Before Pink Floyd became the band of laser pyramids, planetarium domes and the weight of Roger Waters’s monstrously hyper-inflated ego, they were four young men in London trying to see how far they could push rock music as a genre and format.
Their story starts in mid-60s Cambridge and London, in art schools and student flats. They cycled through names and styles, playing American R&B covers and early beat material, before Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett who would have celebrated his 80th birthday this Tuesday, stepped forward with his own peculiarly childlike songs about cats with espionage careers, lonely scarecrows, ghostly girls, or bikes with “a basket and a bell and things to make it look good”.
By 1966, Pink Floyd had become a fixture of London’s underground. At the UFO Club and the Roundhouse, they played under swirls of oil-projector light, their sets stretching from songs into jams and beyond. Accounts from those nights describe the group turning their backs to the audience and locking into a single, heavy riff for what felt like forever, while liquid projections from home-built light rigs boiled across the walls. Barrett’s guitar, fed into Binson Echorec delay units and fuzz pedals, orbited the rest of the band. Notes smeared into feedback, before the music yanked back into focus with chiming phrases.
What makes early Pink Floyd so magnetic is the tension between that free-form chaos and Barrett’s very precise songwriting and lyricism. Take their debut single, “Arnold Layne” (1967). On the surface, it might seem like a relatively straightforward pop tune: verse, chorus, middle eight. Almost Lennon-McCartney-type fare of the Rubber Soul era. But there’s also a weird odor to it. The organ swirls jauntily, the harmonies rise angelically, but the lyrics’ story of a man who gets caught stealing women’s clothes from washing lines sits at a disconcerting angle to the form of the song.
What makes early Pink Floyd so magnetic is the tension between that free-form chaos and Barrett’s very precise songwriting and lyricism.
The follow-up single, “See Emily Play”, is even harder to place. The song is barely three minutes long but keeps changing shape: abrupt edits, backwards piano swirls, tape-echo trails that appear and vanish. These studio effects are part of the song’s grammar—the effect is rather like waking from a very peculiar dream.
This energy carried through to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), the only full album Barrett recorded with the band. The title, lifted from The Wind in the Willows (a 1908 children’s novel by Kenneth Grahame), reflects an English pastoralism far-removed from the band’s American contemporaries, mixed with space-age optimism, and diverging into occasional splashes of psychedelia.
First, there’s the cosmic material: “Astronomy Domine”, with its litany of star names and planets, and “Interstellar Overdrive”, which takes a spiky riff and lets it wander across a map of improvised noise, a prototype of space rock, almost like an intercepted alien radio broadcast.
Second, there are the character songs: “Lucifer Sam”, with its surf-spy guitar riff and a cat who “always sits by your side,” and “The Gnome”, which sounds like an ancient folk tune rewritten by a very stoned children’s author. These tracks are whimsical on the surface, but the lyrics rarely resolve into tidy stories. Things are left unsaid; motives stay blurry.
Finally, there are the fragile, reflective miniatures like “The Scarecrow”, where the protagonist’s condition (“he’s not insane”) sounds suspiciously like the writers trying to convince themselves of their own sanity. “Bike”, which closes the album with a cluttered sound collage of bells, laughter, and ticking clocks, is a door opening into a room you’re not entirely sure you should be in.
Rick Wright’s organ and piano glide between churchy chords and eerie, sustained drones. Nick Mason’s drumming has a loose and conversational bounce to it. Roger Waters’s bass often holds a single, pulsing line, an anchor for Barrett to dance around.
The part of the story everyone knows is what comes next. Extensive psychedelic drug use, the grind of touring, and what we’d now almost certainly identify as serious mental health issues pull Barrett increasingly away from the band and, well, from reality. On stage he becomes unpredictable: occasionally brilliant, sometimes absent, even going so far as to strum a single chord for an entire gig or simply stare into space. The other members, fearing that Syd’s collapse might mean the end of Pink Floyd, bring in Syd’s old Cambridge friend David Gilmour as a second guitarist. For a brief period, Pink Floyd have two lead guitarists, and then they make a decision that will haunt them for decades: they continue without Barrett. He’s never fired. They just stop picking him up for rehearsals and gigs.
Extensive psychedelic drug use, the grind of touring, and what we’d now almost certainly identify as serious mental health issues pull Barrett increasingly away from the band and from reality.
Although Barrett never toured again, he released two solo records, both in 1970: The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. They are characterized by sparse arrangements and perilously shaky performances. But inside that mess are songs that seem shockingly direct.
“Octopus” tumbles through nonsensical imagery and sudden tempo changes, yet lands every time on a hook that burrows into your brain. “Baby Lemonade” opens with a clumsy guitar figure that is atmospheric and also whimsical. And “Dark Globe”, with its almost unaccompanied vocal, seems less like a song than a window being opened onto Syd’s private, unedited distress.
Back in the main Pink Floyd timeline, Syd’s absence and disappearance became one of the band’s recurring themes. You can hear his shadow in the long, side-long pieces on A Saucerful of Secrets (1968) and Meddle (1971)—in the way they patiently build from hush to explosive, cathartic roar. By Wish You Were Here (1975), Barrett’s absence has become the explicit subject matter. “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” is written about Barrett, and is half elegy, half apology. It is perhaps more an awkward expression of fascination than any kind of genuine tribute, but the legend of Syd Barrett, recluse, ghost, and the patron saint of broken geniuses was cemented all the same.
The real Syd, who went back to living under his birth name of Roger, lived many more years back in Cambridge, painting, gardening, occasionally hounded by the paparazzi. He lived off the royalties of his work until 1978, when the money ran out, after which he was cared for by his family. But in terms of recorded music, his window is comparatively tiny: one album with Pink Floyd, a few singles, two solo records, plus some outtakes, bootleg gig recordings, and odds and ends.
Maybe that’s part of why his work still feels alive. Early Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett don’t slot comfortably into classic rock playlists or nostalgia circuits quite like Wish You Were Here or The Dark Side Of The Moon. The songs are too odd, the production too brittle and primitive, the humor too weird. This music lives closer to the edges: in modern psych-folk, in lo-fi bedroom weirdness, in any band that treats the studio as a giant toy box with tape machines misbehaving in the background. Whenever you hear a song that sounds like it’s being written and sabotaged at the same time, you’re probably hearing some echo of Barrett’s short, intense burst of activity.
Whenever you hear a song that sounds like it’s being written and sabotaged at the same time, you’re probably hearing some echo of Barrett’s short, intense burst of activity.
For those, like me, born decades after the 1960s, there’s also a peculiar nostalgia for a world that my generation inherited, a world that we can listen to, but can never really join. The Barrett story floats somewhere between tragedy and triumph, between truth and legend, with Syd as a folkloric hero.
These recordings sound like experiments that the tape just happened to catch. Not locked. There’s always the impression that, given one more take, everything might have gone differently, and for a brief moment you can hear faintly an alternate version of rock history, where Syd Barrett managed to hold it all together, got to stay in the band—and where English rock music took a totally different path.
Happy Birthday, Syd.
Listen to:
Pink Floyd — “Arnold Layne” 1967 debut single. Suburban surrealism: churchy organ, and a quietly subversive lyrics about a compulsive clothes thief.
Pink Floyd — “See Emily Play” 1967 single. Veil-thin divide between lullaby and hallucination, full of reversed pianos, sudden key changes and vanishing echoes.
Pink Floyd — “Astronomy Domine” From The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). Planets and stars, delivered through distorted “mission control” vocals and towering organ chords.
Pink Floyd — “Interstellar Overdrive” Also from Piper. A crooked riff launched into deep space: the band drifts into noisy free improvisation and somehow navigates back to the starting point without a map.
Pink Floyd — “Bike” Piper’s closing track. Toy-shop psychedelia wrapped around a love song that sounds both funny and faintly menacing.
Syd Barrett — “Octopus” From The Madcap Laughs (1970). Fragmented wordplay, tumbling rhythm, and a refrain that’s constantly tripping over itself.
Syd Barrett — “Dark Globe” Also from The Madcap Laughs. Bare, exposed and painfully intimate.
Syd Barrett — “Baby Lemonade” From Barrett (1970). Jangly guitar, lopsided groove, and lyrics blurring domestic detail into dream logic,
Pink Floyd — “Jugband Blues” From A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), Syd’s last song with the band. A brass band drifts in and out, and a final line that sounds like a man carefully writing himself out of existence.
Robyn Hitchcock — “I Often Dream of Trains” Not Barrett, but steeped in his DNA.
