An eternal summer with Syd

Syd Barrett, troubled founder of rock legends Pink Floyd, died last week. David Gale remembers a sunny, serene young man long before he became a 'beast in the basement' acid casualty, while photographer Mick Rock recalls him at the height of his fame
  • The Observer,

As children David Gale and Syd Barrett were near neighbours in Cambridge. They became friends when they were teenagers. Gale is now a playwright and freelance writer

On a summer afternoon in 1965 Syd, Paul, Storm, Imo and myself were sitting in my parents' pleasant back garden in Cambridge. My parents had gone to Australia for six months and I had turned the dustless house into a hipster hostel. Syd and Paul lived round the corner and we used to smoke dope and talk about Jack Kerouac together. Syd, an art student, was involved with a band called Pink Floyd and their work was just starting to get noticed. He was a man without moods, delighted by everyday absurdities, at all times sunny, chuckling and serene.

Earlier in the day Syd and Paul had each taken a heroic dose, as was the custom, of LSD, on a sugar-lump. Syd had giggled for a while then become contemplative. He had found, in my mother's kitchen, a plum, an orange and a matchbox. He was sitting cross-legged on the manicured lawn, gently cradling the items in his hands, studying them intently. From time to time he would smile at them in a friendly way.

Syd studied his objects for four hours. Paul found this unwholesome. He strode over to Syd, seized the plum, the orange and the matchbox and jumped up and down on them, roaring jovially. Syd shouted with laughter and Paul began chasing him round the garden. They rushed into the house and up to the bathroom where Paul yanked the shower from its holder, turned it on to cold and proceeded to soak Syd. They played together like six-year-olds, wrestling, splashing, tearing their shirts off, throwing open the windows and bellowing merrily into the leafy repose of the afternoon.

Like his song lyrics, Syd's humour was both subtle and silly. On one occasion we were driving around Cambridge in Storm's old Studebaker when someone observed that something or other was 'rancid'. Syd instantly shouted 'Well ran, Syd!' and the car swerved across Hills Road as we all cackled with delight. It was the way he said them.

He was also very fond of a catchphrase. We used to go to a fearsome pub called The Criterion, patronised by Teds, beats, undergrads (largely in disguise), American servicemen and short but psychotic youths from the car breaker's yard. It was wise to go to the toilet in twos and it was there that we stood next to two quiffed Teds discussing their favoured sexual practices. With a connoisseur's gravity the larger one announced: 'Me, I like it in the head.' Although my gaze was firmly fixed on the cluster of white disinfectant cakes beneath me in the rancid trough, I couldn't help noticing that my companion was shaking helplessly. For months afterwards, when one might, for example, finish buying a round of drinks by asking 'What about you, Syd?' he would declaim, in a firm but affectless way: 'I like it in the head.' Sometimes when a conversation briefly faltered he would nod wisely and, a propos of absolutely nothing, say it again. His own laughter - he laughed at his own jokes with a certain grace - was disarming.

Syd moved up to London and a few months later I joined him. We shared a cold-water flat just off the Tottenham Court Road. The room was about 12 by eight with a mattress running down either wall. At the end of the day Syd and I would lie back and discuss our experiences in the big city. We had devised a points system for evaluating celebrities spotted in the street. I recall my Petula Clark sighting being awarded five out of 10 while Syd's Hank B Marvin got a seven.

On another occasion we went to London Zoo and were much taken with the spectacle of an orang-utan using a hairy forefinger to prise chunks of shit from its arse then convey them to its mouth. Syd dashed off a sketch of the incident and pinned it to the wall. It had great economy of line and considerable compositional elegance.

All this lightness left him. As the hallucinogens and the downers ploughed through he became morose with his friends and a professional nightmare for the band. He wasn't helped by the romantic culture of madness that surrounded him - a wilful misreading of the revolutionary but fashionable work of RD Laing persuaded many of those around him, myself included, that it was, like, uncool to interfere with Syd's trip because he was, like, on a journey.

By 1967 Syd Barrett had taken so much acid that his beauty and his cheerfulness were extinguished. He stood on stage arhythmically strumming an untuned guitar, his hair bedraggled, black eyeliner running down his pallid cheeks, confronting his fans with a sullen thousand-yard stare. Not only Syd but the rest of the band were at their wits' end. They let him go and, after languishing mute and unapproachable in Earls Court for a while, he walked back home to Cambridge. With the help of his sister Rosemary he shunned the world in a small house for several decades.

Before Syd left London I'd see him in the street now and again. He looked straight through me. There seemed to be no whites in his eyes. I never saw him again.

It's tempting to read the episode in the garden as an early sign of an inwardness that would later consume him. This entails our subscription to the 'beast in the basement' analysis, wherein Syd's sunniness was merely a tissue draped across a psychic disaster waiting to happen. Another view is that the acid ripped up his brain for ever. There seem to be no reliable diagnostic tools available. We describe him as an 'acid casualty' and leave it at that.

But then there's the photo. The iconic unshaven tortured portrait. Clearly Syd serves a purpose. He gives us, for 40 years, something very satisfying. The image of escape without death. He is alive but deathly still. Syd is undead. This is terribly appealing. It's appealing in smacked and doe-eyed Pete Doherty: it is possible to die without having to go. Best of both worlds.

Syd was lovely. There are lovely photos of him. Grinning, gorgeous, giggling. That's how I will remember him.

When he took acid he liked to laugh. By Mick Rock

Syd was a friend. I'd known him since 1966. I was studying modern languages at Cambridge and he was studying at Camberwell Art College. Syd had been at the Cambridge Art College and he'd come down to the Christmas party to play with his band, Pink Floyd. A mutual friend introduced us after the show.

We sat around smoking spliffs and we immediately had a good rapport. I found him very cheerful, very positive. I would carry on seeing him sporadically in the summer of '67. Pink Floyd were already the number one underground band and I would go and see the band and spend time with Syd and crash on his floor. I lived with him for three months in the summer of 1969, after he'd left the Floyd and when I'd just finished at Cambridge.

The pictures were taken in autumn 1969 at the place he moved to in Earl's Court. He'd invited me to take his picture but it took a few goes before we managed it. I'd phone up and he'd be a bit vague and it wouldn't happen. But this time I came around and he was in the middle of painting the room. The painting was half-finished and his floor was covered with orange and blue stripes. His mattress was on the floor and there were cigarette butts embedded between the floorboards. What can I say? He was an artist.

People always ask me what the record on the record player was but I can't remember. It was probably a jazz record. He was easy to photograph - he was very attractive and he looks like a doomed rocker. You can understand why the French loved him - I suppose he was similar to Rimbaud in some ways. I always thought Syd was like that U2 song: he was 'stuck in a moment he couldn't get out of'.

Everyone knows about Syd taking acid, and I took acid with him once. When he took acid he liked to laugh, to listen to records, to read comic books. Of course, there was the tortured artist thing but he was a lot more straightforward than some people imagine. Whenever I spent time with him - often one on one - it was very easy to be with him. We had an easy relationship. I was inspired by him as a subject and he was a really sweet guy.

The last time I saw him was 1974. He would just turn up every six months or so at my house and we would have a cup of tea, smoke a joint and listen to a record.

I think he felt comfortable with me, that I understood him. I don't know whether I did or not, but the Syd I understood wasn't about the madness. I know he liked my photos of him. We had a certain empathy.

· Mick Rock spoke to Ally Carnwath

Today's best video

Latest reviews

Today in pictures