Syd Barrett

Syd died on July 11, 2006. This appreciation of his life appeared in ‘The Observer’ on July 16

On a summer afternoon in 1965 Syd, Paul, Storm, Imo and myself were sitting in my parents’ pleasant back garden in Cambridge. My parents had gone to Australia for six months and I had turned the dustless house into a hipster hostel. Syd and Paul lived round the corner and we used to smoke dope and talk about Jack Kerouac together. Syd, an art student, was involved with a band called Pink Floyd and their work was just starting to get noticed. He was a man without moods, delighted by everyday absurdities, at all times sunny, chuckling and serene.

Earlier in the day Syd and Paul had each taken a heroic dose, as was the custom, of LSD, on a sugar-lump. Syd had giggled for a while then become contemplative. He had found, in my mother’s kitchen, a plum, an orange and a matchbox. He was sitting cross-legged on the manicured lawn, gently cradling the items in his hands, studying them intently. From time to time he would smile at them in a friendly way.

Syd studied his objects for four hours. Paul Charrier found this unwholesome. He strode over to Syd, seized the plum, the orange and the matchbox and jumped up and down on them, roaring jovially. Syd shouted with laughter and Paul began chasing him round the garden. They rushed into the house and up to the bathroom where Paul yanked the shower from its holder, turned it onto cold and proceeded to soak Syd. They played together like six year olds, wrestling, splashing, tearing their shirts off, throwing open the windows and bellowing merrily into the leafy repose of the afternoon.

Like his song lyrics, Syd’s humour was both subtle and silly. On one occasion we were driving around Cambridge in Storm’s old Studebaker when someone observed that something or other was ‘rancid’. Syd instantly shouted “Well ran, Syd!” and the car swerved across Hills Road as we all cackled with delight. It was the way he said them.

He was also very fond of a catchphrase. We used to go to a fearsome pub called ‘The Criterion’, patronised by Teds, beats, undergrads (largely in disguise), American servicemen and short but psychotic youths from the car breaker’s yard. It was wise to go to the toilet in twos and it was there that we stood next to two quiffed Teds discussing their favoured sexual practices. With a connoisseur’s gravity the larger one announced “Me, I like it in the head”. Although my gaze was firmly fixed on the cluster of white disinfectant cakes beneath me in the rancid trough, I couldn’t help noticing that my companion was shaking helplessly. For months afterwards, when one might, for example, finish buying a round of drinks by asking “What about you, Syd?” he would declaim, in a firm but affectless way “I like it in the head.” Sometimes when a conversation briefly faltered he would nod wisely and, a propos of absolutely nothing, say it again. His own laughter – he laughed at his own jokes with a certain grace – was disarming.

Syd moved up to London and a few months later I joined him. We shared a cold-water flat just off the Tottenham Court Road. The room was about twelve by eight with a mattress running down either wall. At the end of the day Syd and I would lie back and discuss our experiences in the big city. We had devised a points system for evaluating celebrities spotted in the street. I recall my Petula Clark sighting being awarded five out of ten while Syd’s Hank B. Marvin got a seven. On another occasion we went to the Zoo and were much taken with the spectacle of an orang-utang using a hairy fore-finger to prise chunks of shit from its arse then convey them to its mouth. Syd dashed off a sketch of the incident and pinned it to the wall. It had great economy of line and considerable compositional elegance.

All this lightness left him. As the hallucinogens and the downers ploughed through he became morose with his friends and a professional nightmare for the band. He wasn’t helped by the romantic culture of madness that surrounded him- a wilful misreading of the revolutionary but fashionable work of R.D. Laing persuaded many of those around him, myself included, that it was, like, uncool to interfere with Syd’s trip because he was, like, on a journey.

By 1967 Syd Barrett had taken so much acid that his beauty and his cheerfulness were extinguished. He stood on stage arhythmically strumming an untuned guitar, his hair bedraggled, black eye-liner running down his pallid cheeks, confronting his fans with a sullen thousand yard stare. Not only Syd but the rest of the band were at their wits’ end. They let him go and, after languishing mute and unapproachable in Earls Court for a while, he walked back home to Cambridge. With the help of his sister, Rosemary, he shunned the world in a small house for several decades.

Before Syd left London I’d see him in the street now and again. He looked straight through me. There seemed to be no whites in his eyes. I never saw him again.

It’s tempting to read the episode in the garden as an early sign of an inwardness that would later consume him. This entails our subscription to the ‘beast in the basement’ analysis, wherein Syd’s sunniness was merely a tissue draped across a psychic disaster waiting to happen. Another view is that the acid ripped up his brain forever. His serotonin reuptake was fucked bigtime. There seem to be no reliable diagnostic tools available here. We describe him as an ‘acid casualty’ and leave it at that.

But then there’s the photo. The iconic unshaven tortured portrait. It’s in all the papers. Clearly Syd serves a purpose. He gives us, for forty years, something very satisfying. The image of escape without death. He is alive but deathly still. Syd is undead. This is terribly appealing. It’s appealing in smacked and doe-eyed Pete Doherty: it is possible to die without having to go. Best of both worlds.

Syd was lovely. There are lovely photos of him. Grinning, gorgeous, giggling. That’s how I will remember him.

Meat Puppetry

This is an open-ended essay. It consists of a series of observations about a particular relationship but does not present an argument. I’ll add to it as further examples pop up. (Looks like I didn’t. (2019))

One of the acts in Lumiere & Son’s legendary ‘Circus Lumiere’ featured the diminutive and remarkable performer George Yiasoumi running onstage carrying a crocodile. George would wrestle noisily with the croc up to the point that the beast would seize him by the ankle and munch its way along his body, eventually swallowing him whole. The gorged reptile lay twitching digestively until hauled off by other performers. The croc was the fruit of an early (1980) collaboration with the Theatre Design Department at Wimbledon School of Art. It was faithfully modelled on the real thing and lined with a rayon gullet for easy slipdown.

When I was at the Royal College of Art Film School, back in 1970, we were visited by the Chilean film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky. A chauffeured Bentley pulled into the courtyard and Jodorowsky stepped out, carrying a silver-topped cane. Half of the students were very excited to see the director, for they had marvelled at his extraordinary, surreal cowboy film ‘El Topo‘ (1970). The other half of the students wanted to work in television and were not impressed by a man who could only show them how to make themselves unemployable. Jodorowsky, possessed of a Daliesque compulsion to show off, showed off to the young film-makers for an hour or two and was then chauffeured away. Some weeks later we were visited by Jerry Lewis.

Unlike Jerry, Jodorowsky had shot a sequence in one of his movies (was it ‘Holy Mountain‘ (1973)?), featuring a man imprisoned within the carcass of a decapitated bull. It was shocking to see. The bull, standing on its back legs, was strapped to a wall so that the man’s head poked out of the neck cavity. One suspected that the dead meat was warm.

Despite my antipathy to the work of Shakespeare, ventilated elsewhere on this site, it is easy enough to recall that Bottom is magically endowed with an ass’s head by Puck, who contrives to make Titania love him. Usually effected in the theatre by means of a full-head mask, the transformation is to be understood, we must assume, as a form of fey transplant surgery in which the transplanted organ is animated by human blood pumped from a human heart. There is no question of Bottom having to endure the pressure of a donkey’s meat and muscle around his own head as he is pampered by Titania’s fairies. Puck gave Bottom a real head, not a mask. Bottom is able, nevertheless, to use the donkey’s vocal apparatus as his own. It’s a moot point, therefore, as to whether this vocalisation constitutes ventriloquism or just an enviable adaptability.

Leatherface, the sissy out of ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘ (1974) who, having given them a nice tan, wore his mummy’s face and chest as an apron, had to compensate for such a sentimental move by getting back at his critics with a chainsaw. The guy was confused. He loved his mother and wanted to stay close to her – that much is clear. But in so doing he lost the power of speech. Is it worth it? Presumably there is great satisfaction to be had from securing mother’s indefinite proximity, especially when you’re on the inside yet still able to enjoy the perquisites of the outside.

Fisting, of course, should be recognised in the context that we are developing. A jovial reference to the practice proved the almost terminal undoing of Julian Clary’s career in 1993. I will not, however, muse on the topic in any proctological detail here, for my purpose is simply to observe that certain jokes about ventriloquism touch on much the same ground as Clary’s unfortunate ad lib, without liquidating careers. How many times have we heard a saucy ventriloquist, or their dummy, complain of ‘making a living with my/your hand up your/my backside’? It’s irresistible. As an image of manipulation suggestive of both demonic possession and parasitism it takes some beating.

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Journalism

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Essays

Comprising rumination, reminiscence, rue, the ribald.
Some of these were written as stand-alones, some were cannibalised from longer, aborted projects.

Natty Dread

Market day in Dreadlock City, (aka Orgiva, Southern Spain). Down from the hills and out of the tipis they are coming in twos and threes. The ones who have come far have backpacks. Some have guitars. A tiny lady in her sixties in a black dress, upper arms tattooed, gold pierces, bare foot, leads a little black dog. A big red-haired guy in a long kilt and heavy boots strides across the bridge. I’m parking the Berlingo. Earlier on I had seen, from the car, a group of five in baggy Indian pants, wrapped around with yellow cloth, some with mohicans, some shaven heads, others with long black locks or skanky dreads. Now the group is over the bridge and moving past the gas station. The local people stare, not over-critically – they’re used to it.

One man is really striking – he has a thin, dark brown cotton blanket over his head and shoulders and strongly resembles Jesus Christ as played by the Spanish student Enrique Irazoqui in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable 1964 B&W bibler ‘The Gospel According to St Matthew’.

Pasolini, a Marxist atheist, dressed the characters in his period movies in costumes that combined elements of the street with the wardrobes deployed by 15th century painters such as Piero della Francesca. In the case of Irazoqui he had cast a haunted, pale youth who glowed with pained earnestness and dressed him so that he seemed interchangeable with the beat kids and travellers who were beginning to thumb their way around Europe at that time.

It’s doubtful whether Pasolini’s politics would have led him to endorse the apolitics of the wandering youth, but their evident disaffection might have struck him as amenable to some sharpening and adjustment. His Christ is an enflamed revolutionary whose long speeches drawn directly from the Gospels and addressed straight to camera have such a mesmerising effect that even a fundamentalist atheist, such as Strength Weekly’s currently foreign correspondent, might be persuaded to reconsider whether it was entirely right not to have helped that old lady across the road.

It is probable that Christ did not thumb rides, but he was not above borrowing other people’s transport on special occasions. On Palm Sunday, according to several of the Gospels, he got two of his disciples to take a colt or donkey from a nearby field in order that he could ride it into Jerusalem.

Some years later, in 1957, thanks to Jack Kerouac, hitch-hiking was repurposed as spiritual practice. The causality is evident. I clearly remember, despite having been counselled never to ‘take a short ride’, my own ecstatic reaction to being deposited, in 1962, on the outskirts of the village of Melbourne, some seven miles out from my home town, after my very first attempt to hitch-hike to London. I had been blessed.

Kerouac admired his friend and travelling companion Neal Cassady, whom he considered to be a complete, radiant and thoroughly present being. The writer himself felt like a pale shadow of the permanently wired hipster yet was widely regarded as the very incarnation of the man liberated from context.

Kerouac mentions the looks he got when he descended into towns wild-haired from the road. He was entirely aware of his eccentricity and probably died as a result of resisting the notion, thrust on him by fans and critics alike, that, as a saint, he should be blissfully unaware of his own radiant awareness. By all accounts, he endured throughout his celebrity a nagging awareness of his limited awareness and an exaggerated sense of his unsuitedness for high spiritual office. He didn’t feel like the real thing.

In the olden days, of course, there were big people who were the real thing all day long and didn’t even know it! These were the people admired by lesser people who not only imitated their bigness but affected a lack of awareness that they too – the imitators – were perceived as incandescent. They were not incandescent, of course, but they understood that the effect would be compromised by their appearing to know about it.

The original big people (I refer to magnitude of being, not stature) lived over a million years ago and were authentically themselves. Their radiance has been emulated everafter.

The ‘angel-headedness’ of the hipster was his (there were no girl hipsters) emblem of ignorance. He was oblivious. In extreme circumstances this had led to Dennis leaning on the live electric hob and not noticing until the elbow of his leather jacket had burned through. This would, generally, be unusual, for a degree of poise was required to maintain the balance between innocence and experience.

Setting aside the toothsome debate about Jesus’s own levels of self-consciousness (I think he knew he was weird, right?), I return to the Berlingo and its satisfying rear double doors that open to reveal chest-high shelving, so handy for stacking boogie boards. Walking away from the hired vehicle I look over my shoulder in response to a call behind me.

The young man with the blanket on his head walks towards me, his hand extended, as if in greeting. He is holding something that he wants me to have. On closer inspection I identify my Armani wraparound shades.

(Well, it says Armani on them and at €5 a pop that guy on the stall obviously doesn’t know he’s sitting on a goldmine!) I must have dropped them as I fastened the car doors.

The young Jesus smiles amiably and I realise that he has no particular axe to grind about the crass stylishness of my fashion items. In Christ’s own day, I imagine, and this is just me imagining, they wore a piece of wood with slits in.

For a moment I rather liked the idea that this striking crusty loved me unconditionally and could, if he felt like it, produce any number of designer leisure accessories and pass them among the people that they need not squint as the rays fell upon them. Then I reverted morosely to the view that we are all copies now.

10.08.2008