The classic Pink Floyd song Syd Barrett never stopped loving
Sadly, Syd Barrett’s rock ‘n’ roll career was lived in miniature. Pink Floyd, who only formed in 1965, were changing the face of music by 1967, and by 1968, the ferentic frontman could no longer function in the band.
That’s not an unfamiliar tale, but usually it is stretched out over decades. Yet, despite his diminutive stint in the limelight, Barrett’s time with Pink Floyd had an indelible impact on music, and remains timelessly revered.
Two solo records followed, and thereafter, he disappeared from the music industry forever. However, in five short years of actively making psychedelic sonics, it could be argued that nobody has had as much of an impact in as little time. As David Bowie opined, “Barrett was a huge influence on me.” It was evident he was far from alone on this front.
Elucidating that influence further, Bowie added, “I thought Syd could do no wrong. I thought he was a massive talent He was the first I had ever seen in the middle ’60s who could decorate a stage. He had this strange mystical look to him, with painted black fingernails and his eyes fully made up. He weaved around the microphone, and I thought, This guy is totally entrancing!”
That same mystic energy carried through to his songwriting. An apt response to hearing the weird ways of Floyd in that era was: what the hell are these songs and what kind of creature bore them. As Bowie fittingly concluded. “He was like some figure out of an Indonesian play or something, and wasn’t altogether of this world. It was so demanding, and I thought it was magical. It’s so sad that he couldn’t continue with the fever he started with.”
So, what did Syd Barrett start?
The two records where Barrett fronted Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets, are among their most celebrated. And they are inexorably linked to everything that followed. His profound creative originality came from a very particular place, which helped to establish the band’s very singular psychedelic ways.
As Jenny Fabian, who crossed paths with Barrett many times both in his famed period and the later fallout, puts it in her novel Groupie: “He was able to access a time we all wanted to go back to, the magic garden and innocence. You felt there was somebody there who understood innocence but couldn’t be innocent in the world, because you can’t,” she writes. “He told us that’s where we wanted to be.”
Rather befittingly, Syd Barrett’s favourite Pink Floyd song was spawned by this notion of a garden of innocence. When he withdrew from the industry in a shroud of mystery, music took a backseat for Barrett. He no longer listened to Pink Floyd. When his sister bought him a new stereo in 2002, all he listened to was The Rolling Stones, Booker-T and classical composers.
He would, however, inadvertently revisit the material of the band he helped to form via a BBC Omnibus documentary. This deep dive into the band popped up on the tele around the time of the Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd release while he was at his sister’s house. She reported that he didn’t make much of it, describing it as “a bit noisy”, but he did enjoy seeing his old landlord, Mike Leonard, who he called his “teacher”. He also enjoyed hearing his old favourite Floyd song, ‘See Emily Play’.
The song was reportedly written about a girl named Emily, who Barrett claimed to have visited him like an apparition while he was sleeping in the woods high on psychedelic drugs. The ‘Emily’ in question was known to Barrett and more than familiar with psychedelics, too. According to legend, the entranced Barrett saw the Honourable Emily Young, daughter of Wayland Young, 2nd Baron Kennet, who was nicknamed “the psychedelic schoolgirl” at the UFO Club, where Barrett would regularly frequent.
This theory was later brought to Young, who spoke to Mojo about how she possibly came to be Barrett’s illusory muse: “On Friday night at the Saints Hall, the regular band was the Pink Floyd Sound,” she said. “I was more into R&B, so their dreamy hippie thing wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but it was interesting. And the light show was wonderful, and I liked to get stoned and dance.”
This was a familiar tale that showcased how Pink Floyd captured the zeitgeist with their liberated sound. “After playing, we’d sit around on grey sofas and pass around joints,” she continued in a perfect vignette of the era. “I was quite pretty, and word got out that I was a lord’s daughter, and apparently the guys in the band called me the ‘psychedelic schoolgirl’.”
She disputes that the song was about her, however, and was shocked upon first hearing it was allegedly written with her in mind: “I thought, gosh, that’s nice, a song with my name, but I didn’t think it was about me. And I don’t think it was now because Syd and I didn’t have a love affair, and he didn’t really know me. It could have been some other girl who played a part in his dream. It could have been Jenny, but Emily scanned better.”
In truth, Barrett always preferred the reaches of his imagination anyway, so even if their time together was fleeting, the poetic notion of the ‘Psychedelic Schoolgirl’ may well have clung to his psyche like a barnacle of inspiration.
Like everything with Barrett, nothing is clear, as he later said that “Emily” was a woman he had met following a particularly tough LSD trip, leading many people to question whether it was, in fact, a hallucination or the real thing. No matter the conception, the song would establish Pink Floyd as one of the most progressive bands around—one that perfectly swirled like the tailspin of the era.
Despite the tough toil that harnessing such a whirlwind would take on Barrett, the perfectly fitting ‘See Emily Play’ remained the only song he would happily revisit when the rigours of the music world had cast him in the role of the recluse who once was leading the way
