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DOWN MEMORY LAYNE I enjoyed reading BP Perry’s candid piece

From page 5 of Classic Rock Magazine November 2006

Cover of November 2006 issue.

on The Wall and Roger Waters (issue 97) with a wry sense of identification! All that stuff about teenage angst and artistic pretensions was spot on.

It‘s interesting, however, how people get

different impressions of our rock heroes. Personally, my own take on Waters was a little different. To me, Roger seemed the archetypal English grammar schoolboy. I gained my first inklings from Melody Maker interviews in the early 70s. He then seemed a typical North London socialist type, munching crumpets and drinking tea, yet railing at the injustices of the world. Years before Waters became the Floyd’s éminence grise , I felt he had inherited that English imagination from Syd Barrett that so typifies the spirit of the band.

Take a neglected track like Cirrus Minor , written by Waters. There you can see how he ‘took off’, as it were, where Syd ‘left off’. The sound of English birdsong slowly transfiguring into the furthest stellar regions (no doubt courtesy of an English radio telescope like Jodrell Bank). Grantchester Meadows and Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun both have that sense of understated drama.

Thanks too to Mick Wall for a very nice, cliche-free article on Syd Barrett. It only increased my fondness for the humanity of the man, showing his vulnerability. God bless him and his family.

John Roberts, former Syd Appreciation Society area secretary (!) and contributor of artwork to Syd fanzine Terrapin (1974-75), Wakefield