The one musician David Bowie said could do no wrong: “I thought he was a massive talent”
It’s impossible for someone to have the career David Bowie did without having a few duds in their discography.
The greatest artists in the world are still fallible at the end of the day, and while ‘The Starman’ showed us pieces of music history that most people couldn’t even conceive of, he is unfortunately the person that also brought us the more cringey moments on Never Let Me Down. But the reason why he was so eclectic was because he listened to other people who followed their muse.
After all, the whole point behind all of Bowie’s music was about being brave even when everyone is saying that your vision won’t work. The idea of an androgynous alien coming down to Earth and saving the world with the power of rock and roll would have been laughed out of the room had he explained everything, but by going forward anyway, he gave the world some of the greatest music glam rock had to offer. But once he had his fill, he would simply move on to a different sound.
One minute he would be a blue-eyed soul crooner, and the next he would be one of the elder voices of drum and bass music, but Bowie never wanted to simply poach another style of music. He wanted to dissect what that genre had to offer, and listening to the way that he worked on tunes like ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ later in his career, he was able to quickly master nearly anything he got his hands on.
But for all of the genre boundaries that he crossed, Bowie felt he was only a pale imitation of what Syd Barrett was doing back in the day. The Pink Floyd that everyone knows has certainly earned its place in music history, but the whimsical side of Barrett’s writing on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is still some of the greatest music the 1960s ever spat out. It didn’t always make the most sense, but each song was like looking deep into someone’s psyche whenever it came on, whether it was the strange chords of ‘Astronomy Domine’ or the instrumental freakout on ‘Interstellar Overdrive’.
He may not have been long for this world, but Bowie felt that Barrett was one of the few untouchable artists of the 1960s, saying, “Barrett was a huge influence on me, absolutely. 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!”
But the real tragedy was not knowing what Barrett could have done had he not lost his mind. He was never going to be a good fit for Floyd after A Saucerful of Secrets, but when listening to some of the ideas that he had on The Madcap Laughs, he clearly had a good idea for what the next phase of his career would be. He just didn’t have the mental capacity to be able to realise those visions anymore.
And while Bowie was the last person to put himself on the same pedestal as Barrett, a lot of what he did throughout the 1970s seemed to pick up where Barrett left off. Floyd’s music was always going to be a reaction to Barrett’s loss after Roger Waters and David Gilmour took over, so hearing the more fantastical side of Bowie on albums like Hunky Dory were like watching what a version of Barrett could have been had he been a bit more androgynous.
Bowie did have his chance to live out his fantasies when he performed songs like ‘Arnold Layne’ with Gilmour, but Barrett’s charisma wasn’t something that anyone could properly repeat. He was a once-in-a-lifetime talent, and while Jimi Hendrix embodied everything psychedelia stood for, Barrett was the kind of artist that people needed to do a bit of digging to truly understand every single track.
