Roger Waters says Pink Floyd bandmate Syd Barrett was cursed with gift for songwriting

Songwriting skills are a blessing and a curse according to Roger Waters, who says bandmate Syd Barrett struggled with his work. The first Pink Floyd frontman would leave soon after the band found fame with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, leaving the bass guitarist to pick up the pieces. While replacing the frontman as a figurehead was “OK”, Waters said he struggled to match his bandmate’s lyrical prowess.

Waters would write some of the band’s very best work, including The Wall, The Dark Side of the Moon, and Wish You Were Here. But even those highlights proved to be a very different sound from what Barrett had provided the group with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Barrett was hailed by Waters in an interview where the Another Brick in the Wall hitmaker outlined the crucial differences between the two songwriting styles.

He said: “Well, replacing Syd as leader of the Pink Floyd was OK. But Syd as a writer was a one-off. I could never aspire to his crazed insights and perceptions. In fact, for a long time I wouldn’t have dreamt of claiming any insights whatsoever. But I’d always credit Syd with the connection he made to his personal unconscious and to the collective, group conscious.

“It’s taken me fifteen years to get anywhere near there. But what enabled Syd to see things in the way he did? It’s like why is an artist an artist? Artists simply do feel and see things in a different way to other people. In a way it’s a blessing, but it can also be a terrible curse. There’s a great deal of satisfaction to be earned from it but often it’s also a terrible burden.”

In a separate interview, Waters would defend his former bandmate from longstanding rumours that acid trips had affected his mental health. Waters said in 2008: “I think it’s a great shame really that people swallowed the notion that he suddenly took a lot of acid and it destroyed him. This is absolute bollocks.

“There was something much more fundamental about Syd’s schizophrenia than taking too much acid.” Waters went on to describe his sadness at having lost Barrett, but that he had paid tribute to him during live shows by using footage of his former bandmate.

The bassist said: “But I felt very sad. I still feel regret that we weren’t able to enjoy his company for all those years when he disappeared into the illness. But I think of him often. Not least because I’ve been editing some of my shows recently and we’ve been doing Shine On You Crazy Diamond. We now do this with a 60-by-30 LED screen with footage of Syd. 

“I went to the opening of Rock and Roll in New York, having been in London and met Tom Stoppard and became friends with him. Have you seen this play? It’s really, really good. Particularly if you’re me, as it’s about three things I’m particularly interested in – Communism, Cambridge and Syd.”