From Robyn on Patreon in 2026
Lately, I’ve been diving back into the primal ocean of Syd Barrett songs. They’re so encoded in my DNA that at times they feel like my own compositions: but, if anything, the reverse is true: they wrote me, effectively. And I absorbed every note, nuance and line of the three albums that he recorded (the first with Pink Floyd) before he disappeared into himself in the early 1970s, never to return.
Singing his songs now, I’m forced to confront how much I almost became Syd Barrett even as he vanished. It was spooky in a way, and I still don’t understand it: my search for a musical identity seemed to dovetail with Barrett discarding his handsome, talented Syd persona and becoming Roger, the reclusive former art student. Syd became vacant and I moved in. Or did he move into me?
More likely I was just an impressionable young musician with identity issues who fell into the thrall of a damaged genius, and the rest was projection in my part. Regardless, I still love Barrett’s songs. They gave me something to aim for and miss, but they raised the bar in the process and took me somewhere as a songwriter that I never imagined. They’re part of me now, and here’s how two of them sound when I perform them here in July 2026, twenty years since Barrett himself passed away: