The untimely death of Pink Floyd founder Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett on July 7th, continues to dominate the news. For the first time in thirty years, his sister Rosemary has given an interview to author Tim Willis, which is published in the UK's Sunday Times this morning. It gives many fascinating insights into the truth behind the man, from one of the few people who knew him intimately, and visited or spoke to him on the phone, on a daily basis.

Sunday Times, July 16th 2006

Barrett lived in a small semi-detached house in Cambridge with his mother until her death in 1991 and then remained there alone. “So much of his life was boringly normal,” said Rosemary. “He looked after himself and the house and garden. He went shopping for basics on his bike — always passing the time of day with the local shopkeepers — and he went to DIY stores like B&Q for wood, which he brought home to make things for the house and garden.

“Actually, he was a hopeless handyman, he was always laughing at his attempts, but he enjoyed it. Then there was his cooking. Like everyone who lives on their own, he sometimes found that boring but he became good at curries.

“When Roger was working he liked to listen to jazz tapes. Thelonious Monk, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were his favourites — he always found something new in them — but apart from the early Rolling Stones, he’d lost interest in pop music a long time ago.

“As for a television or radio, he didn’t feel the need to own one because he didn’t want to waste any energy concentrating on it. It’s not that he couldn’t apply his mind. He read very deeply about the history of art and actually wrote an unpublished book about it, which I’m too sad to read at the moment. But he found his own mind so absorbing that he didn’t want to be distracted.

Rosemary expands on his leisure interests, and explained how they'd sometimes go to the seaside, or how he would quite often take the train to London, on his own, to visit major art collections. She explains in the interview how he used his love of flowers, and combined this with his love of painting.

She said: "He would photograph a particular flower and paint a large canvas from the photograph. Then he would make a photographic record of the picture before destroying the canvas. In a way, that was very typical of his approach to life. Once something was over, it was over. He felt no need to revisit it.

“That’s why he avoided contact with journalists and fans. He simply couldn’t understand the interest in something that had happened so long ago and he wasn’t willing to interrupt his own musings for their sake. After a while he and I stopped discussing the times he was bothered. We both knew what we thought and we simply had nothing more to add. It became easiest to pretend those incidents never happened and just blank them out.

“Roger may have been a bit selfish — or rather self-absorbed — but when people called him a recluse they were really only projecting their own disappointment. He knew what they wanted but he wasn’t willing to give it to them."

The over-riding feeling between Rosemary and her brother was clearly love: “I gave it to him and he gave it to me. He was incredibly supportive when our mother died. And in the past week I’ve been surprised to learn how popular he was with the local tradesmen. He was simply a very lovable person.

“He showed his personality in lots of different ways — which some outsiders found confusing — but underneath he was solid as a rock. It may have been a responsibility to look out for him, but it was never a burden.”

The full, fascinating interview can be read through this link.