Syd Barrett was an English art student who named and launched Pink Floyd. He wrote, sang and played guitar on their first hit records, released in 1967, but soon suffered an irreversible breakdown from taking LSD. Within a year he was out of the band, and by 1970 his career was over. He made two solo records of outstanding beauty and then gave up music. To some ears they’re sketchy and chaotic, but once you become attuned to Barrett these two albums are a seam of dark yet vivid intensity unmatched in modern rock. It’s like looking through a window in somebody’s head directly into all their wayward feelings. It’s unfiltered thought, set to meandering tunes and guitar-playing so edible you can taste it; it’s pure, undiluted – it’s real. And to those of us who speak Syd, exquisite. 

I marinaded myself in those records. During my 20s I became obsessed by Syd Barrett to the point where I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began. There was an open border between us, artistically. I was in a weird relationship to him, which says more about me than about him. By the late 1970s when I’d started the Soft Boys, Barrett himself was bald, chubby, answering to the name Roger and had discarded Syd altogether; I was a young musician who lacked identity and picked up his mantle. Ironically, at this point we were both living in Cambridge. Looking back, neither he nor I wanted to be ourselves; he’d rejected being Syd, and I wasn’t confident enough to be Robyn. So how do you become someone who doesn’t want to exist?

Slowly, Roger Barrett became the painter he’d trained to be at art school, though he used to burn his paintings afterwards, perhaps as a fuck-you to all the fans of his former self who he knew were eager to buy one. Who knows? Eventually, time and life chiselled me into a kind of shape as Robyn Hitchcock. But I remain something of a method actor: when I perform songs by the former Syd, I’m not interpreting them – I’m reverting to my early role, being Robyn-Hitchcock-as-Syd-Barrett. In this upcoming show at the Chapel I’ll be doing my best to channel the spirit that Roger Barrett abandoned all those years ago, with the aid of the great Kelley Stoltz and some other local friends. And then, hopefully, I’ll walk away a free man… – Robyn Hitchcock

Robyn Hitchcock is one of England’s most enduring contemporary singer/songwriters and live performers. A surrealist poet, talented guitarist, cult artist and musician’s musician, Hitchcock is among alternative rock’s father figures and is the closest thing the genre has to a Bob Dylan (not coincidentally his biggest musical inspiration).

Since founding the art-rock band The Soft Boys in 1976, Robyn has recorded more than 20 albums as well as starred in ‘Storefront Hitchcock’ an in concert film recorded in New York and directed by Jonathan Demme.
Blending folk and psychedelia with a wry British nihilism, Robyn describes his songs as ‘paintings you can listen to’.