In memory of Syd Barrett

The trauma of Syd Barrett ran through the entire saga of Pink Floyd, leaving clear traces - from the whole of "The Darks Side Of The Moon" to the epic suite "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" - but also lesser-known testimonies that stayed hidden for a long time. One of these is "Incarceration Of A Flower Child". The gradual exit from the scene of the band's first leader, founder and initial creative driving force, and his painful decline, marked by an outsized talent and irreparable personal fragility, left a deep mark on his bandmates, particularly on Roger Waters, who in 1968 - the year of Barrett's departure - wrote in one sitting a song inspired precisely by that fall, titled, fittingly, "Incarceration Of A Flower Child". A deeply intimate and personal lyric, set to a melody quite far removed from the band's sonic coordinates at the time. Perhaps for that very reason the song was never recorded by Pink Floyd, ending up instead among Waters' archive material for decades.

It was Marianne Faithfull who brought it back to light after more than thirty years. The initiative came from the British singer-songwriter herself: a phone call to her friend Roger Waters, a request to hear any unreleased material, and the subsequent selection of a song that the Pink Floyd leader felt suited her voice and interpretive sensibility. The result was the inclusion of "Incarceration Of A Flower Child" on "Vagabond Ways", an album released in 1999, where the song found a coherent place and a new identity. A demo version was later made available on the reissue of the record, offering a perspective closer to Waters' original idea, who thus found in Marianne the voice that could finally convey the aching intimacy of those verses and that personal story.

The bond between the two didn't end there. After the death of Marianne Faithfull on 30 January at the age of 78, Roger Waters chose to remember her publicly with words and music. In a message shared on social media, he wrote: "My beloved friend Marianne Faithfull has left this mortal life, we loved her," also recalling their last meeting: "I had lunch with her and her grandson Oscar last summer. They were working on her new song, 'Love is'. Now it's finished. Oscar sent it to me yesterday. It's beautiful. Perfect final words for a great woman."

In her tribute, Waters paired personal memories with a posthumous track by the singer, "Love Is," included on the EP "Burning Moonlight." The song, made together with her grandson Oscar Dunbar and enriched by the violin of her granddaughter Eliza, is described as a "tender reflection on the mystery of love." Dunbar himself underlined the emotional value of the track: "'Love Is' is like a bond with my grandmother, one I'll treasure forever, and every time I listen to it, I feel transported back in time, to be with her."

From the unreleased track written in the shadow of Syd Barrett's crisis to the memory entrusted to a posthumous song, the relationship between Roger Waters and Marianne Faithfull thus developed over the years along a path dotted with artistic exchanges and shared memories.

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01/05/2026