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Information Page
CHAPTER ONE
CAMBRIDGE
CHAPTER TWO
SYD & DAVID
CHAPTER THREE
THE MOVE TO TOWN
CHAPTER FOUR
UNDERGROUND LONDON
CHAPTER FIVE
LONDON FREE SCHOOL & INTERNATIONAL TIMES
CHAPTER SIX
UFO CLUB
CHAPTER SEVEN
FROM ARNOLD TO EMILY
CHAPTER EIGHT
ON THE ROAD
CHAPTER NINE
DAVID JOINS
CHAPTER TEN
MEET THE NEW BOSS
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ATOM HEART MOTHER TO MEDDLE
CHAPTER TWELVE
DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
Despite pressure from property developers, Grantchester Meadows remains a quintessentially English patch of countryside, with muddy paths showing the passage of ducks and foxes, dogs and people, lone fishermen on the banks of the winding River Cam, distant bells from the massed church spires beyond the trees, and everywhere the sound of birdsong. The City of Cambridge is relatively small, around 100,000 people, and is one of the most beautiful cities in Britain, if not the world. It has a very powerful physical presence and visitors cannot avoid feeling a tremendous sense of continuity with the past.
All art forms contain an element of the environment that created them, including rock and roll: Elvis Presley was a southern boy, Fats Domino and Dr John have the deep rolling sound of New Orleans, The Beatles were clearly from Liverpool just as the Rolling Stones were the sound of the London suburbs – and Pink Floyd were from Cambridge. Nick Mason and Rick Wright, of course, came from London but the three successive leaders and principal songwriters of the band: Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and David Gilmour were all Cantabrigians.
Elements of their childhood in that city impose themselves on Pink Floyd music in all three of its linked incarnations. No matter how indifferent you may be to ancient buildings it is impossible to spend time in Cambridge without the environment of solid stone walls, the classical volumes and proportions of the buildings, the medieval arrangement of streets and alleys, and the rich patina of age slowing your step, making you aware of the past and reducing the urgency of the present. In the town centre it is still common to see masters and students in gowns and even the occasional mortarboard, the Cam is still thronged with students in punts, and bicycles far outnumber cars in the narrow winding streets of the centre. The country is never far away and the Backs provide an arboreal setting for endless picture postcard views. Ancient bells still ring out from medieval towers and the atmosphere is liturgical: one of learning, of respect for learning; of being part of an historical process.
It is this physical environment, rather than the aural environment (car radios, TV ads) which most American groups had, that is echoed in the architectural structures suggested by Pink Floyd’s music. Even Syd Barrett showed preference for long improvisational passages defined more by surfaces and textures than by virtuoso guitar pyrotechnics. Roger Waters was the most obviously architectural in the construction of his music but Rick Wright and Nick Mason shared his approach – all three were architectural students, of course – down to planning songs with diagrams and graphs rather than words scribbled in pencil on the back of an envelope. Even with master rock guitarist Gilmour at the helm, the music suggests the enormous volumes of architecture and is more likely to proceed at the stately pace of a hymn than a Chuck Berry duckwalk.
As with many groups, the line-up of Pink Floyd was the result of the successive shuffling of players in a series of bands who joined, left and exchanged members in a formal dance that left a lucky few holding a full dance card. On the floor were a circle of friends and acquaintances who knew each other at school in Cambridge and, in many cases, whose parents also knew each other. Various Cambridge, then London-based, groups maneuvered until the band took its final shape. Some of these people played a brief role then moved on, others took on new roles, such as art direction or spouse, while one, David Gilmour, tried a different route before being asked to dance.
George Roger Waters was born on September 9, 1943, the youngest of three boys, in the village of Great Bookham, Surrey, near Dorking, about 20 miles south of London. His father Eric Fletcher Waters, a religious education and physical education teacher, was in Italy serving in the armed forces as a Second Lieutenant with the City of London Regiment of the 8th Battalion Royal Fusiliers under General Leese. His unit was among those that managed a successful landing on January 22 on the beaches at Anzio, 60 miles north of Cassino. This landing behind enemy lines was designed to draw German forces away from the Cassino front so that British and American troops could break through and head north to Rome. The beachhead was consolidated but unfortunately did not break out to engage enemy forces. Parts of the German 14th army were rushed to Anzio as anticipated but they were able to contain the beachhead and pinned down British and American forces in a stalemate. Then, on February 18, 1944, as the allies bombed Monte Cassino prior to the second battle for the ancient monastery, Eric Waters was shot and killed. Roger was five months old.
‘A big bonfire, and being held up to the window, and people with flags … and dancing, and flickering light.’
Roger Waters
As if life was not hard enough for the Waters family, on June 13, 1944, the Germans began launching doodlebugs – V1 flying bombs – against London, many of which overflew Surrey. Several thousand were shot down by artillery or by fighter planes before they reached London, making their flight paths a treacherous place to live. Mary Waters packed her belongings and took her sons, John, the eldest, Duncan and Roger, to Cambridge to start a new life. Roger was two years old. His earliest memory is of VJ night, August 15, 1945: “A big bonfire, and being held up to the window, and people with flags … and dancing, and flickering light.” It was only when his schoolmates began to be picked up from nursery school by their fathers in 1946 when the troops were demobbed that he began asking where his father was. When it sank in that he was dead, Roger became very agitated. His absent father eventually came to dominate his life; becoming the theme for some of his best, and his most obsessional work.
Roger was born into an old-style, resolutely left-wing family. His paternal grandparents lived at Copley, near Barnard Castle in County Durham where his grandmother was the housekeeper for the local country doctor. His grandfather was a coal miner in the drift mines and then became the Labour Party agent for Bradford before dying in the trenches of the Great War. Roger’s father, Eric Fletcher Waters, grew up as a communist Christian, as Waters told the Daily Telegraph: “You could not fail to be a communist then. The children of Bradford did not have shoes or clogs but rags about their feet.” The sacrifice made by both his grandfather and his father was burned into his psychic makeup and was to profoundly affect his life: “I’m filled with the sense that I am heir to their passion and my forebears’ commitment to right and wrong, to truth and justice. I hope I have inherited what I admire about them as men, that they had the courage of their convictions, which caused them to give their lives for liberty and freedom.”
Mary Waters hailed from Scotland, a Communist Party member until the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 which turned many people away from the party. She became a strong supporter of the post-war Labour government and was very involved in local politics. Somehow she managed the daunting tasks of bringing up three boys, holding down her job as a teacher at Morley Memorial Junior School, and being actively engaged in a number of left-wing and humanitarian causes. Roger’s childhood was filled with meetings at the Quaker Meeting House and the Anglo-Chinese Friendship Association, demos and hours of earnest talk. Roger told Jim Ladd: “I think that she gave me, in lots of ways, a reasonable view of the world and what it was like – or as reasonable as she could. Nevertheless, I think that parents tend to indoctrinate their children with their own beliefs far too strongly. My mother was extremely left wing and I grew up really believing that left wing politics was where it was at. But of course, all the children of right wing parents all held the opposite view. And it’s very difficult for parents to say to their children, ‘Well now, this is what I believe, but I might well be wrong.’ Because they don’t feel they’re wrong. They’ve sorted it out and they feel they’re right, but I think you can waste an awful lot of your life if you just adopt your parents’ view of the world – or if you reject it completely as well. If you use their view either positively or negatively to the exclusion of thinking it out for yourself, you can waste 10 or 15 years like that.”
‘I spent many, many happy hours fishing … in that bit of the river Cam. I have powerful memories of the warmth of summer mud oozing up between my toes. That time turned out to be creatively important for me – my work is coloured to a certain extent by the sound of natural history.’
Roger Waters
His mother was clearly a very strong woman; she had to be in her situation, but Roger had an ambivalent relationship with her. There was always the problem of the missing father, an absence she could not hide from her children. Roger: “For one reason or another, I had some powerful feelings of abandonment when I was a very young child.” Roger’s song, ‘Mother’ on The Wall addressed some of these problems. He told Jim Ladd: “It’s about how parents start inducing, almost inject, their own fears and worries into their children from a very early age. Particularly in my case when they had just been through a world war or something like that – we all go through devastating experiences and we tend to pass them onto our children when they are very young – I suspect.” Having lost her husband, Mary Waters was understandably over-possessive of her remaining family, and attempted to exert too much control over their lives. Talking about the song ‘Mother,’ Roger told DJ Tommy Vance: “If you can level one accusation at mothers it is that they tend to protect their children too much. Too much and for too long. This isn’t a portrait of my mother although one or two of the things in there apply to her as well as to, I’m sure, lots of other people’s mothers.”
The family lived at 42 Rock Road, a pleasant street of small three story houses originally known by their names – Roger’s was ‘Fleetwood’ – off Cherry Hinton Road, just a short distance from some of the most idyllic and beautiful countryside in Britain. Roger would cycle out to Grantchester Meadows and fish for gudgeon and roach with a piece of bread on a bent pin on a bamboo pole and go bird-nesting in the beech woods: “I spent many, many happy hours fishing … in that bit of the river Cam. I have powerful memories of the warmth of summer mud oozing up between my toes. That time turned out to be creatively important for me – my work is coloured to a certain extent by the sound of natural history.”
‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, Rupert Brooks’ most famous and memorable poem, is about his house in Grantchester, a village in easy walking distance of Cambridge, as it was before World War I. Some of its arboreal lyricism rubbed off on Roger, particularly in his song ‘Grantchester Meadows.’
Mary Waters also taught at her son’s primary school, Morley Memorial Primary on Blinco Grove, which was just around the corner, so he was rarely out of her sight or control. The friendship group that formed the Pink Floyd* began early. When he was eight Roger attended a Saturday morning art class one block away, on the other side of Hills Road at the Homerton Teachers Training College. Among those daubing the gouache and making crocodiles out of clay were both six-year-old Syd Barrett, who was also taught by Roger’s mother at Morley Memorial, and David Gilmour. David and Syd were the same age so they became friends, Roger was older, he knew Syd through his mother, and sometimes saw him when he was taken to visit his aunt who lived at 187 Hills Road, two doors from Syd, but being two years older, Roger was naturally too grand to play with the younger boys at school.
Like virtually every other British rock and roller of his generation, Roger spent hours listening through the static to Radio Luxembourg, where raw American rock ‘n’ roll was beamed at Britain each evening from 6pm accompanied by Horace Bachelor’s interminable ads for his Infra-Draw method for winning the football pools.* After frequent time checks, always made on an H. Samuels ‘Ever-right watch’, it was possible to hear such shows as Alan Freed’s Rock ‘n’ Roll House Party the likes of which could not conceivably be broadcast by the staid BBC. Freed nearly always played the original black versions of songs, rather than the pallid white imitations, so his listeners knew about the Chords’ ‘Sh-Boom (Life Could Be A Dream)’ rather than the Crew Cuts; Little Richard sang ‘Long Tall Sally’ rather than pale, lifeless Pat Boone; and naturally, he played the American releases of songs, not English covers.
Roger: “I remember when I was 10 or 11 listening to Radio Luxembourg on a crystal set with two headphones and the quality was appalling. But listening to early Gene Vincent and early rock and roll hidden under the bed covers still creating magic moments.”* Some nights the reception on Radio Luxembourg was bad enough to be unlistenable so the alternative was to tune into the American Armed Forces Network in Frankfurt where rock ‘n’ roll was interspersed by army news about exercises and new pension directives from the Pentagon. No one would have even considered tuning in to the BBC. The BBC played very little in the way of rock ‘n’ roll, and certainly not the original black American versions. Most popular hits were covered by one of the BBC’s in-house bands like the NDO (the Northern Dance Orchestra) who I once heard grind their way through Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ of all things. It was almost unrecognisable.
As he grew older there were also concerts to attend. Roger: “Cambridge was a university town, and there were lots of trad-jazz bands, when I was 11 … 12 … 13 … 14. Mainly it was trad-jazz and I used to go to dances in the Corn Exchange. I’d stand there at the back, and look at the guy playing the trumpet on the stage, and think ‘Jesus, that looks good fun. I’d like to be him. I want to be that person.’ Maybe that was something that was very likely to happen in Cambridge, and not so likely to happen in Warrington, or Middlesborough, or somewhere up north.” He began to buy blues albums by Billie Holiday, Leadbelly and Bessie Smith, but however interested he was in music he made no moves in that direction, something which he also blamed, in part, on Mary Waters. “My mother didn’t encourage my creativity,” he complained. “She claims to be tone deaf, whatever that means, and has no interest in music and art or anything like that. She’s only interested in politics. I didn’t really have a happy childhood.”
Wilful and opinionated Roger may have seemed to others but he was no match for his mother. Roger’s problems with his controlling matriarch no doubt say a lot about his future difficulties with Pink Floyd and with women. In several interviews he revealed that his mother attempted to control his love life, trying to get him to play around rather than get too involved with one person. Roger told KMET’s Jim Ladd in 1980: “I think she was kind of old fashioned enough to think that what would be really bad for me would be to find a nice clean girl and get married – and get hooked into some relationship when I was too young. Which in fact, I did. But that’s another story. I can remember her specifically actually encouraging me to go out and look for dirty girls … That was a bit more control. It’s up to you. What you want to do with women is your affair unless you want to seek somebody’s advice. You don’t want somebody watching you. I didn’t anyway. Especially not your mother.”
42 Rock Road was situated just around the corner from ‘The County’ High School on Hills Road. The Cambridgeshire High School For Boys has been the subject of much vituperation on the part of Roger Waters and can be credited as his main source of inspiration for The Wall; if a deep, seething resentment can be called inspiration: “Apart from games, which I loved, I loathed every single second of it.” In the Fifties, grammar schools were run very much as they had been before the war: the teachers had total authority and pupils were expected to do as they were told without question and to remain silent. However Britain had changed and young people now felt that they had a right to air their views. When that was resolutely forbidden, their energy channelled itself in other directions: “It erupted into a very organised clandestine property violence against the school, with bombs, though nobody ever got hurt.” There was one member of staff, the groundsman, that the pupils decided needed to be taught a lesson. He was very proud of his apple orchard and there was one tree in particular, laden with Golden Delicious apples, that was his pride and joy. One night about 10 of the pupils, including Roger, arrived at the orchard carrying step ladders and meticulously ate all of the apples, leaving just the cores hanging from the branches. Roger: “The next morning was just wonderful; we were terribly tired but filled with a real sense of achievement.”
The teachers appeared to be simply going through the motions; they made no effort to encourage the children, to praise any of their efforts, or develop any latent talents they might have. Roger told Tommy Vance: “There were some at my school who were just incredibly bad and treated the children so badly, just putting them down, putting them down, you know, all the time. Never encouraging them to do things, not really trying to interest them in anything, just trying to keep them quiet and still, and crush them into the right shape, so that they would go to university and ‘do well.’”
Roger was considered to be more or less useless at most subjects, including English, “and the Art teacher was so ineffectual that he was practically not there at all.” In fact there was a problem which the education authorities were trying to redress but which received little coverage in the press: many trained teachers had been killed in the war (such as Roger’s father) and others had witnessed such horrors that their mental balance had been permanently affected. This resulted in a shortage of teachers that was dealt with both by bringing teachers out of retirement – who of course brought their old fashioned ideas about education with them – and by putting men back to work who in these more enlightened times would have received years of psychotherapy or counseling before being put in front of a roomful of children. Naturally the children knew nothing of this and made no allowances for the fact that most of their teachers had fought in the war.
Roger’s reading of the situation, like many of his fellow pupils, was that most – not all – of these men were bitter and cynical. Roger told Ladd: “We had one guy who I would fantasise that his wife beat him. Certainly she treated him like shit and he was a really crushed person and he handed as much of that pain onto us as he could and he did quite a good job of it. And it’s funny how those guys, when you get those guys at school, is they will always pick on the weakest kid as well. So the same kids who are susceptible to bullying by other kids are also susceptible to bullying by teachers as well. It’s like smelling blood. They home in on fear and start hacking away – particularly with the younger children … Sarcasm. Sarcastic bastard.”
The grammar schools had a cadet force to provide basic military training and to identify future officers and career military. Roger couldn’t stand the itching of his khaki army uniform so he joined the Combined Cadet Force which led him to spend the occasional weekend at HMS Ganges, the naval training school which took boys as young as 14 and made them into naval seamen. At first Roger was absolutely horrified by it. He couldn’t believe that children that young were being turned into cannon fodder. He also spent weekends on HMS Vanguard before she was scrapped but he didn’t like life at sea because he was susceptible to seasickness. Nonetheless, despite his later blank dismissal of everything to do with the school, he enjoyed being in the sea cadets and became a leading seaman. Part of it was because he enjoyed firing guns; so much so that he used to shoot for the school in competition small bore shooting.
“I think there’s something in me that makes me want to kind of dominate people anyway,” he told Karl Dallas, “so I did all that in the cadet force and was, I think, roundly hated by most people involved. In fact, one weekend, I was set upon by a bunch of enraged schoolboys and dealt with.” It sounds like a precursor of the attitudinal problems that were later to cause Roger to leave the Pink Floyd and for the band to continue without him. The cadets serving under his command gave him a good thrashing and according to Roger: “I learned a lesson then, a bit. It’s not a terribly good thing to throw your weight around too much. And then I left … I still abuse it sometimes.”
The school’s only concern was to get their students into university; preferably into Oxbridge. Roger told Chris Salewicz: “It was a real battery farm. I hated it. All they would do was look at your most obvious aptitude and cram you into that pigeon-hole. I found physics and things like that quite easy to cope with and so I was pushed down that road.” Roger had to stay on for a third year in the sixth form because he failed his pure maths A-level and became the only student in living memory who stayed on for a third year without being made a prefect, something he was rather proud of.
Roger clearly had a ‘bad attitude’. “Toward the end when I was a teenager, going to school was just an ‘us and them’ confrontation between me and a few friends who formed a rather violent and revolutionary clique. That was alright, and I enjoyed the violence of smashing up the school property.” The decision not to make him a prefect might also have had something to do with his dishonourable discharge from the Combined Cadet Force. He had suddenly decided that he no longer wanted to be a part of it. He couldn’t resign, there were no provisions in the rules for people to leave, so he just handed his uniform back in and told them he wasn’t going any more. His final school report said: “Waters never fulfilled his considerable potential and was dishonourably discharged from the cadet force.” From the militarism of the naval cadets, Roger turned to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and worked with Cambridge YCND (Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). He dealt with young people and students who were not at the university; college students were organised by the Combined Universities CND. He also became chairman of the Cambridge Young Socialists, though he later felt that all these activities were done more to please his mother rather than him holding strong views in these areas himself.
‘I think there’s something in me that makes me want to kind of dominate people anyway’
Roger Waters
In case one is tempted to think that Roger Waters’ assessment of his school was somewhat exaggerated, he is supported by an internet posting – unrelated to Pink Floyd – by an ex-High School boy Simon Knott who described “the sadism of a French master, who would wind his fingers into his victims’ hair as he pressed their faces into the desk! On the door of another master’s room the sign ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’: Work Sets You Free, the terrible lie once written above the entrance gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp!” Knott goes on to describe the arrogance of the masters, the sarcasm and the bullying: “Children never to be valued, never to be nurtured, never to be loved” but most of all, the interminable grim reality of wasted lives, year after year of boredom at a time when children are at their most receptive. No wonder Waters hated the place. It is fortunate that the school finally closed, to be reopened as the Hills Road Sixth Form College in 1974. However it has to be said that Syd Barrett, two years below Roger, seems to have sailed through it all, oblivious and unaware that he was living in a fascist regime.*
In interviews Waters always gave an unremittingly bleak assessment of the school and never recalled a single happy memory of his time there but it is well known that he enjoyed sports and presumably his friendships with many of the people later associated with Pink Floyd were forged, in part, because they were with him on the same teams: early Floyd member Bob Klose (real name Rado, but always known by the abbreviation of his second name) and future Pink Floyd art director Storm Thorgerson, the son of Mary Waters’ closest friend, who were both in the year below Roger. Bob Klose, Storm Thorgerson and Roger were also on the County High cricket team together. To extend the Floyd connection: Roger’s best friend at school was Andrew Rawlinson and a year above them was Geoff Mottlow, later a member of the Boston Crabs but who first had a band called Geoff Mott and the Mottoes featuring Syd Barrett on guitar. Rawlinson, Mottlow and Waters were together on the rugby team. In addition, Klose’s family was good friends with David Gilmour’s family.
When Roger left school he was all ready to study Mechanical Engineering at Manchester University but suddenly the thought came to him that he was facing three more years of study on a par with the same set of circumstances he had been under in the Sixth Form. He balked and took a year off to consider his options. Already displaying the self-confidence and independence that was to give him strength, and to cause him problems in the future with fellow band members, he began hitch-hiking around Britain at the age of 13 and as soon as he was old enough to drive, he got hold of a car and went around Europe. In the summer break of 1960, at the age of 17, he set out for Baghdad, exploring the Lebanon and roaming around the Middle East. Roger: “That was very much part of being in Cambridge at that time. We adopted the American literature of the period, things like On The Road by Kerouac, and the Beat poets like Gregory Corso and Ginsberg, and there was this idea of going East in search of adventure.”
After taking a series of aptitude tests at the National Institute of Industrial Psychology they advised him that he would do well at architecture. He later realised that he was being completely passive in allowing these outside agencies to decide his fate, but at the time he went along with it and applied to the Regent Street Polytechnic’s architecture department. But first he had to learn to draw because he needed a portfolio of drawings to show at the admissions interview. He began spending more time with Syd Barrett, going to gigs, riding around on his motorcycle, smoking pot and hanging out with girls. The circle of friends he had in Cambridge would remain central in his life: his first wife, two band members, the group’s designers and even many of their roadies were all Cantabrigians.
* In their early years, approximately up to when Syd Barrett left the group in early 1968, Pink Floyd were known (and generally referred to) as The Pink Floyd. For the chronological purposes of this book, the prefix will continue until that time.
* Batchelor’s address in Keynsham, Bristol, was so fixed in the collective memory from this period that in 1969, the Bonzo Dog Band titled an album Keynsham.
* ‘Be Bop A Lula’ was in the charts in July 1956 so he would have been almost 13.
* Others seemed more excited at the fact that the headmaster at the time, Mr. Brym Newton-John later moved to Australia with his daughter Olivia.
Roger Keith Barrett was born January 6, 1946 at 60 Glisson Road, off Hills Road, Cambridge, the fourth of five children: Alan (b. 1937), Donald, Ruth and Rosemary. His father, Dr. Arthur Max Barrett had attended Cambridge High School before making his career at the London Hospital. It was at the London Hospital that he met Winifred Flack who worked there as the head of the kitchens. She came from a distinguished London family, her great grandmother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, having been the first woman physician in Great Britain. It was largely as a result of Anderson’s campaigning efforts that women were able to enter the medical profession. A year after her death in 1917, her small dispensary was named the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in her honour.* In 1938, Dr Barrett was appointed University Demonstrator in Pathology at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and he returned to his home town with his wife – they were married in 1935 – to raise a family. They quickly became central figures in the intellectual life of Cambridge. Dr. Barrett loved music and was a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society; there was an upright piano in the music room around which the family would sometimes gather. He had his own key to the University Botanical Gardens on Hills Road where he painted plants in watercolour. He was also an expert on fungi and is said to have written several books on that subject though there is no record of them at the British Library. There are suggestions that he illustrated them himself, so Syd’s artistic talent probably came from his father’s side of the family. His mother had a great interest in scouts and guides and was a high ranking figure in the county Girl Guides Brigade. She did a lot of social work, running a lunch club for old-age pensioners and doing other good works.
In 1950, when Syd was four, the family moved a few blocks south to a large doublefronted, five bedroom house at 183 Hills Road, large enough for all the family and their friends. Hills Road was a good deal more leafier then and had a lot less traffic. There was a large, well lit, double-height entry hall with an open staircase which led to a wooden first-floor gallery, protected by a wooden balustrade off which lay the bedrooms. The kitchen and living room was always filled with visitors and the childrens’ schoolmates. It was a big, friendly household but when Dr. Barrett was appointed the university’s Morbid Anatomist – he worked as a police pathologist – he was so occupied with his work at Addenbrooke’s that he rarely was able to spend time alone with any of his children. He engaged in a number of research programmes including pioneer research into cot death syndrome and after his death a ward was named after him.
Young Roger (to be referred to as Syd from now on to distinguish him from Roger Waters) was a keen scout. It was a family tradition; his parents had first got together on a London Hospital scout troupe outing to Essex in the hot summer of 1930 when they encountered each other in a haystack. Syd enjoyed camping and outdoor activities and graduated from cub scout to scout and finally Boy Scout Patrol Leader. Syd was a gregarious, extrovert child; the clown of the family with a great sense of humour – he would entertain everyone by playing the Jew’s harp, acting out Eccles and Major Bloodnok from The Goon Show, and imitating Wilfred Pickles’ Yorkshire accent from the BBC quiz show Have A Go – but he was a spoiled child and used to getting his own way. As the youngest boy, his mother doted on him but when things didn’t go as he planned he was capable of violence: breaking windows, throwing stones at passing cars and misbehaving until he once more gained control.
Syd and his younger sister, Rosemary (‘Roe’), were closest in age and spent a great deal of time together, sharing a bedroom and becoming very close. They often went roller-skating together or explored Grantchester Meadows where they would bathe in the River Cam. The meadows remained one of Syd’s favourite places and he attributed the strong atmosphere of childhood innocence in his lyrics, the references to fairy tales and nursery rhymes, to his idyllic childhood: “I think a lot of it has to do with living in Cambridge, with nature and everything – it’s so clean, and I still drive back a lot. Maybe if I’d stayed at college I would have become a teacher.” When Syd was seven, he and Rosemary won the piano prize at the Cambridge Guildhall for a rendition of ‘The Blue Danube.’
At Hills Road he was enrolled in the Morley Memorial Junior School, being taught by Mary Waters, Roger’s mother. He was so close to his sister that when it came time for her first day at the school, it was Syd that took Rosemary, not their mother. According to Roe they skipped down the road hand-in-hand together but according to Syd’s teachers he was sometimes so reluctant to attend school that his father had to bring him. It was clear that with the obvious exception of art, Syd was not much good at his lessons and he only just scraped through the 11+ examination to Cambridge County High School, just up Hills Road from his house. Though he does not seem to have suffered in the same way as Roger at the County, Syd encountered disciplinary problems, particularly when he would arrive at school without his school blazer or tie. He had wide flat feet and felt more comfortable with no shoelaces and socks, something the school also frowned upon. He was hyperactive, always bouncing on the balls of his feet – a habit he continued into adulthood – and continually interrupted the teachers to excitedly make his own point, but whereas Roger reacted to the teachers with peevish ill-will, Syd had early on discovered that he could usually charm people into letting him have his own way. He was usually able to talk his way out of situations and would wheedle his way around the teachers with smiles and jokes. Syd won poetry reading and public speaking competitions and played the lead in school plays, all of which appealed to his extrovert side. According to his sister Rosemary, many of the twists and turns in Syd’s songs that his fans took so seriously were really jokes, designed to put people on.
Syd’s personality changed dramatically when his father died suddenly on December 11, 1961. Dr Barrett had developed an aggressive cancer and, though the children knew that he was ill, the seriousness of his condition was not made apparent until about a week before his death so it came as a great shock. Syd could not concentrate on his studies and he became rebellious and difficult at home, unable to deal with a situation where he had no control. His sister thinks that out of all the children, Syd was possibly most affected by their father’s death. Winifred now had to bring up five children as a single mother and could no longer devote as much attention to him as before. Money was also a problem and she began to take in lodgers to supplement her income, two to each spare room. This was a common occurrence in the neighbourhood and the lodgers were all ‘high class’ people: among Winifred’s guests were Junichiro Koizumi, later the prime minister of Japan, and Jean Moreau’s daughter. The three older children had all left home so Syd was moved from his upstairs bedroom into the large ground floor to the left of the hall which was fitted with its own Yale lock, giving him in effect a bedsitter of his own.
Syd reacted very badly to all these changes. He threw himself into his art, spending as much time painting as possible. He more or less took over the big communal room downstairs as a painting studio and would often creep away from school to go home and paint; he only lived across the street. Cross-country running was a good lesson for him to sneak away from; he would start the run with the rest of the boys, drop back, then go home, get in an hour of painting, return to the route and join the run somewhere towards the end, huffing and puffing as if he had run the entire distance.
If art was his first love, music came a close second. Like most of his friends, Syd tuned in to Radio Luxembourg in the evenings for black American rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm ‘n’ blues: Bo Diddley was his favourite, and remained so. Luxembourg was also good for skiffle which caused Syd to take up the ukulele. His older brother, Alan, was also keen and played saxophone in a local skiffle group for a while. According to Floyd folklore, Syd’s first real instrument was a banjo, given to him when he was 11 by his father. Syd later claimed that he found it in a second hand store and “plunked away quite happily for about six months. Then I decided to get a guitar.” This suggests that he was older than 11 which appears more likely. His first guitar was a Number 12 Hofner Acoustic, bought by his parents when he was 14, which he played in his bedroom with friend John Gordon, using an amplifier that Syd made himself from a kit. Syd and John called themselves the Hollerin’ Blues.
When he was 16 Syd joined a local group, Geoff Mott & the Mottoes and switched to a Futurama 2. “At the time I thought it was the end in guitars,” said Barrett. “Fantastic design.” It was an iconic instrument, an inexpensive copy of the Fender Stratocaster, with its cut-away body, its angled machine-head ending in a rounded phallic curve and of course its vibrato-bar which made for a whole new range of guitar hero histrionics even though it often threw the guitar out of tune. This was the big switch, musically, from Woody Guthrie, folk and blues, to the electric music of the Shadows.
‘On the train home I clearly remember sitting with Syd making a drawing of all the equipment we through we’d ever need, which consisted of two Vox AC30S.’
Roger Waters
Aside from Syd on guitar and vocals and Geoff Mott as lead singer, the lineup of Geoff Mott & the Mottoes consisted of Tony Sainty on bass and Clive Wellham on drums. They practiced in Syd’s room on Sunday afternoons and, according to Syd, did a lot of work at private parties. However, Barrett scholars say there was only one proper gig, a local CND fundraiser – perhaps organised by Roger Waters who was at school with Geoff and played alongside him in the High School rugby team. As the chairman of YCND Cambridge, Roger sometimes designed posters for the group who mostly played Shadows instrumentals, plus a few Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran songs, along with some original material. Roger occasionally sat in at band practice in Syd’s room but he was not yet a proficient guitarist.
Roger had saved up enough money from pea-picking to buy a 1946 Francis Barnet 125cc motor cycle on which he roared around the Cambridge streets, an apparently terrifying sight with his long legs and teeth clenched tightly together. Roger: “Syd Barrett – who was a couple of years younger – and I became friends in Cambridge. We both had similar interests – rock ‘n’ roll, danger and sex and drugs, probably in that order. I had a motor bike before I left home, and we used to go on mad rides out into the country. We would have races at night, incredibly dangerous, which we survived somehow. Those days – 1959 to 1960 – were heady times.”
Syd and Roger were part of a group of young people who hung out at the Criterion pub, a run-down establishment in Cambridge’s town centre, where they kept company with Aubrey Powell – known as ‘Po’ – Storm Thorgerson and David Gilmour. Roger: “Syd and I went through our most