Whether fans know the full extent of his story or not, Pink Floyd would not be such a legendary group without their original leader, Syd Barrett. He was a musical genius, whose psychedelic take on the rhythms of Bo Diddley and whimsical, space-age lyrics firmly positioned his band at the cutting edge of 1960s rock.
However, his life story is one of the most tragic in pop culture, with severe mental health issues taking a debilitating toll on his life, and in what seemed like a blink of an eye, he had retreated from being one of the counterculture’s brightest lights, into a shell of his former self, enduring a terrible psychological collapse. He retreated into obscurity, and for the rest of his life, hid away from the outside world at his home in Cambridge.
Despite his sharp, and absolutely devastating decline, Barrett’s music remains some of the era’s most celebrated, with him an undisputed pioneer. Without his bold early steps, Pink Floyd would not have had the firm foundation with which to experiment and then burnish their sound, resulting in classics such as The Dark Side of the Moon, and its successor, the heartbreaking tribute to their former leader, Wish You Were Here.
While most groups move past former members, in truth, Pink Floyd never could. His mental decline is a prominent feature on their masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon, the centrepiece ofWish You Were Here, and a spectral presence of both Animals, and The Wall. While the most famous tribute to their old friend is the title track of Wish You Were Here, the album represents the group facing what happened to him head on, with the bulk of it taken up by ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, the nine-part epic written about Barrett’s tragedy.
Reflecting on Wish You Were Here for its 50th anniversary celebration in Uncut, guitarist David Gilmour, who was a childhood friend of Barrett’s – with the pair busking in Europe together as teenagers – reflected on the frontman’s effect on Pink Floyd after he left. He was honest about the fact that Barrett was “the elephant in the room” for the band.
“For years after he left, Syd was the elephant in the room when it came to Pink Floyd. He was the glue that linked us all. He knew Roger, Rick [Wright] and Nick from the first incarnation of the band, obviously, before I joined, but me and Syd were also close friends, dating back before the band,” Gilmour said.
Continuing: “I liked to remember the Syd of my teens, this sweet, crazy, fun-loving friend that I went to France with and went busking with. And the terrible thing is that I couldn’t really equate that figure with the person that he turned into.”
Revealing how heartbreaking the situation was, Gilmour noted that after his breakdown, it seemed that Barrett’s mental health problems would worsen when the band were mentioned. This led to his family telling the members not to visit him, as it could trigger a relapse. Ultimately, it was this distance that led to him being the “elephant in the room”. The last time Gilmour ever saw him was at Abbey Road in 1975 when the band were working on Wish You Were Here.
