Roger Waters recalls early Pink Floyd show where Syd Barrett’s guitar strings ‘fell off’

Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters has recalled the moment Syd Barrett‘s guitar strings “fell off” during a performance.

Waters and the band had been performing at The Cheetah Club, an early stop-off in Pink Floyd‘s career, and it was the scene of a bizarre moment for the band. While the group had been getting themselves together as a psychedelic rock band, their first gig at Winterland proved troublesome. Waters recalled the group had been opening for Big Brother and Richie Havens when Barrett’s guitar fell to pieces. But it wasn’t an accident, Barrett began tuning the strings off of his guitar one by one. It’s one of the many bizarre moments from the creative force behind the band in its earliest years.

An interview between Waters and Alice Cooper had The Wall hitmaker recall the strange moment. Cooper asked Waters if Barrett would sometimes “hit one or two chords and just stop,” which the bassist confirmed.

Waters went on to explain the moment Barrett played off all the chords on his guitar and then stopped playing for the remainder of the gig. He said: “Yeah. I think the first gig we played out there was actually at Winterland, and we were third on the bill to Big Brother and Richie Havens. 

“And we went on, and Syd famously… we started the first tune, I can’t remember what it was, and Syd famously started strumming, you know, his bottom E string, and turning the machinehead down and lowering the tone of the string, and he turned the machinehead ‘til the string fell off the guitar. 

“And then he did the A string, then the D, and then he did all of them. And when they were all hanging off of the guitar that was the end of his performance for the evening. And we played a lot of gigs, as you know, as a pretty small band.”

Barrett would continue this strange behaviour with the band until they eventually removed him from their line-up. He would appear again, briefly, on Wish You Were Here, with Shine on You Crazy Diamond (Pt. 1 – 5) dedicated to Barrett.

Gilmour said: “He showed up at the studio. He was very fat and he had a shaved head and shaved eyebrows and no one recognized him at all first off.

“There was just this strange person walking around the studio, sitting in the control room with us for hours. If anyone else told me this story, I’d find it hard to believe, that you could sit there with someone in a small room for hours, with a close friend of yours for years and years, and not recognise him.

“And I guarantee, no one in the band recognised him. Eventually, I had guessed it. And even knowing, you couldn’t recognise him. He came two or three days and then he didn’t come anymore.”

In the same interview, Gilmour hit out at those who had idolised Barrett as a “living legend” and said he was, in fact, a “sad story romanticised by people who don’t know anything about it.”

He said: “It’s sad that these people think he’s such a wonderful subject, that he’s a living legend when, in fact, there is this poor sad man who can’t deal with life or himself. He’s got uncontrollable things in him that he can’t deal with and people think it’s a marvelous, wonderful, romantic thing.

“It’s just a sad, sad thing, a very nice and talented person who’s just disintegrated. It is sad. Syd’s story is a sad story romanticised by people who don’t know anything about it. They’ve made it fashionable but it’s just not that way.”