As Pink Floyd made the transition to psychedelic and improvisatory rock pioneers, Barrett emerged as the natural leader and songwriter.Įven as the band toiled in obscurity, Barrett took strange, relatively lo-fi risks with his music, sliding ball-bearings down his guitar strings while the Beatles were constructing Sgt. Born Roger Keith Barrett in Cambridge, he acquired the nickname Syd- a poignant reminder of the two very different lives he lived- around age 15.īarrett was a founding member of Pink Floyd, who in their early r&b days went under an assortment of names such as Sigma 6, the Tea Set, and the Screaming Abdabs, until he rechristened them after blues musician Floyd Council and medicine show singer Pink Anderson in 1965. The details of Barrett’s life and too-brief time at the pinnacle of British psychedelia have become so clouded in myth and rumor in the past 30 years that it can be difficult to extricate nuggets of fact from the fiction.
In the eyes of many, he became something of an abstraction, a figurehead or a symbol more than an artist, and as such his death feels confusing, as though it’s now happened for a second time. Strange that a key role in one of the most successful bands of all time should cast him as a cult figure, but such was his life. The recent death of Syd Barrett will lead to talk about his drug abuse, his retreat from music, and his legend.
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