Syd Barrett

• 1. Introduction

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  Syd Barrett walked into Abbey Road Studios on the 5th of June 1975, and the men inside did not know him. He had shaved off his hair and even his eyebrows, and he was overweight. He was 29. The musicians were Pink Floyd, the band he had helped found, and they were finishing the final mix of a song written about him. Roger Waters asked what he thought of it. Barrett said it "sounds a bit old". Then he spent part of the session brushing his teeth. No member of the group ever saw him again.

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• 2. Cambridge Beginnings

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  Roger Keith Barrett was born on the 6th of January 1946 in Cambridge, the fourth of five children. The family lived at 60 Glisson Road, and his father, Arthur Max Barrett, was a prominent pathologist. In 1951 they moved to 183 Hills Road. The boy played piano only now and then and preferred writing and drawing. He bought a ukulele at 10, a banjo at 11 and a Höfner acoustic guitar at 14. He also served as a patrol leader in the 7th Cambridge Scout troop.

  Two accounts explain how Roger became Syd. In one, he borrowed the name from an old Cambridge jazz bassist called Sid "the Beat" Barrett and changed the spelling. In the other, schoolmates named him at 13, after he wore a flat cap instead of his scout beret to a field day at Abington Scout site. They said Syd was a working-class name. His sister Rosemary said: "He was never Syd at home. He would never have allowed it."

  At Morley Memorial Junior School, one of his teachers was the mother of a future bandmate, Roger Waters. In 1957 Barrett joined Waters at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, and the two became childhood friends. On the 11th of December 1961 his father died of cancer, less than a month before Barrett's 16th birthday. He left that day's page in his diary blank.

  His mother wanted to help him through his grief. She encouraged his band, Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, to play in the family front room, and Waters often came to watch. On the 11th of March 1962 Waters organised a CND benefit gig at Friends Meeting House. Soon afterwards Geoff Mott joined the Boston Crabs, and the Mottoes broke up.

  In September 1962 Barrett took a place in the art department of the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology. There he met David Gilmour, who would later join Pink Floyd. Barrett called him "Fred" in letters to girlfriends and relatives. The Beatles made a deep impression on him in late 1962 and early 1963, and he played their songs at parties and picnics. In 1963 he became a Rolling Stones fan, though he said Bo Diddley was his greatest influence.

  Around then he began writing songs. A friend remembered hearing "Effervescing Elephant", which he would later record for his solo album Barrett. He played bass with Those Without in mid-1963 and with the Hollerin' Blues the next year. After he saw Bob Dylan perform in 1964, he wrote "Bob Dylan Blues". Thinking about his future, he enrolled in mid-1964 at Camberwell College of Arts in London. The subject he went there to study was painting, not music.

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• 3. Pink Floyd Rising

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  The group Barrett joined in 1965 was called the Tea Set, sometimes spelled T-Set. Since 1964 it had passed through several names, including the Abdabs, the Screaming Abdabs, Sigma 6 and the Meggadeaths. When another band with the same name appeared on a bill, Barrett came up with a replacement, the Pink Floyd Sound. It was also known as the Pink Floyd Blues Band before it settled on the Pink Floyd.

  The band began with American R&B covers. By 1966 it had carved out a style of improvised rock and roll that drew as much from improvised jazz. After the guitarist Bob Klose departed, the direction shifted, though the change was gradual, with more improvising on guitars and keyboards. The drummer Nick Mason said most of the band's ideas came from Barrett.

  In 1965 Barrett had his first LSD trip, in the garden of his friend Dave Gale. Ian Moore was there too, along with Storm Thorgerson, who would later design Pink Floyd covers. During one trip Barrett and his friend Paul Charrier ended up naked in the bath, reciting: "No rules, no rules". Continued drug use led the band to become absorbed in Sant Mat, a Sikh sect. Barrett and Thorgerson went to a London hotel to meet the sect's guru. Thorgerson joined, but Barrett was judged too young. Thorgerson thought the rejection upset him deeply and mattered a great deal in his life.

  By the end of 1966 the band was popular in the London underground psychedelic scene and had a reliable management team, Andrew King and Peter Jenner. In October they booked a session at Thompson Private Recording Studio in Hemel Hempstead to record demos. King recalled: "That was the first time I realised they were going to write all their own material; Syd just turned into a songwriter, it seemed like overnight." Barrett's reading reputedly included Grimm's Fairy Tales, Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and The I-Ching.

  The first single, "Arnold Layne", was Barrett's song about a man who steals clothes from washing lines. Soon after, the group signed a record deal with EMI. They recorded The Piper at the Gates of Dawn intermittently between February and July 1967 in Studio 3 at Abbey Road Studios, then called EMI Recording Studios. Norman Smith, a former Beatles engineer, produced it. Barrett wrote eight of the eleven songs and co-wrote two more. The album reached number six on the British album charts.

  Barrett wrote another song, "Bike", while living near his friends. Within a year of the album's release, though, the man who wrote it would no longer be in the band.

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• 4. The Unravelling

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  David Gilmour stopped by Sound Techniques studio to say hello while Pink Floyd were recording "See Emily Play". He had just returned from Europe. By his account, Barrett "just looked straight through me, barely acknowledged me that I was there". Through late 1967 and early 1968 Barrett grew more and more erratic, partly because of heavy use of LSD, amphetamine and Mandrax. He developed a blank, dead-eyed stare. He sometimes failed to recognise friends and often did not know where he was.

  The record producer Joe Boyd met Barrett at the UFO Club in mid-1967. Boyd said his eyes were vacant, "as if someone had reached inside his head and turned off a switch". On a tour of Los Angeles, Barrett is said to have exclaimed: "Gee, it sure is nice to be in Las Vegas!" Many reports describe him strumming a single chord through a whole concert, or not playing at all. At a show in Santa Monica he slowly detuned his guitar.

  On the television programme Pat Boone in Hollywood, Barrett answered questions with a "blank and totally mute stare". Mason put it this way: "Syd wasn't into moving his lips that day." On American Bandstand, surviving footage shows him miming his parts competently, but he gave terse answers in the group interview afterwards. On the Perry Como show, Richard Wright had to mime all the vocals on "Matilda Mother" because of Barrett's condition. Barrett often forgot his guitar, sometimes damaged equipment, and at times could not hold the plectrum.

  A widely told story has Barrett crushing Mandrax tablets and a tube of Brylcreem into his hair before a late 1967 show. The mixture supposedly melted down his face under the stage lights, leaving him looking like "a guttered candle". Mason disputed the Mandrax part, saying: "Syd would never waste good mandies". Barrett made his last recordings with the group in October 1967 for the single "Apples and Oranges", which he described as "about a girl whom I just saw walking around Richmond". During the November tour with Jimi Hendrix, David O'List of the Nice stood in for him on several nights.

  Around Christmas 1967 the band asked Gilmour to join as a second guitarist to cover for Barrett. For a handful of shows Gilmour played and sang while Barrett wandered the stage, now and then joining in. On the 26th of January 1968 Waters was driving the band to a show at Southampton University. They chose not to collect Barrett. One person asked, "Shall we pick Syd up?" and another answered, "Let's not bother." The plan was to keep him as a non-touring songwriter, as the Beach Boys had done with Brian Wilson, but that proved impractical.

  Waters said Barrett's last practice session began with a new song he called "Have You Got It Yet?". It seemed simple at first and then became impossible to learn. The band eventually realised that Barrett was changing the arrangement as they played and was joking at their expense. Gilmour said: "Some parts of his brain were perfectly intact", and he counted Barrett's sense of humour among them. Waters called it "a real act of mad genius".

  Of the songs Barrett wrote after The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, only "Jugband Blues" made it onto A Saucerful of Secrets. "Scream Thy Last Scream", "Vegetable Man" and the instrumental "In the Beechwoods" stayed unreleased until 2016. He did play guitar on "Remember a Day" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun". Then he sat in the studio reception area, waiting to be invited in, and came to a few shows to glare at Gilmour. On the 6th of April 1968 the band announced he was no longer a member. The same day their contract with Blackhill Enterprises ended, and Blackhill kept Barrett, seeing him as the band's musical leader.

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• 5. Disputed Causes

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  Richard Wright believed Barrett's trouble began with a massive overdose of acid, because his personality changed so suddenly. Waters disagreed and maintains that Barrett suffered "without a doubt" from schizophrenia. Gilmour offered a third view: "In my opinion, his nervous breakdown would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing." He allowed that the psychedelic experience "might well have acted as a catalyst". He added that he did not think Barrett could cope with the vision of success and everything that came with it.

  In a 1974 interview Gilmour said the rest of the band had taken what they called the "Barrett problem" to the psychiatrist R. D. Laing. After hearing a tape of a Barrett conversation, Laing declared him "incurable".

  Barrett's family told a different story. They reported that he had neither suffered from mental illness nor received treatment for it since regular contact resumed in the 1980s. His sister Rosemary Breen said he had spent time in a private "home for lost souls" called Greenwoods in Essex, with no formal therapy programme. Years later he agreed to sessions with a psychiatrist at Fulbourn Hospital in Cambridge. Breen said neither medication nor therapy was thought appropriate.

  Breen also rejected the idea that her brother was a recluse. She suggested he may have been a bit self-absorbed. In her view, people who called him a recluse were "really only projecting their own disappointment".

  Friends and acquaintances left darker and more contested stories. June Bolan grew concerned when Barrett kept his girlfriend under lock and key for three days, pushing a ration of biscuits under the door. The writer Jonathan Meades reported that some groupies treated Barrett cruelly, and that one said they put him in a cupboard during a bad trip. Thorgerson answered that he remembered no such thing and called it pure fantasy. His colleague Aubrey Powell guessed the groupies had been trying to wind Meades up.

  Other friends said Barrett's flatmates, who had also taken LSD, saw him as a genius or even a deity. They were said to be spiking his morning coffee every day, which left him in a never-ending trip. Friends rescued him from that flat, but his erratic behaviour went on.

  In 1996 Wright said that Barrett's mother had told the members of Pink Floyd not to contact him. Being reminded of the band, she said, would make him depressed for weeks.

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• 6. Solo Albums

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  In 1969, at the urging of EMI and Harvest Records, Barrett began a brief solo career after a year out of the public eye. He released a single, "Octopus", and two albums in 1970, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. Songs such as "Terrapin", "Maisie" and "Bob Dylan Blues" showed his early love of the blues.

  Peter Jenner left his job managing Pink Floyd and took Barrett into EMI Studios in May to record the first tracks for The Madcap Laughs. Jenner later said: "I had seriously underestimated the difficulties of working with him." After the July sessions, Barrett broke up with his girlfriend Lindsay Corner and drove around Britain. He ended up in psychiatric care in Cambridge. By New Year 1969 he had recovered somewhat and taken a flat on Egerton Gardens, South Kensington, with the artist Duggie Fields.

  Barrett then contacted EMI and was passed to Malcolm Jones, head of the new prog rock label Harvest. Norman Smith and Jenner had both declined to produce the record, so Jones did it himself. Sessions began in April 1969 at EMI Studios. Barrett brought in friends, including the drummers Jerry Shirley and Willie Wilson, while Gilmour played bass. Jones found it hard to communicate: "It was a case of following him, not playing with him. They were seeing and then playing so they were always a note behind."

  A legend places Barrett in Ibiza that summer. He had told his flatmate he was going for an afternoon drive but followed Pink Floyd there instead. According to the story, he skipped check-ins and customs and ran onto the runway to flag down a jet. His friend J. Ryan Eaves, bass player of the Manchester band York's Ensemble, spotted him on a beach in dirty clothes, carrying a bag full of money. During the trip Barrett asked Gilmour to help with the recording.

  Gilmour and Waters took over several sessions, which paused while they mixed Pink Floyd's new album Ummagumma. Their method was to record Barrett playing his songs live in the studio, so many tracks keep false starts and Barrett's own commentary. They left off "Opel", a Jones-produced track that was closer to finished. When the album came out in January 1970, Jones was shocked by the weak musicianship on the Gilmour and Waters tracks. Gilmour said: "Perhaps we were trying to show what Syd was really like. But perhaps we were trying to punish him." Waters was kinder: "Syd is a genius." Barrett's own verdict was that it was "quite nice", but he did not think it would stand as his last statement.

  The sessions for Barrett ran more sporadically between February and July 1970. Gilmour produced, with Wright on keyboards and Shirley on drums. Early on, Gilmour worried they were losing the "Barrett-ness". Shirley recalled: "He would never play the same tune twice. Sometimes Syd couldn't play anything that made sense; other times what he'd play was absolute magic." At one session Barrett asked whether "the middle" could be darker and "the end a bit middle afternoonish". He sometimes turned up to spy on Pink Floyd while they recorded Atom Heart Mother.

  He rarely performed. On the 24th of February 1970 he played five songs for John Peel's BBC radio programme Top Gear, accompanied by Gilmour and Shirley. His only proper concert of the period was on the 6th of June 1970 at the Olympia Exhibition Hall. Poor mixing left his voice nearly inaudible until the last of four songs. At the end of the fourth, he politely put down his guitar and walked off the stage. He recorded three songs for BBC Radio on the 16th of February 1971. In an interview that December with Mick Rock for Rolling Stone, he showed off a new 12-string guitar. He said he was frustrated because he could not find anyone good to play with.

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• 7. Silence in Cambridge

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  In February 1972, Barrett formed a short-lived band called Stars with the drummer Twink and the bassist Jack Monck, after a few guest spots in Cambridge under the name The Last Minute Put Together Boogie Band. At first they went down well at the Dandelion coffee bar and in the town's Market Square. A gig at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge, with MC5 on the bill, was a disaster. A few days later Barrett stopped Twink in the street, showed him a scathing review, and quit on the spot.

  On the 9th of May 1972 Barrett became free of his EMI contract. He signed a document ending his association with Pink Floyd and any financial interest in future recordings. In October 1973 he turned up at a jazz and poetry evening with Pete Brown and the former Cream bassist Jack Bruce. Brown arrived late and found a guitarist he vaguely recognised on stage, playing Horace Silver's "Doodlin'". Later Brown dedicated a poem to Syd, saying he was in Cambridge and was one of the best songwriters in the country. The guitarist stood up and said: "No, I'm not".

  By the end of 1973 Barrett was back in London, moving between hotels and finally settling at Chelsea Cloisters in December. He saw few people, apart from visits to his management office to collect royalties and occasional family calls. In August 1974 Jenner persuaded him back to Abbey Road for three days of sessions. The engineer John Leckie noticed that Barrett still looked as he had when younger, with long hair. He recorded eleven tracks, mostly blues rhythm tracks with tentative guitar overdubs, and only one got a title: "If You Go, Don't Be Slow". After that, he left the music industry for good. He sold the rights to his solo albums back to the label, and offers to make him a record producer came to nothing, including one from Jamie Reid on behalf of the Sex Pistols and another from the Damned.

  In 1978, with his money gone, Barrett moved back to Cambridge to live with his mother. He spent a few weeks in London in 1982, then returned to Cambridge for good, walking the 50 miles. He went back to his birth name, Roger. According to the biographer Tim Willis, he lived in his late mother's semi-detached house, painted large abstract canvases and gardened with enthusiasm. His sister Rosemary lived nearby and was his main contact with the world. He had stomach ulcers and type 2 diabetes. Gilmour said of the royalties: "I made sure the money got to him."

  Rosemary said Barrett took up photography and sometimes went with her to the seaside. He often took the train alone to London to see the major art collections. He visited the Botanic Gardens regularly, and the dahlias at Anglesey Abbey, near Lode. Painting, she said, was his passion.

  Reporters and fans still travelled to Cambridge looking for him, despite public appeals from his family. In 1988 a News of the World reporter found him and called him "a hopeless case". In November 2001 he went to his sister's house to watch the BBC Omnibus documentary about him. He called it "a bit noisy", was glad to see Mike Leonard again and called him his "teacher", and enjoyed hearing "See Emily Play". In 1996 Pink Floyd were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with Barrett as a member, but he did not attend.

  In 2002 he made his only public acknowledgement of his musical past since the 1970s. The photographer Mick Rock asked him to autograph 320 copies of his book Psychedelic Renegades, which contained photographs of Barrett. They had not spoken in over 20 years, and Barrett agreed. He signed the book simply "Barrett".

  Barrett died at home in Cambridge on the 7th of July 2006, aged 60, of pancreatic cancer. His death was reported five days later. He was cremated on the 18th of July 2006 at Cambridge Crematorium, and no Pink Floyd member attended. Wright called him the guiding light of the early lineup. Gilmour asked people to play some of Syd's songs and remember "the madcap genius who made us all smile with his wonderfully eccentric songs about bikes, gnomes, and scarecrows".

  NME produced a tribute issue a week later. Local newspapers said Barrett left about £1.7 million to his four siblings, mostly from royalties on Pink Floyd compilations and live recordings featuring his songs. Rosemary Breen said he had written an unpublished book about the history of art. His house in St. Margaret's Square went on sale in 2006, drew over 100 showings, many to fans, and was sold to a French couple who knew nothing about him. On the 28th of November 2006 his other possessions, including paintings and scrapbooks, were auctioned at Cheffins in Cambridge and raised £120,000 for charity.

  A series of events called The City Wakes was held in Cambridge in October 2008 to celebrate his life, art and music. After its success, the arts charity Escape Artists announced plans for a Cambridge centre that would use art to help people with mental health problems. On the 10th of May 2007, a tribute concert called "Madcap's Last Laugh" at the Barbican Centre in London brought together Robyn Hitchcock, Captain Sensible, Damon Albarn, Chrissie Hynde and Kevin Ayers. Gilmour, Wright and Mason played "Bike" and "Arnold Layne", and Waters performed his own song "Flickering Flame".

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• 8. Sound and Influence

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  The free-improvisation guitarist Keith Rowe of the group AMM would lay his guitar flat on a table and run ball bearings, metal rulers, coins or knives along the strings. AMM and Pink Floyd shared several gigs between early 1966 and early 1967, and Barrett even attended the session for AMM's debut album, AMMMusic, in June 1966. Rowe partly inspired Barrett's own experiments with dissonance, distortion, feedback, tape and the echo machine. One trademark was sliding a Zippo lighter up and down the fretboard while playing through an old echo box. Binson delay units gave him his echo sounds, and his free-form "sonic carpets" opened a new way to play rock guitar.

  The guitar most linked with him was a silver Fender Esquire with mirrored discs glued to the body. He felt closest to it. In 1968 he traded it for a black Telecaster Custom, and its whereabouts today are unknown.

  His voice carried a southern English accent. The Guardian writer Nick Kent described a "quintessential English style of vocal projection". David Bowie said Barrett and Anthony Newley were the first people he had heard sing rock or pop with a British accent. Bowie later recorded "See Emily Play" for his 1973 album Pin Ups.

  Norman Smith wrote in his memoir that Barrett "could write like John", meaning Lennon, and that he would have "got even better". Jimmy Page never saw Barrett play with the Floyd but loved the early records. He said that nothing sounded like Barrett before the first album, and that Barrett and Jimi Hendrix both had "a futuristic vision in a sense". The critic Steven Hyden argued that Barrett's spirit "haunted" the band's records after he left.

  The critic John Harris traced Barrett's second life to punk rock. Punk tried to sweep aside the psychedelic 1960s. In time, Harris suggested, some of that older generation were rehabilitated. Barrett had left before the indulgent progressive rock era, and his fate appealed to the punk generation's nihilism.

  His decline shaped Roger Waters' writing. Mental illness runs through the later Pink Floyd albums The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, Wish You Were Here in 1975 and The Wall in 1979. The line "can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?" in the song "Wish You Were Here" echoes a recurring image in Barrett's song "If It's In You" from The Madcap Laughs.

  Outside Pink Floyd, the list of admirers is long. Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Blur, Marc Bolan, The Flaming Lips, Animal Collective and Paul Weller all took inspiration from him. In XTC's album Skylarking, the track "Grass" was influenced when Andy Partridge lent Barrett records to his bandmate Colin Moulding. Robyn Hitchcock built a career on being Barrett-esque, and Phish covered "Bike", "Love You" and "Terrapin", among others. In 1981 the Television Personalities released "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives". Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll, from 2006, opens with Barrett performing "Golden Hair". Noah Hawley named a character in the 2017 series Legion after him.

  The archive grew too. In 1988 EMI, after constant pressure from Malcolm Jones, released Opel, a set of outtakes recorded from 1968 to 1970, with Barrett's approval. In 1993 came the box set Crazy Diamond, whose extra outtakes showed his inability or refusal to play a song the same way twice. A 2023 documentary, Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, includes interviews with Waters, Mason, Gilmour and Rosemary Breen, and is narrated by Jason Isaacs. It shares its title with the song Barrett once used to trick his bandmates.

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