"Happy Birthday Dear Syd!"
Here’s one of the most beautiful arpeggios ever, with acoustic guitar and organ introducing a melody that’s both celestial and languorous, sung by a particularly beautiful and unique voice.
A sound that is neither folk nor blues anymore, it is in the most noble sense of the term "pop," but very modern; bands like Pulp or Blur, etc. will draw heavily from this stuff...
Syd Barrett-Baby Lemonade Roger Keith Barrett was born in Cambridge on January 6, '46.
Max, his father, was an anatomist who in his spare time cultivated mushrooms and painted, while Alan, his older brother, chose to dedicate himself to the saxophone.
After the age of fourteen, he bought his first musical instrument, which was a ukulele.
Music up until then took a back seat, as he preferred drawing and writing: he particularly focused on wordplay and other literary devices, like assonance and onomatopoeia; his literary hero was Edward Lear, the king of nonsense, and he too loved painting.
Anyway, just for the record, before switching to guitar, Roger Keith became interested in the banjo, then he started playing folk guitar with a friend (named John Gordon).
At this point, he began to get closer to music, becoming friends with a drummer named, uh, Sid Barrett.
Frequenters of various venues called them both "Sid," and to distinguish Roger Keith from the drummer, they replaced the 'i' in his nickname with a 'y', and nothing, since I’m tired of copy-pasting nonsense about good old Syd, I’ll sign off and go have dinner with boiled cabbage dressed with balsamic vinegar, e.v.o. oil, and some stracchino... oh wait, I almost forgot,
Syd wasn’t the only nickname given to Barrett; he became known at school as "Syd Knee," or "Syd the Beat," and also as "Sydernee." Only for Libby (his girlfriend from '61 to '64) did he remain simply Roger; in fact, to be precise, "Rog"...!!!
