Just two months after a photo shoot which showed a clearly disconnected Barrett standing among his band mates, Pink Floyd parted ways with the troubled yet immensely talented musician in March 1968. Familiar with the band and even more so with Barrett himself, as the two had traveled and studied together, Gilmour’s addition at the end of 1967 would prove to be a game changer for a band who’d already garnered interest from critics and fans alike for taking experimental risks. With Barrett’s mental state rapidly deteriorating to the point of crisis, his band mates decided to bring on a young guitar player from Cambridge named David Gilmour as an additional member. Along with Waters, Richard Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums), Barrett’s role in Pink Floyd would extend far beyond the reach of Piper and into the very heart of some of rock and roll’s most flawless and perfectly realized albums. The subject of endless speculation and mythology, Barrett’s struggle with mental illness was of course tragic in its own right as a viciously unforgiving disease, yet the effects were undoubtedly driven to insurmountable levels once brought under the microscope of celebrity and media scrutiny. Having already established themselves as a force in the London underground of experimental music, the band’s 1967 full-length debut was met with considerable success both critically and commercially, though the celebration would be cruelly brief due to what had quickly become Barrett’s now completely unhinged mental state. Primarily a blues band in their earliest days, it was not until Barrett took on the role of frontman and lyricist that Pink Floyd began to distance themselves both sonically and thematically from their contemporaries.
Barrett’s friendship with band mate and eventual sole lyricist and bassist for Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, culminated in the artistic relationship that would create the wholly distinctive sound on the band’s debut, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. While the music of Pink Floyd has, for the most part, never embraced the happy-go-lucky ethos of so many of the band’s popular music counterparts in the late ’60s, the disparity between the band’s sound during the brief tenure of vocalist/guitarist Syd Barrett and what came in the wake of his departure is noteworthy when considering the whole of the band’s career. Originally called “The Pink Floyd Sound,” the name was an off-the-cuff moniker created by original vocalist/guitarist Syd Barrett in what would mark an almost cruel prelude for a band who despite earning every possible level of fame and fortune, would never be able to fully come to grips with those realities of losing friends, family, and even themselves along the way.
The story of the band’s beginnings has been well documented with all manner of devoted fans eager to point out the fact that after several name changes (which included the always delightful and mildly prophetic Meggadeaths), the art students-turned-musicians derived the final permutation of the band’s name from blues artists Pinkney “Pink” Anderson and Floyd Council. While their contemporaries honed in on every brilliant pop music formula from places like Liverpool and Southern California, Pink Floyd’s music quickly transformed into both a cautionary tale for the easily starstruck and a deeply personal narrative that became increasingly bleak and, at its most powerful, utterly heartbreaking. Pink Floyd’s most distinctive quality is likely the very thing that provided the greatest friction for the members themselves. It’s a fitting foreword to the band’s story which, over the last fifty years of their existence, has seen them embrace the rarity and mythos that is rock and roll legend with a disarming sense of apprehension, paranoia, and oftentimes rage. How appropriate that Pink Floyd would find their beginnings in the same year that saw the first person walk in space.
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