Cambridge commemorates one of its peculiar own, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett
By J.W. | CAMBRIDGE
ASK anyone what the words “Pink Floyd” mean and you will get a swift answer: one of the biggest rock acts the world has known. Their 1973 LP “The Dark Side of the Moon” transformed them from 1960s cult experimentalists into a late-20th century recording and performing giant. The band made Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright (who died in 2008) vast fortunes. But Syd Barrett, the fifth Floyd, remains a shadow in the background to all but the band's devoted fans and psychedelic-rock aficionados.
Yet it was Barrett who co-founded the group, with Messrs Waters, Mason and Wright, in 1965. Mr Waters and Barrett had known each other at school in Cambridge, where Barrett was born in 1946. Charismatic and curly-haired, elfin in velvet and dress shirts, he became Floyd’s lead guitarist and frontman. With his crisp baritone, he was the beating heart of their early song-making. His quirky stories and imagery in singles such as “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play” feel as vivid today as they were when the songs were hits nearly 50 years ago.
However, after the release in 1967 of Floyd’s first LP, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, which Barrett largely wrote, he ceased to function as a band member, debilitated by LSD use. In the mid- to late 1960s heavy use of the hallucinogen by pop musicians and fans was hardly unusual. But Barrett seems to have been of a fragile constitution, quite unable to cope with the extreme mental states LSD induced.
In 1968 he left the group. Mr Gilmour, also from Cambridge, replaced him. Barrett disappeared more deeply into drugs and recorded two dreary solo albums, “The Madcap Laughs” and “Barrett”, then retreated to his mother’s Cambridge house. His last, shambolic gig was at the city’s Corn Exchange in 1972. Three years later, his former bandmates sat recording their ninth album, “Wish You Were Here”, the lyrics of which were influenced by the absent bandmate, when a shaven-headed and fat man walked into the studio. None of them at first recognised Barrett. Until his death from cancer in 2006, he lived in total seclusion.
The tragedy of more than half of Barrett’s life has now been mitigated, in part, by a memorial to him in the venue where he last performed. Clare Palmier and Spadge Hopkins, two artists from Suffolk, have come up with an art-work as clever as it is entertaining. They were chosen by the Barrett estate to create a piece that will be permanently accessible just inside Cambridge Corn Exchange.
The work, “CODA”, was unveiled on Thursday 27th October. 57 inches high by 29 inches wide, it is a box of highly polished steel chequered with a red pattern that seems to spin playfully across the surface in an expanded spiral. A trace of the outline of Barrett’s guitar is discernible. At the box’s centre is a bicycle wheel. When it spins an LED display projects a mesmerising animation of patterns, shapes and Syd’s face that appears and disappears tantalisingly. Like Barrett’s best songs, it is stirring and evocative.
Ms Palmier explains its genesis. “The estate wanted an abstract piece, not a traditional representation of Syd. I got a sense of him as being quite ethereal. In TV interviews, you can see how intelligent he was, unwilling to be pinned down, and clear about his creativity and freedom. The spinning wheel, referencing the extraordinary 1967 track ‘Bike’, reflects that.”
The unveiling of “CODA” was the climax to a number of events in Cambridge commemorating the star, who would have turned 70 this year. On October 21st a long night of clips and rare footage of Barrett and early Floyd revealed what a fiercely innovative force they were. In the mid-1960s they were in the vanguard of British psychedelia: pioneers just as the Beatles, having quit the stage, were beginning their own experiments. In frame after frame Barrett looks spaced-out but masterful.
Is he worth the fuss? At Pink Floyd’s increasingly lavish banquet, brought to them by the success of “Dark Side”, he was a ghost at the table. But it was a ghost they arguably laid to rest in the catharsis of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” on “Wish You Were Here”, and that 1975 visit, which brought the bandmates to tears. Mr Waters has been clear that the band could not have started without him—nor could it have continued with him.
In his home town, Syd Barrett has finally won his patch of honour. After decades in obscurity, that feels right: “CODA” seems to sing. As Ms Palmier says, “Syd burnt bright but briefly, and I was determined to catch that. And in music today, in my view he remains very present.”
