How did Syd Barrett get into the WYWH-Session?

Got me but he was a suit and likely still had connections at EMI

 

The bigger mystery is how Syd even thought to show up to the studio. After that, getting in had to have been a piece of cake. Security was much more lax in those days.

 

It was.

 

I had meetings there in 2002 and recall just walking in with an air that I belonged, said "studio 2" and walked right in. Perhaps there was more to it than that but I don't recall.

 

Not sure if John ever saw them in concert. Paul did, as he was more informed as to the London scene.

 

Who would have thought ol' Syd being a Daily Mail reader.

 

All of Pink Floyd members are from upper middle class familes, so yes. They would be quite well off.

 

They be a funny lot from Cambridgeshire

 

He maybe

He maybe bald & fat, but still has his good looks

 

Seems he always had his hands "busy". The later years pictures have him nearly always holding something. Many think how sad he must have been; but maybe he was quite happy just "being" and thinking inside his own world.

 

Considering 40 more years have gone by and we're still talking about him...
I'd say yes.

 

That's not what I meant... Today he is often considered a genius, but I wasn't sure if PF fans were even aware of him in the '70s. PF's first album wasn't even in print in the USA after about 1968 (except as part of "A Nice Pair"), so he might not have been well-known.

 

Contact high from shaking hands with Syd?

 

I was in college when DSOTM came out and most people thought it was their debut album. Not very hip people.

 

Yes, John was at the 14 hour Technicolor Dream performance.

 

I believe John was only there early in the evening when Yoko did her "performance piece". Pink Floyd went onstage at about 5 am in the morning, and John was long gone by then.

 

but what about the video footage?

 

I'm sure most fans were aware of the Syd years -- Relics stayed in print during this period.

 

Syd had his cult followers from the time he was out of Pink Floyd. This following was not as large as what came in the late 1980s when the reissues started coming out and this blossomed into the 90s with books dedicated to Syd alone. Then a third generation of fans came along since the start of the internet and of course his death like all deaths even more compounds this fan base from original cult status to almost a household name.

 

You know, I tried that once and it just didn't work. The guy in the Skynyrd t-shirt selling Beatles trinkets on the other side of the cross walk said it would work, but it didn't.

 

RE: money - A lot about this in the hard to get book "Random Precision: Recording the Music of Syd Barrett".

In short, Gilmour (with assistance from manager Peter Jenner) spent a LOT of time recording and mixing Barrett stuff well into the 70's, and made sure his stuff stayed in print and was featured on their reissues so he would get paid. This included persevering through torturous and unlistenable sessions up through 1974 I think it is. The other Floyds were also present on the first two solo albums, as well as most of The Soft Machine, in service of Syd.

He might have had over a million pounds at his death, but I think he lived a just-comfortable existence, in a middle-class way. Not much in the way of finery, or flash items.

Most of the later photos of Roger/Syd aren't from paparazzi, but are taken by fans. Like many, I looked for him in a half-baked manner in Cambridge on several visits.

 

Does the video footage show John during Pink Floyd's set? If so, then you are correct.

 

If I say his name around people today, the response I get is usually "Who's Syd Barrett?" (Average folk, not music historians like here.) Then I say the original guitarist, singer and songwriter from Pink Floyd and they go "Oh."

But I imagine he was and is much more known in the UK than the US. For one thing, the Syd-era Floyd had hit records in the UK, and for another, the first couple albums went out of print fairly early on in the US (though they were reissued later).

 

Does it mention in the book you're referring to as to when Gilmour started going out of his way to help Syd out financially? I'm not talking about the help with the two solo albums at that time but the reissues that came out during the late 80s and beyond. I did read a long time ago that Syd was forced into bankruptcy in the late 70s. Whether this is true or not I don't know. Was he really sitting good financially during the 70s or did this really start in the late 80s? I know that Gilmour was quite gracious in making sure Syd got his royalties and thus the reason he added Syd compositions to various compilations throughout the 80s and up. But when did Syd's financial problems end and his fortune begin is what I would like to know?

 

Pink Floyd were a big deal in underground London. Lennon would have made a point to see them. Paul was very into the underground scene and hanging around the UFO club, and his girlfriend Jane Asher's brother Peter was influential with Indica Books and Gallery and the International Times all of which were interrelated. PMC would have turned Lennon on to it all - Lennon was mostly a homebody in this period.

This book gives a pretty good overview of it all.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...london-since-1945-by-barry-miles-1919971.html