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Producing a bottle of Mandrax, he crushed them into the mess before taking the stage. David Gilmour says he 'still can't believe that Syd would waste good Mandies'. But a lighting man called John Marsh, who was also there, confirms the story. Girls in the front row, seeing his lips and nostrils bubbling with Brylcreem, screamed. He looked like he was decomposing onstage. Faced with this farce, some of the band and crew abandoned themselves to drink, drugs, groupies and the sights.
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When they arrived in Los Angeles, Barrett had forgotten his guitar, which caused much cost and fuss. He fell into a swimming-pool and left his wet clothes behind. The Floyd survived the tour by the skin of their teeth. On TV's Pat Boone Show, where they did 'Apples and Oranges', Barrett was happy to mime in rehearsals - but live he ignored the call to 'Action' four or five times, leaving Waters to fill in.
Asked what he liked in the after-show chat, Barrett replied Finishing their commitments on the West Coast, the band began thinking of how to replace or augment him. The next day, they were in Holland, handing Barrett notes in the hope that he would talk to them. The day after, they were bus-bound on a British package tour with Hendrix, the Move, Amen Corner, the Nice and others, playing two minute sets a night for three weeks, with three days off in middle.
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Though he had worked harder, the schedule was too much for Barrett. Onstage, he was unable to function. Sometimes he failed to show up and the Nice's Dave O'List stood in for him. Once, Jenner had to stop him escaping by train. Barrett did play occasional blinders through out the autumn of , but these instances were as unpredictable as spring showers, and the band's hopes that he might 'return' dimmed. The Floyd stumbled through to Christmas, while the three other band members hatched a plan: Barrett couldn't care less, and Gilmour, broke, bandless and driving a van for a living - was known to be not only a terrific guitarist but also a wonderful mimic of musical parts.
Drummer Nick Mason had already sounded him out when they ran into each other at a gig in Soho. On 3 January , Gilmour accepted a try-out. The band had a week booked in a north London rehearsal hall before going back on the road. Four gigs followed in the next fortnight, with Barrett contributing little. He looks happy enough in a cine-clip from the time, joining in with the lads for a tap-dance in a dressing-room. As they drove, one of them - no one remembers who - asked, 'Shall we pick up Syd? And they never quite put him out of their minds.
Not that their minds were made up. Though the Floyd would go on to huge fame and fortune, at the time they believed they probably had a few months left of milking psychedelia before ignominious disbandment. Barrett, as Waters says, was the 'goose that had laid the golden egg'. Now their frontman had become such a liability on tour, they would rather appear without their main attraction than risk his involvement.
However, Barrett still had the band's schedule. Waters remembers him turning up with his guitar at 'an Imperial College gig, I think, and he had to be very firmly told that he wasn't coming on stage with us'. At the Middle Earth, wearing all his Chelsea threads, he positioned himself in front of the low stage and stared at Gilmour throughout his performance.
Now he had to watch his old college friend playing his licks. Undoubtedly, he felt hurt by this treatment. Though the money from Piper came rolling in, Barrett's work went completely to pot. Jenner took him into the Abbey Road studios several times between May and July , bringing various musicians and musical friends to help out, but achieved next to nothing.
Barrett was all over the place - forgetting to bring his guitar to sessions, breaking equipment to EMI's displeasure. Sometimes he couldn't even hold his plectrum. He was in a state, and had little new material. Jenner had the experience neither as a person not as a producer to coax anything out of him. By August, he and King were having less and less to do with Barrett - which could equally be said of the other lodgers in Egerton Court.
According to flatmate Po, 'Syd could still be very funny and lucid, but he could also be uncommunicative. He had even dri ven Barrett to an appointment: What can you do? So Gale placed a call to Laing and Po booked a cab. But with the taxi-meter ticking outside, Barrett refused to leave the flat.
By the autumn of 68, he was homeless. Periodically he returned to Cambridge, where his mother Win fretted, urged him to see a doctor, and blindly hoped for the best. In London, he crashed on friends' floors - and began the midnight ramblings which would continue for two years. But he wasn't quite invisible. In , ex-girlfriend Gala Pinion was in a supermarket on the Fulham Road. Once there, 'He dropped his trousers and pulled out his cheque book,' says Pinion.
Gala made her excuses and left, never to see him again. However, even as an invisible presence, he loomed large. The previous year, punk rock had appeared and the King's Road had become heartland. Without success, the Sex Pistols, their manager Malcolm McLaren and their art director Jamie Reid tried to contact Barrett, to ask him to produce their first album.
The Damned hoped he would produce their second, realised it was impossible and settled for the Floyd's Nick Mason 'Who didn't have a clue', according to the band's bassist Captain Sensible. Barrett continued to do as little and spend as much as ever. Bankrupt, he left London for Win's new Cambridge home in From then until now, only a handful of encounters with Barrett have been reported first-hand, but some facts have come to light.
An operation on his ulcer meant that Barrett lost much of his excess weight. Win thought he should keep himself occupied, so Roger Waters's mother Mary found him a gardening job with some wealthy friends. At first he prospered but, during a thunderstorm, he threw down his tools and left. By this time, he was just calling himself 'Roger'. In , his finances restored, he booked into the Chelsea Cloisters for a few weeks, but found he disliked London.
He heard the voice of freedom and he followed - walking back to Cambridge, where he was found on Win's doorstep - and leaving his dirty laundry behind. The circumstances of his final return to Cambridge were rightly interpreted by his family as a 'cry for help' and he agreed to spend a spell in Fulbourne psychiatric hospital. It has often been said, on the grounds that he has an 'odd' mind, rather than a sick one. He continued for a while as an outpatient at Fulbourne, with no trouble.
Barrett has never been sectioned. He has never had to take drugs for his mental health, except after one or two uncontrollable fits of anger, when he was admitted to Fulbourne and administered Largactyl. However, he has received other treatments. In the early 80s, he spent two years in a charitable institution, Greenwoods, in Essex.
At this halfway house for lost souls, he joined in group and other forms of therapy, and was very content. But after an imagined slight, he walked out - again all the way to Win's house. The increasingly frail Win moved in with her daughter Roe and her husband Paul Breen, according to Mary Waters, 'because she was so scared of his outbursts'. Some people think Barrett suffers from Asperger's Syndrome. It certainly seems he can't be bothered to think about anything that doesn't directly affect him. He kept rabbits and cats for a while but forgot to feed them, so they had to be sent to more caring homes.
Thereafter, the only intimate contacts he maintained were with Win and Roe. Otherwise, he seems to have lost the habit - and become wary - of human interaction, limiting himself to encounters with shop assistants and his sympathetic GP, whose surgery has become a second home. He was - and is still - in and out of hospital for his ulcers. Paul Breen revealed that his brother-in-law was 'painting again', and meeting his mother in town for shopping trips. It was a 'very, very ordinary lifestyle,' said Breen, but not reclusive: It would be truer to say that he enjoys his own company now, rather than that of others.
As more years went by, other news leaked out. Barrett was collecting coins. He was learning to cook, and could stuff a mean pepper. On the death of Win in , he destroyed all his old diaries and art books - and also chopped down the front garden's fence and tree, and burnt them though more in a spirit of renewal than grief. He had been a great support to Roe in her mourning, but hadn't attended the funeral because he 'wouldn't know what to do'. He still wrote down his thoughts all the time. He still painted - big works, six foot by four - but destroyed any that he didn't consider perfect, and stacked the rest against the wall.
And sometimes he was unable to finish them, because obsessive fans had climbed over his back fence, and stolen the brushes from the table outside, where he worked. A few titbits, to finish. In , Barrett was diagnosed as a B-type diabetic - a genetic condition - and was prescribed a regime of medication and diet to which he is sporadically faithful. His eyesight will inevitably become 'tunnelled' as a result - sooner, rather than later, unless he regularly takes his tablets.
However, he is far from 'blind', as reported on the more excitable websites. For Christmas , Barrett gave his sister a painting. For his birthday in January , she brought him a new stereo, because he likes to listen to the Stones, Booker-T and the classical composers. However, he evinced no interest in the recent Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd on which nearly a fifth of the tracks are written by him, despite the fact that he only recorded with the band for less than a 30th of its lifespan.
To coincide with the album's release, the BBC screened an Omnibus documentary about him, which he watched round at Roe's house. He is reported to have liked hearing 'Emily' and, particularly, seeing his old landlord Mike Leonard - who he called his 'teacher'.
Otherwise, he thought the film 'a bit noisy'. His voice is deeper than on any recordings, more cockneyfied than on the TV interviews he gave in Behind him, the hall is clean but bare, the floorboards mostly covered in linoleum. I mention someone dear to him, from his childhood. She'd be coming to Cambridge in a couple of weeks, and wondered if Barrett might like a visit? I'm left like others before me, trying to work out just what he meant.
A coded message that he may re-emerge into the world - perhaps show new work or perform? And is opening the door in your underpants an unwitting demonstration of self-confidence, or an eccentricity, or worse? I retrace my steps, cross the main road to my car where I write a note that I hope is tactful: I didn't have time to mention that I'm writing a book on you He's wearing khaki shorts now, and gardening gloves, which aren't really suited to receiving the note - and I would be tempting fate to rest it on the side of the wheelbarrow which he has bought with him.
Are you thinking of moving on? As I reach the gate, I see him weeding in the front corner of the garden, on his knees. Topics Biography books The Observer. Music books Psychedelia extracts. Pretty gross, and strange considering we have sinks and soap in our house. Over time he actually started becoming a lot more normal, probably because he came out and partied with us a lot. He actually wheeled quite frequently. Then things started getting a little off. He developed a rash of some sort, which I thought was probably because his room was disgusting and there may have been bugs living in it.
So after a few weeks of him clearly developing paranoia, one morning the shit hit the fan. I woke up one morning at around 6 am to the sound of someone running up and down the stairs. Then I heard more frantic running, followed by my other, normal, roommate screaming. I jumped up and ran out to the kitchen.
Pickles, milk, chili, you name it, all over the ground. Steve asked him what the hell was going on. At this point my other, much slower to react, roommate came out to see what the fuss was about. When he walked into the living room, John looked at him with his death gaze, pointed and said: So after a little while of us trying to figure out what to do while this kid mumbles random things, out of nowhere he jumps to his feet, lets out a war cry, and charges at my roommate Steve.
Now Steve was a bouncer at some bars in our city, so when John charged at him, he hip tossed him right through one of our dining room chairs our dining room and living room were essentially one room. After this he jumped on him and held down his body, then I jumped on his legs and we held him down. He was kicking and punching us, trying to get us off.
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At this point, he started yelling some crazy things, most of which I forget now. Now before I explain what happened next, I should explain what happened after he got taken away. In his room, we found a bunch of our food, a bottle of Tylenol which was missing a substantial amount of pills, and some Benadryl scattered around the floor.
We also found a box that had a photo album and some other things in it which we think most likely was all stuff from his relationship with the girl who dumped him after he moved out here to be with her. That being said, we figure the hat was a gift from her, and the sweatpants were probably hers. So now that ex-girlfriend box is out there, I can continue, and this is where it goes from sad and shocking to just plain creepy and frightening.
While we were holding him down, he kept struggling, and in the process, his little sweatpants started coming down. So we figure he most likely tried to kill himself with pills, but instead he just ended up tripping the fuck out. It began one day while I was at lunch with my girlfriend at the time and her family and got a text from stating: Junior year I lived with two friends.
In this room, we had a walk in closet. They come back pretty smashed and Eric passes out on the couch while Jeff drags himself back to our room and onto his bed. This would normally be the end of the story but Jeff had a strange habit in that when he got really drunk, he would often sleepwalk.
Sophomore year he got tons of shit for waking up after a night out, squeezing past a broken door that barely opened into his closet and literally dousing the joint with piss. Needless to say, he began to repeat this process that night. Now as has been told back to me, Jeff reckons he got up during the night, sleepwalked into our shared walk-in closet that shared my Ikea dresser and closed the door behind him before passing out on the floor. A few hours later Jeff wakes up fully only to find himself in an absolutely pitch black room with unfamiliar objects and no recollection of how he got there.
To this day he claims he thought he was kidnapped. Now Jeff was a rugby player and quite built and so he started to literally tear his way out of the room. He punched a hole in one wall that led to the bathroom and then proceeded to tear a torso sized hole in the opposite wall.
With his bare hands, he went through drywall, insulation and another set of drywall. Upon reaching the vinyl siding that adorned the side of our building he tore down the metal hanging rod, bent it Hulk style and started trying to spear through the siding. If we had had wood siding, he would have probably fallen to his death. It was visibly dented from the outside for at least the rest of our time there. Eventually, after severely denting the vinyl siding and somehow tearing my poor dresser to shreds in the process of all this, Jeff gave up.
He really needed to pee and began to cry at the state of his hopelessness. Sitting in defeat on the floor of the closet, he saw light coming in from the bottom of the door. Spurred by this glorious light and the need to urinate he finally managed to locate the door handle and stepped out into our room. Imagine finding your roommate shirtless, holding a rusty hatchet, in your backyard. The two private areas of the suite contained a private bedroom, a sliding glass patio door, and a private bathroom. I was pissed at this point. He refused to clean or take care of all of the messes listed above, so I ended up cleaning them, but keeping an hourly log and catalog of what work I did and worked out a bill, which I sent to him.
I was tired of cleaning feces out of our refrigerator, finding turds in our crisper drawer, shit on the stovetop, vomit on the carpet, vomit in our potted plants, vomit on the grille of our television set, urine on the carpet, urine on the kitchen floor seeping behind the refrigerator, dead animals in our oven and freezer units, and bags of feces hidden in our light fixtures. Have you ever had to move your refrigerator out of its little nook to get behind it to clean urine mixed with whatever the fuck lurks behind a refrigerator in the first place? After sending him the cleaning bill and getting a refusal of payment, I took some of his stuff, dumped it in a storage unit across town, and held it until he paid me back.
He stole some of my stuff in retaliation, but I called the cops and repossessed my belongings. He was unable to articulate to the cops that I had some of his shit in this exchange, so I ended up basically getting my shit back while he had to be put in their car to cool off. Upon retrospect, I think maybe he became mentally ill after losing his girlfriend, and not being able to part with his feces was part of his illness.
This is purely speculative. This is where the sealing begins. Put a date mark right here, because this is where shit gets crazy. I had had enough. I bought a mini fridge, a plug-in stove top, two padlocked footlockers, a wooden bar, duct tape, a remote-control car, and an external padlock. My private area had two entrances… Here, I best sum up my little fortress in this post I made in another thread:. Actually, upon reflection, I really want to share how I kept my room-mate out of my private area. I had two potential entrances to my private area, a sliding glass patio door and a regular door to the common area.
I secured the common door with a padlock on the outside which was really just for show. The inside was barricaded. At the bottom, I had a rolled up towel, and I sealed the rest of it with tape to avoid smell or other chemical assaults from the common area. I packed against the door with my king-sized bed, which was in turn secured from being dislodged by a bookshelf full of weights and books.
Even if he got through the padlock, he would not have been able to open the door without busting it in two. The top half of the door was unsecured; I was worried he might break the door and gain access, so when I seized his stuff I had it put in public storage across town. Now the sliding glass door is where the home alone shit comes in. It had a lock, but it was nonfunctional and only accessible from the inside. So when I came home, I would whip out my little remote control, make the RC car run off and lift the bar, then gain access to the apartment.
To prevent this system from being discovered, I papered the inside of the sliding door with butcher paper, and I ran a wire outside of the door in an obvious manner so that the roomie would think that this wire somehow if tugged correctly, would undo the lock. To my knowledge, all of his attempts to get inside my apartment were by messing with this wire, which was attached to the handle of an antique coffee grinder and a paint can. I heard this account from the neighbors because it occurred while I was away, but apparently he had lost his front door key, had some kind of intestinal problem, and had to take a shit really bad.
All of the neighbors he knew he had already hit up for toilet access and been refused by this point. I fucking hate him so much. I think he went crazy and lost all his friends at some point because around the time I barricaded, I stopped hearing parties. In fact, I stopped hearing anything from the common area of the apartment, except for the occasional formless moans and thumping.
I did, however, start smelling odors. I taped up my door. After cleaning so much of his shit up, I just wanted the universal god of justice to see what a wreck the place would become without my presence. Forgive me for being a little spotty in my descriptions after this point.
What I do know of what transpired over there I can only reconstruct from forensic evidence, what precisely was destroyed, what common friends have told me in their accounts, and two forays over into the waste zone over the next two months. A few years ago, my roommate started to lose his marbles close to graduation and after he had surgery for a deviated septum. He steadfastly goes upstairs to his room for about 45 minutes.
Then he comes back down and told me that he was lying in bed watching Sports Center and got the sudden urge to break his nose. So he figured if the Penguins won he would go from the left if the Red Wings won he would go from the right. Just as he was about to smash his face into the pillow he realized it was crazy and came downstairs to tell me all of this in some manic, crazy Tom Cruise voice.
In the story, his friend died so at the funeral his other friend gave some speech which concluded with legally changing his name to that of his dead friend. In I went to uni in Edinburgh. Cue the end of 2nd year. My group of friends and I are choosing who lives with who as we move from halls to flats. So I got lumbered with 3 other guys. We got lucky with our flat.
Super-close to the new Parliament and with 3 floors for 4 people, the rent was undervalued hugely because it was brand new and we were the first tenants. So we got everything signed and went to our prospective homes for summer to work etc. Except for J, who decided to hang around for summer and enjoy the festival. The last I see of him is when I leave for home having just put all my coursework, architecture models, computer stuff etc in my room and locking the bedroom door behind me. We decided to celebrate my birthday by having a week in the festival.
We arrive in Waverly, walk the short distance to the flat and get ready for what awaits us. The plan was set: As I reach the top of the stairs I notice something different about my bedroom door. There seems to be only half of it left on the hinges, the rest splintered across the floor. We go into my room. There are three tussled but empty sleeping bags. I step on a used condom. I survey the room. The blinds have been torn and snapped off the wall. The en-suite nice flat as I say — brand new until now — was a tip.
Smears of what I can only assume to be shit along the shower walls. The shower head is smashed and hanging like a New York payphone. I open my wardrobe. On inspection, the insides have been smashed. Time to see Joe. We go down to the kitchen via the living room. Walking in, we see about 10 sleeping bags and a mattress we had no furniture at this stage.
In the corner is a comatosed Joe half on the mattress, half on the floor. His head being on the floor, we step over him and enter the kitchen. Scattered amongst spilled beans and cans of beer were: Many discarded pieces of foil with burn marks I presume crack, heroin. The fridge is ajar.