Among the strangest episodes in the strange saga of Syd Barrett was his unexpected, unexplained arrival at Abbey Road Studios while Pink Floyd, the group he once led, was recording Wish You Were Here during June, 1975. He wasn’t recognised, not at first anyway. Some thought he might be an EMI technician or even a cleaner, others someone who’d wandered in off the street and somehow evaded security on the door. When he was eventually identified, the members of the group were stunned into silence and, by all accounts, Roger Waters began to cry.
Until I watched this 105-minute documentary on Sky Arts over the weekend, I’d seen no visual evidence of Syd’s visit to Abbey Road. With a sense of timing that defies rationality, it occurred just as Messrs Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason were in the midst of recording ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, the lengthiest track on WYWH, written by them as an opaque tribute to the man without whom Pink Floyd would not have existed. It turns out, however, that Phil Taylor, the PF roadie responsible for David Gilmour’s guitars, had a camera with him that day and took a couple of photos of Syd sat on an easy chair in the control room, both of which are seen in this documentary. I thought it was a scoop and I was nearly right. I’m now informed by a PF expert, however, that one of these photos appeared in Nick Mason’s 2004 memoir Inside Out, but the PF drummer has always refused permission for them to be used elsewhere, which explains why I was seeing them here for the first time.
Well, I’m not surprised no one recognised Syd. Overweight, his hair balding at the front and cropped at the back, he was wearing a white polo shirt with hooped brown stripes and looked more like a no-nonsense bouncer outside a dodgy nightclub than the man who once sang, played guitar and composed for Pink Floyd. “He was fat and bald,” says my friend Glen Colson who at the time worked for PF manager Steve O’Rourke and also happened to swing by Abbey Road that day.
“Dave looked at me and said, ‘Do you know who that is?’” says Nick Mason in the documentary. “I said no. He said, ‘That’s Syd’.”
“He hadn’t been seen for six years,” says Storm Thorgerson, the documentary’s co-director and Hipgnosis designer largely responsible for PF’s more surreal LP sleeves. “He asked if he could help,” adds Storm with a bemused grin.
By all accounts, the studio engineer, Brian Humphries, played an extract from the closing section of ‘Shine On…’ in which keyboard player Rick Wright briefly incorporates the melody of ‘See Emily Play’, the Barrett-composed song that in 1967 became PF’s first hit. Syd failed to recognise it.
The presence of Storm Thorgerson in Have You Got It Yet discloses its age. The film was in the works when Storm died in 2013, and in the meantime many of those interviewed have also passed on, among them my old friend photographer Mick Rock, all of which gives it a rather dated, almost nostalgic, feel. It is, nevertheless, the last word we’re ever likely to have on the man whom many consider to have been PF’s “founding genius”, and it certainly didn’t warrant the somewhat mean-spirited review I read in Sunday’s Observer that drew a gratuitous and slightly cynical parallel with Spinal Tap.
Lots of those who knew Syd are interviewed, including the three surviving members of PF, many friends from Cambridge, some contemporary admirers and several former girlfriends, all of whom are as lovely today as they were when they fell for his boyish charms. Also interviewed is Syd’s sister Rosemary who cared for him in later years and, in her down-to-earth, decidedly un-Sydlike manner, seems rather bemused at the fuss surrounding her famous brother. Almost all of them take the view that Syd simply fell out of love with being a pop star and that his intake of drugs, principally LSD, merely accelerated his withdrawal from a music scene he was beginning to detest anyway. Others, not in the film, have told me that Syd enjoyed “acting mad” in front of people with whom he did not wish to interact, just so they would go away. “Then one day he actually turned mad,” said one.
Syd’s music, fragile, whimsical, minimalist and out of kilter with just about everything else that was happening in 1970 when his two solo LPs were released, provides much of the soundtrack. Strikingly unusual, it signposts the way Syd’s mind was heading after Pink Floyd, with replacement Gilmour, opted simply not to bother collecting him on the way to gigs. A few later live shows petered out in farcical circumstances, the final one with a group he called Stars at Cambridge Corn Exchange in February 1972 that inspired my Melody Maker colleague Roy Hollingworth to write what I believe he thought was a sympathetic, albeit truthful, account of what he saw. When Syd read it he evidently thought otherwise and drew the curtains on his musical career that same day, at least according to the film’s voiceover. Roy, who loved Syd’s music, would have been mortified had he known, which I don’t think he ever did.
The only flaw in Have You Got It Yet – its title inspired by a ‘song’ that Syd attempted to teach his bandmates, only to keep changing its chord sequence, so they’d never get it – was the inclusion of scenes wherein actors of different ages imagine themselves as Syd strolling through forests, green fields and doing weird things like diving into an empty swimming pool. Included presumably to emphasise the surreal nature of the subject matter, these scenes were unnecessary. I have always taken the view that the strangeness of Syd’s story speaks for itself, without embellishment.
No comments:
Post a Comment