-- Syd Barrett
quoted in Melody Maker Dec., 1967.
When staying with Lyndsey [Korner], ... [Syd] would spend much of his time simply wandering the streets window-shopping and meandering along the banks of the Thames. One day he noticed an attractive young woman doing her shopping and decided to follow her. He trailed her for hours, finally ending up at the duck pond a short bus ride away on Barned Common. Syd's recollection of this afternoon's light stalking became Apples and Oranges....
-- Cliff "Syd's-Blind-From-Diabetes" Jones, "Wish You Were Here", 1996.
[David Gilmour speaking about Syd Barrett]
"It wasn't just the drugs, we'd both done acid before the whole Floyd thing, it's just a mental foible which grew out of all proportion. I remember all sorts of strange things happening - at one point he was wearing lipstick, dressing in high heels, and believing he had homosexual tendencies...."
-- Nick Kent, New Musical Express, 1974.
Roger Waters' mother noticed that washing, particularly underwear belonging to her female lodgers, kept vanishing from her line during the night. The Cambridge Knicker Snatcher became the cause of much local gossip and Roger would keep Syd abreast of events as more laundry disappeared from his garden. Amused, Syd began work on a song about the story. It took him three weeks to perfect during frequent train journeys between London and Cambridge....
-- Jones, "Wish You Were Here".
'Arnold Layne' was a true story from the group's Cambridge days. "Both my mother and Syd's had students as lodgers because there was a girl's college up the road," says Waters. "So there were constantly great lines of bras and knickers on our washing lines. Arnold, or whoever he was, took bits and pieces off the washing lines."
-- Mike Watkinson & Pete Anderson, "Crazy Diamond: Syd Barrett & the Dawn of Pink Floyd", edited by Chris Charlesworth, Omnibus Press, 2001; p. 51
Roger Waters says, 'Both my mother and Syd's mother had students as lodgers because there was a girl's college up the road so there was constantly great lines of bras and knickers on our washing lines.' In one curious incident, the bras and knickers that hung on the washing lines in the Barrett's garden proved irresistable to a local underwear fetishist. This character, whom Barrett would later immortalise in song as Arnold Layne, made off with many of poor nursing students' undergarments, presumably to indulge his fantasies. 'Arnold or whoever he was, had bits and pieces off our washing lines. They never caught him. He stopped doing it after a bit, when things got too hot for him.' 'I was in Cambridge at the time I started to write the song,' Syd Barrett told *Melody Maker*. 'I pinched the line about "moonshine washing line" from Roger because he had an enormous washing line in the back garden of his house. Then I thought "Arnold must have a hobby" and it went on from there. Arnold Layne just happened to dig dressing up in women's clothing.'
-- Julian Palacios, "Lost in the Woods: Syd Barrett and the Pink Floyd," Boxtree, 1998; p. 27.
Syd's eccentricity also surfaced from time to time such as when he appeared before [Ronnie] Salmon in the foyer [of Chelsea Cloisters] wearing a dress, his head newly shaven. "He had on a Crombie coat with a dress underneath and a pair of plimsoils. I ran after him because I couldn't believe what I'd seen, and there he was walking down Sloane Avenue." Syd had brought 'Arnold Layne' to life and the disarming display no doubt appealed to his creator's dark sense of humour.
-- Watkinson/Anderson, Crazy Diamond, p. 118.
-- Jones, "Wish You Were Here".
[and after the second descending pair of oo-oo-oo's:]
When you dance you die
The last one eats the oreo
Go
Gateway towards your goal
Goal
Go
(Got a private life at home name's Daphne)
-- Kiwikatz and Schiffer!
Syd came down from his [first acid trip with Nigel Gordon and Storm Thorgerson] convinced that he had encountered the full majesty of the universe and began to search for a way to express what he'd seen in his music. He often carried with him a small Times Astronomical Atlas, which included speculation from noted astronomers on the likely surface conditions of each of the planets in the solar system. Syd combined this information with allusions to astronaut Dan Dare, Pilot Of The Future (a popular strip from boys' comic The Eagle) into a string of lyrics which would, a year later, become Astronomy Domine.
-- Jones, "Wish You Were Here".
Syd was reading out of a Times Astronomical Atlas (cf. "Lost in the Woods" and other sources). the initial bit read by Jenner in the classic recording was probably from the same book. Syd was a big fan of collaging lyrics out of single books (the names mentioned in this case are a collage of planets and/or their moons -- ... there's no logical sequence to them, though one could make a rather peculiar case that they represent some kind of journey through our solar system.
To wit, Jupiter and Saturn are in proper order, then three of Uranus' moons (Oberon, Miranda and Titania -- Cordelia, previously mentioned, is also such a satellite of Uranus), then Neptune, again in physical sequence, and, unless the lyric sheets are wrong and it should read "Triton" (moon of Neptune, possible!), the last, 'Titan', is a moon of *Saturn*, throwing a monkey-wrench into the otherwise smooth sequence of astronomical bodies.
-- eArHeAd! (http://www.luckymojo.com/barrett/songstories.html#STORIESS)
-- Watkinson/Anderson, Crazy Diamond, p 32.
'The Bike Song' (aka "Bike") .... [was] the forthcoming album's [i.e. Piper at the Gates of Dawn -- eH] closer. Cliff ["Syd's Blind From Diabetes"] Jones wrote,
The lead vocal on 'Bike' is set far enough apart from the lead to disorient the listener. One fears the vocal tracks will become unglued and drift farther out of phase than they already are. Artificial double tracking was developed at EMI to save the trouble of recording a separate back-up vocal The song started out as a playful Barrett ditty in the style of 'The Gnome', but the haunting coda imbues it with a prophetic, sinister overtone. The finale of the song proper is a parody of the sort of fanfares to be found at the end of an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan or in English vaudeville. Waters, Wright and Barrett join in on a campy chorus, inviting the girlk 'who fits in with my world' into Syd's 'room of musical tunes'. At the beginning of the coda, footsteps echo down a long hallway, a door opens with a heaving creak and a most extraordinary sound collage free of melody or harmony erupts; as if Barrett was trying to let everyone else hear the sounds in his head: a wash of cymbals, discordant string instruments, clockwork echoing the bell towers of Cambridge.
The final ingredient in this sonic bouillabaisse is a repeated loop of shrill and horrific laughing voices, rising discordantly as the 'room of musical tunes' fades back into the recesses of Syd's mind. Slowed down by half,l the loop reveals itself to b a roughly edited loop of bellowing laughter. It resounds from the speakers like the riotous drunken laughter of pub regulars ringing in the ear of one fleeing a pub into a cold, raining night. The twisted laughter is both funny and frightening, disarming you as it hits home. And its eerily reminiscent of the run-out groove on *Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band*, which Syd and the Floyd were directly inspired by when they heard a special advance copy. Indeed, the day *Sergeant Pepper* was released, the Floyd were at Abbey Road working on a version of 'Bike'.
-- Palacios, Lost in the Woods, p. 151.
"Bob Dylan's Blues: Demo" -Solo- Feb 27, 1970
An unreleased song belived to be in the posession of David Gilmour. The lyrics boast: "I've got
the Bob Dylan Blues / I've got the Bob Dylan Blues / My hair and my hat's in a mess / but I don't
give a damn about that."
"Boom Tune" -The PF- 1968
Another popular hangout for the Cambridge set was the home of Seamus O'Connell, whose mother was quasi-bohemian and also tolerant of youngsters running amok in her house. ... Seamus' mother was deeply interested in the occult, and had amassed countless books on tarot cards, astrology and esoteric books on Chinese oracles such as the *I-Ching*. There was a part of Syd's nature that erred towards the mystic, and he would often leaf through the books on visits, always keen to find something new, asking Mrs. O'Connell endless questions.
-- Palacios, Lost in the Woods, p. 22.
In the summer of 1964, Barrett had moved down to London to study painting at Camberwell Art School in Peckham, sharing a flat with David Gale in a building owned by Seamus O'Connell's mother. Others in the Cambridge set would drift in and out.... 'Syd was staying with us in Tottenham Court Road,' says Seamus O'Connell. 'He had a bedsit there. My mother had set up house in this place, and various friends had gotten bedsits there. An appalling place, but it had an atmosphere to it. And Syd was getting interested in the occult, which my mother was also into. She would do tarot card readings for him.' Indeed. Barrett was very keen on the occult and many a night would sit up talking to Seamus' mother about astrology, tarot cards and the like. She introduced him to the *I-Ching*, the Chinese oracle based on readings drawn from random numbers thrown with coins, probably the most interesting of occult fortune telling devices, as it has as much to do with probability and mathematics as divination and mysticism. Syd was suitably intrigued.
...
Lyrically the song was lifted nearly verbatim from Richard Wilhelm's 1924 translation of the Chinese oracle *The I-Ching* -- *The Book of Changes*. Barrett had been given a copy by Seamus O'Connell's mother when he was living in the flat on Tottenham Street and his interest in Eastern mysticism had only grown in Earlham Street's sanctuary of creativity.
-- Palacios, Lost in the Woods, pp. 35, 155.
Syd's words in "Opel"
-- Nick Kent, New Musical Express, April 13, 1974
