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Syd Barrett and the Origins of Pink Floyd

On 22 July 1967, the four members of Pink Floyd were en route to the city of Aberdeen, the most northerly destination for most British musicians. The next night, they would call at Carlisle, where they would share the stage with two unpromisingly-named groups called the Lemon Line and the Cobwebs. Such was the life of a freshly successful British rock group in the mid-to-late 1960s: a seemingly endless trek around musty-smelling ballrooms, where the locals might be attracted by the promise of seeing the latest Hit Sensation, and musicians could be sure of being rewarded in cash. If London proved too far for a drive home, they and their associates would be billeted to a reliably dingy bed and breakfast.

If this aspect of Pink Floyd’s life hardly suggested any kind of glamour, they could take heart from the fact that they were – for the moment at least – accredited pop stars. The week they arrived in Aberdeen, their second single had climbed to number six in the UK singles charts, nestling just below The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ and Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’. As with their first effort, ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘See Emily Play’ was a perfect exemplar of the influences wafting into Britain from the American West Coast being rewired into a very English sense of fairy-tale innocence, an impression only furthered by the Old World elegance of its lyrics, established in the opening line: ‘Emily tries/But misunderstands …’

The single’s success had been boosted by a run of appearances in the kind of magazines that treated their subject matter with a breathless superficiality – like Disc and Music Echo, a weekly that tended to portray musicians as short-lived items on an accelerated production line. The day Pink Floyd were in Aberdeen, it honoured them with its cover, accompanied by a set of pen-portraits, doubtless bashed out in a matter of minutes.

Roger Waters, said the magazine, ‘likes to think he is a hard man, and in fact he can be very evil … He only listens to pop music because he has to.’ Maintaining the sense of a kind of withering demystification, Nick Mason was accused of getting ‘a kick out of being nasty to people – he likes people to be frightened of him, because he is someone of whom you could never be frightened.’ Rick Wright, meanwhile, was ‘the musician of the group, and also very moody. He has written hundreds of songs that will never be heard because he thinks they are not worthy.’

The most lengthy character sketch was given over to Syd Barrett. Pink Floyd’s singer, guitarist, and chief songwriter was described as ‘the mystery man of the group – a gypsy at heart … he loves music, painting and talking to people … totally artistic … believes in total freedom – he hates to impede or criticise others, and hates others to criticise others or impede him.’ Barrett, it was claimed, ‘doesn’t care about money and isn’t worried about the future.’

If such words suggested a blithe kind of contentment, the reality of Barrett’s life was rather different. His London home was shared with people reputed to be ‘messianic acid freaks’, fond of introducing their acquaintances to LSD on the slightest pretext. Barrett’s familiarity with the drug long predated his arrival in their company, but his housemates were hardly ideal companions: by now, Barrett’s acid use was beginning to manifest itself in chronic mood swings that could lead to either raging anger – and occasional violence – or spells of near-catatonia.

Inevitably, all this was starting to have an impact on the group’s working lives. Seven days after the Aberdeen show, Pink Floyd played at a huge London event grandly titled The International Love-In. Mere minutes before stage-time, Barrett had gone AWOL; an associate of the band eventually found him, ‘absolutely gaga, just totally switched off, sitting rigid, like a stone.’ Pushed onto the stage, Barrett remained pretty much silent, apart from the odd moment when he decided to pull flurries of discordant notes from his guitar. Though his three colleagues did their best to somehow cover up for him, it was clear that something was wrong: in the wake of the show, reports in the music press made mention of ‘nervous exhaustion’.

Nonetheless, Pink Floyd’s work-rate hardly slowed down. By September, they were in Scandinavia. Six weeks later, after another run of British shows, they took off for their first tour of the United States, during which Barrett’s problems would worsen: the most-documented episodes from this period are an appearance on the Pat Boone Show that saw Barrett reacting to his host’s questions with a glassy-eyed stare and large-scale silence, and a three-minute spot on American Bandstand in which Barrett reacted to the instruction that he should mime to ‘See Emily Play’ by keeping his mouth resolutely shut.

It is some token of the band’s frenetic schedule that two days after they returned to the UK, they were back on tour, this time in the company of Jimi Hendrix. ‘There was a bit of “Syd’ll pass out of it, it’s only a phase,”’ says Nick Mason. ‘And I think we were anxious to make Syd fit in with what we wanted, rather than giving all our efforts to seeing if we could make him better. We probably said, “Oh well – let’s try and keep working.”

‘Even now,’ says Mason, ‘I’m astonished. How could we have been so blinkered, or so silly, or so stupid?’

When talking to those who once shared Barrett’s company, one facet of his story becomes clear: rather than the astral, saucer-eyed waif of legend, he was initially a gregarious, enthusiastic presence. ‘He was a very friendly soul,’ says Nick Mason. ‘At my first meeting, I can remember him bounding up and saying, “Hello, I’m Syd” – at a time when everyone else would have been cool, staring around the room in a rather studied way, rather than introducing themselves.’

‘Syd was good fun,’ says Peter Jenner, half of Pink Floyd’s initial management team. ‘He and I would sit around and smoke dope, listen to records, talk about things. Sharp? Absolutely. I had no idea that he was going to go loopy; there was no indication. I had enormous respect for him, to the point of being overwhelmed: he did these paintings, and he wrote all these songs, and he played the guitar … he was full of ideas.’

Barrett was born Roger Keith Barrett on 6 January 1946, and grew up in Cambridge. His father, Dr Arthur Barrett, was a hospital pathologist; his mother, Winifred, was a housewife, who shared with her husband a love of classical music, and a wish to encourage their children’s creative side via regular family ‘music evenings’. Dr Barrett died when Syd was fifteen; by that point, he had given his youngest son (Syd had two brothers and two sisters) a guitar, and Syd had begun to make contact with like minds. By 1962, he was the guitarist with a Cambridge band – in thrall to the standard beat-group archetype of the day – called Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, whose rehearsals tended to take place in the front-room of the Barrett family home. Among their circle of intimates was Roger Waters: two years older than Syd, but happy, for now, to leave the slippery art of musicianship to his younger friend. ‘Syd was a little ahead of me,’ says Waters. ‘I was very much on the periphery. I can remember designing posters for Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, quietly wanting to be a bit further towards the centre of things.’

Barrett’s musical activities, along with a talent for painting that led him to enrol at Cambridge’s College of Art and Technology, soon drew him to the city’s young in-crowd: a coterie of late-adolescent bohemians who would gather at the Criterion, a shabby pub located in Cambridge’s centre. He and Waters were soon among the regulars, sharing the company of a guitarist and teenage language student named David Gilmour, and Storm Thorgeson and Aubrey Powell, whose immediate ambitions lay, slightly vaguely, in film and photography.

‘The thing that really struck me about Syd was that he was a kind of elfin character,’ says Aubrey Powell. ‘He walked slightly on his tiptoes all the time, and he used to sort of spring along. He always had a wry smile on his face, as if he was laughing at the world, somehow. And he was always something of a loner: you could be with a group of people and suddenly Syd would be gone. He’d just evaporate, and then two days later he’d return. He was very much his own person.

‘What I really liked about him was this weird attention to detail. One day I went into his room, and he said, “Look at these.” There were these three dodecahedrons hanging from the ceiling, all immaculately made from balsa wood: absolutely perfectly done. They were big, too. And I remember thinking, “God, the patience to do that …”’

In the view of outsiders, Cambridge has a strong self-contained identity, forever bound up with the university that attracts thousands of tourists to the city – but also cleaves the local population into Town and Gown. Indeed, for most young people born and raised in Cambridge, the colleges are irrelevant, strangely distant institutions; far more important is the close proximity of London.

Back in the 1960s, Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and their friends were a perfect case in point. By the summer of 1964, the crowd centred on the Criterion was fast dissipating: Barrett had taken a place at Camberwell Art School, while Waters was readying himself for studying architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic. The latter took very little time to make the move that, back in Cambridge, had always eluded him: drawing on his circle of newfound London friends, he formed a group called Sigma 6 and appointed himself its lead guitar player.

Waters’s colleagues included a bass player named Clive Metcalf, vocalists Keith and Sheila Noble – and a drummer and rhythm guitarist who numbered among Waters’s fellow architecture students. So it was that Nick Mason and Rick Wright entered the picture; to be joined – after Waters had been nudged from lead guitar to bass, Wright had decided to play keyboards, and the band’s more peripheral members had been pushed out – by Syd Barrett. He advised his new band that, having already passed through such ill-advised names as the T-Set, the Megadeaths, and the Abdabs – they should call themselves the Pink Floyd Sound, in partial tribute to two of his favourite blues singers, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

The group played their first show in late 1965 and began moving along the musical trajectory that would define their first career chapter. Like most groups of their era, they were partial to beat-group standards like ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Road-runner’, but they would use such songs as book-ends to extended passages when, led by Barrett, they would step away from three-chord orthodoxy and begin to improvise. It is not hard to draw a line between such flights of musical fancy and Barrett’s drug habits: certainly, though his colleagues were not nearly as quick to ingest illicit substances, it’s a matter of record that by the time of the Pink Floyd Sound’s first manoeuvres, Barrett was well acquainted with both cannabis and LSD.

In the summer of 1966, Peter Jenner, then a young economics graduate, chanced upon a Pink Floyd Sound performance at the Marquee, the London club where The Who had cut their teeth. ‘I was very into the idea of the young, groovy avant-garde,’ he recalls. ‘And I thought this would be a young, groovy, avant-garde show. I got there and I saw the Floyd, and I thought they were remarkable, because I couldn’t work out where each noise was coming from. The Marquee had a stage that kind of stuck out, and I was endlessly walking around it, just trying to figure it out.

‘They were playing these really lame old tunes, like “Louie Louie” and all these hackneyed blues songs – not much of Syd’s stuff. But in the middle, there were all these weird bits going on: what I subsequently discovered were one-chord jams. Instead of there being a blues solo, there was a weird solo. And I liked that. I couldn’t work out where the noise was coming from: whether it was guitar, or organ, or what. I just thought, “Christ, this is interesting.”’

By 1966, a close-knit crowd of Londoners was beginning to coalesce into what would become known as the Underground. They formed a network of young creative people, plugged into a variety of cultural currents: the thrilling sense of possibility embodied by the recent – and unprecedented – success of English rock groups, led by the Beatles and Stones; a burgeoning drug culture; a thawing of social strictures that would soon be embodied in the legalization of abortion and homosexuality; and an economic climate that had given rise to full employment. Of no less importance were a slew of influences taken from the United States: the Beats, Bob Dylan, and most importantly of all, the freshly-born West Coast counterculture – news of which had recently crossed the Atlantic.

Suitably inspired, those at the centre of London’s bohemian milieux were starting to set up their own equivalent. The first issue of a weekly countercultural newspaper, International Times (aka IT), would be published in October 1966. Soon after, a late-night weekly event called UFO began in the unlikely environs of an Irish-themed London establishment called the Blarney Club. Elsewhere, art galleries, bookshops and music events were adding to the sense of a slow-building cultural upsurge.

The philosophical threads that held it all together were as varied as its constituent elements, but the Underground was unquestionably characterized by a shared agenda. Whereas previous radical movements had focused on the wish for change enacted on a grand scale – this being Great Britain, social class remained integral to most critiques of society – the sixties generation placed a new emphasis on the freeing of the individual, who would be liberated, according to the Underground’s louder voices, by embracing the kind of multi-coloured hedonism that defined London’s hipper social circles.

According to Richard Neville, the Australian émigré who contributed to London’s counterculture by editing the magazine Oz, ‘The aim of the alternative culture was to shake up the existing situation, to break down barriers not only between sexes and races and God knows what else, and it was also to have a good time … to enlarge the element of fun that one had occasionally in one’s own life and to make that more pervasive – not just for you but for everyone. I was quite keen to abolish this work/play distinction. There was something incredibly oppressed about the mass of grey people out there. I just thought that people on the whole looked unhappy: they seemed to be pinched and grey and silly and caught up with trivia, and I felt that what was going on in London would bring colour into those grey cheeks and those grey bedrooms. With a bit of sexuality and exciting music and flowers … somehow the direction of society could be altered.’

If Syd Barrett’s lifestyle implicitly allied him with the Underground’s thinking, Peter Jenner was closely tied to some of its most crucial players. Together with John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, a co-founder of International Times, he had established a record label called DNA – and, thrilled by what he had seen at the Marquee, Jenner initially approached the Pink Floyd Sound with a view to releasing their records. Led by Roger Waters, they persuaded him to take on the role of manager. In partnership with his longstanding friend and sometime employee of British Airways, Andrew King, Jenner thus founded the grandly-named Blackhill Enterprises and began to assist his new clients. His first move was inspired: suspecting that the Pink Floyd Sound lent them an unbecoming air of vaudevillian corniness, he convinced them to trade as The Pink Floyd.

Via Jenner’s connections, the group were rapidly placed at the heart of the Underground. In September 1966, they played the first of several fundraising shows for the Notting Hill Free School – a countercultural educational experiment in which Peter Jenner was integrally involved – which took place at the Tabernacle, a church hall in West London. The next month, they appeared at the launch party for International Times. Two days before Christmas, they were the headliners at the first night of UFO, inaugurating a relationship whereby The Pink Floyd were the club’s house band, soundtracking its perfumed murk with music that seemed custom-made for that purpose.

Indeed, The Pink Floyd’s outward aesthetic seemed designed to achieve a perfect fit between the band and their new audience. As strait-laced cover versions were supplanted by Syd Barrett originals, the wildly improvisational element of their show had been built up to the point where it begged the voguish word ‘psychedelic’ (indeed, ads for the Free School shows were straplined with Dr Timothy Leary’s maxim ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’). And inspired by what little they knew of cutting-edge rock shows in the United States, the group now played their shows on stages flooded with the projections from home-made lighting equipment.

The result, according to those who had followed their progress from the start, was little short of revelatory. ‘They’d start a song like “Astronomy Domine”,’ says Aubrey Powell, ‘and work themselves up into a frenzy, and then it would all die down, and there’d be these long, almost embarrassing moments: you really wouldn’t know what was happening. Syd would be playing weird sounds – there were real moments of tension in there. Then suddenly they’d get back to the song, and it would be concluded. It was amazing what Syd was able to do. There was something very unsettling about it. It really wasn’t like watching any other band.’

Outwardly, Pink Floyd seemed to number among the Underground’s aristocracy. Aside from Barrett, however, they cautiously kept their distance – happy to play the shows, but surprisingly indifferent to either the substances or beliefs that tended to go with them. ‘The gigs that we played thanks to all that were great,’ says Roger Waters. ‘It was tremendous fun – going on at the Tabernacle and playing “Louie Louie” for fifteen minutes. There were some of Syd’s early songs in there, but a lot of what we did then came from the length of time we were expected to be onstage: sometimes, we’d play three sets in a night.

‘But I never really knew any of those people that well. And to this day, I still don’t know exactly what a lot of that stuff was actually about. You’d hear the odd thing about revolution, but it was never terribly specific. I don’t know … I read International Times a few times. But, you know – what was the Notting Hill Free School actually all about? What was it meant to do?’

‘There’s a great quote from that period: “They were all stoned, and we were drunk,”’ says Nick Mason. ‘I think the association with the Underground was certainly a Flag of Convenience. I think we’d all concede that. But as usual with these things, there was good stuff there, interwoven with an enormous amount of absolute guff. There were some good ideas, and some very forthright liberal views – but the period was full of an equal number of people with tarot cards and crystals. The number of love beads that one accumulated … I never really thought it was a good way of designing one’s future.’

In February 1967, The Pink Floyd signed a contract with EMI, receiving an advance of £5000. Their first single, released on 11 March, had been recorded early in the new year under the supervision of Joe Boyd, the émigré American who was responsible for the musical aspects of UFO.

‘Arnold Layne’, the embodiment of a pop-minded economy that lay in polar opposition to the band’s approach to performance, nonetheless managed to fill its three minutes with the sense that its authors were pushing their music into uncharted territory. The combination of Barrett’s droning, distracted vocal, the song’s subtle denial of a strict verse/chorus structure and its subject matter – the lifestyle of a kleptomaniac transvestite, placed at the centre of a very English picaresque – lent it the sense of the pop form being very cleverly subverted. When it crept onto the charts, sitting alongside singles by the Monkees, the Turtles and the Dave Clark Five, the point was made explicit.

In the meantime, the group was the subject of a flurry of press attention, focused chiefly on the single’s subject matter (‘Meet the Pinky Kinkies!’ ran one headline) and the allegedly mould-breaking nature of their shows. ‘The Pink Floyd offer a total show consisting of 700 watts of amplification, weird droning music (largely improvised) and lighting and slide projections using melting oil paints,’ said Disc and Music Echo. ‘On stage, the Floyd themselves become completely lost in their music and they aim to absorb the minds of their audience too, which isn’t easy with the usual cool atmospheres around London.’

Crowds in the capital, however, were soon proving to be the least of their worries. With the muted success of ‘Arnold Layne’ – it eventually rose to twenty-one in the UK singles chart, despite being excised from radio playlists on account of its risqué lyrics – Pink Floyd were inducted onto the circuit of regional British ballrooms that would define much of their lives for the next six months. Here, the group’s pushing of the musical envelope counted for nothing: thought the habitués of UFO and the Tabernacle might have thrilled to the band’s extended experiments, outside London, people expected an altogether more orthodox kind of entertainment – music to dance to, and the simple pleasure of hearing the same hits that had recently blared from their radios.

‘The industry was fundamentally different back then,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘Basically, you made your money gigging. That was your job: being a band meant you did six gigs a week – or if you were lucky nine, with double headers at the weekend. It was all about getting in the van, going off with your gear, and doing a gig. And then you would do a record – maybe if you did well, you did a single. And if you were lucky, that was a hit, and your fee went up.’

‘We’d do anything; we’d go anywhere,’ says Roger Waters. ‘You’d get in the van and look forward to the fifty quid. And it was hard work. I can remember a run of gigs that started in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, and then went on to Norfolk, and the next day we were playing Elgin in Scotland. That is a lot. They could be vicious gigs, too: balconies that overlooked the stage, and people dropping pints of beer on us. And, of course, they’d all want to hear the hits. We often refused to play them.’

‘The one that really sticks in my mind is the Queen’s Hall in Barnstaple: an old-fashioned ballroom that would have pop bands on,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘This place had a balcony around the top – and people were pouring beer on them. We needed the money, but there was a real conflict between the market they were playing into – a Top Twenty market – and what the band were playing: this really avant-garde stuff. We got the same problems every time they went out of London. It was all right when they were in the colleges: everyone would turn up with bells around their necks, carrying incense. But when you went elsewhere, it was difficult for them. They got a very hard time.’

For now, the group’s momentum was maintained, though the pressures of the band’s schedule, exacerbated by his drug use, were beginning to exact their toll on Syd Barrett. In March 1967, they entered the hallowed environs of EMI’s Abbey Road studios to work on their first album. According to the terms of their contract, they were to work with a staff producer named Norman Smith, whose résumé at least contained one implicit recommendation: he had been chief engineer on every Beatles album up to Rubber Soul. Thanks chiefly to Barrett, however, his relationship with his new charges quickly proved to be rather fraught. ‘It was sheer hell,’ he later recalled. ‘There are no pleasant memories. I always left with a headache. Syd was undisciplined: he would never sing the same thing twice. Trying to talk to him was like talking to a brick wall, because his face was so expressionless … he was a child in many ways: up one minute, down the next.’

For all Smith’s trials, in Peter Jenner’s estimation, he pulled off a commendable artistic feat: teasing out Barrett’s sense of pop aesthetics from the instrumental tangle that defined Pink Floyd’s performances. ‘What he did,’ says Jenner, ‘was to say, “Well, you’ve written these jolly good pop songs – so let’s have those, and some weird instrumental breaks.” So instead of being blues songs with weird instrumental breaks, it became pop songs with weird instrumental breaks.’

Notice of the abiding idea was served by the opening track, ‘Astronomy Domine’: from Barrett’s supremely sinister opening growl of guitar, it is obvious that havoc is about to be played with the period’s standard musical norms, but the song’s exploratory, improvisational core is book-ended by passages that betray both a tight sense of musical control, and an intuitive grasp of the melodic demands of pop. Even ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, the instrumental mission-statement that found the spirit of their live shows being poured on to tape, is ultimately a showcase for the group’s ability, having let loose chaos, to purposefully rein it back in. For all the lysergic abandon that takes root inside its first minute – punctuated by the kind of musical tension that Aubrey Powell found so compelling in the band’s live shows – its central riff is the essence of both control and streamlined strength: certainly, when it gloriously re-enters the picture after eight and a half minutes, one gets a sense of the band single-mindedly returning to earth.

Piper’s other most notable aspect was Barrett’s lyrics. Whereas the music betrayed both power and sophistication, his words were recurrently grounded in the fragile simplicity of childhood, often so innocently expressed that one cannot help but arrive at a crude explanation for Barrett’s breakdown. How, it might be asked, could the kind of mind that came up with ‘The Gnome’ (‘Look at the sky, look at the river – isn’t it good?’), or the rose-tinted memoir ‘Matilda Mother’ – a loving remembrance of Winifred Barrett reading her son fairy-tales – adapt to the hard demands of adulthood, let alone the pressures that arrive in the wake of commercial success? Rock music, even then, was only partly founded on talent and creativity; if a musician was to survive, he or she also needed wiliness, resilience, and determination: in short, a keen sense of ambition.

‘Syd was a real hippie in a lot of respects,’ says Aubrey Powell. ‘If he had a guitar, and he could play some tunes, and sing some of his wonderful bits of poetry, and somebody could supply him with a nice space where he could play his Bo Diddley albums, that was enough. Even when he was earning money, Syd wasn’t living extravagantly. He was quite happy to live in a flat with no furniture in it. He was a real bohemian in that sense. I never felt he was pop star material; he wasn’t made for it.’

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was preceded by ‘See Emily Play’, which thrust Pink Floyd into dizzying territory, climbing to number six on the British singles charts, and confirming the necessity of endlessly touring the country so as to prolong their success. By the time of its release, however, Syd Barrett was beginning to fall apart. ‘He became steadily more remote,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘He was hard to talk to. From being occasionally withdrawn, he got very strange. And his life became more and more his own life until we hardly saw him. That was when I really began to worry that there was something going seriously awry.’

Most of the songs on Piper had been written during a concerted burst of creativity in late 1966 and early 1967, when Barrett was living in an apartment on Earlham Street in central London. In the recollection of his flatmate, the group’s lighting technician Peter Wynne-Wilson, ‘Those were halcyon days. He’d sit around with copious amounts of hash and grass and write these incredible songs. There’s no doubt they were crafted very carefully and deliberately.’

By April 1967, Barrett had shifted his base of operations to 101 Cromwell Road, an address in Earls Court. Among the residents was one Brian ‘Scotty’ Scott, remembered by one Pink Floyd associate as ‘one of the original acid-in-the-reservoir, change-the-face-of-the-world missionaries’. For Barrett, the upshot of such company was clear enough. ‘He seemed to be on acid every day,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘We heard he was getting it in his tea every morning.’ This, it was safe to say, was hardly the ideal lifestyle for someone whose sensibilities were proving ever more fragile, but for the moment, neither the band nor their associates saw fit to intervene.

‘Everything was coming at us from all directions,’ says Jenner. ‘In the early days, when Syd was at Earlham Street, I’d just pop round there quite often and see him. As they became bigger, he moved into his own social scene. We saw less of him; he became more distant. We realized there was something strange going on in Cromwell Road, but I didn’t know the people who were there. And I never really felt it was my job to find out. It was only when it became clear that there was a problem with gigging – with work … In those days, it was really uncool – man – to pry into someone’s life.’

When the group and their associates attempted to deal with Barrett’s predicament, they initially did so in the context of a quintessentially 1960s invention known as anti-psychiatry, one of the many strands of thought beloved of the upper echelons of the Underground. Relative to the other credos of the period, it was a neat fit: just as underground insiders like Richard Neville believed that the key to social change lay with the moral and emotional liberation of the individual, so anti-psychiatry held that the shortcomings of twentieth-century civilization were reflected in isolated cases of supposed mental breakdown. The key pioneer of all this was a Scottish doctor named R. D. Laing, born in 1927, but sufficiently radical in his outlook to be co-opted into the Underground by his younger admirers.

Laing was fleetingly involved in the Notting Hill Free School, became a regular presence at Underground events, and was decisively tied into the mood of 1967 by that year’s publication of a polemic, drawn from his lectures, entitled The Politics of Experience. Schizophrenia, the book claimed, arose from a rational desire to opt out of impossible circumstances: ‘The experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.’ Moreover, the supposed schizophrenic might actually be capable of greater insights and achievements than the allegedly sane: in Laing’s view, asking whether the condition was wholly due to a deficiency on the part of the sufferer was ‘rather like supposing that a man doing a handstand on a bicycle on a tightrope 100 feet up with no safety net is suffering from an inability to stand on his own two feet. We may well ask why these people have to be, often brilliantly, so devious, so elusive, so adept at making themselves so unremittingly incomprehensible.’ Underlying all this was the belief that society so squashed individual potential that mental dislocation was inevitable. ‘The ordinary person,’ Laing wrote, ‘is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be.’

‘There were a whole team of them who all believed it was rather good to be mad, and it was the rest of us who were making less sense,’ remembers Roger Waters. ‘And it may be that there is something to be said for the idea that people who we claim to be mad might see things that the rest of us don’t, and their experience can illuminate life for us. He seemed to be thinking that insanity might be a very subjective idea; that perhaps madness might give people some kind of greater insight. In Syd’s case, you could say that it was his potential for decline into schizophrenia that gave him the talent to express mildly untouchable things. But I confess that I feel that a lot less now than I may have done then.’

‘With Syd’s very clear mental problems,’ says Peter Jenner, ‘there was a sense of, “Well, is it our fault or his? Who’s actually mad: him or the rest of us? Is the madman speaking truth?” For someone like me, who was quite young and pretentious and intellectual and read too many books, it was very hard to cope with. We knew something was a bit weird, but on the other hand, the Floyd’s whole experience had been a bit weird. We were out there on the edge, so what was wrong with Syd being a bit out there on the edge? At what point does being original and new and different become loony? It seemed impossible to say. It’s a continuum.’

On one occasion, Barrett’s colleagues arranged for him to meet Laing, only for Syd to decide at the last moment that he was unwilling to go through with it. ‘He wouldn’t get out of the car,’ says Roger Waters, who accompanied Barrett to Laing’s house. ‘And I’m not sure that was necessarily a bad thing. Laing was a mad old cunt by then. [Pause] Actually, “cunt” is a bit strong. But he was drinking a lot.’

Contrary to the fashionable thinking of the time – and in keeping with his distanced relationship with the Underground – Waters claims to have held fast to a conventional diagnosis of Barrett’s problems. ‘Syd was a schizophrenic,’ he says. ‘It was pretty clear to me that that was what was the matter with him. But not everybody would accept that. I had ties with Syd’s family going back a fair way, and I can remember telephoning one of Syd’s brothers and telling him he had to come and get Syd, because he was in a terrible mess, and he needed help. And the three of us sat there, and in effect, Syd did a fairly convincing impression of sanity. And his brother said, “Well, Roger says Syd’s ill, but that’s not the way it seems to me.”

‘There was eventually a lot of argy-bargy with his family, and a lot of stuff about whose fault it was,’ says Waters. ‘His mother blamed me entirely for Syd’s illness. I was supposed, I think, to have taken him off to the fleshpots of London and destroyed his brain with drugs. And the fact is, I never had anything to do with drug-taking. Certainly not with Syd, although he did indulge in lots of acid, which given the fact that he was an incipient schizophrenic was obviously the worst possible thing in the world for him. But mothers have favourite sons – and if something goes wrong, they have to find someone to blame.’

Barrett’s decline took place against the backdrop of frantic activity: the aforementioned US tour, a run of British shows with The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Nice, and attempts to record a new single, so as to capitalize on the success of both ‘See Emily Play’ and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The fact that Barrett was able to honour the vast majority of his commitments seems faintly miraculous, although his behaviour was leading to snowballing tension within the group. While Waters, Mason and Wright would attempt to found the band’s shows on at least some sense of structure, Barrett was prone to perpetrating musical anarchy, regularly detuning his guitar, and frequently proving reluctant to sing. For at least one show on the Hendrix tour, he could not even be persuaded to take the stage: so it was that David O’List, The Nice’s guitarist, was cajoled into temporarily taking his place.

‘We were irritated,’ says Nick Mason. ‘There was a tendency to tut: a lot of “Oh God”. And to some extent, we ignored it. That’s the way I remember it: there wouldn’t have been a big row in the dressing-room. There was never any confrontation: it was very much, “Let’s avoid confrontation at all costs – for God’s sake, let’s try and pretend everything’s all right. Let’s not have a crisis. Maybe things will be all right if we just keep them going.” I think that’s a peculiarly English thing anyway. But we didn’t have those sorts of skills in terms of … [pause] human resources.

‘On any given night, we had no idea what was going to happen. And it wasn’t like every gig, or every song, being a disaster. I don’t remember being onstage thinking, “Here we go again.” Each time, it was a surprise.’

In the recording studio, the impossibility of Barrett’s position was increasingly evident. By way of a new single, he came up with ‘Apples and Oranges’: in Roger Waters’s view, ‘a fucking good song … destroyed by the production.’ In fact, it amounted to a loose-ended sketch that might conceivably have been honed into shape had its author not been in such a fragile state. The band’s public certainly thought as much: though EMI was desperately hoping for a third hit, ‘Apples and Oranges’ stiffed.

The run of sessions that produced that song also gave rise to three other Barrett-authored tracks, all of which attested to his decline. On ‘Jugband Blues’, a song that teetered on the brink of collapse before being suddenly and inexplicably invaded by a Salvation Army band, he came close to expressing a chronic sense of self-alienation (‘I’m not here … And I’m wondering who could be writing this song’). ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’, on which Barrett was accompanied by a speeded-up, inescapably irritating backing vocal, was eventually all but subsumed – for some reason – by a cacophony of audience noise. Perhaps most telling of all was a song called ‘Vegetable Man’. If its lyrics superficially suggested a self-deprecating joke, it also betrayed a palpable sense of self-loathing, only accentuated by the churning, discordant music that made up its backing track.

On all four songs, the sense of inspired exploration that had been the hallmark of The Piper at the Gates had evaporated. Now, it seemed, Pink Floyd were simply tumbling into chaos.

By the end of 1967, Pink Floyd (the ‘The’ would continue to crop up on posters and handbills until mid-1969, though its use was evidently on the wane) was at an unenviable career juncture. It was clear that Barrett’s role was untenable; and yet the group’s management was adamant that a future without his creative input was inconceivable. The one Roger Waters composition released thus far was ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’, a musical makeweight that amounted to Piper’s one glaring flaw; Rick Wright had contributed ‘Paintbox’, as the B-side of ‘Apples and Oranges’ – the breezy tale of a night on the town that was so lacking in any of the group’s customary experimentalism that it skirted dangerously close to the dread category of Easy Listening.

To Peter Jenner and Andrew King, all this amounted to clear evidence that Barrett had somehow to be kept in the band. Waters, however, was adamant that he had to leave. ‘Roger was the leader of the “Syd Must Go” faction,’ says Peter Jenner. ‘He was saying, “We can’t work with this guy any more. It’s impossible for us to go to a gig and have him turn up, or not turn up, and not give us a set list – it’s making us look like prats.” He was out there on the frontline, whereas I was back in the office being intellectual about it. But he was aware that they were killing their career by doing these gigs with Syd, because they were turning off the punters. It was a complete mess. And I think the worst thing was the demand for another record, when there were no songs coming from Syd. It was, “What the fuck are we going to do?” But the Syd faction – myself and Andrew – had no confidence in any of them writing without him.’

By way of a compromise, it was suggested that the group should recruit a second guitarist, leaving Barrett to appear as and when he was in sufficiently good shape, and continue to write the group’s songs. They thus made renewed contact with an old acquaintance from their days in Cambridge: David Gilmour, then making frustratingly little headway in a London-based trio called Bullitt. He accepted the offer of a new job, he later recalled, largely thanks to the prospect of ‘fame and the girls’. On the former count, at least, he did not get off to the most promising start. By the time of the announcement of his recruitment in the music press, the group’s stock had so fallen that the story was not exactly headline news: the NME gave it one small paragraph, and spelled the new member’s surname ‘Gilmur’.

In January 1968, the five-man incarnation of Pink Floyd played four shows, in Birmingham, Weston-Super-Mare, and the Sussex towns of Lewes and Hastings. Aubrey Powell clearly recalls seeing at least one of those shows, and quickly succumbing to absolute bafflement. ‘Syd wasn’t doing anything really,’ he says. ‘He was just sitting on the front of the stage, kicking his legs. It was very, very odd.’

‘My initial ambition was just to get them into some sort of shape,’ Gilmour later recalled. ‘It seems ridiculous now, but I thought the band was awfully bad at the time when I joined. The gigs I’d seen with Syd were incredibly undisciplined. The leader figure was falling apart, and so was the group.’

It did not take long for Pink Floyd to bow to the inevitable. In David Gilmour’s recollection, Barrett’s ejection from the group was confirmed as they drove from London to an engagement in Southampton. ‘Someone said, “Shall we pick up Syd?”’ he later remembered, ‘and someone else said, “Nah, let’s not bother.” And that was the end.’

So it was that Pink Floyd dispensed with the figure on whose talents their reputation had been built. ‘We carried on without a second thought,’ says Nick Mason. ‘It didn’t occur to us that it wouldn’t work. In retrospect, I find that very curious.’