What is Syd Barrett doing now?
RW: I last saw him about ten years ago. But my mother still lives in Cambridge and I get to hear about him from time to time. He’s not doing very much at all. What happened with Syd was that we were being managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner of Blackhill Enterprises, for whom I still have a very soft spot. When Syd flipped I had this theory that we could go on with Syd still being a member of the group if he could become Brian Wilson and simply be a backroom boy. But Syd had other ideas: he wanted to get in two sax-players and a girl singer. To which we resolutely said no! But Peter and Andrew both thought it couldn’t happen without Syd and stuck with him. Which is how the Pink Floyd came to be managed by Steve O’Rourke. Bryan Morrison was our agent when we were with Blackhill, and Steve O’Rourke was a booker who worked for him, Bryan Morrison wanted to sell the group to NEMS (Brian Epstein’s Company), but we’d never had an official contract with him. So the night before the deal wi
