The first trailer has been unveiled for the upcoming Syd Barrett documentary Have You Got It Yet?: The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd. The documentary was made with the cooperation of the Barrett estate and of Pink Floyd‘s three surviving members, all of whom were interviewed for the project.
Furthering the film’s bonafides, it was co-directed by longtime Pink Floyd art designer Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis, in tandem with Roddy Bogawa. After a London premiere tonight (April 27), Have You Got It Yet? will screen May 15 in U.K. theaters. A global release is planned for later this year.
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Barrett co-founded Pink Floyd with Roger Waters and Nick Mason in 1965 while he was still a teenager, and was the creative visionary behind the band’s early psychedelic classics The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets. When Barrett’s mental health became unstable, possibly due to overuse of psychedelic drugs, Pink Floyd brought in guitarist David Gilmour as a stabilizing force, and he eventually took Barrett’s place when the latter left the band for good in 1968.
As his health worsened, Barrett mustered two fragile but influential solo albums in 1970: The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. But by the mid-’70s he was back living at his mother’s home in Cambridge, where he more or less remained as a recluse, painter, and eventual cult hero for the next 30-plus years until his death from diabetes complications in 2006 at the age of 60.
Beyond participation from Waters, Gilmour, and Mason, the synopsis for Have You Got It Yet? reads: “Cult icon, enigma, recluse … the life of Syd Barrett, founding member of Pink Floyd, is full of unanswered questions. Until now. Piecing together his comet-like rise to pop stardom, his creative and destructive impulses, breakdown, exit from the band, and subsequent life alone, this feature-length documentary is set against the social context of the explosive ’60s.”
