For years before his death in 2006, Syd Barrett was rock’s greatest living legend, even if he hadn’t played a note of music in ages. Perhaps it was his isolation that allowed the legend to grow. Barrett was the brilliant mind behind the original Pink Floyd, but flamed out from too many of the psychedelic journeys his music recorded so well and fell down a rabbit hole never to surface again. Probably if Barrett had been able to continue in a reduced state, entertaining county fairs long after the light of creativity had dimmed, the long aftermath would have held less interest and little mystery.
With A Very Peculiar Head: The Life of Syd Barrett (DaCapo), British music writer Rob Chapman writes the most thorough account of the bright young man whose name became the watchword for a certain kind of excessperhaps a childlike refusal to be wary of the wolves in the dark woods beyond the no trespassing sign. Barrett was born to an academically inclined family in Cambridge, a place of concentrated intellect and eccentricity. The rising tide of middle class affluence by the 1960s made Barrett and the adventure of the counterculture possible. Although students in the exclusive schools he attended were still sometimes canned, dissent could occur within the safe haven of privilege under a gaze of benign tolerance. LSD was legal when Barrett and his friends first found it and everyone their age in Cambridge was doing it.
“LSD was obviously a key turning point for Syd,” said Anthony Stern, among the dozens of friends and family members interviewed by Chapman. “He discovered how absolutely fabulous the inside, the interior world really wasthe colours, the movements, the things spiralingthe constant breaking up and the fractal imagery all happening at the same time.”
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Barrett’s music sounded like that description. Although grounded in the same American blues and R&B as the Stones, the music of Pink Floyd (and others) transcended those roots through acid, which helped open the doors that led rock into European fantasy and fairytale, literature and music. Some of the doors led to dangerous dimensions. In the accounts by some of Barrett’s friends collected by Chapman, the young guitarist with a penchant for privacy, who never dreamed of stardom, was caught unprepared. “I think that [fame] must have started disturbing him more than the drugs ever did,” said Hester Page. “I think he just got more and more wound up about it and started to retreat into himself.”
What Chapman finds in Barrett’s final, unreleased recordings with Pink Floyd was not the diary of a madman but a “sheer sardonic onslaught on the superficiality of fame,” replete with self-parody and contempt for the celebrity culture he stumbled upon. If Barrett had been born in Tolkien’s time, he might have been happy writing children’s verse, teaching the odd seminar in literature and puttering on weekends with easel and paint. Pop culture was too much for him.
Chapman interprets many of the charges against Barrett in his last days with Pink Floyd, including his insistence on playing a single note through an entire concert, as a flirtation with the avant-garde misunderstood as insanity by the rather rote rock musicians he encountered. The author offers alternate explanations for many of the stories told by band members and debunks many legends of Barrett’s catatonia on stage. Barrett was troubled toward the end and drugs only deepened the malaise, yet “Every piece of visual or audio evidence that survives from the period refutes the wisdom Syd was turning into the ‘Vegetable Man’…the circumstances of his departure from the band have as much to do with pragmatism and hard-nosed commercial decisions as anything else.”
A Very Irregular Head puts Barrett’s life and artistry in a new light. Troubled but not insane, Barrett made some beautifully lyrical solo recordingswhose meaning, like imagist poetry, resists literal interpretationsbefore retreating entirely from the culture that unnerved him. But his erratic behavior unnerved many around him and he seemed to never finish anything. “You get the idea on drugs but you never have the ‘sustain’ to write it down,” as Robyn Hitchcock said.
Largely under the care of his sister Rosemary, Syd led the last quarter century of life in seclusion, reading and listening to classical music and jazz. The rock scene he was part of fell into decline around the time he disappeared, which didn’t prevent his bandmates, still calling themselves Pink Floyd, from breaking sales records later in the ‘70s. While they are loved and hated, most everyone aware of their founding member views him with the deepest admiration. Chapman concludes that Barrett’s early retirement spared his fans “the indignity of witnessing slow decline and diminishing returns.” The legend lives on.
