Once the shining star of Pink Floyd, and the entire UK psychedelic scene, by 1974 Syd Barrett was a cracked shell of his former self. David Gilmour, the guitarist who had taken Syd's place in his former group, had helped eke out two albums from him, 1970’s The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, but while both would quickly acquire cult status, their author was far too damaged and fragile for anything approaching a conventional solo career.
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After the misfiring 1968 sessions for The Madcap Laughs, Barrett and Floyd’s former manager Peter Jenner had seen little to nothing of Syd (“I think he did come into our office once to get a passport signed” Jenner recalls). But in the wake of Pink Floyd’s extraordinary success with The Dark Side Of The Moon, the repackaging of 1967 debut The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and follow up A Saucerful Of Secrets as A Nice Pair, plus related interest in Madcap and Barrett, there was appetite at EMI for Syd material. Bryan Morrison, Floyd’s perma-tanned manager, now handling Barrett too, booked Abbey Road Studio 3 for the week beginning August 12, 1974, and asked Jenner to produce.
“We did know that Syd had songs that had never been recorded – his juvenilia,” says Jenner. “He had a binder with lyrics in. And there were songs from the EMI period, like She’s A Millionaire. It had a hook, had potential.
Barrett arrived promptly at Abbey Road at 2pm on Monday 12, wearing scruffy clothes and longish hair, along with four or five guitars, a bass and a drum kit. “It was all new,” says John Leckie, who was engineering. “Still with the labels on and some still in cardboard boxes. Not rented.”
If he brought a guitar with no strings on – an enduring Syd legend – no one remembers it. Barrett’s manner, however, boded less well: “Syd had this vacant, scared look,” recalls Leckie. “A bit like he’d just got up. It was like… shock.”
Encouraged by Jenner or Leckie, Barrett would pick up a guitar and strum, then lose track, unplug, wander off. “There was obviously something still in there saying to him, ‘Ah! Guitar! I play guitar, don’t I?’” says Jenner. “Then confusion would descend. He’d play a line but couldn’t move on to the next line. It was like occupational therapy. We were trying to see if the muscle memory would come back.”
Leckie’s tape-op observed that if Barrett left Studio 3 and turned left, he would return after a while; if he turned right, he would be gone for the day. “In the old Studio 3 at Abbey Road you could see the famous crossing from a side window,” says Leckie. “That was the only view of the outside world. We’d watch him cross the crossing. Then we’d all fall around laughing. That’s how it was.”
Nothing like Barrett’s jaunty Effervescing Elephant, or even the sloppy mandraxed blues of Maisie, was forthcoming, as Barrett essayed aimless blues strums and desultory overdubs (you can hear bootlegs of 11 of them on YouTube, entitled If You Go, Don’t Be Slow takes 1 and 2, Boogie #1, Boogie #2, Boogie #3, Chook-Chooka Chug Chug, Slow Boogie, Fast Boogie, John Lee Hooker, Ballad and Untitled). Every evening Morrison would stop by to check on the non-progress. “Then Bryan would give Syd a talking to,” Leckie recalls. “Shout at him, really. And Pete would sit there staring at the mixer.”
“The worst thing was that you felt that there was something there,” says Jenner. “Because there would be hints, little bits where me and John would look at each other and go, I wonder if we could get him to do that again? But every moment was a new start. In 1968 it had been a challenge but we’d had parts of songs, something to work with. This was more chaotic, more fogged.”
For four days, the pattern repeated. Syd turned up on time, refused headphones, barely played (“He didn’t want us to hear, I think,” says Leckie). On the Thursday, he departed for good, leaving Jenner crestfallen: “I was very upset. Very upset. Because he was the most creative person I’ve ever met, before or since. For him to end up a shadow… that was the frustration. The odd glimpses of Syd were there, then they would disappear into the fog.”
Could Jenner and Leckie have done anything differently? They doubt it. “Probably what he really wanted was someone to play with,” says Leckie. During Syd’s absences, he and Jenner would call up tapes of unused Madcap and Barrett material to see what could be mixed back to life, including the Floyd-era Vegetable Man and Scream Thy Last Scream. But also to no avail.
“I never understood why the Floyd would never let them out,” says Jenner of the latter tracks, which would eventually appear on 2016’s The Early Years box set. “They’re like postcards from this ghastly journey.” He pauses. “I say ‘ghastly’ but I don’t really know. Perhaps ‘unfortunate’, certainly for us. I was never really sure with Syd whether he was glad to be out of it. Was he unhappy? Who knows?”
This article originally appeared in MOJO The Collectors' Series: Pink Floyd Essentials.
Picture: Getty/Redferns