The final time Syd Barrett ever saw Pink Floyd: “I think I was threatened by him”
When a group has been going for decades, you are bound to lose a member here or there to some form of trial, tribulation or tragedy. If your band started out in the 1960s, then it is almost a guarantee. The same can certainly be said for Pink Floyd and their enigmatic founder, Syd Barrett. On June 5th 1975, Pink Floyd would see their old bandmate and former ringleader Barett for the final time.
For a while, Barrett had become a peripheral figure in the group’s story and had been cast out of the main framework of the group for decades. His final appearance in the group’s world would not only provide a tragic tableau but offer up a sincere reason for why they could have ever achieved the success they did with him in the band. The pioneering musician dropped in on one of Pink Floyd’s recording sessions for the acclaimed Wish You Were Here out of the blue, and, in truth, he looked a shadow of his former self. Afterwards, Barrett would leave the studio and drift helplessly into obscurity.
Legend has it that Barrett arrived at the studio at the same time that the band was working on the track ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, a song about their fallen founder. By this point, Barrett had mostly left the music industry for good, choosing instead to live out of a London hotel and rarely connecting with the public in any meaningful way. Having cut out contact with his former bandmates, his arrival at the recording studio left them rippled with shock.
Roger Waters, who penned the track about his old friend, was one of the members of the band who were forced to relinquish Barrett of his duties in 1968. He and Barrett had started the group together, and the decision to remove Barrett from his duties was not taken lightly. As his drug use continued to spiral out of control, along with his frailing mental health, Barrett’s use of psychedelics had significantly impaired his creative vision and left him without a view of how to proceed in the pop music world. He had recoiled from the imaginative creator he once was and was now seemingly unable to escape the worlds he had created in his own mind. Without the ability to perform live or write songs, it became clear that Barrett didn’t need to be in a rock group, he needed help.
It was an extremely tough situation for everyone involved. The remaining Floyd members carried immense guilt over his departure and, in a bid to deal with it, helped him create his two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. The late Richard Wright, reflecting on the struggle he faced helping on those sessions for Barrett’s solo material, once said: “Doing Syd’s record was interesting, but extremely difficult. Dave [Gilmour] and Roger did the first one (The Madcap Laughs) and Dave and myself did the second one. But by then it was just trying to help Syd any way we could, rather than worrying about getting the best guitar sound. You could forget about that! It was just going into the studio and trying to get him to sing.”
The Barrett who arrived at Floyd’s studio on that balmy June evening was a completely different entity from the one they had last seen a few years ago. The musician had become bloated, and even though he was physically there in the studio, mentally, he wasn’t.
Pink Floyd were initially bewildered by his arrival, assuming he must be a member of the crew and it took a while before Gilmour eventually identified him as their former bandmate. Waters, it is said, immediately broke down in tears after seeing what Barrett had become. That June day also happened to be Gilmour’s wedding day, so Barrett wandered into the guitarist’s reception at EMI but then left without telling anyone, disappearing in a similarly strange fashion as he’d arrived.
“I’m very sad about Syd, [though] I wasn’t for years,” Waters said in 1975. “For years, I suppose he was a threat because of all that bollocks written about him and us. Of course, he was very important and the band would never have fucking started without him, because he was writing all the material. It couldn’t have happened without him, but on the other hand, it couldn’t have gone on with him.
“He may or may not be important in rock ‘n’ roll anthology terms, but he’s certainly not nearly as important as people say in terms of Pink Floyd. So, I think I was threatened by him.”
Waters would have one final chance encounter with his final bandmate, a devastatingly sad occurrence: “The last time I saw him was a couple of years after he turned up at the Wish You Were Here sessions,” he told the Mirror in 2008. “I bumped into him in [British department store] Harrods where he used to go to buy sweets, but we didn’t speak — he sort of scuttled away.”
During Barrett’s time in the band they concocted some magic which he was the reason for but like Waters admitted in 1975, they wouldn’t be where they were without him or indeed with him if he had continued to be a member beyond 1968.
