Full of Dust and Guitars

Once The Piper At The Gates of Dawn, now more likely to be The Madcap at the gates of Heaven, late psychedelic visionary and Pink Floyd pioneer Syd Barrett may be one of the most overlooked songwriters of not just the 1960’s, but in British music history.


Such an oversight is forgivable given the illimitable number of rock and pop luminaries who were at the peak of their powers during the same decade. Barrett can’t boast a discography that matches that of Lennon, Jagger or Townshend, and given the brevity of his LSD fuelled career, will never be considered to be above ‘cult’ status. A crying shame given the fact his fellow Floyd’s have achieved legendary status for releasing a series of lesser, self indulgent records that, Dark Side of The Moon aside, couldn’t touch the Barrett helmed Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

An advocate of musical mayhem, Barrett was the most tragic victim of the LSD age. His incessant drug intake was at odds with the requirements of being a front man and figurehead, even in the substance riddled sixties. He didn’t possess the fresh faced charm of say a Beatle or a Kink, nor was he the type to embrace television appearances and interviews. Piper… should have been the start of something beautiful for Barrett and The Floyd, but instead, it proved to be the beginning of the end.

Recorded in Studio 3 at Abbey Road between February and July of 1967, Piper At The Gates of Dawn was one of three albums set to herald the psychedelic era into Britain from across the Atlantic. The other two albums that completed this trilogy, The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and S.F. Sorrow by The Pretty Things were taking shape at the same time in Studios 1 and 2 respectively.

In the ultimate testament to Barrett’s vision, Paul McCartney would down bass and ‘just so happen’ to drop by Studio 3 every now and again in order to see Barrett weave his mind expanding opus. Even McCartney, at the height of The Fab Four’s psychedelic prowess, was taken aback by the sheer adventure of Barrett’s work. In his book Revolution In The Head, Ian Macdonald claims that McCartney waxed lyrical to his fellow Beatles about the hypnotic sounds emanating from down the Abbey Road corridors and wished to embrace them in their newfound kaleidoscopic adventure.


Spaced out odysseys such as Astronomy Domine, Matilda Mother and Interstellar Overdrive were unlike anything the British music scene had ever leant it’s ears to. And The Floyd’s live shows were equally frenetic to bear witness to. Not only was Barrett fearless, he was right on the edge too. Due to the success of Piper…, Barrett’s psychological state deteriorated under a mountain of commercial pressure and mammoth LSD intake. Live shows became a showcase for Syd’s eccentricities, whether it was strumming one chord for the entire concert, wandering offstage or squeezing an entire tube of Brylcreem into his hair in order for it to melt down his face under the stage lights and resemble “a guttered candle”.


Such behaviour proved to be tolerable only for so long, and by April 1968, just eight months after the release of his most seminal work, Syd Barrett was removed from his very own creation, being replaced by David Gilmour.

For all the psychedelic creativity it inspired, LSD was never meant to be consumed in the manner Barrett consumed it. Syd didn’t so much as open the Doors Of Perception, but rather kicked them down and burnt them to cinders. Acid eroded his psyche and pressured Syd into writing and performing on the edge of implosion. It’s precisely this ‘Point of No Return’ philosophy that has rendered his excruciatingly limited body of work so influential over the past 40 years. David Bowie was enamoured with Syd’s sci-fi psychedelics after witnessing them first hand in 1967;

“Barrett was a huge influence on me. I thought Syd could do no wrong. I thought he was a massive talent. He was the first I have ever seen in the middle 60’s who could decorate a stage. He had this strange mystical look to him, with painted black fingernails and his eyes fully made up. He was like some figure out of an Indonesian play or something, and he wasn’t altogether of this world.”

This influence would spread onwards over the decades, to Robert Smith of The Cure (and his blatant plagiarising of Syd’s hairstyle and penchant for eyeliner), REM, The Flaming Lips, Placebo and early Blur and Supergrass. Upon the founding of Creation Records in 1983, Alan McGee announced his intention to “fuse together the legacies of Joy Division and Syd Barrett”.

Syd’s British eccentricity coupled with his Through The Looking Glass surrealism and almost childlike innocence has made him ripe for exploring and idolising, and nowhere are these characteristics better exemplified than in The Madcap Laughs, his debut solo album. Produced by his Floyd replacement David Gilmour, Madcap is as erratic and unorthodox to listen to as it was to make. The sophisticated production techniques such as multi-track recording that were being pioneered at the time were thrown out of the window and replaced by Syd’s random strumming, ad-lib and total lack of control.

Gilmour later commented that the Madcap sessions were “pretty torturous and very rushed”, yet it was this process which suited Syd best. Had it simply been a straight forward studio processed album, it quite simply wouldn’t have been the same album. There would be none of the same charm or lustre and it would be impossible to derive the same enjoyment from listening to it.

Which, in a nutshell, fittingly describes Roger Keith ‘Syd’ Barrett to a tee. His blatant disregard for the norm is what has made him such an endearing cult icon. He didn’t care for the silly ‘business’ of music or life in general. He lived his life separately from all others in his own alternate dimension, blissfully unaware of the beautiful chaos he was causing in this one.




By Joe Baiamonte