The Dark Side Of Pink Floyd:
Music, Magic And Madness In Psychedelic London
From: Saucerful Of Secrets:
The Pink Floyd Odyssey
By Nicholas Schaffner
Musician February 1991, Page 38 &
March 1991, Page 32
Illustrations By Jamie Hogan

The Final Weeks Of Rock 'n' Roll's Most Magical Year Caught Britain's Most Promising New Band In An Excruciating Dilemma.

In 1967 Pink Floyd Epitomized The Emerging Revolution That Had Already Transformed The Look, Sound And Message Of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones And Other Established Pop Idols. As "the Movement's House Orchestra"-bassist Roger Waters' Phrase-Pink Floyd Was Already Renowned For Their Futuristic Multimedia Concert Happenings the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-entranced listeners with its innovative blend of lyrical fantasy, melodic pop inventiveness, spaced-out improvisation and surreal sound effects.

But for Waters and his two former architecture college classmates, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright, any aura of promise and triumph had been all but nullified by the problem of Syd. The band's songwriter and artistic catalyst, as well as the sole member endowed with unalloyed pop star charisma, guitarist Syd Barrett had provided Pink Floyd with its voice, its identity, even its mysterious name.

Onstage, when the players weren't altogether obscured by visual projections and flashing lights, Barrett would dominate the lineup with the intensity of his presence, ominously flailing his cape-shrouded arms between transports of interstellar feedback.

On record, the words and music evoked a magical world-peopled by futuristic space travelers, rocky horror transvestites and the gnomes and unicorns of English fairy-tale lore-that was distinctively Barrett's own. "The imagination that he had Rick Wright marvels a generation later. "He was brilliant. And such a nice guy'

Pink Floyd without Syd seemed unthinkable. Yet, the way Syd was going, the prospect of the band continuing with him was becoming hardly more conceivable. Sometimes Barrett was so remote as to be almost invisible; other times he was simply impossible.

In London's "underground" and pop music circles, tales of Syd's erratic behavior were already legion. Pink Floyd had been invited to make three consecutive appearances on the televised hit-parade countdown "Top of the Pops." For their first performance, Barrett and his band members were arrayed in satins and velvets from the exclusive pop-star boutiques that lined the King's Road. The next time 'round, Syd retained his Summer of Love finery-yet looked as if he had slept in it over the past week. Then, for the third show. he arrived at the TV studio resplendent in a trendy new costume-hot clutching a pile of smelly old rags into which he changed just before the Floyd's appearance.

Friends and associates variously attributed Barrett's metamorphosis to some long-dormant mental dislocation; to the pressures of terrestrial celebrity on a highly strung 21-year-old visionary artist; and to a steady diet of LSD and other such brain-frying substances. Whatever the cause, everyone could agree the situation was going from mad to worse.

While Syd lingered before a dressing room mirror at a gig in late '67, primping up a luxuriant Afro-the obligatory Hendrix perm, as Roger Waters would call it 12 years later in The Wall-his exasperated colleagues finally hit the stage without him. This prodded Barrett to take decisive measures: Crushing the contents of a jar of his beloved Mandrax tablets, he ground the fragments into his hair along with a full tube of Brylcream. Syd then joined the group onstage, where the heat of the spotlights turned his unique beauty treatment into a dribbling mess that left the oblivious star looking, in the eyes of their dumbstruck lighting director, "like a guttered candle." The only note to emanate from Syd's guitar all night was an endlessly repeated middle C.

The rest of the hand decided that they had to augment the line-up with another singer/guitarist to pick up the slack Syd so often left. The blond sometime-model David Gilmour seemed the perfect choice-he was as steady and easygoing as Barrett was not, and had known and worked with Barrett even longer than the rest of the band. Growing up with Syd in Cambridge, Dave had taught him Stones licks before the pair developed the guitar style each in turn would make famous. In the likely event that Barrett might not be all there during a gig, Gilmour could flawlessly recreate all his parts and few would the the wiser.

For a while, the other Floyds and their managers discerned a possible solution in the precedent set by the Beach Boys, whose similarly mercurial songwriter and resident genius Brian Wilson was left at home to compose when the band went off on tour. But Barrett's harrowing new songs "Vegetable Man" and "Scream Thy Last Scream" hardly, seemed calculated to boost the Floyd's popular appeal. And have "Have You Got It Yet?" appeared to acquire a completely new melody and chord progression each time Syd rehearsed it with his colleagues. Calling the piece "a real act of mad genius," Roger Water's later remembered: "I stood there for an hour while he was singing... trying to explain that he was changing it all the time so I couldn't follow it. He'd sing, 'Have you got it yet?' and I'd sing, 'No, no!"'

Roger was out of all patience with Syd. Perceiving Pink Floyd's dreams of fame and acclaim fast slipping, he responded to Barrett's transgressions with a withering antagonism that the bassist was to rue profoundly in the years to come.

One afternoon in February, 1968, Waters, at the wheel of the band's oversized old Bentley-Rolls, was making the rounds of Pink Floyd's various London habitats prior to the drive down to the next gig in the southern provinces. Barrett, living in suburban Richmond, was always the last to be collected. "Shall we pick Syd up?" said one of the group. "Oh, no, let's not," groaned another. And in that moment, everyone suddenly understood that they much preferred simply to manage without him as best they could. There was to be no looking back: When they returned to EMI's Abbey Road studio to record their second album, a bemused Syd was sometimes left holding his guitar in the reception area while the others put down tracks for "A Saucerful of Secrets."

On April 6,1968 it was confirmed that Syd Barrett was no longer a member of Pink Floyd. As far as the London pop music media-and even the group's managers- were concerned, that news flash spelled the end of the Floyd. Syd, after all, was Pink.

Barrett never did accept the notion that Pink Floyd was anything other than his group. He continued to turn up unannounced for subsequent Floyd shows at "alternative" London clubs like Middle Earth, planting himself at the front of the audience and leveling an unblinking stare at Dave Gilmour throughout the admittedly shambolic performances. "It was a paranoid experience," said Gilmour. "It took me a long time to feel a part of the band."

Gilmour says his contact with Syd throughout the '80s was limited to "a bit of checking on whether his money was getting to him properly, stuff like that. And I asked Rose, his sister, whether I could go and see him. But she didn't think it was a good idea, because things that remind him of that period of his past tend to depress him. If he sees me or other people from that period, begets depressed for a couple of weeks. It's not really worth it."

The closest anyone came to reestablishing contact was in October 1988. when BBC's Nicky Campbell persuaded a family spokesman to mark the appearance of Opel, a Syd compilation, by saying a few words on his show. Sister Rose's husband, hotel manager Paul Breem, let it be known that Barrett was pursuing "a very ordinary sort of lifestyle-albeit one devoid of any regular human contact beyond an occasional shopping trip with his elderly mother-and doesn't play any musical instruments anymore."

As for Syd's musical career, that was a "part of his life which he prefers to forget now. He had some bad experiences, and, thankfully, has come through all the worst of these, and is now able-fortunately-to lead a normal life here in Cambridge."

In Cambridge, tucked away on a cul-de-sac in his little semi-detached suburban home, the man who named Pink Floyd follows a quiet, solitary existence. Among his pastimes, only the unfinished canvases-painted in a style that is, to say the least, abstract-give any indication that this is an individual of any exceptional sensibility. The rest of Roger Barrett's time is whiled away tending to his beloved garden and his coin collection, watching TV, reading and endlessly redecorating his cozy Shangri-La. He has not touched a guitar in years, and the only music he ever listens to is jazz and the classics. This portly, balding, middle-aged man is not entirely unaware of

that other life he led as "Syd," or of the on-going fascination with his extinguished alter-ego's work and legacy. Syd's Floyd records continue to bring in more than enough to subsidize Roger Barrett's modest needs; he rarely buys anything, and money in the bank means nothing to him.

While his family and few friends are grateful that he is "getting better" with each passing year, it remains painfully difficult for him to communicate with other human beings on almost any level. But though he seldom ventures beyond his English garden, the man who was once Syd is settled and reasonably content-and almost determinedly ordinary as he shuffles through his simple daily routines. Sometimes, he even dreams that he will soon be well enough to hold down a nine-to-five London office job and commute every day into the big city.

Dominated since the thirteenth century by its world-renowned university Cambridge is exceptional for its affluence and sophistication, and for its unspoiled medieval character doll scenic beauty. Unlike some other British rock luminaries, the leading lights of Pink Floyd never pretended to be working-class heroes." Their backgrounds were strictly white-collar, their parents downright (distinguished. Doug Gilmour was a professor of genetics and his wife Sylvia a schoolteacher turned film editor. Max Barrett was a police pathologist also known as one of Britain's leading authorities on infant mortality. Mary Waters was a schoolmistress active in local politics; her husband had also been a teacher, specializing in religious training as well as physical education.

Eric Fletcher Waters, however, was long dead -gunned down in 1944 in Italy. Waters senior was only 30 when he died, only a few months after his third child had been born on September 6. Along with 40,000 other British soldiers, he was slain in a reckless British campaign to capture the bridgehead of Anzio from the Nazis. One need look no further for the source of the chip on the shoulder that marked George Roger Waters throughout his years with the Floyd-to say nothing of the militant anti-militarism that cauterized his Song lyrics. In Waters' terminology, the absence of his father amounted to the first-and the worst-brick in his wall.

Anyone familiar with the album and film of The Wall will recognize certain details drawn from Roger's childhood: stumbling upon his father's uniform, and a scroll of condolence from King George VI, in one of his mother's drawers; rescuing a dying animal, only to be made to toss it in the garbage by her; getting packed off to a grammar school staffed by Dickensian sadists bent on purging their hapless little victims of any spark of creativity or individuality. "It was terrible," Waters would recall in 1979. "Never encouraging them to do things, not really trying to interest them in anything, just trying to keep them quiet and still and crush them into the right shape so that they would go on to university and do well."

All further bricks in the wall, but animated in Roger's magnum opus by a certain amount of caricature. Some of his teachers were "very nice guys," he admitted; and his mum did give him a "reasonable view of the world and what it was like-or as reasonable as she could."

As a young teenager, Roger's favorite pursuits included playing with toy guns (and shooting real ones)-and staying awake at night with his "wireless" tuned to American Forces Network or Radio Luxembourg (a memory that he was to draw upon 30 years later with his solo album Radio KAOS.): "In a solitary way, the radio station was the first thing I established a kind of relationship with, outside of my family or school.... It's not bombarding you or forcing you into corners, and yet you're getting other people's ideas through it, more so than with television. There's no image on the radio. Radio is much easier to concentrate on. You can't watch TV in the dark because it makes it light."

He was less enchanted by his weekend apprenticeship as a naval cadet, despite attaining the rank of Leading Seaman. In one prophetic incident, his young subordinates, riled by Roger's overbearing manner, mutinied and beat him up. Waters summarily turned in his uniform and was slapped with a dishonorable discharge. He became instead the chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's local youth chapter.

Also attending Cambridge County High School for Boys were several colleagues-to-be. One of Roger's classmates was Storm Thorgerson-son of Mary Waters' closest friend and future mastermind of the Floyd's classic album covers. Two grades below them was Syd Barrett, with whom Storm became increasingly friendly, and two below him the latter-day second Floyd (and Roger Waters') guitarist Tim Renwick-who cherishes memories of Syd's stint as his Boy Scout patrol leader.

Roger Keith Barrett-born on January 6,1946-was raised in a large house on Hill Road, the nicest street in Cherry Hinton, by loving parents. A popular and successful student, his passions ranged from camping and sports to drama and painting, at which he particularly excelled. His father was a classical music buff around whose prized grand piano young Roger Barrett (or "Syd," as he came to be nicknamed) and his two brothers and two sisters would regularly be drawn into musical family get-togethers. Max also encouraged his youngest son's interest in music with the gift of a banjo-and then, at the boy's insistence, a guitar.

When Syd was 14, however, the idyllic picture shattered with Dr. Barrett's sudden death. Storm Thorgerson proposes this trauma as the first "catalyst" in his friend's eventual dementia. It was, in Waters-speak, the first brick in Syd's wall.

Storm's lifelong "best mate" David Gilmour was born exactly two months after Syd, on March 6,1946. In marked contrast to Roger Waters, the athletic young Dave was raised by permissive, easygoing parents characterized by one Cambridge friend as "fairly Bohemian, pretty trendy for that time." Gilmour found his calling at 13 when he inherited a cheap Spanish guitar from a neighbor.

By 1962 Cambridge, like most British cities, was enlivened by a thriving music scene, with well over a hundred local bands springing up on both sides of the town-and-gown divide. Among the lesser of these was Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, whose lineup encompassed Syd Barrett on a proudly acquired electric guitar for which he had constructed a small amp. Partly to help Syd get his mind off his father's death, the ever-indulgent Mrs. Barrett encouraged her son's band to rehearse and perform in the spacious front room of the home that reduced circumstances had obliged her to turn into a boarding house. The Mottoes' repertoire consisted of current British hit-parade fodder like Cliff Richard's Shadows, with an occasional stab at Chuck Berry.

A frequent visitor to their gigs was Barrett's older school chum Roger Waters, who would roar into Hill Road on his beloved old AIS motorbike-but had yet to evince great interest in playing music

Like all Syd's Cambridge friends, the Mottoes' drummer Clive Wetham detected few signs of incipient musical genius-or mental instability. Weiham regarded Barrett first and foremost as "an excellent painter, a much more talented painter than musician. To be honest, Syd was a very rookie guitarist. Even when the Floyd became famous, his real skill was his innovations rather than his musical ability."

Dave Gilmour and Syd grew close at Cambridge's College of Arts and Technology. "He was in the art department," recalls Gilmour, "and I was doing modern languages. He and I, and quite a lot of other people who were interested in music, would hang out in the art school every lunchtime and play songs, with guitars and harmonicas."

The songs played at such gatherings were by British artists-the Beatles and their successors. Gilmour-much the more fluent guitarist-helped Barrett figure out Keith Richards' licks; the pair also experimented with slide guitar and echo boxes (not to mention hashish). But until the Floyd's brief incarnation as a five-piece in early 1968, their musical partnership extended only to a handful of acoustic sessions at a Cambridge club called the Mill- and dueling for spare change on the streets of southern France.

Dr. Gilmour, meanwhile, had been drawn overseas-to lower Manhattan, in fact-in the "brain drain" of Britain's top scientists and scholars, able to command vastly higher salaries in America.

("Roger," Dave once quipped, "lost his father in the war. I lost mine in Greenwich Village.") Always encouraged to be independent by his parents, Dave was left to fend for himself in a small flat on Mill Road. "He was pretty hard up in those days," says Clive Welbam Just a pair of jeans and a donkey jacket, that was about it.

Gilmour recalls nights of playing U.S. military bases in a cover land called Jokers Wild and collapsing into bed at 4 AM-only to rise three hours later to tackle odd jobs. (Among these, the most lucrative-for a blond, handsome youth like Dave-proved to be posing as a male model) All of which helped instill in the easy going guitarist his underlying grit, and a determination to succeed on his own terms that was to resurface during the Floydian civil wars a generation later.

While Gilmour and Jokers Wild remained based in Cambridge, Waters and Barrett moved to London to pursue their destinies as, respectively, an architect and a painter. At Regent Street Polytechnic, Waters-having acquired a guitar after becoming a Stones fan-fell in with fellow architecture students Rick Wright and Nick Mason, who shared a flat in Highgate and wanted to form a band.

Born July 28, 1945, Richard William Wright (son of Bridle and Cedric) had attended a haberdasher's prep school before changing to architecture "I didn't want to be an architect," Rick recalls. "I wanted to be a musician. Jazz was my main love then. The only time I've ever stood in line for tickets was for Duke Ellington, when I was 17."

While all the Floyds were well-off by the standard of aspiring '60s Rock n' rollers, Nicholas Berkeley Mason was rich. He was raised by Bill and Sally Mason in a stately home on one of the most exclusive streets of London's exclusive Hampstead district. The Masons' driveway was often rendered impassable by flashy sports cars, including the Lotus Elan and Aston Martin that Nick himself already owned around the time he linked up with Wright and Waters.

Sigma 6 was the name of the first band featuring Waters, Wright and Mason-on, respectively, lead guitar, rhythm guitar and drums, none of which they particularly knew how to play.

Waters moved into Mason's Highgate pad. Given the tendency of students from Cambridge to seek one another out in the big city, it was hardly surprising that two acquaintances from home should also wind up there-and begin playing in Roger's band. One was Bob Close, a fellow student at the Regent Street Poly and an accomplished jazz guitarist who cut his teeth in a group called Blues Anonymous. The other was Syd Barrett.

"With the advent of Bob Close," Waters recalled, 'we actually bad someone who could play an instrument. It was really then that we did the shuffle job of who played what. I was demoted from lead guitar to rhythm guitar and finally bass. There was always this frightful fear that I could land up as the drummer."

Syd very quickly clashed with the incorrigibly square Close-who failed to share the art student's fascination with guitar feedback and echo boxes, let alone his burgeoning interest in Eastern mysticism, supernaturalism, ESP and LSD.

Bob bailed out-leaving Syd, almost by default, fronting the group.

Barrett found more permanent lodgings near the West End theater district, at 2 Earlham Street, which several Cambridge acquaintances had already made their home. These included Susie Gawler Wright, whose live-in boyfriend Peter Wynne Wilson, a lighting technician at the New Theatre, was to become one of Syd's closest friends and artistic partners.

Barrett was profoundly troubled by an incident that Storm Thorgerson suggests may have been the second catalyst for what was to come. Many of Syd's Cambridge gang"-most of whom had already sampled LSD-became deeply involved with an Indian-based religious cult called Sant Mat, or the Path of the Masters. "A lot of people tried to capture Syd and force him into their religion," says Susie-who was one of its adherents.

"So Syd and I went to a hotel in the center of London to meet the Master," Thorgerson recalls. "Syd was seeking initiation to become, as it was called, a Sat Sanghi." Barrett was rejected by the Maharaji Charan Singh Ji on the grounds that he was a student who should focus instead on finishing his courses Though he seldom discussed it with his friends, they sensed that Barrett took the inscrutable guru's rejection very personally. Henceforth, he would feel obliged to seek his enlightenment elsewhere-notably through artistic expression, and through chemicals.

The strange moniker Syd bequeathed to his band was suggested not by a drug vision but by two obscure names in his record collection: Georgia blues man Pink Anderson (1900-1974) and Floyd "Dipper Boy" Council (1911-1976). The Pink Floyd Sound's early choice of material was less esoteric, consisting mainly of Rolling Stones hits and chestnuts like "Louie Louie" and "Road Runner" The one feature to set the group apart from 10,000 others playing the same numbers at parties and pubs was the instrumental breaks, pregnant with distortion, feedback and possibilities, during which the guitarist (increasingly abetted by the Stockhausen-influenced keyboard player) would drive his solid little R&B band into another realm entirely. The Pink Floyd Sound was first billed as such at London's Countdown Club in late 1965-a gig for which the four students received £15 During the next several months, Jokers Wild and the Floyd often opened shows for one another in their respective bailiwicks of Cambridge and London. One memorable evening, Gilmour and Barrett-"twin luminaries from a small town," as Thorgerson puts it-co-starred with their bands at a large party in Shelford, just outside Cambridge The "cabaret" slot-during which an acoustic act or a comedian would give the dancing crowds a respite from the amplified rock 'n' roll-was filled by a struggling New York folkie named Paul Simon.

The emerging London counterculture gathered steam with a series of Sunday afternoon happenings at the Marquee Club, the celebrated Soho venue where the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and the Who had launched their legends. "Spontaneous Underground"- roughly equal measure jam session, costume party and free-for-all-offered a British variation on the American Be-in.

The invite to the inaugural Marquee happening in February 1966 lead: Who will be there? Poets, pop singers, hoods, Americans, homosexuals because they make up 10 percent of the population), 20 clowns, jazz musicians, one murderer, sculptors, politicians and some girls who defy description

Though a rock band or two might be included in the afternoon's entertainment. no one act could expect to be the sole focus of attention eight-millimeter films flickered on the wall throughout the performances, and little distinction was made between player and audience The latter were encouraged to dress as outrageously as possible and to contribute to the mayhem with such "found" instruments as toilet plungers, mailing tubes and transistor radios.

On March 13th came the Spontaneous Underground debut of a group of four students identified by the inscription on the bassist's amplifier as the Pink Floyd Sound. John Hopkins was there. "There weren't many people. maybe 40 or 50," he recalls. "The band was not playing music, they were playing sounds. Waves and walls of sounds, quite unlike anything anybody in rock 'n' roll had played before John Cage had done stuff like that. And suddenly here were these young art students playing the same crazy stuff. It blew a lot of people's minds. It was exciting."

Local scene maker Peter Jenner was trying to get an experimental record label off the ground. It dawned on him that under the terms of his fledgling avant-jazz label's contract with Elektra, "we'd have to sell millions of albums to make any money. We couldn't even pay off the recording costs out of our two percent royalty. I concluded we needed a pop group-because I thought pop groups made money."

One Sunday in May, Jenner dropped by the Marquee. As far as many of the Spontaneous Undergrounders were concerned, the chief attraction that afternoon was one of the first of the great pink jellies (known to Americans as Jello) that were to become an obligatory feature of alternative-London happenings. Several daring young hipsters doffed their Kings Road finery to squirm in the pink ooze-to the music of the appropriately named Pink Floyd Sound.

"I have this recollection of walking 'round the stage at the Marquee," says Jenner, "Trying to work out where the noise was coming from, who was playing it. Normally you'd have the bass, bomp, bomp, bomp; the piano, clink, clink, clink-and, clang, clan& clang, that's the guitar. But during the solo instrumental bits, I couldn't work out whether it was the guitar or the keyboards. It wasn't neat and tidy like most pop music, which I'd found quite boring: My baby loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah, with the same chords going 'round and 'round."

Jenner subsequently tracked down the bassist and drummer at their flat in Highgate. In a 1973 interview, Roger Waters recalled Jenner proclaiming, "'You lads could be bigger than the Beatles'--and we sort of looked at him and replied in a dubious tone, 'Yes, well, we'll see you when we get back from our hols,' because we were all shooting off for some sun on the Continent"

After their summer break, Barrett, Waters, Mason and Wright were ready to talk business with Jenner and his friend and prospective partner Andrew King. The four students had no manager or agent, minimal equipment in varying states of decrepitude and a van about to give up the ghost. After they agreed to throw in their lot with Jenner and King, one of the latter's first gestures was to buy them about £1000 worth of new instruments and amplifiers. (These were almost immediately stolen, obliging the musicians to acquire yet another set of gear on the installment plan.) Jenner turned Syd Barrett on to such performance techniques as rolling ball bearings down guitar strings-and suggested that Pink Floyd rid their name of the superfluous "Sound."

The original plan to turn the Floyd into a flagship for Jenner's DNA Records was quickly forgotten, after Roger insisted that what the group really needed was a full-time manager-a role that Peter and Andrew enthusiastically agreed to share.

Rick Wright has described early Floyd performances as "purely experimental for us and a time of learning and finding out what we were trying to do. Each night was a complete buzz because we did totally new things and none of us knew how the others would react to it."

Writer Barry Miles nonetheless recalls that after a typical Sound and Light Workshop the Floyd "took questions from the audience, while earnest young avantgardists like myself asked about multimedia experiments and all the rest of it. It was an 'educational event.' Very serious."

Syd Barrett was now sharing the top floor of Peter and Susie's house with his look alike girlfriend, model Lindsay Korner. Good-natured and comparatively low-key, Lindsay was to remain devoted to Syd through all the ups and downs of his Floyd years.

Now that the Pink Floyd were taking flight, Syd had abandoned his canvases to create "music in colors" instead: writing songs with a flair and dedication that astonished even his closest associates. His typically "underground" enthusiasms and influences-Chinese oracles and childhood fairy stories; pulp sci-fi and JR K. Tolkien's tales of Middle-Earth; English folk ballads, Chicago blues, avant-garde electronics and Donovan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones-all percolated in the cauldron of his subconscious to reemerge in a voice, sound and style that was uniquely Syd.

"In the early days," says Wynne Wilson, "much more time would be spent writing numbers than performing. He would be building towards a performance rather than writing for a record. Writing the lyrics for a number, he would compose the basics of it-and then endlessly play around with how he was going to take his improvisation during the gig. Those were halcyon days-everything was very pleasant then. It was going exactly the way Syd wanted. He would have endless time to write and play.

"I can remember him sitting around and playing with lyrics, and copious quantities of grass and hashish would be smoked. It was all very mellow-and later became far too pressured and plastic."

"He was very, very much the creator of the group in those days," says June Bolan. 'When he would sit at home and write a song, he'd think of what the drummer ought to play, how the bass line should be He played very good rhythm as well as lead, and he'd know what he wanted to hear. He'd go into rehearsals and say to Nick, This is what I want you to play'.. .and that's how it would come out"

Sumi Jenner never found Syd very communicative: "He just expressed himself through his music." Her husband remembers Barrett as "the most creative person I've ever known. It was extraordinary-in those few months at Earlham Street he wrote nearly all his songs for the Floyd and the solo albums. It was all very casual, done off the top of the head. No tortured genius sweating through his pain. When people write without any inhibitions, they write so I much better than when they start getting concerned that they're great writers.

Peter Jenner's own most tangible contribution to this output, however inadvertent may be found in the power-chord leitmotif of 'Interstellar Overdrive-the long instrumental freak-out that became a highlight of Syd's performances with the Floyd. It began with Jenner's attempt to serenade Barrett with the guitar hook from Love's version of Burt Bacharach's My Little Red Book." "I'm not the world's greatest singer: I've got a terrible sense of pitch," says Jenner "He played back a riff on his guitar, said, 'It goes like this?' and of course it was quite different, because my humming was so bad!"

The overnight flowering of Barrett's creativity was soon evinced onstage. "He took you into a whole other world," recalls Sunil Jenner. "The others always seemed to be struggling to keep up with him." During the course of the shows' centerpieces-30- to 45-minute free form disarrangements of "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Astronomy DominŽ"-Barrett would transform into a dervish; unleashing salvos of feedback, the guitarist would wave his arms in the air as the colored spotlights cast his looming shadow onto the screen behind. Syd's Floyd, Miles observed, 'would walk out on incredibly dangerous limbs and dance along crumbling precipices, saved sometimes only by the confidence beamed at them from the audience sitting a matter of inches away at their feet. Ultimately, having explored to their satisfaction, Nick would begin the drum roil that led to a final run-through of the theme, and everyone could breathe again."

Rick Wright's good nature, at least, appears to have been excellent right from the start-as was his inherent vulnerability. One friend from the early Floyd days remembers him as gentle and sweet," yet "willowy and shaky" Though initially twitted by his colleagues for always seeming to play the same lick no matter what the song-Rick's Turkish Delight, they called it-Wright was Barrett's closest partner in the Floyd, both socially and musically.

"In the early days," says Jenner, "Rick used to tune everybody's guitars Syd couldn't be bothered-wasn't terribly good at it, but could if he had to- and Roger was tone-deaf, didn't have a clue. I never rated Roger's bass playing-no wonder he didn't like me. I never got over the fact that Roger was tone-deaf, and couldn't tune his bass He wasn't an instinctive musician like Syd."

Nonetheless, at least one key associate- producer Joe Boyd--recognized Waters' driving bass style, with its trademark octave swoops, as a major component of the Pink Floyd sound. Equally important to the Floyd's early success, the bassist was himself driven:

It was he who assumed the responsibility of organizing the group's activities, and of serving as their articulate press spokesman. The fact that Waters was slightly older-and, at six-foot-one, somewhat taller-also contributed to his aura of authority within the Floyd. Jenner does credit Roger for being incredibly hard-working and committed"-and, without question, "the strongest personality in the band."

On the night of October 15, 1966 Pink Floyd inaugurated the Roundhouse-which has since become an established London venue for both musical and theatrical events. Advertised as a "Pop Op Costume Masque Drag Ball," the event attracted the cream of London's fashion, art and pop-music worlds, dazzlingly arrayed in caftans, floral pajamas and antique military regalia. Paul McCartney and Marianne Faithfull were there-dressed, respectively, as a white-robed Arab and a partially disrobed nun.

Upon arrival, each ticketholder was ceremoniously presented with a sugar cube (albeit one that, unlike so many then in circulation, lacked any active ingredient. Much of the audience, however, proceeded on the premise that their cubes were spiked.).

The Floyd rose to the ecstatic occasion with their most powerful performance to date. Their light show was especially striking in the enveloping darkness of its barely wired surroundings. According to IT magazine, the Floyd "did weird things to the feel of the event with scary feedback sounds, slide projections playing on their skin. spotlights flashing in time with the drums." In keeping with the evening's total unpredictability, the concert came to an abrupt and dramatic end when the Roundhouse's power blew out during "Interstellar Overdrive."

The Floyd's Roundhouse performance earned a mention in the Sunday Times-their first in an established British newspaper. At the launching of the new magazine IT the other night a pop group called the Pink Floyd played throbbing music while a series of bizarre colored shapes flashed on a huge screen behind them. Someone had made a mountain of jelly which people ate at midnight and another person had parked his motorbike in the middle of the room. All apparently very psychedelic."

The piece concluded with remarks by Roger Waters: "Our music may give you the screaming horrors or throw you into screaming ecstasy. Mostly it's the latter. We find our audiences stop dancing now. We tend to get them standing there totally grooved with their mouths open."

By the time they began playing at UFO, London's hottest underground club, Pink Floyd's light show had a permanent impact upon their relationship with their audience. Because the individual performers tended to recede into (and be obscured by) the overall presentation, they were rarely recognized offstage and thus were able to cultivate the anonymity that was to remain a Floyd hallmark even after the group had become world-famous.

One individual presence did make itself known amid the paisley swirl. "Syd was recognized," says Peter Jenner. "He was marked out almost instantly as a 'star.' Everyone was in love with him."

It was at UFO that Cream lyricist Pete Brown "first saw Barrett doing 'the act.' With the leaping around and the madness, and the improvisation he was doing, my impression was that he was inspired. He would get past his limitations and into areas that were very, very interesting. Which none of the others could do. Quite frankly, the rest of them were not even competent. Syd's songs were so magical and ground breaking. The whole thing was animated by those songs and his personality. It might be overly poetic, but you could almost say that he appeared to exist and live in those light shows-a creature of the imagination. His movements were orchestrated to fit in with the lights, and he appeared to be a natural extension-the human element-to those melting images."

"It was at UFO that everything started to jell," says Wynne Wilison. "There's no doubt that the music they played at UFO was the best they ever did. It's a shame there were no live recordings made there Syd's improvisations would go on for extended periods, but would be absolutely immaculate."

Nick Mason, however, remembers the UFO performances in a slightly more ambivalent light. "It was almost a sort of punk thing-very free. It's funny when you're improvising and you're not particularly technically able: It's one thing if you're Charlie Parker, it's another thing if you're us The ratio of good stuff to bad is not that great. In the very early Pink Floyd days in the clubs like UFO, there were people definitely prepared to go on the basis-perhaps because of the state they were in-that we were being great 80 percent of the time rather than 20 percent. But there was a hell of a lot of rubbish being played in order to get a few good ideas out"

The discrepancy between these recollections of the UFO gigs ("they were great 80 percent of the time," insists Peter Jenner) may be traced back to the diverging attitudes and lifestyles within the Floyd camp at the time. Barrett and Wynne Wilson believed in the miraculous new age arising all around them. Waters and Mason were content merely to provide the musical soundtrack-even as they set their sights on broader-based pop success for the band. (Not that Barrett wasn't initially attracted to the glamor of stardom.)

As early as January 1967, Mason readily admitted that the psychedelic movement had "taken place around us-not within us." Much as these words may also have applied to Waters, Barrett could hardly have been more unequivocal in his embrace of the underground's ideals and excesses. One close associate states that Waters and Mason actually "represented exactly what Syd was rejecting. Even though they were now playing in a rock band, they were very', pleased with themselves for having heel) architecture students, for having followed that nice upper-middle-class script"

By the beginning of 1967, LSD) bad come to rival cannabis as Barrett's drag of choice at Earlham Street. "Syd was the only one of the group," says Wynne Wilson, "who was part of the-these words sound absurdly pretentious now-consciousness-expanding experimental movement. Which isn't to say we didn't take acid for fun, but we were anticipating some progress."

At first, the acid seemed to raise Barrett to even greater heights of inspiration and creativity. There were a few dodgy moments, such as when the police appeared at 2 Earlham Street's purple-painted door in search of a sometime-tenant with a heroin habit and a criminal record, and Barrett-in an era when "the fuzz" were a byword for paranoia even if a "freak" wasn't tripping- seemed to lose all powers of motion or speech as he fixed the men in blue with (in Susie's phrase) "huge horror eyes." (Fortunately another charming lady friend of Syd's named Carrie Anne stepped in to distract the bobbies with small talk and tea.)

On February 1,1967, the Pink Floyd officially "went professional," shelving their college careers to focus on the band. "Mind you," bantered Nick Mason-who still thought he might return to college the following year-"the best chance for an architect to find clients is in show business. I'm always on the lookout for someone who has half a million pounds to spare and wants me to design him a house."

The Floyd's priority now, however, was to put out a record. A hoary EMI executive named Beecher Stevens, having heard "a lot of fuss about their music and lights and so on," had sniffed around All Saints Church, accompanied by his A&R man Norman Smith. Smith was best-known as a longtime engineer for the Beatles-whom Stevens during his previous job at Decca, had deemed (to his subsequent embarrassment) undeserving of a record contract. Stevens rated the Floyd "weird but good" -yet was given pause when "one of the boys, and some of the people around them, seemed a bit strange." Hoping to excite more record-company interest, the Floyd went into Chelsea's Sound Techniques Studios with Joe Boyd to record "Arnold Layne"-a catchy Barrett penned fable about a kleptomaniac transvestite. The late January sessions also yielded an early version of "Interstellar Overdrive" and a proposed B-side hastily rewritten as "Candy and a Currant Bun" after someone from the BBC took exception to the original title "Let's Roll Another One."

EMI's top brass were suitably impressed, and upped the ante to a then-considerable £5000, contingent upon the band agreeing to work exclusively with a staff producer at EMI's Abbey Road studios. Stevens was determined that a sober-minded citizen- specifically, Norman Smith-"keep a firm hand on the sessions.

Upon its March 11 release on EMI's Columbia label, the creepy yet seductive "Arnold" drew both controversy and acclaim. Melody Maker hailed it as "an amusing and colourful story about a guy who got himself put inside whilst learning of the birds and the bees...without a doubt, a very good disc. The Pink Floyd represents a new form of music to the English pop scene so let's hope the English are broadminded enough to accept it with open arms."

Those who didn't included the popular and hipper-than-thou pirate Radio London which slapped the "smutty" platter with a ban. "If we can't write and sing songs about various forms of human predicament," responded Waters, "then we might as well not be in the business." Wright suggested that "the record was banned not because of the lyrics-because there's nothing there you can really object to-but because they're against us as a group and against what we stand for." The song's 21-year-old author said that "Arnold Layne just happens to dig dressing up in women's clothing; a lot of people do, so let's face up to reality!"

A little controversy, of course, has never harmed sales; the music and production, moreover, did not stint on good old-fashioned pop hooks. A decade later (on Capital Radio's "Pink Floyd Story" series), Nick Mason said "Arnold Layne" was expressly devised to establish the Floyd as "a hit parade band.... We were interested in the business of being a pop group: successful-money-cars-that sort of thing. Good living. I mean, that's the reason most people get involved in rock music, because they want that sort of success. If you don't, you get involved in something else."

"Arnold Layne" did crack the British Top Twenty-just barely-which was actually a better showing than all but two of the Floyd's singles were to achieve throughout the rest of the band's career. Yet the record rose far higher in underground London, and by dint of endless playings became a virtual anthem at clubs like UFO.

"'Arnold Layne' was probably the first-ever pop hit that dealt in an English accent with English cultural obsessions and English fetishes," declares Pete Brown. "There had never been anything quite like it; everyone had been behaving like Americans."

Many of the group's early associates agree that were it not for the tireless efforts and devotion of Jenner and King, the Pink Floyd might never have taken off as they did. Yet Waters was already betraying impatience with the duo-especially with the more nervous and intense King. This was dramatized that spring, on the Floyd's first European tour, when Andrew managed to drop the contents of his pocket into a Copenhagen drain while fumbling for his keys-and Roger turned on him, sneering, "We can't have a manager who throws our money down the drain, now, can we?"

Though Norman Smith had already taped such tuneful Barrett compositions as "The Gnome" and "The Scarecrow" at Abbey Road, both he and the Floyd's managers instantly recognized a new ditty called "Games for May" as the most suitable follow-up to "Arnold Layne." Syd then changed his title to "See Emily Play."

Barrett later put forth the story that "Emily" had materialized whole-cloth in a dream-ˆ la Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"- after he dozed off in the woods. Be that as it may, the lyric was directed at a flesh-and-blood Emily well-known to the UFO crowd-the "psychedelic school girl" daughter of the aristocrat author Lord Ken-net. Arnold the sex fetishist made way for Emily the flower child....

"See Emily Play" was a hit. Radio London listed Emily" almost instantly-at Number One And so the Pink Floyd, willy nilly, became pop stars.

There was at least one bad omen. David Gilmour, back from Europe to buy replacements for Jokers Wild's stolen equipment, dropped by Sound Techniques to visit Syd during the "Emily" sessions. He was thoroughly nonplussed when his old chum just looked straight through me, barely acknowlged that I was there. Very weird...."

The first Pink Floyd LP was completed in July 1967 and released in early August. Over 20 years and some dozen albums later, Rick Wright still cites it as one of his two or three favorite Floyd records (as does David Gilmour-who wasn't even on it). "I love listening to it, just to listen to Syd's songs," says Wright. "It's sad in a way as well, because it reminds me of what might have been. I think he could have easily been one of the finest songwriters today."

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was a remarkable achievement. It is also the work on which Syd's mythic reputation is almost entirely based, and one that provided the blueprints for albums his colleagues were subsequently to make in his absence.

Piper was, as June Bolan says, "very much Syd's baby-and such a wonderful baby." Throughout the making of the album, according to Andrew King, Barrett "was very hard on himself. He wouldn't do anything unless he thought he was doing it in an artistic way." His distinctive flair extended even to the then normally humdrum mixing process, when Syd "would throw the levers on the boards up and down apparently at random, making pretty pictures with his hands."

Even stripped of such gimmickry, Syd's playing is highly innovative and expressive. Melodic solos abruptly give way to harsh dissonance, and Dylanesque strumming to improvisation wherein key and time signatures are all but forgotten. Barrett was among the first rock guitarists to experiment with the wah-wah pedal and echo box, and transformed slide guitar into a fixture of the Floyd's thoroughly English dreamscapes.

Unlike his later work, Piper captures Barrett in full command of his creative powers. Only "Bike" seems to teeter on the edge of psychosis:

I've got a cloak, it's a bit of a joke, There's a tear up the front, it's red and black

I've had it for months, If you think it could look good, then I guess it should....

At the end, the listener is invited into Syd's "other room"-and all hell breaks loose. His collage-barrage!-of clockwork sound effects bears no discernible relation to the rest of the song's content, and thus sounds all the more diabolical and demented.

As much of Piper demonstrates, the Floyd got maximum mileage out of limited studio facilities. "Astronomy Domino" (on which Jenner can be heard reeling off the names of stars and galaxies through a megaphone) shows the hand using studio effects such as echo virtually as another instrument. Much of the credit is due Norman Smith-and, indirectly, George Martin and the Beatles, for whom Smith had engineered every album up to Rubber Soul. Piper abounds with studio wizardry borrowed from the Fab Four, notably the double-tracking of the vocals, which was applied to Barrett's even more liberally than it had been to Lennon's and McCartney's, and which contributed in no small measure to their otherworldly textures. Smith also coaxed the same distinctive thud from Mason's drums that he and Martin had with Ringo Starr's-by the same method of covering them with tea towels.

The two camps were formally introduced towards the end of April, when Barry Miles was hanging out with Paul McCartney at Abbey Road during one of the final Pepper sessions. Told by an engineer that Pink Floyd was working in the next studio, Miles mentioned it to Paul-who proposed that they stop by to say hello. George Harrison and Bingo also tagged along.

"Paul was patting them on the back, saying they were great and were going to do fine," Miles recalls. "He wasn't being patronizing; it was almost like the Beatles passing on the mantle-at least some of it- and acknowledging the existence of a new generation of music. In my discussions with him, McCartney had always been convinced that there would be a new synthesis of electronic music and studio techniques and rock 'n' roll. He didn't see the Beatles as being quite the vehicle for that. But the Pink Floyd, he thought, were the very stuff that we'd been talking about"

"I'm sure the Beatles were copying what we were doing," adds Peter Jenner. "Just as we were copying what we were hearing down the corridor!"

For Pink Floyd, however, the party that much of the rest of the turned-on tuned-in world would remember as the Summer of Love Was apparently doomed to end almost before it had begun. The night after Sgt. Pepper's release-on June 2-the Floyd returned to Joe Boyd's club UFO for the first time in months.

The club was as packed as it had ever been, with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and a flock of Yardbirds and Animals joining a mob of eager new fans, would-be hippies and plain old tourists. Yet the Floyd were obliged to use the same entrance as everyone else, before fighting their way to their dressing room.

On their way in they passed Joe Boyd, who later told Barry Miles, "It was very crushed, so it was like faces two inches from your nose. They all came by-'Hi, Joe!' 'How are you?' 'Great!' I greeted them all as they came through, and the last one was Syd.

"And the great thing with Syd was that he had a twinkle in his eye; he was a real eye-twinkler. He had this impish look about him, this mischievous grin. He came by, and I said, 'Hi, Syd!' And he just looked at me. I looked right in his eye and there was no twinkle. No glint. It was like somebody had pulled the blinds-you know, nobody home."

The next issue of IT charged that the Floyd "played like bums" that night. Only in retrospect did it become apparent that Syd Barrett was beginning to crack.

The Crack Up:
How Pink Floyd Lost Its Leader
By Nicholas Schaffner
Musician, March 1991, page 32

It was all so easy then," says Pink Floyd's then-manager Peter Jenner of Syd Barrett's artistic flowering and the Pink Floyd's initial success. "The question is why it then became so hard. money? fame? people coming up and asking Syd the meaning of life and giving him loads of acid? I blame the acid, but I think it would have been something else if it hadn't been the acid." "certainly acid had something to do with it," says Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright. "you don't know whether the acid accelerated this process that was happening in his brain, or was the cause of it. I think Syd just got involved with people who were trying to turn him on. in the late '60s taking acid was a whole new world. He got caught up in it."

Barrett's move in mid-1967 to the most notorious underground address in South Kensington was stepping from the frying pan into the fire. One Cambridge friend remembers 101 Cromwell Road, already home to much of their old crowd, as 'an extraordinary building knit of extraordinary people-very talented and high-flying painters and musicians. It was heavily drug-oriented; international acid dealers would stop off there for three days."

Syd Barrett gave every indication of having been launched into a permanent LSD orbit. In early days, says light man Peter Wynne Wilson. "we would take acid in very protected circumstances-with people we knew very well, in familiar surroundings. But Syd began taking it on his own-and getting well freaked-out."

In this he was now constantly (if unwittingly) aided and abetted by the likes of another new roommate named Scotty, characterized by Floyd underling John Marsh as "one of the original acid-in-the-reservoir, change the-face-of-the-world acid missionaries-and a desperately twisted freak" to boot. According to Marsh, Syd's more earthbound visitors would decline all offers of refreshments at 101 Cromwell Road, including a glass of water-unless you got it yourself from the tap, and even then he desperately worried, because Scotty was spiking everything."

After Barrett, who adored cats, adopted one of Jenner's, it to was fed LSD. Yet Peter Jenner and Marsh, like almost everyone around the hand, continued to keep to themselves any misgivings about Syd's excesses. It was after all, line Summer of Love when nobody-least of all a manager of Pink Floyd or a Mod kid privdeged to help run their psychedelic lights-wished to be so boring as to suggest that the acid mania might he getting out of hand.

And yet, June stresses, there was no overnight change. "He'd be all right for a couple of weeks, and then he'd be funny for a couple of days-and it would transpire that he was taking a lot of acid. He knew the volume of the acid he was taking. But then 'friends,' when he had a cup of tea, would drop one in and not tell him, so that halfway through a trip he'd be on another trip. And perhaps they'd do that a couple of times a day for two or three weeks. And that's when his hold on reality became very tenuous."

Syd's year-long acid trip began to go haywire just when the Floyd's career was shifting into overdrive. Some of his friends attribute part of Barrett's deterioration to the pressures of "pop stardom" and the attitudes of the rest of the Floyd; others maintain that the personality conflicts within the band, along with Syd's inability to handle his success, essentially arose from his own acid-fueled derangement.

Peter Jenner is the first to concede that the Floyd's professional life "suddenly stopped being fun. All these people were asking, 'What's the next single? We need another hit now' And we were thinking, 'Blimey, what's a hit?' It was all becoming a business." And Syd, says photographer Mick Rock, "was a totally pure artist; he could not deal with the business."

Contributing to the pressure-cooker ambience was the relentless touring to which the Floyd were committed throughout the rest of 1967: over 80 shows from May to September alone. Some were what June Bolan calls "double-headers"--two gigs in one night.

The British provinces-apart from a few hip pockets in the north-tended to be ill-prepared for Barrett's 20-minute feedback soliloquies, lighting designer Wynne Wilson's cosmic bubbles and the group's willful lack of danceable rhythms or traditional showmanship. Conspicuously absent from most sets, moreover, was the one tune-"See Emily Play"-that the punters were likely to have heard, or want to hear. Years later, Roger Waters quipped to a friend that the '67-model Floyd "earned the record for clearing ballrooms faster than any other band."

Sometimes, however, audiences expressed their displeasure more forcefully. At one Bedfordshire ballroom earlier in the year, Waters reminisced, "they were pouring pints of beer onto us from the balcony That was most unpleasant, and very dangerous too." As close to home as the Feathers Club, in the London suburb of Ealing, a heckler armed with oversize pre-decimalization British pennies "made a bloody great cut in the middle of my forehead. I bled quite a lot. And I stood right in front of the stage to see if I could see him throw one. I was glowering in a real rage, and I was gonna leap out into the audience and get him. Happily there was one freak who turned up who liked us, so the audience spent t he whole evening beating the shit out of him."

The Floyd, in Mason's words, "trudged around for a daily dose of broken bottle."

"When Syd was at the height of his powers-and when they had these pop hits, 'Emily' and 'Arnold Layne,"' Cream lyricist Pete Brown recalls, "the whole psychedelic thing was a very London-based phenomenon; it didn't spread for a long time. And they were putting them out on the road playing ballrooms-to audiences who'd only heard R&B bands and didn't know what the fuck was going on.

"And of course Syd was probably the last person in the world who could deal with music business structures. He was out there giving 100 percent and not getting very much back-except in London where people understood him. That was a big strain."

An ever-widening rift developed between Syd and at least two of his fellow Floyds. According to one insider, "Roger was always intensely ambitious. The others obviously liked the idea of being pop stars, but Roger was constantly trying to drive the group into more commercial situations-in the way of the press, in the way the gigs were structured, in the numbers they put out. Nick Mason went along with that.

"Rick was a much lower-key personality, very much more in tune with Syd in the early days. They played a lot together, worked a lot together. Basically they were the two smokers, and Roger and Nick were the two drinkers. There was a bit of a split But Rick eventually swung towards the stronger personalities in the group."

Peter Jenner, on the other hand-his own differences with Waters not withstanding-feels the bassist was motivated by a desire "to get the whole thing organized and make it more manageable." And he, at least, remembers Mason as the Floyd "who could always talk to everybody, the one who had nothing to prove. He deserves enormous credit for keeping the band together over the years."

June Bolan attributes some of the friction to Barrett-the charismatic singer and songwriter-having naturally been singled out for special attention. "It always happens: The singer in the band gets more pictures. He was also the most photogenic. Syd was the motivating force in the band, and that's basically, initially,who people wanted to see.

"I think it's indicative of 'fame'-it could be just one record, something like 'See Emily Play,' and your first 'Top of the Pops'-and then things change," she says. "Before, they were four people who'd grown up together, or gone to college together. It became separate camps of people: your smokers and dopers, and your drinkers."

Peter Wynne Wilson remembers, "There was always a lot of pressure on Syd from Nick and Roger to conform to their picture of what a pop group should do-that they should always play the current single at a concert, and selected tracks from the album. And that just wasn't in Syd's reckoning at all. He was very much wanting to develop the music, because of that experimental altruistic feeling among like minded people at that time. But Nick and Roger saw the possibility of big commercial success for the band.

"They put a lot of pressure on me, too. Roger would often complain that he was not illuminated as a star. I specifically didn't illuminate any of them as 'rock stars' because I did the lighting to blend with the music rather than accentuate somebody as a personality."

"The Floyd tours," says Susie Wynne Wilson, "were frantic and competitive, and they hassled each other. Roger had a very heavy way of playing, as if there had to be a winner.'

They didn't have the same living attitudes; they only lived together because they were on tour together. They didn't even eat the same food. Syd, Pete and I were vegetarian and smoking vast quantities of dope. Everyone else was into drinking beer and eating big juicy steaks. We were in a completely different space, worlds apart."

As Barrett's behavior on the road turned increasingly erratic, the other Floyds took to needling him with a vengeance. During one trip, for instance, he was moved to buy himself not one but 12 sandwiches from a roadside stand. These he proceeded to cram into his mouth in rapid succession, oblivious to the mess accruing to his face and hands, while his band members egged him on in a mounting chorus of sarcasm and contempt. Amazingly, he didn't get sick.

June Bolan affirms that "once Syd lost his grip, they were really wicked to him. With Syd behaving like a complete cretin, they would send him up on long car journeys where you're all stuck in one vehicle, and there's nowhere to go because you've got to end up at the gig.

"Perhaps had they been kinder, in those early days of his breakdown or cracking up or what ever you want to call it, he may not have been hit so hard by it all. But that is speculation. It may have happened anyway, in exactly the same way, or it may not have happened so badly-but I do feel that they were horrider to him than they need to have been."

On July 29, the Pink Floyd appeared at an Alexandra Palace extravaganza, second-billed only to Eric "San Francisco Nights" Burdon and his new set of psychedelic Animals. As the Floyd's big moment approached, June Bolan remembers, Barrett was nowhere to be seen. She finally located him in a dressing room, "absolutely gaga, just totally switched-off, sitting rigid like a stone."

"Syd!" she cried. "It's June! Look at me!" his blank stare registered not a flicker of recognition. As the milling audience grew restless, the stage manager kept knocking on the door with his increasingly urgent summons: Time to go! Time to go! "And we're trying to get Syd up," June recalls, "and get him together to go and play. He couldn't speak. He was absolutely catatonic. Roger and I hoofed him onto the stage, and en route put his guitar around his neck, and stood him in front of the vocal mike.

'That's when you have to give Roger credit for what he did. He actually got the other two together and made a sort of half-arsed version of a set. Peter and Andrew were frantic-they were pulling out their hair."

The two managers' relief when Syd at last let rip with his white Stratocaster proved short-lived, according to June, the discordant, yowling notes bore little connection to what the other three were playing, Mostly, Barrett "just stood there, tripping out of his mind."

The next issue of Melody Maker announced that "Syd Barrett is suffering from 'nervous exhaustion' and the group have withdrawn from all engagements booked for the month of August. As a result they have lost at least £4000 in work." In keeping with the band's newfound prominence, this report appeared on page one-under the banner headline PINK FLOYD FLAKE OUT!

By the summer of 1967, the conquest of America had begun to loom large in Jenner and King's plan. "The American tour was when Syd was beginning to get seriously eccentric," says Jenner. "That was when it became inarguable that it was a real problem."

In San Francisco, the Floyd played not only the Fillmore but a few dates at Winterland, where they opened for Big Brother and the Holding Company. Though disappointed that Big Brother and the other Haight-Ashbury bands proved to be so much less "extraordinary and mind blowing and trippy" than he anticipated, Waters-along with Mason-was initiated backstage by lead singer Janis Joplin into the joys of Southern Comfort.

"Syd was okay at Winterland-just," says Peter Wynne Wilson, who accompanied the Floyd to the States. "But when we went on to Los Angeles to play at a little club, Syd became almost catatonic-partly because we weren't sleeping much. We were constantly being taken up by ravishing California girls who asked us our star signs and then plied us with everything you can think of. Very seductive for somebody from England, particularly in that sunshine."

Any party atmosphere was dispelled after the Floyd took the Cheetah Club stage-where Syd stared blankly off into farthest space, his right hand dangling inertly by his side. When he failed to deliver any of his lyrics, Waters and Wright struggled to cover for his vocals. "It wasn't unnatural that Roger got very pissed off," says Wynne Wilson. "I seem to remember that he was actually demanding that Syd be dismissed on the spot"

A decade later, Nick Mason spoke revealingly of his own emotional response to Syd: "It's easy now to look back on the past and try and give it some shape and some form. But at the time you're in a total state of confusion, muddling about because you're trying to be in this band and

be successful and make it work-and things aren't working out. You don't really understand why, and you can't believe someone's deliberately trying to screw it up; and yet the other half of you is saying, me!'Destroy me, you know-it gets very 'This man's crazy-he's trying to destroy personal. You all get very worked up into a state of extreme rage. incredible moments of clarity, like the wonderful American tour, which will live forever. Syd detuning his guitar all the way through one number, striking the strings and detuning the guitar, which is-very modern," Mason laughs, "but very difficult for a band to follow or play with. Other occasions he more or less just ceased playing and would stand there-leaving us to muddle along as best we could. At times like that you think, 'What we need is someone else-or at least some help!'"

Capitol Records, meanwhile, obliviously continued to lay on its brand of hospitality. After ushering the Floyd around Beverly Hills to gawk at the homes of the stars, an A&R man trumpeted, "Yes, and here we are, the center of it all-Hollywood and Vine!" At which the glassy-eyed Barrett momentarily seemed to snap out of his trance, gushing, "It's great to be in Las Vegas!"

Another eager host in Los Angeles was Alice Cooper, who invited Syd and the others to dinner with his own band. Guitarist Glen Buxton came away convinced that "Syd was definitely from Mars. All of a sudden I'd pick up the sugar and pass it to him," he recalls, "and he'd shake his head like, 'Yeah, thanks....' It's like telepathy, it really was. It was very weird. You would find yourself right in the middle of doing something, as you were passing the sugar or whatever, and think,

'Well, damn! I didn't hear anybody say anything.' That was the first time in my life I'd met anybody that could actually do that freely. And this guy did it all the time."

The nadir of the Floyd's stay in Tinseltown were their legendary televised encounters with Pat Boone and Dick Clark (on November 5 and 6, respectively), during which Syd mutely responded to Boone's fatuous questions with his most zombie-like stare-and then kept his lips sealed when it came time to mime "See Emily Play" on "American Bandstand." In the wake of these mortifying episodes the tour's promoter decided to cut his losses and put everyone on the next plane home.

"They all came back from the States with gonorrhea," recalls one of their female friends. "They were all frantically getting injections."

And yet, now that the starmaking machine had been activated, one could hardly switch it off, and so the Floyd went right back on the road as a supporting act on a Jimi Hendrix Experience package tour. At each gig, the headlining Hendrix was allotted exactly 40 minutes. The Move, who preceded him onstage, had just half an hour. And the Floyd were expected to sum up what they were all about in precisely 17 minutes! Which, from the standpoint of Waters and Mason, required that the band play a selection of tested favorites-and keep them as short and snappy as possible. Barrett willfully resisted his colleagues' attempt to exert a modicum of professionalism; they in turn became ever more intolerant of his idiosyncrasies.

As the Hendrix tour wore on, Barrett appeared increasingly morose and depressed. Jimi Hendrix, unaware as almost everyone else of the underlying seriousness of Syd's condition, tools to addressing him ironically as "laughing Syd Barrett." Hendrix had cause to smile; his star was exploding into worldwide renown, and his guitar pyrotechnics were rapturously received throughout the tour. "The girls were throwing themselves at him like there was no tomorrow," says Wynne Wilson. "I remember two girls coming down from his room, absolutely shaking. One of them had had a severely physical time with him, and her friend took her off to the loo to try to repair the damage."

For Syd one of the compensations of pop stardom had always been the constant supply of nubile bodies thrown at his disposal; as with the drugs, he was hardly one to stint on his indulgence. Syd's friend Storm Thorgerson feels that this "wantonness with women" may have played a part in Barrett's breakdown, insofar as "being a good-looking and charismatic guy, and all the chicks liking it, doesn't necessarily do your sense of reality any good. Often times it wears off, it's not the whole story. I think that was quite confusing for him-a bit of an overload, too. That was another catalyst."

A third Pink Floyd single-Barrett's "Apples And Oranges," paired with Rick Wright's vinyl debut as a composer, "Paint Box"-was released during the Jimi Hendrix tour.

Unlike its two predecessors, however, the hurriedly recorded "Apples and Oranges" is not only bereft of Beatlesesque hooks, but glaringly out-of-tune-and with each maniacally sped-up verse set to completely different music, hardly the recipe for a pop smash. It made not the slightest impression on the British charts. Syd's own public reaction to his single's failure was "couldn't care less."

There were three more Barrett compositions in the Floyd pipeline- next to any of which "Apples and Oranges" sounded almost commercial. The one Syd reportedly favored for a single release was the shatteringly disjointed "Jug Band Blues"-whose middle section featured, at Barrett's insistence, a guest appearance by a Salvation Army sextet whom he instructed to "play what you want." Citing phrases like I'm most obliged to you for making it clear that I'm not here, and I'm wondering who could be writing this song, Jenner describes "Jug Band Blues" as "possibly the ultimate self-diagnosis on a state of schizophrenia." "Jug Band" was at least to surface the following summer on the second Pink Floyd album-a distinction denied the similarly autobiographical "Scream Thy Last Scream (Old Woman with a Casket)" and "Vegetable Man." "Syd wrote 'Vegetable Man' in my house," Jenner recalls. "It was really uncanny. He sat there and just described himself, what he was wearing and doing at that time."In yellow shoes I get the blues...blue velvet trousers make me feel Pink.. in my paisley shirt I look a jerk. "After he left the band, they all thought those songs were too intense. They couldn't handle them. They were like words from a psychiatrist's chair-an extraordinary document of a serious mental disturbance.

"I always thought they should be put out, so I let my copies be heard. I knew that Roger would never let them out, or Dave. They somehow felt they were a bit indecent, like putting out nude pictures of a famous actress; it just wasn't cricket. But I thought they were good songs and great pieces of art. They're disturbing, and not a lot of fun, but they're some of Syd's finest work-though God knows I wouldn't wish anyone to go through what he's gone through to get to those songs. They're like Van Gogh."

Van Gogh or no, Jenner and his partner were confronted with "an economic crisis developing in the band. The initial flood of money was drying up, and tax bills were beginning to loom on the horizon."

"At the end of the week," Roger Waters recalled, "we'd all go in to get our checks-and week by week people would start to go in earlier and earlier. They'd collect their check, dash 'round to their bank and have it expressed because there wasn't enough money to pay everybody-so whoever got their check first got their money. Checks were just bouncing all the time

A campaign for Barrett's ouster from the Floyd was now being openly waged, with Roger (in Jenner's words) "the leader of the Syd Must Go faction." One insider remembers Waters presenting "a whole list of complaints about Syd. Some of them seemed a bit petty; one was that Syd kept nicking Roger's cigarettes and never bought any of his own. Roger said that was the final straw."

Storm Thorgerson, however, argues that "it's not very fruitful being hard on Roger and Nick and Rick, or them on themselves. My recollection is that they really didn't know how to handle it. You don't cut off your nose to spite your face-he was the songwriter. That's ascribing to Roger vast degrees of egocentricity which he later had, but I don't think he did then. It was a very difficult time for them. I know they were very reluctant because they met in my flat and were talking about how difficult Syd was, and we had a big conversation about what to do."

Peter Jenner recalls that he and King "fought like mad against Syd leaving the band. We went through a lot of grief trying to keep him in. But finally we had to agree it was just too much. They'd go onstage and wouldn't know what songs he'd play. He might do a solo which might go on for two minutes or five. He might just play the same song for 40 minutes-and the same note all the way through it. They'd just have to keep wailing away while he'd play the same note, boing.. boing.. . boing. . . for ages and ages. As it became obvious that he was deeply disturbed, we had to accept that we couldn't reasonably expect the others to go on working with him as before."

Syd's old school chum David Gilmour, in the meantime, had endured his own series of rather more down-to-earth frustrations. Jokers Wild had had little trouble mustering gigs and appreciative audiences on the Continent as a cover band, with the songs of the Four Seasons making way for those of Jimi Hendrix. Come 1967, they even changed their name to the Flowers.

In London one night, after David attended a typically catastrophic Floyd performance, Nick Mason approached him with a vague proposition: "Keep it under your hat-but would you consider joining the band at some time in the future? Because we might need to get someone in...."

Barrett, however, had arrived at plans of his own for expanding the lineup-with, according to Waters, "two freaks that he'd met somewhere or other. One of them played the banjo and the other played the saxophone. We weren't into that at all, and it was obvious that the crunch had finally come."

Gilmour's call came at Christmas time. "They just said, 'Did I want to?' and I said, 'Yes,' and it was as simple as that." The initial inducement for Dave had less to do with new artistic horizons than with the prospect of "fame and the girls."

His rock 'n' roll acquaintances suspected something was afoot when Dave strode into a Cambridge music shop they frequented and grandly requested the new Fender Stratocaster that they had all coveted. Future Sex Pistols chronicler Lee Wood watched agog as Gilmour then produced a wad of banknotes totaling "a hundred and something pounds. They took this yellow Stratocaster off the wall and he bought it and said 'Cheerio' and walked out. We were all thinking, 'How did he get all that money?' About three days later in Melody Maker I read that Dave Gilmour had joined the Pink Floyd." The Stratocaster was to remain Gilmour's guitar of choice throughout his career with the Floyd.) Gilmour's addition was officially announced in January, 1968, alleging the Floyd's desire "to explore new instruments and add further experimental dimensions to its sound." One of Dave's first assignments was to pretend to play a guitar on an "Apples and Oranges" video-with Roger faking the recalcitrant Syd's vocal. Gilmour, says a friend, found such episodes "really spooky."

And how did Barrett react to finding his old mate in the spotlight with him? "It was fairly obvious," Gilmour recalled years later, "that I was brought in to take over from him, at least onstage, [but] it was impossible to gauge his feelings about it. I don't think Syd has opinions as such. He functions on a totally different plane of logic, and some people will claim, 'Well yeah, man, he's on a higher cosmic level'-but basically there's something drastically wrong.

"It wasn't just the drugs-we'd both done acid before the Floyd thing. It's just a mental foible which grew out of all proportion. I remember all sorts of strange things happening-at one point he was wearing lipstick, dressing in high heels and believing he had homosexual tendencies. We all felt he should have gone to see a psychiatrist, though someone in fact played an interview he did to RD. Laing, and Laing claimed he was incurable."

Gilmour, for his part, brought to the Floyd a musicality as harmoulous and adaptable as his character. "He came into a very difficult situation," says Peter Jenner, "and he handled it very well. He was also a great guitarist-the best musician the Floyd ever had." In a conversation with superfan Andy Mabbett, the manager recalled, "Dave could do a great imitation of Syd Barrett. He was a technician in a way that none of the others were. He started off playing in a very simple Syd style, and through the years it's become his own."

The Floyd proceeded to play a handful of gigs as a five-piece-until the day that the others decided not to bothe r to fetch Barrett before a performance. "The idea," says Jenner, "was that Dave would be Syd's dep; he would cover for his eccentricities. And when that got to be not workable, Syd was just going to write, just to try to keep him involved, but in a way where the others could work and function." Accordingly, Barrett was left-in Gilmour's words-"to stay home and write wonderful songs, become the mystery Brian Wilson figure behind the group."

But Syd's new material turned out to be more than the band was willing or able to handle-especially the taunting "Have You Got It Yet?" with its ever-changing melody and chord progression. His bemused colleagues had simply had enough. In April the press was advised that Syd Barrett had "left" the Pink Floyd.

But, says Jenner, "Syd never really understood that, because he always thought of them as his band. He just drifted back to the Floyd always." Then again, in a figurative sense (e.g., Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall), the Floyd would end up drifting inexorably back to Syd.

Syd moved into Storm Thorgerson's flat opposite the South Kensington underground station. The roster of resident Bohemians included Mick Rock (who romanticized Barrett during this period as "a doomed flying force"), Storm's fellow Royal College of Art student and Hipgnosis design partner Aubrey "Po" Powell and one Harry Dobson.

According to the writer Jonathan Meades, Barrett "was this rather weird, exotic and mildly famous creature.. living in this flat with these people who to some extent were pimping off him both professionally and privately. I went there to see Harry and there was this terrible noise. It sounded like heating pipes shaking. I said, 'What's that?' and he sort of giggled and said, That's Syd having a bad trip. We put him in the linen cupboard."'

Jonathon Green-then a staffer for Rolling Stone's short-lived British edition-remembers being sent to interview Barrett. Green says, "I went into this big white room, and there was Syd, dressed all in white clothes. It was really very sad. Syd spent the whole time looking at the top corner of the room, saying, 'Hey man.. hey.. right.'

"Now look up there-can you see the people on the ceiling?" In the end, Green decided to scrap his article.

By 1971 Syd was living in Cambridge with his mother, where at one point Mrs. Barrett had him committed to a sanatorium for several months. Like his own songs, Syd seemed alternately lucid and elliptical. He told Mick Rock he felt "full of dust and guitars," and, at 25, afraid of getting old. "I think young people should have fun, but I never have any." Yet he insisted he was "totally together," adding: "I'm nothing that you think I am anyway."