July 12, 2006
Baby Lemonade.
Syd Barrett has passed away. For those of you who aren't wired up that way, Syd was the original guitarist and songwriter for a band who later became known worldwide as 'Pink Floyd'. Syd's band, The Pink Floyd, released two albums of delicate, graceful fairytale songwriting, tempered by nightmarish excursions into the slowly fragmenting psyche of their bandleader, before the entire thing fell apart in a haze of paranoia, drug worship, and schizophrenia.
Later, Syd recorded three deeply upsetting albums that chart his inner apocalypse - becoming more and more dissonant and fractured as they progress, they are a searing portrait of a young man coming apart at the seams. It's not funny, or cool - it's just a very sad spectacle of a once-groundbreaking talent being laid to waste by forces beyond his control.
And then, it was over. He retreated home, and lived in his Mum's house until the day he died. Syd sightings surfaced from time to time in the intervening 30 years, but Syd slowly transformed into a man utterly unrecognizable from his former self. Overweight, dishevelled, and obviously scared of the entire world, Floyd freaks have been clamouring for a peek into the life of their exiled idol. At least now, he won't have to run from their prying eyes.
I remember, back in the seemingly eternal past of 1993, I asked my parents to buy me the Syd Barrett boxed set for my birthday. They did, and I spent many years afterwards listening and re-listening to those albums, trying to unravel the labyrinthine tapestry of Syd's tumbling, scrambled neurosis. Ultimately, there was no great truth to be learned from studying those records - they are aural portraits of a life-crushing sickness. Yet, so strong was Syd's talent, that even while the chaos inside his head had ravaged his abilities as a songwriter, there remained moments of penetrating, pure, shattering beauty.
So long, Syd.
Posted by David at July 12, 2006 10:05 PM