Marcelo Paulo de Souza is a Brazilian Pink Floyd collector and aficionado who has lived in London for over 30 years. Our thanks to Marcelo for kindly supplying the following chat with author Rob Chapman.

During The Madcap's Lasting Laugh, the eight-day celebration of Syd Barrett's life at The Piper in St Leonards-on-Sea, I had the chance to speak with Rob Chapman, the author of Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head, widely considered the definitive biography of Syd, and of Psychedelia and Other Colours, his acclaimed history of psychedelia and a Guardian, Mojo and Rough Trade Book of the Year. We talked outside the venue on Sunday 5 July, the day after his talk Syd's Last Stand, where he was interviewed on stage by Tony Higgins. I wrote about the festival and the unveiling of Syd's famous floorboards in my earlier feature for Brain Damage; this is the second article from that weekend.

This was the third time I have met Rob. The first was at the premiere of Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, the documentary about Syd. The second was at a talk and book signing organised by the Walthamstow Rock ‘n' Roll Book Club, practically around the corner from my house, where he spoke about Unsung Unsaid and signed my copies of his Syd biography and the lyrics book. On both occasions he was welcoming and always ready to talk.

A lifetime of thinking

I opened by repeating something many fans believe: that his book is considered the best because he spent ten years researching it. Rob corrected me, and his answer was better than the legend. He wrote the Mojo obituary when Syd died in 2006, and shortly after that he got a contract through Faber to write the book, which he submitted in 2009. So the research took about two years. But then he reached for a famous story about Picasso. Someone once told Picasso that a child of five could have made one of his works in five minutes. Picasso answered that it took him a lifetime to do it in five minutes. It is the same with the book, Rob told me: a lifetime of thinking and evaluating went into it before the research even began. "It took me 30 years and 2 years."

Those thirty years began one spring evening in 1967, when Rob was twelve, sitting on a wall with a friend who had a transistor radio. The friend played him a song from Radio Caroline and said: they're called the Pink Floyd, and they're going to be famous. The song was "Arnold Layne". Rob loved the name Pink Floyd, but he admitted something funny: at the time, he could not remember whether it was "Arnold Layne" by Pink Floyd or "Pink Floyd" by Arnold Layne. He could easily imagine a man called Pink Floyd. What he loved was the strangeness of it. Nobody made records called "Arnold Layne". He placed it alongside the great character songs of that period, like "I'm a Boy" and "Happy Jack" by The Who, or "Matthew and Son" by Cat Stevens: odd, quirky characters living inside pop songs. And at the time, he reminded me, nobody knew what it would lead to. It was just this one-off record.

Deciphering Syd with David Gilmour

Rob also wrote the introduction to The Lyrics of Syd Barrett, the official book of Syd's collected lyrics published by Omnibus Press. When the publisher approached him, David Gilmour was hesitating about whether to get involved. They spoke on the phone, and Rob found himself telling David: you were there and I wasn't, this needs your input. Gilmour agreed, and the two spent most of the summer of 2020, the first lockdown year, working together by email and the occasional phone call.

Gilmour went to remarkable lengths. Using Pro Tools, he isolated Syd's vocal tracks from the original recordings and sent the sound files to Rob, and together they tried to work out, line by line, what Syd was actually singing. They usually came to an agreement. But there was one line they could never solve, in the song "No Man's Land". Even listening closely to the isolated vocal, they could never work out what Syd was singing.

I love that detail. After all the books, all the research and all the technology, there is still one line where Syd keeps his secret.

The night before our conversation, Rob had been on stage for Syd's Last Stand, in discussion with Tony Higgins. He told me he can't be pinned down to regular Q&As anymore; no more "tell me, Rob, how did you first get into Pink Floyd". These days he takes "the scenic route", and Tony let him talk about whatever he wanted. He laughed about the questions collectors ask, like what exact month the floorboards were painted. "I don't know and I don't care." After thirty years of thinking and writing about Syd, Rob has earned the right to talk about him in his own way.

Waiting for Godot for rock casualties

Rob's most recent book is something different: a novel called Unsung Unsaid: Syd and Nick in Absentia. The idea came from a coincidence he noticed. Syd Barrett and Nick Drake both went into a recording studio for the last time within a month of each other in 1974: Nick in July, Syd in August. As far as anyone knows, they never met. So Rob imagined that they did. He pictured them meeting in a café, and from that one scene grew a whole series of imagined encounters and side stories.

Publishers would not touch it, so he published it himself. With no reviews anywhere, it has sold around 850 copies, which for a self- published book is remarkable. Rob was not surprised. When he wrote it, he told me, he knew it would find its tribe. There was a lot of goodwill towards the book too: both the Mick Rock estate and the Keith Morris estate gave permission for the cover photo.

When I suggested that one day we might see a film based on it, he did not dismiss the idea at all. He thinks it would make a cracking film, and not the usual biopic, because it catches both men after fame. Publishers always ask him to sum up a book in one line, he said, and he always struggles. But for this one he has an answer: "Waiting for Godot for rock casualties."*

Unsung Unsaid is available on Amazon as a paperback or eBook through Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

We said our goodbyes outside The Piper, with the floorboards from Syd's flat upstairs and Hastings Pier, where Syd played his last gig with Pink Floyd, across the road. Rob Chapman has spent a lifetime thinking about Syd Barrett. On the evidence of our conversation, he is not finished yet.

More about Rob Chapman and all his books can be found on his website, rob-chapman.com.

* Waiting for Godot is a famous play from the 1950s by Samuel Beckett, in which two men spend the whole play waiting for someone who never arrives.