He also came up with the final name for the formation. Soon, guitarist and composer Syd Barrett joined the group, initially dominating the group’s activities. Fascinated by the achievements of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Cream believed that they could offer their listeners a kind of music that they had never encountered before. It all started for Pink Floyd in 1965, when three students of the architecture department at London Polytechnic: Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright wanted to become rock stars. The new issue of Classic Rock tells the inside story the tour that road-tested Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon (opens in new tab).David Gilmour famous guitarist of Pink Floyd returns to Pompeii after 45 years. “Syd is a genius,” he said after the Floyd split.Īnd there’s a very fine line between genius and madness. They’ll have to offer a well-presented theatre show.”Īnd as we know. But in future, groups are going to have to offer much more than just a pop show.
“Really,” Barrett told the Melody Maker in 1967, “we have only started to scrape the surface of effects, and ideas of lights and music combined we think music and lights are part of the same scene, one enhances and adds to the other. Floyd’s early gigs utilised oil-slide projection and strobe-effect lighting to further enhance the music. The spectacular light shows and theatricality were more than hinted at when he was in the band. It wasn’t just Barrett’s obsession with the darker sides of the human psyche that would go on to characterise Floyd’s work without him. That was never to be, but whether Gilmour and Waters explicitly acknowledged it or not, his influence on the band has continued. ‘ Shine on you crazy diamond/Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze/Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine.’īefore Syd finally quit his own band in April 1968 following his own mental decline after prolonged LSD experimentation, it had been suggested that he would carry on working with Pink Floyd as a songwriter and possibly a studio musician. It’s an oft-told story concerning Syd’s reappearance – virtually unrecognisable, balding and overweight – in the studio as the band recorded Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Floyd’s homage to the man who had directed their career.Įven the song that paid tribute to Syd utilised the word ‘crazy’, albeit in an affectionate rather than abusive manner. From Dark Side’s tirade ‘ I’ve been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks…’ to the steady mental disintegration of Pink (the central character in The Wall), insanity was never too far away. The themes of despair and a mind teetering on the edge of oblivion would become the blueprint that would characterise the rest of Floyd’s material, long after Barrett had left the band.
Lyrically Barrett was preoccupied with the mind and all its frailties, the chorus illustrating how close the central figure is to losing the plot: ‘ There is no other day/Let’s try it another way/You’ll lose your mind and play/Free games for May/See Emily play’. Floyd’s early single, the aforementioned See Emily Play, dealt with madness. It was Syd who first took the tales of superficially everyday folk and translated them into quirky songscapes. None of us advocated doing anything more eccentric.” “We worked up to See Emily Play and so on quite naturally from the Rolling Stones numbers we used to play. “The Floyd’s music arose out of playing together we didn’t set out to do anything new,” Barrett reflected in 1971. His playing was ramshackle, using wah-wah, feedback and discordant passages to create a sonic palette that was brand new to the music listeners of the mid-60s. Syd’s somewhat rudimentary guitar playing meant that he had to find other ways to express his musical vision. “It was painting that brought me here to art school. “I didn’t mean to play forever,” he said. Barrett was never shy about admitting that music wasn’t his primary obsession. He saw his band not only as a musical entity, but rather as an extension of his creative and artistic endeavours. Syd had a vision for his musical endeavours, an idea that stepped beyond the three-minute pop songs that were chart fodder of the time.
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