Born on January 6, 1946, Roger Keith Barrett was raised in Cambridge England. He was given the nickname "Syd" as a youngster, while attending the city's High School, where his friends included Roger Waters and David Gilmour, and it stuck with him as he grew up.
In his late teens, after his father died, he started producing paintings and music. He was an originating member of The Abdabs, The T-Sets, Sigma 6, and other names such as The Meggadeaths, in 1965. He worked with people like Bob Close, Roger Waters, Nick mason, and Richard Wright.
When Bob Close left the band, Syd renamed the group The Pink Floyd Sound, named after the cover of an album of two american bluesmen, Pink Anderson, and Floyd Council. Syd wrote almost everything for The Pink Floyd Sound, then The Pink Floyd finally renamed just Pink Floyd), he played guitar, sung, and wrote the music and the lyrics as well. The other Cambridge native forming The Pink Floyd were Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums).
Within weeks the new line-up had rehearsed at the Thompson Private Record Company, a tiny studio sited in the basement of a house in Hemel, Hampstead. Here they recorded two songs; an original hinged to the Gloria riff entitled Lucy Leave and a version of Slim Harpo's I'm a King Bee already made famous by the Rolling Stones. At first, The Pink Floyd were a much more conventional act that the act into which they would evolve, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that were so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British bands.
Syd's influences were the Stones, Beatles, Byrds and Love," the group's first manager, Pete Jenner, told Nick Kent, adding at Barrett wore out his copy of the last-named group's debut album. "I was trying to tell him about this Arthur Lee song I couldn't remember the title of, so I just hummed the main riff. Syd picked up his guitar, followed what I was humming, and went on to use the chord pattern he worked out for 'Interstellar Overdrive'.
Pink Floyd then began to experiment, however, stretching out songs with wild instrumental freak-out passages incorporating feedback, electronic screeches, and unusual, eerie sounds created by loud amplification, reverb, and such tricks as sliding ball bearings up and down guitar strings. In 1966, they began to pick up a following in the London underground; onstage, they began to incorporate light shows to add to the psychedelic effect. Most importantly, Syd Barrett began to compose pop-psychedelic gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements (particularly in the haunting guitar and celestial organ licks) with catchy melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the world with a sense of poetic, child-like wonder, pushung the pop format to its outer limits.
When Pink Floyd released two sets of singles, Arnold Layne, Candy and a Currant Bun and See Emily Play, The ScareCrow, Syd got heavily into drugs, under the pressure of his fame. Arnold Layne was meanwhile coupled to another original from the first Sound Techniques' visit, Let's Roll Another One, late given the less contentious title Candy and a Currant Bun. The pairing form the Pink Floyd's debut the following March and the resultant top 30 hit confirmed the group as a national attraction
After the success of the singles, Syd wrote most of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released in 1967, which can be considered as the greatest British psychedelic album other than Sgt. Pepper's. Dominated almost wholly by Barrett's songs, the album was a charming funhouse of driving, mysterious rockers (Lucifer Sam), odd character sketches (The Gnome), childhood flashbacks (Bike, Matilda Mother), and freakier pieces with lengthy instrumental passages (Astronomy Domine, Interstellar Overdrive, Pow R Toc H) that mapped out their fascination with space travel. The record was not only like no other at the time; it was like no other that Pink Floyd would make, colored as it was by a vision that was far more humorous, pop-friendly, and light-hearted than those of their subsequent epics.
Interstellar Overdrive, with it's extended free-form passage, was the piece which established Pink Floyd's experimental reputation and it was one of the tracks the group attempted during their first recording session at Chelsea's Sound Technique.
Around mid-1967, the prodigy began showing increasingly alarming signs of mental instability. Syd would go catatonic onstage, playing music that had little to do with the material, or not playing at all. An American tour had to be cut short when he was barely able to function at all, let alone play the pop star game. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their vision and material, the rest of the group were nevertheless finding him impossible to work with, live or in the studio. One night, on the way to a performance, the other members decided not to pick up Barrett becauseof his heavy drug addiction and unpredictability. To cover for Barrettwas his old friend David Gilmour, who was also from Cambridge and whith whom Syd toured as a folk singer on the french c™te d'azur in his 16.
Syd had only three tracks on the Saucerful of Secrets, the second album.and the rest were Waters tracks. Barrett agreed to the permanent split of him and the group. After he left Pink Floyd, he recorded separate solo albums, there was Barrett, The Madcap Lauphs, The Peel Session acoustic live album with David Gilmour, and Opel and various other compilation and collection of rare material. Syd only attenpted once to play with a new band, Star.
After Pink Floyd's great success with Dark Side of the Moon, Syd went to check up on his friends in the group Pink Floyd. He showed up at a Recording session of Wish You Were Here.At first nobody recognized Syd, but after a while they realized who it was and they welcomed him. Although Syd didn't play at the session, the album was about him, a thank you recording for his help in there early career.
Syd is now a schizophrenic, and resides sometimes with his aunt in Cambridge, sometimes in his London flat. He now carries a low profile live on, and is rarely seen. The money he made during the early Floyd days was enough to support his low key life.
Despite their astral image, Pink Floyd was brought down to earth in the 1980s by decidedly mundane power struggles over leadership and, ultimately, ownership of the band's very name.
Since that time, they've been little more than a dinosaur act, capable of filling stadiums and topping the charts, but offering little more than a spectacular recreation of their most successful formulas. Their latter-day staleness cannot disguise the fact that, for the first decade or so of their existence, they were one of the most innovative groups around, in concert and (especially) in the studio.
It was reported in 1996 that Syd was lying ill in a Cambridge hospital, unable or unwilling to regulate his diabetic condition.
