When I was 19 heroes still came in plastic boxes and what was kept inside was not a shiny toy or a tiny figurine but a small cassette tape. Scribbles of handwriting, capital letters, numbers and symbols proclaiming the cassettes magical potency, these were the talismans of youth and a memory in the palm of your hand. All you had to do was put them into a machine and press play.
“You’ve got to listen to this…” words like these were common currency. Tapes were made with love and passion and exchanged with infectious enthusiasm. There was every possibility of wonder back then, when everything seemed new and uncharted in our lives and on our stereos. It was just a compilation tape, some early Pink Floyd, a few bootlegs and the songs from his solo trajectory, but enough was there. A creative life in snapshots and an intimation of something bigger if the listener got it. In the end all it took was one side of the tape to play and Syd Barrett exploded into my imagination.
Soon the modern bands of the time became nothing. The otherworldly distorted echoes from Barrett’s guitar made other bands with their effect pedals seem like hopeless amateurs, he had the spirit of invention while they had an inability to play. The child-like ‘English’ phrases played in my ear more convincingly than a dozen other English sounding bands and to my young ears Syd looked and played better than all of them. Everyone else was a pretender, his lyrics stolen by Blur, his look appropriated by Bolan and his interstellar nursery rhymes borrowed by Bowie, his influence seemed everywhere. And all this was discovered through the early recordings of Pink Floyd a band I’d previously seen as over indulgent progressive nonsense. That cassette tape changed my life.
At 19 I was converted into a world of experimental pop songs, free-form psychedelic jams and absurd lyrics depicting outer space, pet mice and peeping toms. The records bought, the bootlegs collected, the black and white video footage, the books, the pictures, the posters, the chord progressions, the interviews and the history, it was all assembled. But the desire was never satiated, Syd Barrett’s creative period was brief and there was little to it other than a handful of albums and maybe a few unreleased tracks and it took a lot for me to admit there was no more to it than what I had gathered. Such a love is frustrating and bittersweet, it was incongruent that someone so young and talented didn’t carry on, despite his later problems, but this affair was more to do with the dream of a life I had ahead of me rather than his, a symbiosis of potential encapsulated in another that I wanted to achieve and not the realities of a life as it is lived.
People would spout off famous tales of Barrett’s later illness as if it was a fetish of artistic credibility but to me this was always cruel, the sound of a broken man has never been funny or cool and this was the cipher through which he was judged, as a madcap and a fool. It’s easy to dissect an enthusiasm if there seems little to it or no one else comprehends it, and with Barrett both cases applied, my romance was from such a small place but big in my heart, but that’s what it’s like with youthful pursuits, no one seems to understand them quite like you do. It all came down to a love of his creativity, the artistic burst of musical experimentation propelled forward by the enquiry of a young mind. It was the intensity of youth echoed back to me as I delivered my own youthful appreciation.
Such a passion was born to die both in Syd and in me, the hints of loss were already there in his later recordings and in the later life I was to lead. That fervour is now but the dream from a memory, placed in a small plastic box, and that is all it is. With time and knowledge and technology between us the cassette tape is now defunct. It may be left to gather dust in the far reaches of a cupboard but that plastic box will still be carried around with me wherever I live.
This article originally appeared in Moondiscs (Sept 2007) and Discorder Magazine (Oct 2007).
