When Syd Barrett decided she didn’t want to be a pop star, she went back to painting abstract paintings with bright colors. When one was finished, he photographed it and destroyed it or painted another one over it. But his colleagues in Pink Floyd, the band that was born out of his impulse, wanted to be pop stars. So much so that one day when the van was supposed to pick up Barrett for a gig, they decided not to stop for him. Not on this day or any other.
The bitter and dark story of the “mad diamond” or “the madman,” as two Pink Floyd songs alluded to him after his departure, is told in the documentary “Syd Barrett and the Origin of Pink Floyd” (Have You Got It Yet? ) told. , on Movistar+. Without sensational revelations, but thorough, with statements from people close to him, including his sister, his bandmates, other musicians and those who were his managers. However, it is noted that the artist was not videotaped except for a few performances and some video clips from his first album. And then he wasn’t visible. The film promises to solve the mystery surrounding this character, but doesn’t quite achieve it. The mystery remains because even those closest to him found it difficult to get into his head.
Barrett, actually called Roger Keith Barrett, was the composer, guitarist and lead singer of the band that began attracting attention in 1966 at the UFO, a well-known London venue, and became a sensation in the underground scene. As a blues lover, he was fascinated by the Beatles’ Revolver and wanted to delve deeper into this psychedelic path. He led the group’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which moved between the sonic experimentation of its long instrumentals and a handful of pop tunes with Lewis Carroll-influenced lyrics. They recorded it in Abbey Road, next to the Beatles’ studio, those were big words.
But he quickly faltered and was unreliable at concerts: his creative and unstable mind did not digest the success or abuse of LSD well. He stayed blank, or didn’t appear, or played the same note the whole time, or something different than what the others were playing. He only contributed one song to the second album (and two were discarded). By 1968 he was already out. From this base, his companions developed into rock with artistic ambition and created one of the greatest discographies of their time, reaching peaks such as “The Dark Side of the Moon” in the seventies.
Guilty of having gotten rid of him in a bad way, Roger Waters (who took over as leader of the group) and David Gilmour (who replaced him on vocals and guitar) helped Syd Barrett release two solo albums in 1969 in 1970. Then it disappeared completely . He sold his copyrights for Peanuts to the record company. Devastated, he confined himself to his mother’s house. There he painted and destroyed paintings. He barely set foot on the street. Gilmour says he regrets not visiting in the decades that followed. It was Barrett who visited his colleagues in the studio in 1975 when they were recording “Wish You Were Here”. They were very shocked because they hardly recognized him: the previously glamorous guy had shaved his hair and gained weight. The music of his classmates seemed “strange” to him.
The tabloids saved him from time to time on their front pages: to the tabloids he was the broken toy of British rock, a bad example of morality. If he had died young like Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix, he would have ascended to the Olympus of popular culture. For him, it was less epic: diabetes and pancreatic cancer killed him in 2006 at the age of 60. He didn’t brag, nor did he seem aware of how far what he had started had come. The late sixties and seventies, the most fertile era of rock, cannot be understood without him.
Pink Floyd got along very well without him, but his shadow often hung over what they did. “And when the band you’re in starts playing different tunes, I see you on the dark side of the moon,” goes Brain Damage, a song that was supposed to be called The Lunatic. “You’re caught in the crossfire of childhood and fame,” goes “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” “Come on, painter, flautist, prisoner, and shine!” His sign was always there.
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