Pink Floyd’s interpersonal story, like so many others across the history of rock, has mostly devolved into a permanent state of mutual loathing fueled by ego and bitterness; not a great example for younger folks still clinging to the idea that time heals all wounds.
After decades of headlines documenting the never-ending Pink Floyd custody battle between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, however, it’s worth occasionally remembering how much love existed in the early incarnation of the band, and how central Waters and Gilmour’s mutual friend, founding member Syd Barrett, was to that dynamic.
“[Syd] was physically beautiful, witty, funny,” Gilmour said in 2021, speaking of the bandmate he’d befriended as a teenager in 1962. “He was much loved by everyone around him.”
More than just a charismatic performer, though, Barrett was also the original brains of the Pink Floyd operation and the architect of the band’s early records, making his sudden decline in mental illness difficult on multiple levels.
“When he was still in the band in the later stages, we got to the point where any one of us was likely to tear his throat out at any minute because he was so impossible,” Waters told Melody Maker in 1971.
Barrett was technically sacked from Floyd in 1968, but it was unclear to his bandmates for a while if Syd even realised what had happened. By 1970, with concern growing around his well-being, Barrett was still motivated to make new music, and Gilmour – feeling a confluence of hope, guilt, and obligation – offered to help him record what would become a pair of remarkable and notoriously difficult solo albums, Barrett and The Madcap Laughs.
“It was this labour of love where they so badly wanted to support him,” Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan recently said on his podcast, recalling a chat he’d had with Gilmour about those sessions.
Adding, “The only way they could record was, Syd would go in and record live with all those weird stops and starts and timings, and then they’d have to figure out how to go back in and build a band around the tracks. And David Gilmour told me it was a nightmare, because it’s like, how do you follow that weird timing? . . . Basically, it got to the point where he couldn’t play the same thing twice.”
Barrett’s lyrics were similarly ever-changing from one take to the next.
“It looked, to me even, like he just sort of made them up as he went along,” Gilmour told Rolling Stone in 2021. “Some of the time, I just couldn’t work out what he was saying. And on other occasions he says different things on different versions of the same song, double tracking his own voice and different words are coming out. The title of the first album is The Madcap Laughs, but on some [versions of ‘Octopus’] he sings ‘the mad cat laughs’ with a ‘T’ in cat, and some he sings ‘madcap.’ . . . They were quite hard to decipher because they don’t follow what we would normally see as common sense in a linear way.”
Under the circumstances, the fact that Barrett’s solo albums wound up as uniquely unusual and beautiful as they did stands as a testament not to just to Syd’s undeniable talent and adventurousness, but of the devoted friendship of Gilmour and the other musicians and producers on the records, all of whom were willing to go the extra mile to help harness Barrett’s wild vision into something with a semblance of palatable structure.
