Syd Barrett (Graphic with Vintage Print Effect)

Syd Barrett 

Before Pink Floyd became one of the biggest bands in the world, there was Syd Barrett.

Barrett co-founded Pink Floyd in 1965 and became the creative force behind the band’s wonderfully strange early psychedelic sound. He wrote most of their 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, giving us songs like “Astronomy Domine,” “Lucifer Sam,” “Bike,” and “The Gnome”—music that sounded playful, beautiful, slightly sinister, and unlike much of anything else happening at the time.

But Syd’s time with the band was remarkably brief. As his behavior became increasingly unpredictable, David Gilmour was brought in and Barrett left Pink Floyd in 1968. He went on to make two extraordinary and wonderfully fragile solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, both released in 1970.

After that, Syd gradually withdrew from the music business and eventually returned to Cambridge, where he lived quietly and largely outside public view until his death in 2006. His disappearance from rock stardom inevitably became part of the mythology surrounding him, though the music itself is much more interesting than the legend of the “lost genius.”

His influence is enormous. Generations of psychedelic, punk, post-punk, indie, and alternative musicians have found something in Barrett’s strange little songs, unconventional guitar playing, and complete lack of interest in sounding like anybody else.