Syd Barrett, the swinging 60

Pink Floyd’s guiding genius walked away as stardom beckoned. On his 60th birthday, John Robb analyses his iconic status and speaks to those who remember him best

Published: 07 January 2006
THE INDEPENDENT

One of the key figures of the Sixties – and the original acid casualty – was 60 years old yesterday. How he celebrated, no one can be too sure, for Syd Barrett has been seen by virtually no one except his mother for many of those years.

With the handful of songs he wrote while fronting Pink Floyd in 1966 and 1967, Barrett was at the forefront of British psychedelia. He changed the way pop music was listened to and played, fusing childlike, whimsical songs with wild freak-outs, forging a vibrant whole that set the template for the late 60s and beyond.

His unique style – off-the-wall slide guitar shoved through an echo unit – took the guitar away from plain riffing. It was like listening to the colour of sound even before Jimi Hendrix arrived in London. The post-Barrett Floyd operated in his shadow, while a host of contemporary musicians are still in awe of his plaintive and original songs. It has been 35 years since his last interview and more than 30 years since he released an album, but the legend continues to grow, though the man himself disappeared into a reclusive life in Cambridge.

Barrett had it all – he was innovative, artistic and surrounded by beautiful women. But he imploded months after the band’s breakthrough, a victim of the hectic touring, the pressure to come up with new songs and his drug experimentation that put intolerable pressure on an already fragile psyche. In autumn 1967 he started behaving oddly on TV shows in America, and at gigs would stand onstage stock still and not playing a note.

In early 1968, the band drafted in Dave Gilmour to cover. The plan was for Barrett to be a Brian Wilson figure, writing the songs but not playing live. But after five weeks, in the face of increasingly erratic and unreliable behaviour, they decided, reluctantly, to on without him.

Barrett returned to the studio to cut two solo albums of sad, lilting off-the-wall songs, fragments of genius that have become precursors to modern day lo-fi indie rock – highly personal music poured on to tape. But he was now starting to withdraw from the world, and for the next few years he lived in virtual seclusion in his London flat, then, at the end of the 1970 went back to the family home in Cambridge.

Syd Barrett could have been one of the pantheon of rock legends, alongside Bob Dylan, John Lennon or the Rolling Stones. Instead he bailed out early, leaving those who knew him still touched by his genius four decades later.

Dave Gilmour, Pink Floyd guitarist

He was a truly magnetic personality. When he was very young, he was a figure in his home town. People would look at him in the street and say, “There’s Syd Barrett,” and he would be only 14 years old.

In my opinion, [his breakdown] would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I’ll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don’t think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it.

[On working with Barrett later]: Roger [Waters, Pink Floyd’s bassist] and I sat down with him after listening to all his songs and said: “Syd, play this one. Syd, play that one.” We sat him on a chair with a couple of mics in front of him and got him to sing. The potential of some of those songs… they could have really been fantastic. But trying to find a technique of working with Syd was so difficult. You had to pre-record tracks without him, working from one version of the song he had done, and then sit Syd down afterwards and try to get him to play and sing along. Or you could get him to do a performance of it on his own and then try to dub everything else on top. The concept of him performing with another bunch of musicians was clearly impossible because he’d change the song every time. He’d never do a song the same twice, I think quite deliberately.

Pete Jenner, Pink Floyd co-manager 1966-68

My first contact with Pink Floyd was at the Marquee in June 1966. I had this label and we were looking for a band that could sell records. I was not really into pop, but I did like the way the band improvised. I remember walking round the stage at the Marquee because the stage stuck out, trying to work out where the noise came from.

All the stuff on Floyd’s first album he wrote in autumn, 1966. In fact, nearly all the songs he ever wrote were in that six months, and a lot of the songs cropped up on his solo albums.

The autumn after the first US tour, there were problems. He’d been wobbling out all sorts of weird shit, and from there on in it was a real struggle keeping it together – keeping him together. We were all saying: “We need more songs” – everyone was putting pressure on him. In the end, it became obvious that it couldn’t go on working, and that’s when Dave Gilmour came in as the fifth man. Did Syd know what was happening? I don’t know… I think in a way he had removed himself from the band.

Andrew King, Pink Floyd co-manager 1966-68

Syd told me it took him weeks to perfect the lyrics for “Arnold Layne” [Pink Floyd’s debut single]. There was a lot of intellectual effort involved. I miss him every day off my life, really. He had everything. He was a songwriter, painter, actor, charmer. I don’t want to talk about him in the past. I just want to say, “Happy birthday, Syd”.

Duggie Fields, musician And Barrett’s former flatmate

I went to their early gigs. They also used to rehearse in the flat – I remember it was the twists in their music more than the blues they played that made them interesting. Syd was certainly the major creator in the band – he was the one everyone would look to at gigs. Then he obviously became dysfunctional, but the person I saw was not dysfunctional by a long shot. I looked at their touring schedule a few years ago and was shocked by it – such a crazy schedule. Throw in a bit of drug abuse, and it would be enough to freak anyone out.

Eventually, he withdrew more and more. There would be curtains permanently on the windows, no fresh air… it seems like in retrospect he was withdrawing, though it didn’t seem like that at the time. I have very fond memories of Syd.

Jeff Dexter, deejay at London’s legendary psychedelic club, UFO

In the summer of ’66, I went to one of these Sunday spontaneous underground things at the Marquee. I didn’t get Pink Floyd at that time. I was into more straight rock ‘n’ roll. The International Times party at the Roundhouse [15 October 1966] was a key event. I was more enamoured by the event than by any particular band, but I did speak to Syd. I was intrigued by all the birds round him. At the time, everyone was spaced out, and Syd was no different.

At UFO, they were on every other week with their light show. It wasn’t like watching an average rock band – there were people lying on the floor, people dancing round or just waving their arms about.

John Leckie, record producer

I saw Pink Floyd at All Saints Church Hall in Powys Terrace [30 September 1966]. They were fantastic. The hall was minute – it was a nursery school with little chairs. Everyone sat on the chairs, and now and then people would get up and idiot-dance. And musically it was great – Syd’s guitar was really loud, with lots of improvisation.

In 1974, they’d released his solo albums, Barrett and The Madcap Laughs, as a double album in America and they had done well. So EMI wanted him in the studio. Pete Jenner said: “Syd’s going to come in, he’s not in very good shape, and we’re just going to see what we can get.” So Syd came in with new guitars. He had six Stratocasters – his flat must have looked like a music shop. He still looked like Syd – long hair, bit unkempt but still looking good. He seemed bit vacant, a bit shell-shocked. Still, every day he would turn up with a different girl. But there were no lyrics, nothing at all. I’m not sure if he even had any songs.

Every day if he walked out of the studio and turned left he would come back again, and if he turned right he would disappear. On the last day he left and turned right, and that was the last we ever saw of him.

Mick Rock, photographer

I was studying modern languages at Cambridge. It was New Year’s Eve 1966, and I had mutual friends saying: “You’ve got to come and see Syd with his band.” I went along and yes, indeed, it was one of those unprecedented things! Completely out of stage left! There was nothing else quite like them. I wonder if it had something to do with the chemicals… After, there was a party at Syd’s mother’s house, where I first met Syd. He had a very attractive girlfriend. I thought “Wow! he has got everything!”

Syd was very friendly. I always remember him laughing a lot – if you look at pictures I took later in 1971, in the garden in Cambridge, there was a lot of laughing in them as well. We had a good rapport. The chemicals help initially with creative people but then the hindrance sets in. The impression I got when I interviewed him in 1971 was that he didn’t want to be a pop star anymore.

Daevid Allen, guitarist, The Soft Machine

I first saw them at the IT festival. I was obviously influenced by what he was doing, sliding things up and down the neck of guitar. He was pretty – I met him at [the club] UFO and he would stare right at you. His naive, childlike songs were for people who wanted to reject the old ways – the generation which hadn’t grown up with the war. It was a glorification of the innocence of childhood. In the end, Syd ran out of freshness. It got boring, it wasn’t fun any more, so he stopped.

John Robb’s “Punk Rock: The Oral History”, will be published shortly by Ebury

Jan 7, 2006 New York Times

The Saturday Profile

Nearly 100, LSD’s Father Ponders His ‘Problem Child’

By CRAIG SMITH
BURG, Switzerland

ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane.

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann’s conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man’s oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.

“It’s very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature,” he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. “In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans,” he said. “The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature.” And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his “problem child,” could help reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls “a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality.”

“I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature,” he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. “Outside is pure energy and colorless substance,” he said. “All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. “Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom,” he said.

MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body’s circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. “Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child,” he said. “I didn’t know what caused it, but I knew that it was important.”

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of LSD. “LSD spoke to me,” Mr. Hofmann said with an amused, animated smile. “He came to me and said, ‘You must find me.’ He told me, ‘Don’t give me to the pharmacologist, he won’t find anything.’ ”

HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the most active toxin known at that time would have had little or no effect. The result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience, during which he rode his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as “bicycle day.”

Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann’s home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. “That was the first planned psychedelic test,” Mr. Hofmann said.

He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced what he called a “horror trip” when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him.

“I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore,” Mr. Hofmann said. “Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley,” who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.

But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD “medicine for the soul” and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. “It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis,” he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960’s and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others “a crime.”

“It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine,” he said.

Mr. Hofmann lives with his wife in the house they built 38 years ago. He raised four children and watched one son struggle with alcoholism before dying at 53. He has eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. As far as he knows, no one in his family besides his wife has tried LSD.

Mr. Hofmann rose, slightly stooped and now barely reaching five feet, and walked through his house with his arm-support cane. When asked if the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and said no. “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all,” he said.

Friday Nights @ Not A Cornfield

‘What Comes Next?’ Discussion Series: Healing Gardens
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Film Screening: The Shaman’s Apprentice

Friday, January 6, 2006 @ 7:30pm

This is the first in a planned series of discussions and presentations about issues that relate to the follow-up of the Not A Cornfield project on the grounds of the Los Angeles State Historic Park in downtown Los Angeles.

Not A Cornfield
South gate:
1201 N. Spring St.
North gate:
1799 Baker St.
(323) 226-1158

– All events and activities are FREE.
– Handicapped Accessible
– Refreshments served during special events

This first discussion is an invitation to discuss healing gardens. An end goal is to define what to plant in the spiral “Eye” near the southern end of the 32-acre site.

Anyone interested in influencing this dialog is welcome to attend and encouraged to participate in the evening’s discussion. To expand the brainstorming, Echo Park Film Center will bes hoing the film, “The Shaman’s Apprentice.”

NOTE
Friday Nights@Not A Cornfield programs are held rain or shine in the heated and covered Yurt, near the Not A Cornfield North Gate entrance. These events are free of charge and open to the public.

FILM PROGRAM
The Shaman’s Apprentice (Miranda Smith, 2001, 54 minutes)
Curated by Sarah McCabe and Jaime Lopez in association with Echo Park Film Center.

ABOUT THE FILM
The Shaman’s Apprentice, an award-winning documentary directed by Miranda Smith with narration by Susan Sarandon, examines Ethonobotanist Mark Plotkin’s quest to preserve the ancient wisdom of Amazonian shamans.

‚ÄúFor more than twenty years Dr. Mark Plotkin has searched the Amazon for plants that heal. He is an ethnobotanist, a scientist who studies the relationship between indigenous people and plants. He set out on a mission to find a cure for diabetes, a disease that killed both of his grandmothers. The Shaman‚Äôs Apprentice charts the story of Mark’s discoveries, and looks at the astonishing ability of native people to manage their environment.

People of the forest have become sophisticated chemists by necessity, utilizing plants for every aspect of their lives. Often, the entire knowledge of a tribe resides in the mind of the shaman – the tribe’s doctor and spiritual leader. But the shamans are also the most endangered species in the Amazon. Marooned in time by the loss of traditional ways, many of the native healers have no apprentices. Most are old, and each shaman’s death is a kind of extinction. It is these shamans that Mark seeks out, hoping to save their precious knowledge, for it may be vital to the world’s future.

The Shaman‚Äôs Apprentice is a story of survival against the odds. It interweaves the luminous rain forest world of phenomena and legends with western science and the grim realities of extinction. In the story of one man’s quest to preserve the ancient wisdom of our species, we find intelligence, cooperation and hope that could save one of the most glorious places on Earth. ‚Äú
–Text from Bullfrog Films

ACLU will provide cameras to tape police
By Jeremy Kohler

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Saturday, Dec. 31 2005

St. Louis police officers often say they feel as if people are looking over
their shoulders.

That feeling isn’t likely to let up this year.

The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, a frequent critic of
the city police, says it plans to arm residents of the city’s north side with
video cameras to record officers’ dealings with the public.

The activist group says the department often mistreats and unfairly targets
blacks and said it hopes the presence of cameras will act as a deterrent to
police abuse and result in smoother dealings between residents and police.

The group said the cameras will start rolling in the summer, after a series of
workshops near Fairground Park where blacks can learn about how to protect
their rights during dealings with police. The program is called the Racial
Justice Initiative.

ACLU leaders notified Police Chief Joe Mokwa of its plans in meetings during
the fall. Neither the ACLU nor the police knew of any other previous effort
nationally to put officers under private surveillance.

The department has responded with a shrug. While some commanders are leery of
having their officers taped, Mokwa said, “It’s legal and there is nothing wrong
with it.”

Sgt. Kevin Ahlbrand, president of the St. Louis Police Officers Association,
said: “We don’t expect any negative reports to come out of videotaping. Our
members are under the assumption that in today’s society, they should assume
that any time they’re in public, they may be being videotaped.”

Redditt Hudson, who heads the ACLU’s racial justice program, said, “It’s not
like we needed their clearance.”

Mokwa said his officers are used to hearing criticism. On Dec. 22, the chief
said, he rushed to Barnes-Jewish Hospital to visit a rookie officer who had
been just been shot in the neck.

Mokwa said the first words of the officer, Matthew Greco, were, “I didn’t do
anything wrong.”

But Brenda Jones, the ACLU chapter’s executive director, said some criticism of
police is warranted.

“People are being stopped by the police for no particular reason,” she said. “A
number who have run-ins have attempted to file complaints but haven’t been able
to get to internal affairs.”

The group wants to lessen the “tension and potential for violence that has
occurred with police patrolling some of the poor neighborhoods in the city,”
she said.

Mokwa said he hopes the amateur cameramen don’t interfere with officers or bait
them with bogus calls. He said he disagrees with the premise of the action – he
feels most people are happy with his officers’ service.

The ACLU only hears from the small percentage of people who feel they have been
wronged by police, he said.

He said he thinks most people want police officers to be aggressive in dealing
with troublemakers in their neighborhoods.

Mokwa said he hopes the tapes depict officers acting professionally. If the
videos expose problems, he said, “we’d want to know about those anyway.”

Zapatistas start political tour
By Claire Marshall
BBC News, Mexico City

Mexico’s Zapatista rebels are emerging once again from their jungle hiding place in the south of the country.
The Zapatistas are embarking on a six-month tour of Mexico’s 31 states as an “alternative project” to the presidential elections.

Their enigmatic, pipe-smoking leader, Marcos, has dropped the title of subcomandante to become Delegate Zero.

Still wearing his ski mask, this time he wants to build a national leftist movement through peaceful means.

Zapatista rebels will head from the jungle village of Garrucha for San Cristobal and then march to the Yucatan Peninsula on the Caribbean coast.

Unlike their armed uprising on New Year’s Day in 1994, this time the weapons will be left behind.

It’s being called ‘the other campaign’, billed as an alternative to the presidential election race which is already well under way.

The Zapatista command has said that the movement is shunning mainstream politics as corrupt.

It has heavily criticised the current front-runner in the election race, the leftist mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The details of this new face of Zapatismo are unclear but a recent statement said a step forward is only possible if “we link with other sections of society”.

The core principles therefore seem to be the same – more rights for Mexico’s indigenous Indian minority and a fairer, less corrupt nation.

The question now is whether, 12 years after their fight started, they can now make a real impact across the nation.