Syd Barrett

Born on January 6, 1946, Roger Keith Barrett was raised in CambridgeEngland. He was given the nickname "Syd" as a youngster, while attending the city's High School, where his friends included Roger Waters and David Gilmour, and it stuck with him as he grew up.

In his late teens, after his father died, he started producing paintings and music. He was an originating member of The Abdabs, The T-Sets, Sigma 6, and other names such as The Meggadeaths, in 1965. He worked with people like Bob Close, Roger Waters, Nick mason, and Richard Wright.

When Bob Close left the band, Syd renamed the group The Pink Floyd Sound, named after the cover of an album of two american bluesmen, Pink Anderson, and Floyd Council. Syd wrote almost everything for The Pink Floyd Sound, then The Pink Floyd finally renamed just Pink Floyd), he played guitar, sung, and wrote the music and the lyrics as well. The other Cambridge native forming The Pink Floyd were Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums).

Within weeks the new line-up had rehearsed at the Thompson Private Record Company, a tiny studio sited in the basement of a house in Hemel, Hampstead. Here they recorded two songs; an original hinged to the Gloria riff entitled Lucy Leave and a version of Slim Harpo's I'm a King Bee already made famous by the Rolling Stones. At first, The Pink Floyd were a much more conventional act that the act into which they would evolve, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that were so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British bands.

Syd's influences were the Stones, Beatles, Byrds and Love," the group's first manager, Pete Jenner, told Nick Kent, adding at Barrett wore out his copy of the last-named group's debut album. "I was trying to tell him about this Arthur Lee song I couldn't remember the title of, so I just hummed the main riff. Syd picked up his guitar, followed what I was...