“Perfect”: Syd Barrett named his favourite guitarist of all time
The story of Syd Barrett will likely never fail to capture the imagination of music fans. An enigmatic genius, far too ahead of his time and perhaps too unique to be fully understood within the confines of his day, the original Pink Floyd leader set the scene for what was to come for the band and played a crucial role in the psychedelic explosion of 1967.
Barrett is often afforded the status of a tragic hero. While this one-dimensional archetype certainly holds true in the sense that his life didn’t pan out in the way that anyone could have imagined when he was at the top of his game, with his mental health issues all-encompassing, there is much more to it. He wasn’t a fictional character but a complex man who was ill in a way that the medical professionals of his era could not comprehend.
Just ask his old friend and brief Pink Floyd bandmate, David Gilmour, the man drafted in to alleviate the logistical woes of his condition. In 1982, when speaking Musician, the guitarist gave a candid account of Barrett’s decline in mental health, the romanticisation of it, and the long-held belief that it was down to too much acid. He described it as a deep-rooted issue that “would have happened anyway”, regardless of whether psychedelics were the catalyst or not.
Gilmour said: “It’s sad that these people think he’s such a wonderful subject, that he’s a living legend when, in fact, there is this poor sad man who can’t deal with life or himself. He’s got uncontrollable things in him that he can’t deal with, and people think it’s a marvellous, wonderful, romantic thing. It’s just a sad, sad thing, a very nice and talented person who’s just disintegrated”.
While Barrett’s story was undeniably sad and a tragedy for him and his bandmates, underneath the cataclysm, there was a brilliant songwriter and guitarist who put a unique spin on the nascent psychedelic rock, taking it in more fantastical directions than anyone else. Tapping into a strange world evoking the Victorian opium-laced madness of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, his imagination and skill as a songwriter saw Pink Floyd stand out and chart a distinctive course.
A widely influential figure despite his small body of work, even by the time he had started to withdraw from society after releasing his duo of solo albums in 1970, Barrett was hailed as one of the best guitarists of his generation. As part of an eye-opening and heartbreaking discussion with Rolling Stone the following year, the ailing artist, who explained that he was purposefully disappearing, provided insight into how he viewed guitar playing by naming his favourite musician as Jimi Hendrix. He described the American as a “perfect” player.
As both men are psychedelic pioneers known for their clangorous, tradition-defying approach, it makes sense that Barrett should see his contemporary as the ideal player. Offering another dose of regret, thought, Barrett also explained why he thought he could never get to Hendrix’s level.
“He was better than people really knew. But very self-conscious about his consciousness,” he once said. “Hendrix was a perfect guitarist. And that’s all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way.”
According to Barrett, Hendrix’s playing speed completely mesmerised him, and even though he tried his best to imitate it, it always seemed impossible.
