On 5 June 1975, an overweight man with a shaved head and shaved eyebrows wandered into Abbey Road Studios in London, where Pink Floyd sat mixing a song written as a tribute to their original frontman. Nobody in the room recognised him at first. When recognition finally arrived, the band found themselves face to face with Syd Barrett, whom they left behind seven years earlier. What turned Barrett into a stranger to his own bandmates? And what filled the three decades that followed, after he returned to Cambridge and refused to answer to the name Syd at all? Join me to find out.
Before rumour attached itself to his name, Syd Barrett fronted Pink Floyd and wrote most of its early songs. Across late 1967 and early 1968, however, his behaviour grew erratic and unpredictable. His bandmates largely blamed heavy psychedelic drug use (LSD above all), along with the pressure that fame placed on a young man barely into his twenties. Whether that explanation tells the whole story remains an open question, as we shall soon see.