| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Fluffy |
Posted - 07/12/2006 : 04:44:03 AM
I heard earlier this after noon, a friend texted me from NY to break the news. I was quite saddened. We had been talking alot about Syd on this TouR surprisingly enuf. TR even brought some Syd CD's with him so we will be listening to him all day tomorrow on our drive to Baltimore in his honor. He also came up at dinner and it was great for me to hear all these musicians I respect so much speaking so highly of him. It confirmed what I have always felt about Syd. Later in the evening, after the gig, I got a call from TR and told me Syd had visited him in his hotel room tonite and wanted us to know that he is OK and doing great and that he is happy. Whooooaa!
SYD BARRETT DEAD
July 12, 2006
Syd Barrett, the "crazy diamond" guitarist who shaped the early Pink Floyd psychedelic sound, has died nearly 40 years after becoming one of rock music's most dramatic casualties.
He turned into a recluse after an LSD-induced breakdown and in recent years suffered from complications due to diabetes.
After becoming severely ill last week, Barrett was admitted to Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge. He was discharged on Thursday and died the following day at his home, in St Margaret's Square, which he shared with his mother until she died a few years ago. He was 60.
His brother, Alan, said: "He died peacefully at home. There will be a private family funeral in the next few days."
Barrett walked away from fame as a cult figure, vanishing behind the blinds of his mother's semi-detached house, preferring to tend his garden, visit Sainsbury's on a bike and mutter inanities to unwelcome visitors.
Barrett reportedly entered a mental home at one stage, and latterly always avoided anybody who called on him. Wearing only his underpants he met his biographer Tim Willis at his front door and said: "I'm just looking after this place for the moment. I'm not going to stay here forever."
However, he is thought to have left a fortune. David Gilmour, drafted in to Pink Floyd during a period in which Barrett was behaving erratically, made sure that royalties on his compositions flowed steadily into his bank account.
Even though he was only with the band for its first three years and appeared on just one album, Piper At The Gates of Dawn, Barrett's quarterly income was still into seven figures. Friends said he was happy never to mention his cult status, adding that he was neither poor nor sad.
Rock stars paid tribute to him last night. David Bowie described Barrett as a "major inspiration", saying: "I can't tell you how sad I feel.
"The few times I saw him perform in London at UFO and the Marquee clubs during the 1960s will forever be etched in my mind. He was so charismatic and such a startlingly original songwriter. His impact on my thinking was enormous. A major regret is that I never got to know him. A diamond indeed."
A statement from Pink Floyd said: "The band are naturally very upset and sad to learn of Syd's death. He was the guiding light of the early band line-up and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire."
The former Blur guitarist Graham Coxon released a statement saying: "Lost him again ... For bang on 20 years Syd led me to better places."
BBC's Radio Cambridgeshire played the Floyd's Wish You Were Here, with its opening lyric, "So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain". The recording, in 1975, was the last time the band saw Barrett.
He ambled into the studio to listen and, initially, nobody recognised him, as the former 9st guitarist had become a shambolic, 16st balding man.
At first, Pink Floyd was Syd's band, made in his image, and making singular music with its quintessentially English take on psychedelia. But the feeling is that Barrett was a fragile figure from the first, and LSD, with its increasingly uncontrollable trips, put him over the edge.
Gilmour said he thought that Barrett's breakdown was always on the cards. "It was a deep-rooted thing. But I'll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst.
I just don't think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it."
Joe Boyd, his first producer, said: "It is a very sad and lonely tale. With the band and him, you had the feeling you were in the presence of people who were a soundtrack of a revolutionary period. I don't know what Swinging London would have been without him."
The Daily Telegraph
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/07/12/1152383753977.html
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| 5 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Ranting Thespian |
Posted - 07/14/2006 : 03:55:42 AM
I must say, I am not fond of all of Syd's music, but without him things would have never been so grand. Syd was a major part of Floyd's music even after he left. I think he does infect both Gilmour and Waters still very much so. It's a sad story for what happened to him, but thankfuly he didn't fall victim to LSD like Jimi Hendrix. It is quite sad that he died, but I am glad he went peacefuly with his family.
It was very kind of Syd to pay Tim a visit, I am very glad Syd is happy.
Continue you to shine on Roger "Syd" Barret. |
| KevinLesko |
Posted - 07/13/2006 : 3:38:37 PM
We (we being all of us into Psychodelic rock) owe Mr. Barrett a big thanks. |
| Robin |
Posted - 07/12/2006 : 8:39:09 PM
I saw this in the paper this morning and instantly thought of you. He was incredible that's for sure. Peace, Robin |
| Fluffy |
Posted - 07/12/2006 : 04:54:43 AM
Rolling Stone, December 1971
The Madcap Who Named Pink Floyd
An Interview with Syd Barrett
By M. Rock
London:
If you tend to believe what you hear, rather than what is, Syd Barrett is either dead, behind bars, or a vegetable. He is in fact alive and as confusing as ever, in the town where he was born, Cambridge.
In 1966-67, Barrett was playing lead guitar with Pink Floyd. He'd named the band and was writing most of their music, including the only two hit singles they ever had. His eerie electronic guitar style and gnome-like stage presence made him an authentic cult figure for the nascent London underground, then just beginning to gather at the UFO club and the Roundhouse. The Floyd were a house band and the music went on into the wee hours. Cambridge is an hour's train ride from London. Syd doesn't see many people these days. Visiting him is like intruding into a very private world.
"I'm disappearing", he says, "avoiding most things." He seems very tense, ill at ease. Hollow-cheeked and pale, his eyes reflect a permanent state of shock. He has a ghostly beauty which one normally associates with poets of old. His hair is short now, uncombed, the wavy locks gone. The velvet pants and new green snake skin boots show some attachment to the way it used to be. "I'm treading the backward path," he smiles. "Mostly, I just waste my time." He walks a lot. "Eight miles a day," he says. "It's bound to show. But I don't know how."
"I'm sorry I can't speak very coherently," he says, "It's rather difficult to think of anybody being really interested in me. But you know, man, I am totally together. I even think I should be."
Occasionally, Syd responds directly to a question. Mostly his answers are fragmented, a stream of consciousness (the words of James Joyce's poem 'Golden Hair' are in one of his songs). "I'm full of dust and guitars," he says. "The only work I've done the last two years is interviews. I'm very good at it." In fact, Syd has made three albums in that time, produced by the Floyd. '
The Madcap Laughs', his second, he says, was pretty good: "Like a painting as big as the cellar." Before the Floyd got off the ground, Barrett attended art school. He still paints. Sometimes crazy jungles of thick blobs. Sometimes simple linear pieces. His favourite is a white semi-circle on a white canvas.
In a cellar where he spends much of his time, he sits surrounded by paintings and records, his amps and guitars. He feels safe there, under the ground. Like a character out of one of his own songs. Syd says his favourite musician is Hendrix.
"I toured with him you know, Lindsay (an old girl-friend) and I used to sit on the back of the bus, with him up front; he would film us. But we never spoke really. It was like this. Very polite. 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 wouldn't let anyone in."
Syd himself has been known to sit behind locked doors, refusing to see anyone for days at a time. Frequently in his last months with the Floyd, he'd go on stage and play no more than two notes in a whole set.
"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."
"I may seem to get hung-up, that's because I am frustrated work-wise, terribly. 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 do get to think theoretically."
He'd like to get another band together. "But I can't find anybody. That's the problem. I don't know where they are. I mean, I've got an idea that there must be someone to play with. If I was going to play properly, I should need some really good people."
Syd leaves the cellar and goes up to a sedate little room full of pictures of himself with his family. He was a pretty child. English tea, cake and biscuits, arrives. Like many innovators, Barrett seems to have missed the recognition due to him, while others have cleaned up.
"I'd like to be rich. I'd like a lot of money to put into my physicals and to buy food for all my friends."
"I'll show you a book of all my songs before you go. I think it's so exciting. I'm glad you're here."
He produces a folder containing all his recorded songs to date, neatly typed, with no music. Most of them stand alone as written pieces. Sometimes simple, lyrical, though never without some touch of irony. Sometimes surreal, images weaving dreamily, echoes of a mindscape that defies traditional analysis. Syd's present favourite is 'Wolfpack,' a taut threatening, claustrophobic number. It finishes with:
Mild the reflecting electricity eyes
The life that was ours grew sharper
and stronger away and beyond
short wheeling fresh spring
gripped with blanched bones moaned
Magnesium proverbs and sobs.
Syd thinks people who sing their own songs are boring. He has never recorded anyone else's. He produces a guitar and begins to strum out a new version of 'Love You,' from Madcap. "I worked this out yesterday. I think it's much better. It's my new 12-string guitar. I'm just getting used to it. I polished it yesterday." It's a Yamaha. He stops and eases it into a regular tuning, shaking his head.
"I never felt so close to a guitar as that silver one with mirrors that I used on stage all the time. I swapped it for the black one, but I've never played it."
Syd is 25 now, and worried about getting old. "I wasn't always this introverted,' he says, 'I think young people should have a lot of fun. But I never seem to have any."
Suddenly he points out the window. "Have you seen the roses? There's a whole lot of colors." Syd says he doesn't take acid anymore, but he doesn't want to talk about it... "There's really nothing to say."
He goes into the garden and stretches out on an old wooden seat. "Once you're into something..." he says, looking very puzzled. He stops. "I don't think I'm easy to talk about. I've got a very irregular head. And I'm not anything that you think I am anyway."
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| Fluffy |
Posted - 07/12/2006 : 04:51:54 AM
Pink Void
The psychedelic legacy of Syd Barrett.
By Jody Rosen
Posted Tuesday, July 11, 2006, at 6:12 PM ET
Syd Barrett, who died several days ago (no one is sure exactly when) at age 60, was, to say the least, a mess. The wire services are remembering the co-founder and first lead singer of Pink Floyd as a "troubled genius"—obit-speak for lunatic—and indeed his life was a lurid tragedy that seemed scripted for a VH-1 Behind the Music special: Gifted psychedelic-rock pioneer streaks like a comet across the Swinging London music scene, sears his mind on drugs, descends into madness, and disappears. He became something more horrifying than a rock martyr like Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix; he became a kind of living dead man. The most famous episode in the Barrett legend was his 1975 reunion with Pink Floyd, when he turned up unannounced at Abbey Road Studios just as the band was recording their Barrett elegy, "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond." He was a gruesome apparition—bloated, with a shaved head and shaved eyebrows—and none of his ex-bandmates recognized him.
And yet this epic mess of a man made art that was anything but. Listening to Barrett's songs—to the first Pink Floyd singles, to the band's 1967 debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and to Barrett's early '70s solo records—one is struck by the formal rigor, the wit, the satisfying symmetries of his music and words. Barrett was a terrific craftsman, and neither the dissonance and clatter of his soundscapes nor the cheery freakiness of his lyrics could hide the songs' essential classicism. Had Barrett been born 30 years earlier, and done several thousand fewer hits of LSD, he could have made a fine living on Tin Pan Alley. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is probably the great '60s psychedelic rock album, and it reminds us that psychedelic rock wasn't an atonal maelstrom, but pop gone a little fuzzy and acid-fried around the edges: catchy songs tricked out with weird noises. Barrett's lyrics similarly mixed old-fashioned rigor with drug-fueled surreality, nonsense with wry, funny, haunting sense. "Arnold Layne," Pink Floyd's first single, sounds like doggerel, but listen closer and you hear the tale of a transvestite who steals his wardrobe from clotheslines: "Arnold Layne/ Had a strange hobby/ Collecting clothes/ Moonshine, washing line/ They suit him fine."
Barrett delivers those lines in a nasal southern English whine, which was something of an innovation for the time. Most British bands, including the Stones and early Beatles, sang in ersatz-American accents, but Barrett proclaimed his Englishness and not just by refusing to Yankee-up his singing voice. His songs are steeped in a pastoral fairy-tale Englishness—enchanted forests and gnomes in tunics and mice romping through barley fields—which is what you get, I guess, when you mix hard drugs with Victorian children's literature. (Barrett took the phrase "piper at the gates of dawn" from Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.) It's a deeply quaint and provincial worldview, perfect for Barrett's twisty little pop songs but miles from the space-rock grandeur that Pink Floyd would achieve on post-Barrett classics like Dark Side of the Moon. Rock snobs like to say that Pink Floyd lost it when Barrett freaked out and left the band, but the truth is Floyd would probably have gone down in history as a curio had Barrett stuck around—and what's more, there wouldn't be any such thing as Radiohead.
For decades, Barrett was rock's great romantic-tragic recluse, and now that there will definitely be no second act to his sad story, the Byronic myth surrounding him is bound to inflate. (I'm sure we'll be hearing lots of his 1970 ballad "Dark Globe," a terrifying farewell from a man slipping into madness: "Please, please, please lift a hand/ With Eskimo chain/ I tattered my brain/ Won't you miss me?/ Wouldn't you miss me at all?") But it would be nice if Barrett was recalled not just as an acid casualty or as a legendary "rock madman" but as an English eccentric in the surreal-comic tradition that extends from Lewis Carroll to Monty Python and, via Barrett, onto the weirdo-pop specialist Robyn Hitchcock. Barrett spent his final years in his mother's house in Cambridge, England, living comfortably off the royalties that his former bandmates made sure he collected. Reportedly, his pastimes were painting and gardening, and he was often seen by neighbors on his bicycle. It sounds like a pretty nice life, actually, and it's pleasant to think of Barrett ending his days as a vaguely Victorian figure—an odd old Englishman who'd made quite a splash in his youth, tottering through town on two wheels.
http://www.slate.com/id/2145531 |
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