You know, nobody home.”īarrett, meanwhile, recorded two shambling solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, with assistance from Waters and Gilmour. “I looked right in his eye and there was no twinkle, no glint. “He just looked at me,” said Boyd, who had produced Pink Floyd's 'Arnold Layne' single. Without overtly admitting it, Waters wrote of Barrett: “Now there’s a look in your eye/ Like black holes in the sky.” It echoed the sentiment of famed Brit folk producer Joe Boyd in June 1967, who seeing Barrett for the first time in months noted a change. While the title track longs for the company of a man who no longer existed at that point, the other songs attack the irony of wanting fame you’re unable to handle when you obtain it head-on. Pink Floyd, of course, went on to sell hundreds of millions of records, but never quite shook Barrett’s legacy, essentially composing an entire album around his story in 1975’s Wish You Were Here. Managers Peter Jenner and Andrew King, who had founded Blackhill Enterprises as a partnership with Pink Floyd, stuck with Barrett, whose heart-breaking final contribution to the band, “Jugband Blues”, closes their sophomore album, A Saucerful of Secrets. In early 1968, they stopped picking Barrett up for gigs, leading to the final split. As 1967 drew to a close, they hired David Gilmour to take Barrett’s place on stage, with the intent of turning Barrett into a Brian Wilson figure- writing the songs and gracing the records but staying far away from the live setting. Outside of the studio, however, Barrett’s unpredictability had fellow Floyd bandmates Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Rick Wright at wit’s end. On Pink Floyd's debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, songs like “Astronomy Domine” and “Interstellar Overdrive” greatly pushed the boundaries of rock music, while “The Gnome”, “Bike”, and “Lucifer Sam” helped define British psychedelic whimsy. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band down the hall. 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.

Madcap laughs lyrics