Syd Barrett was a rock and roll visionary who saw the world through a psychedelic kaleidoscope of fantasy and distortion. And the faster it spun, propelled by the band’s spiraling success and
Barrett’s increasing diet of mind-altering drugs, the less able he was to cope.
His life’s transition from colorful dreamscape to gray-walled nightmare was fairly sudden. By October 1967 Barrett’s gnarled guitar playing―which alternated between angular blocks of sound and cascades of rippling or sliding notes, his sweetly nasal voice, ruffled English looks, and
lyrics about gnomes and childhood’s innocence had elevated the band Pink Floyd from the London underground to touring with Jimi Hendrix supporting their critically heralded debut
Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Yet Barrett’s deterioration became obvious by the year’s end.
Many of Pink Floyd’s numbers, like the magnificent, howling “Interstellar Overdrive” and the clangorous
“Astronomy Domine,” were based on simple chord structures, but Barrett took that to an extreme on-stage―sometimes standing in place and stroking a single chord throughout an entire set, or just sitting down on the floor and not playing at all. At a concert in San Francisco he reportedly detuned his guitar string by string on “Interstellar Overdrive”―a gambit the crowd might have taken as a burst of creativity, but one his bandmates knew was just another example of swelling derangement.
Barrett’s school chum David Gilmour was drafted by the other members of Pink Floyd to help. He was brought in initially as a friend, to support Barrett whenever he seemed to be drifting away, but he also sang and played guitar on those nights when Syd might merely wander as if lost across the stage. Too many of those nights occurred, and on the way to a gig in January 1968 drummer Nick Mason, bassist Roger Waters, and keyboardist Richard Wright decided to simply pick up Gilmour and leave Barrett at home.
Gilmour was a more evolved musician than Syd, if less raw and mercurial. His style was steeped in blues. However, he’d discovered a way of playing the guitar that, like Hendrix, allowed the genre to be pulled in all sorts of directions.
Over the next few years Gilmour would develop that style into one of the most recognizable and commanding instrumental voices in rock history. But in the early winter of ’68, there was a new Pink Floyd album to record. And
A Saucerful of Secrets became the doorway to the band’s future―a disc that captured the group’s transition in leadership and, consequently, musical approach, and set into motion the sonic experimentation that would yield the masterpieces
Dark Side of the Moon,
Wish You Were Here, and
Animals, and the uneven epic
The Wall.
When the
Saucerful sessions began, the plan called for Barrett to remain the group’s songwriter guru,
like Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys. But Barrett wasn’t up to―or perhaps even up for―the task. He brought in one song called “Have You Got It Yet?,” and each time the band tried playing it in rehearsal, he’d change the chords and sing the title refrain.
Ultimately just one of Barrett’s tunes made the disc: the sadly whimsical semi-acoustic
“Jug Band Blues,” in which Barrett appears to be questioning his identity and distancing himself from the group and the album with the line “I don’t care if nothing is mine.”
But the old, masterful Syd did make two appearances on
A Saucerful of Secrets. Barrett added slithering slide six-string to Wright’s “Remember a Day,” helping to drive the song’s innocent lyric to a darker place, and pinned a hushed malevolently Eastern melody to Waters’ “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” a modal work-out that captured the spirit of Pink Floyd’s live explorations on disc for the initial time. Then, he slipped off into his own world, becoming rock’s first acid casualty.
Gilmour was just as experimental a player, but more controlled. His whammy bar tempered feedback, echo effects, and other tonal colorations on the title track―a spontaneous composition he shared with Waters, Wright, and Mason―fit deftly in place despite the number’s overall Martian atmosphere.
Gilmour’s playing most closely matches Barrett’s on “See Saw,” where Gilmour whips his slide up and down his guitar’s neck to generate waves of Theremin-like sound, albeit with more fluidity than Barrett might have employed. Gilmour’s explosions of feedback, though, are as jarring as the ripsaw chords Barrett was famed for.
Another factor that made Barrett and Gilmour sound different was their gear. Barrett preferred the bright, bristling tone he achieved with the 1959 single-coil pickup
Danelectro he used on “Interstellar Overdrive.” Later, he used a Fender Esquire, a single-pickup version of a Telecaster. It was black with a white pickguard and rosewood fretboard. He experimented with a variety of pickups, both single-coils and humbuckers. He also used several Telecasters and a white Stratocaster. His amps were Selmers: a 100-watt stereo model and a Piggyback. And he favored a Binson Echorec echo unit to add dimension. He often played a bottleneck slide, but was also known to use ball bearings and a Zippo lighter to achieve wailing elongated tones.
Today Gilmour is one of the world’s most famous Stratocaster players and owns the instrument bearing the serial number 001. But back in his early days with the Floyd he usually dug into a blonde ash bodied Telecaster plugged into Selmer and Magnatone amps. Hence, the eerie resemblance to Barrett on some of
A Saucerful of Secrets’ cuts, although a Strat also seems to have been used on the LP.
The album won a thornier reception than
Piper at the Gates of Dawn when it was released in June 1968. Nonetheless, it endures and today is widely acknowledged as the first entry in the realm of progressive rock. And with one disc of unfettered textural interplay behind them, the remaining members of Pink Floyd began to find the band’s true voice―a blend of experimentalism and sturdy song construction that appeals to musically demanding listeners, pop fans, and stoners alike.
The rest of Pink Floyd’s story is well documented, but the details of Barrett’s life remain largely a mystery. He released two solo albums,
The Madcap Laughs and
Barrett, and attempted to form a new band in 1972, then retired to his mother’s house in Cambridge to never perform again.
Reportedly he became an avid gardener and returned to
his first form of artistic expression, abstract painting. In addition to his apparent mental illness he developed diabetes and stomach ulcers. His brief appearance―heavyset and nearly unrecognizable to his friends in the band―in the studio during the 1975
Wish You Were Here sessions brought tears to Gilmour. And Syd’s fans, indeed, the whole world of rock, was saddened by his death from pancreatic cancer death in 2006.