Pigs Might Fly Read online

  Before rehearsals for Live 8, David Gilmour and Roger Waters had last spent time in each other’s company on 23 December 1987, in the words of the guitarist, to ‘thrash out the terms of our divorce’. Convening on Gilmour’s houseboat-cum-studio, the pair finalised the deal with an accountant and a computer to settle the terms of a legal document relating to use of the name Pink Floyd.

  Previously, Waters had filed law suits against both Gilmour and Mason, believing that the band name should have been put to rest following his official departure in 1985. For nearly twenty years, Waters had been the group’s dominant songwriter, devising the original concepts behind albums such as Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, writing the bulk of the lyrics and, in his own words, ‘driving the band’. Refusing to cede to his demands, Gilmour and Mason had elected to continue as Pink Floyd. Three months before this final meeting, the pair had released a new Floyd album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, signing up Richard Wright to play on the subsequent tour. Two months later, despite being denounced by Waters as ‘a fair forgery’, the album had notched up platinum sales, confirming that the Pink Floyd brand was strong enough to weather even the loss of a key member.

  Then again, it wasn’t the first time the band had lost one of its number. At Live 8, Roger Waters had acknowledged the one Pink Floyd member missing that night, dedicating ‘Wish You Were Here’ to ‘everyone that’s not here, but particularly, of course, Syd’.

  Syd Barrett, once Pink Floyd’s lead singer, guitarist and guiding light, had dropped out of both the band and the music business some three decades earlier. As his former bandmates performed to over 100,000 fans in Hyde Park and to a television audience of over 2 billion people around the world, Syd Barrett remained at home in a semi-detached house in suburban Cambridge. At his own request, Barrett no longer had any direct contact with Pink Floyd or wished to be reminded of his time in the band. For him, it had long been over.

  CHAPTER TWO THE ENDLESS SUMMER

  ‘Freedom is what I’m after.’

  Syd Barrett

  It was made public four days after the event. On Friday, 7 July 2006, Syd Barrett died. The cause of death was given as pancreatic cancer, though his health had been declining for many years. Syd’s family informed David Gilmour, who relayed the news to his former bandmates and others in the Floyd’s circle of friends. Respecting Syd’s family’s wishes, none of Pink Floyd had seen or spoken to Syd in many years. When the news finally broke worldwide on Tuesday, 11 July, photographs of Barrett appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the world. It was an extraordinary and unprecedented reaction to the death of a man who had not made a record in over thirty years, and had not spoken about his time as a pop star for just as long.

  In the spring of 1968, Pink Floyd had parted company with their original singer and childhood friend. By then, David Gilmour had joined the group to provide some musical stability, as Barrett’s drug use and increasingly fractious state of mind had rendered him a liability. In January that year, on their way to perform a show, the rest of the band took the decision not to collect Syd, a decision that would have a profound effect on the rest of their lives.

  The week before Pink Floyd’s Live 8 performance, the London Evening Standard despatched a journalist to Barrett’s house in Cambridge, in an attempt to interview the band’s elusive former singer. Barrett refused to answer the door. His sister Rosemary revealed that she had told her brother of Pink Floyd’s imminent reunion, only to be met with a blank response. ‘That is another life for him,’ she explained, ‘another world in another time.’ The nickname of Syd, acquired in that previous life, had been abandoned. For many years Syd had been known once again as Roger Barrett.

  The anonymous semi-detached house at 6 St Margaret’s Square, Cambridge, where Barrett spent his final years, gave away very little about the identity of its sole occupant. There were none of the trappings beloved by rock stars of all generations: no wall-mounted gold discs to be glimpsed through the gaps in the curtains or expensive sports cars lined up in the driveway. Yet there was none of the neglect some might expect after hearing the rumours and whispered half-truths about the mental state of its owner. Barrett had lived there alone since the death of his mother in 1991. He had never married, fathered any children or held down a job for a significant length of time since his alter ego left Pink Floyd in the 1960s.

  Every so often the outside world would impinge on his private universe. Pictures of the navy-blue front door would be splashed across the newspapers, alongside an image of the occupant himself. Caught unawares on his doorstep by photographers, Syd always looked baffled, sometimes angry or scared, invariably half-dressed with a middle-age paunch on display. Any glimpse of his down-at-heel appearance supplied more grist to the Syd Barrett rumour mill.

  Syd would undergo these intrusions whenever his past life became a topic of interest in the present day. When Pink Floyd reconvened without him to play Live 8, it was inevitable that the press would descend. Previously, during the media frenzy surrounding acid house raves in the late 1980s, Barrett was held up by the News of the World as a cautionary example of the dangers of taking LSD. Of course, they knew he would never sue. But then, who knew what he might do? Neighbours spoke of hearing deathly screams in the middle of the night, while others said they’d heard him bark like a dog. Since the early nineties, though, Roger Barrett simply spent his days painting, reading and cycling to the local shops. He led a quiet, though not completely reclusive existence. Invariably, after each intrusion on his privacy, the trail would go cold again and Syd would be left alone, with only the occasional uninvited fan knocking on his door.

  Yet, whatever their context, the photographs of the old Syd Barrett that accompanied these newspaper exposés were still unavoidably compelling. Those same pictures appeared again after his death. Taken almost forty years earlier, they showed Syd dolled up in his best Kings Road clothes, wavy hair teased into an explosive halo, eyes smouldering into the camera, as he blueprinted the image of the doomed rock star, a cliché adopted by countless would-be Syds ever since.

  ‘He was someone that people would point out on the street,’ recalls David Gilmour of his childhood friend. ‘Syd had that charisma, that magnetism.’

  The shared history of Pink Floyd’s three chief protagonists – Barrett, Gilmour and Waters – is irrevocably tied to the city of their youth.

  Cambridge’s reputation as a seat of learning began as early as the thirteenth century. With the striking architecture of its colleges and the River Cam winding its way through the city, it retains a traditional English quality. Yet as a counterpoint to any quaintness, the landscape around the city comprises rugged fenland. The atmosphere seeped into Pink Floyd’s music from the start. The title of the group’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was taken from The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s novel set on a riverbank. In the chapter of the same name, two of the book’s animal characters embark on a bizarre spiritual quest. ‘Grantchester Meadows’, Roger Waters’ softly played interlude on the band’s Ummagumma album, was named after the beautiful, heavily wooded riverbank area tucked away towards the south of the city, near David Gilmour’s family home.

  At the time of the three principal Floyds’ arrival into the world, Cambridge was, as one of their childhood peers now describes it, ‘a place where licensed eccentricity was considered permissible. You’d see all these brilliant but rather odd people such as Francis Crick who discovered DNA, cycling eccentrically down the street.’ Syd’s father was another familiar, eccentric figure, often to be seen cycling on an upright bicycle down Hills Road.

  Dr Arthur Max Barrett, known to all as Max, was a university demonstrator in pathology at the local Addenbrooke’s hospital. Later, he would take up the position of morbid anatomist at the university. In his spare time he was a noted amateur painter and botanist, with the privilege of his own set of keys to the city’s botanical gardens. Displaying the musical talent for which his son
would become better known, Dr Barrett was also a member of the Cambridge Philharmonic Society.

  He was married to Winifred Garrett, the great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the country’s first female physician in 1865. The Barretts had five children: Alan, Donald, Ruth, Roger (later known as Syd) and Rosemary. Syd was born on 6 January 1946 in the first family home at 60 Glisson Road, near to the centre of Cambridge. Three years later, the family moved to a nearby five-bedroom house at 183 Hills Road.

  A few minutes’ walk from the Barretts’ new home was Rock Road, where the family of George Roger Waters would settle when he was just two years old. Roger’s father, Eric Fletcher Waters, had grown up in County Durham, the grandson of a coal miner and prominent Labour Party agent. He became a schoolteacher and, being a devout Christian and conscientious objector, refused to join up at the outbreak of the war. Instead he did voluntary work and drove an ambulance during the Blitz and joined the Communist Party. But halfway through the conflict, Eric had a change of heart and decided to sign up for the war. He eventually joined the City of London Regiment, 8th Battalion Royal Fusiliers as a second lieutenant.

  Preceded by one brother, John, Roger was born on 6 September 1943. His mother, formerly Mary Whyte, was also a schoolteacher. When Eric was posted overseas, Mary moved with her sons from Great Bookham, in Surrey, to Cambridge, believing they would be safer from German bombing raids over London.

  Eric Waters was declared missing presumed dead on 18 February 1944, during the Allies’ assault on the beaches of Anzio, on the Italian coast. Roger was just five months old at the time.

  David Jon Gilmour arrived in the world on 6 March 1946. The Gilmours’ home at the time was a village outside Cambridge called Trumpington. The family moved several times, before finally settling at 109 Grantchester Meadows in the Newnham district, near the River Cam, when David was ten years old. His father, Doug, and mother, Sylvia, met at Cambridge’s Homerton College, where both were training to be teachers. Sylvia went on to become a film editor, eventually working for the BBC. Doug Gilmour became a senior lecturer in zoology at the university. The couple had four children: David, his brothers Peter and Mark, and a sister, Catherine.

  ‘Cambridge was a great place to grow up,’ says Gilmour. ‘You’re in a town dominated by education, you’re surrounded by bright people. But then it’s also got this rural heart that spreads practically to the centre. There were great places to meet up with friends.’

  While Gilmour has no memory of the meeting, he first encountered Barrett and Waters when the three were enrolled by their parents at a Saturday morning art club at Homerton College. Both Waters and Barrett attended Morley Memorial primary school in Blinco Grove, where Mary Waters was working as a teacher. It was here that Syd’s precocious talents first became apparent. Noted for his gift of mimicry, he and sister Rosemary (known to most as Roe) also won a shared prize for playing the piano when Syd was seven years old.

  Nick Barraclough, a fellow Morley Memorial pupil, later to become a musician and BBC broadcaster, remembers Syd as ‘a beautiful boy and incredibly artistic. My sister was in his class. They would have been about ten or eleven, and the pupils were asked to paint their impressions of a hot day. Most of the children drew a beach or a sun. Roger – as he was still called then – drew a girl lying on a beach in a bikini with an ice-lolly dripping over her, which all seemed terribly advanced considering his age.’ All three boys sat and passed their 11-plus, the then compulsory test which divided British schoolchildren into those deemed intelligent enough for a grammar school education, or, if not, the secondary modern school system. ‘My father was a primary school teacher,’ remembers Barraclough, ‘and the two Rogers both came to him at different times to be coached in advance for the 11-plus.’

  Waters was enrolled at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys (formerly the Cambridge and County School) in Hills Road in 1954. Now reinvented as Hills Road Sixth Form College, back then ‘the County’ was, as one former pupil described it, ‘a grammar school that thought it was a public school, with masters, mortar boards and sadism’. The school had a record for high academic achievement, with a similarly impressive Oxbridge output.

  Roger became a noted sportsman: a wicket keeper in the school’s first XI cricket team, and an impressive fly half in the rugby team. He also joined the school’s Combined Cadet Force, initially against his wishes, spending some time at the weekend naval training school at HMS Ganges. Part of the Force’s training involved target practice and marksmanship, to which he was better disposed. However, although he was smart and witty, his sharp tongue and overbearing streak could also make him unpopular. On at least one occasion his fellow pupils beat him up. ‘I think I was roundly hated by most of the people involved,’ admitted Waters later.

  ‘Roger was in the year above me,’ remembers fellow County boy Seamus O’Connell. ‘I was friends with another chap called Andrew Rawlinson, whose nickname was Willa, and who was a great friend of Roger’s. The relationship between Roger and I was a bit fraught at school as he wasn’t always that pleasant, but we still counted each other as friends.’

  Later, tiring of the Cadet Force, and in a fit of pique, Roger simply handed in his uniform and refused to attend further training, leading to a dishonourable discharge. Fellow County pupil Tim Renwick, who would go on to work with Pink Floyd as a guitarist, recalls the scandal: ‘I was a couple of years younger than Roger, but everyone in the school heard about it. He caused rather a fuss. Though I’m sure I can remember hearing that Roger told them he was leaving on the grounds that he was a conscientious objector.’

  Waters’ childhood experiences would find their way time and again into Pink Floyd’s music, leaving even the most inattentive listener in little doubt about his feelings for life at the County.

  ‘Roger tolerated his schooling,’ said Mary Waters. ‘His attitude was, “You have to get on with it and make the most of it.”’

  ‘I hated every second of it, apart from games,’ Roger insisted. ‘The regime at school was a very oppressive one. It was being run on pre-war lines, where you bloody well did as you were told, and there was nothing to do for us but to rebel against it. It’s funny how, when you get these guys at school, they will always pick on the weakest kid. So the same kids who are susceptible to bullying by other kids are also susceptible to bullying by the teachers. It’s like smelling blood. They home in on it. Most of the teachers were absolute swine.’

  ‘I always presumed that Pink Floyd’s The Wall was about the masters at the County,’ says Nick Barraclough, who followed Waters to the school. ‘The headmaster there at the time was a man named Eagling, who was, to this day, the scariest man I have ever known. The two Rogers would have been right in the thick of all that.’

  Being schooled after the Second World War in an education system still behind the times, hampered by pre-war attitudes, and hardly attuned to a generation enjoying the peace and relative prosperity not afforded to their parents, the late fifties was an era of opportunity for teenagers, unlike any before.

  Railing against the school system, Waters would later describe an episode that encapsulated this contempt. Deciding to seek revenge on the school’s gardener for some real or imagined slight, he and a group of co-conspirators went into the school orchard with a stepladder and singled out the gardener’s favourite tree. They then proceeded to eat every apple on the tree, taking care not to remove any from the branches. Recounting the incident for Musician magazine over thirty years later, Waters proudly recalled ‘being filled with a real sense of achievement’ after the elaborate prank.

  Three years behind Waters, Syd Barrett’s progress through the County was marked by an overriding passion for art and a keen interest in poetry and drama. Also displaying an anti-authoritarian streak, Barrett could charm his way out of trouble by being smart, good-looking and, as Gilmour recalls, ‘a sharp cookie, very able in many areas’. Nevertheless, adhering to more conventional lines, Syd rose through the ranks to beco
me patrol leader, Kingfisher patrol, in his local Scout troop.

  In June 1961, aged fifteen, Syd began a relationship with Elizabeth Gausden (known by everyone as Libby), a pupil at the nearby Cambridge Grammar School for Girls. ‘Syd actually had a girlfriend already, a very pretty, fluffy German girl called Verena Frances,’ remembers Libby. ‘But we hit it off. He always used to say, “You’re not the prettiest, but you’re the funniest girl ever”. He was a wonderful boy. Everybody loved him.’

  John Gordon first encountered Syd in the County’s art class. ‘He shone from the first day,’ he remembers. ‘His hair was longer than anyone else’s. He spoke his mind to the teachers and would even walk out of a class if he was being told off.’

  Syd frequently refused to wear his school blazer and was also notable for wearing his shoes without laces, a trait that continued into adulthood. Encouraged by his parents, Syd also indulged the keenly creative streak that had first surfaced at the Morley Memorial, participating in poetry readings and public speaking. But his adolescence would be blighted. On 11 December 1961, Dr Barrett died. ‘His father had been ill for a long time,’ says Libby Gausden. ‘He had cancer and it was very painful, and I think it was almost a great relief to the children as he was suffering so much before he died. Syd was a great diary writer. Each page was about a foot and a half long, and he would fill every page. But on the day his father died, he just wrote “Poor Dad died today”.’

  Many people have speculated about the impact of his father’s death on Syd. David Gilmour, who spent a great deal of time with his friend in those years, says that ‘Syd never spoke about it. People say his father’s death changed him, but at the time it was difficult to recall any great change.’