Pink Floyd With Syd Barrett - Interstellar Overdrive Full Length Video - Part 1, London 1966
Syd Barrett - Short bio and history
Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett (6 January 1946 – 7 July 2006) was an English singer, songwriter, guitarist, and painter, best remembered as a founder member of the band Pink Floyd. He was the lead vocalist, guitarist, and primary songwriter during the band's psychedelic years, providing major musical and stylistic direction in their early work: he is credited with creating their name. Barrett left the group in April 1968 amid speculations of mental illness exacerbated by drug use, and was briefly hospitalised.
He was active musically for ten years, recording with Pink Floyd four singles, the debut album (and contributing to the second one), plus several unreleased songs. In 1969, Barrett started off a solo career with the release of the single, "Octopus", which foreshadowed his first solo album, The Madcap Laughs (1970), which was recorded over the course of one year (1968–1969) with four different producers (Peter Jenner, Malcolm Jones, David Gilmour, and Roger Waters). Nearly two months after Madcap was released, Barrett began working on his second – and last – album, Barrett (produced by Gilmour, and featuring contributions from Richard Wright), which would be released in late 1970, before going into self-imposed seclusion lasting until his death in 2006. In 1988, an album of unreleased tracks/alternate takes, Opel, was released by EMI with Barrett's approval.
Barrett's innovative guitar work and exploration of experimental techniques such as using dissonance, distortion, and feedback had an enormous legacy, with a wide variety of musicians from David Bowie to Brian Eno to Jimmy Page and more drawing influence. In his post-musician life, Barrett continued with his painting and dedicated himself to gardening, never to return to the public eye. He died in 2006. A number of biographies have been written about him since the 1980s, and Pink Floyd wrote and recorded several tributes to him after he left, most notably the 1975 album Wish You Were Here.
Pink Floyd years (1965–68)
Starting in 1964, the band that would become Pink Floyd underwent various line-up and name changes such as "The Abdabs", "The Screaming Abdabs", "Sigma 6", and "The Meggadeaths". In 1965, Barrett joined them as The Tea Set (sometimes spelt as T-Set)] and when they found themselves playing a concert with a band of the same name, Barrett came up with the name "The Pink Floyd Sound" (also known as "The Pink Floyd Blues Band", later "The Pink Floyd"). He devised the name "Pink Floyd" by juxtaposing the first names of Pink Anderson and Floyd Council whom he had read about in a sleeve note by Paul Oliver for a 1962 Blind Boy Fuller LP (Philips BBL-7512): "Curley Weaver and Fred McMullen, (... ) Pink Anderson or Floyd Council—these were a few amongst the many blues singers who were to be heard in the rolling hills of the Piedmont, or meandering with the streams through the wooded valleys." Barrett used "Pink and Floyd" as the name of his two pet cats. Barrett also told the story that the name was transmitted to him by a flying saucer while he was sitting on Glastonbury Tor.
During 1965, they went into a studio for the first time, after a friend of Richard Wright's was giving the band free time. They recorded a cover of Slim Harpo's "I'm a King Bee", and 3 Barrett originals: "Double O Bo", "Butterfly" and "Lucy Leave". "Double O Bo" and "Lucy Leave" survive as vinyl acetates. At this time, Barrett had moved to Earlham Street, in Covent Garden. With the new residency, Barrett met (among others) Peter Wynne Wilson and Susie Gawler-Wright, "The Psychedelic Debutante", who would provide lighting for Pink Floyd shows later on. In the summer of 1965, Barrett had begun an affair with Lindsay Corner. It was during this summer that Barrett had his first acid trip in the garden of friend, Dave Gale,] with Ian Moore and Storm Thorgerson. While under the influence of the acid, Barrett had placed an orange, a plum and a matchbox into a corner, while staring at the fruit, which he claimed symbolized "Venus and Jupiter". Thorgerson later used this imagery, by adding the previously mentioned items to the cover of the double album combination of Barrett's solo albums, Syd Barrett.
In August 1965, Barrett (without the band) together with other Cambridge friends, went to St. Tropez, in France, travelling via Land Rover, meeting up with Gilmour at the end of the journey. There, Barrett and Gilmour were arrested for busking Beatles songs on the streets.Later, they trekked to Paris, camping outside the city for the course of a week and visiting one of the landmarks, the Louvre.After arriving back in London, the entire band was taking acid frequently. In one period of experimentation with acid, Barrett and another friend, Paul Charrier, end up naked in the bath, reciting: "No rules, no rules". Later on in the summer, as a consequence of the continuation of drug use, the band became absorbed in Sant Mat, a Sikh sect. Thorgerson (now living on Earlham Street) and Barrett went to a London hotel to meet the sect's guru; Thorgerson managed to join the sect, while Barrett, however, was deemed too young to join. Thorgerson perceives this as a deeply important event in Barrett's life, as he was intensely upset by the rejection. While living within close proximity of his friends, Barrett decided to write more songs ("Bike" was written around this time).
Barrett's departure from Pink Floyd
Through late 1967 and early 1968, Barrett's behaviour became increasingly erratic and unpredictable, partly as a consequence of his reported heavy use of psychedelic drugs, most prominently LSD.Many report having seen him on stage with the group, strumming on one chord through the entire concert, or not playing at all. At a show at The Fillmore in San Francisco, during a performance of "Interstellar Overdrive", Barrett slowly detuned his guitar. The audience seemed to enjoy such antics, unaware of the rest of the band's consternation. Interviewed on Pat Boone's show during this tour, Syd's reply to Boone's questions was a "blank and totally mute stare"; according to Nick Mason, "Syd wasn't into moving his lips that day". Barrett exhibited related behaviour during the band's first appearance on Dick Clark's popular TV show American Bandstand. Although surviving footage of this appearance shows Barrett miming his parts of the song competently, during a group interview afterwards, when asked two questions by Clark, Barrett's answers were terse, almost to the point of rudeness (though, as Clark admitted, they had been flying non-stop from London to Los Angeles). Before a performance in late 1967, Barrett reportedly crushed Mandrax tranquilliser tablets and an entire tube of Brylcreem into his hair, which subsequently melted down his face under the heat of the stage lighting, making him look like "a guttered candle". Nick Mason later disputed the Mandrax portion of this story, stating that "Syd would never waste good mandies".
During their UK tour with Jimi Hendrix in November 1967, guitarist David O'List from The Nice was called in to substitute for Barrett on several occasions when he was unable to perform or failed to appear. And sometime around Christmas, David Gilmour (Barrett's old school friend) was asked to join the band as a second guitarist to cover for Barrett, whose erratic behaviour prevented him from performing. For a handful of shows Gilmour played and sang while Barrett wandered around on stage, occasionally deciding to join in playing. The other band members soon grew tired of Barrett's antics and, on 26 January 1968, when Waters was driving on the way to a show at Southampton University, the band elected not to pick Barrett up: one person in the car said, "Shall we pick Syd up?" and another said, "Let's not bother." As Barrett had, up until then, written the overwhelming bulk of the band's material the initial plan was to keep him in the group as a non-touring member—as The Beach Boys had done with Brian Wilson—but this soon proved to be impractical.
According to Roger Waters, Barrett came into what was to be their last practice session with a new song he had dubbed "Have You Got It Yet?". The song seemed simple enough when he first presented it to his bandmates, but it soon became impossibly difficult to learn and they eventually realised that while they were practising it, Barrett kept changing the arrangement. He would then play it again, with the arbitrary changes, and sing "Have you got it yet?". Eventually they realised they never would and that they were simply bearing the brunt of Barrett's idiosyncratic sense of humour.[86] Waters had called it "a real act of mad genius".
Barrett did not contribute material to the band after A Saucerful of Secrets was released in 1968. Of the songs he wrote for Pink Floyd after The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, only one ("Jugband Blues") made it to the band's second album; one ("Apples and Oranges") became a less-than-successful single, and two others ("Scream Thy Last Scream" and "Vegetable Man") were never officially released. Barrett supposedly spent time outside the recording studio, in the reception area, waiting to be invited in. He also showed up to a few gigs and glared at Gilmour. Barrett played slide guitar on "Remember a Day" (which had been first attempted during the Piper sessions), and also played on "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun". On 6 April 1968, the group officially announced Barrett was no longer a member of Pink Floyd,[87] the same day, the band's contract with Blackhill Enterprises was terminated.
Solo years (1968–72)
After leaving Pink Floyd, Barrett distanced himself from the public eye. At the behest of EMI and Harvest Records, he embarked on a brief solo career, releasing two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett (both 1970), and a single, "Octopus". Some songs, "Terrapin", "Maisie" and "Bob Dylan Blues", reflected Barrett's early interest in the blues.
Source:wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Barrett
