Syd Barrett

 A DVD release just came out last week, I believe, about Syd and the Pink Floyd legacy. It's interesting to listen to Roger talk about him and get so emotional. Robyn Hitchcock also sings a couple of Syd's tunes. While Syd is not my favorite Floydian, I'll vote for the 'love' his music category.

 

Mind that Syd due to schizophrenia and drug abuse was never able to fulfill the dreams of so many fans and people from the musicial press!

I like his PF stuff. A lot.

Good but not fantastic.

Absolutly brillient he is. Unfortunatly with the high levels of prog production compared to what Syd put out its hard to fully appreciate some times. I would love to hear his songs redone with the full thing and not just one acoustic guitar or whatever. Listening to Dominoes and Terrapin on the Dave Gilmour DVD is bliss!!

Who wouldn't  Syd Barrett?

In the 60's, people said that Barret was the only lyricist that could match John Lennon.

erik neuteboom wrote: Hallo Damen. I'm very curious where you get that information about the Asperger Syndrome from? I have read many books about Syd Barrett and never read anything about that syndrome and several people (like Roger Waters) sonsider Syd's behaviour as from a schizophrenic disease. I'm working for 20 years as a psychiatric nurse and to me his symptoms are very similar to schizophrenia and not to the Asperger Syndrome. On the other hand, it often happen that schizophrenia and forms of austism (like the Asperger Syndrome) are confused with each other so I'm curious to your explanation, very interesting!

Well, the common symptoms of Asperger's syndrome are social impairments, such as being unable to express oneself using body language, facial expressions, and nuance in the ways most people do. Another symptom is narrow, intense interests, which focus on a certain thing to a degree that manifests extremely sophisticated reason, an almost obsessive focus, and eidetic memory. Another symptom is speech and language peculiarities, inlucing a rare gift for humor (in the form of puns, wordplay, doggerel, satire, ect.) or a rare gift for writing. Other symptoms include  range of other sensory, developmental, and physiological anomalies, a delayed development of motor skills at a young age, and they also may display a distinctive "waddling" or "mincing" gait when they walk and may walk with their arms held out in an unusual manner. Compulsive finger, hand, or arm movements, such as flapping, are also observed.

I think that better describes Barrett's behavior rather than schizophrenia as I see him display more of these behaviors.

Hello Damen.

Thanks for your interesting answer! My problems with your explanation concerns his abilities with communication, sport and humor. Indeed, he has a very special way of expressing himself with words (like 'newspeak' and association) but in general Syd could communicate very well, he could maintain relationships, he did sports (no problems with his way of moving) and he had a very good sense of humor. All these facts you can read in the excellent books about Syd: Lost in the woods and Crazy Diamond. In my opinion all problems really started after the sudden death of his father (when Syd was almost 16). His behaviour became more and more strange and he even started to lose contact with the reality (but this was also due to the abuse of acid). In my opinion he suffered from paranoid hallucinations, deeper than from drugs-abuse and went in a catatonic schizophrenic state on stage (when he stood motionless with his guitar on his neck). In my opinion he's nowadays suffering from the negative symptomes of schizophrenia like partial lost of activity and emotion, fragmentic thinking and formes of regression.

This is my explanation, Damen, don't consider it as an attack because your explanation did let me think and today I've searched on Internet on Asperger Syndrome sites.This in order to obtain more information, it remains very interesting although Syd's situation is very bad also due to his deteriorating diabetic state (he can hardly see).

i might be the only one but i dont like his pink floyd stuff as much as his solo work