‘Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd’ Review: The Definitive Documentary on Early Pink Floyd
Syd Barrett was the guiding light of the original Pink Floyd — the band’s singer, primary songwriter and guitarist from their first day until their psychedelia-defining 1967 debut album, “Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” His sparkling, childlike melodies and lyrics have cast a huge influence over rock and pop music ever since — David Bowie cited him as a pivotal influence, and it shows — and entire genres of music, particularly the neo-psychedelic waves of the early ‘80s in the U.S. and U.K., bear his fingerprints.
Yet he was also one of rock’s first “acid casualties” — people who took too many drugs, or at least the wrong ones, and were never the same afterward. His bandmates and friends say one day, he was just gone: The distinctive sparkle in his eye and spring in his step had disappeared. He became uncommunicative and withdrawn; he’d go onstage and just stand there, strumming one chord or doing nothing while the other bandmembers would struggle to hold things together. He’d bring the band a song and continually change it as they tried to follow him — this remarkable documentary takes its title from one such song, so titled because they could never get it if he kept changing it.
More from Variety
Eventually the group had no choice but to fire him, and although they certainly figured out how to succeed without him — Pink Floyd, after all, is one of the most influential and commercially successful rock groups of all time — the ensuing emotional turmoil has always followed them. They helped Barrett to release two solo albums in 1970, but then he essentially became a recluse, shunning most social contact and declining the interviewers who’d sporadically appear at his doorstep or photograph him. “Syd doesn’t live here,” he’d say.
In 1975, Floyd famously wrote the song “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” for him: “When you were young, you’d shine like the sun / Now there’s a look in your eye, like black holes in the sky.” He died in 2006, at the age of 60.
Barrett’s story has been told many times, but never in this way: “Have You Got It Yet?” gathers most of the surviving people who were closest to him, via interviews conducted by his childhood friend Storm Thorgerson — who not only co-directed and co-produced this film, he was the co-founder of the famous Hipgnosis studio, which designed many of Floyd’s most iconic album covers and hundreds of others; he died in 2013, but not before shooting multiple interviews. Thorgerson and co-director Roddy Bogawa brought together not only the three surviving bandmembers but the group’s original managers, Barrett’s girlfriends, colleagues and influencees — the Who’s Pete Townshend and Blur’s Graham Coxon both sat for interviews — and friends dating back to his childhood. Most of these people essentially grew up together, and their memories — which have the benefit, and admittedly the drawbacks, of 50-plus years of hindsight — create what must be the definitive picture of this singular and all-too-brief talent. Several of them are in tears by the end of the film.
“This bloke changed the lives of everyone around him, and…” original co-manager Andrew King says at the end, tearing up while gesturing wordlessly at the futility of it all. “It’s a terrible story. A very, very sad story.”
Yet it’s not just the thoroughness but the intimacy of the interviews that gives this film its definitiveness. Thorgerson was as uncompromising a personality as the bandmembers — which is saying something — and the directness of his questioning and his decades of friendship with the interviewees give their comments an honesty that journalists rarely can hope to achieve: The subjects are usually speaking to him, not a faceless audience, and frequently call him by name, or recall events and say “You were there, too,” in a way that is initially confusing to the viewer but ultimately so revealing — they know they can’t bullshit him or gloss things over, and we’re in on it, essentially eavesdropping on candid, personal conversations between friends.
Thorgerson and Bogawa (who also directed a recent Hipgnosis doc) manage to keep the film visually engaging by intermingling dazzling archival footage and a few impressionistic dramatizations with the main element: seated, although lively, conversations with the elderly interviewees, which are contrasted with photos from the 1960s that show them as some of the coolest-looking young sharps you’ve ever seen. They also captured some of the subjects just in time: Not only Thorgerson but several interviewees have died in recent years.
The story is familiar, but it’s never been told in such detail. Born Roger Keith Barrett in Cambridge in 1946, Syd (who acquired the nickname in his early teens) was always artistic — he was as talented a painter as he was a musician — and always a leader. He met future bandmates at school or as part of the extended social clique that also included Gilmour and the future Hipgnosis founders, and after playing in a number of bands — including performing acoustically with Gilmour — he, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright formed the Pink Floyd Sound (or the Pink Floyd Blues Band), taken from the names of two obscure blues singers, in 1964.
Inspired by the Beatles and LSD — which Barrett took for the first time with Thorgerson — the group soon developed its own sound, a wild cross between naïve pop, hard rock and jazz-inspired improvisation. Their early concerts defined the burgeoning psychedelic movement, and were punctuated by dizzying light shows, strobes and long, free-form jamming. Surprisingly, they also scored hit singles with Barrett-penned songs like “Arnold Layne” (about a man imprisoned for stealing women’s underclothes) and “See Emily Play,” and climaxed with “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” in the summer of 1967.
“Syd defined the whole of that moment in the ‘60s,” Townshend says in the film.
However, by the time the album was released, Barrett’s decline had begun. “Everyone was dropping acid in London at that time — but no one took as much as he did,” Thorgerson says. Whether that caused his breakdown on its own or exacerbated already-existing issues is unclear and, at the end of the day, irrelevant. “He just decided that he no longer wanted to be a pop star,” one interviewee says, and gradually, that was it.
Gilmour initially came in to cover for Barrett’s unreliability, and ultimately replaced him. Gilmour also produced/ cajoled two solo albums out of him, but after a couple of gigs with a short-lived band called Stars, Barrett never performed or recorded again. He became a curiosity, photographed by British tabloids every couple of years, with journalists occasionally knocking fruitlessly on his door. He was often mocked by the future generations he’d influenced rather than being viewed as a tragedy; in 1981, the British indie group the Television Personalities released a song, written to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage,” called “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives” (“There’s a little man in a little house/ With a little pet dog and a little pet mouse”).
Yet the film’s most emotional point comes when the bandmembers recall Barrett suddenly turning up at Abbey Road Studios one day in 1975 — bizarrely, while they were recording “Shine On,” the tribute to him — offering to “help.” Initially none of them recognized him: He was overweight and had shaved not only his head but his eyebrows. He stayed for a couple of hours — one of the engineers snapped some photos, which appear in the doc — and then they didn’t see him again. Waters burst into tears after he left.
At the film’s end, many of Barrett’s friends consider what they might have done differently. Gilmour’s is the most poignant. “We probably did about as much as we could have, although we were all very young,” he says. “But I have a regret or two,” he admits. “I never went to see him, even though his family kind of discouraged it” — because Barrett didn’t like to be reminded of his past — “and I regret that I never went up to his house and knocked on the door.” He concludes, “I think both Syd and I might have gained something out of one or two people popping ’round to his house for a cup of tea.”
Best of Variety
Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
