Syd Barrett: the guitarist Pete Townshend called “astonishing”
Pete Townshend is less shy about doling out his opinions than a football pundit on Twitter. The Who strummer has slammed Led Zeppelin, berated Woodstock, and even questioned The Beatles. Hell, he says classic rock only consists of two bands: his own and The Rolling Stones. But that doesn’t mean he is musically cloistered.
While Pink Floyd and The Who might exist in two separate musical worlds, he has always been full of praise for the prog-rock pioneers. In fact, when Townshend inducted Pink Floyd into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005, he glowingly recalled the first time he witnessed the band play live and the major impact it had on him as a young musician. “I first saw Pink Floyd during the Christmas break in 1966 at the UFO club in London, it was a great club,” he began.
The mid-1960s era for ‘The Floyd’ was one that saw them heavily guided by their near-mystic frontman, the late, great Syd Barrett. The tragic figure was renowned for his enchanting performances, and he certainly wowed Townshend. “Syd Barrett was on guitar at the time,” he recalled, going on the call him, “astonishing.“
He continued: “The whole band were wonderful, just wonderful. Roger had the most extraordinary impressive presence and their sound were swirling, cosmic and enveloping.” However, it has always been evident that Barrett’s ethereal ways formed the main allure for Townshend.
The importance of music went beyond mere melodies for Townshend, even when he was a kid. “I was the child of the guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band,” he said. “He knew what his music was for – it was for post-war, and it was for dancing with a woman that you might end up marrying. It was about romance, dreams, fantasy”.
With riots running rampant, Presidents being assassinated, and the world looking for direction amid an explosion of pop culture, he set about a new type of song. “Music, even today, is about much more than that. It has a function, which is to help us understand what is going on in the world and to help us understand what is going on inside us, so the purpose and the duty of somebody who makes music is very different to the way it used to be. […] And I think I was the first to articulate that and try to explain it,” he told Apple Music.
This was typified by Barrett’s otherworldliness. And while his guitar playing might sometimes go unheralded, subsumed by the welter of everything else he had to offer, he was perhaps the most singular guitarist on the scene for a couple of years. He was a keen experimenter, epitomised by the use of his own homemade fuzzbox, alongside a Selmer Treble N Bass 50 amp and a Selmer Stereomaster, which gave the band a truly unique sound, pretty much inventing the oeuvre that Pink Floyd spawned.
As Townshend concludes, “We were all the beneficiaries of his talent and his wild mind. His early work with Pink Floyd had been sublime and anarchically adventurous.”
