Conspiro Media

My thanks go out (once again) to Mark for inviting me along as a guest on his regular pod-casts, and for giving me the opportunity to share my research, info and love of music with you. Words can’t describe how much I appreciate his ongoing support… but, to save you from boredom and/or reaching for the puke-bucket, I won’t bother to elaborate further!

About a week before hooking up with Mark for this latest interview, I asked him if he’d be kind enough to allow me the pleasure of posting an article on his site that expands on some of the topics discussed in our latest pod-chat. Mark – being the laidback kind of guy he is – was up for that… so here I am!

What I’d like to delve into further is the possibility that founding Pink Floyd member, Syd Barrett was a victim of MK Ultra/Mind Control. I must point out however, that due to deadline restraints, this article is by no means conclusive. It’s merely a brief overview and analysis. I’ve taken a look at some (not all) of the available ‘evidence’ on offer and highlighted some of the classic ’tell-tale’ signs that you’ll be familiar with.

According to close friends and associates of Barrett‘s, there was a marked decline in his mental state from 1967 onwards, perhaps sometime during or after ‘The Pink Floyd’ (as they were then known) enjoyed two UK hit singles and a top-selling, critically acclaimed album (‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’). Syd was the band’s principle song-writer and visionary, and also its brightest star. 

He was a darling of the London psychedelic scene. Admired by his peers (Paul McCartney and Pete Townshend of The Who most notably), revered by the music-press, and lusted after by young female fans for his good-looks, it seemed as though Syd had it all. However, as the fame grew, so did the signs of his mental instability and his apparent distaste for playing the music-industry game. As I briefly touched on in my chat with Mark, when Pink Floyd turned up to play on one TV show in particular, Syd – the lead singer – made no attempt to mime along to the backing-track. Drummer, Nick Mason reportedly said, “Syd stopped enjoying it. He just lost interest, an ever-declining interest and enthusiasm. That’s the unravelling, the rest of us were still hot to do it. Syd underwent a conscience crisis that this wasn’t art. It was becoming so commercial with television and record sales, promotions, and he had been an artist.” As time went on, he became increasingly erratic and unpredictable, behaviour that was seemingly fuelled by his growing appetite for LSD. His growing disillusionment with the music-industry and his Acid-tinged state of mind is perhaps best illustrated by his friend, Jenny Fabian who recalls one particular Pink Floyd gig in London in 1967. She said, “Syd went on to play and I noticed halfway through the first set he wasn’t singing and hardly playing a note. After the first set, Syd said he wanted to get away from the club and sit somewhere quiet. We took a taxicab back to my flat, promising to return in time for the second set. He sat down and suddenly started talking about all the people who were now putting down the group because they had made it. He believed the group had sold out. He couldn’t reconcile what he wanted to do with what he was doing. I wanted to help. I didn’t understand what was wrong. The best and grooviest musicians around. They could play where they liked and what they liked and still make more bread than they needed. In a position to experiment with new musical ideas, there was nothing Syd couldn’t do if he had just half a mind to get it together. I just didn’t understand it. It was as if his mind was burning up right in front of my eyes. I’d Tripped and turned on, not enough to realise what he was going through. Enough to know what Acid did to minds. This beautiful Pop musician, shivering and pouring out his torture and miseries, was something else. He seemed to have lost touch with reality. There’s no convincing someone like that. I kept silent and just listened. When it was time to go he rose without argument and we went back for the second set. This time he made no bones about his problem, or the effect it was having on him. He went on stage, silent, pale and sweaty… and just sat on the floor with the guitar in his lap. He stayed like that for the whole set. Syd started to collapse on stage. He sat down during one number. He continued to play but he didn’t look like he was going to go on for long and then he just stopped playing and then he just lay down and I wanted to help him. I couldn’t.” This was a merely a taste of what would soon become the norm…
Weeks later, Syd went missing for a few days following the band’s performance at the multi-act ‘International Love-In’ at London’s Alexandra Palace. Pink Floyd keyboardist, Richard Wright recalls, “he went missing for the whole weekend and when he appeared again on the Monday, he was a totally different person. When they (the road crew) found Syd, they told us, ‘well, something’s happened to Syd.’ Something had happened to him, a total difference. He’d gone – still looking the same but somewhere else. They said, ‘something terrible has happened, he’s like a zombie.’” Floyd’s Roger Waters remembers, “the shock of seeing him, such a change. Very frightening. I couldn’t believe what had happened… because he came the next day, and he was a different person.”
Although it’s not exactly clear where Syd disappeared to during his ‘lost weekend,’ the reports of his altered personality upon his return are one of those “tell-tale” signs I was alluding to earlier. What we do know is Barrett was living in a flat at the notorious 101 Cromwell Road in London, which former Pink Floyd manager, Peter Jenner once described as being “run by heavy, loony messianic Acid freaks.” Legendary music-photographer, Mick Rock is quoted as saying that Syd’s flat was “a burnt-out place, the biggest hovel, the biggest shit-heap; a total Acid-shell, the craziest flat in the world. There were so many people, it was like a railway station. Two cats Syd had, one called Pink and one called Floyd, were still living in the flat after he left. He just left them there. Those were the cats they used to give Acid to.” 

John Marsh, who was Pink Floyd’s lighting man, reportedly said Syd lived at Cromwell Road “with various characters, among whom was a psychotic kind of character called Scotty. He was one of the original Acid-in-the-reservoir, change-the-face-of-the-world missionaries. He was also a desperately twisted freak and really malevolent crazy. Everyone knew that if you went round to see Syd never have a cup of tea, never take a glass of water unless you got it yourself from the tap and even then be desperately worried, because Scotty’s thing was spiking everything. By this time, Syd was living on a diet that must have been comprised of 80% Acid.” As discussed in my chat with Mark, another guest at Cromwell Road was John Esam. He was a poet, film-maker, advocate of LSD and friend of Michael Hollingshead, a British-born researcher in psychedelic drugs who, by his own words, was first introduced to LSD by Aldous Huxley. According to Hollingshead’s autobiography, the ‘Brave New World’ author “suggested that I go to Harvard (University) to meet a Dr. Timothy Leary, a professor there, whom he’d met earlier that year in Copenhagen, when he had presented a paper on induced visionary experience before the Fourteenth International Congress of Applied Psychology. Leary had also read a paper on ‘How to Change Behaviour’ describing the induction of visionary mental states by psilocybin, the synthetic of the sacred mushroom of Mexico.” The two did eventually meet and it was Hollingshead – according to his autobiography – who Leary experienced his first LSD Trip with. The pair subsequently began working together at Harvard in the research of hallucinogens. I’m pretty sure it’s no ‘coincidence’ that MK Ultra experiments with psilocybin were also taking place at the very same university during this period? In 1965, Hollingshead returned to the UK and straight into ‘swinging‘ London. He claims, “I had brought with me from America a quantity of LSD, about half a gram, or enough for 5,000 sessions, part of an experimental batch made available by courtesy of the Czech Government laboratories in Prague.” He then leased a flat in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea where he opened the ‘World Psychedelic Centre.’ His mission was clear; “Our Crusade was to launch LSD on the world! Whilst other artists/visionaries/seers had been content to observe the world, the New Message was simple: if things are not right, then change them! We would make the dynamic life-giving adventure of exploring Inner Space the New Romance! We would set off an explosion that would sweep through our culture and give birth to a New Radicalism! We would even found a drug-based religion, whose message would be ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out’! We would proclaim the Reign of the Happily Integrated Modern Soul! We would become the first signatories of a new ‘Declaration of Evolution’ as published in Timothy Leary’s The Polities of Ecstasy.’” This “crusade” began almost at once. Leary – the alleged CIA asset – ingratiated himself with all the hip ’n’ happenin’ Pop stars of the day – as did Hollingshead who reportedly introduced John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Keith Richards, and Charles Mingus to LSD. God only knows how Syd Barrett might possibly figure in all of this. And what of his supposed meeting with the notorious British psychiatrist, R.D. Laing who worked at the Tavistock Clinic during the 1950s and ‘60s and at the Gartnavel Psychiatric Hospital in Glasgow – the very hospital where MK Ultra’s Dr. Ewan Cameron had once been based? Pink Floyd’s future was threatened with each passing day as Syd, their leading light, continued to deteriorate, and it seems that the band and it’s management eventually turned to Laing for help as a result. Peter Jenner is quoted as saying, “we tried to stop him going crazy. I put all my textbook sociology, all the stuff I’d read about psychology in action. We took him to R.D. Laing, Laing didn’t say much. We moved him out of Cromwell Road but it was too late.” According to some accounts though, Barrett never met Laing personally. Roger Waters claims that they managed to get him as far as Laing’s front-door before he bolted (maybe he knew something they didn’t?). It’s also been claimed that Laing was given a tape-recording of Barrett talking, at the end of which the psychiatrist stated that the singer was “incurable.” Whether Barrett did meet face-to-face with Laing or not is debatable but worth noting nonetheless, especially when stacked alongside all the other connections in this article linking Syd (and the music-industry) in some shape or form to Mind Control, LSD, and the CIA. Consider this also…
The ground-breaking light-shows that accompanied early-era Pink Floyd gigs were a taste of what would follow almost twenty years later with the advent of Acid House and then ‘Rave.’ But what effect did these lights have on Syd? In his book, ‘Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd – Dark Globe,’ author, Julian Palacios makes an interesting point:

Even without drugs, Barrett was up for days on end. Sleep deprivation and exhaustion brought on their own altered states. Syd’s sensitivity to flickering lights did not help… disdained strobes, though alternating lanterns with rapid-fire motion meant a flicker effect pummelled the stage Eyes closed or open, Barrett was subjected to lights pulsing in time with his brain-waves. At some point, Barrett let feeling trapped onstage get the better of him. He turned to face the lights, well aware they acted as (a) large-scale Dream Machine…

Flickering in time with his alpha-waves, lights sent Barrett in and out of trance-like states, even hypnosis. “We did use stroboscopic lighting onstage a lot in the early years,” confirmed (David) Gilmour. “Pink Floyd was warned… you shouldn’t do it so much. People had fits and convulsions while stroboscopic lights were going on. Drugs as well as stroboscopic lighting could send anyone over the edge. It was hard to play, onstage, straight. With strobe lighting going on, even if you shut your eyes it made little difference, interacting with body rhythms or brainwaves. Syd’s demise has been blamed on drugs, but it’s not out of the question to suggest stroboscopic lighting allied with drugs contributed to the collapse of his faculties.”

David Gilmour had been drafted into the band in 1968 as an extra guitarist, initially to act as Syd’s shadow during gigs in case he chose not to play his instrument (or even turn up in the first place for that matter). Looking back on the group’s somewhat ill-fated maiden tour of the US earlier in 1967, Nick Mason says, “Syd went mad on that very first American tour. He didn’t know where he was most of the time. He detuned his guitar onstage. He just stood there rattling strings, a bit weird even for us.” Barrett had very little to offer in the recording-studio either. The man who’d penned the band’s first two singles and the majority of their debut album, had nothing else to give – that is with the exception of a handful of tracks, a number of which remain unreleased to this day such as the rather aptly titled, ‘Vegetable Man,’ and ‘Scream Thy Last Scream.’ Pink Floyd’s second album released in 1968 and titled, ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ featured only one Barrett-penned song. His time was up. It was while the band was travelling to a gig in early 1968 that someone asked whether they should collect Syd on the way. Gilmour recalls that “somebody, probably Roger, said, ‘no, let’s not bother.’” 

Syd embarked on a solo career of sorts, releasing two albums between 1969 and 1970 before gradually retreating from public life and the music-industry altogether.

In June 1975, Pink Floyd were busy recording the follow-up to their worldwide smash, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ at the legendary Abbey Road studios when an unusual visitor stopped by. Richard Wright remembers that “I saw this big bald guy sitting on the couch… about sixteen stone, huge bald fat guy. I didn’t think anything of it. In those days, it was normal for strangers to wander into our sessions. I thought, ‘he looks a bit strange.’ I sat down with Roger at the desk and we worked for about ten minutes. This guy kept on getting up and brushing his teeth and then sitting, doing weird things, but keeping quiet. I said to Roger, ‘who is he?’ Roger said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘well, I assumed he was a friend of yours.’ He said, ‘no, I don’t know who he is.’ It took me a long time. Then suddenly I realised it was Syd, after maybe forty-five minutes.” It just so happened that the band were working on a song that was dedicated to their former leading light when he walked in on them. Wright continues, “he came in as we were doing vocals for ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond,’ about Syd. He for some reason picked the day we were doing a song about him. A huge shock. I hadn’t seen him for about six years. He’d shaven all his hair off – his eyebrows, everything. Awful. Roger was in tears, we both were. Shocking, seven years of no contact, and then to walk in while we’re doing that track. Coincidence, karma, fate – who knows, very powerful.” Peter Jenner was there too. He says it was “terribly sad. This great fat, bald, mad person who we used to know and who this song was all about sitting there in another world. Weird. He kept brushing his teeth with this little toothbrush. I asked him what he’d been doing. He just smiled. What I’d call ‘barking mad,‘ terribly distressing.“ David Gilmour recalls that “he turned up for a couple of days then wandered off and we never saw him again.” 

Assuming that Barrett was indeed a victim of MK Ultra, then it would appear that his impromptu reunion with Floyd at Abbey Road occurred during a period in time when he was undergoing some form of programming-meltdown. Those classic “tell-tale” signs are there again; the shaved head and eye-brows are the most obvious, but, it’s also worth noting that Syd was twenty-nine years of age when he walked in on his former band-mates in June ’75. As you’re no doubt aware, Mind Control victims are said to experience a major breakdown as they approach thirty.

In 1981, Barrett moved in to his mother’s modest semi-detached home in Cambridge, the old university town where he was born and raised. He remained living there as a virtual recluse until his death from cancer in 2006 at the age of sixty – well, almost. He did spend some time in what his sister, Rosemary has reportedly said was a private “home for lost souls.” That’s not exactly how author, Julian Palacios describes it in his ‘Dark Globe’ biography however. He writes, “during 1983-‘84, Barrett spent eighteen months at Greenwoods, a National Health Service treatment facility” in Brentwood, a town in the county of Essex. It “offered in-patient rehabilitation for people with ’severe and enduring mental health problems and associated behavioural problems.’” Furthermore, physicians at Greenwoods are said to have diagnosed him as having a “personality disorder.”
Whilst Barrett lived a life of anonymity in Cambridge under the watchful eye of his sister and his mother, interest in Syd’s music and cultural legacy showed no signs of diminishing. Fans and journalists regularly came knocking at his front-door, but unfortunately for them, he often refused to entertain their curiosity. Rosemary has reportedly said, “having people coming to the door upset him… Some more extreme fans would stalk him. In the end he just disconnected his door-bell.” She claims “he showed no interest in Pink Floyd at all” or any other episode from his former life as a popular musician and song-writer to the point that he reverted back to his birth-name, ’Roger.’ It seems, as far as he was concerned, ‘Syd’ was a persona, an alter-ego that he no longer wanted to be shackled to… (I think you know where I’m going with this?)… Rosemary says, “my brother was two people. He was ‘Roger’ when we were children. ‘Syd,’ as most people knew him, was a nickname for just a few years. After that, he was ‘Roger’ again for the rest of his life.” Additionally, “if anyone called him ‘Syd’ he wouldn’t answer – ‘Syd’ was Pink Floyd.” In a 2009 interview, she said her brother maybe “just wanted to become the real person that he was, I’m not sure how genuine the ‘Syd’ character really was.”
I think we can mark that down as another “tell-tale” sign, right?

In essence (assuming that Rosemary’s recollections are accurate), Syd no longer resided in Barrett’s head. The psychedelic Prince of Pop, the founding member of one of the biggest bands… ever, didn’t die of cancer in 2006. He met his end years before when ’Roger’ reappeared after a lengthy absence. Yeah, sure, Syd continued to live on in the hearts and minds of millions of fans across the world, but not in Roger Barrett’s. There was almost no trace of him. The persona that shone so brightly if not briefly for a time back in the 1960s had served its purpose. For example, Roger’s sister claims her brother effectively stopped playing the guitar from the 1990s onwards. “He had really changed his interest from music to painting” she once said. Fact is, Barrett was picking up where he left off. Before Pink Floyd existed, he was a student at London’s prestigious Camberwell College of Arts. According to Rosemary he “always considered himself an artist not a musician. For him music always went alongside art and if anything he was probably moved off a more obvious path by music. Music was a fun thing but art was where his real love was. The music came to the fore because of Pink Floyd but without that he would have carried on the art.”

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The Barrett-era Pink Floyd song, ‘Arnold Layne’ is purportedly based on a real-life person who stole women’s underwear from washing-lines in Cambridge. This might explain the guest appearance of a mannequin in the accompanying music-video. Be that as it may, dolls, dummies, and mannequins are also said to signify the disassociative state of the Mind Control victim >>> >>> >>>

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Opinion remains divided as to the exact nature of Barrett’s mental decline. Depending on which member of Pink Floyd you ask for example, it seems they either take the view that the LSD turned him into a schizophrenic, or visa versa. Personally, I do have to admit that I come away from all of this with the impression that he did sometimes play on his reputation as an Acid-soaked madman just to irritate people for his own amusement. He was, after all, a sharp-witted young man by all accounts and I’m sure that he was still capable of serving up the odd flash of brilliance in spite of his deteriorating mental state. Roger Waters remembers one such moment which occurred not long before Syd’s exit from Pink Floyd when his long-suffering band-mates repeatedly tried, and largely failed, to coax him into writing some new material. Waters says, “we were trying to get songs out of him… he came to a rehearsal… erm, room that we were in with a new song. ‘Oh, great. How does it go?’ I remember sitting down with him with a guitar and he was strumming away and, er, this song went… he said, ‘I’ll teach you the chorus okay, it goes like this: ‘Have you got it yet? Have you got it yet? Have you got it yet?’ And I went, ‘okay, yeah. Yeah, okay,’ and, er… we started playing together and he’d do it slightly different. And then he’d do it slightly different. And after he kept changing it… about the sixth time we’d done it… I went, ‘I’ve got it.’ And I just put the guitar down and that was it. That was the last time I ever did anything with him. It was a very clever joke. I was desperately trying to learn this thing, and it kept changing. ‘Have you got it yet?’ Yep. Got it.”

It might be difficult to comprehend now, given Pink Floyd’s mass appeal and status as one of the Great Giants of Rock, but back in 1966 and ’67 prior to signing with EMI, the band were – to pinch words from someone else’s article – “the psychedelic pied pipers of the ’London underground’ scene” thanks to their spaced-out live jams and groundbreaking, if somewhat hallucinatory lightshows. In short, whether due to accident or design, Syd Barrett rose to prominence during a time in cultural history when vast numbers of young people were ready and willing to fall under his influence. Consider the fairytale-like quality of some of the songs he wrote and recorded for Pink Floyd’s debut album in 1967 too. They’re said to have been inspired by the works of C.S. Lewis and Kenneth Grahame author of ‘Wind in the Willows.’ This unique fusion of psychedelic Pop, surrealism, and English whimsy was popular with other bands of the time such as The Beatles who that same year revisited their childhood with the singles ‘Penny Lane,’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ and would later reach back further drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll on ‘I Am the Walrus.’ Over in the US meanwhile, Jefferson Airplane released ‘White Rabbit,’ a psychedelic anthem that borrowed suggestive imagery from ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ leading many to conclude that the track was a metaphor (or perhaps even a commercial) for mind-altering substances such as Acid and Magic Mushrooms. 1967 was also the year that Timothy Leary stood in front of an estimated 30,000 hippies at a mass gathering in San Francisco and called on them to: “Turn on, tune in, drop out” – and thousands, if not millions did so willingly – Syd included. Reflecting on the impact of the phrase, Leary reportedly stated, “unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean ‘get Stoned and abandon all constructive activity.’” Well, it’s certainly been interpreted that way by a significant number of researchers and authors who claim the so-called ‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s was largely an orchestrated plot by the Military/Intelligence Complex to do just that and more. Pete Brown the poet and one-time song-writer for ‘60s Rock band, Cream was a friend of Syd’s, and according to recent reports, deeply suspicious of Leary‘s Acid crusade. In the 2010 biography, ‘Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head,‘ he claims he “got very angry” after realising that the 1960s drug-scene was “a diversion and people were getting damaged.” He goes on, “in hindsight of course it looks very much like it was pushed to the underground as a kind of semi-conspiracy thing. I mean, I am a paranoid conspiracy freak, I have to say that. But then most of it’s come true, hasn’t it? Most of it’s been sussed since then. Acid was made very appealing, with a nice PR campaign, and people got destroyed by it. It blunted the teeth of the so-called ‘underground,’ quite honestly. I don’t think that political awareness or even, for that matter, artistic awareness, is aided by continual drug use. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have the odd joint and relax, or have the odd pint down the pub. But you can’t build a revolution on it. You can’t even build one in your mind. I was very suspicious of Leary and all those people. They had dodgy connections. I wouldn’t have trusted them with a bag of peas. I didn’t buy those people. I think they did more damage than good.”
So, how does Syd Barrett figure in all this? Was he a ‘psychedelic pied piper’ leading a generation of unwitting youths a few steps closer towards a New World Order? Well, I don’t know about you, but having mulled over the “tell-tale” signs featured in this article, I’m inclined to subscribe to the view that MK Ultra/Mind Control definitely played a major factor, if he was indeed in the service of malevolent hidden forces that is.

** Matt Sergiou – Oct. 2nd 2013


Check out my blog ‘Conspiro Media’…
http://conspiromedia.wordpress.com

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REFERENCE LINKS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd

http://www.pinkfloydz.com/artqmagsydjan2004.htm

‘Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd – Dark Globe.’ – Justin Palacios

‘Pink Floyd – Pigs Might Fly.’ – Mark Blake

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2011/sep/11/john-esam-obituary

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hollingshead

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/hollings.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Henderson_(psychiatrist)

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/syd-barretts-sister-shares-memories-328475

http://www.pink-floyd.org/barrett/Rosemary.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/syd-barretts-inner-visions-962512.html

http://www.sydbarrett.com/links/BrainDamage_August09.pdf

http://www.neptunepinkfloyd.co.uk/index.php/news/news-archives/44-news-archive-2006/232-syd-barretts-former-house-for-sale

http://www.angelfire.com/wv/breastmilky/artsyd002.html

https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/pink-floyd/bio/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rabbit_(song)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_the_Walrus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Fields_Forever

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out

** Please feel free to contact me with any info/questions/comments regarding this article, or indeed anything else:

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