In rock star portraiture, it behooves a writer to avoid straightforward presentation of cliche. The story of a troubled virtuoso tormented by their own genius, turning to drink and drugs, then flaming out before their time has been told over and over again. And so in the making of Have You Got It Yet?, his new documentary about the Pink Floyd cofounder Syd Barrett, director Roddy Bogawa faced the peculiar task of fighting the ready-made drama of a man whose life story sounds like legend.
Barrett led the group as guitarist and vocalist when they dubbed themselves The Pink Floyd Sound in 1965, and he spearheaded the creation of their groundbreaking debut album Piper at the Gates of Dawn two years later. But erratic behavior stemming from his deteriorating mental health had alienated his fellow band members, and ultimately led to his unceremonious dismissal not long afterward. There were murmurs that LSD had liquefied his brain, leaving him to slowly descend into madness while secluding himself in his country home. In the popular imagination, he became a symbol of squandered potential and larger-than-life tragedy.
Look closer, however, and you’ll find a biography with a stronger tether to Earth. In close study of Barrett’s work, in visiting his old haunts, and especially in consulting those who knew him personally, Bogawa and his late co-director Storm Thorgerson acquainted themselves with a figure of fragile brilliance offset by modest humanity. Barrett shrugged off the spotlight in an effort to bring some measure of normalcy back to his life, a withdrawal that ironically drew in the curiosity of a loyal fandom. The relative lack of intel turned him into a palimpsest on to which any listener could scrawl their fantasies and anxieties, but Bogawa sought out the interior essence of an icon now more image than man.
“His is a story of many artists and creative people: Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones, Brian Wilson, Daniel Johnston, even Kurt Cobain in some ways,” Bogawa tells the Guardian from his home in Manhattan. “These are people who found a creative outlet to express the things that were inside them, then the combination of external and internal pressures built up these fractures. One of the things that makes Syd unique in this group is that he didn’t die [see footnote]. He in fact did become a recluse, lived for 22 more years after recording his last record. He went back to painting. Nobody really knew what had happened to him … One of the things that’s built Syd’s image is people projecting their own feelings and thoughts or even worries on to his story. He was out of the limelight, so people could fill in that unresolved mystery how they like. That’s compelling to people.”
Bogawa first restores mortality to Barrett by focusing on the mechanics of his music, breaking down his forward-thinking techniques spun out from jazz. He advanced the front lines of instrumental innovation alongside The Beatles – who worked on Sgt Pepper’s down the hall from Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn sessions at Abbey Road Studios – with his avant-garde forays into backwards guitar mixing and multi-track recording. “He was hanging out with AMM and Keith Rowe and all these people,” Bogawa says. “Some of the stuff we’d call prepared piano or prepared guitar now, he was doing things other people weren’t – rolling the ball bearings on the electric guitar, playing slide guitar with a Zippo lighter. I think Graham Coxon said this, which I thought was beautiful, that he was using his guitar as a sonic paintbrush. He wasn’t a typical-minded musician. He’d make chord shapes just by looking at his fingers, the shape of his hand. He hung out with some experimental people. Going into this as a film director instead of a fan, pairing his music with footage and edits, I listened more closely than I ever had. I was blown away by his inventiveness.”
Articulating the content of Barrett’s character proved more complicated, a gradual process of getting to know someone long since passed away. As he conducted interviews with the subject’s loved ones and Britpop luminaries inspired by his legacy, Bogawa came to realize that Barrett was reacting somewhat reasonably to the extreme pressures that ten-plus gigs per week on top of unceasing nagging from label executives for the next single can exert on someone in his twenties. The rumors that he took acid with breakfast every morning were quickly revealed as “a crock of shit,” though Bogawa surmises that there’s a kernel of truth in the tall tale of Barrett walking fifty miles just to get home one night. Friends suggest that he hitchhiked as far as he could then walked the rest of the way, long enough to sustain the hideous blisters his sister recalls seeing on his feet. He was eccentric and temperamental, though one would be hard-pressed to find a great artist who isn’t. Mostly, Bogawa saw someone repeatedly and uncharitably misunderstood.
“One of the myths that was repeated, which we wanted to debunk, was from a neighbor who said they were taking out the trash and could hear Syd in his garage banging his head against the wall and screaming,” Bogawa says. “He said ‘howling like a dog,’ I believe. This was taken as a sign that he was living by himself and going crazy. You see images of the stuff he had in his house, and you realize he was just doing construction projects!”
“People think of him as being this hermit, but they have stories of seeing him ride his bike to the shops, going to the art store, riding to the local pub. He functioned on his own, living with his mother at first and then by himself after she passed away. His sister would come by to check on him and take care of him, but he did function. Some reporters tried to door-stop him over the years, so you get these photos where he looks freaked out, but that’s because he suddenly had people on his doorstep yelling, ‘Hey! You’re Syd Barrett!’ The photographs that exist, that made people think he’d gone crazy, some of them just look like he’s tired or a little stoned or just caught off guard. We’ve all seen bad pictures of ourselves. If you see the full range of photos shot during his later sessions, in some of them, he looks great!”
While Bogawa does his part to course-correct posterity, he’s nonetheless secure in the staying power of the first band he ever saw in concert. (“Animals Tour, which dates me,” he chuckles.) He teaches film production at New Jersey City University, where he regularly sees undergrads in Pink Floyd T-shirts, and he was heartened to hear that his teenage son’s classmates still go through the formative adolescent ritual of imbibing Dark Side of the Moon through a pair of high-end headphones. The sensitivity, perfectionism, and depth of feeling that made Barrett a singular talent also left him ill-equipped for the demands of his career, but he’s not an also-ran footnote of history. He’s survived by a generation-to-generation legion of admirers who recognize and respect his multi-dimensionality, a grounded form of worship exemplified by Bogawa’s lifelong passion.
“Animals was the first Floyd record I owned,” Bogawa fondly recalls. “And collecting records made me think for the first time about how I wanted to dress, how to wear my hair, what kind of kid I wanted to be. I grew up in LA during the late 70s, just as punk hit big, and I took a big right turn. I’d go to clubs in Hollywood with an English friend, and I was like, ‘Whoa! This is my misfit tribe!’ Music was self-discovery for me, it helped me build an identity. I took photos at shows, played in a bunch of different bands, and the group I played in during college, our bassist loved Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Total Syd Barrett fanatic. We tried to learn his songs, and we never could figure them out.”
• Have You Got It Yet? is out in New York cinemas and will open in LA on 21 July with a UK date to be announced
• Footnote added 20 July 2023 regarding Roddy Bogawa’s quote, “One of the things that makes Syd unique in this group is that he didn’t die.” Among those in the group he is referring to, Brian Wilson is still alive and Daniel Johnston died in 2019, aged 58. Syd Barrett died in 2006, aged 60.
