The loss of Syd Barrett and Rick Wright marked the end of two eras. Yet before Waters and Gilmour took control of the band it was Syd’s scribbly guitar and Rick’s fairy-tale keyboards that helped define the Pink Floyd sound.
Syd Barrett (1946–2006) was an English musician who was best known as the original frontman and primary songwriter of the English rock band Pink Floyd.With the band, he recorded and wrote the majority of songs for their first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and was credited for one song ('Jugband Blues') on their second album A Saucerful of Secrets. Syd Barrett Review Psychedelic Freak Out 1965 - 1974 Demos, Acetates & Mixes 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.” So said Syd Barret. Founding father of the Pink Floyd & enfant terrible of avant garde rock.
In different ways, both Syd Barrett and Rick Wright were let down by Pink Floyd. Neither really wanted to leave the group, yet both were forced to, leaving a nasty taste in the mouth, no matter how well Roger Waters and David Gilmour managed without them.
Oh, Syd was mad, though, wasn’t he…? Actually, he had never been required to take medication specifically for his mental health. There was some speculation that he might have suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder on the autism spectrum. Classic symptoms include difficulty with social interactions and incorrectly interpreting social cues. Asperger’s sufferers are often highly intelligent, just unconcerned with anything that doesn’t directly affect them.
As for Wright, he was a victim of Waters’s ungovernable egotism, banished to the shadows after The Wall. Go back to those earliest Floyd recordings, though, and you’re reminded that neither Waters nor Gilmour had much to do with the musical mien of a group that, at its best, relished its outsider status, as evidenced by its two most fragile personalities: Barrett and Wright.
Listen again to Matilda Mother, the first track recorded for their debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, co-written by Barrett and Wright and with Rick handling most of the lead vocals, and you hear the sense of wonder, that characterised their best work in the years to come.
The same goes for Astronomy Domine, again written by Barrett and Wright, with the two of them sharing lead vocals. All the musical mystery and slightly hysterical lyrical edge that defined Pink Floyd up to and including Wish You Were Here is already there. ‘Floating down, the sound resounds,’ sing Syd and Rick as the carnival-esque music, chiefly provided by the same two insouciant musicians, swirls around them.
In so many ways, Wright was the yin to Barrett’s yang; as pretty as Syd, but full of light where Syd was found by darkness, and almost as prolific on his fairy-tale keyboards and buttercup vocals as Syd was on his scribbly guitar and permanently astonished songs. And as easy to scare away when things finally got too much.
After Syd ‘left’ Floyd, shunted aside without actually being told his services were no longer required, it was Rick who picked up the baton and attempted to maintain the psychedelic footprint of Barrett’s best songs. He did this first by writing the distinctly Barrett-esque Paint Box. In the song’s black-and-white promo clip, Rick sings in the same whimsical style as Syd, and looks remarkably similar to him in his fedora, scarf and dark stare.
Wright does an even more passable imitation with Floyd’s next single, It Would Be So Nice, on which he sings lead. But it wasn’t a hit, and the next one, Let There Be More Light, although co-sung by Wright, was a Waters song, with Rick’s Remember A Day relegated to the B-side.
Indeed, the first post-Barrett Floyd album, 1968’s A Saucerful Of Secrets, was dominated by Wright originals or co-writes, his vocals used again to replicate Barrett’s in a ‘can’t see the join’ attempt to pull off the impossible.
Speaking years later, Wright admitted he cringed at some of the material on Secrets: “We were pretty amateurish at the time. Syd was the songwriter, and then we came in and had to take over the songwriting and it was a lot of responsibility to assume. We could never write like Syd. We never had the imagination to come out with the kind of lyrics he did.”
Nor did they share his lysergic dreams, according to Wright: “I took two trips in my life. The first was quite enjoyable, and that was before I was in the band. Then I took one more and I didn’t enjoy it at all, so I never took it again. It certainly destroyed Syd.”
As Ron Geesin, the avant-garde performer who helped write Atom Heart Mother, says now of Floyd’s other lost genius: “Rick was just very, very quiet, and he’d just be very nice, almost demure. He would wait and see how the others felt. He wouldn’t react, just went along with it.”
But if Barrett had been the psychedelic poster boy who took an otherwise ordinary R&B band and turned them into musical extra-terrestrials, it was Wright who helped them become progressive rock goliaths in the 70s. And all in the space of a single piano note that Wright then fed into a Leslie speaker and resembled the ping of a submarine’s sonar. It was in the sessions for 1971’s Meddle, and the ‘ping’ introduced the Barrett-less Floyd’s first genuine masterpiece: Echoes, a 23-minute track that took up the whole of the album’s second side.
There would be other great Rick Wright moments to come, including the elegiac The Great Gig In The Sky and various parts of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, to name just two. But while Barrett’s significance in rock history continues to grow since his death in 2006, Wright’s was all but forgotten before the release of 2014’s The Endless River, a requiem of sorts to the much-overlooked talents of Syd’s quietly shimmering shadow.
When Wright died from cancer in 2008, it caused Gilmour to reflect: “No one can replace Richard Wright. He was my musical partner and my friend. In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick’s enormous input was frequently forgotten. He was gentle, unassuming, and private, but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound. I have never played with anyone quite like him.”
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 girlfriend) 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:
Mind 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
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 colours.” 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.”
This story is from the December 23rd, 1971 issue of Rolling Stone.