Syd Barrett Quotes

“Wish You Were Here

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skys from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade
Your heros for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.”
― Roger Waters

“That's all I wanted to do as a kid. Play a guitar properly and jump around. But too many people got in the way.”
― Syd Barrett

“I'm full of dust and guitars...”
― Syd Barrett

“I'm treading the backward path. Mostly, I just waste my time.”
― Syd Barrett

“Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter…I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done…But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger.”
― Syd Barrett

“In the end it comes down to two rival versions of the English middle afternoon. Post-Barrett, Pink Floyd kept on in a middle-afternoonish vein, but they fell in love with the idea of portentous storm clouds in the offing somewhere over Grantchester....Barrett's afternoonishness was far more supple and engaging. It superimposed the hippie cult of eternal solstice on the pre-teatime daydreams of one's childhood, occasioned by a slick of sunlight on a chest of drawers....His afternoonishness is lit by an importunate adult intelligence that can't quite get back to the place it longs to be....Barrett created the same precocious longing in adolescents.
"I remember 'See Emily Play' drifting across a school corridor in 1967...and I remember the powerful wish to stay suspended indefinitely in that music...I also remember the quasi-adult intimation that this wasn't possible.

[from the London Review of Books for January 2, 2003]”
― Jeremy Harding

“Dark Child by Stewart Stafford

Moondust down the fire curtain
Carried Syd to the darkest side,
Trespass became a prison term,
A non-compos mentis dark child.

From gambolling nymph with a lute,
To an imp falling over instruments,
A thousand-yard stare sucked in,
Vacant eyes drew like a black hole.

Riderless horse, a living déjà vu,
The spectral shell of our brother,
Ambled towards us at his nadir,
We wept for the shuffling stranger.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford