The Story of Syd Barrett, the man who created Pink Floyd

When Syd Barrett , the founder and leader of Pink Floyd , died on July 7, 2006, his sister found that in Roger's account (his real name) was just over two million euros.

An immaculate account of years and years fattened by the money that entered him in his account periodically, coming from royalties and sale of Pink Floyd records. David Gilmour always worried about getting him the money. All that money eventually came to his two sisters.

Officially, Barrett had died of pancreatic cancer, but he had been a diabetic for the past eight years. The worse part is, since being kicked out of Pink Floyd's in April 1968, he suffered from life-threatening schizophrenia, caused by his addiction to LSD, coupled with bipolar disorder and a spectrum of autism. The Barret case is one of the most studied in the world of schizophrenia.

Syd Barrett lived like a hermit in his town, in Cambridge. He was riding a bicycle, with a kind of basket, as he described in his brilliant and surreal "Bike" song. In the end, it seems that he was trying to write a book. That was the life of a genius who went insane. It's that simple. The founder of Pink Floyd, the creator of absolute masterpieces like "Arnold Layne", "See Emily Play" and "Interstellar overdrive".

He also invented the Pink Floyd sound. Even the name, taken as a surrealist joke, based on the names of two not so well-known blues musicians: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

Syd was so avant-garde and revolutionary that he is yet to know the new genius who can surpass him in his own astronomy of schizophrenia.

The last time he was seen with Pink Floyd

A CRAZY DIAMOND

I never found it strange when in June of 1975, Syd said that "Shine on your crazy diamond", the main song of a new album by Pink Floyd, seemed to sound "somewhat old", to questions of his old friend and colleague Roger Waters.

It seems that June 5, 1975 was the last day that the four Pink Floyd were able to see Syd Barrett for the last time. That day, David Gilmour, his replacement as guitarist for the group, had invited him to his wedding with his first wife Ginger. Later, they both went to Abbey Road, Studio 3, to the top, where Pink Floyd was recording "Whish You were Here", the decisive album after the hit success of " Dark side of the Moon ".

Syd Barrett sat at the back, behind the recording console. The three of them arrived and nobody recognized him. Syd was bald, fat and almost toothless. No, it could not be the incredible and magical Syd Barrett founder of Pink Floyd. He did not speak, no one was approaching, until Waters asked him what he thought of "Shine on your crazy diamond". Rogers had always taken advantage of the madness of his old friend to write his "lunatic" lyrics and was only digging into the legend itself in which Syd had become over time as a revolutionary musician and also as the first great genius of music victim of LSD.

In "Dark side of the Moon" already wrote "Brain damage" and "Eclipse"to increase the figure of Syd. And then the next album was called "Wish you were here" and dared to put "Shine on your crazy diamond", because it was known that Syd no longer knew anything. Waters has always been intelligent, cynical, and perverse.

Kevin Ayers was friends with Syd at school, at Cambridge, at Technical College. Kevin said many things about how Syd simply wanted to travel and travel to that "dominated astronomy" by his brain. Beyond the mind. Maybe that's why he found the interstellar instrument in LSD. According to Kevin, he would put four trips of LSD a day into anything, into a spoon, into a lump of sugar, whatever.

But in return, the music he made was extremely different, spatial, galactic. Syd invented psychedelic in the world of music. He was his own "psychedelia".

For the clip of Arnold Layne

THE RIVAL OF THE BEATLES

Kevin thought that probably signing for EMI, with a great status, like the Beatles, and recording with the Beatles engineer himself, was not something that would suit the galactic Syd. He began to say that he was a revolutionary and that he was not famous. And what's worse: that he lived in a "flat" rented and John Lennon, in a mansion. And that was absolutely unfair.

Norman Smith, the producer and engineer of the Beatles, never liked Syd, because he was disconcerted in each of the sessions that he directed with his new great group Pink Floyd. Barret's brain was at lightning speed and Norman's was only at the speed of a good craftsman.

Norman has even said that the only one who was indifferent and inconsistent with the Beatles was Barret himself when Norman took them to study 2 to meet the "majesties"of British music. It was in the spring of 1967, while the Beatles recorded "Lovely Rita" from "Sgt. Peppers ". Roger, Nick and Rick appeared almost slimy with the Beatles, but Syd went so far as to say that the music was shit, a comment that apparently did not reach Paul, who was the author of the song. That night, they recorded "The Scarecrow" from "The Pipe at the Gates of Dawn".

THE FIRST GREAT ALBUM

Personally this is one of my favorite albums by Pink Floyd. Published at the end of 1967 it still seems incredible how they could get so far in those years. It seems to me something sublime, majestic, as if discovering the stars, the space with the music of Syd Barret. The work of a genius who never obeyed Norman Smith. More transgressor than Jimi Hendrix, more nihilistic than the very Pete Townshend. An absolute genius. David Bowie has always been a special fan of Barret.

Even in his album of "Pin-ups" versions included the incredible "See Emily Play", which had been chosen as the best psychedelic song in history. For Bowie what puzzled him most was his phrasing, his diction, the way he sang. It was not typical of an "English fool," but it had more than the American singer's technique.

To Bowie, Syd's voice sounded like something out of this world. Bowie's love for Barret got to the point that the last time he has sung live in all these years, was to pay a small tribute to Syd, which David Gilmour, his replacement in Pink Floyd, had prepared at the Royal Albert Hall, in May of the year 2006.

Just eight years ago. Bowie sang Pink Floyd's first single, the incredible "Arnold Layne," the grotesque story of a guy who stole women's panties and clothes and then put them in his house. At that time Roger Waters 'mother, his friend, was renting rooms for students in Cambridge and Syd had the habit of taking the girls' panties and smelling them intensely to know the depth of their smell, as if it were a wolf in heat."The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", despite its avant-garde weight, despite its supposed lack of commerciality, was an incredible success. The album of the great psychedelic. Unfortunately, Barret, every day, was a zombie who was headed. His great mental paralysis began. There were concerts that launched the guitar as if it were a grenade and, in other performances, simply stood still and Pink Floyd, without remedy, had to suspend the performance.

ACID, LYSERGIC ACID

Syd Barret was able to reach Los Angeles, which was the capital of his paranoia. An unknown Alice Cooper had heard the Pink Floyd album and wanted to meet them as it was. They came to dinner at Chetah's club and Cooper's guitarist was puzzled when Syd asked him to pour the sugar in while he took out a bowl and bathed them in the lump. They all started traveling to another galaxy.

Back in London, Pink Floyd were on tour with Jimi Hendrix and Kevin Ayers. And Kevin said that Jimi gave him Chas Chandler, his manager heroine and poor Syd they gave him everything. he could take Mandrax, the tranquilizer or slimming pills. Syd was already mad. So, what happened in San Francisco was continually happening. Barret purposely detuned the guitar and could no longer sing.He couldn't even move his lips. For the next tour it was already impossible to have him in the group, so they suddenly remembered David Gilmour, who was good friends with Syd.

Gilmour was handsome, a great guitar player, a great technician, but he lacked Barrett's imagination. Pink Floyd began to grow fear, panic. They lost their composer, their leader, their guide. Even for the EMI company it seemed like a tragedy. Even the engineer and producer Norman Smith panicked at the possibility of the degeneration of the group that he produced ..In January of 1968 it was decided definitively that Syd Barret would become a kind of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. He was not expelled from the group, but he did not go on tour or play live. Neither was he expected in the recording studio.

THE FRAME AND THE FINAL

When Pink Floyd recorded the second album, "A Saucerful of Secrets", they only let him play some guitar in "Set the controls for the heart of the sun". They kept him away from the studio room 3. They even placed him at the studio desk. There lying or hidden in the forests of his madness or his intergalactic mental journeys.

Nobody wanted to leave Syd Barret laying there, but the fact is that it happened. David Gilmour, who had always felt guilty for taking the job, was the last to make an effort by putting money and producing the second solo album, simply called, Barrett. It was impossible to do something coherent with that madman who had ceased to have a coherent brain. The album, in addition, was done between rest of sessions of other records of Pink Floyd. And it was worse than the first solo attempt, "The Madcap laughs," which could have ended with Joe Boyd and five other producers, all of whom gave up on the impossibility of recording something rational.

Drowning in his own madness, one day he said that he wanted to be a doctor and that he became Cambridge. He wanted to change his life and become something different. Soon after, they stripped him of any thread with his Pink Floyd. I always found it disgraceful that a poor madman had him sign in May 1972 a document in which he had no further financial ties or interests to the following works of Pink Floyd.

Two years later, they persuaded him to return to Abbey Road Studios so he could record anything. But the sessions of three days were erratic and unpresentable, in spite of that Barret was able to maquette eleven songs. For a few years he wandered arround London hotels, worried as usual about his own clothes. There are anecdotes of all kinds of that time. For example how Syd took his dirty clothes to the "boutique" of the moment, because  they had told him it was a good laundry.

Once all the money was spent and, without resources, this time if he returned definitely to Cambridge, to his mother's house, she was still alive. He did not leave there until his death, except for a few months in 1982, when he returned to London. On his return he did something that required a new psychiatric treatment. Syd returned to Cambridge from London, walking no less than 80 kilometers.

Syd Barret began to paint. Abstract pictures with stars of protagonists. Always in company with the same discs. Much of Bo Didley, his favorite guitarist, some of the Beatles and Stones and many old jazz records. But he was never happy or free in those days that he lived as a hermit or a schizophrenia patient with a simple recluse. An inmate with 25 guitars he kept from his old days, he never played, he sat in astonishment watching TV and getting fatter every day.Perhaps he was a prisoner of chronic existential anxiety. Perhaps he was simply a non-dangerous madman, though perpetually watched first by his mother and then by his sister Rosemary, who lived near Syd's small house in St. Margaret Square, where Frenchmen who bought it for little money and that of course they did not know who was the previous inhabitant.

The last known photo of Syd Barrett

According to his sister, in his last years of life he did not even know that he was a musician and that he had been the founder of a group like Pink Floyd. He died with the schizophrenic laugh of a madman. But I'm sure there was a strange pleasure in his madness that only the madmen know. 

The source of my images are GOOGLE and PINTEREST.

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