TIM WILLIS on previously unseen drawings by Syd Barrett, who died on Friday
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As everyone should know by now, the late Roger "Syd" Barrett started Pink Floyd in 1965 and left the group in 1968, eventually finding a reclusive peace in his native Cambridge.
But while he will be remembered as the founder of the British psychedelic sound, who foundered on the rocks of mental illness, he would probably have preferred to be known as a visual artist.
From entering polytechnic at 16, to leaving Camberwell Art School after his foundation course, he painted big, abstract oils - a vocation he resumed in his forties, when he became a regular customer of Heffers.
However, throughout his teens, he |
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was also a furious - and often hilarious - scribbler.
These drawings are from Barrett's letters and sketchbooks of the period, and many have never been reproduced before. The portrait of a boy belongs to Viv Brans, an ex-girlfriend, and shows her nephew in |
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| Barrett would have preferred to be known as a visual artist |
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the mid-Sixties ("Syd knocked it off in a couple of minutes," she once told me).
The sketches belong to Libby Gausden, his first - and probably most important - girlfriend, and are taken from a sheaf of letters he sent her, which she has kept for more than 40 years. Some illustrate the text, turning the mundane into the  |
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