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When things happen on Fridays or the weekend, I never seem to hear about them for days. So I’ve only just become aware of the sad passing of Syd Barrett. For me, Pink Floyd is far more about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets than Dark Side of the Moon. The Wikipedia article I’ve linked to is great on his career, life and influences.
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Shine On You Crazy Diamond
Yep!
And weren’t 60s rock stars much better looking than naughties ones!
Oh, no! I just read this! Is Syd really gone…?
Alas.
“The black and green scarecrow
Was sadder than me,
But now he’s resigned
To his fate, cuz life’s not unkind,
He doesn’t mind.
He stood in a field
Where barley grows…”
Godspeed, Mr. Barrett. Barley will always grow in the place where you stood.
Nicely said, j_p_z.
I was just musing – that pic would make someone a great gravatar.
Pink Floyd were never the same when Roger Waters left and even when he came back.
I always preferred Umma Gumma probably because all those people who bought Dark Side of the Moon had never heard of it.
Won’t you miss me?
Wouldn’t you miss me at all?
I think some of those lyrics might be wrong… but that was the last song composed by Barrett for the Floyd.
“I always preferred Umma Gumma …”
My next door neighbour used to have that. That doesn’t mean he was cool. He also used to thrash Inagadavida (which I think would go down as the worst rock album, like, evah) to death.
I’ve always been fascinated with the enduring interest in Barrett, the strange disappearing rock star. He wasn’t the first the first muso to go off the rails because of excessive drug consumption. From what I heard of his output on the ABC show the other night it was pretty stock standard druggie psychadelia with REALLY dumb lyrics (OK – not as dumb as I. Ron Butterfly).
Dumb lyrics. In a rock song. What a completely stupid arsehat thing to say. I’m sorry. I’m just going into that vacant room with this lovely loaded pistol. Don’t come in.
We’re not saying he was Y.B. Yeats or anything, Christine. But he represents an innocent, playful, era of Pink Floyd that got stifled by the bleak cynicism of Roger Waters (don’t get me wrong… I like the bleak cynicism).
I have his solo album “The Madcap Laughs”… but am not too impressed with it. Piper at the Gates of Dawn however, is an wonderful record.
Erm… make that W.B. Yeats
Nice pic — but it does take me back to the era when my mum always said ‘You’d look so much prettier with your hair out of your eyes.’
Christine, you would say that!
Anyone who puts Iron Butterfly and Pink Floyd in the same sentence needs to be exterminated dalek style
That’s right… the W is silent in my idiolect.
I didn’t hear the sad news either, Kim. I have a connection with Syd. We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year…
Sorry BBEP. I actually saw Pink Floyd (along, I think, with Deep Purple, Manfred Mann, and possibly Daddy Cool) in their Umma Gumma period at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Didn’t think too much of the set, but that may have had more to do with the copious amounts of Stones green ginger wine consumed on a particularly hot summer’s day.
Ewww. Stones’ Green Ginger Wine. That brings back bad memories of student poverty days. We used to mix it with VB to dilute the taste. In retrospect that possibly wasn’t the best idea.
Yes Mark. I was young, inexperienced, and had yet to be exposed to the sophisticated delights (imagine, for a moment, a world of smoking jackets, Noel Coward, and the tinkle of girlish laughter) of more upmarket beverages like Strongbow cider or retsina.
Christine,
I think you are having a Harold McMillan moment.
When they performed in Sydney ( My memory has it Deep Purple and Black Sabbath) it was far closer to Dark Side of the Moon than Umma Gumma.
Either way it doesn’t matter Iron Butterfly simply shouldn’t be put in the same sentence.
It is a bit like Keith Richards and Jeff Beck
Earth receive an honored guest,
Good Syd Barrett is laid to rest.
“Look at the sky.
Look at the river.
Isn’t it good?”
Of course you’re right BBEP re artiste juxtaposition. Forgive me.
I’m not sure if Black Sabbath at that gig, it’s all a bit of a blur and come to think of it it I’m not too sure how I got home.
However, since I raised the subject of Syd’s lyrics and subsequently shot myself in remorse, I now feel I may have been too hasty. Could we have a verdict on a sample (Song: It Is Obvious)?
It is obvious
May I say, oh baby, that it is found on another plane?
Yes I can creep into cupboards, sleep in the hall
Your stars – my stars, a simple cock bar
Only an impulse – pie in the sky
Mumble listen dolly
Drift over your mind – holly
Creep into bed when your heads on the ground
She held the torch on the porch,
She winked an eye
Hmmmmmmmmm
I have a howardian memory.
I do remember Deep Purple and Black Sabbath but whether Pink Floyd was there as well is a blur.
I remember thinking I shouldn’t slagged off Deep Purple and Richie Blackmore so much because they were quite good
Oh wow man, lay off The Purple!
Support the NLF.
An Effervescing Elephant
with tiny eyes and great big trunk
once whispered to the tiny ear
the ear of one inferior
that by next June he’d die, oh yeah!
because the tiger would roam.
The little one said: “Oh my goodness I must stay at home!
and every time I hear a growl
I’ll know the tiger’s on the prowl
and I’ll be really safe, you know
the elephant he told me so.”
Everyone was nervy, oh yeah!
and the message was spread
to zebra, mongoose, and the dirty hippopotamus
who wallowed in the mud and chewed
his spicy hippo-plankton food
and tended to ignore the word
preferring to survey a herd
of stupid water bison, oh yeah!
And all the jungle took fright,
and ran around for all the day and the night
but all in vain, because, you see,
the tiger came and said: “Who me?!
You know, I wouldn’t hurt not one of you.
I’d much prefer something to chew
and you’re all to scant.” oh yeah!
He ate the Elephant
Syd’s lyrics don’t translate on to the page, but Wolfpack off his second and final solo album is a great example of how scary and evocative his words could be in his half-lucid moments. Favourite line: “Moaned magnesium proverbs and sobs”.
Cliff, give The Madcap Laughs another chance – it’s definitely an acquired taste. “Long Gone” in particular is controlled enough to suggest he wasn’t quite as far gone as he made himself out to be. Mind you, I like everything else on the album as well.
I’ve been a bit irritated by the number of quotations of later Floyd songs like Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Wish You Were Here (no offence, Kim) in Syd Barrett tributes. Hats off then to The 7:30 Report which, apropos of nothing, has just used Interstellar Overdrive to accompany a report on industrial disputes at Perth construction sites.
I heard the news today oh boy – so on the way home I picked up a tab of acid a bottle of Hennessy XO and am now absorbing both it and The Piper At The Gates of Dawn as I type.
Once upon a time when I was a teenager last century, I was at a friend’s house after school where we were playing records to eachother. I put on my latest discovery “A Nice Pair�, the old EMI/Harvest double album reissue of Pink Floyd’s first two 33rpm waxings. His father passed by just as I mentioned Syd Barrett.
“Syd Barrett? I know Syd.�
We both looked with complete surprise at my mate’s father, an apparently very respectable Scottish banker. It turned out he used to manage the branch of the bank (National Westminster I think) in Cambridge during the late 70s where Syd had tens of thousands pounds in songwriting royalties steadily accumulating.
“Really? Tell us more.�
I’m paraphrasing quite a bit here now, plus I can’t do a good lowlands Scots accent, but his response was something along these lines.
“Very well mannered and quiet if a bit distracted at times. We worked out his routine. He’d come in the morning with his banking passbook and stand there until we sent a teller over to help him. He’d often take out several thousand pounds in cash and then return just before closing and redeposit just about all of it minus 50 quid or so. Can’t say I ever understood his music but he was always very much a soft spoken gentleman and valued customer. All the tellers really liked him.�
So that’s my one degree of separation from Syd Barrett.
However I prefer to remember him like this and this.
A marvelous boy who was another wonderful exotic plant in the strange and often secret garden of English romantic, slyly provocative yet cheerfully quotidian surrealism – a strange flourishing 1000 year plus old hothouse of Albion’s topsy-turvy dreaming that embraced trees, shrubs, cuttings and creepers like Tristam Shandy, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Thomas Chatterton, Sam Coleridge, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame (Pink Floyd’s first album was named after the penultimate chapter of ‘The Wind In the Willows’), Shredni Vashtar, Jefferies ‘After London’, Lord Dunsany, Bram Stoker, Audery Beardsley, Austin Spare, W. Heath Robinson, Gormenghast, Stanley Spencer, Diary of a Nobody, the Goons, Syd Barrett, Professor Stanley Unwin, O Lucky Man, JG Ballard, Smallcreeps’ Day, Angela Carter, Derek Jarman, Dr Who, Kate Bush, Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair and Damien Hirst’s sliced beasties.
And hats as you can see from the clips above. Lots and lots of hats under a flat grey sky where one has to put some work into casting a distinct shadow.
And as Bowie points out with typical acuity, Syd was one of the first late 20th century UK pop artistes to unapologetically use his native accent.
This is the song off that childhood copy of A Nice Pair that first really turned me onto Syd.
Have you got it yet? Syd dyd and it dyd him in.
Grimble grumble, should have read –
“so on the way home I picked up a tab of acid a bottle of Hennessy XO”
Also I forget to mention Worzel Gummidge, Hammer horror and Quatermass as part of Albion’s dreaming.
This strikethrough function thingy is just not working for me. One more try.
“so on the way home I picked up
a tab of acida bottle of Hennessy XOâ€?Ah ha!And I fucked that last link up too didn’t I?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDXZv6bWmNk&search=“lucifer sam”
Oooooh! Great story and nice analysis Nabs. You should have mentioned Nick Drake though, and I think that nice Mr Bowie would fit extremely well into that list. Apart from being a god I mean.
I liked “See Emily Play”, esp Bowie’s version on Pinups. But DSOTM and WYWH were definitive albums and clearly represented a stupendous musical evolution. Barrett’s tragic fall from grace and premature death is also a salutary lesson to those Wets who are soft on hard drugs.
Just say no.
He just couldn’t help himself, could he?
I read that he fed LSD to his cat… not good. Poor old Lucifer.
See, now, I think giving a cat acid is worse than making children cry so you can take photos of them.
Besides, AFAICS, cats are already on acid.
Oh yeeeeaaaaahhhhh … my paws are made of raindrops.
SB’s later third person references to “Syd” were eerily spot on. Some detached part of his psyche seems to have realised that the core of his original self had been anhilated by drugs.
The loss of identity is the spiritual equivalent of death. In that sense SB’s obituaries are about 30 years overdue.
“Ewww. Stones’ Green Ginger Wine. That brings back bad memories of student poverty days. ”
Yes, the thought of Stones’ Green Ginger Wine brings back some awful memories for me too. I think I’m getting a headache, better lie down ……
Here Steve, have a Bex.
Yes, and they used the good version of IO. What a masterpiece. And I think the references to the post-Syd music was that these two pieces were in fact written about Syd, as far as I know.
My partner recorded a doco about Syd that was screened on ABC just a week or so ago. We sat down tonight and watched it. Poor, brilliant, beautiful, crazy Syd.
Thought I would reactivate this thread to relate the news that Arthur Lee from Love has died of leukemia at the age of 61. It hasn’t been a good month for sixties rock casualties …
Yes Captain Wacky, those early Love albums were magic. I’d definitely put love in my top 5 all time favourite rock bands.
Jack Strocker giving opinion on music is like giving strawberry’s to fucking pigs.