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Tue 11 Jul, 2006 09:35 am
I've just heard on the radio that Syd Barrett has died. The report stated that he died several days ago, but that the news has just been released. It was stated that no cause of death has yet been given. Barrett was 60 of age.
Incredibly, Wikipedia lists his date of death as July 7, 2006--but i still have been unable to find any news items online about it.
Wikipedia links
this BBC story about Barrett's death, with today's date in the dateline. He is said by Wikipedia to have died of complications arising from diabetes.
Roger "Syd" Barrett was one of the founding members of the group "The Pink Floyd Sound." He dropped out of the group rather early, though, and is said to have suffered a mental breakdown as a result of drug use. Pink Floyd has become world famous since he left the band, but he was well-known in the English music "scene" in the 1960s.
"Shine on, you crazy diamond" was written as a tribute to him.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5169682.stm
Pink FLoyd are as bound up in my life in terms of music as anyone or anything else. I rate them right up there with Haydn and Mozart.
Fans of early Floyd (the best Floyd IMO) MUST listen to Octopus or Mad Cap Laughs, his solo work.
I've been listening to Octopus obsessively for the past few weeks. It's like a cross between Nick Drake and Sgt. Pepper era Beatles--every song has a gloomy swing, a dark complacency and poetic sense of humor.
Credit him with the idea and aura of Floyd, even way after he left the band. The mystery of Floyd is Syd Barret.
R.I.P.
Set....
Just the other day, I was listening to "Brain Damage". I switched the station on just as "the lunatic is in the hall" was being sung.
When that laughter came on, a really clear image of you popped in my head.
No insult, it was like you were laughing at something incredibly imbecilic you were reading here.
Just thought I'd share....
No problem, i often laugh out loud at what i read here . . .
I agree with the Koolaid man, Syd was Pink Floyd . . .
"Shine On You Crazy Diamond (IV)"
Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom,
blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter,
come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision,
rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!
I really enjoyed this quote from the BBC piece:
He was the first guy I'd heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent - his impact on my thinking was enormous
-- David Bowie
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5170028.stm
Barrett's 'extraordinary legacy'
Joe Boyd - one of the pivotal figures of the 1960s rock scene - offers his memories of Pink Floyd founding member Syd Barrett, who has died aged 60.
...."I was in London in 1966, working for Electra Records, and I was also involved in an organisation called the London Free School, a radical attempt to help revolutionise west London.
That organisation ended up kick-starting the Notting Hill Carnival in 1966. But the carnival didn't raise any money, so there was an attempt to do so by putting on concerts at a church hall in Palace Square.
The key figure in the London Free School was Peter Jenner. He knew this group from Cambridge called Pink Floyd who were in London looking for work.
He convinced them to do a gig as a benefit concert as it would be good publicity for them.
It worked, it was great. They had this light show and they were really wonderful and original. ............"
A great loss
but Haydn Mozart really rock
am I gettin old?
did he write dark side of the moon? that still twangs a string with me
No, Steve...he'd left the band by about '68 or so.
ok thanks
must confess I didnt really know much about him.
seems he was a recluse for many years
lsd dontcha know
I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives
Television Personalities
There's a little man in a little house
With a little pet dog and a little pet mouse
I know where he lives and I visit him
We have sunday tea, sausages and beans
I know where he lives
Cause I know where Syd Barrett lives
He was very famous once upon a time
But no one knows even if he's alive
But I know where he lives and I visit him
In a little hut in Cambridge
I know where he lives
Cause I know where Syd Barrett lives
And the trees and the flowers are so pretty, aren't they?
He was very famous once upon a time
And no one cares even if he's alive (we do)
But I know where he lives and I visit him
In a little hut by the edge of the wood
Oh shut up!
Rolling Stone, December 1971
The Madcap Who Named Pink Floyd
By M. Rock
London:
If you tend to believe what you hear, rather than what is, Syd Barrett is either dead, behind bars, or a vegetable. He is in fact alive and as confusing as ever, in the town where he was born, Cambridge.
In 1966-67, Barrett was playing lead guitar with Pink Floyd. He'd named the band and was writing most of their music, including the only two hit singles they ever had. His eerie electronic guitar style and gnome-like stage presence made him an authentic cult figure for the nascent London underground, then just beginning to gather at the UFO club and the Roundhouse. The Floyd were a house band and the music went on into the wee hours. Cambridge is an hour's train ride from London. Syd doesn't see many people these days. Visiting him is like intruding into a very private world.
"I'm disappearing", he says, "avoiding most things." He seems very tense, ill at ease. Hollow-cheeked and pale, his eyes reflect a permanent state of shock. He has a ghostly beauty which one normally associates with poets of old. His hair is short now, uncombed, the wavy locks gone. The velvet pants and new green snake skin boots show some attachment to the way it used to be. "I'm treading the backward path," he smiles. "Mostly, I just waste my time." He walks a lot. "Eight miles a day," he says. "It's bound to show. But I don't know how."
"I'm sorry I can't speak very coherently," he says, "It's rather difficult to think of anybody being really interested in me. But you know, man, I am totally together. I even think I should be."
Occasionally, Syd responds directly to a question. Mostly his answers are fragmented, a stream of consciousness (the words of James Joyce's poem 'Golden Hair' are in one of his songs). "I'm full of dust and guitars," he says. "The only work I've done the last two years is interviews. I'm very good at it." In fact, Syd has made three albums in that time, produced by the Floyd. '
The Madcap Laughs', his second, he says, was pretty good: "Like a painting as big as the cellar." Before the Floyd got off the ground, Barrett attended art school. He still paints. Sometimes crazy jungles of thick blobs. Sometimes simple linear pieces. His favourite is a white semi-circle on a white canvas.
In a cellar where he spends much of his time, he sits surrounded by paintings and records, his amps and guitars. He feels safe there, under the ground. Like a character out of one of his own songs. Syd says his favourite musician is Hendrix.
"I toured with him you know, Lindsay (an old girl-friend) and I used to sit on the back of the bus, with him up front; he would film us. But we never spoke really. It was like this. Very polite. He was better than people really knew. But very self-conscious about his consciousness. He'd lock himself in the dressing room with a TV and wouldn't let anyone in."
Syd himself has been known to sit behind locked doors, refusing to see anyone for days at a time. Frequently in his last months with the Floyd, he'd go on stage and play no more than two notes in a whole set.
"Hendrix was a perfect guitarist. And that's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way. It's always been too slow for me. Playing. The pace of things. I mean, I'm a fast sprinter. The trouble was, after playing in the group for a few months, I couldn't reach that point."
"I may seem to get hung-up, that's because I am frustrated work-wise, terribly. The fact is I haven't done anything this year, I've probably been chattering, explaining that away like anything. But the other bit about not working is that you do get to think theoretically."
He'd like to get another band together. "But I can't find anybody. That's the problem. I don't know where they are. I mean, I've got an idea that there must be someone to play with. If I was going to play properly, I should need some really good people."
Syd leaves the cellar and goes up to a sedate little room full of pictures of himself with his family. He was a pretty child. English tea, cake and biscuits, arrives. Like many innovators, Barrett seems to have missed the recognition due to him, while others have cleaned up.
"I'd like to be rich. I'd like a lot of money to put into my physicals and to buy food for all my friends."
"I'll show you a book of all my songs before you go. I think it's so exciting. I'm glad you're here."
He produces a folder containing all his recorded songs to date, neatly typed, with no music. Most of them stand alone as written pieces. Sometimes simple, lyrical, though never without some touch of irony. Sometimes surreal, images weaving dreamily, echoes of a mindscape that defies traditional analysis. Syd's present favourite is 'Wolfpack,' a taut threatening, claustrophobic number. It finishes with:
Mild the reflecting electricity eyes
The life that was ours grew sharper
and stronger away and beyond
short wheeling fresh spring
gripped with blanched bones moaned
Magnesium proverbs and sobs.
Syd thinks people who sing their own songs are boring. He has never recorded anyone else's. He produces a guitar and begins to strum out a new version of 'Love You,' from Madcap. "I worked this out yesterday. I think it's much better. It's my new 12-string guitar. I'm just getting used to it. I polished it yesterday." It's a Yamaha. He stops and eases it into a regular tuning, shaking his head.
"I never felt so close to a guitar as that silver one with mirrors that I used on stage all the time. I swapped it for the black one, but I've never played it."
Syd is 25 now, and worried about getting old. "I wasn't always this introverted,' he says, 'I think young people should have a lot of fun. But I never seem to have any."
Suddenly he points out the window. "Have you seen the roses? There's a whole lot of colors." Syd says he doesn't take acid anymore, but he doesn't want to talk about it... "There's really nothing to say."
He goes into the garden and stretches out on an old wooden seat. "Once you're into something..." he says, looking very puzzled. He stops. "I don't think I'm easy to talk about. I've got a very irregular head. And I'm not anything that you think I am anyway."
Pics from today's The Guardian, page 3
Quote:Syd Barrett
Gifted founding member of Pink Floyd whose talent was destroyed by drugs
Alan Clayson
To some of his fans, it was the misfortune of Syd Barrett, who has died aged 60 of cancer, to have become the ultimate pop recluse after leaving Pink Floyd, the band of which he was a founder member. His retirement to lead an outwardly unproductive life was on a par with, say, Mick Jagger leaving the Rolling Stones in 1964 to live quietly with his parents.
The fourth of five siblings, Barrett was born in a genteel suburb of Cambridge. He was 14 when his father, a hospital pathologist, died, but the effect of this loss did not blight his development as a teenager, and he explored alternative culture more than most young people in the 1960s. Even before he passed his 11-plus and went to Cambridge high school, he showed promise as a classical pianist and visual artist. But intrigued by an elder brother's skiffle combo, he taught himself guitar, mostly by playing along to records. He and a kindred spirit, David Gilmour, practised together, but did not progress much further than talking about starting a group.
It was around this time that Barrett acquired the nickname Syd (to replace his given name, Roger). At 16, he was was playing non-committally with local beat groups, sometimes sharing a stage with bass guitarist Roger Waters. On winning scholarships ?- Barrett to Camberwell Art College and Waters to the Regent Street Polytechnic ?- the pair moved to London, where what was to become Pink Floyd ?- initially the Pink Floyd ?- smouldered into formwith Barrett, Waters, drummer Nick Mason and, on keyboards, Rick Wright.
The gradual introduction of adventurous, self-written material and lengthy, monochordal improvisations made them popular fixtures in London's underground clubs, where light shows helped to simulate the psychedelic experience. Snapped up by EMI, the group produced their Barrett-written debut single, Arnold Layne (1967), which was, unsurprisingly, self- consciously weird ?- and a Top 30 entry, despite airplay restrictions. The follow-up, a tartly arranged See Emily Play ?- also written by Barrett ?- climbed to number six.
Recognition came from the Beatles, who looked in during a Floyd session for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (also 1967), a first album penned almost entirely by Barrett, who as a guitarist was as capable of severe dissonance as serene, if echo-laden, melody, and whose vocal style was as English as Elvis Presley's was American.
With the other personnel keeping pace, Barrett had, musically speaking, gone far into the cosmos with Astronomy Domine, Piper's opening track. Indeed, he seemed disconnected with earthly existence altogether on Interstellar Overdrive. Gnome, Matilda Mother, Flaming and the medievalflavoured Scarecrow cornered the childlike end of psychedelia more effectively than, for example, the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
But a now drug-addled Barrett was already proving ill-equipped to cope with pop stardom, particularly after a troubled US tour and the disappointment of a flop third single, Apples and Oranges, at the end of 1967. The following year Gilmour was enlisted as the increasingly unreliable Barrett's understudy, and, during the making a transitional second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), as his successor.
If happier as concert performers, Pink Floyd were initially at a loss without Barrett's input. Attempting to master his inner chaos, he released in 1970 two patchy solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and the more focused Just Barrett, with help from members of Soft Machine, Humble Pie and Pink Floyd, and was persuaded to undertake promotional stage appearances. Eventually, he returned to Cambridge, where he fronted a trio called Stars, who struggled through a solitary official booking at the city's Corn Exchange in 1972.
The years left to Barrett were almost perversely unremarkable. Though he was known to be a painter, he neither exhibited nor sold anywork. Nevertheless, a legend took shape, bringing out strange stories, the most verifiable of which was of him presenting himself, portly and shaven-headed, in the studio when Pink Floyd were recording 1975's Wish You Were Here album, which was to contain Shine on You Crazy Diamond, regarded as a salute to their former leader. After that, press photographs of Barrett portrayed him looking as middle-aged as his former colleagues, all of whom had become multi-millionaires while he existed on invalidity benefit and fluctuating royalties.
He continued to fascinate countless fans, as well as record company moguls scraping the barrel for anything on which he so much as breathed ?- as instanced by Crazy Diamond, a big-selling 1993 CD box set incorporating hithertounreleased tracks. His income was buoyed, too, via respects paid by other artists, most conspicuously David Bowie, who revived See Emily Play on 1973's Pin-Ups album, and Arnold Layne when he was guest singer at David Gilmour's London concert in the Royal Albert Hall last month. A further tribute comes in Tom Stoppard's new West End play, Rock'n'Roll. Songs by Barrett reinforce Stoppard's theme that rock music helped see off repression, even if the freedom it ushered in brought new dangers.
In truth, few of the faithful expected or wanted Barrett to make a comeback. They preferred him as an ever-silent, "no return" saga rather than one in which he was likely to try and fail to debunk the myth of an artistic death. Roger Keith ?'Syd' Barrett, musician and composer, born January 6 1946; died July 7 2006.
source: The Guardian, 12.07.2006, Obtuaries, page 29
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