Those looking for some presentiment in these last lyrics of what was to come could probably seize on the last verse of ‘Rider on the Wheel’: ‘I don’t feel the same / But I ain’t gonna blame / The rider on the wheel’. But then, they could just as easily lock on to a song like ‘Outside’, written in 1967–68, the concluding couplet of which read, ‘If the world is all wrong / I won’t be staying long.’
None of this may matter a great deal if Drake’s death, in the early hours of 25 November 1974, was the result of an accidental overdose, and not the suicide that the official coroner concluded it was. But there are too many people close to Drake who had seen it coming for this to be a credible conclusion. A few weeks earlier, Drake had asked his mother(!) to invite the Martyns to their home. Although Beverley was too pregnant to make the journey, John came and they made their peace.
But, as Beverley wrote in her recent autobiography, Sweet Honesty, her husband’s account of their reconciliation filled her with an ominous feeling: ‘He had wanted to make up his friendship with us and apologized for that last evening. With hindsight, it was as if he was tying up the loose ends in his life. I was glad we were all friends again but I felt that he was going to do something bad. I told John I thought we were going to lose him, but it still came as a shock when the phone rang.’ John Martyn later told his own biographer: ‘It seemed so obvious at the time that it would come. It was inevitable. He was surrounded by a loving family, they adored him. [But] he was just too distant.’
Suicide had been on Drake’s mind throughout those last few months (returning from a brief trip to France, he handed his mother a copy of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, a philosophical discourse on whether suicide is morally justifiable), and maybe for some time before that. His friend Paul Wheeler remembers one occasion when he had been playing Stephen Stills’ ‘Four & Twenty’, from Déjà Vu, and a visiting Drake became extremely agitated. At the time of the incident, Drake was approximately the same age as the narrator in Stills’ song, who is contemplating taking his own life:
Morning comes the sunrise, and I’m driven to my bed
I see that it is empty, and there’s devils in my head.
I embrace the many-colored beast.
I grow weary of the torment. Can there be no peace?
I find myself wishin’ that my life would simply cease.
Drakes long-term girlfriend, Sophie Ryde, had also finally broken off their on–off relationship, prompting Drake to write her one last letter the night before his death. What he didn’t pen that night was a suicide note, which at the time convinced NME’s Nick Kent – who would write the most influential profile of the singer-songwriter just three months after his self-induced death – that it was probably an accidental overdose of the all-too-lethal anti-depressant Tryptizol, not the last act of a desperately depressed individual. Kent later recanted his view: ‘At the time I made great play of the fact that no suicide note, no grand flourish, had accompanied the act – yet this in all honesty is probably exactly the way Drake would have ended it all.’
In fact, the twenty-six-year-old did leave behind everything he wanted to say. An exercise book of his lyrics was at his bedside when his mother found him the following morning, slumped across his bed. Nor did Molly find the absence of a suicide note so curious. As she later said: ‘He never wrote anything down, never kept a diary, hardly even wrote his name in his own books . . . It was as if he didn’t want anything of himself to remain except his songs.’[my italics] The exercise book of his songs, bought when he was at Cambridge University and the songs still flowed effortlessly from his sloping pen, would remain Molly’s solitary reminder – his recordings excepted – of her son’s remarkable gifts.
Meanwhile, the songs from those final sessions would take their own sweet time appearing. Richard Williams, head of A&R at Island in the mid-Seventies, even put about a story that they had been destroyed. But finally in 1979, with Island preparing the release of a three-album boxed-set of Drake’s recorded work, Fruit Tree, it was decided to place the four finished 1974 tracks at the end of Pink Moon (finally making it a forty-minute album). Seven years later these same tracks got their own album, Time of No Reply, a collection of assorted studio outtakes and home demos that climaxed with the same quartet of songs. And that seemed to be that, until 2004, when history was again up for grabs, thanks to Drake’s estate. This time, the now-five tracks were scattered around a new thirteen-track set, and ‘Tow the Line’ became his final word. (Wood himself participated in the myth-making, describing it in his notes as ‘the last song Nick ever recorded’.) Not so.
*
In the summer of 1974 Drake was not the only burn-out victim who had returned to his inner child’s home base with an exercise book of old lyrics to hand. Nor was he alone in discovering that his old record label was prepared to fund further recordings on the back of a revival of interest from an influential rock writer, pushing for proof that the flame still burned. In April 1974 Nick Kent, still ten months away from turning his attention to the permanently-stilled Drake, published perhaps his most famous piece: a five-page NME cover-story on the enigma that was Syd Barrett, the front-cover caption of which read: ‘Whatever happened to the cosmic dream?’
With Dark Side of the Moon still in the charts a full year after its release, and with no news of Syd Barrett in more than two years, Kent felt that now would be a good time to remind NME readers of Syd’s central role in the band’s early career (on the back of Piper’s re-release as the first part of A Nice Pair). He even hoped to remind Barrett himself that he still had an audience, claiming ‘demand for more Syd Barrett material is remarkably high at the moment and EMI are all ready to swoop the lad into the studio, producer in tow, at any given moment’. (The previous month, Capitol US had issued a double album of the two solo Syd LPs to a positive reception.)
The real problem, according to Peter Jenner, was finding out whether in fact ‘Syd Barrett is [now] unable to write songs . . . or [if] he writes songs and won’t show them to anyone’. There was only one way to know for certain: book a studio. So it was that on 12 August 1974, Jenner and Barrett resumed where they left off some six years earlier – recording whatever Barrett had in his locker, even if it was just meandering bluesy improvs. The hope was that the results could sit alongside a couple of lost tracks from the Floyd era and a smattering of tracks that could, and maybe should, have made the two solo LPs. Engineer John Leckie says the thinking behind these sessions was simple: ‘There were things that [eventually] came out on Opel like ‘Dolly Rocker’ . . . [as well as] ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’, ‘Vegetable Man’ [but] there wasn’t enough to make an LP up, and [so we] were at least hoping to get at least a couple of new tracks from Syd, so that we could mix it all together.’36
Jenner recalls that ‘there was some indication that he wanted to do it’. But who did Jenner think would turn up: Roger K. Barrett or his creative alter ego Syd? Did he even still think of himself as ‘Syd’? According to the contracts he had recently signed with EMI – for the two reissues released in the past nine months – he did. He had signed both, ‘Syd Barrett’, which would be all well and good had he not previously always signed his official contracts with his real name, ‘R. K. Barrett’. Only after his muse was permanently stilled did he start signing himself ‘Syd’, suggesting this was still one crazy diamond.
Jenner’s attitude was suitably philosophical: ‘Give Syd all the tools and then see what he comes up with.’ Thinking ahead, Jenner had even booked a whole week of studio time, in case the first day or two proved a bust. But the Barrett who dutifully turned up for the first four days was a shell of the former shell. When Jenner’s gentle cajoling failed to produce anything, agent Bryan Morrison gave Syd one of his pep-talks, ‘Come on, Syd, come on, Syd, get it together.’ Barrett just kept noodling away at guitar-parts for songs he knew he would never finish and after four days of this torture walked out of the studio, never to return. One imagines the experience was at least as p
ainful for him as it was for a disabused Jenner. Not one note was usable (though this hasn’t stopped bootleggers from releasing several meandering snippets searching forlornly for a musical berth), and the idea of an album of outtakes was quietly put to bed. It would be 1988 before the project saw the light of day, as Opel, and even then the Floyd exercised their veto when it came to the two unreleased 1967 masterpieces that would have made the album a chart prospect.
And that was that. Barrett stopped kidding himself he was still Syd, gave up his latest flat in London and returned to Cambridge. By now, this had become a pattern of sorts. As Hester Page told Rob Chapman: ‘Like a homing pigeon, if he started to feel a bit out of it he went back to where it was familiar and he was safe . . . In the end it was safer to go back to Cambridge and not be pestered by this world he felt he couldn’t fit into anymore.’ In his mind, he never really had left home. As Mick Rock observed at the time of his friend’s 2006 death: ‘Syd never really left Cambridge, never really left England particularly. He returned to the house he grew up in, living like this mad uncle upstairs, occasionally floating down.’
And yet, just like Drake and Green, it seems Barrett didn’t really like it at home; he just couldn’t bear it anywhere else for very long. He had told Steve Turner as much, back in March 1971, as he was preparing to fade from view: ‘Cambridge is very much a place to get adjusted to. I’ve found it difficult . . . [but] it’s the home place where I used to live . . . It’s a nice place to live really – under the ground.’ Much like the Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.
At least he retained that unique sense of humour. And he would need it now, as the ill-assorted set of individuals that had once constituted ‘his band’ became one of the two or three biggest concert attractions in the world. In the four months that separated Nick Kent’s eulogistic piece on Syd from those final, frustrating sessions with Jenner, Floyd fans heard the first whispers that the band was finally getting down to work on a successor to the record-breaking Dark Side of the Moon. In June, they played a short set of shows in France, where they unveiled two new compositions, both lengthy, the ten-minute ‘Raving and Drooling’ and the epic, nine-part ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ – and there was no doubting which mad gem they meant. Waters talked about the initial inspiration for the latter song in a 1975 interview with Rock et Folk, while continuing his boycott of the British music press:
Roger Waters: We didn’t start out with the idea of making a record based on the theme of absence . . . We began to put the music for ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ together, and from that we got a very strong feeling of melancholy . . . When I wrote the words, I don’t know why, but I began to write about Syd’s [creative] demise. And then a few other sections got written . . . I wanted to force myself into what I felt at the time and to write something about it all . . . projecting my feelings about what was going on inside me. [1975]
But there was a lot more to Waters’ decision to write about Barrett that spring than mere happenstance, or rank sentiment. He was clearly responding to Nick Kent’s article, which implied that the band stopped being interesting the day he gave Syd his marching orders. Not that an affronted Waters was about to acknowledge Kent. No, no, no, he was responding to all the recent articles about Barrett in those impertinent English music papers – sum total as of May 1974, one:
Roger Waters: For my part I’ve never read an intelligent piece on Syd Barrett in any magazine. Never. No one knows what they’re talking about. Only us, the people who knew him, who still know him a bit, only we know the facts, how he lived, what happened to him, why he was doing certain things . . . They make me laugh, these journalists with their rubbish. In actual fact, I wrote that song . . . above all to see the reactions of people who reckon they know and understand Syd Barrett . . . Because he’s left, withdrawn so far away that, as far as we’re concerned, he’s no longer there. [1975]
Waters’ own song to Syd – indeed, all three of the new songs he had now written for Dark Side’s successor – soon became a battleground for the spat to end all spats between Waters, as self-appointed spokesman for the pretentious wing of English prog-rock, and the king rat of rock critics, Mr Kent (‘You Gotta Be Crazy’, the title of the other track debuted at autumn UK concerts was, according to Waters, ‘a reply to the English press’). When Kent was dispatched by NME editor Nick Logan to review the first of three sold-out Floyd shows at Wembley’s dilapidated Empire Pool Arena on 15 November 1974, he was given the opportunity to expand further on his former treatise and did not stint:
Incisiveness has never been something the post-Syd Floyd have prided themselves on, and so one has to wade through laboured sections of indolent musical driftwood before, lo, the plot is resumed and one is sent careering back to our Roger’s bloated denunciation . . . [which] ends with a mildly potent ‘j’accuse’ blast of postured psychological cause-and-effect ranting.
Waters was furious. Yet he wasn’t about to respond directly to Kent’s critique of the band’s current failings. As he would tell Rock et Folk, ‘I don’t think it’s really essential to institute a dialogue with the rock critics . . . there are more interesting minorities . . . Rock critics . . . are not an explanatory medium between us and the public.’ It was simply a coincidence that they formed such an insistent backdrop to his recent output (including a song he never finished but mentioned in passing, ‘Flight from Reality’). The following year he would ratchet up the personal paranoia to heights even Barrett never scaled, telling Capital Radio that ‘because we’re very successful, we’re very vulnerable to attack and Syd is the weapon that is used to attack us’.
As of December 1974 – with Floyd’s follow-up to Dark Side . . . still seven months away – it was left to Gilmour, who had previously tracked down Kent in order to ensure some personal input in his Barrett article, to now denigrate the man’s critical faculties. Gilmour duly informed NME’s Pete Erskine that his fellow scribe ‘goes on about Syd too much and yet, as far as I can see, there’s no relevance in talking about Syd in reviewing one of our [current] concerts’. In fact, the words ‘Syd Barrett’ were mentioned exactly once in Kent’s 3,000-word review of the Wembley show; and anyway, to suggest that the subject had ‘no relevance’ when the centrepiece of the new set was a twenty-five-minute ‘tribute’ in song to their former leader, and the second half of the show was a live re-creation of an entire album haunted by Syd’s spectre, was disingenuous at best.
Actually, Kent had done the band a big favour. The result of his attack – and it was certainly that – was ultimately a positive one. As Kent later revealed: ‘I saw Rick Wright after that piece came out and he actually thanked me for it. He said he didn’t like what I’d written, but at the same time it stimulated some kind of intra-group discussion, because as a group they had [started to] become so detached from each other.’ Some unity was now needed because, as of January 1975, when Erskine’s counter-piece appeared in NME, the Floyd had not even started recording the most eagerly awaited rock album of 1975, Wish You Were Here.
And still, any fears about bootlegging – and this time the Floyd really were the target of those shady preservers of musical history, with Tour ’74 capturing all three new songs live from Stoke in startlingly good audience stereo, housed in a laminated sleeve with lyrics – remained secondary to the band’s belief that the songs were immeasurably strengthened by being forged in the furnace of live performance. In the case of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, they were right. But the longer they worked on the new songs, the more convinced they became that they should change the dynamic. By early June 1975, when they were finally putting the finishing touches to Dark Side’s superior successor, they had put aside Waters’ latest songs of madness – ‘You Gotta Be Crazy’ and ‘Raving and Drooling’ – to make the twenty-minute ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ not only the album’s centrepiece, but its bookends. All it needed now was a few judicious overdubs.
And so it was that the band convened at Abbey Road o
n 5 June 1975, to celebrate Dave Gilmour’s wedding to his long-term girlfriend, and to apply those last dabs of the audio brush to a song they had now been working on for a solid year. Because the wedding reception was being held in the Abbey Road canteen, there were a lot of people from the band’s wacky past milling around that day, most of them at Gilmour’s behest. They included Jerry Shirley, who had made such a contribution to those Gilmour-Barrett sessions. And there was a large, bald man with no eyebrows, who was sitting next to Shirley in the canteen, wearing a slightly dazed look, and a huge grin. It was Syd.
Waters seems to have been more fazed by Barrett’s appearance that day than the others, or perhaps than he really should have been. He later commented, ‘For him to pick the very day we start putting vocals on a song about him – very strange.’ And yet it was hardly the only occasion Barrett had kept tabs on ‘his band’ since his 1968 departure, or the first time he had decided to visit them in the studio. As for his timing, the press had been talking about this track for the past nine months. Who, in such a situation, wouldn’t be the least bit curious to hear what the fuss was about?
Of course, he did look a bit odd with those shaved eyebrows and ill-fitting white suit.37 But then, he had always enjoyed yanking the chain of these former architecture students. And, as Duggie Fields once observed, ‘You weren’t always sure with Syd whether he was winding you up . . . He liked challenging people.’ So was this impromptu appearance a case of the madcap having one last laugh? According to his sister Rosemary, it was. In a rare interview, published in Luca Ferrari’s A Fish Out of Water, she suggested: ‘Syd was actually joking, and . . . everything from the white outfit to the shaved head and eyebrows was meant in jest.’
All the Madmen Page 29