What a great article! Without Syd Barrett, would we ever have had Pink Floyd? Would their singular sound have been the same? Impossible question to answer for one of my all time favourite bands. but I do agree with the first line of this remarkable and brilliant article from NME. And I also agree that Syd was cracked and flawed, but he was a creative genius too. When Gilmour says of you: "the guy was a real innovator. One of the three or four greats along with Dylan", then you deserve to be remembered.

First came the Floyd. Then came the void. And sometime in between this tragic passage the omens were there for all to see that something terribly wrong was happening to their golden boy but everyone was being too cool and ‘laissez-faire’ to accept them for what they were. Like that night, just as the summer of love was starting to crest into autumnal green, backstage as a London club where his group was about to take the stage, when Syd Barrett could be espied quietly blowing his mind to tiny psychedelic smithereens.

His kohl-encircled eyes were glazed and sunken and his hair looked even worse, bursting from his skull like a badly orchestrated explosion. All evening he’d been impossible to communicate with. Instead, he’d stayed slumped in a chair, hallucinating at an image of himself from a long grubby mirror while the others busied themselves, tugging a stray thread from their latest fop-hippie fashion accessory or tuning up their guitars.

Actually, it was down to Rick Wright, the keyboard player, to tune up the guitars. Roger Waters, the bass player, was unfortunately tone-deaf and, by this stage, well, let’s just say Syd was about as enamoured with the idea of maintaining concert tuning as he was with employing “chord progressions” or – God forbid – “coherent guitar solos.” Which is to say, not at all. As anarchy came screaming through his psyche, so the sound it made overwhelmed his muse and its music.

The rest of the group were actually all three standing on the stage, ready to begin, when Barrett finally awoke from his numb narcissistic reverie in front of the dressing-room mirror. First he roused himself into action by emptying a bottle of strong tranquilizers known as “Mandrax” of its contents and breaking the pills into tiny fragments on a nearby table. He then produced a large bottle of Brylcream, an extremely greasy form of British hair gel, and emptied the whole jar onto the pills. Next, taking the main residue of this gunk in both hands, he lifted it aloft, dumping the whole filthy mess on top of his head, letting it slowly seep on to his scalp and duly down his neck. Then he turned, picked up his white Telecaster with the groovy mirrored discs reflecting out, and stepped uncertainly towards the stage.

A quarter of an hour later, as the tom-toms were thumping their way into trance-time, the bass began booming out low ominous frequencies and the organ arched off into a tentative solo full of spicy Eastern cliches. But anyone could tell that Syd, once the leader, was no longer inhabiting the same planet as the other three. Sometimes he’d twang a few desultory notes, sometimes he’d run his slide up and down the strings but everything sounded so random and fragmented now that nothing he did really connected with the overall sound. Meanwhile the lighting had grown hot enough for Barrett’s acid-casualty hair remedy to start running amok in several grotesque oily streams down his neck and forehead while the residue of the broken pills was being deposited all over his face. It was then that everyone could see how desperately things were going wrong, for he looked like some grotesque waxwork of himself on fire, a blurred effigy of melting flesh and brain tissue coming apart in front of his peers, his fans and his followers.

There is a photograph of Syd Barrett which sometimes appears that was taken well before the darkness descended. He’s sweet sixteen and sitting cross-legged in the garden of his mother’s delightful house in Cambridge, playing with a kitten. The image it conveys is the very epitome of rising sixties affluence. His clothes are casual, his hair is neither long nor short, but already he’s got the air of someone from the first ranks of England’s “You’ve-never-had-it-so-good” generation who knows he possesses both good looks and easy charm, someone beamingly confident about his place in the future scheme of things. Why, there’s even an “I can’t help it if I’m lucky” twinkle in his eye, an impish grin that’s almost impossible not to be a little seduced by. It’s an image worth studying long and hard, because in only a matter of two years, maybe a little less, the twinkle in those eyes and the glow in those cheeks would be cruelly snuffed out, perhaps forever. Also, the picture indicates the nature of Syd Barrett’s roots. Nice. Genteel. Upper Middle Class. Cambridge. It was into this rarefied atmosphere that Barrett was born, one of five children, to Dr. Max Barrett, a police pathologist (and leading British authority on infant mortality), and his wife. He was always a popular, conscientious student, gifted artistically, and girls found him attractive.

Storm Thorgeson, another Cambridge las who went on to enjoy a long and creative relationship with the Pink Floyd as their sleeve designer, remembers Barrett as a “bright, extrovert kid. By 1962, we were all into Jimmy Smith. Then 1963 brought dope and rock. Syd was one of the first to get into the Beatles and the Stones. He smoked dope, pulled chicks – the usual thing. He had no problems on the surface. He was no introvert as far as I could tell back then.”

The same year he was caught merrily posing with his kitten he’d already joined his first group, Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, a timid-sounding youth club ensemble, fond of strumming out Cliff Richard and the Shadows numbers in the dens of their parents’ houses. Barrett would soon leave his childhood chums to secure a short tenure as bassist in a fledgling R ‘n’ B outfit known as Hollering Blues. At roughly the same time he began strumming an acoustic guitar at one of the city’s local folk clubs, notably a place called The Mill. He could be found mostly wherever attractive young people gathered together to play Beatles songs on village greens and smoke the odd stick of “pot.”

Then came the Architectural Abdabs, or the T-Set, as they were sometimes known. They were a five-piece, anyway, consisting of three aspiring student architects, a jazz guitarist called Bob Close and – the youngest member – recently moved to London as an art student, Roger Keith Barrett. (Barrett, like most other kids, had been landed with a nickname – “Syd” – which somehow remained long after his school days had been completed.) Of the three would-be architects, the most notable was Roger Waters, a Cambridge acquaintance of Barrett and a haughty youth over six feet tall who inwardly despised the druggy scene and sensibility his group became quickly bonded to.

Waters seethed with a terrible inner rage and his main obsession in life was to take control of everything he ever got involved with. His main ally was fellow student and London-based drummer Nick Mason, born into a life of luxury and fast sports cars, and more of a boozy “horray-Harry” type than a hippie. Rounding out the lineup was another Londoner, Richard Wright, a likeable flake who attended the same college as Waters and Mason, smoked dope, listened to a bit of jazz and noodled around on the keyboards. The band, it was generally considered, were pretty dire – but, as two of them emanated from the hip elitist circles of fruity old Cambridge, they were respected after a fashion, at least in their own area.

Before the advent of the Pink Floyd, Barrett had three brooding interests in life – music, painting and religion. A number of Barrett’s seniors in Cambridge were starting to get involved in an obscure form of Eastern mysticism known as “Sant Mat” or “The Path of the Masters,” which involved heady bouts of meditation, much contemplation of purity and the inner light, and the dispensing of wisdom by means of cosmic riddles. Syd attempted to involved himself in the faith, but was turned down for being “too young” (he was 19 at the time). The rejection was said to have troubled him deeply. “Syd has always had this big phobia about his age,” states Pete Barnes, who became involved in the labyrinthine complexities of Barrett’s affairs and general psyche after the Floyd split. “I mean, when we would try to get him back into the studio to record he would get very defensive and say ‘I’m only 24, I’m still too young. I’ve still got time. “That thing with religion could have been partly responsible for it.”

At any rate, Barrett lost all interest in spiritualism after the incident and soon enough, he’d be giving up his painting too. This was unfortunate as he’d been a good enough artist to land a scholarship at the prestigious Camberwell Art School in the London suburb of Peckham. Both Dave Gilmour and Storm claim that Barrett’s painting showed exceptional promise: “Syd was a great artist. I loved his work, but he just stopped. First it was the religion, then the painting. He was starting to shut himself off slowly even then.”

Music, still, remained. The Ab Dabs … well, let’s forget about them and examine the “Pink Floyd Sound” instead, which was really just the old band but minus Bob Close, who’d “never quite fitted in.”The Pink Floyd Sound name came from Syd, after a blues record he owned which featured two bluesmen from Georgia (sic), Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The two Christian names meshed together nicely, so … Anyway, the band was still none too inspiring – no original material, but long, anarchic versions of “Louie, Louie” and “Road Runner” into which would be interspersed liberal dosages of staccato freak-out guitar white noise and snake-charmer’s organ solos.