The 1967 song that marked the end of Syd Barrett: “He was a different person”
The version of Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett wasn’t meant for this world for long.
As much fun as it may have been listening to them sing about the fanciful words that Barrett put together on those first few albums, it was only a matter of time before Barrett started losing his way and began making something that was a lot darker than anyone had imagined.
Something had to be done. Pink Floyd were on the cusp of realising their pulsating potential and Barrett’s condition was starting to make him a liability. With the hope that Barrett was simply going through a ‘phase’, the group enlisted David Gilmour to help out on vocals and guitar, alleviating some pressure from their frontman. Sadly, things didn’t wuite pan out that way.
David Gilmour may have been the substitute that everyone embraced with open arms, but Barrett’s presence within the group began to grow as a negative. He was struggling with a mental break, and the band were moving too fast to slow down for him; instead, they would eventually jettison the affected singer.
It’s hard to lay too much blame at the feet of the young men who made up the rest of Pink Floyd. With little to no exposure to mental health issues available at the time, most believed Barrett’s problems to be centred on drugs and the group therefore believed a detox could perhaps solve his issues. But, nevertheless, Gilmour knew something was definitely wrong the minute he came to rehearsal and saw Barrett play ‘See Emily Play’.
If anything, most of the song should have been right in Barrett’s wheelhouse. Half of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is centred around playful characters that felt like something out of Alice in Wonderland, so hearing this kind of song being played on a clean electric guitar felt like the perfect kind of single for the group.
By the time the band first started rehearsing for the next album, though, Barett had begun to fall apart. A lot of the traditional spark that he had in the early days was gone, leading to many sessions where he would be caught in a sort of daze and struggle to even maintain his position onstage.
After Gilmour saw him one day performing the song, he knew he was looking at someone completely different than the zany creative force he had come to know, saying in Syd Barrett: Crazy Diamond, “Syd didn’t seem to recognise me and just stared back. I got to know that look pretty well and I’ll go on record as saying that was when he changed. It was a shock. He was a different person.”
The recording may have gone smoothly, but Gilmour was there because of how badly Barrett was beginning to crack up. As much as he may have loved playing music, his mental struggles tended to get the better of him, leading to some shows that featured him staring at the audience the whole time and one performance where he detuned every string on his guitar before leaving the stage.
If the recording for ‘See Emily Play’ was uncomfortable, then getting the band together for A Saucerful of Secrets was one of the most disheartening experiences of their lives. In essence, the following album was a torch-passing moment from Barrett to Gilmour, taking over guitar duties as the rest of the band had to say goodbye to one of their best friends.
Whereas most artists would flounder after being ousted from a band like Pink Floyd, Barrett made some incredible solo releases like The Madcap Laughs before fading into obscurity after a few years. His presence may have left Pink Floyd, but that didn’t mean the rest of the band forgot about their friend.
Half of the band’s biggest albums after the fact had to do with him leaving, from ‘the lunatic’ in Dark Side of the Moon being a pretty good stand-in for Barrett and Wish You Were Here being a glowing obituary to their fallen friendship. Whether Waters wants to admit it or not, The Wall is probably a far better encapsulation of what Barrett went through than anything that he experienced as a rockstar.
