A Very Irregular Head and Apathy For The Devil, two cracking books about two maverick figures from far flung corners of the pop firmament, each in their own way the brightest star in their respective galaxies.

With each passing day Syd Barrett’s name drifts further into the mainstream background. If he is known by normal people at all these days it is perhaps only as the sine qua non of 60s acid casualties. Barrett, the loony tune behind the early Pink Floyd. The one who burned out in a trice then spent the last thirty years of his life as a hollowed out recluse in Cambridge, while his erstwhile friends and colleagues became the biggest act on the planet by writing the most successful albums ever recorded. All about him.

Even among music fans Barrett is not widely listened to and a mention is more likely to produce stories of Mad Syd the psychedelic explorer than the music. So well rehearsed is this version that when he died in 2006 hardly anything at all was mentioned about Syd Barrett the artist, only about the myths of acid adventures and the pathetic tragedy of his fall. Syd Barrett has become a cariacature, a curly haired, dead-eyed cypher.

Rob Chapman’s fantastic book, A Very Irregular Head, does its level best to reclaim Syd Barrett from drug-hazed mythology and relocate him as a central figure, perhaps the central figure, in the emergence  of a particularly English mode of middle-class, art school pop. The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, an artful synthesis of Victoriana, childhood stories – particularly those of Edward Lear and Kenneth Grahame -alongside an amateur’s instinctive search for the boundaries of pop, saw Barrett create the template for all English psychedelia to come. In retrospect only John Lennon stands alongside Barrett as the hero of 1966 and 1967, pop’s absolute high water mark. A Very Irregular Head traces the roots of his singular genius (for once genius is precisely the right word) to paint a picture of a pop figure like no other.

Barrett was not a musician, was if anything at all an aspiring painter, but was alive to the world around him. And it was this sense of his immediate vicinity he put into his art. As much as the Beatles were professionals whose art was rooted in Liverpool, Barrett was an innocent, an amateur rooted in Cambridge – cloistered, academic, bucolic, gentle Cambridge. The pop Barrett created couldn’t be further removed from the simple working class pleasure version that had prevailed until the Beatles came along and opened it all up.

Barrett’s band, Pink Floyd, were hated by the musical motorway pounders. While these turns were plying their trade in clubs and converted cinemas up and down the country, getting tired kids to dance at the end of the working week, Pink Floyd were creating psychedelia in it’s lava-lamped, light show glory to a small but hugely influential crowd of hipsters. This inspired, questing Floyd as opposed to the architectural monolith they would become had the yin of glorious three minute pop songs like See Emily Play and Arnold Layne and the yang of improvised twenty minute journeys into the unknown like Interstellar Overdrive and Astronomy Domine. Astride it all was this beautiful, curly-haired God. And then, just as as the world caught up, it was all over for Syd Barrett. The art and the person had pretty much run their course within 18 months.

Barrett’s art was childlike, but never childish, amateur and instinctive and he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand the professional, the rehearsed and the routine. The moment he became a star he became bored with what it took to remain one, was incapable of the disciplined drudgery, increasingly unable and unwilling to top what he had created so far. Yes the drugs played their part. Chapman shows his supposedly gargantuan intake was no more gargantuan than many others of the time. But coupled with Barrett’s growing dive into depression and an all-consuming ennui, they finished him as an artist and unfortunately as a fully functioning human being. The myths of mad Syd being incapable may be untrue, as Chapman forensically shows Barrett performing perfectly well on trips he is widely believed to have been semi-comatose on, yet the drugs and the ennui and the depression did for him in the end as he sabotaged Pink Floyd and retreated into his own private world.

Two solo albums were teased out. One a magnificent record that comes from another world, combines the questing spirit of John Lennon with the sensitivity of Nick Drake. The other, while clearly the work of a man falling apart, has flashes of utter brilliance. And the rest is silence. Syd Barrett was 24.

Genius is thrown around willy nilly but Syd Barrett was a very peculiar, very English type of 24 carat genius. A Very Irregular Head does a magnificent job rescuing Barrett from myth and recasting him as human being and as an Artist with a capital “A” whose romantic worth is based on a magnificently small body of work.  Read the book while playing The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and A Madcap Laughs and revel, revel in the rediscovery.

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