Educating Peter

by Tom Cox

  Two of Peter’s first ‘texts’ were the cassettes I’d made for him of The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, the two undernourished solo albums that Syd Barrett had recorded during the early Seventies, following his exodus from Pink Floyd. My intention had been for Peter to take these home and spend some serious time pontificating over them, but since we were on our way to follow Barrett’s trail, and they were the sort of albums you didn’t want to be alone in a room with, I’d decided to play them in the van.

  ‘Did they not have proper studios in those days, then?’ said Peter, as the opening track of The Madcap Laughs wobbled into earshot.

  Earlier, the transit had developed a fresh rattle in the region of the undercarriage directly beneath my left foot. Now it was impossible to distinguish rattle from lo-fi sonic experiment. I glanced across at Peter. The look on his face seemed to reflect all my uncertainty about what I was putting him through. Did he think I liked this music? I hoped not. Being careful not to steer the van into a fat-necked man’s BMW, but not too careful, I strained to find the melody of the song over the grunt of the diesel engine, feeling certain it had involved a guitar at some point. It was the sort of album that gave you an involuntary squint.

  I’d often wondered, during my time writing about rock music, if there was a mandatory contract that someone had forgotten to give me at the beginning of my career, stipulating that I should worship the ground Syd Barrett teetered on. The relationship between music writers – cynical, slouched men not given to gratuitous displays of enthusiasm – and Barrett reminded me of something the rapper Ice-T had once said about the relationship between the toughest hip-hop stars and the work of Michael Jackson, an assessment which, though now dim in my mind in its complete form, almost certainly ended with the phrase ‘jumping up and down like little bitches’. But while I would quite happily do just that, and several considerably more embarrassing things, in the vicinity of Thriller or Off The Wall, I couldn’t see the appeal of The Madcap Laughs or Barrett at all.

  The hype surrounding Barrett seemed to me a classic case of confusing the legend with the music. For a brief, glittering moment, Syd (real name: Roger) was in possession of one of the psychedelic movement’s most productive, kaleidoscopic minds. However, at some point between 1967 and 1969, something (some say Mandrax, some say acid, some say sherbet lemons) had gone very seriously wrong, leaving him an uncommunicative wreck with an inclination to freeze up on stage and rub drugs in his hair. Barrett hadn’t just been Pink Floyd’s tousle-haired, sylphlike pin-up, he’d been their main songwriter too, and his bandmates had shown immense patience with him, but in 1969 he’d finally edged himself out of the band, going on to make a couple of solo albums and then retreat on a near-permanent basis to the cellar of his mother’s house in Cambridge.

  Little had been seen of him since, besides a few paparazzi shots, and by the time Peter and I arrived in Cambridge, Barrett’s only real competitors for the title of Most Intriguing Rock Recluse were Sly Stone and Brian Wilson – both of whom had also had breakdowns in rock’s big breakdown era (1967–75), but neither of whom had quite shown the self-discipline of the bona fide hermit. No other living musician generated quite so many rumours: ‘Syd hasn’t seen daylight for thirty years’; ‘Syd is a painter, a gardener’; ‘Syd has secret parties with Brian Eno’; ‘Syd is diabetic’; ‘Syd hangs around my local pub’; ‘Syd still thinks he’s leader of Pink Floyd’; ‘Syd can’t spell his first name properly’.

  ‘Over the years, vague bits of information would filter back to me via my mum, who still lives in Cambridge,’ Barrett’s former bandmate Roger Waters had told me in an interview a few months before my visit to Cambridge. ‘That Syd had moved house, or that he had moved back in with his mum, or that he was in the local sanatorium. But I haven’t actually spoken to him since 1975.’

  During the Seventies, Waters, who’d formed Pink Floyd with Barrett when they were still schoolboys, had gone on with Barrett’s replacement Dave Gilmour to turn the band into the prog rock colossus that the majority of the general public knew it as – something which seemed to many an innate contradiction of Barrett’s original vision. In 1975, the new, slicker Floyd had made a concept album about their former leader, and, during its conception, Barrett had turned up at the studio, uninvited, eating a bag of boiled sweets and looking virtually unrecognisable. ‘He’d put on about four stone and shaved all his body hair,’ Waters told me. ‘He’d changed from this beautiful curly-haired youth into something resembling the bloke who keeps the scores on that Vic Reeves show.’

  There was no denying that the Barrett story was a fascinating one, and you could see why journalists held it close to their heart – for one thing, it allowed the more sharp-minded among them, like Nick Kent, to use witty wordplay such as ‘First came the Floyd, then came the void’. But, much as it troubled me to admit it to Peter, the albums quite plainly didn’t back it up. If I was honest with myself, I only liked three Barrett songs – ‘See Emily Play’, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Arnold Layne’ – the latter two of which could genuinely piss me off if I had anything even resembling the beginnings of a stress headache. The solo albums, meanwhile, were virtually unlistenable: scrappy, wretched things that I wouldn’t feed to my dog if it was starving. For years, having been told in hushed tones by acquaintances that they were ‘albums that you just have to have in your collection’, I’d pretended to like them, to hear some kind of cracked charm in their meagre fidelity. But then the truth of what I was doing had hit me: I was trying to force some enjoyment out of the sound of a man sitting in an empty room mumbling incoherently about sea creatures while a tape player whirred somewhere in the middle distance. There was nothing musical or endearing about this, just like there would be nothing musical or endearing about me making a Dictaphone recording of my own digestive system.

  I wasn’t in Cambridge because I was enchanted by Barrett’s art; I was in Cambridge because I was enchanted by his legend, or at least my own romanticised version of it, and, in a way, I felt even that was losing its appeal, now I’d stopped pretending that I liked his music. All in all, I wasn’t quite sure what Peter and I were looking for – neither in a spiritual sense, nor a physical one. Yet I felt that the search was a necessary stage in Peter’s personal musical evolution. Every would-be rock artisan went through a Barrett phase – or something similar – at some point on the way to attaining true manhood. Now was as good a time as any for Peter to get his out of the way.

  The only question was: where did we start? My mental picture of Barrett still came from a photograph, taken during the late Sixties, which showed him looking slim, ruffled, kaftaned and tassled. I knew, though, from the photos that had been snatched outside his house in the Eighties, that I should be hunting for something considerably less graceful: a rotund, inelegant, severely balding figure, staring at something at least 3,000 miles behind the camera lens.

  ‘So what you’ve got to look out for,’ I explained to Peter, ‘is some kind of cross-fertilisation of Benny from Crossroads, Marlon Brando, and the Michael Jackson impersonator from The Simpsons.’

  ‘Who’s Benny from Crossroads?’ said Peter.

  In truth, I wasn’t sure if we did want to find Barrett. I had no intention of doorstepping him, and, even if I did have, I wouldn’t have wanted to do it with Peter in tow. Instead, I carried with me to Cambridge a nebulous idea of drifting around the city’s parks, bike lanes and student bookshops on the off-chance of bumping into him. But I wondered if at root my plan wasn’t even vaguer than that. I wanted to meet Syd’s 2002 incarnation even less than I wanted to meet Brian Wilson’s 2002 incarnation, and I wanted Peter to meet him even less. What I wanted to do was follow the ghost of his twenty-something self (Barrett was, after all, in terms of cult status, the nearest thing to a dead rock star, hence perfectly entitled to his own ghost). I wanted to sit where he had sat, to picture what he had worn, to see the world, just for a moment, the way he had seen it – though not in any psychologically
damaging way. Then I wanted to see if Peter could do the same.

  ‘So picture the scene,’ I said to Peter, as we sat on the banks of the River Cam, watching a lone punt brave the bracing spring air. ‘You’re a former maverick songwriter – some would say a genius. But you want to hide from the world indefinitely. You want somewhere sophisticated yet olde worlde, somewhere full of young people, to help give you a preserved sense of youth. Somewhere you can feel like you’re still a part of something, but go about your business without being hassled. This seems like the perfect place, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Peter. ‘It’s . . . got a lot of good-looking girls.’

  ‘But suppose you’re Syd Barrett,’ I said. ‘Say you’re coming here in the mid-Seventies to ponder your lot in life. You’ve freaked out and left your band, and they’ve become multi-millionaires, and you’re plunged back into obscurity. What would you be thinking?’

  ‘Well, it depends if you’re mad or not, doesn’t it? I mean, listening to that stuff you had on in the van, I wasn’t quite sure. He could have been putting it on.’

  ‘Well, think about both scenarios. What would you think about if you were mad, and what would you think about if you weren’t mad?’

  ‘Well, if you were mad, you’d probably be thinking about onions or skirting boards or something. And if you weren’t mad . . . well, I guess you’d be thinking about that blonde girl with the rucksack over there.’

  ‘But this is 1974. She wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Her mum might.’

  ‘Good point.’

  The two of us stared towards the opposite bank for a moment, lost in thought.

  ‘You know mad people, when they talk really loud on the bus about onions and stuff?’ said Peter. ‘Have you ever thought what they might do if you talked about onions back to them even louder?’

  ‘Quite frequently, actually.’

  ‘But I bet you’ve never tried it.’

  ‘No. Never had the guts.’

  In the mid-term sun, Cambridge bustled, and Peter and I sucked absent-mindedly on the cola-flavoured laces that I’d purchased from a sweet stall at an outdoor market. It was an easy place in which to let your mind drift. Lecturer-types hurtled past us on wobbly bikes, riding no-handed, gaggles of Japanese students laid out cloths for picnics; the world felt momentarily right, and as we made our way past the majestic façade of King’s College, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Peter and I had been thinking exactly the same thing: not ‘I wonder if we’ll find Syd Barrett?’ so much as ‘Wouldn’t this be an ace place to be young?’ After a visit to Hot Numbers, a musty second-hand record shop tucked away unusually on a residential street towards the railway line, we’d been directed by the shop’s proprietor to the Millpond, a notoriously tranquil corner of the city which, it was rumoured, still provided one of Barrett’s favourite pondering spots. But all we’d discovered there were more students, and now we found our attention distracted from Barrett all too easily. Or, at least, I found mine distracted. I wasn’t so sure Peter’s had been on him in the first place. As we walked across the city, idly taking in the day, every twenty minutes or so I’d hear my impassive friend emit a low grunt. At each of these grunts I’d start slightly and turn round, under the impression that he was talking to me, only to find him muttering insouciantly into his palm-size mobile phone, which was set to vibrate rather than ring (somehow, Peter didn’t seem like a ring-tone kind of guy). These conversations were short yet frequent, and would consist solely of words with one syllable, or sometimes less. ‘Hi.’ ‘Yeh.’ ‘Nnn.’ ‘Ggg.’ ‘Cool.’ ‘Mmm.’ ‘Tmrrow.’ ‘Jjj.’ ‘W.’ ‘Ha.’ ‘Sure.’ ‘See ya.’ I could vaguely remember my own self-inflicted problems with communication as a teenager – a particularly recalcitrant ‘wounded bison noises’ phase surrounding my thirteenth birthday sprang to mind – but even at my most monosyllabic, I’d never spoken in a language remotely like the one Peter was speaking in now. ‘At times you may be embarrassed because you may suddenly produce a squeak when you’re talking,’ Elizabeth Fenwick and Dr Tony Smith had warned teenagers in Adolescence: The Survival Guide, but this was something else altogether. Was it really possible to form a meaningful conversation with this few officially recognised words?

  I was impressed. Before, I’d imagined that it was only me, Jenny and Ian whom Peter was reticent towards, but, compared to his friends, it was clear that we had it easy.

  ‘What was that about?’ I asked him, unable to suppress my curiosity, after he’d clicked the phone shut for the fourth time.

  ‘Just a mate. Wanted some help with this computer game I lent him.’

  ‘What? You mean he couldn’t work out how to switch on the console or something?’

  ‘No. There are these samurai bats that you have to get past to get to level six, and he wanted to know how to do it.’

  ‘And you told him how to do it just now?’

  He ripped open a bag of pickled-onion-flavour Monster Munch. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But you barely said three words to him.’

  ‘Well, it’s pretty simple, once you get the hang of it.’

  ‘Is he a friend you don’t like very much?’

  ‘No. That was Quentin – he’s totally okay, like really cool.’

  The rest of the afternoon had a reassuring pattern to it which, while not quite what I’d hoped for, proved to be a pleasantly laid-back contrast to our encounters with Ed The Troubadour and Brian Wilson. While Peter rumbled into his mobile phone and played Spot The Band T-Shirt, I ogled architecture, browsed in shops selling furniture that I could never afford, and fantasised about a parallel universe where I hadn’t dropped out of higher education three months into my first term. Cambridge, while annoyingly tourist-heavy, was undoubtedly a happening city, though not in quite the way I’d imagined. It was the kind of place that you assumed would have more second-hand bookshops, record shops and subterranean hang-outs than it did. The few of these places that were left seemed to be empty or poorly stocked, and the employees, when asked for Barrett gossip, would shrug blankly, or look off into the distance, as if remembering something surprisingly mundane from another lifetime. ‘You hear stories,’ said a bespectacled man in a tiny, ailing bookshop, which, when I revisited the city a few weeks later, had vanished entirely. ‘Stories about him riding his bike by the river. But not so much now. People don’t care so much any more.’ ‘Syd Barrett? No. Is he one of them rappers?’ said a man serving in a café, who’d lived in Cambridge since the early Sixties. At least if Barrett had died, like Hendrix or Jim Morrison or Keith Moon or the other cult heroes he was mentioned alongside, he’d have a plaque or some graffiti or a lavish gravestone. As it was, he had nothing – not even the attention of the local population. But perhaps that’s the way he’d wanted it all along.

  Back on the streets, the academics were heading home to book-lined townhouses and pet cats with names like Kafka and Mailer, the American tourists were asking the hotdog sellers moronic questions (‘Does this river, like, lead directly to Oxford? ’Cos that’s the next town, right?’), the Japanese girls were folding up their picnic blankets, and, in the bigger gaps between the lot of them, it was possible to spot an unusually large number of men who resembled Benny-from-Crossroads two decades on. It was a good city to hide in if you were a spherical man on the runway to old age. It was also a city with great furniture shops, fudge shops, clothes shops and chain stores – a city whose quaintness was preserved via institutions and buildings, rather than gig venues, bohemian eateries or retail outlets. The place seemed somehow beyond Syd Barrett. And while he was surely still here somewhere, painting or being diabetic or hanging out in someone’s local pub or having a picnic or gardening or having a secret party with Brian Eno, his ghost had obviously skipped town aeons ago.

  REALLY FUNNY (REPRISE)

  ‘IT WAS REALLY funny. There was this party the other week – at my mate Catherine’s? – and for a trick, me and Raf and Jim – he’s like this bl
oke with a massive head who everyone calls “Cauliflower” – decided to put pants on our heads and take a vow of silence for a laugh.’

  ‘I hope they were clean pants. Whose were they?’

  ‘They were Catherine’s brother’s. He was out. So, anyway, we’re just sitting there in the living room with these jockey shorts on our heads, and Catherine’s mum comes in early from her yoga class and sees us and she’s like, “What are you doing?”, and we’re like just sitting there shrugging, ’cos Raf’s said that if any of us speak or take the pants off our head before midnight then we have to run around the middle of the road shouting, “I am the chicken God!” as a penalty.’

  ‘That’s quite an elaborate penalty.’

  ‘Yeah. If you knew Raf, you probably wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘So what happened in the end?’

  ‘Yeah, right. It was so cool. In the end, Sophie – that’s Catherine’s mum? – had picked the phone up and was threatening to call Raf’s mum if we carried on not saying anything, and she’s just dialled the number when Raf stood up, threw the pants across the room – they landed on this, like, really expensive lamp and it nearly fell off the table – and ran out the door.’

  ‘What, he went home? And left you to talk your way out of it?’

  ‘Yeah, it was kind of okay, though. Sophie’s quite cool. We stayed up till about eleven talking about The Simpsons and stuff.’

  ‘Do you drink alcohol at these parties?’