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- Herausgeber: Plexus Publishing Ltd.
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Syd Barrett was an English composer and purveyor of some of the most intriguing music ever written. Famous before his twentieth birthday, Barrett led the charge of psychedelia onstage at London's famed UFO club. With a Fender Telecaster and a primitive Binson echo unit, Barrett liberated the guitar from being, in critic Simon Reynolds' words, 'a riff machine, and turned it into a texture and timbre generator.' His inspired celestial flights of improvisation, and his more structured and whimsical short songs indicated a mind of unusual inventiveness. Chief in Barrett's mind was a Zen-like insistence on spontaneity; each performance had to be unique, and Barrett strived to push his music farther and farther out into the zone of complete abstraction. This in-depth analysis of Pink Floyd founding member Syd Barrett's life and work is the product of years of extensive research. Lost in the Woods traces Syd's swift evolution from precocious young art student to acid-fuelled psychedelic rock star, and examines the myriad musical and literary influences that he utilised in composing his hypnotic, groundbreaking songs. A never-forgotten casualty of the excesses, innovations, and idealism of the 1960s, Syd Barrett is one of the most heavily mythologized men in rock, and Lost in the Woods offers a rare portrayal of a unique spirit in freefall.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD: GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE
When we think of Syd, we first see his eyes. Syd’s eyes were haunted, but not haunted by something terrifying that he had seen and hated to face in the way we usually think of it. Haunted by the sheer complexity of everything in this universe and the none-sensus reality we humans seem to inhabit. Overwhelmed by the sensory responsibilities of seeing endlessly spiralling strands of DNA that programme our lives, our behaviours – both as individuals and as a species.
Syd saw infinite fractals of fragile nature in layer after layer, interconnecting and separating, spinning particles filled with information and messages expanding and multiplying in intricate webs that threaten to paralyse all flexibility until we are entombed, immobile in a paralysis of inertia. The eyes have it, as they say in the hallowed halls of power.
Why was Syd so haunted by seeing so many strata of meaning and possibility? Because Syd was one of the rarest of souls that grace our transient paths of mortality. He was a storyteller, in the ancient sense of the shaman who instructs, forewarns, re-minds and heals others of their people, their clan, their culture or their chosen family and their community. This is a sacred calling, a spiritual duty that once understood as one’s fate cannot be denied, no matter what the price.
In the Middle Ages, this would be the troubadour. The musician-poet who wandered from court to court, castle to castle, inventing songs and allegories of love, lust, betrayal, and all other aspects of the human condition – often at the risk of brutal punishment, or even execution, should they offend the authority deciding the status quo of the moment. Regardless of danger, these beings are charged with seeking spiritual wisdoms to describe, interpret and, occasionally, even to elicit sense from nonsense.
For Syd, this ‘religious’ obligation required language. Syd took and used words in order to describe incredibly difficult revelations and observations on our behalf. After exploring new landscapes, alien territories and complex feelings, his task was to retrieve what useable ‘maps’ and explanations he could to share with his chosen community through the medium of the song. Lyrical lyrics. This demands an immensity of metaphor few can reach.
When we read Syd’s lyrics it would be easy to assume the jumbling, layering, colliding, anarchy of his surreal combinations is chaotic – reflecting a chaotic mind. But, we would contend that his smashing together of clusters of images and phrases is not designed to create chaos, nor even describe it, but is ironically, a technique born of genius to enable him to be ever more precise and orderly in his messages.
In the 1950s, W.S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin sought to liberate ‘the word’ in order to discover new ways to write ‘reality’ as we really experience it through all five senses simultaneously, plus memories triggered, plus expectations of possible and impossible repercussions. With Finnegans Wake, James Joyce had tried to write down what the inside of a thinking brain is like. Samuel Beckett attempted to imply the nature of consciousness without motive – but, until Syd Barrett, nobody had really applied this aspiration to the (often dismissed as banal) pop song, except maybe Bob Dylan.
What Burroughs and Gysin proposed was a tool they dubbed ‘The Cut-Up’ where they literally cut-up pieces of their own texts and texts by other writers, then re-assembled them at random ‘…to see what it really says’, as Burroughs pointed out. What they achieved was a neo-magickal system somewhere between prophecy and function. In their book The Third Mind, they discuss the various successes and failures of these experiments.
We had the great fortune to see the original Pink Floyd at the UFO Club and Middle Earth in the sixties and later without Syd several times in 1969 when they were promoting Ummagumma. There’s no space to discuss the pros and cons of Pink Floyd with and without Syd musically, though my personal preference remains for with Syd. What seems vital to focus upon is the poetic core of the Syd songs. He may seem to be extending an infatuation with the likes of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, The Wind in the Willows and nonsense limericks, as has been pointed out many times. (In fact ‘Octopus’ has been noted as consisting almost entirely of quotes from other people’s poems, which is a pure cut-up in the tradition of the Beats.)
What seems to me to be the purest aspect of Syd’s genius is his appropriation of a highly stylised, individual language all of his own in order to achieve the impossible of describing a holographic picture of life, of existence – both internally and externally. From the microscopic quantum landscape of psychedelically revealed particles, to the galactic expanse of space, stars, the planets and light.
In his solo work, Syd chose to insist on the inclusion of studio ‘mistakes’ or ‘misstakes’, as he might playfully say. Syd is reminding us over and over again that the means of perception and creation cannot and must not be controlled or constricted into more conventional formats. To solidify rules and parameters is to confine and sterilise the very essence of imagination. No stone can be left unturned in this search to comprehend.
Interestingly, legendary biologist Francis Crick only admitted years after his groundbreaking work discovering the double-helix structure of DNA that he had been using LSD regularly for problem solving at that time. Using small (then legal) amounts of LSD to increase his powers of analytical thought and speculation. It seems that Aldous Huxley had introduced him to this option. Crick said nothing at the time, as it might have been used to discredit his research.
Syd Barrett was using exactly the same process in his search to find the perfect phrase, chord, surprise, and joke that would encapsulate in some oblique but precise way the mystery of being alive and being an alive being. His innately shamanic tendencies were a blessing, in that they exposed vividly to him the intricacies of existence and a spiritual view of nature. They were also a curse, in that they were so shatteringly pervasive that he became lost within their infinity. In a very real sense, he was drowning in sensation and vision at the mercy of ubiquitous sensation. What he desperately needed was not to be cast adrift in the eye of his storm, but to feel a loving hand reach out to him, to rescue him unconditionally before his catastrophic isolation was compounded irreversibly by abandonment.
These would be djinn in some cultures, angels in others, tricksters and spirits slipping temporarily into this linear dimension, the one we each think of as ‘life’ as we talk to ourselves in our thoughts.
Syd Barrett took his journey for all of us. He was compelled to stare into the centre of all matter and meaning driven by an idealistic faith in the ultimate right to evolutionary salvation of our human species. He was not the first; he will not be the last of his kind.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, NYC
1. THE RIVER BANK
‘All movement is accomplished in six stages, and the seventh brings return.’
I Ching: Book of Changes Chapter 24: Fû/Return – The Turning Point Richard Wilhelm, translator, 1950
‘“So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end all too soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. Nothing seems worthwhile but to hear that sound once more and go on listening to forever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.’
The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame, 1908
Strange lights once flickered in the Fens outside Cambridge, a bleak land rife with myth. As dogs whined into the darkness, chill winds blew in off the Fen, as lights shone at twilight over damp ground. Legend held it that will-o’-the-wisps or hob-o’-lanterns were spirits bearing lanterns, leading travellers on the road astray. In the eerie glow, lights flickered above dykes and bog, weaving a hypnotic spell on wayfarers, drawing them to brackish waters.
Cambridge rose from drained marshlands. Old English fenns formed a flat pastureland of dark, rich silt. Reclaimed from the North Sea in the 17th century, much of this land once lay below salty water. A battle between land and sea had been waged since the dawn of Cambridgeshire’s recorded history. Barriers of trees curbed high winds off the ocean. Uninhabited wetlands became England’s finest farmland.
The Fens were rumoured to be the haunt of lost souls, witches, and web-footed peasants. Inbred Fen folk roamed the swampy sedges, traversing frozen ponds using bones as skates, as they hunted eels in lodes with three-pronged spears. No one would think of wandering in the Fens at night. They were too dangerous. The landscape was strewn with abbeys and monasteries set amid heavy, mist-laden bogs. Only monks and drovers knew the routes from one safe area to another.
Cambridge rose in the valley of the River Cam. With its source at Ashwell in Hertfordshire, the river feeds on through the Lower Cam, controlled by locks and weirs out toward the Fen. Merging with the Great Ouse south of Ely, it drifts into the North Sea at the lonely mudflat estuary of the Wash, where grey gulls screech amid the breakers.
Four miles south-east of Cambridge, the Gog Magog Downs, or Gogs, rise two hundred feet above the flat river valley. Here, pastures give way to outcroppings of chalk on the downs. The gradient is slight, less a climb then a vigorous walk to Wandlebury and Little Trees Hill. Steeped in ancient mystery, legend has it that Gog Magog the giant sleeps here, disenchanted by rejection from the nymph Granta in the river below.
Romans set up a garrison on Castle Hill overlooking the barren mire; they built a small town, Durolipons. In 410 AD, as the Empire collapsed, legions abandoned the town to invaders, leaving behind a long straight road known as the Roman Road. The ancient thoroughfare Via Devana that extends in a straight line along the perimeter of Wandlebury and the Beechwoods remains.
At the foot of the Magog Downs lies the springs of the Nine Wells – where children were warned not to play, as they were always associated with witchcraft and druids. The Nine Wells provides the water for Hobson’s Conduit on Trumpington Street.
In the early 17th century, Dutch engineers built drains and dykes to pump out the water until the fens emerged. The land was fertile, but until then it had been a system of marshland, bogs, and small, sparsely inhabited islands. Towns like Frog’s Abbey, Whittlesey and Downham Market emerged. Cambridge is laid bare to the fen where Huntingdon and St Ives stretch round to the Isle of Ely.
‘East Anglia is an odd area,’ affirms Syd Barrett’s friend David Gale. ‘Towns sit on this great flat expanse and can be seen from a distance. Driving from Cambridge, Ely looms out of the fens. Then across miles of flatland until reaching Norwich at the edge of the sea.’
Seamus O’Connell, friend of Roger Waters and Barrett, says, ‘Around Cambridge is dead flat, except for the Gogs nearby. In winter, we got ghastly cold winds from the north.’
Cambridge seems colder in winter, with arctic winds blowing across flat fields, coming straight in off the North Sea, forty miles distant. The city’s location in the river valley makes for damp, misty, cold winters due to this exposure to the northern elements.
Springtime is similarly chill, damp and windy, with south-westerly rains lashing violet flowers at the base of the Beechwoods. A land inundated by rainfall produces plentiful greenery that is further fed by sluices carved through marshland. Skies obscured by clouds hold rain in suspension over pastures and marsh grass. Sparse copses are silent, save for wind dragging leaves from shuddering trees rent by contractions of an unstable water table beneath the soil.
To the south of Cambridge lies London. Across the heights of Essex once travelled by road, now rail; less than an hour away through woodland and forest.
To the south-west lies Grantchester, where fence posts strung with rusted wire enclose pastures. Herds of cattle lay serpentine trails through loamy flax fields bound by grids of carline thistle. By the River Cam’s edge, framed against slow clouds, gnarled roots of willows twist deep into the chalk. Oak and ash trees with fallen boughs covered in moss score trails into the woods. Scattered hedges of bramble bush hem in deserted patches of bedstraw and snapdragon in the undergrowth. Violet bellflowers, vetch, scabious and poppies run rampant. Gales of wind cut through the woods, as slubby mud in ferrous veins churns underfoot. The land stands in silence.
Past Sheep’s Green and across Fen Causeway, by the King’s Mill and Laundress Green, the Cam feeds through the mill wheel and rushes into the Mill Pond, at a deep bend in the river. From here, the Upper Cam becomes the Lower Cam and drifts along the stretch of river known as the Backs, between the backs of the colleges and Queen’s Road. The Cam swirls and eddies under the bridges of the colleges, their lawns and buildings stretching down to the river bank.
From the Backs, the turrets of King’s College Chapel shadow the skyline. A landmark for hundreds of years, the chapel bears the portcullis and rose of the Tudor Kings. A vast, eighty-foot vaulted fan roof, the largest in the world, looms over the whole. Below, the flagstones and steps are worn to a smooth slope by the countless feet that have walked on them, and cast their lot on destinations unknown.
At the centre of the nave, there is a superbly carved screen where an organ stands with a towering protrusion of golden pipes, garnished with herald angels with gold trumpets. Underneath, an arch leads to the dark-panelled choir stalls that ring the walnut pulpit. With no cathedral of its own, and an exception to the rule, Cambridge Town was granted the title of ‘City’ by dint of royal edict.
The formative tributaries of psychedelia can be found among the sylvan meadows at the Mill Pond. Here, Roger Barrett and others hung out playing songs for friends on idyllic after-school afternoons and at weekends. The Mill Pond is a touchstone for the dream-like evocations of childhood that stand at the heart of psychedelia. Barrett’s songs called forth the infinity of space, with its multiplicity of unknown worlds amid the earthbound riverbank. A macrocosm within a microcosm.
At Grantchester Meadows, teenagers caroused in the grass, far from parental eyes. Sometimes, they would have drinks or ice cream in the tea gardens at the Orchard, under apple trees that exploded with blossoms in spring. By evening, pink clouds reflected in dark water, outlined by the blue sky, as swans and kingfishers glide by. Dry yellow stocks of corn herald the end of summer, as sunsets glow to crimson. Green grow the rushes at the riverbank, anchored in mud, with tall reeds swaying in the breeze, speaking silently of nature’s implacable restlessness.
In the 14th century, Protestant students and dissident monks broke away from Catholic Oxford University and came to Cambridge. Their Protestantism is borne out in the architecture. Cambridge, a cold, stone-built, north-European town, had always been a busy thoroughfare with thriving ports and communities along its shores. The clunch and stone needed to build the Colleges of King’s College Chapel was transported down the Cam waterways.
Beyond King’s Bridge and Garret Hostel Lane is Clare, the oldest of the Cam’s Bridges. Built in 1640, it has thirteen and seven-eighths stone balls decorating its span. The fourteenth ball has a segment chipped off in spite by an irate mason, vexed by being told his arches were off-centre. Further down, the Bridge of Sighs, a miniature of that found in Venice, safeguards the Cam at St John’s. Then, Magdalene Bridge, the original site of Roman and Saxon ports, where Pagan burial urns were discovered by a shocked angler.
The Cam snakes around the city, a stone mirage of medieval spires, carved corbels and granite archways. The river is bordered by trees that touch the ground to silhouette as the sun casts spectral shadows on gravel paths and cycle lanes. Squat, stone buildings are arranged along narrow closeted alleys. St John’s Chapel tower, the ‘wedding cake’, and the University Library loom, but none stand taller than King’s College Chapel. Symmetry, drafted by the Restoration architects, astounds, as oak-panelled doors, and mahogany-beam roof supports frame rooms where squeaking doors will always squeak.
In the Civil War, Oliver Cromwell garrisoned his army in King’s Chapel. He did not break the beautiful stained glass windows made by Flemish master glaziers, as he was intent on keeping his men warm.
The bell tower of Great St Mary’s rings out over King’s Parade and Market Hill. Here, a carved granite arch dated 1273 stands, chipped at the corners by modern-day vans as they turn into Market Hill’s narrow streets from butchers and bakers down Newnham Road. The cobbled Market Square, with neatly lined stalls under brightly coloured striped awnings, boasts local produce, hawked by East Anglian farmers. Their distinctive accent, a rhythm of long, stressed vowels, squared flat as the Fens, is a holdover from the Germanic Angles.
Fresh apples, oranges, raspberries in baskets, carrots stalks bound in twine, pickles, marigolds, bottled fruits and jams, sweets and buns, sit cheek by jowl with bric-à-brac and trinkets – curios, old boots, and second-hand books. Here, town and gown meet, one and alike. The central fountain an important meeting place in days gone by.
At bookshops tucked into alleyways, romantic poetry with gilt, marbled leaves crowds the shelves. An antique shop with scarred end tables holds cluttered tin ornaments in florid script that tells of old apothecaries and long-forgotten remedies.
Intricately wrought iron gates guard ivy-covered halls where undergraduates sit in wood-panelled rooms discussing logic and literature. At Clare College Gardens, white Forget-me-nots are interspersed with kaleidoscopic red and yellow tulips.
At Christ’s College Fellows’ Garden, Milton’s ghost paces eternally around a mulberry tree. Each college seems to have a ghost, often a peevish bedder or charlady. Sir Isaac Newton is rumoured to haunt his old rooms at Trinity where, from his window, above the gate, he ponders the proverbial apple tree. Clocks tick and stop when no one watches. Books fall open when no one looks. Laughter echoes from rooms that are never opened. Abbey House, at the corner of Beche Road, is said to be the single most haunted spot in Britain.
Under Silver Street Bridge, Scudamore’s punts are stacked with tarpaulins. Daily, the flat-bottomed boats glide across the Cam propelled by bargepoles. Under the Mathematical Bridge at Queen’s, built in 1749, currents push the punts farther down the lower Cam, stopping at Magdalene. Beyond this, Jesus Lock and a deeper stretch where houseboats hug the banks.
Wind rustles under bridges and fairy-ring mushrooms sprout at willows weeping by the banks. A lark spies an electric-blue dragonfly over the verdant lawns of Sidney Sussex College, as a toad croaks under a waterlogged broken oar, and caterpillars feed on water figwort.
Under towering trees, bike paths and rain gutters wind down to the water. Cool moss throngs on stone chairs. Lime-washed walls, porcelain washbasins, student quarters, with drab curtains and green glass lamps, lighten long, cold walks across town after dark, under bristling trees and through empty windswept streets.
All of these are signposts on the hidden map of Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett, who trod the alleys and pathways through the scholastic medieval town. Cambridge was home to three of the Pink Floyd; Barrett, David Gilmour, and Roger Waters – all raised in relative middle-class comfort. ‘When I was a townie in Cambridge, I coveted those sports cars those rich undergraduates were driving round in,’ Waters told the Big Issue. ‘I wanted a Lotus Elite.’
Waters and Gilmour left and never came back, while Barrett returned to live out his days in Cambridge, seat of academia, an oasis and anomaly in East Anglia. ‘The university is slightly misleading because it brings tremendous vitality, crowds and bustle and multifaceted cultural action to the city,’ explains David Gale. ‘This tends to obscure that Cambridge would only be one-horse market town were it not for the university. Cambridge in the early sixties was still a hick town. London seemed exotic, despite only being an hour away by rail.’
‘Because the university was there, there were always new students around at the beginning of term and the university dominated the town centre,’ says O’Connell. ‘The colleges were a wonder to look at, going on punts up and down the river.’
Wide open spaces, commons or ‘pieces’, ring the town, their mown grass scything into the landscape. Below Midsummer Common, plague victims are buried. In Elizabethan times, women accused of witchcraft were hung from gallows on Jesus Green. The verdant Parker’s Piece separates off the City Centre and stretches out towards Romsey Town and East Road. Half way across, there is a tall lamppost with ‘Reality Checkpoint’ scratched into its paintwork. This is the no man’s land of Cambridge. Behind are the college buildings and the town centre, ahead the Victorian terraces and housing estates.
Working-class estates set a geographic mile from the town centre might as well be a hundred figurative miles from the turreted university spires. This is the ‘town’ rather than the ‘gown’ district. The gown area extends in a one-mile radius from the chapel. When students are in residence, this part of Cambridge, like a corridor, belongs to those connected with the university.
Once, students knew too well not to cross the ‘checkpoint’ after dark on a Saturday, lest they be punched in the face by a ‘townie’ from the Romsey Estate. Besides the famed annual rowing races, ‘grad-bashing’ was also a tradition. ‘We hadn’t much to do with the university; there was a “town and gown” divide,’ explains O’Connell. ‘There was social tension. On Guy Fawkes Night, there was a tradition; town and gown would have a punch-up.’
Each 5 November, bonfires and fireworks marked Fawkes’s bungled attempt to blow up Parliament. These often ended in drunken student celebrations in Market Square. In 1954, townies swooped on the square and set upon students with punches and kicks.
Students who attended the university merged into the upper class that runs Britain. Seniors sat at High Table in college dining halls sipping port. As one local dryly notes, ‘Cambridge is where the elite student fraternity push to the front of queues, act obnoxious, and think they are the first people to get arseholed by drinking more than two pints.’
Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon, a young woman from the town, had an upbringing greatly removed from the comforts of middle-class Hills Road, where Barrett was raised. Jenny recalls there being ‘a definite divide between town and gown. Because I hadn’t come from a privileged background, I saw things differently. I’m from a working-class background and went to a rough school. That was tough among the working classes; there was no post-war prosperity. A struggle growing up and we had little. In winter it was cold, there sometimes was no money to buy food and we had little to wear. No one had a car, for example. My mother was a “bedder” at the college; she made students’ beds. When I started going out with undergraduates it resulted in her having to leave the college. There was a huge divide, though on the other hand, that worked well. Cambridge was a lot smaller. Everyone knew one another, there was much more trust. Cambridge was still a small town where everyone rode bicycles.’
Back then, students had to be in college by 10:30pm. The ‘Bulldogs’, a university police who dressed in black gowns and bowler hats, chased them up before locking the gates. It was different for the town kids; they had the run of the place. ‘Cambridge in the fifties was a calm, sedate and homely place with coffee bars, bookshops, and students,’ recalls Jenny’s husband, Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘There were many brainy people, a rural setting, though full of minds dealing in physics and mathematics.’
David Gale was the son of one such brain. ‘I grew up in Cambridge. My father was a biochemist at the university. From the age of eleven, we lived in a house near to where Syd Barrett’s parents lived, a few hundred yards around the corner along Hills Road.’
Roger Keith Barrett was born on 6 January 1946 in a small semi-detached house at 60 Glisson Road, ‘Jesmond’ chiselled in stone over the door. Glisson Road was part of the ‘town’, though comfortable nonetheless.
Already a well-established family with three other children, Roger was delivered by a midwife in the middle of the coldest winter in decades. Another product of the post-war baby boom, he was born almost nine months after VJ Day, the outpouring of delirious joy after a war that claimed over eight hundred thousand British soldiers and civilians. His youngest sister Rosemary was born in 1947.
Analysis developed by linguist Michael A. Covington indicates that Roger made immediate and powerful connections between sky, snow and winds. His first word association was wind; windy snow and wind through the sky. As the unforgiving winter raged around his windows, wind whipped snow into twenty-foot drifts and the Cam froze for miles. Barrett peeked from his mother’s arms at the world.
As soon as he could walk, Barrett toddled at the flood-swollen Mill Pond under the amused eye of his mother. A thunderbolt of infantile sensory connection linked ‘trees’, ‘river’, ‘rain’ and ‘sand’ in his young mind; words that would appear in equal dispersion across the length and breadth of his lyrical output. This profound connection with nature never left him. In his lyrics, the sky was a woman, and love was air. A delightful, cheerful toddler, Barrett woke smiling at the world.
England in the fifties anxiously retained its fading vestiges of Empire. On day trips to Cromer Pier the family rented a red-roofed beach hut. They sat by the frigid North Sea with trays of tea and sticky currant buns. On the wood plank pier sat a glass and steel pavilion that housed an amusement arcade with roll-a-penny stalls and candyfloss machines. The gypsy fortune-teller, a mechanical mannequin in glass box ringed with electric lights, scribbled handwritten fortunes for a few farthings. Vendors sold windmills on sticks and paper flags from far-flung British colonies in Pitcairn and Gibraltar for adorning sandcastles. As he trod the sand, traditional Punch and Judy puppet shows delighted Barrett, drawn to their anarchic festivity. ‘My earliest memory of Roger is of him on a seaside holiday running in front of me, turning and looking back at me from between his legs and giggling,’ Rosemary recalled.
The seashore made a profund impression on Roger. The moment he saw light strike the water, the diamond sun shining on the silver sea dazzled him. His world shone. The roots of Barrett’s lyrical connections linking places, words and feelings are to be found in these experiences. This imagistic meta-language gave scattered clues of how he interpreted the world. For Roger, ‘to see’ equalled ‘to know’. To know was to be, to know was to dream. In his mind, to think was to feel.
‘Love’ so closely correlated with ‘know’ as to form variants on the same feeling. With little division, he approached the world purely through his senses, open and receptive. Fiery food for the mind, Barrett appraised life purely through vision. When he was with you, he loved you. To know was to love, to love was to know – his wellspring. As sure as water streams from Hobson’s Conduit, Barrett loved knowledge he could comprehend by sight. ‘He would see and hear things no one else ever did,’ remembered Rosemary. ‘Colours were the thing. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had a condition like synaesthesia because a sound was a colour to him. If something were loud, he would say it was black and I knew what he meant because I’d grown up with him and was so close to him. Thinking about it now, to describe sounds as colours is unusual, but I understood.’
Synaesthesia refers to seeing sounds or hearing sights. In his variant, chromaesthesia, sound evoked colour. Words and numbers shone colours in Roger’s mind’s eye. To an unusual degree, his imagination was vivid, with a keen ability to absorb and recombine influences, however briefly observed. Even as a child, Barrett skimmed the surface of what was set before him, seizing upon what caught his eye.
For Roger, art came before music, and never left him. He liked drawing best of all. He showed talent for sketching early on, began to draw and paint at eighteen months old and never stopped. ‘People first realised there was something special about him when they saw his paintings as a child,’ said Rosemary. ‘He would do pencil drawings that were exceptional and he had what it took to draw what he saw. He was born with it.’
Stray images captured on walks were drawn with accuracy and skill. What caught Roger’s capricious fancy seeped into his sketchbooks. ‘As a child he did some very unusual caricatures of people in the family, they would have great big heads or be in some way amusing,’ Rosemary recalled.
By 1950, the Barrett family had moved to 183 Hills Road, further from the town and university in the nearby suburbs. The large double-fronted Victorian house stood back from the main road, with ivy running riot at the front and well-attended privy hedges lining a gravel driveway. At the back was a garden, where tall trees and shrubbery-lined paths and high retaining walls enclosed a gazebo. Inside were flock wallpaper and porcelain washbasins, with damask curtains and green glass lamps. Enamelled doorknobs with spidery cracks opened on large yet cosy rooms. In their happy home, the Barrett family valued literature, music and painting.
Touchstone of Roger’s world, 183 Hills Road was grey and black outside, wooden and warm on the inside. His childhood toys harked back to Victoriana. He played with his Pollock’s Toy Theatre, an elaborate painted cardboard box where he invented stories for puppets moved around a miniature stage by sticks and wires. Roger had little need for a script; the games he played were drawn from his own imagination. Poet Robert Graves wrote: ‘The Romantic peers by chance into the toy theatre and finds a play already in progress. He records, not the plot, but the impression.’ On other days he built trains with caterpillar hoods, or metal Spitfire aeroplanes and boats. With methodical concentration, Roger transformed the inanimate into life.
Barrett’s childhood was not commonplace. His understanding and personality were exceptional. Roger absorbed varied influences with ease through remarkable insight that sprang from what seemed to be an inexhaustible fount. Sensitive to words and prosody, he rapidly built a syntactic skeleton structure, talking and counting before he walked.
Barrett’s father, Doctor Arthur Max Barrett, Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery, Pembroke, was the morbid anatomist and pathologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Formal in manner, he was both kind and respected. Known as ‘Max’ to friends and family, Doctor Barrett was a brilliant, cultured man.
Born in Thaxted, Essex in 1909, Doctor Barrett’s father, Arthur Samuel Barrett, conducted a retail business in the town. His mother Alice Mary (née Ashford) was daughter of Reverend Charles Ashford, a Congregational Minister. The doctor’s maternal grandmother (née Ellen Garrett) was cousin of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to achieve a medical qualification in Britain. Garrett remarked, ‘My strength lies in the extra daring which I have as family endowment. All Garretts have it.’
Doctor Barrett came up to Cambridge in 1927, with a scholarship to the County and then Pembroke College. He had an outstanding academic career, with first-class honours. Forming part of the University Rover Crew, Max ran a Wolf Cub Pack with Miss Winifred Heeps, whom he married. They planned expeditions and summer camps. Max was awarded the Scout’s Medal for Valour after rescuing a woman from the River Cam.
In 1938, he was appointed to the post of University Demonstrator in the Department of Pathology. Masterly demonstrations in the post-mortem room and intensive dedication combined with what colleagues described as a ‘serene good nature’. A man intensely dedicated to his work, contemporaries recalled Doctor Barrett as being meticulous, skilful, and above all, systematic.
An interest in botany led Doctor Barrett to spend his free time roaming the East Anglian countryside in search of wild flowers and birds. The good doctor’s hobbies were painting intricate watercolours of wild fungi and mushrooms he collected on Gog Magog Downs, and playing in the local philharmonic. Max and Winifred gained immense pleasure from the success of their five children. This happiness at home greatly sustained him.
Barrett’s mother, Winifred, was considered a remarkable woman. A friend of Roger’s recalls, ‘Winifred was a jolly no nonsense woman, bustling and busy. She was always baking wonderful Victoria sponges and making jam. Homely, she didn’t wear aprons though. She was ordinarily un-smartish. Not intimidating at all, and very nice.’
Barrett’s four brothers and sisters, Alan, Donald, Ruth, and Rosemary, indulged young Roger, a bright sparkling boy. Rosemary was his closest sibling in age and temperament and shared a bedroom with him. ‘We were five children and so different,’ she explained. ‘Ours was a house where we could do many things. We had so many interests. In every room was different music and different things happening. Our house was very happy.’
Barrett’s father performed with the Cambridge Philarmonic, and was a pianist of considerable skill. David Gale recalls, ‘Cambridge was full of eccentric men on bicycles in those days, who looked slightly out of time, though a community that supported eccentricity rather comfortably. Roger’s father was a familiar figure cycling an upright bicycle on Hills Road. His mother was a jolly white-haired figure. He had two sisters and two brothers. His sister Rosemary was extremely jolly, the older one, less jolly, more contained. He had a curious elder brother who seemed pale, withdrawn, quiet and moody. Possibly he did not like us, though that was the impression I got.’
There were differences in temperament among the Barrett family. Although his father and elder siblings were quiet and reserved, his mother, Rosemary and Roger were more jovial. In adulthood, Roger gravitated towards the ‘withdrawn, quiet and moody’. Rosemary remembers her father being consumed with his work, and like a father only on holidays, even then somewhat distant. ‘He was there with us,’ she said, ‘but as if he was not there, but on another planet.’
Such remote parenting was the norm for middle-class fathers in post-war Britain. Rosemary subsequently asserted to biographers Watkinson and Anderson that her brother and father shared a ‘unique closeness. If Roger said anything witty, our father would always be first to laugh.’
The two sides of the family presented a stable balance. ‘Even when a child he always had a good sense of humour and was very sharp,’ recalled Rosemary. ‘If the atmosphere was thick and heavy for some reason, he would lighten it with a joke.’
‘Syd came from a middle-class background, so they were well-off,’ explains Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘They were all big houses on Hills Road. By the time I knew Syd I never met the other siblings, besides Rosemary.’
While Roger was still in short pants, his elder siblings made their exit into the wider world. He and Rosemary had the run of spacious house and garden. Rosemary later observed that they were inseparable, ‘like twins’. Roger recalled childhood birthdays with ‘parties and games that you play in the dark, when someone hides and hits you with a cushion. We also used to dress up and go into the street and throw stones at passing cars.’ Roger’s parties were a smash with visiting brothers Alan and Donald, who smiled as their puckish brother dashed through the house with sparklers, lighting up corridors in flickering light.
Winifred took ‘Rog and Roe’ to the children’s bathing spot on Snob’s Brook, a backwater off a small tributary at Coe Fen. There, the children learnt to swim, before graduating to Jesus Green outdoor lido, a hundred yards of river-fed water. Wooden bathing sheds by the riverbank, idyllic spots to idle away days sat on grass verges before a plunge into the icy water.
The River Cam was deeper then, and at Sheep’s Green’s bathing sheds, hardy Newnham Riverbank Club members climbed high diving boards for elaborate dives. Along green tussock sedge, quacking ducks echoed in cool swells beneath trees. Swallows perched on branches, water rats and moles scampered on the banks. Life had a measured rhythm.
‘With our father as kids we used to go to Byron’s Pool in Grantchester, a big pool and a wood, and [Roger] used to like going there,’ Rosemary explained to Simon Webb of the Syd Barrett Fund. ‘Any quiet, countryside areas around Cambridge he would enjoy.’
At the country’s oldest travelling funfair, Midsummer Fair, held on Cambridge’s Midsummer Common every June for over eight hundred years, lorries rolled in with fairground rides, tents, games and diversions. Assembled on the common, townspeople flocked to the fair. The Mayor of Cambridge opened proceedings, drove around in an open car and threw coins to children. Bertram Mills Circus also came, and entertained with clowns and jugglers, while Charley Baumann’s Bengal Tigers prowled in cages and a panatrope of fairground organs rang in the air.
A special treat was the Lyons ice cream stand, which also offered hot dogs with fried onions. Rog and Roe rode the Skid or Atomic Thriller below red-and-white-striped awnings. On the Octopus ride, bright with lights, cars mounted on mechanical arms spun on an axis. Arms rose and fell on hydraulics, and dipped and tilted to the children’s delight and terror. On tent flaps, suffused with lacquered paint, lurid murals were magic to impressionable children. They gazed awestruck at giant octopi smashing frigates to bits with tentacles, and sailors thrown pell-mell into the sea.
Music came into Roger’s life early, with piano lessons at seven. Two weeks after they began he staged a rebellion, stamped his foot and that was that. He did appear, though, with Roe in a school recital at the Guildhall off Market Square. At this first stage appearance, the siblings took to the piano and played Johann Strauss’s ‘Blue Danube’ waltz for their doting parents.
Barrett was brought up in a house where his father played the kind of classical waltzes that later peppered his own songs. ‘Music was always played in our house because our father loved it and our elder brother had a jazz band,’ recounted Rosemary.
Concerts by classical trios, quartets and orchestras punctuated the school year. Each Christmas Eve, King’s College Boys Choir sang Nine Lessons and Carols that were broadcast throughout Britain on the wireless. Childhood friends recall sitting around an electric fire in Roger’s room, singing Christmas carols regardless of the season. Barrett brought out the best in those around him with his open and warm nature. ‘My mother’s friends would come to the house to see him,’ explained Rosemary. ‘A witty, bright, attractive child, always making people laugh and everybody loved him. He had enormous presence and was always going to be something special. He had that sparkle.’
‘Syd was very much a product of the English middle to upper middle-class university or cathedral town background,’ observes Barry Miles, luminary of the sixties London underground scene. ‘Syd was well-grounded in English children’s literature and imagery of childhood was strong for him. He would have read nursery stories like The Wind in the Willows, Rupert the Bear and Winnie the Pooh; all the classic children’s stories that tend to be middle-class. Syd was a very British product in that sense. Oddly enough, the Soft Machine were similar in that their background was in Canterbury. Canterbury and Cambridge were not that different. A strong middle-class background in those towns, where everyone was nice, nice, nice, and a nice way to grow up. Syd was much like that, with highly developed wit, and English eccentricity. Nothing too strange, whimsical and I imagine not that different from others.’
Barrett later mused in an absent manner, ‘Fairytales are nice; a lot of it has to do with living in Cambridge, with nature and everything.’ Fairytales formed him. Beatrix Potter was a smash at Hills Road, with The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher being a favourite. Like Mr Jeremy Fisher, young Roger liked ‘getting his feet wet; nobody ever scolded him, and he never caught a cold!’ He could also be distracted easily. Once he forgot hot water running into the tub and roamed back to his room. A trickle down the stairs turned to a torrent. ‘Mum says it will take a week for the boiler to heat any more water,’ he ruefully wrote in a letter. ‘Mum was very cross; she hit me, I cried.’
At Hills Road, Winifred read to the children from the 1942 The Little Grey Men by B.B. (Denys Watkins-Pitchford). Baldmoney, Sneezewort, Dodder, and Cloudberry, the last four gnomes in Britain, lived in an oak tree at Folly Brook. When Cloudberry disappeared, his siblings built a boat to paddle upstream and find him.
When Roger was seven, he travelled to North Wales with his family. In woods around misty Mount Snowdon, he went missing. All six Barretts, and a few chaps from the Forestry Service, set off to search for him. Who should come ambling down the path, surprised how frantic everyone was. Roger had wandered off and had not felt lost in the woods – everyone else did. Taking off without a word was a facet of Barrett’s boundless curiosity. There was no telling what mischief he would get up to given half a chance.
One of Roger’s favourite tales was Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 The Wind in the Willows,which features the classically English adventures of Toad, Mole, Badger and Rat. Winifred also read the children bedtime stories from the 1918 compendium, English Fairy Tales, a book filled with evocative and slightly spooky colour plate illustrations by Arthur Rackham.
Roger’s influences came from a normal upper-middle-class sensibility. Everyone from that background was brought up with what parents and schools inculcated into them – the classic children’s literary education.
Barrett’s powerful connection to nature set him apart from others brought up with the same books. His lyrics evoke the woods, fenlands and rivers of Cambridgeshire. Cows ambled on the green and horses cantered on macadam paths by the Cam, amid croaking frogs, scarecrows in fields, as field mice ran around on the ground.
The satirical witticisms of Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc, ‘Designed for the Admonition of Children between the Ages of Eight and Fourteen Years’, were morbid and rum allegories. Belloc’s tale of ‘Matilda, Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death’ was one that Roger asked Winifred to read for him and Roe as a bedtime story. Barrett’s bond to Winifred was close, and there was no question who was mother’s favourite. Bright and precocious, demanding and petulant, Winifred doted on her youngest son. ‘My mother spoiled him because she loved him much more than us,’ Rosemary asserted. ‘Roger asked for more, and the child who asks more gets more. They were very close.’ There was always a slice of sponge cake in the kitchen when he came home from school.
In Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, Puck, last of the People of the Hills and ‘oldest thing in England’, dovetailed well with the Piper in The Wind in the Willows. Barrett was absorbed with woodland sprites and shaggy half-man, half-goat Pan figures. Puckish himself, stories fired mischief in his lively eyes, brown flecked with green. In Lewis Carroll’s twin tomes Alice’s Adventures Underground and Through the Looking Glass, young Alice stepped through a mirror into a world of curious and curiouser creatures. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis stirred his imagination, as schoolchildren passed through a wardrobe to Narnia.
‘He was always reading children’s books, fascinated by the magical Alice in Wonderland side of things,’ said Rosemary. ‘The childish make-believe world was one he lived in always, so he made lyrics out of that. Fantasy was always more interesting to him than reality. Reality was always tricky and boring. He hadn’t got a lot of time for reality!’ Forever seeking a magic portal, fired by flights of fancy in his books, the line dividing fantasy and reality was a nebulous one. For Barrett, fantasy was reality.
At home, there was The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Kenneth Grahame, Nursery Rhymes of England by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, and Nursery Rhyme Book by Andrew Lang. Roger also owned Mother Goose or the Old Nursery Rhymes, illustrated in delicate pastels by Kate Greenaway. Edward Lear’s Absolute Nonsense and Book of Limericks, with its inspired wordplay and nonsensical rhymes. Roger, like Lear and Carroll, would later favour stressed line endings, where stress falls on the last syllable. Winfred read, ‘Far and few, far and few/ Are the lands where the Jumblies live/ Their heads are green, and their hands are blue/ And they went to sea in a sieve.’
The erudite nonsense of these traditional English children’s stories blends fantasy and sly surrealism. Gnomes, goblins, Hobbits, unicorns, Cheshire cats and hubble-bubble smoking caterpillars. Moles and toads walked, talked, and even drove motor cars. English in eccentricities and mannerisms, the animals wore waistcoats, carried pocket watches, smoked pipes, and were irritable and witty by turns. As Barrett grew, he reached up to higher shelves for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, with Middle Earth, wizard Gandalf and Hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
Television was a luxury in post-war Britain, though the Barrett house had a large black-and-white set with a tiny round screen. The BBC broadcast children’s shows. Besides Andy Pandy and The Woodentops were The Flowerpot Men – puppets Bill and Ben lived out the back of a shed in a garden and spoke their own language, ‘oddle-poddle’. A Little Weed lived between their flowerpots and cried ‘wee-eed weee-eeed’ whenever possible – a formative influence.
Mesmeric fantasy might have seemed preferable to Morley Memorial Junior School on Blinco Grove, a few dozen yards up Hills Road, which Roger attended in the early 1950s. Though he wept bitterly during his first week, classmate Alison Barraclough vividly recalled an eleven-year-old Barrett singing in Music and Movement class. Barrett, in short pants, stood before the class and sang, ‘Cherry-ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry/ Full and fair ones; come and buy.’ ‘There was always something special about Roger even then, his amazing imagination,’ observed Barraclough.
When pupils were instructed to draw a hot day, classmates dashed off perfunctory sand-and-sea scenes, while young Barrett cheekily drew a girl on a beach in a bikini with an ice-lolly dripping on her.
After school, Roger and Alison walked home up Marshall Road, crouching in autumn leaves and rolling marbles in the gutter. ‘We were mad about marbles. All of us had our own sets we kept in special marbles bags our mothers made. The last time we played marbles we were only eleven but would be going to different schools after holidays. There was an air of finality about Syd when he turned to me and said, “These are for you.” He handed me what was probably the most treasured thing he had, that bag of marbles. I could not believe it. A beautiful set like that! No one ever gave their marbles away to anyone but Roger gave me his. Even as a little boy, he was extraordinary, beautiful. All the girls loved him but he always had a special sparkle in his eye for me.’
Rosemary said, ‘Very, very charismatic. As a child, he was a clown. Very attractive and exceptionally gifted. He always had loads and loads of friends, because he was such fun. Always laughing and always had a huge sparkle in his eyes.’
From nursery rhymes, Barrett adopted his curious phrasing, rhyming and meter, cadence and intonation. Interplay between words and melody in nursery rhymes made a profound impression at a tender age.
‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, with its falling cadence and diatonic notes, was one. ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ also possess a certain melodic touch that later slotted into Barrett’s material, rife with the falling chromatic melodies that run through all his songs. All have a falling semitone interval, difficult to sing for adults, simple for children. For Barrett, rhyme, matching words with similar sounds in couplet verse, opened up a new world. All his best songs resonate with these formative connections.
Music-hall songs rang in Roger’s ears, culled from old seventy-eights he found at home. On a wind-up gramophone with brass bell, he put flat heavy shellac records and wound the handle. From the skating needle hummed a hiss of crackling song. A quintessential English form; satirical, humorous, risqué music-hall tunes remained ingrained in British culture long after its heyday. Songs performed in character saw ‘Champagne Charlie’, the London swell, living the high life. Lowbrow music-hall tunes celebrated wine, women and song; the Victorian version of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Cross-dressing, part of the firmament of English culture, saw female and male impersonators enjoy stardom in music halls.
Musical acts were supported by clowns and jugglers, acrobats and trick cyclists. Famed ‘Queen of the Music Hall’ Marie Lloyd fluttered a sequin fan as she wagged hoop-skirted hips and sang ‘she’d never had her ticket punched before’ with saucy knowing winks, alongside energetic renditions of ‘Every Little Movement Has a Meaning of Its Own’. The music halls enshrined a peculiarly English humour favouring wordplay, innuendo and double entendre.
Barrett songs like ‘Here I Go’ display ample affection for these sounds. Dance-hall favourites from the twenties and thirties by Billy Cotton and his London Savannah Band were songs from his parents’ youth. English dance bands toured ballrooms countrywide with brass, banjos, stand-up bass and snare drum. Barrett’s Pink Floyd often played those same ballrooms, the faded remnants of a bygone era.
There was also roller-skating at yellow-brick Corn Exchange on Wheeler Street on Friday nights for half a crown. The Regal, a single-screen cinema on St Andrew’s Street, ran ‘the minors’ for kids on Saturday mornings. They screened westerns and cartoons for a rowdy audience. The Regal ran matinees or epics Ben Hur and El Cid, which Barrett and friends trooped off to watch.
Walt Disney’s Fantasia made a strong impression, with its dancing hippopotami and ostriches in tutus. The film provided Roger with an early exposure to Igor Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’, with a discordant bassoon opening a tone poem on creation. Tchaikovsky’s hypnotic ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’, with jangling celeste blended with lilting clarinet and plucked string pizzicatos. Amazed at how they were used, they crept into his later improvisations.
When he was nine or ten, Roger progressed to comic books. From comics like The Beezer, he was enthralled by ‘The Iron Eaters’, sponges from space that ate iron. His Eagle comics featured intrepid space swashbuckler Dan Dare, ‘pilot of the future’, battling the dreaded lime-green-skinned Mekon, wicked ruler of Venus. An adaptation of the strip was also dramatised seven times a week on Radio Luxembourg.
Barrett sat on the floor at Hills Road and followed Dan Dare and sidekick Digby as ‘Operation Saturn’ ran in serial. Flying figures in uniform, they plummeted toward Saturn’s moon, Titan. Digby exclaimed in mortal terror, ‘Water, sir! Nowt but water!’ Another Dan Dare comic involved the Wandering World, a nomad space city last seen in ‘sub-light transit away from the Solar System’ and refusing all contact. Roger went through a phase of drawing strip cartoons about heroes he’d made up. In this, he refers to Dan Dare, singing about the frightening icy seas of Jupiter and Saturn.
Another favourite was Journey into Space on BBC radio. Operation Luna told of misadventures of the first moon landing crew: Captain ‘Jet’ Morgan, Canadian ‘Doc’ Matthews, Australian engineer ‘Mitch’ Mitchell and Cockney radio operator ‘Lemmy’ Barnet saved the world from Martian invasion in distant 1971. ‘BBC presents… Jet Morgan in… Journey into Space!’ As a rocket took off (actually a jet at Heathrow Airport), followed by ascending tone (a thermionic valve through the BBC’s echo chamber), eerie clavioline by Van Phillips in the background.
Over Christmas and New Year 1958-59, he watched the popular television science fiction show Quatermass, in which Professor Bernard Quatermass saved the earth from alien invasion. Singularly horrifying to a generation, an alien object dug up at a building site in London had terrible effects on whoever came into contact with it, even Quatermass.
On a lighter note, Roger loved the The Goon Show – a long-running series of comedy radio routines where Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan improvised with abandon, using sound effects, nonsense and vocal tricks to construct a subtle satire on British culture.
Sellers solemnly intoned, ‘Feathered non-saxophone-playing Senapati tribesmen have been sweeping down from date fields of Northern Waziristan… The reason for these destructive raids was an attempt to capture and imprison the recipe for the Great International Christmas Pudding!’ The Goons’ obsession with accents and wordplay electrified radio. Barrett knew what surrealism was; he had ample evidence from the Goons, which he incorporated into his own off-kilter humour. On Sunday mornings, the mildly ribald Round the Horne followed The Goon Show, whose nonsensical exchanges and twist endings delighted Barrett.
Charles: ‘I know.’
Fiona: ‘I know you know.’
Charles: ‘I know you know I know.’
Fiona: ‘Yes, I know.’
Roger Waters first met Barrett at a Saturday-morning art class taught by his schoolteacher mother Mary at Homerton College on Hills Road. Waters lived around the corner on Rock Road. Barrett was six and Waters eight. Barrett’s parents were friends with Mary Waters, though their sons did not become friends until their teenage years. When Waters was five months old, his father was killed in World War Two. Waters said that this formed his outlook on life, and left him with much anger and hurt.
‘The house Roger Waters lived in on Rock Road was not all that big,’ explained Seamus O’Connell. ‘Mary had to bring up these two boys on her own. Mary Waters’s attitudes were progressive; she was big in local politics, an energetic and remarkable woman.’ Though his mother taught art, Waters complained that Mary did not encourage his creativity: ‘No interest in music and art, only politics. I did not have a happy childhood.’
Waters attended the highly competitive state-funded Cambridge and County School for Boys, ‘the County’, at a red-Suffolk-brick building on Hills Road. He was miserable there, save for physical education. He and teammates Rado ‘Bob’ Klose and Storm Thorgerson all played for the cricket team. The uniform was strict; navy-blue blazer, caps and school tie. All the boys were addressed by surname, with added initial when needed. Masters barked at, berated, and caned pupils.
However, one inspirational teacher was Denis Fielder, Director of Music. He told pupils, one of whom was soon to be Barrett, ‘Music is never notes on a page. Any composer who tells you so is hiding something. Always ask what the composer is trying to tell you. Whether about himself or the world he lives in.’
Waters said, ‘I was considered a complete twat at almost everything, particularly English. Most teachers were absolute swine, only concerned with university entrance. I hated it, apart from games, which I loved. You bloody well did as you were told and kept your mouth shut. School was an “us and them” confrontation. A few friends and I formed a rather violent, revolutionary clique. I enjoyed the violence of smashing up school property; organized clandestine property violence against the school, with bombs, though nobody ever got hurt.’ Even at school, Waters had conflicting motivations; resisting authority though wanting to lead, inflicting damage though restrained by humanitarianism – anger and empathy in equal measure.
In 1957, as Waters bombed the school, Barrett arrived at the County. ‘I had a very straightforward life,’ he observed. ‘I went to a school just over the road.’ Barrett enjoyed school, was popular and became recognised as an intelligent, though lackadaisical student. Subsequently recalled as a distinguished old boy of the school, he was regarded as an artist of promise. ‘Syd went to the County, so he had a lot of intellect on him,’ remembered his friend John Watkins. ‘He read many books and educated himself.’
Precocious, Barrett was often annoyed with tedious geography lessons and became disruptive, though with such wit that teachers often excused his cheekiness. A harlequin who used cleverness and trickery to outwit his betters, Barrett had charisma and offhand brilliance. When he chose to engage his intellect, he met with success, shining in art. Despite having little interest in athletics, he was a good long-distance runner and always ran topless or barefoot; the fastest sprinter in the whole school, nobody could beat him. His hair was longer than anyone at the County and he wore it combed in a fringe before the Beatles adopted the style.
Pink Floyd album-cover designer Storm Thorgerson was in the year above Barrett. Tim Renwick, from Pink Floyd’s touring band, two years below: ‘They were older than me, though I remember them clearly; they were very cool. Roger made history refusing to join the cadet force, a rebel. Syd was my patrol leader in the Scouts. An impressive and charismatic bloke, as was Roger.’
The Seventh Cambridge Boy Scouts was all pupils from the County. Barrett’s Wolf Cub pack met at a Scout Hut on Perne Road to set out on camping trips and night hikes in the Norfolk Broads. In his 1908 manual, Scouting for Boys, Scouts’ founder Robert Baden-Powell wrote, ‘Hills and trees, and birds and beasts, and sea and rivers… all this brings health and happiness such as you can never get among bricks and smoke of the town.’ Barrett took those words to heart. He had relentless energy and pranksterish good fun as he took to the hills and woods with the Scouts. Wrapping a blanket around his head, he declared himself Tutankhamun’s mummy, and twanged away on his banjo, using a sash from his mother’s curtains as a strap.
‘Barrett and I were about the same age, with only a few months between,’ recalled classmate Don Leighton. ‘It was usual to congregate in Drummer Street bus station after school, before departing for home. A girl infatuated with him, much to my annoyance, introduced me! The kind of guy who attracted girls effortlessly. I remember vividly one conversation we had – what we were going to do after we left school. His reply was surprising. He was going to become a solicitor’s clerk. Yes, I did hear correctly. That was delivered without irony. In hindsight I’d say he had to be pulling my leg!’
Another close friend at the County was the late Paul Charrier. ‘Paul was at school with him and a huge influence on Syd,’ recounts Jenny Lesmoir-Gordon. ‘They were good friends; Paul was a little bit younger but a very strong character. Paul was such a wild person. He had long, curly blonde hair that stood up, and these little glasses. He’d ride his cycle singing at the top of his voice around Cambridge.’
‘Paul was a remarkable young man, a person of tremendous energy and exuberance,’ notes David Gale. ‘Paul lived, as it happened, between Syd and me. The three of us would often hang out and have an uproarious time. Paul was outrageous and amusing, kindly, ultimately serious and spiritually inclined.’
Charrier was notorious for his pranks – once setting fire to a stuffy patron’s newspaper at the Kenya coffee house. He also encouraged Barrett’s extrovert nature, and the pair became rumbustious mischief-makers, bunking off school to scamper around nearby railway tracks, or race bikes by the Cam, ringing bells madly.
Past the Perse on Hills Road, underneath Long Road, was the Cut. Gravel walks ran beneath a bridge where couples kissed and third-formers smoked with school ties loosened, laughing at jokes without punch lines beneath horse chestnut trees with knotty trunks. Roger and Paul skylarked to chalk pits in a disused quarry at Cherry Hinton. Up Cherry Hinton Road, past Cherry Hinton Hall, the soft marl chalk crumbled beneath their wheels. The two friends biked to the quarry in secrecy, picking through underbrush inches from the deep pits now filled with dark water, a dangerous thrill forbidden by parents.
