SYD IS DEAD

12 July 2006

Driving up England. Doing the dad thing. Kate, my eldest daughter has just finished university. Got her degree in philosophy and I’m driving back up the A1 to pick her and all her three years of student accumulations and take them back down to her mum’s in Aylesbury.

The sun is shining, the corn is golden, the window on the driver’s seat side is down and I have this great big loving feeling inside me. I also feel like crying. This has got nothing to do with me wallowing in thoughts of being a good, average or bad dad, but everything to do with the copy of The Guardian that is lying open on the empty passenger seat.

I keep glancing from the road in front to the newspaper. Syd Barrett is staring back at me. Syd died yesterday. He had cancer. He was 60. Lots of people die of cancer when they get to 60 or thereabouts. Also on the front page of this copy of The Guardian is a report that at least 60 people have been killed on packed commuter trains in Mumbai: ‘A synchronised series of bombs ripped through packed commuter trains and stations in the evening rush hour …’ Mothers, children, young men in the prime of their lives with so much to offer are dead, not some wasted old rocker in his 60s who only ever made a few good tracks. But it is because of Syd that the tears are welling up. How fucked up is that?

When Jimi Hendrix died in September 1970 I felt nothing. Saw him on Top Of The Pops in 1967 playing ‘Purple Haze’. It was the wildest thing I had ever seen. Bought Axis Bold As Love in 1968. ‘Little Wing’ was the most beautiful guitar playing that had ever been done. Saw him on Lulu’s TV show in 1969 playing a version of ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’; as far as I was concerned it was revolution live on Saturday night TV. Saw him play live at the Isle Of Wight pop festival in 1970. He was shit. Washed-up and pointless. He died 17 days later. I’m not saying he deserved to die but if he had lived any longer he would not have done anything else of merit.

When Lennon got shot in 1981 I thought, well he had to go. Everything he had done since The Plastic Ono Band album was shite, but the most crap was his comeback Double Fantasy album. John Lennon no longer served any purpose for me.

So why now as the fields of Lincolnshire speed by and my elbow rests on the open window, am I having to hold back tears? I look over at the angelic face of Syd again. He must have been the same age as Kate, my daughter, is now when the picture was taken. Fuck it. I’m letting those tears flow. There is no point in trying to stop them. Everybody who knows anything about the history of rock ‘n’ roll knows that Syd Barrett has done fuck-all since 1971, and even if he had, we would have wished that he hadn’t.

So why am I crying for Syd? Well obviously I’m not. You can’t mourn somebody you have never met or hardly know anything about. I’m sure someone who knows about these things could explain it all, how I’m mourning my own lost youth. Bemoaning my own mortality. It’s not like I was even a huge Syd Barrett fan. When the ‘Arnold Lane’ and ‘See Emily Play’ singles came out in 1967 I thought they were great but I also thought ‘Rainbow Chaser’ by Nirvana (the original ones) was just as great. But I haven’t got a clue who was in that Nirvana or if they are alive or dead now.

The LP Atom Heart Mother came out in 1971. It was the first proper post Syd LP by Pink Floyd* and at that time I thought it was the best thing they had ever done. I played it and played it. In comparison, the first Syd solo album, The Mad Cap Laughs, was twaddle. But as the years went by Pink Floyd became more bombastic and Nick Mason’s collection of cars grew, and Roger Waters’ ego grew even bigger and Dave Gilmore spent years making a solo album and Rick Wright … what did Rick Wright do? Syd kept his counsel, and as all us white rock boys knew, he lived with his mum, lost his hair, got fat and did nothing but occasionally get photographed when popping out to the shops. But for us his iconic status grew and grew. And I’m not going to try and explain that. I’m sure there are plenty of rock journalists at this very moment tapping away on their keyboards explaining the impact of Syd’s silence and what his burgeoning cult fame was all about.

What I will tell you is that sunny summer days like this always make me think of the sunny summer days in the English countryside in the late 1960s. But, more importantly for me and my life and what I’m doing now and what I may have been doing for sod knows how long is that it was on a day like today, a day when the corn was already golden and house martins fluttered ’round the eaves and it was 1968, when I was in my bedroom listening to a second-hand LP that I had just bought at a jumble sale that morning. The LP was The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, the first album by Pink Floyd. This, according to one of the rock critics writing in this morning’s Guardian, was Syd’s masterpiece. Maybe it was but I remember being disappointed with it at the time. I mean, it had cost me five shillings and I was hoping it was all going to sound like ‘Arnold Lane’ and ‘See Emily Play’ but it didn’t. I persevered and listened to it all again and then again. Then when I was listening to the last track on side two for the fourth time, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, that I had an idea. My sister had this Spanish guitar, she’d had it for two or three years. She’d had a few lessons at school but never really bothered with it. Her room was next to mine. She was out somewhere. I went in and got it. Up until then it had never really crossed my mind to learn to play the guitar. The rest of the Saturday afternoon was spent trying to learn and play the riff to ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. Now I’m not saying that if it were not for Syd I would never have picked up a guitar. But even these days it is still that riff that my fingers automatically drift towards playing any time I absentmindedly pick up a guitar. As I have written elsewhere, it was Peter Green who went on to be the guitar hero of my mid-teen years. There was never another Pink Floyd song that I consciously learned to play.

But on this sunny summer morning as the golden fields of Lincolnshire still flash past and my elbow still rests on the open window of the Land Rover I can hear The17 in my head. What they are singing is this huge and sprawling version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. No guitars or drums or keyboards, no lead singer and no words. Just the massed ranks of The17 as they sing that most foreboding of riffs. The sound gets bigger and louder and wilder like an untamed mountain and then they take it down to almost a whisper and the tears keep rolling down my cheeks.
‘Syd is dead. Syd is sodding dead’