Dark side of the man

MADCAP: The Half-Life of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's Lost Genius by Tim Willis (Short Books, pounds 12.99)

IT'S more than 30 years since Syd Barrett vanished from view - and almost as long since the Syd Barrett Appreciation Society wound up its affairs, due to "lack of Syd".

What would have happened if Barrett hadn't left - or been booted out of Pink Floyd? Presumably, he'd be just another rock dinosaur gamely going through his faltering paces to general scorn, or indifference.

Instead, he has become, as Tim Willis points out in his biography of Barrett, rock's Rimbaud, the "lost genius" who went away and never came back.

"Both started new lives, leaving images of themselves which, unlike their contemporaries, will never age."

But whereas Rimbaud disappeared off to Africa, Syd Barrett went back to his home town of Cambridge. That was back in 1971 and he hasn't been seen in public since. This, of course, only set the myths multiplying. Over the years various rumours have filtered out about Barrett's welfare, or lack of it.

He was believed to have turned into a frighteningly swollen fatty, to have become nuttier than ever and - a recent variant - to be on the verge of blindness.

The truth, not surprisingly, proves to be more prosaic. Willis starts his book with a bravura piece of doorstepping. He finds out where Barrett lives, turns up and knocks on the door. Nothing happens. So he knocks again. This time the door opens to reveal a middle-aged man, naked apart from a pair of bright blue Y-fronts. Not enormously fat, plainly not blind, and as far as Willis can tell in an admittedly brief encounter, not noticeably nutty either. As for the Y-fronts, it's a hot day and Barrett has been sunbathing in his garden.

Yet it's clear that something did go very wrong with him, although no one seems quite sure what. Roger, as he was christened - and the name to which he has reverted - appears to have been happy enough as a boy, one of five children born to his father, Max, Cambridge University's Morbid Anatomist, and his mother, Winifred.

Initially, Roger wanted to be an artist, then he began dabbling in music.

While still at art school, he joined the prototype Pink Floyd, replacing a man who used to climax the band's act by doing Hitler impersonations using his mouth organ as a moustache. To begin with, everything was fine. Barrett - now "Syd" - began writing the wistful, absurdist, faintly Betjemanesque songs that became his hallmark, one of which, Arnold Layne, became the Floyd's first hit.

But then he grew increasingly, and disturbingly, weird - this in an era where weirdness was held in very high regard. On stage he took to plucking abstractedly at his guitar, or just staring intimidatingly at the audience.

He shocked the rest of the band by insisting on appearing on Top of the Pops dressed in rags.

Just how much acid he was taking has long been a source of great conjecture among Barrettophiles. Some insist that he was wolfing down the stuff in record-breaking quantities and that this was what sent him over the edge.

Others, rather more plausibly, I suspect, claim that his consumption, although fairly hefty, was not excessive by the standards of the day.

EMI, Floyd's record label, desperate for a follow-up single to the band's second hit, See Emily Play, were understandably appalled when Barrett produced an "ear-splitting mess" entitled, Scream Thy Last Scream, Old Woman With a Casket.

By now the end was near. One day in 1968, the other members of the Floyd were driving through London to a business meeting when someone said, "Shall we pick up Syd?"

"F*** it," said the others. "Let's not bother." So they didn't. And that was that.

After two fitfully brilliant solo albums, Barrett returned home to Cambridge, buried Syd and became Roger again. His madness, if it is madness, consists largely of not having any interest in human contact. Despite spells in hospital and at a charitable institution, he's never been sectioned and has only twice been prescribed drugs for his mental state.

In his foreword, Tim Willis writes that he doesn't believe his book to be definitive, but he does at least hope it's factually accurate. He is, I think, being unduly modest. In many respects he is an ideal biographer for Barrett; admiring, sympathetic and perceptive, yet far from sycophantic.

And while his book is not long, its brevity suits it very well; unlike most rock writing there's a merciful absence of self- indulgence. Above all, Willis is, one senses, happiest hovering on Barrett's doorstep; partly wanting to be invited in, but partly being appalled by the idea - feeling on balance that it's better to leave his hero still shimmering enigmatically on the other side of the threshold, and not broach his mystery by stepping across.

Copyright 2002
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