(((O))) Review: Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd

“Fame requires every kind of excess.
I mean true fame.
A devouring neon.
Long journeys across grey space.
Danger, the edge of every void.
Understand the man who must inhabit
these extreme regions.
Even if half-mad, he is absorbed into the 
public’s total madness.
Even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell,
a secret genius of survival, he is sure
to be destroyed by the public’s contempt
for survivors.”

The quote from Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street, which is introduced by narration from Jason Isaacs, and throughout the entire structure of the documentary, give viewers an insight that once you’ve achieved success, you go into a deep, mental state and be destroyed from your own personal state. There are artists who go through the success they had, but went down the rabbit hole. From Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators, Skip Spence of Moby Grape, and of course, the founder of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett.

Syd’s legacy has achieved cult status. He had released two solo albums between 1969 (The Madcap Laughs) and 1970 (Barrett) after he was let go from the Floyd in April of 1968 and following the band’s 1967 debut, the previous year with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Why do you think that bands and artists like Robyn Hitchcock, Graham Coxon, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, and Soft Machine’s Kevin Ayers who would later work with Syd on a song called ‘Religious Experience (Singing a Song in the Morning)’ during the sessions for his 1969 solo debut, Joy of a Toy.

Syd’s legacy remains a mystery. This incredible documentary, co-directed by Roddy Bogawa and the late, great Storm Thorgerson called Have You Got It Yet: The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, gives us an insight of who Roger Keith Barrett was. From his Cambridge roots, getting the nick name Syd from his friends at school, losing his dad who was a pathologist and avid botanist from cancer, his love of painting, Syd had a real taste on what he wanted to, and the direction he wanted to go in when he bought his first futurama.

This isn’t the first time that there has been a documentary about Syd Barrett. The first one was done for the BBC series Omnibus, 23 years ago entitled Syd Barrett: Crazy Diamond, directed by John Edginton, and it included an interview with the “fifth” member of the Floyd, Bob Klose and Light show pioneer Mike Leonard in which Roger Waters described as Leonard’s Lodgers at his place.

Watching this documentary, was like going through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass to get an understanding of who Barrett really was. “He was one of the most emotionally and intellectually curious people that I’ve ever met”. Roger is spot-on about Barrett as the band went through various names; The Architectural Abdabs and The Tea Set. Syd would later name the band Pink Floyd after two blues artists that he admired: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

Going from an R&B band into an improvisational realm of psychedelic and early beginnings of progressive rock music, the Floyd changed everything. The doc also included rare photos of Syd during his childhood years, his paintings, art school, clubs, and during his time with the Floyd. For Bogowa and Thorgerson, they were very much like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, finding more pieces of the puzzle about Barrett’s legacy.

Storm handles the Q&A during the interviews he’s done from Waters, Gilmour, Mason, Peter Wynne-Wilson, Peter Jenner, Andrew King, his girlfriends, Duggie Fields, filmmaker Peter Whitehead, and Cedric Bixler-Zavala to name a few. When you read his lyrics from his time with the Floyd, he had that English sense of as Nick Laird-Clowes and Whitehead would describe it as Edwardian musicals, Vaudeville, and an English romantic of the 19th century.

He wasn’t singing about flowers in your hair, or singing about the hippie culture, Syd grew up reading those books as a child to an adult during the psychedelic scene. Whether it was the I Ching (Book of Changes), Lewis Carroll or Kenneth Grahame, Barrett knew the source materials very well. He broke the rules and didn’t give a shit what people thought about it.

I mean a song like ‘Bike’ its quite catchy. Almost very sing-along like to its rhyme-scheme before it goes into a chaotic end. But once we get into ‘Vegetable Man’, ‘Apples and Oranges’, and the crazed ‘Scream thy Last Scream’ which those two (‘Scream they last Scream’ and ‘Vegetable Man’) songs I’ve mentioned that had been previously bootlegged and featured in the first volume of The Early Years box set (1965-1967 Cambridge St/ation), gives us an insight the mental breakdown of Barrett’s decline. The ending lyric on ‘Jugband Blues’ says it all. “And the sea isn’t green / And I love the queen / And what is exactly is a dream / And what exactly is a joke?” The success and stardom were beginning to wear on his psyche.

The film does give us an insight that Bogawa and Thorgerson had brought upon the madcap genius. While Bogawa had done a documentary on Storm back in 2011 entitled Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis, followed by Anton Corbijn’s 2022 doc on the designing duo of Storm and Po entitled Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis, Have You Got It Yet is quite an adventure.

While I wished they had covered a little bit more during the Post-Barrett years of the Floyd during the time when they were an underground band when Gilmour joined before achieving superstardom with their groundbreaking 1973 opus Dark Side of the Moon, the Floyd never forgotten Syd.

When Barrett died in 2006 due to pancreatic cancer, it marked the end of an era. But it gives the younger generation to discover the world of what Barrett had done. From his run with the Floyd, a solo artist, painter, he was everything. The opening lines from the first part of ‘Shine On you Crazy Diamond’ from Wish You Were Here is absolutely right.

“Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom,
Blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter,
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!”