Bike: for Syd Barrett
In 2015 we developed a proposal in response to a call from Cambridge Live
for a public art commission in tribute to Pink Floyd founding-member Syd Barrett, to be permanently displayed at the Cambridge Corn Exchange.
Our proposal was not adopted but is included on this site as part of our proposal archive
The brief included the advice that:
'The art can take the form of a painting, sculpture or installation but must be able to attach to a brick wall.
Due to Syd’s creative nature it is not appropriate for the art to be either a static stone sculpture or commemorative plaque.
Instead movement and colour should be a key theme.
In order to encapsulate his character and thus the direction of the art, the Barrett family has offered some descriptive words:
He was very bright, funny, quirky and witty. He was an artist, but not just in terms of ‘music’ or ‘paintings’; he used art to explore and relate to his world. Music was sound and colours and patterns to him, not notes on a page. He was child-like and imaginative and liked to push boundaries.
The piece of art needs to represent this and be bright, colourful and full of fun and movement
The main outcomes of the commission are to:
• _capture the creativity and character of Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett allowing audiences attending live concerts at the Corn Exchange who view the art to reflect back on his unique character and his creative work
• _adequately mark the place of Syd’s final live musical appearances and enable audiences to make this connection
• _link Syd Barrett to the city of Cambridge
• _Contextualise Syd as a founding member of Pink Floyd
Our proposal:
The proposed wall mounted artwork takes as its basis one of Barret’s songs, Bike (link to Cambridge etc.)
I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you like, it’s got a basket a bell that rings and things that make it look good
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The installation comprises Syd’s initial S composed from a an arrangement of bicycle bells. At the centre of each of the bells is a letter which read in sequence will form the lyrics of Syd’s famous song ‘Bike’
These will ight up in sequence to pick out the words of the song.
Manually ringing the final bell will activate the sequence.
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The bicycle bell also references Syd’s relationship with Cambridge, a city closely associated with the everyday use of the bicycle
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Light, Language and Rhythm:
Notes on the proposal, by Will Hill
There would seem to be a contradiction in commemorating Syd Barrett’s legacy in a fixed material form, as his work belongs to a particularly vibrant culture of fluid, temporal media. It evokes a time that found its best expression through the mobile forms of music, film, and performance rather than fixed and completed visual works.
Like his own painting, his songs were dynamic things, seldom completely resolved into definitive form: recordings, line-ups, songs were only conditional; often more about the process than fixed outcomes. (Fellow musicians tell of him teaching them a song called ‘Have you got it yet’, which he would deliberately alter each time to prevent them ever learning it.)
It was particularly important therefore that the work should have a kinetic dimension, an inbuilt pattern of variation. This is also an important quality in an interior artwork , which does not offer the same transformations that weather conditions bring to bear upon exterior works. As it becomes increasingly familiar, it should still continue to surprise.
The paradox of designing a fixed installation to embody a sense of the mutable, evoking indeterminacy and the unfinished, led us to think of two qualities that allow change in fixed objects: transparency and the variable play of light.
These qualities affirm that things can yield unexpected meanings when viewed from different angles and in different conditions of light, and that a ‘very irregular head’ (one of the terms used to described Barrett’s unique viewpoint) may access unexpected perspectives on the familiar.
Like sound and light, language is a fluid medium, capable of different meanings when seen in different contexts and broken into different patterns. Barrett’s work uses shifting structures of rhyme and metre, often fragmented, expanded and contracted in very inventive and painterly ways.
His work has always reflected a playful enjoyment of odd turns of language, unexpected rhythmic collisions of words, and vivid, non-linear thinking. Every song is characterised by its own quirky internal logic.
The song ‘Bike’ suggests particularly strong references to Cambridge, a city where bicycles have defined people's movement and social activity for a century or more. Again, values and meanings are fluid, the bike is not owned: “I’d give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it”
It is a song of three verses, each about quite different objects and possessions, given a linking context by a chorus that presents these to an un-named other who ‘fits in with my world’. From an outwardly joyful and celebratory tone it ends with a descent into atonality and musique concrete, as the mechanical rhythms of clockwork instruments overpower the song’s structure. Successively whimsical and terrifying, it defines its world and then un-makes it.
The proposed sculptural installation will incorporate words of each verse of the song, using translucent and transparent surfaces, and sequenced lighting. The shifting patterns of light will then illuminate and obscure different parts of the text in complex and random sequences, to reveal and obscure different facets of the lyric, but also to reduce it to a pure typographic abstraction, (referencing the song’s final phase of dissonance and atonality).
The work is designed to evoke surprise, uncertainty and shape-shifting, but also the exuberance of Syd in happier times, wheeling through Cambridge on a borrowed bike.
