most convincing canvases, but its mere existence indicates that during 1971 Syd was still trying to reconnect with his first love, painting.
‘He doesn’t actually play the guitar nowadays. He prefers to merely strum,’ the interview states, but further on in the piece Syd feels suitably emboldened to show Rock a folder full of all his lyrics, neatly typed. ‘I think it’s so exciting. I’m glad you’re here,’ he says. He even produces a brand new twelve-string Yamaha and plays Mick and Sheila a version of ‘Love You’, a song he still remained inordinately fond of. ‘He’s holding a guitar in a couple of the frames that I shot in the basement, and that’s what he was doing in those pictures. He was actually playing me that. I think it was something about our relationship that he was very relaxed with me. But other people seemed to make him very uptight. I think he had a very - what’s the word? - it was something to do with the people he had grown up with, which he’d developed a kind of antipathy towards by then. And, yes, he did manifest certain aspects of paranoia, and certainly I know of some things he did as described to me by other people over the years, which sound pretty loony, but I never saw anything like that when he was in my company.’
As Rock says in the interview, ‘Visiting him is like intruding into a very private world.’ The portrait that Rock paints in the Rolling Stone feature is essentially one of a retired rock legend. Syd says that he doesn’t take acid anymore and talks poignantly about the old days. ‘I never felt so close to a guitar as that silver one with mirrors that I used on stage all the time,’ he says sadly. He also talks with almost childlike innocence about what he would do with an abundance of wealth. ‘I’d like a lot of money to put into my physicals and to buy food for all my friends,’ he says sweetly.
All of this is shot through with scenes of touching domesticity. ‘His mum brought us tea and cakes,’ remembers Rock. ‘I don’t have a strong impression of her, maybe I was too focused on Syd, but she was certainly around and she certainly brought out tea and cakes for three. It was all very English.’
Perhaps the most poignant moment in the entire interview, and one which was not included in the original published version, occurs when Syd alludes to his recent break-up with Gayla Pinion. ‘I’ve often been in love,’ he says. ‘The last time it lasted only a few months and at the end of it I almost broke down.’ ‘He relates this as if remembering from a script pedantically,’ says Rock in the feature. ‘He pours another cup of tea and confides flatly, “I love girls, you know. I wanna get married and have kids.”‘
‘There was that part of him that knew there was a regular life out there to be had,’ says Rock. ‘But as he says at the end, “I’ve got a very irregular head.” So I think he understood that in the end that was never gonna be. I don’t know that he ever did have another girlfriend after that.’
Or any kind of friend at all.