Iggy Rose was one of Syd Barrett's girlfriends in 1969. She is most famous for being the model on the Syd Barrett album: 'The Madcap Laughs'. Nicknamed Iggy the Eskimo, it was rumoured she was part Inuit.

One day, in 1969, she disappeared out of Syd's life and was not heard of ever since.

Almost four decades later, the Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit started to mess with things. Its five years mission: to find Iggy and bring her back to the spotlights. And guess what, with some invaluable help from many, many friends... we did...

Beginning 2017 Iggy Rose decided to leave social media. She died peacefully on the 13th of December 2017, just before her seventieth birthday. Wishing you good luck, Iggy, wherever you are.

Iggy Rose 1947 - 2017: Eskimos and Unicorns.

Shine on You crazy Diamond

Review and comparison of the 2001 documentary ‘The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story’ and the 2023 film ‘Have You Got It Yet?’

Beware: this is a pretty long article and not always written in a coherent way. Some pictures are fanart products.

2001: The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story

‘The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story’ is a praised 2001 documentary made by John Edginton (Otmoor Productions) for BBC Omnibus. In true Pink Floyd tradition, it has been issued several times. The Church has it in three different releases, culminating in a 2-DVD set with lots of extras. As usual, we never watched those, so we haven’t gotten a clue what secrets are hidden in there.

Starting with — how original — Shine On You Crazy Diamond, we see Syd performing in slow motion, wearing his favourite Freddy Krueger shirt. Roger Waters acknowledges the song is ‘absolutely about him’ and Nick Mason gives a short account of the legendary 1975 Wish You Were Here encounter.

Cambridge

Over at Cambridge, in black and white, with the first few notes of King Bee. David Gilmour admits that a lot of people, himself included, were a bit jealous of the ‘bright light’ Barrett was in those days. Libby Gausden says ‘Syd the Beat’ wore very tight jeans, giving the documentary a sudden (and probably unwanted) Rutles vibe.

London

In London, Syd joins his old friends Roger Waters and Bob Klose, who are already in a band. Mike Leonard will become their landlord, light wizard and keyboard player for a while. Pink Floyd records Lucy Leave, and Bob Klose leaves the band shortly after that. There simply is no future for an R&B band.

The Pink Floyd join the London Underground clubs and find managers in Peter Jenner and Andrew King. They contact Joe Boyd, and that leads to the recording of Arnold Layne and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

LSD

LSD was seen as a quasi-religious method to change the world and end the Vietnam War, so we are told, but it merely changed Syd’s mind and behaviour. David Gilmour: “Syd was a changed person.”

Rick Wright remembers Syd’s lost weekend: “Something happened to Syd. (…) He took too much and was gone. He was still looking the same, but he was somewhere else.”

Getting Syd to play on stage is becoming difficult. It doesn’t make him popular with the gang. Nick Mason: “Shall I roll with laughter or shall I try to kill him?”

The English way to deal with the Syd situation is to ignore it until it leads to the point where they ignore picking him up.

Wetherby Mansions

Duggie Fields, who shared a flat with Syd, remembers how Barrett painted the floor in two different colours, but he actually painted himself in. There is no word about Iggy, though, who was there with him that day.

Sessions

Jerry Shirley remembers that Syd sometimes faked his eccentric nuttiness when he didn’t want to cope with reality. This is also a theory Rosemary Breen has put forward. She has claimed that Syd was actually just joking, while people around him were thinking he was bonkers.

Procrastination

Duggie Fields has a kind of philosophical explanation of Syd’s incapability of doing anything — laying in bed all day long.

While he lay there, he had the possibility of doing anything in the world that he chose. But the minute he made a choice, he was limiting his possibilities, so he lay there as long as he could.

Stars

Syd, after his failed solo career, returns to Cambridge, where he joins the band Stars with Twink and Jack Monk: “You were witnessing the breakdown of someone in performance.”

1975: Wish You Were Here

The spectre of Syd, as David Gilmour calls it, haunts Pink Floyd for years, culminating in Wish You Were Here.

The last four or five minutes of the documentary are used to describe Syd’s visit(s) at Abbey Road in 1975 (without specifying a date). Wright remembers Syd jumping up and down, brushing his teeth, which has been largely debunked by Nick Sedgwick’s testimony, noted down by Mark Blake. (Nick Sedgwick describing Syd's visit at: Roger is always right)

Conclusion

This is an excellent documentary, catch it while you can.

2023: Have You Got It Yet?

The story of how Storm Thorgerson’s and Roddy Bogawa’s documentary came into place can be read in an earlier post: Incarceration of a Flower Child. Let’s just say it took an awful long time to see the finished product. We can only guess if Pink Floyd, the company, is to blame for that. They like to have their hands in the till. The movie made a world tour in cinemas around the globe, meaning that it mainly toured Great Britain and the USA.

While initial reviews were exhilarating and enthusiastic, later comments toned down a bit, as we shall see.

Opal

The film opens with a quote from Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street. This novel is about a rock star who leaves his band and escapes to an unfurnished flat, where he takes a drug that incapacitates his speech.

While surreal scenes play in his brain, people keep harassing him. Fans knock on his door; record label executives want him to release a ‘lost’ album.

Last but not least, he has a girlfriend named Opel. Sounds familiar, huh?

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

The quote from the Don DeLillo novel segues into a Syd Barrett interview where he says that he will take a break from pop music in order to do some more painting.

Before someone can say Several Species Of Small Furry Animals (etc…) the mourning tones of Shine On You Crazy Diamond start. A Storm Thorgerson Mister Screen movie starts, and these snippets will intersect the documentary at regular intervals. Not all viewers like this, but it needs to be said that this film was initially Thorgerson’s baby.

Cut to an interview with Roger Waters, dating from over a decade ago. All conversations from Storm with the old Cambridge mafia date (obviously) from before his death in 2013.

A Syd

Peter Jenner remembers that there was almost religious acid-taking in the 1960s and that Syd was one of the saints of that underground cult. ”Syd was the perfect god, and gods must be killed and eaten,” adds Peter Whitehead. “But then you must be reborn.”

That’s a lot of pseudo-philosophical cackle even before the documentary has well started. To add insult to injury, we have a glimpse of a boy carrying an orange, a plum, and a box of matches just before disappearing through a magical door, guarded by some dogs. Welcome to cuckooland.

Cambridge

We teleport to Cambridge, where it all started. We learn that Roger Keith is nicknamed Syd after a local jazz musician. That story may or may not be exactly true, as there is anecdotal evidence that Syd’s nickname came from his love for Carry On actor Sid James. But that is anorak territory and not fit for the average viewer.

Old Cambridge friends remember Syd as a talented, flamboyant, and sympathetic youngster. Syd joins Geoff Mott & The Mottoes and is part of the ‘crowd’. He already looks like he is going to go places and is the star of the gang. There is not a word about the drugs and sex experiments in the group. These grandmas and grandpas don’t want their grandchildren to know how groovy they were, swallowing pills, smoking dope, and having a regular dose of ummagumma.

London Lodgers

In 1964, Syd goes to London, where he joins his old buddy Roger Waters. He also meets Nick Mason and Rick Wright. For a while, they are Leonard’s Lodgers. Syd has to choose between a career as a painter or as a rock musician. The money is simply too good, and he takes a sabbatical from the academy.

The counterculture blossoms in 1966 with lots of drugs. Syd dives willingly into that world and comes up with Interstellar Overdrive, a track that Pete Townshend describes as psychedelic heavy metal.

LSD

David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist for fuck’s sake, explains that LSD stimulates a specific serotonin receptor in the brain, interrupting the traditional way in which the brain is organised.

In other words, Syd’s brain may have been categorically miswired after one trip too many.

Psychiatrist Mark Collins puts it this way: “The right brain has got nothing left, and the left brain has got nothing right.”

Change Returns Success

Pink Floyd makes it big with Arnold Layne, See Emily Play and The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. That is the moment when Syd realises he doesn’t want to be a pop star any more. Unfortunately, he doesn’t ventilate his feelings to the rest of the band and retreats into an impregnable inner space.

The American tour, as we all know, is disastrous, and Syd becomes a problem — a very big problem.

Mad Jock and Sue

The rumour that Syd was spiked with LSD every morning is once again denied by Sue Kingsford. As Storm puts it, it is quite ‘good’ if your hero is flawed by someone else rather than by himself.

Pink Floyd and Syd break up, and Barrett begins a solo career. Po (Aubrey Powell) tells the story of how Storm and Mick Rock go to Syd’s place to take some pictures (a thing that has been minimised by Storm for ages). Mick Rock mentions Iggy, ‘who was never really his girlfriend, because these were hippie times’.

Storm erroneously believes she was an Eskimo ‘who liked to run around naked’. So far for research. Iggy occasionally liked to stroll in the altogether (but she wasn't an Eskimo).

Gala Pinion

Gala gets into Syd’s life. She testifies how he suddenly buys canvasses, pots of paint, and brushes. Syd locks himself up and paints day and night, destroying or overpainting the works of the day before. They move to Cambridge, where they live in a cellar.

There is the tomato soup incident, the engagement is stopped, and Syd returns to London.

Poor Syd

There is no such thing as poor Syd claims Mick Rock, saying that he earned millions of pounds. But, as some people have suggested, Roger probably never cashed the checks that were destined for Syd. His family, helped by Pink Floyd, had to run after the money.

Wishing (if I had a photograph of you)

Half an hour before the end of the documentary, we get to the weird encounter during the Shine On You Crazy Diamond sessions. There is no precise date, nor is the marriage of David Gilmour mentioned. We will get to that a bit later.

During the occasion, Phil Taylor takes some pictures, and these haven’t been shown before. Syd is in a white Fred Perry shirt, sitting next to Roger Waters, who plays an acoustic guitar. Another shot shows Syd with the Martin D-35, but he never played it, apparently.

London – Cambridge – London – Cambridge

Syd disappears completely from the radar. Around 1981, he is practically bankrupt. He returns to Cambridge, where he will stay for the rest of his life.

There is a huge In Memoriam section, at the end of the documentary, remembering those people who aren’t here any more: Duggie, Nigel, John, Hoppy, Peter, Anthony, Iggy, Mick, Luke, Storm, Rick, and, of course, Syd. Our old pal Mick Brown isn’t on the list, but he always distanced himself from those ‘old toffs stuck in a lava lamp’ anyway.

Interlude

I’m going to kick in an open door by saying that although there is a two-decade gap between both documentaries, there isn’t that much difference. Although biographers and documentary makers claim to have created the ultimate Barrett story, there is the black hole that is Barrett’s London life between the mid-seventies and the early eighties. And then there are the Cambridge days when Syd’s privacy, now Roger Keith's, was better protected than the 13th chapter of the Necronomicon. The Barrett family was pretty protective of their brother and had all the right to be that way.

There are some scarce anecdotes that are not always in ‘Have You Got It Yet?’ In 1977, Barrett invited Gala Pinion to his apartment for some tea. She accepted but fled when he insulted her in a very rude way.

Barrett was no stranger to the office, whatever the office was. In 1980, he entered Blackhill and, just like in 1975, wasn’t recognised at first. Syd had an administrative problem with his passport and wanted Peter Jenner to solve it. The question is what he was planning to do with a passport anyway, other than undertake a pilgrimage to an Oseira monastery. There have also been rumours that Barrett called the Pink Floyd ‘office’ in later days to get rid of unwanted visitors, knocking at his door all the time.

Funny Farm

Barrett wasn’t in great shape when he returned to Cambridge, neither physically nor mentally. His mother was afraid of his sudden aggressive outbursts, and it was decided to separate him from her.

On one occasion, Barrett was transported by the police to Fulbourn Hospital, where he was released after some hours. There was nothing they could do for him. So they returned him to his mother.

A stay in the therapeutic Christian community of Greenwoods took a lot longer. According to different sources, he resided there between one year and 18 months. This is Pink Floyd territory where no single witness agrees on the version of another one. People claim he left the centre one day in 1984, walking the 50-mile (80 km) distance to home.

Kid's Play

In December 2006, the Mail on Sunday ran a story how Barrett frightened the neighbours’ kid by having frequent anger attacks. While this anecdote made it into Mark Blake’s acclaimed Pink Floyd biography, another biographer didn’t ‘want to give this individual a scintilla of publicity’. Weird, because that author added Radha’s story in his biography, about an enchanting encounter between a young girl, who allegedly lived a few houses away, and her friendly, gardening, neighbour Roger. Radharani’s existence has been highly controversial since 2007. (More about her at: Making it clear...)

Various Oddments

But let us go back to ‘Have You Got It Yet?’ What initially made the fans happy are the few new pictures that can be seen in the movie, especially those from 1975.

These pictures create a problem, discussed by several anoraks on the World Wide Wicked Web.

Up until now, we had two pictures of Syd during the Wish You Were Here sessions. The first has Syd in a white polo shirt. It can be found in Nick Mason’s memoirs (2004) and has been dated June 5, 1975 (page 211 in the hardcover version).

A second picture appeared 13 years later when Pink Floyd promoted the Their Mortal Remains exhibition. It shows Syd in a striped shirt, allegedly taken on the 7th of July 1975, coincidentally (or not?) the day that David Gilmour got married.

Calendar Boy

The 'Have You Got It Yet?' documentary doesn’t say when Syd visited the Abbey Road studios, nor does it say that he visited the studio at least twice.The above calendar explains why there was a month between both visits: Pink Floyd were on tour in America. Probably the band may have informed Syd that they were leaving for the States the day after his visit.

A month later the Floyd had an average gig at Knebworth Park, Stevenage, England. Ginger Gilmour claims this was due to jet-lag, and so does biographer Mark Blake.

Road manager Phil Taylor took some pictures of Syd in a white Fred Perry t-shirt, shown for the very first time in the documentary. His testimony allows us to make an educated guess, as several Sydiots have pointed out.

Marc-Olivier Becks:

In the documentary, Phil Taylor says he took the pictures with a camera that the band gave him after the Knebworth gig, which happened on July 5, 1975. So, the picture must have been taken early in July, not in June.

Rarepinkfloyd:

What Phil Taylor reveals in the documentary is very precise: the pictures he took were with the camera that the band offered him at the end of the Knebworth gig (the last date of the 1975 tour). So, it should be after July 5.

It appears that Taylor’s pictures were taken on July 7, 1975. This means that the 'Mortal Remains' picture of Syd in a striped t-shirt is not from that day. However, the picture that is dated June 5, 1975, in Mason’s biography, shows Syd in a white polo.

The logical conclusion is that the dates need to be swapped. The striped shirt picture is from the 5th of June, and the white Fred Perry one is from the 7th of July 1975, on Gilmour’s marriage day, a week after the North American tour. If you look close at the picture, you can see several bottles in the background, perhaps because they all have been celebrating.

Weird Scenes

But it gets weirder. According to Phil Taylor, ‘it took a while before Roger or David realised this was Syd’. This makes no sense at all because the band met him a month earlier, before the American tour.

Ginger Gilmour's description of the event, in her book 'Memoirs Of The Bright Side Of The Moon', does not really clarify the situation. Her second autobiography, 'Behind The Wall', has the following:

There is a huge sofa in front of the mixing desk in that EMI recording room. I don’t think any of them were completely certain who was sitting there until David confirmed it. David looked and his face clouded over with the reality of what he saw. Under his breath, he said, “It's Syd.” The atmosphere in the room went silent as they digested the moment. Roger, especially, who is quoted to have had many mixed emotions for the past came flooding back.

Again, this makes no sense if they met him the month before. In our Shady Diamond article, we wrote:

For one reason or another, Pink Floyd members (and other witnesses) amalgamated the different Barrett appearances into one quasi-mythical event.

Unfortunately, this documentary does the same. It doesn’t mention that Syd ‘came two or three days’, as David Gilmour said, and makes this one big, muddled, event out of it.

Unless, of course, the meeting on the 5th of June never took place and has to be situated somewhere in July, but that contradicts Mason’s account (who is known as the archivist of the band).

Hats off to Harper

Roy Harper was at the Knebworth festival, joining the band for Have A Cigar and has an even weirder story to tell, as noted down by Watkinson & Anderson:

According to Harper, who was also managed by Blackhill, a set of photographs were taken earlier in the day when a Floyd-versus-Blackhill cricket match was held in the festival grounds. Harper: "When the snaps were passed round at Abbey Road a week later, somebody said: 'My God, that's Syd!' We all crowded round to have a look and I'm absolutely certain it was Syd. There was this bald overweight figure actually standing next to me in one of the photos yet no one could remember seeing him there at the time."

This anecdote, however, has been vehemently denied by Gilmour and as far as I can remember hasn't been repeated in other biographies.

Pictures

Here are the Barrett WYWH pictures that made it into the documentary.

To add insult to injury, it has been rumoured that other pictures of this event exist. These will probably be saved for yet another overpriced limited set somewhere in the future.

Ladies Night

Fans were exhilarated when they found out that two of Syd’s girlfriends, who had been silent for decades, would have their say in the documentary.

As a matter of fact, news was already given to us with the first ‘Have You Got It Yet?’ trailer, published in 2013, when the project was still named ‘Wouldn’t You Miss Me?’ (a filmic investigation by Storm Thorgerson). Yes, that is 2013, a full decade before the product was finally released. (This trailer can be seen in our previous HYGIY episode: Incarceration of a Flower Child.)

Gaylor ‘Gala’ Pinion arrives at about 7:50 in the trailer. “He wasn’t normal at all," she jokingly adds. A minute later, Lindsay Corner joins the gang of talking heads, claiming that Syd smoked too much.

Fans were thrilled because, up until then, these two people had stayed in the shadows, refusing to comment on their relationship with Syd. It was even impossible to get a fairly recent picture of them, unless you were a part of the special few high-ranking Syd investigators, and agreed to a non-disclosure contract, signed at midnight, in virgin’s blood at a cemetery of your choice, under a full moon.

But all that changed in the last decade, and pictures of Gala and Lindsay are now quite common to find.

Obviously, it is very nice to see them in the documentary, but those fans who thought they were going to reveal the answer to life, the universe, and Syd Barrett will be a little disappointed.

There is not a lot to say about Syd that we don’t already know, and that hasn’t been revealed in the biographies out there. Other friends who talk dearly about him are Jenny and Libby. Iggy was asked for an interview as well, at Libby’s place, but she freaked out at the last minute, plagued by one of her many phobia.

He [Storm, FA] wanted to do it and was setting it up in London. Anyway, my lovely Libby offered her beautiful home for me to be filmed and interviewed. I think Rupert [Truman, FA] was going to do the interview with a script.

Someone whom I would have liked to see is the elusive Dominique, but alas, she doesn’t want to talk about what happened during her été d'amour. What is her right, obviously.

Conclusion

HYGIY is a pretty decent documentary about someone who wanted to disappear through an infinity of pleasure. Many Sydiots want to know more about Syd because he was an enigma. But because he was an enigma, there is not a lot we can say about him. And maybe that is for the best, although not all Barrett scholars agree. Hallucalation, for instance, accuses the makers of being 'lacklustre', despite the 10-year ingestion of the project:

[The] Director (...) told me on Facebook that he wasn't even aware of [Syd's tap-dancing home movie, FA] when I asked why it wasn't included. Footage research was lacklustre to say the least - there's still plenty of unseen Floyd prime silent footage from UFO club in Blu-Ray like quality out there, none of it are in the film. (Source: Hallucalation on Steve Hoffman Music Forums.)

StarsCanFrighten agrees:

The Syd Barrett universe is full of so many obsessive, detail-oriented researchers and fans, it was a little disappointing to have someone undertake the project who appeared to be a more casual admirer. Sometimes, those type of documentarians can produce a more unbiased, unvarnished look at their subjects, but I think in this case the lack of detail and research-focus, hurt the end product. (Source: StarsCanFrighten on Steve Hoffman Music Forums.)

I never got the impression that Roddy was that compelled with Syd’s story. Either that, or he just never had a grip on precisely how to tell it. (Source: StarsCanFrighten on Steve Hoffman Music Forums.)

It is unfortunate that Pink Floyd Ltd never listens to the fans, that their archivist team sucks and that they deliberately change history when there is recycled product to promote. There may have been some diplomatic rope dancing to finish this movie after all. Especially when one finds out that Paul Loasby is an executive producer.

We, obsessive fans, will never be satisfied, but frankly, this is an excellent movie. Perhaps it is time to leave the man alone and grant him the peace of mind he always wanted. Despite the internal Pink Floyds wars, there is one constant they all agree on. As long as there are £££ (or $$$ or €€€) signs at the horizon, they will produce.

Guest List

For those who kick on those things, here is a list of the talking heads in both documentaries. It shows that both have an exclusive list of guests. How many of these people do you know?
   

The Church wishes to thank: Antonio Jesùs Reyes, Eleonora Siatoni, Hallucalation, Marc-Olivier Becks, Rarepinkfloyd, Roddy Bogawa, Stanislav V. Grigorev, StarsCanFrighten.

Sources (other than the above mentioned links):
Blake, Mark: Pigs Might Fly, Aurum Press Limited, London, 2013.
Chapman, Rob: A Very Irregular Head, Faber and Faber, London, 2010.
Chapman, Rob: Rob Chapman answers your questions, private publication, 2010, p. 7.
Gilmour, Ginger: Behind The Wall, New Haven Publishers LTD, 2023, Chapter 12.
Gilmour, Ginger: Memoirs of the Bright Side of the Moon, Angelscript International, 2015, p. 103-104.
Mason, Nick: Inside Out: A personal history of Pink Floyd, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2004, p. 211.
Palacios, Julian: Darker Globe: Uncut and Unedited, private publication, 2021, p. 983, 987.
Parker, David: Random Precision, Cherry Red Books, London, 2001, p. 7-8.
Povey, Glenn: The Complete Pink Floyd, The Ultimate Reference, Stirling, New York, 2016, p. 239-243.
Watkinson, Mike & Anderson, Pete: Crazy Diamond, Omnibus Press, London, 1993, p. 120.

Fanart images by Antonio Jesùs Reyes, Black123, Felix Atagong, Julie Salvatore, Stanislav (and a couple of unknowns).

Some links for the Sydiots out there:
Several Syd appearances in: Shady Diamond.
The HYGIY story in: Incarceration of a Flower Child.
Nick Sedgwick about Syd Barrett: Roger is always right.