Syd Barrett’s unique ability to “deconstruct” the guitar
Syd Barrett is a figure defined by tragedy these days. It’s not entirely unfair; the story of his decline in the face of drug addiction and mental health issues is a sobering one that clouds the entire career of one of rock’s biggest and most influential bands. There is still joy to be found there, though, and in the two decades since his passing, it’s been genuinely heartening to see the discussion of Syd’s career change.
Where once the focus was on the sordid and tragic details of his life, today, the emphasis is as much on Barrett’s music as his story—and deservedly so. His back catalogue is nearly as influential as the entirety of Pink Floyd’s work in its own right. Born Roger Barrett in Cambridge, Syd formed a bond with two schoolmates, Roger Waters and Bob Klose, the latter becoming Floyd’s original lead guitarist, and together they laid the foundation for what would become the first incarnation of Pink Floyd.
Their friendship would remain steady even after moving to London to study at university. Waters and Klose heading for the Regent’s Street Polytechnic and Barrett, ever the artiste, heading down south to Camberwell. Klose’s bond with Barrett gave him a rare insight into Barrett’s creative process, which he details in an interview with John Edginton posted below.
In it, he talks about how Barrett was able to see the world quite literally differently from everyone else due to a condition called synaesthesia. Syd’s sister Rosemary, a nurse who Syd lived with for most of his adult life, also commented on this condition in an interview with The Times titled ‘My Lovably Ordinary Brother Syd’. In her words, it allows people to “see sounds and hear colours”. Klose talks about how this gave Barrett a structure to write songs, saying, “He was able to chart his songs out in terms of colours”. Tim Willis (who interviewed the aforementioned Rosemary for that article) also reports this in his book Madcap: The Half-Life of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s Lost Genius.
When he was making his second solo album, Barrett, he would comment on a take he didn’t like by saying things like, “Perhaps we could make the middle darker and maybe the end a bit middle afternoonish. At the moment it’s too windy and icy.” In the interview, Klose goes on to talk about how this condition allowed him to, in his words, “deconstruct the guitar.” In Barrett’s hands, the guitar became “a tuned set of drums with his echoes and stuff.”
His way of viewing and, indeed, hearing the instrument was quite literally different from everyone else. Comparing him to the American jazz guitarist who was a huge inspiration to both of them, he says, “Anyone can learn to do a Wes Montgomery impression, but you can’t learn to do a Syd impression because it’s not in any of the books.”
While it led to some truly boundary-pushing music, it wasn’t quite so fun for his bandmates. While working on The Madcap Laughs, drummer Robert Wyatt asked Barrett what key a song was in, to which Barrett responded with “Yeah”. However, when it’s clear that you’re working with a genuine visionary, it’s worth it. They may need a little more time and patience than normal to get the track where it needs to be, but once it’s there, you can be sure that nothing else released will sound anything like it.
