Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett (6 January 1946 – 7 July 2006) was an English singer, guitarist and songwriter who co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd in 1965. Until his departure in 1968, he was Pink Floyd's frontman and primary songwriter, known for his whimsical style of psychedelia and stream-of-consciousness writing. As a guitarist, he was influential for his free-form playing and for employing effects such as dissonance, distortion, echo and feedback.
Barrett was musically active for just over ten years. With Pink Floyd, he recorded the first three singles, their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), part of their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), and several songs that were not released until later. He departed in April 1968 amid speculation of mental illness and his use of psychedelic drugs. Barrett began a brief solo career the following year with the single "Octopus", followed by albums The Madcap Laughs (1970) and Barrett (1970), recorded with the help of Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine.
In 1974, Barrett left the music industry, retired from public life and guarded his privacy until his death. He continued painting and dedicated himself to gardening. Pink Floyd recorded several tributes and homages, including the 1975 song suite "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and parts of the 1979 rock opera The Wall. In 1988, EMI released an album of unreleased tracks and outtakes, Opel, with Barrett's approval. In 1996, Barrett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Pink Floyd. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2006.
Roger Keith Barrett was born on 6 January 1946 in Cambridge as the fourth of five children to a middle-class family living at 60 Glisson Road. His father, Arthur Max Barrett, was a prominent pathologist and was said to be related to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson through Max's maternal grandmother Ellen Garrett. In 1951, his family moved to 183 Hills Road, Cambridge.
Barrett played piano occasionally but usually preferred writing and drawing. He bought a ukulele aged 10, a banjo at 11 and a Höfner acoustic guitar at 14. Initially playing acoustic guitar, he later purchased an electric Selmer Futurama III. He was a Scout with the 7th Cambridge troop and went on to be a patrol leader.
Barrett reportedly used the nickname Syd from the age of 14, derived from the name of an old Cambridge jazz bassist, Sid "the Beat" Barrett; Barrett changed the spelling to differentiate himself. By another account, when Barrett was 13, his schoolmates nicknamed him Syd after he came to a field day at Abington Scout site wearing a flat cap instead of his scout beret, because "Syd" was a "working-class" name. He used both names interchangeably for several years. His sister Rosemary said: "He was never Syd at home. He would never have allowed it."
At one point at Morley Memorial Junior School, Barrett was taught by the mother of his future Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters. Later, in 1957, he attended Cambridgeshire High School for Boys with Waters. His father died of cancer on 11 December 1961, less than a month before Barrett's 16th birthday. On this date, Barrett left the entry in his diary blank. By this time, his siblings had left home and his mother rented out rooms to lodgers.
Eager to help her son recover from his grief, Barrett's mother encouraged the band in which he played, Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, a band which Barrett formed, to perform in their front room. Waters and Barrett were childhood friends, and Waters often visited such gigs. At one point, Waters organised a gig, a CND benefit at Friends Meeting House on 11 March 1962, but shortly afterwards Geoff Mott joined the Boston Crabs, and the Mottoes broke up.
In September 1962, Barrett took a place at the art department of the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, where he met future Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. In late 1962 and early 1963, the Beatles made an impact on Barrett, and he began to play Beatles songs at parties and at picnics. In 1963, he became a Rolling Stones fan and attended a performance at a village hall in Cambridgeshire. He said Bo Diddley was his greatest influence.
At this point, Barrett started writing songs. One friend recalled hearing "Effervescing Elephant", which he later recorded for his solo album Barrett. Also around this time, Barrett and Gilmour occasionally played acoustic gigs together. Barrett referred to Gilmour as "Fred" in letters to girlfriends and relatives. Barrett had played bass guitar with Those Without in mid-1963 and bass and guitar with the Hollerin' Blues the next year. In 1964, Barrett and Gausden saw Bob Dylan perform. After this performance, Barrett was inspired to write "Bob Dylan Blues". Barrett, now thinking about his future, decided to apply for Camberwell College of Arts in London. He enrolled in the college in mid-1964 to study painting.
Starting in 1964, the band that would become Pink Floyd evolved through various line-up and name changes including the Abdabs, the Screaming Abdabs, Sigma 6 and the Meggadeaths. Barrett joined them in 1965 when they were called the Tea Set (sometimes spelled T-Set) When they played with another band of the same name, Barrett came up with the name the Pink Floyd Sound (also known as the Pink Floyd Blues Band, later the Pink Floyd).
In 1965, Barrett had his first LSD trip in the garden of his friend Dave Gale, with Ian Moore and the future Pink Floyd cover artist Storm Thorgerson. During one trip, Barrett and another friend, Paul Charrier, ended up naked in the bath, reciting: "No rules, no rules". As a result of the continued drug use, the band became absorbed in Sant Mat, a Sikh sect. Thorgerson (then living on Earlham Street) and Barrett went to a London hotel to meet the sect's guru. Thorgerson joined the sect, but Barrett was deemed too young. Thorgerson saw this as a deeply important event in Barrett's life, as he was upset by the rejection. While living near his friends, Barrett wrote more songs, including "Bike".
Pink Floyd began by playing American R&B covers, but by 1966 they had carved out their own style of improvised rock and roll, which drew as much from improvised jazz. After the guitarist Bob Klose departed, the band's direction changed. However, the change was not instantaneous, with more improvising on the guitars and keyboards. The drummer, Nick Mason, said most of the band's ideas came from Barrett.
Around this time, Barrett wrote most of the songs for Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), and songs that later appeared on his solo albums. His reading reputedly included Grimm's Fairy Tales, Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and The I-Ching. In 1966, Pink Floyd became a popular group in the London underground psychedelic music scene. By the end of the year, Pink Floyd had gained a reliable management team in Andrew King and Peter Jenner. In October, they booked a session at Thompson Private Recording Studio, in Hemel Hempstead, for Pink Floyd to record demos. King said of the demos: "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 wrote the group's first single, "Arnold Layne", about a man stealing clothes from washing lines. Shortly afterwards, Pink Floyd signed a record deal with EMI. They recorded the album 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), and produced by the former Beatles engineer Norman Smith. Of the eleven songs, Barrett wrote eight and co-wrote another two. The album reached number six on the British album charts.
Through late 1967 and early 1968, Barrett became increasingly erratic, partly due to his heavy use of drugs such as LSD, amphetamine, and Mandrax. He developed a blank, dead-eyed stare. Barrett did not recognise friends and he often did not know where he was. While Pink Floyd were recording "See Emily Play" at the Sound Techniques studio, Gilmour stopped by on his return visit from Europe to say hello to Barrett. According to Gilmour, he "just looked straight through me, barely acknowledged me that I was there". The record producer Joe Boyd described encountering Barrett at the UFO Club in mid-1967: "His sparkling eyes had always been his most attractive feature but that night they were vacant, as if someone had reached inside his head and turned off a switch. During their set he hardly sang, standing motionless for long passages, arms by his sides, staring into space." On a tour of Los Angeles, Barrett is said to have exclaimed, "Gee, it sure is nice to be in Las Vegas!" Many reports described him on stage, strumming one chord through the entire concert, or not playing at all. At a show in Santa Monica, Barrett slowly detuned his guitar.