Sid Barrett, Rock’s Crazy Diamond dies

Syd Barrett

Gifted founding member of Pink Floyd whose talent was destroyed by drugs

Alan Clayson

To some of his fans, it was the misfortune of Syd Barrett, who has died aged 60 of cancer, to have become the ultimate pop recluse after leaving Pink Floyd, the band of which he was a founder member. His retirement to lead an outwardly unproductive life was on a par with, say, Mick Jagger leaving the Rolling Stones in 1964 to live quietly with his parents.

The fourth of five siblings, Barrett was born in a genteel suburb of Cambridge. He was 14 when his father, a hospital pathologist, died, but the effect of this loss did not blight his development as a teenager, and he explored alternative culture more than most young people in the 1960s. Even before he passed his 11-plus and went to Cambridge high school, he showed promise as a classical pianist and visual artist. But intrigued by an elder brother's skiffle combo, he taught himself guitar, mostly by playing along to records. He and a kindred spirit, David Gilmour, practised together, but did not progress much further than talking about starting a group.

It was around this time that Barrett acquired the nickname Syd (to replace his given name, Roger). At 16, he was was playing non-committally with local beat groups, sometimes sharing a stage with bass guitarist Roger Waters. On winning scholarships ?- Barrett to Camberwell Art College and Waters to the Regent Street Polytechnic ?- the pair moved to London, where what was to become Pink Floyd ?- initially the Pink Floyd ?- smouldered into formwith Barrett, Waters, drummer Nick Mason and, on keyboards, Rick Wright.

The gradual introduction of adventurous, self-written material and lengthy, monochordal improvisations made them popular fixtures in London's underground clubs, where light shows helped to simulate the psychedelic experience. Snapped up by EMI, the group produced their Barrett-written debut single, Arnold Layne (1967), which was, unsurprisingly, self- consciously weird ?- and a Top 30 entry, despite airplay restrictions. The follow-up, a tartly arranged See Emily Play ?- also written by Barrett ?- climbed to number six.

Recognition came from the Beatles, who looked in during a Floyd session for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (also 1967), a first album penned almost entirely by Barrett, who as a guitarist was as capable of severe dissonance as serene, if echo-laden, melody, and whose vocal style was as English as Elvis Presley's was American.

With the other personnel keeping pace, Barrett had, musically speaking, gone far into the cosmos with Astronomy Domine, Piper's opening track. Indeed, he seemed disconnected with earthly existence altogether on Interstellar Overdrive. Gnome, Matilda Mother, Flaming and the medievalflavoured Scarecrow cornered the childlike end of psychedelia more effectively than, for example, the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

But a now drug-addled Barrett was already proving ill-equipped to cope with pop stardom, particularly after a troubled US tour and the disappointment of a flop third single, Apples and Oranges, at the end of 1967. The following year Gilmour was enlisted as the increasingly unreliable Barrett's understudy, and, during the making a transitional second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), as his successor.

If happier as concert performers, Pink Floyd were initially at a loss without Barrett's input. Attempting to master his inner chaos, he released in 1970 two patchy solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and the more focused Just Barrett, with help from members of Soft Machine, Humble Pie and Pink Floyd, and was persuaded to undertake promotional stage appearances. Eventually, he returned to Cambridge, where he fronted a trio called Stars, who struggled through a solitary official booking at the city's Corn Exchange in 1972.

The years left to Barrett were almost perversely unremarkable. Though he was known to be a painter, he neither exhibited nor sold anywork. Nevertheless, a legend took shape, bringing out strange stories, the most verifiable of which was of him presenting himself, portly and shaven-headed, in the studio when Pink Floyd were recording 1975's Wish You Were Here album, which was to contain Shine on You Crazy Diamond, regarded as a salute to their former leader. After that, press photographs of Barrett portrayed him looking as middle-aged as his former colleagues, all of whom had become multi-millionaires while he existed on invalidity benefit and fluctuating royalties.

He continued to fascinate countless fans, as well as record company moguls scraping the barrel for anything on which he so much as breathed ?- as instanced by Crazy Diamond, a big-selling 1993 CD box set incorporating hithertounreleased tracks. His income was buoyed, too, via respects paid by other artists, most conspicuously David Bowie, who revived See Emily Play on 1973's Pin-Ups album, and Arnold Layne when he was guest singer at David Gilmour's London concert in the Royal Albert Hall last month. A further tribute comes in Tom Stoppard's new West End play, Rock'n'Roll. Songs by Barrett reinforce Stoppard's theme that rock music helped see off repression, even if the freedom it ushered in brought new dangers.

In truth, few of the faithful expected or wanted Barrett to make a comeback. They preferred him as an ever-silent, "no return" saga rather than one in which he was likely to try and fail to debunk the myth of an artistic death. Roger Keith ?'Syd' Barrett, musician and composer, born January 6 1946; died July 7 2006.