Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head, By Rob Chapman
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/syd-barrett-a-very-irregular-head-by-rob-chapman-1958008.html
Faber & Faber £14.99 441pp. £13.49 from the Independent Booksho p:
08430 600 030
Reviewed by John Walsh
Friday, 30 April 2010
Syd Barrett's career was over as soon as it had begun. Its zenith and
nadir followed each other in a matter of months. In autumn 1964, a
charming, romantic, artistically inclined youth of 16, he joined a
rudimentary blues band called the Tea Set and changed their name to
Pink Floyd, after the Christian names of two obscure North Carolina bluesmen.
He wrote whimsical songs based on The Wind in the Willows and Hilaire
Belloc's Cautionary Verses, and played wibbly, discordant guitar at
spaced-out "happenings" at the UFO, formerly an Irish ballroom in
Tottenham Court Road.
Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Barrett's "Arnold Layne," in
Chelsea in January 1967. In July, they produced their hugely
influential first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In August
Barrett and his girlfriend Lindsay moved into 101 Cromwell Road, an
address that was to become infamous.
By November, when Pink Floyd toured America with Jimi Hendrix and The
Move, it was clear that something was dreadfully wrong with Barrett.
He would do nothing on stage but stand open-mouthed, arms limp by his
side, or de-tune his guitar and rattle the strings, or blow a
referee's whistle. A favourite strategy during interviews was to
adopt a catatonic stare. Back home, he would beat his girlfriend
Lindsay's head on the floor. "This angelic boy," wrote his friend
David Gale, "became this thousand yard stare, sullen, black bags
under the eyes, pale, listless, not talking, moody, impossible to
work with, violent man."
The band brought in David Gilmour, a schoolfriend of Syd's, to help
out on guitar duties. In April 1968, it was announced that Barrett
had left Pink Floyd. He made two solo albums, The Madcap Laughs, and
Barrett, but the songs seemed virtually dragged out of him by the
supportive Gilmour and a sound engineer, in recordings that make
painful listening.
In 1972, Barrett retired completely from music, from London, from the
scene, and went to live in his mother's house in Cambridge. Silence
and reclusion closed over him for 30-odd years. He died in 2006.
How can such a brief, tragic life justify a 440-page biography?
Because Syd Barrett has always stood for more than an acid casualty.
He is the damaged archangel of the Sixties counterculture, a martyr
to art and soul and inner space, a guy who wouldn't have any truck
with commercialism.
That's the view of Sydologists worldwide, and in Rob Chapman they
have found an energetic spokesman. Chapman saw Barrett in the flesh
just once, and clearly never got over it. His book is a monument of
special pleading.
He examines every adverse judgement on his hero and contradicts it.
He doesn't believe Syd's intake of LSD was out of the ordinary; he's
seen no evidence of his "madness" in documentary footage; he
attributes his on-stage anarchy to "radical art statements"; he
wasn't even a real recluse, because he used to go to the pub now and
again (by himself.)
Chapman has interviewed more Barrett family members than any previous
biographer. Their reminiscences, and those of the usual Sixties
suspects, give the book its dense, patchouli-scented texture. You
won't read a better account of the Cambridge intelligentsia of the
1950s, or the wacky countercultural events of the 1960s than here -
the Wholly Communion poetry readings, the Spontaneous Underground parties.
Chapman offers some genuine insights, such as the fact that all
Barrett's literary heroes Lear, Carroll, Belloc and Kenneth Grahame
lost a parent at an early age, like him. Their works are full of
"disembodied identity, a dream-like sense of the self in limbo...
rootlessness, restlessness, rejection, detachment, escapism".
But he takes it too far. Acres of space are employed in recalling
what critics once said about the mad Victorian poet John Clare, or
the Jesuit Gerald Manley Hopkins, and trying to fit their judgements
to Syd's whimsical nonsense. Opaque lyrical moments are deemed
"worthy of Dylan Thomas". Random appropriations from Shakespeare are
held up as evidence of deep empathy. Painter friends of Barrett are
co-opted to say things like "I think Syd is quite Picasso-like."
In bigging-up Barrett as the rock visionary who couldn't stand all
that rock star nonsense, Chapman flays others for their shortcomings.
He bitches at the press for perpetuating myths about Syd's lysergic
dementia, while revealing that he started a few such rumours himself.
He attacks ink Floyd for excessive clarity: "Waters, Mason, Wright
and Gilmour (even sounds like a firm of chartered surveyors, doesn't
it?) were governed by caution, deliberation, meticulous attention to
detail... linearity. Syd was driven (and impeded, of course) by
immediacy, spontaneity, unmediated response".
Unfortunately, none of this rescues Syd Barrett from being, or
seeming, a mildly talented Sixties art-school dilettante who couldn't
stand the limelight and withdrew into a dazed, drugged, petulant
melancholy. There was something about him, Chapman writes, "that
brought out the eulogiser in everyone." Not everyone, Rob.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
