SYD BARRETT (1946 – 2006)



Syd Barrett, of (The) Pink Floyd, died on July 7. As soon as the news was announced, tributes flooded into the BBC’s entertainment website. It’s fascinating that someone who probably recorded no more than ten outstanding songs, nearly all of which are featured on one album, should have such an enduring appeal. What is it about these songs that distinguishes them?

In the mid-1960s, the Beatles were the real innovators, leading the way into the territory of childhood as a storehouse for the imagery with which to communicate the psychedelic experience. Other musicians dutifully adopted this template, creating a very British style of psychedelic music utterly different from what American bands were doing at the time. For a short time, attachment to childhood was cool and the underground was awash with nursery-rhyme songs from the likes of Donovan, Kaleidoscope, The Idle Race and Tomorrow. Syd Barrett was – for the brief time when he sang for Pink Floyd – the unacknowledged master of the genre. He, more than anyone else, created the flawed, but often brilliant, psychedelic album The Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

Because he had never really severed connection with his childhood, Syd’s songs are both more playful and more genuinely affecting than anything that his contemporaries were able to produce - perhaps with the exception of Strawberry Fields Forever. The Pink Floyd, produced by Norman Smith, brought the songs to life with sparse experimental arrangements featuring moments of Syd’s jagged tinny guitar and liberal use of reverb. Bass lines meander, scamper around and often disappear altogether; the most startling effect is brought about, for example in the Scarecrow, by omitting the low frequency sounds and then introducing them unexpectedly. (This almost never happens in modern music, which uses bass more or less formulaically, dead-centre and constant, until the listener tunes it out.)

The album opens with Syd, like a child fascinated with a new book on astronomy, stringing together the names of astral bodies into a seamless incantation in Astronomy Domine; it is perhaps the first, and certainly the most evocative, piece of “space rock” ever produced. In Matilda Mother, there are obvious psychedelic parallels in his description of being read a fairy story: “You only have to read the lines of scribbly black and everything shines…” (Vocal harmonies suddenly drench the last word here, creating an unforgettably synaesthetic effect.) In the nonsense song Flaming, where he is “lying on an eiderdown” and “travelling by telephone” there is something euphoric in the way these vocal lines are delivered. It’s typical of his best vocals: artless, sometimes a bit flat, but sung with such teasing knowingness that the listener cannot help being transported to the enchanted space where the lyrics were captured.

One of his songs, Effervescing Elephant, was so obviously a children's song that I managed to get away with teaching it to my class of 8-year-olds to sing at assembly. One of the girls subsequently learned the words by heart and went around singing them to impress her classmates. I wonder if she ever found out its origin.

Syd’s obvious yearning for a more innocent time, amplified by copious LSD use, probably contributed towards his mental breakdown. Sadly, none of his later work after Piper At The Gates of Dawn come from the same land as these early songs. You can only hear the hollow voice of someone completely losing their bearings, as the other musicians struggle to keep to his erratic time signatures. The sound of this lonely encounter with madness is one reason why he has such a cult following, but it is in these few short pieces of English whimsy where his genius lies: See Emily Play, Astronomy Domine, Lucifer Sam, Matilda Mother, Flaming, Bike, the Scarecrow.

Pink Floyd, with a new guitarist who briefly tried to write and sing in Syd Barrett's style, went on to conquer the world as arguably the most artistic of all rock bands, but in a completely different vein, and without any of the lightness of touch that characterised their founder.

Obituary on Pink Floyd fan site