Syd Barrett and British Psychedelia by Rob Chapman

Author:Rob Chapman [Rob Chapman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: syd_barrett_and_british_pschedelia_apple
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

‘Syd was an incredible performer,’ says Peter Brown, who saw Pink Floyd play several times during this period. ‘Miles had invited me down to Powis Square. “You’ve gotta hear this band.” I didn’t think that much of them actually, but I liked Syd. And then because I was kind of persona grata at UFO I used to go down there a lot – partly chasing girls, but partly because it was a kind of a loose community at the time, and we all had certain aims in common. Syd was incredibly charismatic, and within his limitations he could do things on guitar that were very, very interesting. Some of them were textural things and others were definitely kind of linear improvisational type things. I mean, when he was on, when he was happening, he was really happening, y’know?’

‘I have to admit that he never struck me as special as everyone now thinks he was,’ says Barry Miles. ‘But to me he was the most sympathetic one out of the Pink Floyd. He was the one that was most in tune with what was going on at the UFO club and avant-garde music in general. He was very interested in electronic music, like Luciano Berio, who was very important at that time with his recordings of speeded-up and slowed-down collages of tape. Syd was very interested in this sort of thing, which is why he was so interested in AMM. And he certainly knew a lot about art. He was fascinated by the subject. He genuinely cared about what was going on in America. He would talk about De Kooning and Rothko and all the stuff that was being shown at the Whitechapel Gallery. I was never a close friend of Syd’s, but the few conversations we had were usually on that kind of level, because we had the same art school background and the same influences.’

Syd’s fascination with the Dutch abstract expressionist Willem De Kooning reveals another line of contact. Chaim Soutine’s ‘thick squidgy excited paint’, as Robert Hughes put it, had a big influence on De Kooning, the originator of what became known as action painting, and influenced Syd further on down the line. Indeed Robert Hughes’ description of De Kooning as ‘a creature of Protean vitality who subsumes the history of art in his own person, becomes a touchstone of the culture, and so transcends all questions of originality’ echoes Andrew Rawlinson’s early assessment of Syd, and like so many comments on his influences might just as easily have been applied to Syd himself.

Co-manager Andrew King agrees that, for all his apparent spontaneity and improvisation, it was clear that Syd had thought things through conceptually. ‘Someone once said to Picasso, “I could do that in five minutes”, and Picasso replied, “Well, it took me seventy years and five minutes.” Syd’s guitar explorations were like that. They didn’t come out of nowhere.’

‘I think that’s a quote from Whistler, actually,’ says Anthony Stern. ‘I think Whistler was sued by somebody for fraud, because he’d painted in a very abstract kind of way.

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