HW: Various

[Jon Jarrett]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, M Holmes wrote:

(quoting Keith Henderson)
> > but I suppose the irony is what
> > happened to Syd Barrett stemmed mainly from LSD.  (Unless that's myth.)
>
> Weirdly I know someone who bumped into him in the wilds and spent some
> time in his company (as a retired rock star - they only figured out who
> after the holiday). Seems it's no rumour. It really didn't do the guy
> any good. Something lije 3% of the population are prone to schizophrenia
> and a bad LSD experience is one of the things that can set it off.

        Certainly the sate he's in is documented, every now and then when
there's some Floyd-like news the _Cambridge Evening News_ prints a picture
of Syd and tries to tie the story in with him. When that recent Barrett
best of came out they even tried to get an interview, but he wouldn't let
them. He `doesn't deal terribly well with people', is the best way I've so
far seen it put.

        Meanwhile, of course, finding somebody round here with a Syd story
is not hard to do. My favourite one is an erstwhile Cambridge friend of
mine who, being small and female, was in the habit of singing to herself
when she had to walk places alone to keep her spirits up. One time she was
trying to find a friend's house in a part of Cambridge she'd not been
before, and passed a guy standing by himself at the entrance to the
road. She was singing something of her own devising, but when she
realised she'd got the wrong, dead-end, road and came back again, the guy
was singing a harmony part to it. Then when she finally found the friend
she was after, said friend heard about this and said, all open-mouthed,
"oh, but that's the area Syd Barrett goes walking in..." My friend
unfortunately had no idea what Syd then looked like, and doesn't have very
good sight anyway, so we'll never know how likely that is, but it's a good
little story anyway. Yours,
                            JOn

--
                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)