-'The Wind in the Willows' by Kenneth Grahame

Chapter 24: 'Fu - the Turning Point' 
I-Ching

EFFERVESCING ELEPHANT(written when Syd was 16)

An Effervescing Elephant
with tiny eyes and great big trunk
once whispered to the tiny ear
the ear of one inferior
that by next June he'd die, oh yeah!
because the tiger would roam.
The little one said: 'Oh my goodness I must stay at home!
and every time I hear a growl
I'll know the tiger's on the prowl
and I'll be really safe, you know
the elephant he told me so.'

Syd Barrett:
'I wasn't always this introverted, I think young people should have a lot of fun. But I never seem to have any.....'

Syd Barrett:(on influence of fairy tales in his music) Fairy-tales are nice. I think a lot of it has to do with living in Cambridge, with nature and everything. It's so clean and I still drive back a lot. Maybe if I'd stayed at college, I would have become a teacher. Leaving school and suddenly being without that structure around you and nothing to relate to...maybe that's a part of it, too.
 

MATILDA MOTHER
(from 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn')

For all the time spent in that room
The doll's house, darkness, old perfume
And fairy stories held me high on
Clouds of sunlight floating by.
Oh Mother, tell me more
Tell me more....

John Marsh: Syd was a beautiful person, a lovely guy. He had a creative brain, a way of looking at things that was really genuinely revolutionary and different.

Roger Waters: Syd and I went through our *most* formative years together, riding on my motorbike, getting drunk, doing a little dope, flirting with girls, all that basic stuff. I still consider Syd a great primary inspiration; there was a wonderful human tenderness to all his unique musical flights.

Peter Jenner: Syd was the only person I know who Roger has ever really liked and looked up to.

David Gilmour: Syd was a strange guy even back in Cambridge. He was a very respected figure back there in his own way. 

Storm Thorgerson: It was the usual thing, really, (in) 1962 we were all into (R&B/jazz organist) Jimmy Smith. Then 1963 brought dope and rock. Syd was one of the first to get into The Beatles and the Stones. Syd started playing guitar around then - used to take it to parties or play down at this club called The Mill. Syd and David Gilmour went to the South of France one summer and busked around. (Syd was a) bright, extrovert kid. Smoked dope, pulled chicks - the usual thing. He had no problems on the surface. He was no introvert as far as I could see then.

Syd Barrett: Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter...The fine arts thing at college was always too much for me to think about. What I was more involved in was being successful at arts school. 

Peter Jenner: The strongest image I have of Syd is of him sitting in his flat with a guitar and his book of songs, which he represented by paintings with different coloured circles. You'd go round to Syd's and you'd see him write a song. It just poured out. The acid brought out his latent madness. I'm sure it was his latent madness which gave him his creativity. The acid brought out the creativity, but more importantly, it brought out the madness. The creativity was there - dope was enough to get it going. He wrote all his songs, including the ones on his solo LP's, in a eighteen month period.

Syd Barrett: (on the influence of art school on his songwriting) Only the rate of work, learning to work hard. I do tend to take lines from other things, lines I like, and then write around them but I don't consciously relate to painting. It's just writing good songs that matters, really.

David Gilmour: (on studying with Syd at Cambridge Tech) We would hang around in the art department, playing guitars every lunchtime. Teaching each other basically. The thing with Syd was that his guitar wasn't his strongest feature. His style was very stiff. I always thought I was the better guitar player. But he was very clever, very intelligent, an artist in every way. And he was a frightening talent when it came to words, and lyrics. They just used to pour out.

Rick Wright: While we were at the (London's Regent Street Polytechnic) we had various people in and out of the band and one particular, very good guitar player Bob Close. He was really a far better musician than any of the rest of us. But I think he had some exam problems and really felt that he had to apply himself to work, whereas the rest of us were not that conscientious. And so he was sort of out of the band and we were looking for another guitar player and we knew that Syd was coming up to London from Cambridge and so he just, well he was just co-opted into the whole thing.

Mick Rock: They used to play things like 'In the Midnight Hour,' and Syd would go watch Dave play because I think Dave had got his chords down a bit better than Syd in the early days. Syd was always a bit weird about Dave. That was Syd's band, the Floyd.

Rick Wright: It was great when Syd joined. Before him we'd play the R&B classics, because that's what all groups were supposed to do then. But I never liked R&B very much. I was actually more of a jazz fan. With Syd the direction changes, it became more improvised around the guitar and keyboards. Roger started playing the bass as a lead instrument, and I started to introduce more of my classical feel.

Syd Barrett: Roger Waters is older than I am. He was at the architecture school in London. I was studying at Cambridge, I think it was before I had set up at Camberwell Art School. I was really moving backwards and forwards to London. I was living in Highgate with him, we shared a place there, and got a van and spent a lot of our grant on pubs and that sort of thing. We were playing Stones numbers. I suppose we were interested in playing guitars, I picked up playing guitar quite quickly...I didn't play much in Cambridge because I was from the art school, you know. But I was soon playing on the professional scene and began to write from there.

Storm Thorgerson: Syd was a great artist. I loved his work, but he just stopped. First it was the religion, then the painting. He was (already) starting to shut himself off slowly then.

Peter Jenner: Syd was an exceptional figure, far and away the most important in the band. He wrote the songs, he was the singer, he played most of the solos, he was the lead guitarist, it was his band. He was much the most interesting, much the most creative: the others were just students. I always think that it's really important that Syd was an artist whereas the other two were architects, and that really showed in the music. Syd did this wild, impossible drawing and they turned it into the Pink Floyd. Syd was a really good artist too. I'm sure he was a star student. And it was a time when you just expressed yourself away - if you were good at painting then you could be good at writing songs. Why not?
 

Nick Mason: I think we started to develop a cult following because everyone was talking about the psychedelic revolution and light and sound and all the rest of it. People were looking to try and guess, as they always are, what was going going to happen next in music. This suddenly looked like what was going to happen next. I mean, we were incredibly awful, we were a dreadful band, we must have sounded frightful, but we were so different and so odd that I think, I mean odd, for those days. Of course, now, people would look at it and laugh. You look at the early photographs and we just look like a sort of elderly version of the Monkees or something. At the time, that was what was happening and no-one really understood it, but they all thought they ought to try and get in on it. So the record deal was in fact a really rather good one considering we had no track record whatsoever and couldn't play the instruments.

Duggie Fields: They used to rehearse in the flat, and I used to go downstairs and put on Smokey Robinson as loud as possible. I don't know where they all arrived from, but I went to architecture school (with) Rick Wright and Roger Waters. I don't quite remember how I met them all. I just remember suddenly being surrounded by the Pink Floyd and hundreds of groupies instantly.

Peter Jenner: (on seeing the Pink Floyd for the first time) It was one of the first rock events I'd seen, I didn't know anything about rock really. Actually the Floyd then were barely semi pro standard, now that I think about it, but I was so impressed by the electric guitar sound. At that stage they were a blues band who played things like 'Louie Louie and then played wacky bits in the middle. So the solos were wacky, they just sort of went on: this was Syd Barrett and also Rick Wright. I wandered around the stage, trying to work out where the noise was coming from, just what was playing it. Normally you would hear something: that's the bass, thta's the drums, that's the sax, you knew where everything was. But the Floyd, when they were doing their solo bits, I couldn't work out whether it was coming from the keyboards or from the guitar and that was what was interesting to me. The band was just at the point of breaking up then, you know. It was weird - they just thought 'Oh, well, might as well pack it all in.' They were all going off for the summer vacation and they didn't know whether they'd get back together in the autumn. I said, 'You should stay together and sign to my label.' So they said, 'Come see us after the vacation.' So I tracked them down and I did go and see them and they said, 'What we really need is a manager, otherwise we're going to break up. We don't have enough equipment, we need someone to help..' I called Andrew King and he bought them some equipment, and we became their managers. The equipment instantly got lost.

Peter Jenner: (on All Saint's Hall, site of early Floyd gigs) I was now managing the Floyd, so I though; let's put on some gigs. And that's where they started and went off like a rocket. None of us knew what had hit us. It was all word of mouth - it hit a responsive chord. There were these two guys who turned up from America and did the blippy lights, the oil slide show. It wasn't too psychedelic - smoking dope, but not too much acid. We'd read about it, but there wasn't much around. And the only people who smoked were me and Syd.

Syd Barrett: All the equipment was battered and worn, all the stuff we started out with was our own, the guitars were our own property. The electronic noises were probably necessary. They were very exciting. That's all really. The whole thing at the time was playing on stage.

Roger Waters: (1967) We've had problems with our equipment and we can't get the P.A. to work because we play extremely loudly. It's a pity because Syd writes great lyrics and nobody ever hears them. Maybe it's our fault because we are trying too hard. After all the human voice can't compete with Fender Telecasters and double drum kits. We're a very young group, not in age, but in experience. We're trying to solve problems that haven't existed before. Perhaps we should stop trying to do our singles on stage. Even the Beatles, when they worked live, sounded like their records. But the sort of records we make today are impossible to reproduce on stage so there is no point in trying.

Peter Jenner: Syd was really amazing though. I mean, his inventiveness was quite astounding. All those songs from that whole Pink Floyd phase were written in no more than six months. He just started and took it from there. His influences were very much the Stones, The Beatles, Byrds and Love. The Stones were the prominent ones - he wore out his copy of 'Between the Buttons' very quickly. Love's album too. In fact, I was once trying to tell him about this Arthur Lee song I couldn't remember the title of, so I just hummed the main riff. Syd picked up his guitar and followed what I was humming chord-wise. The chord pattern he worked out he went on to use as the main riff for 'Interstellar Overdrive'. Syd was no guitar hero - never remotely in the class of Page or Clapton, say, (but) he had this technique that I found very pleasing.

Nick Mason: You must never underestimate how unpopular we were around the rest of England. They hated it. They would throw things, pour beer over us. And we were terrible, though we didn't quite know it. Promoters were always coming up to us and saying, 'I don't know why you boys won't do proper songs'. Looking back on it, I can't think why we persevered.

Roger Waters: (1967) We're being frustrated at the moment by the fact that to stay alive we have to play lots and lots of places and venues that are not really suitable. This can't last obviously and we're hoping to create our own venues. We all like our music. That's the only driving force behind us. All the trappings of becoming vaguely successful - like being able to buy bigger amplifiers - none of that stuff is really important.

Peter Jenner: The Pink Floyd were the only psychedelic band. They had this improvisation, this spirit of psychedlia which I don't think any other band had. The Pink Floyd didn't play chords. At their finest it was very extraordinary free improvisation. We thought we were doing what was happening in San Francisco, which we'd never heard, and it was totally different. Attempting to imitate what you don't actually know what your imitating leads to genuine creativity and I think that's what happened with the Pink Floyd.

Roger Waters: All that stuff about Syd starting the space-rock thing is just so much fucking nonsense. He was completely into Hilaire Belloc, and all his stuff was kind of whimsical, all fairly heavy rooted in English literature. I think Syd had one song that had anything to do with space, 'Astronomy Domine', that's all. That's the sum total of all Syd's writing about space and yet there's this whole fucking mystique about how he was the father of it all. It's just a load of old bollocks, it all happened afterwards. There's an instrumental track which we came up with together on the first album, 'Interstellar Overdrive', thats just the title, you see, it's actually an abstract piece with an interstellar attachment in terms of its name.

Syd Barrett: (on his bandmates in the Pink Floyd) Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people, I would've thought, primarily. I mean, anybody walking into an art school like that would've been tricked, maybe they were working their entry into an art school. But the choice of material was restricted, I suppose, by the fact that both Roger and I wrote different things. We wrote our own songs, played our own music. They were older, by about two years, I think. I was 18 or 19........

......One thinks of it all as a dream."