The conclusion, however, is always inescapable and goes far beyond the utterly bogus image compounded of the artist as some fated victim spread out on an altar of acid and sacrificed to the glorious spirit of ’67. A recent port of call was a clothes store down the King’s Road where Syd tried on three vastly different sizes of trousers, claimed that all of them fitted him perfectly, and then disappeared again, without buying any.Īnd that’s basically what the whole Syd Barrett story is all about, a huge tragedy shot through with so many ludicrously comic aspects that you could easily be tempted to fill out a whole article by simply relating all the crazy anecdotes and half-chewed tales of twilight dementia, and leave it at that. The rest of Barrett’s time is spent sprawled out in front of the large colour TV in his two room apartment situated at the hinterland of Chelsea or else just walking at random around London. Otherwise Barrett tends to appear at Lupus only when the rent is due or when he wants to buy a guitar (a luxury that at one point became an obsession and consequently had to be curtailed). This routine has been going on for years now. Asked if he’d written any new tunes, he replied in his usual hazy condition, hair grown out somewhat from its former scalp shaved condition, “No.” He then promptly disappeared again. His next appearance at the office occurred last week. are all ready to swoop the lad into the studio, producer in tow, at any given moment.īarrett claimed that no, he hadn’t written anything but dutifully agreed to get down and produce *some* sort of something. After all, demand for more Syd Barrett material is remarkably high at the moment and E.M.I. On one of his last visits (which constitute possibly Barrett’s only real contact with the outside world), Brian Morrison, Lupus’ manager, started getting insistent that Barrett write some songs. It exists amidst an infinity of strange tales, many of them fact, just as many wistful fiction, that surround and largely comprise the whole legend-in-his-own-time schtick of which Syd Barrett is very much the dubiously honoured possessor.īarrett is still alive and basically functioning, by the way.Įvery so often he appears at Lupus Music, his publishing company situated on Berkeley Square which handles his royalties situation and has kept him in modest financial stead these last few dormant years. This story is probably more or less true. He then poured the whole coagulated mass onto his head, picked up his Telecaster, and walked on stage.Īs he was playing his customary incoherent, sporadic, almost catatonic guitar-phrases, the Mandrax-Brylcreem combination started to run amok under the intense heat of the stage-lighting and dribbled down from his scalp so that it looked like his face was melting into a distorted wax effigy of flesh. After a lengthy interval, the band decided to take the stage (there is a certain amount of dispute as to which venue this all took place at), all except for Syd Barrett, who was left in the dressing room, manically trying to organise his anarchically-inclined hairstyle of the time.Īs his comrades were tuning up, Barrett, more out of desperation than anything, emptied the contents of a jar of Mandrax, broke the pills into tiny pieces and mixed the crumbs in with a full jar of Brylcreem. There is a story that exists pertaining to an incident which occurred during one of Syd Barrett’s later gigs with Pink Floyd. Brian Jones was casually snuffed out, Jimi Hendrix blew up in his own face… but one extraordinary tragi-comedy struggles on and on: The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett… The summer of ’67 went up like a psychedelic mushroom-cloud, and some of the fall-out’s still coming down. New Musical Express – April 13, 1974, Nick Kent Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd, dies.
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