Syd Barrett
The Peel Session

This is the story of the Pinco Pallo brothers, three alpha floydians that I don't really know what the hell it means, but it gives a good idea.

To give you an even better idea, I'll tell you they were devoted to that sacred cult that the jokers of the time summarized with the phrase “oh dark side of the moon if you were here you would tear down the wall!!!” I knew them well, they had a bar and I worked for them.

And, even if being a bartender was a crappy job, in the end I wasn't doing too badly. The three, apart from their questionable musical preferences, were good guys and didn't break the cabasisi.

In fact, they introduced me to solo Syd by happily giving me, eager to get rid of it, their copy of “Opel” (the fabulous collection of unreleased tracks and outtakes that came out in the mid-eighties).

I still remember well what Roger, the eldest of the three, said to me: “this album is an enormous piece of crap.” And I remember even better the stupid/self-satisfied chuckle of the other two in the background, the same one I still hear in my ears today when someone talks about Barrett.

Now, if someone introduced you to something that changed your life, it doesn’t matter much that they did it to get rid of it. So eternal glory to the Pinco Pallo brothers. Even if...

But let's move on with our story. One day, a shabby-looking guy with a sweet and lost expression started frequenting the bar. He always sat in a corner sipping tea without talking to anyone except, occasionally, the three brothers. There was a kind of wordless understanding between them that was quite strange. Always tempted to ask something, I never dared do so. After all, it was none of my business.

Well, to cut a long story short, one day I had an argument with that guy, something trivial, which I barely remember. Slightly annoyed, I asked Roger “so who is that idiot?” “Oh, he's my brother.” Now, how long had the guy been frequenting the bar? At least a year. And in a year, I still hadn't realized he was their brother? And the fact that I called him an idiot, they just let it slide like that?

Suddenly I remembered a story my friend Giorgio had told me many years before. The story started with a tape that contained the most esoteric music I had ever listened to until then.

“Who recorded this tape for you?”

“Stefano”

“........”

“He was the most brilliant guy in our group, drew like a god and had sharp and lively eyes, everyone, but really everyone, adored him. He had three brothers who would have jumped into the fire for him. Then I know his father died, and everything fell apart.”

That shabby-looking guy was the Stefano of that old story!!!

We became friends, of course. He had an impressive folk record collection and a fabulous and incoherent library. Talking to him was fantastic, he always said something unexpected.

Then, little by little, the increase in quirkiness led him to retreat COMPLETELY into his own world. A Barrett in the sixteenth.

Since then, the association between the four brothers and Pink Floyd is automatic for me. The ancient devotion to the brilliant boy became nothing more than a barren form of tolerance.

Then of course, a music group is not a family, and the music business is not a small-town bar. And the Floyd were architecture students, not three somewhat obtuse bartenders.

Yet the same is true for the distance between two irreconcilable worlds that managed to stay together only until the brilliance turned into what often is its corollary, namely terrible fragility.

I therefore dedicate these “Peel sessions” to both Stefano and his brothers.

Because here those irreconcilable worlds can still meet and that damn stupid/self-satisfied chuckle in the background has no raison d'être.

Where everything runs smoothly and there are neither drowsiness, nor strangeness, nor dust.

No “pictures as large as a wall,” no songs that make you feel like you're in a bubble just before it bursts.

Here there's only pop... and a Syd shockingly fit... crystal clear, witty, just the right amount of faded, darting like a fish and maybe still with eyes like a weasel.

Ah, this could even have been the barrettian final destination, a light madness almost from the charts. But it didn't exactly turn out that way.