Roger Waters recalls night he and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett ‘could have been killed’

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Bassist Roger Waters has claimed he and Syd Barrett “could have been killed” while racing in the 1960s.

The Pink Floyd founding members found themselves “very drunk” and racing their friends after a night in Cambridge. Waters would share the incident in an interview decades later, recalling a loud “bang” which only occurred once they reached their destination. The rip in the rear tyre could’ve been the end of Pink Floyd before it ever started, with Waters citing the race as a “stupid, childish thing” he and Barrett did. Barrett had been sitting on the pillion behind Waters, who was driving that night. Though the pair made it safely back home, the journey was not without its dangers, as they would find once they made it to Barrett’s mother’s home. Speaking to Radio Bogota, Waters confirmed the near-death experience and how Pink Floyd were nearly over before the band had ever started.

Waters said: “I think, you know, the years after we both went up to college in London, which would have been sixty… well, I went up in ’62 and he arrived in ’64. So then those years when we were working together in Pink Floyd and when he was writing a lot and when we were very young, you know, students together in London, working with the band. 

“He was extraordinarily creative. It was a great time for all of us. Though funnily enough, having said that, I always remember before we left Cambridge, one night, very drunk, having a race with somebody, a friend of ours, owned a car. I remember we gave him a start. There was a famous roundabout outside Cambridge at the end of what was called the Hawkstone half-mile. 

“It was about ten miles out of town. We gave this guy a big start, and then Syd and I climbed on, I had an old Norton motorcycle at the time. And I drove the motorcycle with Syd on the pillion as fast as I could to this roundabout and back. 

“And we got back and as we drove into the front drive of his mother’s house, just as he was getting off the back tyre went bang and there was a puncture, there’d been a big split in the rear tyre so it was only by a hair’s breadth that Pink Floyd ever existed at all ‘cos Syd and I could so easily have been killed together that night on that motorcycle doing that stupid childish thing.”

The pair would thankfully carry on their work with Pink Floyd, with Barrett kicked out of the group in April 1968. Pink Floyd would release the likes of Atom Heart Mother, The Dark Side of the Moon, and Animals in the decade to follow Barrett’s departure from the band.