Appendix: Syd Barrett’s Techniques

Syd’s Gear

Barrett used a 50-watt Selmer Truvoice Treble n’ Bass 50 Mk II with matching ‘All-Purpose 50’ Speaker Cabinet with 2X12
speakers. Onstage, the Pink Floyd used Selmer Goliath cabinets and Stereomaster guitar amplifier heads, with four Selmer
TV/100 PA amplifier heads, for a tremendous roar.

A perfect gig amp with clean tone, Syd’s Selmer combo excelled at two things – treble and bass. Channels had clean tone to
about four on the volume dial. Turning volume up, bass channel had vigorous crunch, with blues and jazz overtones. A bit
higher and Syd’s dark expansive proto-metal sound rumbled through. Even with treble control down, treble channel had knife’s
edge sharpness. As Syd turned treble higher and pushed the amplifier hard, he got into extreme noise and feedback. His
Selmer amp had an effects loop wired to pre-amp valve, an echo send return on the back Syd utilised with Binson and a Selmer
Buzz-Tone fuzz pedal. Barrett was an expert manipulator of effects, used with restraint.

An early solid-state distortion unit Selmer introduced in September 1966, a three-stage transistor circuit gave Selmer Buzz-Tone
much smoother distortion than other fuzz pedals. Barrett’s Buzz-Tone fuzz had stinging bite at high volume, with great sustain.
(‘buzz a while...sting!’) Syd put Buzz-Tone on maximum setting then rolled guitar volume knob down for overdriven parts and
back for distortion. Like Gilmour or Hendrix, Syd set fuzz and volume at maximum level and used guitar volume to control gain
and fuzz. Fuzz pedal boosted and clipped sine wave input from guitar into square waveform. Buzz-Tone’s germanium
transistors were notorious for wonky tone in hot clubs, an interstellar overdose of flat sine waves. As Buzz-Tone clipped,
intermodulation caused signal heavy with extra harmonics, often distorted.

Syd’s Esquire proved versatile for every gig. With all 21 frets clear of the cutaway, Syd howled right up the neck with superb
sustain. The single coil bridge pickup was heavy, with strong mid-range, and much power at high volume. Playing live, Syd
flicked the three-tone selector switch, with resistors and capacitors altering frequency response.

In position one, or bridge-setting, tone control was disconnected and wired direct to output jack. Here, Syd got crisp treble lead
tones, setting Selmer at four or five gain, for leads more scalding than Telecaster. In position two, standard volume and tone
control arrangement allowed Syd to darken and brighten passages. Turning tone knob to the centre gave Syd good Telecaster-
like mid-range to vamp while Rick soloed. Syd could mellow tone a bit by strumming past where neck pickup would be, or
diving to the bridge with Zippo flashing across the bottom E string for his signature sustain violin-like tone. In position three,
tone control was again disengaged. A unique Fender tone capacitor rolled off treble and some bass, producing muted dark
tone the rhythm player in Syd thrived on. Here he could drop into Waters’ bass range and thicken rhythm.

Esquire enthusiasts rave about so-called ‘cocked wah’ in the third position, where signal highs and lows swooped and dipped
for pronounced hard-hitting tone. Barrett relied on barré chords to reduce dissonance, damping with his thumb over E string.
Syd used atmospheric phrases, sliding on the fret board, from octave to octave in seesawing glissandi backgrounds to layer
rhythm or lead. Barrett built restless cross rhythms, dancing around the beat, sneaking in mechanical repetitions to disorient.
Morphing into Wright’s oceanic modal echo, Barrett’s improvisations were contentious exercises in restless, relentless rhythm
with urgent brief phrases over echo. Salathé notes of ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’: ‘Wright’s solo is in A Mixolydian mode,
inherently unstable. Despite the A major chords on verses, Barrett's vocal melody is A minor pentatonic. C-sharp contradicts the
song's main melody.’

Applying effects to amplified signal after distortion by preamp, echo and fuzz sounded better. Syd tweaked Binson volume
input for overdrive and ran the loop in parallel with dry amp signal, boosting Binson’s maelstrom undertow as signal waned.
Syd would raise volume on fading echoes, capturing decay, decentring rhythm. Using different pedals in an effects chain,
plugging ends into the amplifier, Syd got repetitive feedback signal he modulated with effects; filtering with Binson, adding gain
with Buzz-Tone; modulating wave forms with swell.

By the Games for May concert, Syd was experimenting with a Fender Stratocaster and Vox Tone-Bender pedal, also using a foot
switch to tap in and out of Binson echoes. By the end of the summer, Syd was further using a Selmer wah pedal, one of the
very first British guitarists to do so.
Barrett and Wright earliest Binson Echorec 2 units had had six knobs: an input volume, one to control length, volume and tone
of swell, a three-position selector knob. The selectors accessed echo (one repeat), repeat (more than one repeat) or swell
(reverbs cleverly devised to feed output back), while switching knobs accessed twelve variations. A steel drum driven by
powerful AC motor and rubber jockey wheel kept transport stable. With record and playback heads arranged around the drum,
the longest echo was 350-375 milliseconds. Analogue valves gave echoes depth later transistor models could not. Analogue
delays did not perfectly play notes back, giving that haunting Pink Floyd echo sound; on Binson, Syd and Rick could overload
analogue delays.

The Binson Echorec four-inch metal ‘memory disc’ had a magnetic band around the edge producing long delays. Barrett
tweaked Echorec so the fifth head answered back prominently. Kevin Ryan, co-author of the definitive Recording the Beatles,
notes, ‘If delayed echo was returned to the (Binson) an echo of an echo was created. This ‘regeneration’ induced multiple
repeats. If turned too high, the level built rapidly into a rush of white noise.’
Overdriving input valve, volume pedal kept level manageable to the amplifier. Barrett tweaked swell knob to control repeat
echoes, also feedback. With volume knob, Syd controlled delay, as he blasted into improvisational space. Barebones bass and
treble equaliser coloured delay signal. Here Barrett exercised subtle changes from dark to bright.

Throwing the selector switch, Barrett accessed different combinations between playback heads arranged around the internal
disc. Binson’s selector had three modes; first, simple ‘Echo’ used on slap back echo like 50’s Elvis Presley’s vocals. Next,
‘Repeat’, standard delay where Syd extended notes or glissandi, key integer in Pink Floyd’s sound which Wright and Gilmour
also relied on. Third, ‘Swell’, was delay with overlaps, closer to reverb. Binson’s level indicator, a glowing green eye in the
middle, waxed and waned with input signal level. A channel selector managed up to three inputs for each instrument, with two
channels active, with different outputs - one with effect and one dry, both delayed, or both dry. Here, Syd later added effects
pedals. Wright and Barrett both relied heavily on Binson Echorec units. With all heads engaged and swell turned up, Syd
achieved his distinctive violin-like tone.

By January 1967, Barrett switched to a new silver Baby Binson unit. The new Binson still accessed twelve echoes for complex
multi-tap effects. It had shorter echo, sustained swell, hard slap-back echo and echo repeats. Notching up the input for
overdrive, Syd gingerly adjusted the overdrive, replay and regeneration knobs for a broad range of effects. Syd struck high-
pitched skittering effects, plinking at high end of fret board with echo swelling to a crest. As compounded echo and dramatic
volume shifts suggested boundless space, echoes turned to reverberation, a critical difference. If echo was repetition by
reflection then reverberation was repercussion, sound after the source has stopped.

Increasing input signal (first knob) resulted in distorted echo signal; boosting volume in Binson valves and disc. Dynamic sound,
hard attacks stayed clean but came through louder so amplifier handled overdrive. Turning up length of swell knob, signal
began feeding back on itself. Delays were crisp if volume was up and input down, or warm and slightly overdriven by doing the
opposite. Playing single pick-up Esquire through Binson echo and into valve-driven Vox amp added warmth to overall sound,
and increased volume and additional valve distortion when turned up.

Barrett’s prepared guitar experiments, taking cues from Keith Rowe, explored timbre and electro acoustics – freed from pitch,
timbre became paramount. Tweaking swell on Binson, echo rose and fell in cadenzas, dramatic ascending and descending
spirals as though programming a crude synthesizer. Barrett twiddled swell control, amped up echo volume level, and switched
twelve-position head selector switch. A footswitch allowed Barrett and Wright to cut Binson’s swampy echoes at a tap, aiding
Syd’s extreme stops and starts, a vital difference between his style and David Gilmour’s.

Barrett branched out from standard ‘blues box’ riffing patterns, creating rippling tension by buzzing between major and minor
notes in Wright’s scales like a king bee. Barrett departed from standard 12-bar blues by slipping in extra beats on the measure,
throwing in a half beat when needed to create pause for effect. Syd took inspired erratic patterns of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Slim
Harpo on a Gypsy caravan through English woods. When he plays rhythm, he recalls eccentric bars and measures in Bo Diddley
instrumentals like ‘Aztec’. Where delayed resolution plays games with time - Wagner’s isoryhthms by way of Congo Square in
New Orleans.

Fragments of pentatonic blues scales serve as anchoring, while glissandi swooping fret board created a motion mirroring
Barrett's own hands. One can find similar analogues of motion in, for example, gapped fingerings used in Barrett's chromatic
scales, travelling fret board by half steps, in filigrees that ornament and articulate the song's harmonic canvas. Master of
contrasts, Barrett was skilled in creating illusions of depth, pitting time against space, dizzying shimmering peaks and plunging
drops, like Icarus in flight and fall.

In Barrett’s improvisations, reaching for an intangible lost wholeness is forever present. Slivers of Persian scales, pentatonic folk
scales, blues and exotic bounding between parallel thirds and fifths all point to the proverbial lost chord that will integrate
Barrett’s synaesthetic impulses. At his finest moments, Syd Barrett’s explorations are a philosophical inquiry, spiritual longing
for completion forever missing. An abstract of infinity capturing essentials and reducing complexity, Barrett told Disc & Music
Echo: ‘Our music is like an abstract painting. It should suggest something to each person.’

Syd and Chromatics

In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, make succinct comment, ‘Certain ethnomusicologists have found
extraordinary cases where a first, diatonic, vocal part is superseded by chromatic descent into secret language that slips from
one sound to the next until it becomes a ‘parlando’, all intervals blur together, a chromatic language.’

The key in early Pink Floyd is Syd Barrett’s chromatics itching against Wright’s diatonic modal lines. In simplest terms, diatonic
refers to white keys alone, while chromatics are black and white keys on piano. As Wright floated along seven white keys on
major and minor scales, Syd darted around like a king bee, buzzing with five extra pentatonic semi-tones. It cannot be
overemphasized how unusual this was in rock, especially in 1967. Surging chromaticism in music most always parallels culture
in rapid transition.

Wright’s modal scales allowed Barrett great freedom when soloing, as he could zip along guitar neck with Zippo and still hit
right notes using intuition. Musician Josh Shamash states, ‘Stock open and barré chord shapes, first ones you learn, account for
the largest portion of Syd’s recorded guitar work (with occasional C7 shape transposed and added 9th here and there).’

Barrett relied on crude barré chords, and modified open-G tuning, abandoning standard chord figures to ease chromatic
pandemonium. Chromatic colours in Syd’s glissandi worked much the same as in painting - brightening, darkening and
saturating. Lessons extrapolated from Camberwell and the Tech on bending perspective, and creating depth distortions were
fresh in his mind. Darting between foreground and shadow, Barrett created a sound picture made of sparring contrasts, in
melody pitched through chromatic shifts. At Camberwell, art students had chromatic colour wheels drilled into them by tutors.
Barrett was keenly aware of synaesthetic colour-sound shifts onstage at UFO.

Chromatics smudged tonality, by escaping tonal centre and gravity, a musical rebellion. Composer Daniel Nass comments,
‘chromaticism forms Barrett’s 'dark' sound. Chromatics takes away pre-conceived expectations of what comes next. Isn’t it
interesting his chromatic phrases tend to descend more often than ascend? There are so many instances of descending phrases
(chromatic and otherwise) in his songs.’ Nass adds, ‘Vegetable Man’ is one of few instances where Syd’s chromatic patterns
move higher and higher in the verse.’ These descending phrases pointed in a direct line to childhood nursery rhymes, almost all
of which contain semitone intervals - difficult for novice singers, except children, who grasp them unconsciously and
immediately. Diatonic tonalities of Syd’s childlike folk-inspired songs itched against chromatic improvisations; what one writer
called ‘getting childlike folk song diatonic and unpredictability of heavy chromaticism from one progression.’ Standout
chromatic descents sweep through the bitter folk-blues of ‘Long Gone’ in waltz time as Syd laments.

His taste for chromatics extends across the ‘space section’ of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, where unlike his beloved modern jazz
heroes Barrett avoids solos for a string of motifs derived from disparate sources. Salathé says, ‘’Interstellar Overdrive’ is a
progression from one note (E) to all notes, then back; an exercise in minimalism, process, and improvisation. The main riff,
though it articulates a fall from B to E, spends most time on G and E with a falling minor third.’ Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky’s ‘Dance
of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ from the Nutcracker Suite creeps into the mix, stirred by memories of Fantasia, along with ancient
nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’s descending diatonic chromatic riff. Elaborating on central descending riff,
Barrett plays chromatic transpositions, melody travelling along within chords. His blues-derived string bends amplify chromatic
mayhem, dipping into microtonal territory. Small wonder technical guitarists often dismiss Barrett’s playing, how could they
even transcribe what he’s doing?

Phil Salathé further notes, ‘Barrett transposed fixed chord-forms in the introduction to ‘Astronomy Dominé’, lowering the E
chord-shape to create the marvellous dissonant chord which follows, a simultaneity of E and E-flat which foreshadows actual
chord changes of the verse.’

On ‘Matilda Mother’, Rick Wright plays a solo in Phrygian dominant scale, soon a psychedelia cliché, novel then. Culled from
Rick’s travels around the Greek isles, the others poked fun at Wright's ‘Turkish Delight’ riff, after a popular candy commercial
theme. Phrygian was interwoven in Turkish classical music, or in Gypsy flamenco as Phrygian Dominant. (Jefferson Airplane
had just incorporated the scale into ‘White Rabbit’, recorded three months earlier). A medieval mode whose scale pattern is E
to E on white keys, Wright played F# Phrygian dominant scale with raised sixth rather than standard minor second. This eased
Syd’s octave-fifth pattern which shared the same notes as F# Phrygian, showing how attuned they were. With Phrygian among
the darkest common modes, Wright chord substitution lightened the mood while amplifying funereal feel by inferring its
absence. Indeed, inference by absence is a Pink Floyd hallmark, exercised in lyrics and chords.

‘Matilda Mother’ ended with an E Mixolydian-based waltz with wordless vocal harmonies by Wright and Barrett like a muezzin’s
call to prayer in the Arab world. Marking the midpoint between Indian sitar and Western guitar, Cellular clusters shifted from
octave to octave, each cluster ending on the same fret before ascending in tidy leaps.
Salathé notes, ‘Reinterpreting the pitch spectrum as fluid continuity, comprehending chromatics and microtones and whatever
else, allowed Barrett to scatter fragmented verse anywhere he saw fit.’

By such heavy chromatic and microtonal inflection, Barrett defied strict scales, in sharp contrast to Wright’s droning modes,
rendering him an irrepressible, Puck-like harmonic mischief-maker in a static musical field. Due to lack of strict tonal centre,
Syd’s chromatic riffs encourage illusion of timelessness. In Salathé's words, ‘ascending and descending in rhythmic patterns
independent of large-scale, periodic structural articulations.’ Composer Saeed Shahram notes, ‘Syd playing thirds and fifths
over and over feels like an Arabian, Indian or Iranian scale.’ Waters played bass as lead, jockeying in the foreground between D
and F sharp on the D string, as if playing rhythm guitar. Anchoring airy modes and chromatics left Barrett and Wright free to
overlay melodic lines.

Barrett introduced atonality into rock, a very consonant music and conservative form, then as now. The old tonal system
gravitated around a key centre chromaticism diluted with ‘outside’ notes. The more Barrett used chromatic tones, the more key
weakened, to no tonal centre. Extra tones allowed greater emotional colouration, using dissonance to create tension, with
relief when release came. Syd delayed release with chromatics, so listener was pulled forward, awaiting resolution. As Syd used
more chromatic tones, lack of tonal focus grew to atonality, and no centre. Wright and Barrett’s floating key centre had Waters
forever pulling them back to the tonic.

Syd’s Semitone Drops

From nursery rhymes, Barrett adopted his curious phrasing, rhyming and metre, cadence and intonation. Interplay between
words and melody in nursery rhymes made a profound impression at a tender age. ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, with its falling
cadence and diatonic notes, was one. ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ also possess a certain melodic
touch that later slotted into Barrett’s material, rife with the falling chromatic melodies that run through all his songs. All have a
falling semitone interval, difficult to sing for adults, simple for children.

Russell Reising, in Speak to Me: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, noted a three-semitone drop as a Pink Floyd
favourite during Syd’s time and after, his most obvious legacy, a signature touch allowing wavering between tonics of adjoining
chords. Harmonic ambiguity heightened lyrical ambiguity.

Barrett was further influenced here by the Beatles, whose three-semitone drop in ‘If I Fell’ was echoed in his own ‘Late Night’.
Composer Phil Salathé notes, ‘switching between G-natural and G-sharp throughout the vocal melody of ‘Arnold Layne’ is
another Barrett trademark. The three- semitone drop maintains common tone between chords; if they're both major, the third
of chord one becomes fifth of chord two (as in ‘Arnold Layne’s C# vocal note (‘caught’) and second syllable of (‘person’) over A
and F#).’ On ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ the classic Syd three-semitone reappears in the drop from G minor to E minor.

Syd’s Structural Tritones

When Barrett and Wright first plugged into Binson Echorec and experimented, they chanced on audio illusion ‘the tritone
paradox’, finite tones continually rising or falling in pitch. Using glissando in league with modal riffs, they created an
approximation of this audio illusion such that ‘space’ sections should have disorienting perpetual rising and falling action
through scales. A discovery they soon put to work onstage. (Wright again used this tritone paradox at the end of ‘Echoes’.)

Futurist Luigi Russolo wrote, ‘Every noise has a note - sometimes even a chord - that predominates in the ensemble of its
irregular vibrations Thus certain noises produced by rotary motion may offer a complete ascending and descending chromatic
scale by merely increasing or decreasing speed of motion.’
Barrett liked to voice dominant seventh chords, typical of psychedelia, on guitar in a manner that emphasized dissonance. A
dominant seventh chord on C, made from notes C, E, G, and B-flat, had characteristic 'flavour' generated from the tritone
between E and B-flat.

The tritone, or flatted-fifth interval, is two notes six steps apart, spanning three whole tones. An extreme dissonant sound, a
‘perfect discord’, tritones promise resolution but never deliver. Known as Diabolus in Musica, or ‘the devil in music’, as late as
the 18th century musicians were reprimanded for using this ‘inharmonious transverse’. The blues scale draws much power
from the tritone at its core, and chromatic turnarounds using tritones as pivot point.

Salathé says, ‘Syd often ended phrases on a strong dissonant note. Sometimes a dissonant chord he was already using, though
just as often Barrett chose a pitch thoroughly at odds with the harmony. He pulled off deft musical alchemy, sustaining
dissonance through to another chord that included the note in question. In effect, reinterpreting foreign pitch as normative
sonority; this technique, known as anticipation, dates as far as Bach. In Syd's hands, anticipation is often deployed with magical
effect.’ Composer Phil Salathé points out broader tonal architecture of key-relationships across songs such as ‘Here I Go’, where
Salathé notes, ‘This ambiguity persists for a tantalizing second, until we intuit the concluding E chord -- which would have been
the subdominant in relation to the opening B major sonority. Which, under rules of common-practice harmony, was the chord
needed to fully establish B as the tonic harmony is now functioning as the dominant of A major, key of the ‘song proper’. The
chord Syd was withholding turns out to be our pointer to the song's 'true' home, harmonically and lyrically.’

Beyond words Syd sang, his subtlety lies where he placed emphasis. Rhyme schemes changed from song to song. In ‘Lucifer
Sam’, inside the song, with rhymes in two middle bars parried with one rhyme in the second, and ending with two in the middle
of the last verse.

Author Tim Ellison states, ‘‘Lucifer Sam,’ noted for Gothic connotations in lyrics, features a minor key guitar riff with both raised
fourth tritone and raised seventh tones’. Barrett deliberately uses the Diabolus in Musica discordant interval to evoke
Luciferian overtones. Phil Salathé concurs, ‘the tritone prominent in ‘Lucifer Sam’ is unmistakable, all the way from F# minor to
C major in the space of five chords. C major almost takes place of the dominant on C-sharp, though E is the dominant 'trope'.
There’s no C-sharp chord, which justifies the tritone as structural.’

Musicologist Dave Lewis says, ‘When playing such a chord, Syd might either leave the G out or move it elsewhere on the
fingerboard, so the tritone between E and B-flat sounded louder than the rest of the chord’. Phil Salathé says, ‘Another
property of dominant seventh chords is the tritone giving them flavour is shared between dominant sevenths, whose roots are
also a tritone apart. Many composers have taken advantage of this, especially early moderns like Syd’s hero Igor Stravinsky.’

On ‘Jugband Blues’, Phil Salathé notes, ‘On the structural level, the song's introductory verse starts with a C major chord and
ends with an F# major chord. That's critical. B minor, F# minor, B minor, F# major - a structural tritone 'Jugband Blues' is
bounded by.’ On ‘Baby Lemonade’, Salathé adds, ‘’Baby Lemonade’ is a slippery devil, and a favourite for that very reason. The
song is intriguing harmonically, suspended between Bb and D in the strangest way. Syd's guitar intro is clearly in E, but ends on
the note Bb. The first chord of the song is Bb. It's a super-fore grounded tritone event, as it were. Arpeggios toward the end of
the intro involve a single, fixed chord shape moved down one fret at a time, with one open string (B) droning throughout.
Again, a highly characteristic gesture in that Syd's hand shape stays the same throughout. The first part of the intro is straight-
up blues in E, but an unexpected G# at the end (a major third, rather than G-natural, the blues minor third) starts to send us in a
new direction. Then we get the descending blues riff, then arpeggios, which are classic Syd transitional chromaticism, then
descending blues riff again, but this time elaborated, expanded, and used as a bridge to B-flat to start the song. The intro to
‘Baby Lemonade’ makes far more formal sense than one would think.’

When Pink Floyd recorded ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, David Gilmour noted of the distinctive riff, ‘I don’t know where it
came from. I was just playing an A-minor chord and moved my fingers to the wrong position. It could be just an accident - a
haunting, calling sound.’ Phil Salathé states, ‘Which would be the Bb-E tritone, which bounds it (temporally, i.e. horizontally),
plausible also to hear an echo of the prominent tritone in ‘Lucifer Sam’.’

Chords for ‘Octopus’ are singularly intriguing, festooned with suspended notes and unusual progressions, a sinuous emphatic
Ab weaving like an octopus tentacle all the way down to the fade. Phil Salathé writes, ‘The basic chord progression of ‘Octopus’
is highly unusual. A chromatically descending set of three chords with lengthy sojourn until return to the first progression.
Then first dominant-tonic at ‘please leave us here’, which sidesteps onto Eb at the end, as if Bb were the dominant of Eb all
along. Unexpectedly, then Gb for the ‘lost in the woods' section, followed by another chromatic sequence, ascending this time
to Ab, which bobs and weaves with oscillation. ‘Octopus’ is a weird song, not from any single chord sequence, but because
tonal centre is so unclear: Ab is a primary key centre, though one of several.’
 ‘Apples and Oranges’ features a curious F#m Eb D G chord progression under girding the lilting ‘See you, see you, see you...’,
echoing a variety of church hymns. The first chord is deceptive, sounding like a simple A chord, rather than the F#m that is
recurrent in early Pink Floyd songs. Salathé notes, ‘Syd might be playing just A. Rick is clearly adding F#, in the vocal line.
However, that provides an important clue as to its function: The entire progression is a circle of fifths in disguise. Interestingly,
both ‘see you’ figures are in essence descending minor thirds.’

On ‘I Never Lied to You’, Salathé points out, ‘the first F# chord coincides with the first major interruption in the song's basic 4/4
(though we'd had a bar of 2/4 leading into that section, on the G chord right before ‘everything I knew’). Syd foreshortens the
end of the phrase, turning it into a bar of 7/8 (one eighth-note short). Interesting rhythmic instability created by that gesture is
resolved by dropping another eighth-note at ‘So I went ahead around my world’ - also returning to the song's tonic key of A.
There is coordination of harmonic, textual, and metric/rhythmic parameters there.’

By contrast, Salathé says, ‘the Opel version of ‘Wined and Dined’ is highly irregular. Syd takes four bars of 4/4 and turns it into
4/4 + 7/8 + 7/8 + 5/8! In many kinds of music there is a long tradition of flexible phrase lengths; in many older blues recordings,
a chorus of ‘12-bar blues’ would, as often as not, end up being 13 bars long, or 11, or 12-and-a-half, to accommodate lyrical
variations and ad-libs.’

Syd’s ‘Moods’

Interviewer Steve Turner noted, ‘His songs, like paintings, were used essentially to convey a mood. Throughout the interview
he spoke of ‘relating to a mood’ when referring to his work.’ Barrett stressed the sense of his songs as ‘moods’, much as Brian
Wilson of the Beach Boys composed short piano segments, or ‘feels’, as he dubbed them, to construct compositions. Moods, to
Barrett, stemmed from words. These contemporaries infused songs with emotional resonance, mirroring state of mind during
composition. Each watched mood pieces become more fragmented, unable to be fitted together.

Singer-songwriter Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses said, ‘Words are an instrument played by syllables. Those syllables are
words and sentences.’ Hersh heard sounds, wrote them phonetically, and they became songs. At the piano, Brian Wilson
played ‘feels’, what he termed ‘...specific rhythm patterns, fragments of ideas. Once they’re out of my head and into the open
air, I can see them and touch them firmly. Then the song starts to blossom and become a real thing.’

Where Wilson’s rhythmic patterns generated songs Syd Barrett collated ‘moods’ through words. Rhythm of Syd’s words
dictated harmonic construction, with melodic rhythmic riffs and chromatic descending melodic lines serving as handmaidens.
Princeton music professor Robert Wegman states another trait Wilson shared with Barrett, ‘the descending melodic line by
which Brian organized his right-hand chords was more usually chromatic than diatonic, more adventurous and downright jazzy.’

If Wegman felt Wilson’s ‘countermelodies tend to leap rather than descend—to counteract the downward chromatic slide’,
then in Barrett’s works chromatic descents act as connective glue between intervallic leaps. Like Wilson, Barrett shared taste
for wide harmonic leaps. Wegman states, ‘Brian neither begins nor ends descending progressions, these ‘feels,’ on the tonic,
and keeps songs perpetually floating in mid-air.’ This calls to mind Barrett’s slide guitar in ‘Remember a Day’, ascending and
descending around a floating key centre.

Syd’s Compound Glance

When writing lyrics, Syd Barrett often reached for the nearest book at hand, flipped it open, and scanned down whatever page
he happened to land on. Spurred on by experiments in Cambridge writing poetry, reading about Tristan Tzara’s Dada
techniques, delving into Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’ cut-up method, listening to John Cage explain his chance
operations, Barrett was very keen to use accidents, chance and instinct in tandem when writing. An early example would be his
instant collage in Fart Enjoy, where Syd flipped open his illustrated Kate Greenaway 1881 Mother Goose, or the Old Nursery
Rhymes, scanned the title page and picked out ‘sprat locket patch’ from the table of contents.

Jack Sprat could eat no fat

Lucy Locket, lost her pocket
Cross Patch, lift the latch
Fitting for a son of East Anglia, Syd’s eyes almost always tended to fall on hard Anglo-Saxon words, rather than Romanesque
melodic words. Fond of end rhymes in Carroll and Lear, Syd’s lyrics expertly weave between ethereal imagery bracketed with
hard rhyming words heavy on consonance.

Concrete poetry, where the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as words, was
another inspiration. In Fart Enjoy, Barrett clipped a page out of a nearby Universal Critical and Pronouncing Dictionary of the
English Language, and cut and typed a concrete poem, allowing the shape of the words on the page to create form.

In ‘Late Night’, for lyric structure, a dark spark was drawn from Edward Lear’s 1877 Laughable Lyrics, and the diatonic melody
and end-rhymes of 1806 rhyme ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ by Jane Taylor, culled from Barrett’s oft-used 1913 Cambridge Book
of Poetry for Children. Syd used his familiar compound method, gathering end rhymes.

In Taylor’s ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’:

Then the traveller in the dark,
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.

In Lear’s Laughable Lyrics:

Then, through the vast and gloomy dark
There moves what seems a fiery spark,
A lonely spark with silvery rays
Piercing the coal-black night,
A Meteor strange and bright:
Hither and thither the vision strays,
A single lurid light.

Elsewhere, Barrett makes ample use of internal rhyme, rhyming sounds in the same line for effect, where at least one word
does not fall at the end of a line, is used time and again to amplify his compound glances across secondary sources.

Barrett was inspired by Old English poetry and British Islands traditional ballads, where each line is broken into half-lines by
strategic break or pauses. Accented syllables trigger specific emphasis, cementing tone. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, structural
emphasis comes in accentual meter (or alliterative-stress meter). In A Study of English Rhyme, Francis Child wrote, ‘There are
(usually) two alliterations in the first line and one at the beginning of the second line. Alliteration is the domestic artifice of
Teutonic poetry, as rhyme and assonance are of the Romanesque.’ Barrett, always the man on the border, straddles the two.