RR: There is an amazing 20-minute instrumental on An Introduction to Syd Barrett called “Rhamadan,” which is listed as previously unreleased and produced by you. The track features percussion, dulcimer, Mellotron, and sound effects, and everything is wild and stretched out. Do you know when that track was recorded?

PJ: I think that was something which was done for a soundtrack, or something. I’m not sure. It doesn’t ring…there were various soundtrack-y things that we did during the course of the period—odd bits of recording in places—and it may have turned up from that and doing demos before we started doing the album with EMI. There were various bits and pieces, and I don’t know if, maybe, that was done for a soundtrack for a film that someone once did that never got used. I really don’t know. There were various things which happened, and then these things get dug up because they weren’t done for the record company, they weren’t songs, they weren’t finished, and they were sort of like sketches which were left lying around. (laughter) I don’t know—like in an artist’s studio, you do a doodle and it’s left lying around.

RR: Was it brought to your attention in the last few years that “Rhamadan” was something that you produced, and they were thinking of putting it on this Syd Barrett compilation as a bonus track?

PJ: Oh, no, no, no. No one talks to me. I mean, I don’t know if I produced it, or when it happened. I don’t know if it was when I was doing it; no one’s played it to me. I don’t know whether I produced it, or whether it was done for a third party. I hope that there’s information, whatever information’s available on the album could tell you that, but I’ve got no idea—

RR: And if there isn’t information?

PJ: a) It’s the mist of time, and b) Who have we got to pay for this? (laughter)

RR: Perhaps, a bit of the latter.

PJ: “We can rely on no one being able to remember in the haze of drugs and age what happened there 40 years ago.”

RR: Let’s provide some clarity and understanding for our various readers—young, or otherwise. What was your involvement with Syd Barrett during the recording and production of his two solo albums in the early 1970s? You were involved in various other acts at that point, right? Roy Harper, among many others.

PJ: Yes, I was involved in various other acts like Roy Harper and so on and started doing records for them. I think the thing was that Syd drifted into being looked after by Bryan Morrison, and he asked me if I could get anything out of him in 1974. And then, he tried to get something together with the stuff that we’d done both in ’68 and in ’74.

[As far as the early 70s two solo albums] I think Roger [Waters] and Dave [Gilmour] and everybody wanted to try to do something with Syd, and try to see if there could be any way that it could be got together. I was not involved in those things. So, I don’t know what I produced and I don’t know where the stuff that I was involved with ended up. It all disappeared into a haze. I was running Blackhill with Andrew Hill and we were doing well. There was plenty of business and busy. I would have always done something if anybody had asked me, but no one asked me. I don’t think…you see, I couldn’t have done what Dave and Roger did, which was to, as it were, musically take it over. They took things which were sketches and colourized them. I don’t know how much Syd had to do with any of that stuff which they did up. You’d have to ask them. I don’t know if they, as it were, took the stuff and said, “Well, this is what we can do with it,” and then did it. I presume, at some stage, Syd heard it, and said, “Oh, all right” sort of thing in a casual way. I would imagine someone somewhere approved it. God knows I had nothing to do with it. No one told me what they were doing with it. No one consulted me. Which I thought was a bit naughty, but there you go—at least someone was doing something with it and it was trying to help Syd and that was great. So O.K., there you go, that’s what happens, life goes on, I’ve got other things to do.

RR: How long did you spend time in the studio with Syd in 1974? How productive were those sessions?

PJ: I think there were several days, probably five, or six, or seven days, or sections of a day, and nothing really came out that wasn’t rather confused. To this day, the only thing I remember really feeling together was “Golden Hair.” I never realized that was a James Joyce lyric. I just thought it was a lovely song. That was one of the key things that kept me going was trying to get that song done because I thought that was such a killer song.

RR: Indeed. I am going to draw a line from your illustrious and formidable past, and on to your various acts, which you managed, from the Floyd to T. Rex to Roy Harper to The Clash to Robyn Hitchcock to Billy Bragg. I would like to discuss your involvement in modern times with the Association of United Recording Artists, specifically your opinion about file sharing. Did you ever imagine—

PJ: Are you trying to get me into trouble?

RR: No, not at all. (laughter) Ever think of how artist’s rights have evolved, or de-evolved, during your time in the music business, and how you are a part of that?

PJ: Well, where do you start? I’m so sort of obsessively involved in all that stuff for the last few years. I think, basically, my fundamental position is that copyright was developed for a particular technology and time, and it’s a work that developed as the technology developed, up until the CD. The CD, in a way, was the last manifestation of the old copyright regime, but, also, opened the door to the new chaos because they digitized everything, and it was really easy for people to get the material in an unencumbered digital way. In a sense, the record companies were hoping to get people to buy their records again in the digital format. “We managed to get you to replace your vinyl collection with CDs. Now, we’re going to try to get you to replace your CDs with buying digital files.”

However, they didn’t quite realize that the problem was that they hadn’t, in any way, protected these CDs. So, at that point, the game was up. I think, since then, they’ve been trying to get the genie back in the bottle, but they let the genie out, and the genie is out. My feeling is that copyright is about the right to copy and to control the right to copy and to monetize the right to copy. That’s what copyright is all about. That’s what the word means. In a digital world, you can’t control copying. That’s the fundamental issue. What you’re trying to do is restrict the machinery and the technology from doing what it does. If you look at the whole digital structure construct—whether it’s the Internet, computers, everything—it’s all about copying. That’s what computers do; they copy. They convert things into digital information, which they can then copy, and they can shift around and they can move around and you can download and all the rest of it.

In a sense, you have to re-think the way that you deal with this. And you have to re-think your business structures, and you have to re-think how you charge for music, or how you compensate or pay people to invest in making music. That’s the thing they haven’t been able to do because you’ve got these huge industrial structures which are trying to hold on. They’ve held on pretty well for ten years. (laughs) They’ve been on the slide now for ten years, and you have to say it’s pretty remarkable that they’ve been able to hold on as long as they have. I think the game is up, and they’ve got to re-build their business. It involves losing a lot of control, I think it involves the artist a lot more, and it involves how people should get paid. I think that the whole structure of the recorded music business—and, therefore, by implications, the whole of the music industry—has to re-think its game.

You’ve got to think about how you’re going to generate enough revenue for people to invest their time and money in making recordings. If you don’t do that, then I think you have a big problem going forward in the music industry because if you don’t have the big stars tomorrow, you’re not going to fill the arenas and the sheds and the stadiums, so the live industry is going to hurt. We’re going to end up with sort of a localized industry, and people aren’t going to be phoning me up from America to ask about things. I think it’ll become localized and amateurized.

Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know. I’m not so moralistic about it. What I say is if you want to have a coherent and progressive…if you want to have recorded music made in the styles, and developing from the styles, that we’ve made in the last 40 years, you’ve got to find a way of rewarding that. You have to work out how that can work with the way people use computers, and they use digital devises, and where those digital devices are going. You have to have a fundamental re-think. That means your old game is up. And that’s very hard for anyone who is running a big company with lots of employees to say—“our game is up.”

You see, the trouble is, because of copyright length, the length of copyright, it’s not like what you really needed was to have new industries. If you look at the transport industry, you had stagecoaches, then you had railroads, then you had airplanes, and then, you had ocean liners. And all these businesses grew up against the old one. In the music business, we’ve got this total, new distribution structure, new potential industrial structure—you can make your records at home, you can distribute them yourself, you can download them yourself, and all the rest of it. It’s a different game. But, yet, a lot of the stuff is controlled and owned by these corporations who are built around the old technology. So, it’s like you’ve got the train companies deciding and trying to control the airplane companies: “Hey, you can’t do that because that would upset our old train business.”

RR: Tying all of this together, and taking it into a different line of thinking, the word “copy” comes up quite a bit with those artists who tried to artistically imitate the way that Syd Barrett constructed songs. I don’t think they ever quite got there. Was it his own unique Cambridge, or British, spirit that inspired his work?

PJ: I think it was his own, his individuality. No one is original. You all draw on what you’ve heard. I think there are nursery rhymes in there, too. I do believe that every artist is in some sense a cut-and-paste artist. You cut and paste what you experience, and what you’ve heard, or what you’ve read, or what you see, or what you’ve played. You cut and paste those things together in your own combination. And no one has come up with that same combination since then. Hitchcock’s done some stuff which is close to it, but, in a way, I think Robyn is a bit prone to pastiching it. And Syd didn’t do pastiches. That’s what he was—at his best, he was a very child-like person, in the best way. He was very naïve in some ways, and very open, and very innovative, and would try things—try too many things, I think. The seeds of whatever was in his head came out in the music, and came out in where he ended up, as well.

RR: Peter, it’s been an honor to get a chance to talk with you. Thank you.

PJ: I, obviously, like the fact that you’ve done your research. Well done.

RR: For quite a while.

PJ: Oh, God—you’re a casualty, just like me.

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