So Long Syd Barrett

Posted by Myrna the Minx on July 11, 2006 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

The minx was raised on Motown, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, and Pink Floyd (I know, that explains a lot). Slate has a really nice obituary. Here’s an excerpt:

For decades, Barrett was rock’s great romantic-tragic recluse, and now that there will definitely be no second act to his sad story, the Byronic myth surrounding him is bound to inflate. (I’m sure we’ll be hearing lots of his 1970 ballad “Dark Globe,” a terrifying farewell from a man slipping into madness: “Please, please, please lift a hand/ With Eskimo chain/ I tattered my brain/ Won’t you miss me?/ Wouldn’t you miss me at all?”) But it would be nice if Barrett was recalled not just as an acid casualty or as a legendary “rock madman” but as an English eccentric in the surreal-comic tradition that extends from Lewis Carroll to Monty Python and, via Barrett, onto the weirdo-pop specialist Robyn Hitchcock. Barrett spent his final years in his mother’s house in Cambridge, England, living comfortably off the royalties that his former bandmates made sure he collected. Reportedly, his pastimes were painting and gardening, and he was often seen by neighbors on his bicycle. It sounds like a pretty nice life, actually, and it’s pleasant to think of Barrett ending his days as a vaguely Victorian figure—an odd old Englishman who’d made quite a splash in his youth, tottering through town on two wheels.