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Friday, 6th January, marked the 60th
birthday of Pink Floyd founding member Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett, and
it was nice to see the tributes paid to him on this special occasion.
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| Barrett feature in The Independent |
With the rather distasteful
antics of the UK's Daily Mirror, printing two pictures of him about his
daily chores on Friday, it was a pleasure to read the tribute to him on
David Gilmour's blog, and the exhaustive coverage that the UK's Independent newspaper printed yesterday (and shown to the right).
Under the headline "Syd Barrett -
The Swinging 60", the article sought the opinions of many of his
friends and peers - included were former Floyd managers Peter Jenner
and Andrew King, former flatmate Duggie Fields, Jeff Dexter - DJ at
UFO, record producer John Leckie, Soft Machine guitarist Daevid Allen,
photographer Mick Rock, and David Gilmour.
In David's contribution to
the piece, he mentions that Syd "was a truly magnetic personality. When
he was very young, he was a figure in his home town. People would look
at him in the street and say, "There's Syd Barrett," and he would be
only 14 years old."
David talks of Syd's breakdown, and the potential that some of his songs had, if only they'd found a way of recording them.
"They could have really been
fantastic. But trying to find a technique of working with Syd was so
difficult. You had to pre-record tracks without him, working from one
version of the song he had done, and then sit Syd down afterwards and
try to get him to play and sing along. Or you could get him to do a
performance of it on his own and then try to dub everything else on
top. The concept of him performing with another bunch of musicians was
clearly impossible because he'd change the song every time. He'd never
do a song the same twice, I think quite deliberately."
The full set of interviews can be read through this link.
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