“Hardhearted”: The moment Pink Floyd abandoned Syd Barrett
Kicking a member out of a band is always bound to be a messy affair. It’s like a divorce in many ways as the musicians are entangled by personal and creative relationships and share assets. It’s not as simple as merely walking away from one another but often involves a painful process of dividing things up and drawing a line in the sand as the remaining members move on to a new era. But there are ways of doing things to soften the blow, which someone should have told Pink Floyd when they cut Syd Barrett loose in a callous way that could rival any toxic marriage split.
However, it’s not like Barrett had been a great partner to the band. Despite being a vital cornerstone of the group’s history, the original founder was only in the group for three short years. But in that short time period, his contribution was immeasurable as he set them on a course into experimentation, helping point them in the direction they would always go in, venturing into a world of genre defiance and sonic adventuring.
Yet that spirit would also be Barrett’s downfall. It was his experimentation with drugs that seemed to spur his boldness within his music, with psychedelics giving the group a new and woozy language with which to play. But in a story told time and time again in music, Barrett dove too deep and fell victim to addiction. Similar to the story of Brian Jones, the singer and guitarist’s drug use made him unproductive, unreliable and, eventually, deeply unwell. While the rest of the group seemed able to balance their hedonism with the level of focus needed to make it to gigs on time and stay busy in the studio, Barrett fell behind, becoming a heavy weight that the rest felt was dragging them down or holding them back.
By the start of 1968, things were at a crisis point. Barrett had become essentially useless to the group. They brought in David Gilmour, who was tasked with replacing the musician in a veiled way. Gilmour was going to be something of a backup member, able to step in whenever Barrett inevitably let them down. Then, when the newest member was on stage more than the original, they planned to have Barrett behind the scenes writing songs, slowly making his role smaller and smaller.
But that’s not a healthy way for a band to function. For neither Barrett nor Gilmour, a one-foot-in, one-foot-out approach is no good for creativity. Yet, as the original member continued to be less and less reliable, falling deeper and deeper into a state of terrible mental health, there was no way to spark Barrett back up, it seemed.
Realistically, what should have been done is some severe intervention. The band should have stepped in to get the musician the help he desperately needed, but this was the 1960s. Conversations around mental health, let alone men’s mental health, were nonexistent. There wasn’t the language to talk about these things that there is today, nor the structures in place to get people adequate support.
However, even with that excuse as reasonable, the band could’ve handled the end better. “In the car on the way to collect Syd, someone said ‘Shall we pick up Syd?’ and the response was ‘No, fuck it, let’s not bother’”, drummer Nick Mason recalled. That was it. They simply didn’t pick him up.
Waters said callously, “He was our friend, but most of the time we now wanted to strangle him.”
At least there’s a level of self-awareness within the band now, as Mason added in retrospect, “To recount it as baldly as this sounds hardhearted to the point of being cruel – it’s true. The decision was, and we were, completely callous.” Only years later, when Barrett fell into a reclusive life, the band seemed to see just how blinded they were at the time.
“In the blinkered sense of what we were doing, I thought Syd was simply being bloody-minded and was so exasperated with him that I could only see the short-term impact he was having on our desire to be a successful band,” Mason said.
They put the band first, and with the legacy Pink Floyd went on to build, who can really blame them? But even still, the sad blow of the split could have been handled with more kindness.
