I stopped using the word 'genius' a long time ago. Once in a while I may still slip it into the odd sentence but it would never be about a person. Rather, it would be about a song, a plot device or an especially good scene from a film. Basically, an artist can produce a genius painting without being a genius him- or herself. I think the problem that I have is that the word 'genius' presupposes a certain purity that is simply nowhere to be found. It is all too diluted and tampered with. And yet there are moments in my life when I come back to the music of Syd Barrett and the dim, broken light of the word 'genius' starts to shine again. It just becomes overwhelming, and for a while there is no other art that I can accept.
It still gives me chills, that brilliantly unnerving fact that back in 2003, when I was in England for the first time, Syd Barrett was alive. Apparently content, if not actually happy (that is, according to his sister Rosemary), he could sometimes be spotted in the streets of Cambridge, lost and barely recognisable from the old days, with a desolate stare and a paper bag filled with groceries. Tim, a friend of mine, kept saying that Syd Barrett had to leave Pink Floyd in 1968, that he was no longer compos mentis and that there was nothing else for his bandmates to do. While I was having none of it. They pushed him out, I reasoned. They forced him out of his own band. Obviously, I did not know the full story back then, I did not know about the mind-altering effects of acid and just how much he took, but I knew what I loved. It was called The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, and it had gripped me like nothing else.
He would die three years later, in July, during my second stay in Gateshead. By then, I had read and reread the full lyrics of Syd Barrett's songs and learnt them by heart. There was a certain sentimentality about them, a certain childish magic that I could relate to. And there was one song in particular for which I developed a strange fascination. It was called "Scream Thy Last Scream" and I could not find its recording anywhere (members of Pink Floyd had blocked its release for many years). So instead, I came from school one day, took my sister's guitar and tried to set those lyrics to my own melody. Happy with the results, I even recorded it on a dictaphone. Many years later, when I finally heard "Vegetable Man" and "Scream Thy Last Scream", I was quite disturbed to realise that a small part of my largely hopeless melody for the latter was eerily similar to what Syd Barrett wrote in 1967. It was one of his last songs for the band that would in a few months cut him off and terminate his contract. Interestingly, none of subsequent revelations, documentaries, interviews and books (of which A Very Irregular Head and Random Precision are absolute must-reads) would make me see the break-up in a different light from how I felt more than 20 years ago. There is something truly horrifying about Rosemary's words that in later years, when he was living in his messy, half-empty house in Cambridge, suffering from diabetes and severe mental issues, the very name of Roger Waters would send Syd into a fit of rage.
I sometimes go back to that summer of 2003 and think about this chance that I had. I could ask Tim to drive me to Cambridge where I could perhaps come across Syd Barrett in the street or even knock on the door of his house. But then again - what next? Robyn Hitchcock has once described his own experience of undertaking a similar pilgrimage and being stopped at the door by Syd's mother or sister. "Oh he is not at home, he is in London". Nervous, pink with anxiety, Hitchcock felt a great relief and was happy to leave Cambridge without ever meeting his hero.
And it was actually Robyn Hitchcock who, I believe, gave the best explanation of what happened to this incredible, singularly gifted man of twenty-four years old. That generally speaking, all artists dilute their talent. That there are these tubes filled with paint, and they squeeze the paint out a little and smear it thinly over a canvas or a page. Syd Barrett was different in that in those couple of years he squeezed it all out very quickly, in one go. And those colours were amazing, and glorious, and truly magical, but they could not last. Soon it all ran dry and there was nothing left.
Peter Jenner, I believe, the manager of Pink Floyd in those early days, would say at some point that he could never listen to either Barrett or The Madcap Laughs. Moreover, he would say that he could never understand the people who did. He actually called the very idea of listening to those albums strange and even 'ghoulish'. While I understand his thinking, I also believe that the sheer light of Syd Barrett's music (tragic though it was during the disjointed sessions for his two solo albums) is such that not listening to it, even in the form of frail, occasionally incoherent outtakes released in 1987, is a big loss and grave mistake. Because this was, in a kind of terrible and perverted way, a part of his world that he shared with us for a brief few years of his music career. It is not for me to judge how inevitable it was, but I have come to believe that it was integral. And we should all be grateful to people like Malcolm Jones, David Gilmour and Richard Wright for making those 1969/1970 recordings even possible.
Besides those timeless early singles and three albums (of which The Piper and The Madcap Laughs are in my personal top ten of all time), I find myself coming back to "Jugband Blues" time and time again. In a somewhat emotional move by the band, they attached Syd's last song for Pink Floyd at the end of A Saucerful Of Secrets. It is a harrowing and very pure expression of the artist's state of mind, impossibly sad and yet one of Syd Barrett's best creations. There is nothing tampered or diluted about what is expressed here, the song comes at you full-on, with gut-punching lyrics and inescapable melodies. It is both unbearable and irresistible. Sometimes, though, it is too hard for me to listen to it, almost as hard as watching the closing few seconds of this video, the last that were recorded with him in the band:
