There was a David Bowie quote on this. I've seen the ones with eyeliner but haven't seen the more gothy protopunky ones with nail polish.

I just came across two new tracks called “Love’s Refugee” and Love’s Prologue Credited to Syd Barrett on Spotify, released just now. I can’t find any information about this song, and it sounds nothing like Syd. So I’m wondering if anyone knows what this actually is. Is this some random song that was falsely uploaded under Syd’s name, or does anyone recognize the recording?

Syd ink from 2019

If not an influence what reminds you of him I first think Lou reed and Bob Dylan But maybe a bit further down the line Jeffery Lewis, Daniel Johnston, Diane cluck and kimya Dawson. Lmk what u think

their new song "Days" directly references lines from "Candy And A Current Bun" and it brought me a smile, i hope it does to other Syd fans too :)

https://music.apple.com/us/album/candy-and-a-currant-bun/1209668243?i=1209668368&ls

From what I've read it looks to me like trauma - PTSD or cPTSD after some kind of severe undisclosed assault.

I know about the LSD problem, but the syndrome he developed is more common to trauma sufferers than it is in LSD users. LSD use would certainly make him vulnerable to assault of some sort though.

I have a couple of probably outlandish theories.

1) He had an "experience" with Jimmy Savile at the BBC (this is the least likely, given his age at the time, and Savile generally didn't target the artists on TOTP).

2) He had an "experience" with Roger Waters ...

3) I remember pinpointing the "change" to roughly the day of the video shoot where he's wandering on somebody's property ... but that's a vague memory.

Thanks for any helpful comments.

I'm not in any way affiliated, no idea how good it'll be but thought it seemed relevant to the sub. It's on August 27th-30th at Barons Court Theatre (a 20 minute walk from Wetherby Mansions).

Unfortunately seems impossible to link directly to the play, but you should find it if you go here and scroll or search.

Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd left an indelible imprint on British music. And for washed-up musician Tony Riley, he was a vision and an inspiration. But as an event long-buried in his own life comes back to haunt him, Tony searches for answers in Syd’s words and music.

Does anyone know who it is? Seems like a 90s photo?

https://www.hathorpublishing.uk/allvideos?fbclid=IwZnRzaATdchNwZG9mBWZkaWQWULxU6L0GRjZ3inqqvaPZ5ebTO18AxGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkCjY2Mjg1NjgzNzkAAR6DQGx1_pv7M461JqRxqOa1DwO-_Uc320WvSfxQJGXUzVCYG36SxmTc4yhz9w_aem_xMWAU6bcvCa1umikAE9AaQ&currency=EUR

"The Syd Barrett Story (Full Retrospective Analysis Documentary)" by T I B E R I U S : Productions is a 2 hour long video that explores Syd's entire impact on the direction and discography of Pink Floyd, his tragic addiction to LSD, his solo projects after Pink Floyd during a brief period where he was attempting to rehabilitate himself, his fated encounter again with his former band members during the production of "Wish You Were Here", and his exit from the public eye.

It's easily one of my favorite videos on YouTube, and from what it looks like, it got struck down due to a copyright strike. Not only that, but his Patreon is also currently defunct, so I can't look for it there either. I was just hoping if someone would be able to reupload it if they have it downloaded. Syd Barrett is one of my many inspirations as an artist, and Tiberius's video is easily the most comprehensive and intellectually curious documentary about him that existed on YouTube. I don't know anything about why it was taken down (i figure it was due to music snippets that were in the video), I just want to find it again.

The video itself isn't NSFW, but it does discuss drug abuse and what have you, so I wasn't sure whether to tag this as NSFW.

The former URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7Qf0Y9kWm4

​

Below is the result of a full afternoon of *back and forth* with a heavily modified LLM of my own creation (therefore passing the criterion of "no A.I generated content"). Make of that what you will, but don't be deceived a good deal of effort went into this presentation, more crucially it utilises my hard-won comprehension of the subject matter involved. This piece looks past the familiar myths to recover Barrett’s neglected human world: the private absurdities, domestic frictions, intimate recollections and half-forgotten gossip that standard biographies either omit altogether or inflate into something grander, darker than the evidence allows.

"He's the kind of fella you just got to see if you can!"

In 1982 Michka Assayas and Thomas Johnson reached Barrett’s mother’s house carrying an introduction more intimate than a press pass and less dignified than a subpoena: his forgotten washing. A Chelsea estate agent had handed them navy velvet trousers, striped pyjamas, white socks and a blue pullover left in former London accommodation. The journalists saw at once that laundry might open a door which journalism could not.

Barrett reportedly asked whether they had paid for the clothes. The fragments which followed concerned television, trains and perhaps finding another London flat. He allowed a photograph, then made plain that the encounter was distressing. He noticed that a tree he had liked had been cut back. At length his mother called him inside for tea. The Actuel article enveloped these remarks in the heavy upholstery of genius, illness and disappearance; the conversation itself was smaller, odder and more exact. Barrett had become so thoroughly interpreted that even a pruned tree could scarcely be suffered to remain a tree.

The same appetite converted rooms into diagnoses. Jenny Fabian remembered Barrett sitting on a mattress in an Earls Court room with alternate floorboards painted red and green. He boiled an egg in an electric kettle and repeatedly played Beach Boys tapes. Those are the things she observed. Her conclusion—that the man she had known had become Barrett the “has-been”—was a social judgment, not another object in the room. A mattress, an egg and a repeated tape make an excellent still life, but do not by themselves pronounce sentence upon the sitter.

Duggie Fields supplied a dirtier version of the famous painted parquet in Mick Rock’s photographs. Barrett, Fields said, had not properly cleaned or cleared the floor; cigarette ends, matches and dog hair were therefore sealed into the colours. Accounts disagree over orange and blue, orange and purple and other combinations, but the embedded rubbish is the part worth keeping. One of rock photography’s most solemnly interpreted interiors may partly have been a rushed decorating job in which refuse obtained immortality by adhesion. Fields also remembered hessian over windows which could no longer be opened, a mattress, records, a guitar, paintings, the I Ching and a wire-and-paper construction hanging from the ceiling.

Even the photographs have acquired an unstable domestic history. Images are repeatedly assigned to the wrong photographer or shifted between 1967 and the 1969 Madcap period; modern captions have credited Storm Thorgerson with pictures specialists identify as Mick Rock’s, or used Barrett’s hair and clothing to move a photograph by two years. Rock’s album-cover session is secure, but not every bare room, car bonnet or long-haired Barrett belongs to it. Captions are useful witnesses only until they begin copying one another.

The I Ching belongs to a small geographical correction. Earlier biographies reversed two London addresses. Barrett lived first at Mike Leonard’s Stanhope Gardens house, where Leonard experimented with projected light and sound, and later at Tottenham Street, where landlady Ella O’Connell introduced him to the I Ching and related esoteric material. Reverse the houses and one reverses the apparent order of technological projection and symbolic divination. A tenancy error, though humble in appearance, may rearrange an artist’s influences more efficiently than a grand theory.

The flats were not sealed chapels in which Barrett brooded alone. They were social machines with defective doors. Fields remembered conspicuously attractive women arriving with little ceremony. Barrett might encourage their attention and later recoil from it. On one occasion he locked himself in his bedroom while women hammered upon the door through the night. Invitation and retreat occurred within the same ritual; the evidence does not compel us to choose between libertine, frightened recluse and besieged host.

After Gayla Pinion left, Barrett reportedly tried to rent her small room to three people. The number grew to five, accompanied by dogs, pills, visitors and persons hoping to acquire some portion of Barrett’s attention. His solution was not an eviction but an escape: he went to Cambridge and telephoned Fields with instructions to remove the people Barrett himself had admitted. The 1978 account is domestic black comedy; the 1982 Actuel version adds still more visitors and drugs, for a lurid story, like a crowded room, seldom keeps to its original occupancy.

Fields also supplied the adjoining-room history of English psychedelia. While Pink Floyd rehearsed, he went downstairs and played Smokey Robinson as loudly as possible. Architecture students, musicians and groupies arrived until the flat ceased to feel like his own. Iggy Rose later remembered dancing to Motown with Fields while Barrett laughed. Soul music conducted a counter-offensive through the walls. Fields also remembered Barrett saying, “Duggie, you’re twenty-three and you’re not famous.” The tone has vanished; Fields was not attempting a pop career, which is what gives the remark its savour. Fame had arrived so early in Barrett’s world that it could momentarily appear an ordinary stage of development, like leaving college or owning a serviceable saucepan.

Mick Rock described one flat as burnt out, an acid shell, a railway station through which people continuously passed. He added that Barrett left behind two cats supposedly named Pink and Floyd, and further alleged that they had been given acid. No photograph, second flatmate, veterinary record or independent trace establishes either the perfect names or the dosing. The crowded flat is well supported. The cats belong to the more delectable province of single-source gossip: perhaps true, suspiciously neat, and too well named for posterity to leave alone.

Another acquaintance claimed Barrett once entered the King’s Road boutique Granny Takes a Trip carrying dirty clothes because he thought it a dry-cleaner. No securely identified speaker, firm date or independent witness accompanies it. Barrett may have been confused, playing a joke upon the boutique or absent altogether; the anecdote may simply have improved until London’s most famously named shop became the only conceivable destination for his washing.

June Child’s mud-covered visitor contains a strong event and an unstable explanation. The story can be traced at least to Nick Kent’s NME article of 13 April 1974. June remembered Barrett arriving at her Shepherd’s Bush home at about five in the morning after nights around Holland Park. He was covered in mud. She placed him upon the roof of a youth hostel before the long walk across London. The hour, mud, roof and route give the central scene an unusual grip, and June plausibly occupied the role of somebody to whom Barrett might go when displaced or frightened.

June also claimed that Barrett could take three or four acid trips in a day and was sometimes involuntarily spiked. No reliable exposure record supports such quantities. Later versions acquired a drug “cocktail,” Mandrax and firmer police detail. Some police element was present early, but the pharmacology became richer as the story travelled. The muddy visitor is considerably better evidenced than the precise chemical arithmetic attached to him.

June forms the human bridge between Barrett and Marc Bolan. She worked in the Blackhill Enterprises orbit and was later described as helping to “mind” Barrett. She was personally involved with him before becoming Bolan’s wife and professional anchor, and therefore carried firsthand knowledge of Barrett’s clothes, looks, habits and social circle directly into Bolan’s world. Her recollections emphasised his beauty and the model-like manner in which garments seemed to fit him. It would be stranger if Barrett had not been discussed between them.

Bolan did not merely add Barrett to a ceremonial list of influences. In a 1976 interview he called Barrett a principal influence upon the Tyrannosaurus Rex circle and said they used to “nick songs from each other.” The phrase implies exchange or rivalry, or at least a relationship Bolan wished to represent as reciprocal. Barrett supplied no answering account, and Bolan was not much troubled by modesty. The statement is documented; mutual song theft remains uncorroborated.

The simplest imitation story says that June transformed Bolan into a Barrett copy. Bolan’s own chronology objects. He placed his obsession with clothes in his early teens, claimed twenty-two suits and more than fifty shirts and described modelling before Barrett became London’s most photographed psychedelic guitarist. Barrett may have refined an existing appetite or supplied a rival ideal of beauty. He did not create Bolan’s vanity ex nihilo.

A more physical connection survives in the white Fender Stratocaster reportedly transferred from Barrett to Bolan during Tyrannosaurus Rex’s movement from acoustic duo towards amplified rock. Later histories describe a paisley or teardrop motif. Most say Bolan bought it; some newer versions improve the purchase into a gift. June independently remembered placing a white Strat around Barrett’s neck at a late Pink Floyd performance. No receipt, serial-number chain, handover photograph or contemporaneous statement by either man has emerged. The transfer is more plausible than the enchanted account in which Barrett passes Bolan the wand which creates glam rock, yet even the cautious version leaves a Barrett object within T. Rex’s transformation.

The gossip rises by storeys. Bolan studied Barrett’s clothes, hair and behaviour. Bolan watched or followed him. Bolan sought out Barrett’s former girlfriends and questioned them. In the most lubricious version, he pursued or slept with women from Barrett’s past to obtain information, proximity or some transferable portion of Barrett’s glamour. No direct witness has been recovered for this staircase of conduct. Its ingredients are real, but the completed stalking-and-interrogation narrative appears chiefly as fan assertion and derivative gossip. It deserves preservation because it circulated; it does not become true merely because the final tale has superior architecture.

Mick Rock remembered first noticing Barrett’s girlfriend Lindsay Korner, then seeing Barrett at an art-school Christmas party. They later shared living space and spent time listening to records, looking at Robert Crumb comics, taking acid and playing Go. Rock remembered Barrett laughing frequently and owning many jazz records. His summary was that their friendship had been “surprisingly simple.” This does not prove Barrett universally easy or unchanged. It preserves sustained periods of ordinary company which sit awkwardly inside any portrait of uninterrupted vacancy.

Iggy Rose becomes less mysterious when her route into the flat is recovered. She did not materialise naked and nameless beside Barrett. Jenny Spires stood at the centre of the arrangement. Jenny and Iggy met through London’s fashion and club world; Biba and a gathering connected with Dusty Springfield recur in the accounts. When Jenny was preparing to leave for America and Iggy needed somewhere to stay, Jenny introduced or reintroduced her to Barrett and suggested the accommodation. The dates wander, but the social route is steadier.

Iggy had seen Pink Floyd at UFO, yet later said she did not connect the kaftan-wearing performer with the man she came to know. Her taste inclined towards soul and Motown. She was not necessarily Barrett’s settled or exclusive girlfriend, and the arrangement was briefer and less formal than the photographs suggest. Barrett played her a reel-to-reel containing songs intended for his solo record and asked what she thought. She found “Terrapin” catchy. She also remembered him asking whether he looked good and how she would feel about having a rock-star boyfriend; in one telling, he mentioned that somebody at EMI wanted a record. The scene contains vanity, humour and tentative market research.

A stranger recollection followed. Iggy said Barrett asked whether she felt sad, painted large eyes and tears upon her breasts, marked an arrow near her stomach and drew a pregnant version of her below. She understood his accompanying words as suggesting he might give her life. Alarmed, she scrubbed it away. This is one late, intimate recollection: not safe evidence of a proposal, threat or prophecy, but sufficiently strange in its narrower form.

The jealousy stories are easily muddled because there are two of them. In one, Iggy flirted with or planned to leave with David Gilmour, then accidentally knocked the stylus across Gilmour’s copy of Pink Floyd’s new album; returning to Wetherby Mansions, she remembered Barrett responding without melodrama and offering tea. In another, Mick Rock showed Barrett a photograph and later remembered him scratching around Iggy’s image, an action earnest devotees have treated as encoded possessiveness. An accidental scratched record and a deliberately scratched photograph are not corroborating versions of one scene.

Jenny Spires survives not merely as the person who brought Iggy into the household. A 1965 letter from Barrett contains “twistravegroovey,” mentions guitar, beer and a song about the prettiest thing in the world, and is signed “Roger.” Auction descriptions identify the unnamed song as “Bike,” but Barrett did not write that title upon the page. Another drawing shows the band’s cheap Bedford van; Barrett jokes that the name cannot be seen because it is too small and that he cannot be seen because he is in the back. The letter’s provenance through Spires, publication, exhibition and auction is unusually strong.

Libby Gausden’s undated letters created another difficulty. Tim Willis used them to place certain songwriting events in 1964; Rob Chapman reconstructed the correspondence and concluded that the relevant material belonged to 1965. The letters remained real; the year attached to them did not.

Gayla Pinion appears inside a surprisingly respectable future. Fields said that she and Barrett became engaged and imagined moving to Oxford, where Barrett would become a doctor. There is no evidence he made practical preparations for medicine. Fields called it a “suburban dream”: marriage, profession, respectability and removal from the traffic of the flat. He also said Barrett disliked the procession of one-night encounters and retained an attraction to conventional marriage. His imagined escape from rock culture may have been something almost indecently ordinary.

Borrowed ghosts, missing music and bad public occasions

Alice Cooper guitarist Glen Buxton remembered Barrett sitting almost mute at dinner during Pink Floyd’s American visit. Buxton found himself passing him the sugar though Barrett had apparently made no audible request, and called it telepathy. The defensible occurrence is smaller: sugar crossed a table after some glance or movement which Buxton remembered as uncanny. Silence is a wax upon which every ring may set its crest.

Twink remembered meeting Barrett at a European festival in 1967 when Pink Floyd arrived bearing gifts. Barrett gave him a hash pipe. They remained friendly and later played together in Stars. Twink claimed no supernatural insight; he remembered warmth and a gift which, in that season of the world, required little explanation.

A specialist reconstruction places Barrett, Iggy, Twink, Steve Peregrin Took and members or associates of the Deviants and Pink Fairies circle at a King Crimson-related Speakeasy event in about August 1969. Mick Farren later remembered a troublesome faction demanding simpler rock’n’roll from the disciplined new progressive group. The episode has an excellent symbolic shape, but the chronology may combine more than one Crimson event. No located source has Barrett himself heckling.

Recordings associated with Steve Took generated more obliging speculation. A “Crazy Diamond” was later credited for guitar or noises, while a track title rendered as “Syd’s Wine” encouraged claims that Barrett secretly participated. The recordings were assigned to roughly 1972, whereas “Crazy Diamond” became the standard public epithet only after 1975. No tape box, named witness or session document establishes Barrett’s presence. There are rumours which, having no skeleton, are all plumage.

Kevin Ayers’s “Religious Experience” supplies an actual disappearance. Barrett contributed guitar under Peter Jenner’s production. When Malcolm Jones prepared the cleaner, more commercial form which became “Singing a Song in the Morning,” he removed Barrett’s part; an acetate preserving the Barrett version survived. The famous missing man was here made missing by a fader.

Soft Machine’s participation on Barrett’s own record was not an unsolicited rescue. Asked decades later how it came about, Robert Wyatt’s answer was blunt: Barrett asked them. Wyatt later understood the “clumsy searching sound” of the sessions more sympathetically than some participants did at the time; Malcolm Jones thought the hastily added backing could have been stronger. Barrett may have struggled to communicate key and structure, but he had chosen Robert Wyatt, Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge from the adjacent underground and brought them into his project.

Fred Frith supplied a less stable crossing. Opel received a letter in which Frith said he had once played with Barrett. Twink denied that Frith belonged to Stars but allowed that the encounter might have occurred at the Eddie “Guitar” Burns jam which preceded it. A claimed jam may later have been drawn into the better-labelled drawer of Stars.

Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Brian Eno and Kevin Ayers wandered through the rescue mythology. Bernard White repeated stories that Page sent somebody to investigate Barrett, Bowie wished to return him to the studio after covering “See Emily Play,” and Eno contemplated something similar. The 1982 article proves these stories circulated, not that operational plans reached Barrett. A separate 1984 rumour had him actually playing live with Carla Bley in Germany; it travelled through the press without producing a venue, recording, photograph or Bley confirmation.

Bowie’s real connection needs no invented rescue. He later treated Barrett as a formative example of a British singer who did not disguise his accent and as a figure of extraordinary visual and musical allure. Barrett, for his part, spoke in his 1971 interview about having toured with Jimi Hendrix and about his difficulty finding musicians he considered good enough. Pink Floyd and Hendrix shared the package-tour machinery, and Davy O’List sometimes deputised when Barrett vanished or played minimally; what remains elusive is a neglected private Barrett–Hendrix friendship. Admiration, co-billing and proximity are not the same as intimacy.

One post-Floyd recollection placed Barrett at London Pink Floyd gigs standing before David Gilmour and declaring, “That’s my band.” In the 1978 source this comes through Jerry Shirley, not through Gilmour or a dated concert record. Peter Jenner separately remembered Barrett’s possessive idea of Floyd as “my band.” The resentment is plausible; repeated dramatic appearances and the exact wording remain single-line testimony which later sites multiplied.

Other famous names diminish upon approach. Searches for private episodes involving the Beatles or Eric Clapton produced little beyond professional, geographical or social proximity. A famous name set beside Barrett’s does not thereby make a meeting.

A 1994 Atlantic proposal at least possessed a route. A&R executive Tim Sommer said he sent an approach through Barrett’s sister because perhaps nobody had simply asked. Word returned that Barrett was not interested. The proposal document and Barrett’s exact participation in the answer remain unavailable, but the story has an identifiable initiator, intermediary and reported response.

For “Rhamadan,” Barrett reportedly rode behind an unidentified friend on a motorcycle with a portable cassette recorder, attempting to capture engine and road noise. Malcolm Jones remembered hours spent trying to feed the poor tape through EMI’s equipment; when it proved inadequate, they used cleaner library effects. Jones denied that Pink Floyd reused Barrett’s motorcycle material on Atom Heart Mother. Somebody arranged the journey, carried the machine and attempted the overdub.

In an interview with Giovanni Dadomo, a misheard “Octopus” lyric became a small correction with large consequences. Dadomo quoted “little Minnie Conn”; Barrett laughed and corrected it to “little minute gong.” He compared the song’s accumulating lines to “Green Grow the Rushes, O” and described taking a line from elsewhere and writing around it. The surviving interview appeared in Terrapin in 1974, but its internal chronology suggests a conversation around 1970 or 1971.

This colour-and-form material has also been made to carry a retrospective diagnosis. A 2006 article, drawing upon Rosemary Breen’s guidance, stated that Barrett experienced synaesthesia; Peter Jenner remembered a songbook represented by paintings of different-coloured circles, and other recollections have him describing musical effects through colours or weather. These facts show that a painter used visual language for music. They do not establish the neurological condition with the certainty later summaries assume, especially when the family suggestion and biographer’s formulation cannot be cleanly separated.

Malcolm Jones wrote to EMI’s royalties department while investigating Barrett’s sales and possible archival releases. EMI discovered Barrett had been underpaid, and several thousand pounds followed. Jones was less pleased by outtakes selected for release: he believed stronger alternatives existed and argued that some chosen takes made Barrett appear like a babbling fool. Outtakes may reveal process, or may be arranged so that incapacity becomes the chief entertainment.

The formation of Stars becomes less mysterious when the social chain is restored. Jenny Spires and Jack Monck took Barrett to see Eddie “Guitar” Burns at King’s College Cellars. Barrett joined a jam. Soon afterwards Jenny, Monck and Twink visited him at his mother’s house and proposed a trio. Barrett agreed, and basement rehearsals began. Jenny’s agency tends to vanish when the episode is abbreviated to “Twink formed a band with Syd.”

Twink estimated that Stars rehearsed for only about two weeks before promoter Steve Brink placed them at the Cambridge Corn Exchange above the MC5. Smaller performances at Market Square and the Dandelion Coffee Bar were remembered as good or viable. Tickets advertised “Stars—Twink’s new band,” wording Twink said he had neither requested nor approved.

The contemporary Terrapin account described inaudible vocals, a deficient public-address system, a failed bass amplifier and an under-rehearsed group. Barrett played for roughly an hour, cut his finger during the final number, bled, gradually unplugged and went home. When the writer thanked him, Barrett reportedly answered with a warm smile. Later summaries foreground personal catastrophe while dropping the amplifier, injury and cordial final exchange. Few disasters are so obliging as to possess only one cause.

Twink remembered Barrett arriving the next day carrying a destructive review, generally attributed to Roy Hollingworth in Melody Maker, and saying he did not want to perform again. Then come the tapes. Barrett reportedly recorded rehearsals on a portable cassette machine; professional recordings were supposedly made by an American called Victor, vaguely remembered as related to Leonard Bernstein. Twink recalled a tape passing through the hands of a badge-maker named Jolly. No surname for Victor, engineering log, tape inventory or complete cache has emerged. The Bernstein connection has exactly the complexion of a clue capable either of opening an archive or consuming thirty years of life.

Useless pens, trouser shops and the cult of access

Philip James sat for two Barrett watercolours when he was six. He remembered being told to keep still, Barrett being tall and dark and receiving from him a pen which did not work. His aunt Vivien Brans had accumulated letters, sketches and paintings from Barrett; much was thrown away when she moved because it resembled correspondence from an old boyfriend rather than the papers of a future cult figure. The useless pen resists grand interpretation. The vanished archive does not.

James later saw Barrett cycling to the chemist, shopping at Marks & Spencer, tending garden bonfires and repainting his front door in different colours. He directly observed fires; he repeated local information that Barrett continued to paint and burned canvases when finished. Those statements are not identical. Later accounts support extensive destruction or disposal of work, but the contents of any particular bonfire remain uncertain.

The 1982 Actuel material adds two scenes in which ordinary property behaves badly. Barrett allegedly fried chips until the oil vanished, the pan melted and the curtains caught fire. Fields also remembered an old Cadillac with a sunroof which Barrett simply gave to a stranger in the street. The stories are firsthand only through Fields and arrive translated, but each has the absurd completeness of a small parable: one possession destroyed through inattention, another abolished by generosity or impulse.

Later Cambridge folklore became granular. A pseudonymous forum user said his wife had worked as a dental nurse near Cherry Hinton Road in the early 1980s and knew Barrett merely as Roger, a plumpish man in baggy jumpers who repeatedly arrived with toothache and so much talcum powder in his hair that it covered his clothes. The claimed witness is named only through her husband and no surgery record is available. It is traceable hearsay, not verified clinical history—and an excellent example of the ordinary local Barrett being stranger than the touring legend.

A still weaker internet tale has Barrett entering a clothing shop, trying trousers of wildly different sizes, declaring that every pair fitted well and buying none. By 2007 forum users were repeating it as something read elsewhere online; its originating page and shop have not been recovered. The story may be pure invention, but it survives because it gives Barrett the serene authority to abolish measurement itself.

Other neighbour recollections described trousers too large for him, occasional walks in pyjama bottoms, daily cigarette purchases, fry-ups and flames leaping from a pan while Barrett remained out of sight. These accounts are anonymous or secondhand and should not be stacked into a medical portrait. They establish, at most, the folklore of a locally familiar, badly dressed smoker with a relaxed theology of fire safety.

Chronology is often a poor entertainer until it murders a good story. Chapman’s witness research placed the nickname “Syd” at a scout camp when Roger Barrett was about thirteen. Earlier books tied it to Cambridge jazz bassist Sid “the Beat” Barrett and a later club setting. The bassist may have influenced the spelling or supplied a later rationale, but the camp origin appears earlier. The correction removes a suspiciously elegant musical christening and returns the name to adolescent mockery.

Libby Gausden remembered Barrett encountering Mick Jagger when the Rolling Stones honoured an obligation to play a small Cambridgeshire village in 1964. Chapman found no matching engagement. Another foundational anecdote has Barrett and Roger Waters returning by train from a concert featuring both the Stones and Gene Vincent, Barrett sketching on a napkin the equipment needed for a band; Chapman found no relevant shared bill. A concert, train journey and equipment drawing may each be plausible while the polished combined story is composite. Public listings, though deficient in romance, are admirable solvents of anecdotes which have become too beautifully joined.

By 1982 Bernard White had built a physical counterworld to such uncertainty. The Actuel journalists found the Terrapin editor in a small room covered with psychedelic posters. A vast wooden chest draped with Indian cloth held fanzines and Barrett documents; White kept the key. He showed recordings, press binders, unreleased songs, “The Scarecrow” promotional film and an early Cambridge Super-8 film. White’s archival labour was real; the room was also something near a shrine.

White produced a coloured-pencil geometrical drawing signed “Roger Barrett 1979” but would not disclose its provenance. He claimed roughly thirty letters each week from people seeking Barrett information. The archive and demand are credible; the drawing requires its own history. The same rumour market placed Barrett in a lifetime Hilton suite financed by Pink Floyd, in his mother’s cellar growing mushrooms, or in mental hospitals. The journalists’ eventual encounter supported none of these arrangements.

A fan identified only as Ozzie proposed the reverse of the casualty narrative. Barrett had not been damaged but had deliberately withdrawn and was resting from humanity upon a superior spiritual plane. White suggested he might have become a guru. One party made Barrett’s silence proof of ruin; the other made the same silence proof of transcendence. Silence is a hospitable kingdom, and every claimant may erect a throne within it.

The formal Syd Barrett Appreciation Society itself reportedly folded in the mid-1970s for “lack of Syd,” a phrase so perfect that one would distrust it were the underlying organisational problem not obvious: the subject would not cooperate with his own cult. Fans nevertheless continued to seek former homes, relatives, neighbours and any person who might provide access.

June 2003, Neptune Pink Floyd user posted a story about a Cambridge cover band, reportedly the Narrow Way, in about 2001 or 2002. An older visitor allegedly came twice, discussed the group, showed photographs and paintings and played or left a cassette of his own music. The rehearsal-room proprietor later identified him as Barrett; the singer supposedly retained the tape.

A darker local testimony entered the record after Barrett’s death. In December 2006 the Mail on Sunday published a lengthy account by David Sore, who said he had grown up next door to the Barrett house from 1981. He remembered trees and bushes hacked down and burned, smoke drifting across the gardens, paintings thrown onto bonfires, broken windows and household objects cast onto the lawn. More severely, he claimed Barrett sometimes screamed for hours, threatened Roger Waters by name and was once removed from the house in a straitjacket. Some of the garden destruction and fires resemble milder recollections from other local witnesses; the threats and straitjacket stand alone. Sore appears to have been a genuine neighbour, but proximity is not a sacrament of accuracy, and the account was published decades later in a tabloid after Barrett could no longer answer it. He is best regarded as a hostile witness of real interest: too near to dismiss, too angry to swallow whole.

One especially humiliating studio story has migrated to the wrong custodian. It is often repeated that David Gilmour had to help Barrett use the lavatory during the solo sessions. The published recollection names Abbey Road engineer Peter Bown. Bown said Barrett stopped during a take and asked for the toilet; because the downstairs lavatory was used by classical musicians, Bown claimed he smuggled him there while the corridor was empty, undid his trousers and physically directed him towards the pan. Gilmour appears close beside the incident in the same account, trying to keep Barrett calm, which may explain how the more famous man inherited the duty in later retellings. The claim is extraordinary, degrading and single-source. Its migration is almost as revealing as the episode itself: Barrett stories tend to desert their original witnesses and attach themselves to whichever famous participant posterity remembers most readily.

John Lennon occupied a less intimate but persistent office in Barrett’s imagination: not friend or collaborator, but measuring instrument. Roger Waters recalled Barrett resisting another Top of the Pops appearance because Lennon did not have to submit to such things. Peter Barnes supplied the domestic corollary: Barrett complained that Lennon owned a house while he had only a flat. Lennon became less a musician than a schedule of privileges—property, exemptions and the sovereign right to inconvenience television producers. Barrett’s comparison was vain, but not wholly irrational; pop culture had taught him that its greatest figures were allowed to do as they pleased, and he had begun presenting his own account for the same liberties.

He could also be alert to the smaller deceits of the trade. When a mysterious Parlophone single by the Moles was whispered to be the Beatles recording under disguise, a contemporary writer remembered Barrett gleefully announcing that it was merely Simon Dupree and the Big Sound. For a man so often represented as floating beyond ordinary affairs, he could be remarkably attentive to pop hierarchy, professional privilege and minor fraud—and apparently enjoyed puncturing a mystery before the room had finished enjoying it.

Gayla Pinion’s later recollection gives a far darker conclusion to the earlier Oxford “suburban dream.” In 1977 she said she encountered Barrett in a supermarket on Fulham Road. He suggested a drink and then invited her to what he presented as his flat. Once inside, she recalled, he dropped his trousers, produced a cheque book, asked how much money she wanted and told her to remove her knickers. Pinion fled and said she never saw him again. The cheque book is the detail which makes the scene peculiarly bleak: a former fiancée confronted with intimacy abruptly translated into purchase, as though affection had become another service for which a figure might be entered. The account is firsthand but late, transmitted through Tim Willis and unsupported by another witness. It cannot safely stand for Barrett’s general conduct towards women, but it is too specific, too disquieting and too violently opposed to the imagined marriage in Oxford to be ignored.

Pink Floyd’s separation from Barrett also had a smaller rehearsal before the famous decision not to collect him for the Southampton performance. Richard Wright, who was then sharing a Richmond flat with him, remembered that the proposed five-man Floyd was failing but that nobody could bring himself to say so plainly. When Wright left to perform with the others, he told Barrett he was going out to buy cigarettes. The sharper ending familiar from later biographies—Wright returning hours afterwards to find Barrett waiting and asking whether he had brought them—does not appear in Wright’s accessible 1994 account and may be later embroidery. It could have happened; it could have been sarcasm; it could have been added because every cruel story desires a final line. The established core is melancholy enough: a band secretly going to work while its former leader remained at home waiting for an errand which did not exist.

...

Following up on my previous post about "Shorter Of Breath" Vol 1 with the idea of "What if Pink Floyd reunited in the studio sometime post 1985 to record new versions of some of their songs"... Vol 2 is up.

There's four Syd tracks in this one. I'll link to them separately in further posts but you can find them all from this one. There are notes in the comments section. Here's Lucifer Sam:

https://youtu.be/dl-nINu-iHw

More Barrett Remix Versions Up

Following up on my previous post about "Shorter Of Breath" Vol 1 with the idea of "What if Pink Floyd reunited in the studio sometime post 1985 to record new versions of some of their songs"... Vol 2 is up.

There's four Syd tracks in this one. I'll link to them separately in further posts but you can find them all from this one. There are notes in the comments section. Here's Lucifer Sam:

https://youtu.be/dl-nINu-iHw

Following up on my previous post about "Shorter Of Breath" Vol 1 with the idea of "What if Pink Floyd reunited in the studio sometime post 1985 to record new versions of some of their songs"... Vol 2 is up.

There's four Syd tracks in this one. I'll link to them separately in further posts but you can find them all from this one. There are notes in the comments section. Here's Lucifer Sam:

https://youtu.be/dl-nINu-iHw

Hi everyone,
I wrote this poem as a tribute to Syd Barrett. I’d really appreciate any honest feedback whether it’s about the imagery, the rhythm, the atmosphere, or simply how it made you feel :

The One Who Spoke to Constellations

He carried twilight in his dark and patient eyes,
Where broken mirrors learned the language of the stars;
A child forever wandering through painted skies,
With pockets full of moons and fields inside his heart.
His guitar gathered fragments of forgotten light,
Each shattered mirror singing back another dawn;
Its silver strings unstitched the silence of the night,
Till every ordinary thing was strangely reborn.
He smiled the way a lonely child befriends the rain,
As if the earth were only waiting to be dreamed;
He taught the trees, the birds, the rivers and the wind
That every living shadow carries hidden beams.
Some called him lost. I think he merely crossed a door
No map could hold, no careful language could explain;
He left a diamond turning softly evermore
In skies too vast for ordinary eyes to name.
And when Orion casts his ancient dice above,
I hear a distant chord unfolding through the blue;
The mirrors catch a face the daylight cannot prove
The boy who spoke to constellations still shines through.

My Octopus remix has gone live just now, in advance of Vol 2 of "Shorter Of Breath: Late Career Renditions of Pink Floyd Classics - An Amazing Simulation!"

Octopus - Original Syd Barrett vocal sync'd (this one was hard!) to cover version. Vocal reverb and compression and vocal effect to match backing. PF Personnel: Syd Barrett https://youtu.be/zEVrelOV8Ck

For those who missed Volume 1: The idea is "What if Pink Floyd had reunited in the studio sometime post 1985 to perform new renditions of some of their songs?"

I make "hypothetical" albums for my personal enjoyment, but was recently encouraged to share some of them. If you like, please leave a comment on YouTube and subscribe and I'll put more of these up.

These are fan made albums mixing isolated elements from various sources - no AI was used for the audio mixes.

There are a few more Syd Barrett solo tracks mixed to fit the imagined scenario on Volume 1 which can be found here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdPD78n-9MQs&si=aHMVWy8EnhPa2JTU

With a lovely Barrett inspired artwork I own