January 6, 1946 - July 7, 2006

IN THE early days of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett was the group’s undisputed leader. His psychedelic and often whimsical style of songwriting perfectly encapsulated the heady spirit of the late 1960s and the hippy dream. Barrett’s compositional method has been called naïve, but it is perhaps better described as childlike, often effortlessly inhabiting the worlds of dream, mystery and the subconscious.

He was a wonderfully instinctive guitarist, and his highly original use of slide and echo was able to translate the hypnotic atmosphere that Pink Floyd generated on stage to the albums they created in the studio. These are memorable as few others of their era are.

But Barrett then fell victim to the darker side of those heady times, as his copious indulgence in hallucinogenic drugs pushed an already fragile psyche over the edge.

After dominating Pink Floyd’s early material and writing their first two hit singles, by 1968 he found himself forced out of the group on account of his erratic behaviour. Without him, they went on to become one of the biggest-selling acts of the 1970s and 1980s, while his output was restricted to two strange but compelling solo albums, which reflected his precarious mental state and are today regarded as cult classics.

After that, the rest was silence, as he became a recluse and abandoned all involvement in music. Yet although he did not release another record after 1970, he continued to exert an eerie fascination for generations of future musicians — perhaps because his fate reminded them of the slender thread by which creative talent can hang.

The son of a Cambridge pathologist, Roger Keith Barrett fell in love with rock’n’roll in the late 1950s while at Cambridge High School. He earned the nickname “Syd” at a local jazz club, after a drummer of the same name, and by the early 1960s was in his first group, Geoff Mott and the Mottoes.

The line-up also included future Pink Floyd colleague Roger Waters. After a brief spell in another local R&B band, Those Without, Barrett moved to London in 1964 to attend Camberwell Art College.

There he was reunited with Waters in a new band, which already included the drummer Nick Mason and Rick Wright on keyboards. After trying various names, including the Spectrum Five and the Tea Set, they settled upon the Pink Floyd Blues Band.

Barrett had coined the name as a fusion of two grizzled bluesmen called Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, although hippy romantics will always prefer the story he later told of the name being transmitted to him by a flying saucer while he was sitting on Glastonbury Tor.

At first, the group played mostly R&B covers. But Barrett had begun experimenting with LSD in 1965 and the experience began to inspire his own songwriting. As the nascent post-beat, drug-based hippy subculture gathered pace throughout 1966, Pink Floyd — as they were now called — effectively became its house band. The R&B covers gave way to Barrett’s quirky songs and long, improvisational “space” epics, with titles such as Interstellar Overdrive and Astronomy Domine.

By early 1967 all of the main record labels were looking to sign one of the new psychedelic groups. Pink Floyd, who had built a sizeable following at all-night underground London clubs with names such as Middle Earth and UFO, were top of most A&R men’s lists and, after turning down a deal with Polydor, they were snapped up by EMI.

Not that the company was totally aware of whom or what it had signed. When the group were introduced to the label’s executives, one of them reportedly demanded to know which one was Pink. EMI was also concerned by the band’s druggy image and felt obliged to issue a press statement insisting that the term “psychedelic” referred to the effect created by the light show which accompanied the Floyd’s live performances, and that it had no connection with drugs.

The band had already recorded Arnold Layne with the producer Joe Boyd before signing, and the song became Pink Floyd’s first single. Despite Barrett’s lyrics about transvestism, it somehow escaped a BBC ban and reached number 20 in the charts. The follow-up, See Emily Play, did even better. It reached number 6, found the band miming on Top Of The Pops and was later covered by David Bowie. The two songs were undoubted masterpieces of early psychedelic pop and are the bedrock of claims that Barrett was a “genius”.