Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd

"Fame requires every kind of excess."

"I mean true fame."

"A devouring neon."

"Long journeys across grey space."

"Danger."

"The edge of every void."

"Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions."

"Even if half-mad, he is absorbed into the public's total madness."

"Even If fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell,"

"a secret genius of survival,"

"he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors."

What are you working on at the moment inside yourself?

I can't really say.

Maybe this break would be very valuable

to try painting again after a break of going into pop music.

I don't know.

If I wanted to say nothing,

or if I want to act in an extraordinary way,

then I feel that that too is justified.

Syd Barrett, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd,

has died at the age of 60.

A statement from the band described him as a guiding light

who leaves a legacy which continues to inspire.

He left the Pink Floyd in 1968

and lived as a recluse in Cambridge for three decades.

How would you describe, now in your maturity...

Thank you.

...his contribution to Pink Floyd?

Well, it wouldn't have existed if it hadn't been for Syd.

We would have been one of those thousands and thousands of bands

who come up and they play blues and "Louie Louie".

They might write the odd crappy song and then they disappear.

They get proper jobs and that's the end of it.

I discovered Pink Floyd's music

through the music they made in the late '70s.

For people that got info Pink Floyd at that point

and were listening to those records first,

they knew that there had been this guy Syd in the band.

The story was always, "Oh, he went mad and left the group."

That's all we knew about it.

There was religious acid taking at that time.

Syd was one of the sort of saints of that underground cult.

Literature and the Bible for example, is full of people

who deliberately isolated themselves.

The hermits who went info the desert.

People who had visions, who preferred to be on their own.

And others, who having those experiences,

were determined to preach to the multitude.

The romantic ideal is

that a creative person is drawn by something so powerful

that he, or she, will follow that

regardless of the price that has to be paid.

These people are out there in front.

They're not looking over their shoulder,

they're just gonna do it.

Syd is the ultimate kind of loner.

It's the same a little bit with Brian Jones or something.

I suppose what is sad ls about somebody

who is still extremely relevant, Just decides to stop.

It's OK when someone carries on into irrelevance and then stops.

No one cares.

The last thing he was interested in was explaining himself.

And consequently, he became a figure of intense-focused interest,

because there was a mystery there.

He's the perfect god, you see.

A god must actually be killed and eaten,

but then he must be reborn.

The life of Syd Barrett,

founding member of Pink Floyd, is full of unanswered questions.

Though he named the group and wrote their first two hit songs,

Barrett was later pushed out of the band by its members,

who were convinced he was having an LSD-induced psychotic breakdown.

But to examine the complex story of Syd Barrett,

one needs to take a trip.

A trip back to the picturesque and historic

English university town of Cambridge.

Roger Keith Barrett was born in Cambridge on January 6th 1946.

One of five children, closest to his sister Rosemary.

He was always wanting the next bit of fun.

And if it didn't arrive, then he'd make it.

I can remember once at the dinner table,

when he had a little bit of cabbage sticking out of his mouth.

He knew it was there and he kept it there for the whole meal

and pretended he didn't know.

Of course, everybody was giggling because his face was,

"I know it's there, I know you're laughing at me

but I'm going to ignore it."

Barrett's father, a pathologist and avid botanist,

encouraged the artistic leanings of his son,

who loved to write and draw.

By the age of 13 or 14,

Roger had acquired the nickname 'Syd' from his friends at school.

As legend has it after a local jazz bass player,

Syd 'the beat' Barrett.

At home he remained Roger or Rog.

I'm speaking at this level. I'm speaking at this level.

Ok. This is slate three.

I believe Storm's interview, it's 08:10.

Big clap.

My name is Storm. I knew Syd in the early '60s.

We were both at the same school

as Roger and Dave, who became Pink Floyd obviously.

The peer group in Cambridge that Syd was part of

was full of aspiring artists.

Not businessmen, not medical, not lawyers.

Syd was not unusual

and seemed to be as he were one of the gang.

The group evolved by itself.

Nobody was really the leader.

The centers of Seamus and Storm

was simply because their mothers were very indulgent

towards teenage boys.

The start came at Cherry Hinton Road at your mother's house.

I tended to be into beer and jazz and students.

Your lot were more into drugs and rock music and cool people.

I deny it totally.

I went to the county high school, Cambridgeshire High School for boys,

and was in the same year as Syd.

We had to choose between woodwork, metal work and art.

So I went info the art class

and there I discovered a bunch of people who were useless.

A teacher who was equally useless,

but one student by the name of Roger Barrett,

had a flare way beyond his years.

The Christmas holiday of 1961 was overshadowed

by his father's death from cancer,

Just a month before Syd's 16th birthday.

Syd's family moves to 183 Hills Road.

Libby Gausden lives several houses up the street.

I Met Syd, I think, in 1961.

We'd have both been 15.

Where did you meet?

I met him at Jesus Green,

which is a wonderful place in Cambridge.

I'd been swimming and diving actually with Dave Gilmour.

After the swimming, I came out with some friends

and we were messing about on the see-saw outside.

And I met Syd there.

He was kind, he was gentle, he was generous,

he liked buying presents.

He wrote to me all the time.

I had always thought of you as Syd's first major girlfriend.

We were always together.

When you went out with him how was he?

It always looked like he was full of the joys of spring, which he was.

Let's go back, way back to the early '60s.

What is your abiding memory of Syd?

Just a guy who was fiercely intelligent and loads of fun.

Life was just too easy for him really in a way.

He had huge gifts

which were natural to him so he didn't see them as huge.

Everything he turned his hand to worked.

The girls worked, the painting worked, the music worked,

the friendships worked.

I always remember Syd's hair.

- Do you? - Yeah.

- Curly, black. - Yeah, lovely.

And I also remember his walk.

- He smelled nice. - Sorry?

He smelled nice.

You could see this extraordinary buoyancy

which was most clearly evidenced in the way he walked.

He walked with a bounce, he walked on the front of his feet

with his heels off the ground all the time.

You could spot him several hundred yards away in Cambridge

wandering up the street.

We used to go on my Vespa down to Hills Road

for these Sunday afternoon jam sessions,

where I saw Syd playing guitar for the first time.

The music side of the story really begins

with Geoff Mott And The Mottoes, of which Syd was an august member.

I remember when Syd bought his first Futurama.

It was bright red as I recall

and he used to learn Duane Eddy things on it

like "Walk Don't Run".

We'd started to go to shows in London

and I remember sitting on the train having seen Gene Vincent.

We sat there with a piece of paper

and figured out the amplification for the band

that we were going to be.

It had two VOX AC30s drawn on it.

And we were going, "Well, the vocals and the bass

and then this can go through this one.

The rhythm guitar...

Will we have a keyboard? Don't know, maybe."

He used to appear at parties

of which we had quite a lot of in Cambridge at that time.

He used to play a lot of the songs that later became songs on his album.

But because he was just as he were one of the gang,

I don't think anybody thought anything about him.

He had this grin

you could mistake for a smirk but it wasn't.

It was almost like he knew something you didn't know.

He was one of those people

that was part of the crowd very much so

and then the next minute, he'd slipped away from a room.

And it'd be, "Where's Syd?" Nobody knows.

Syd's enthusiasm for painting

sees him enroll at the Cambridge School of Art in 1962.

Simultaneously, he discovers Beat poetry, Kerouac