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Unsung : Unsaid: Syd and Nick in absentia
In the summer of 1974 Nick Drake and Syd Barrett made their final ill-fated ventures into a recording studio. There has never been any evidence that they ever met or that their paths crossed in any meaningful way. Until now.
In a parallel fictional universe it turns out that they did indeed have a series of encounters that year, firstly in the café snack bar in Kensington Market and subsequently in other central London locations. These meetings, tentative and fragmentary, yet full of shared understanding reveal much about the inner life of each man during that troubled late stage of their respective careers.
In Unsung : Unsaid we also learn about other previously undocumented aspects of their young lives. There’s Nick’s showcase Festival Hall concert in the summer of 1971 and Syd’s short-lived band with Steve Took, during 1972. A portfolio of Syd’s unrecorded songs which turned up at his music publishers in 1974 will reveal to the reader for the very first time an abundance of previously unseen lyrics. Similarly, a bootlegged copy of Nick’s unreleased fourth LP is faithfully and lovingly detailed by two of his most ardent admirers. You can read about the long-lost solo album that Syd was going to record in 1967 before the demo went missing, and about Nick’s aborted plan to record an album of cover versions, complete with a full run down of the tracks he chose and his reasons for choosing them. A rare audio letter has been unearthed in which Nick muses on his musical apprenticeship and his misgivings about the record industry. In another equally candid letter, written but never sent to Francoise Hardy he talks about his love of Paris, about Albert Camus and other philosophical matters.
We explore the intricacies of both men’s dreams and what they say about their troubled psyches. We learn in more animated detail than ever before about the realities (and acid induced unrealities) of Syd’s formative years in Cambridge and his coming of age in Swinging London. The Happenings. The art school apprenticeship. The light shows. The I Ching and the search for spiritual enlightenment. Syd’s residency at the Chelsea Cloisters hotel and his increasingly wayward daily derives around London. It’s all here.
Unsung : Unsaid gives momentum to stasis, substance to enigma and helps us understand more about what drove and derailed each man’s creativity. It is a philosophical meditation on absence, existential crisis and loss. But underpinning it all is those three (or is it four? Or more?) encounters in 1974. “This bedraggled Estragon and haunted Vladimir, so alike in their vacancy” captured shortly before they both drift into myths and fables. In a way it always has been about myths and fables but you’ll learn as much here about the actual Syd Barrett and Nick Drake as you will from any biographical account.
Here’s to more plausible myths and fables.
In a parallel fictional universe it turns out that they did indeed have a series of encounters that year, firstly in the café snack bar in Kensington Market and subsequently in other central London locations. These meetings, tentative and fragmentary, yet full of shared understanding reveal much about the inner life of each man during that troubled late stage of their respective careers.
In Unsung : Unsaid we also learn about other previously undocumented aspects of their young lives. There’s Nick’s showcase Festival Hall concert in the summer of 1971 and Syd’s short-lived band with Steve Took, during 1972. A portfolio of Syd’s unrecorded songs which turned up at his music publishers in 1974 will reveal to the reader for the very first time an abundance of previously unseen lyrics. Similarly, a bootlegged copy of Nick’s unreleased fourth LP is faithfully and lovingly detailed by two of his most ardent admirers. You can read about the long-lost solo album that Syd was going to record in 1967 before the demo went missing, and about Nick’s aborted plan to record an album of cover versions, complete with a full run down of the tracks he chose and his reasons for choosing them. A rare audio letter has been unearthed in which Nick muses on his musical apprenticeship and his misgivings about the record industry. In another equally candid letter, written but never sent to Francoise Hardy he talks about his love of Paris, about Albert Camus and other philosophical matters.
We explore the intricacies of both men’s dreams and what they say about their troubled psyches. We learn in more animated detail than ever before about the realities (and acid induced unrealities) of Syd’s formative years in Cambridge and his coming of age in Swinging London. The Happenings. The art school apprenticeship. The light shows. The I Ching and the search for spiritual enlightenment. Syd’s residency at the Chelsea Cloisters hotel and his increasingly wayward daily derives around London. It’s all here.
Unsung : Unsaid gives momentum to stasis, substance to enigma and helps us understand more about what drove and derailed each man’s creativity. It is a philosophical meditation on absence, existential crisis and loss. But underpinning it all is those three (or is it four? Or more?) encounters in 1974. “This bedraggled Estragon and haunted Vladimir, so alike in their vacancy” captured shortly before they both drift into myths and fables. In a way it always has been about myths and fables but you’ll learn as much here about the actual Syd Barrett and Nick Drake as you will from any biographical account.
Here’s to more plausible myths and fables.
275 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 1, 2024
7 people are currently reading
37 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 15, 2024
The lives of Syd Barrett and Nick Drake are so entwined with myth and fable that it seems surprising no one has written a speculative fiction about them before now. Rob Chapman was responsible for a fine biography of Barrett some years ago and has also written perceptively about Drake. The biographer’s obligation to fact, however, can impede a larger truth. In this book Chapman is free to explore the dreams and nightmares of his subjects and enter their private thoughts. He takes the received history, and the received legends, and twists them into fresh shape with empathetic imagination. He explores songs that were never written, albums that never existed, and concerts that didn’t take place. He imagines a series of chance encounters between the pair in 1974, the year they both entered the recording studio for the final time (as far as we know they never actually met).
Syd and Nick shared similar social backgrounds and were, in many ways, mirror images of each other. A star while barely out of his teens, Barrett was subjected to the inanities of the pop music industry, and soon fled into solitude. Drake was too fastidious to join that particular circus but ultimately crushed nonetheless by the failure of his work to connect with a large audience.
Chapman’s novel is formally inventive. He switches from first-person narrative to third-person and the story proceeds through reviews, music paper articles, song lyrics, diary entries and correspondence. The Nick Drake letters are so convincing that I sometimes had to remind myself that Chapman had made them all up. He captures Drake’s voice perfectly: impeccably well-educated and sophisticated, yet tentative and full of self-doubt; just a bit too sensitive for the real world.
Fictionalising the actual can fall embarrassingly flat. Chapman succeeds because he is so immersed in his subject. A sixties child himself he knows this terrain from the inside and it shows. Unsung: Unsaid illuminates not just the lives of Barrett and Drake but an entire era. I strongly recommend it to all devotees of the Madcap and St. Nick of Tanworth.
Syd and Nick shared similar social backgrounds and were, in many ways, mirror images of each other. A star while barely out of his teens, Barrett was subjected to the inanities of the pop music industry, and soon fled into solitude. Drake was too fastidious to join that particular circus but ultimately crushed nonetheless by the failure of his work to connect with a large audience.
Chapman’s novel is formally inventive. He switches from first-person narrative to third-person and the story proceeds through reviews, music paper articles, song lyrics, diary entries and correspondence. The Nick Drake letters are so convincing that I sometimes had to remind myself that Chapman had made them all up. He captures Drake’s voice perfectly: impeccably well-educated and sophisticated, yet tentative and full of self-doubt; just a bit too sensitive for the real world.
Fictionalising the actual can fall embarrassingly flat. Chapman succeeds because he is so immersed in his subject. A sixties child himself he knows this terrain from the inside and it shows. Unsung: Unsaid illuminates not just the lives of Barrett and Drake but an entire era. I strongly recommend it to all devotees of the Madcap and St. Nick of Tanworth.
December 11, 2025
Unsung Unsaid is one of those rare books that stays with you long after you close it. Rob Chapman manages to do something incredibly delicate here he brings together Syd Barrett and Nick Drake, two musicians who never truly crossed paths in real life, and imagines a world where they did. And the way he does it feels so natural, so intimate, that I sometimes had to remind myself this was fiction.
What struck me most was how tenderly Chapman treats both men. Their imagined encounters quiet café moments, chance meetings around London are written with such fragility that you can almost hear the echo of their inner worlds. There’s no forced drama, no overblown scenes. Just two troubled geniuses drifting through the same city at the same time, sharing a kind of unspoken understanding that feels almost sacred.
The book goes far beyond the simple premise of what if they met. It fills in the gaps of their lives with astonishing detail Nick’s Festival Hall concert, Syd’s brief collaboration with Steve Took, the lost songs, the bootlegs, the unfinished albums. Chapman doesn’t just invent these things; he breathes life into them. I found myself believing every lyric, every anecdote, every scrap of rediscovered tape. It’s a tribute, but also a meditation on how easily brilliance can slip through our fingers.
One of my favorite parts is the exploration of their dreams and inner struggles. It’s written with a raw honesty that made me pause more than once. Chapman manages to touch on the fragility of creativity, the weight of expectation, and the loneliness that often shadows artists like Syd and Nick without turning them into clichés.
The book is philosophical, melancholic, and quietly luminous. There were moments that felt like reading someone’s private letters or watching two ghosts walk alongside each other, just out of reach of a world that never understood them fully.
By the final pages, I didn’t just feel like I knew more about Barrett and Drake I felt closer to the versions of themselves they might have been, in the spaces between fact and imagination.
If you love either artist, or you’re drawn to stories about fragile brilliance, lost possibilities, and the gentle art of myth making, this book will hit you straight in the heart.
Here’s to more myths and the truths they help us uncover.
What struck me most was how tenderly Chapman treats both men. Their imagined encounters quiet café moments, chance meetings around London are written with such fragility that you can almost hear the echo of their inner worlds. There’s no forced drama, no overblown scenes. Just two troubled geniuses drifting through the same city at the same time, sharing a kind of unspoken understanding that feels almost sacred.
The book goes far beyond the simple premise of what if they met. It fills in the gaps of their lives with astonishing detail Nick’s Festival Hall concert, Syd’s brief collaboration with Steve Took, the lost songs, the bootlegs, the unfinished albums. Chapman doesn’t just invent these things; he breathes life into them. I found myself believing every lyric, every anecdote, every scrap of rediscovered tape. It’s a tribute, but also a meditation on how easily brilliance can slip through our fingers.
One of my favorite parts is the exploration of their dreams and inner struggles. It’s written with a raw honesty that made me pause more than once. Chapman manages to touch on the fragility of creativity, the weight of expectation, and the loneliness that often shadows artists like Syd and Nick without turning them into clichés.
The book is philosophical, melancholic, and quietly luminous. There were moments that felt like reading someone’s private letters or watching two ghosts walk alongside each other, just out of reach of a world that never understood them fully.
By the final pages, I didn’t just feel like I knew more about Barrett and Drake I felt closer to the versions of themselves they might have been, in the spaces between fact and imagination.
If you love either artist, or you’re drawn to stories about fragile brilliance, lost possibilities, and the gentle art of myth making, this book will hit you straight in the heart.
Here’s to more myths and the truths they help us uncover.
January 19, 2024
I finished reading this incredible novel very early in the morning, at 6am to be precise. I’d been woken by my usual night-time companion - insomnia - and had meant to try and go back to sleep. But Syd and Nick had other ideas; once I picked up the book I spent the rest of my small hours wandering in their world. And what a world that is. Their voices - and the voices are captured perfectly, both in cadence and vocabulary - echo in the air long after you step back into your own space. Their outer and inner landscapes are carefully, lovingly painted. No detail is overlooked. I kept forgetting I was reading fiction, because it blended so seamlessly with what I already knew about both artists and the places and times they inhabited. Or thought I knew.
Anyone drawn to Syd Barrett and Nick Drake will find much to delight them here. Little clues, playful nods to other realities. Two mythical princes crossing and uncrossing paths. Imaginary meetings of remarkable men. Beautifully-written, insightful and very, very moving. The final chapter stayed in my mind all day, long after closing the book. And that was another thing: my immediate urge was to head right back to the beginning and go round again, because this is a world that contains multitudes and there will be more to discover each time you look. I have always thought that writers must be charmed by the characters they create - how else could they lure us in? - and here the author's love for, and understanding and knowledge of, his subjects is clear. You invest in them because he does.
I am reminded of what Hilary Mantel said about her 'creation' of Cromwell, beyond his historical existence, that it was "like trying to polish up a thunderstorm.". In this hugely imaginative work, Rob Chapman has polished up *two* thunderstorms.
Read this book. Why wouldn't you?
Anyone drawn to Syd Barrett and Nick Drake will find much to delight them here. Little clues, playful nods to other realities. Two mythical princes crossing and uncrossing paths. Imaginary meetings of remarkable men. Beautifully-written, insightful and very, very moving. The final chapter stayed in my mind all day, long after closing the book. And that was another thing: my immediate urge was to head right back to the beginning and go round again, because this is a world that contains multitudes and there will be more to discover each time you look. I have always thought that writers must be charmed by the characters they create - how else could they lure us in? - and here the author's love for, and understanding and knowledge of, his subjects is clear. You invest in them because he does.
I am reminded of what Hilary Mantel said about her 'creation' of Cromwell, beyond his historical existence, that it was "like trying to polish up a thunderstorm.". In this hugely imaginative work, Rob Chapman has polished up *two* thunderstorms.
Read this book. Why wouldn't you?
January 25, 2024
What a remarkably moving book. Rob Chapman has such a wonderfully engaging style of writing that draws one in to the story of Syd Barrett and Nick Drake from the very first paragraph. Syd and Nick, it transpires, were rock gods of the early 70s, but although I’m of that era, I knew nothing about them (I think I interviewed one of them for a student newspaper in 1972, but that obviously didn’t leave me with any memories!). I’m writing this review while listening to some of Nick’s recordings I found on YouTube. I rather wish now I’d searched them out before reading the book. They definitely add to the mood.
Thus, I read the book as pure fiction, which of course it largely is. The story itself is secondary; the book is more constructed as a set of long essays, not always seeming to be in a logical order, some apparently factual, but most purely descriptive. Like Syd and Nick’s lives, not going anywhere, or at least not in any clear direction. One is lifted by their three meetings, hoping against hope that the protagonists will enthuse each other and achieve more with their lives; and then, the reader is brought back to earth by chapters describing their daily, largely solitary, lives, drawing the reader deep into their fictional minds. It should be depressing, but it’s not. The quality of prose and the deep passion that the author has for his characters guarantee that. I finished the book thinking “thank heavens I never got into that scene” but with a new insight into the minds and lives of many people that I hung out with in that era.
This book was recommended to me – it’s not one that I would ever have picked up in a bookshop – and I recommend it to you. If you know about Syd and Nick, you may enjoy it even more than I did. Listen to the music while you read.
Thus, I read the book as pure fiction, which of course it largely is. The story itself is secondary; the book is more constructed as a set of long essays, not always seeming to be in a logical order, some apparently factual, but most purely descriptive. Like Syd and Nick’s lives, not going anywhere, or at least not in any clear direction. One is lifted by their three meetings, hoping against hope that the protagonists will enthuse each other and achieve more with their lives; and then, the reader is brought back to earth by chapters describing their daily, largely solitary, lives, drawing the reader deep into their fictional minds. It should be depressing, but it’s not. The quality of prose and the deep passion that the author has for his characters guarantee that. I finished the book thinking “thank heavens I never got into that scene” but with a new insight into the minds and lives of many people that I hung out with in that era.
This book was recommended to me – it’s not one that I would ever have picked up in a bookshop – and I recommend it to you. If you know about Syd and Nick, you may enjoy it even more than I did. Listen to the music while you read.
June 3, 2024
A strange book that I'm glad I read, but probably would never read again. An imagined meeting between Syd Barrett & Nick Drake (Two of my favourite singer/songwriters, even ignoring Syds work with the early Floyd) spins off into speculation about their separate lives with occasional crossing of paths. No spoilers but there as some poignant moments especially as their lives unravel.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews