Syd Barrett is the lost boy of British pop. A dazzling original who saw and heard differently to everyone else, he went through the looking glass in search of his psychedelic vision, and never came back. Barrett’s story is a tragic saga of glory and madness, part daring adventure, part cautionary tale. By the age of 23, he had changed music forever – and it had destroyed him.
Barrett’s fame principally rests on his role as the lead guitarist, singer and songwriter for Pink Floyd. Although he made only three singles and one album with the progressive rockers, it was Barrett’s brilliance that set them on their path and haunted them ever after.
Born Roger Barrett in Cambridge in 1946, into an artistic middle-class family, he played guitar and piano and dreamed of becoming a painter. Handsome, charismatic and sociable, Barrett was popular on the local music scene, where he picked up the nickname Syd after an unrelated Cambridge jazz musician, Sid “The Beat” Barrett. “He was physically beautiful, witty, funny,” says David Gilmour, who befriended Barrett in 1962. “He was much loved by everyone around him.” The two went busking in France, where Barrett would make up songs on the spot. “Syd had a natural poetic gift, he’d effortlessly knock out stuff.”
Some of those early songs turned up on Barrett’s later solo albums and demonstrate an affinity for nonsense rhymes, a fascination with the sound of words for their own sake. Others played with blues forms. Folk songs, Shakespeare, fairy tales, the mysticism of the I Ching and the dream logic of Lewis Carroll all went into the mix, whimsy balanced with formality.
In 1964, Barrett enrolled at the Camberwell College of Arts in London to study painting, and reconnected with another childhood friend, Roger Waters, eventually joining his rhythm and blues covers band, The Tea Set, with Waters on bass, Rick Wright on keyboards and Nick Mason on drums. It was Barrett who renamed them Pink Floyd (after two obscure bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). The group began improvising soundscapes to accompany experimental light shows around the same time that Barrett started taking LSD on an almost daily basis.
