Pink Floyd Band Member Biographies
Syd Barrett





Roger Keith (Syd) Barrett was born in Cambridge, England on January 6, 1946. He has two elder brothers and a sister called Rosemary. He went to Cambridge High School for Boys where he was two years below Roger Waters. He led a comfortable middle class English family life. His father died when he was 12 years old, soon after he started at secondary school.

He seems to have always been artistic and musical. Though he decided to study painting his interest in music also began at an early age:

"My first musical instrument, at a very tender age, was a ukelele. Then, when I was eleven years old, my parents bought me a banjo.

"A year later I talked them into buying me a guitar; quite a cheap one; and I learned to play it from tutor books and from friends who could play a little.

"At fifteen, I took a dramatic step forward, becoming the proud possessor of an electric guitar, with a small amplifier that I made myself. And with this kit, which I fitted into a cabinet, I joined my first group - Geoff Mott and the Mottoes - playing at parties and the like around my home town of Cambridge.

"For a couple of years, from the age of sixteen, I was not with any regular group, and during this time I acquired a 12-string guitar and then a bass guitar which I played with another local group, The Hollering Blues.

"Then I decided to go to London; took a while to get in the scene; and joined forces with three boys I had met (Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright). I switched to lead guitar and after using various names, we decided to call ourselves The Pink Floyd."

Syd shared his musical education in Cambridge with his friend Dave Gilmour who taught Syd quite a few things about playing the guitar. After technical college Syd moved down to London to study painting at Camberwell Art School in Peckham. He had been travelling up and down between Cambridge and London but now he settled and shared a flat with Roger Waters in Highgate.

"Roger Waters is older than I am. He was at the architecture school in London. I was studying at Cambridge; I think it was before I had set up at Camberwell. I was really moving backwards and forwards to London. I was living in Highgate with him, we shared a place there, and got a van, and spent a lot of our grant on pubs and that sort of thing.

"We were playing Stones numbers. I suppose we were interested in playing guitars. I picked up playing guitar quite quickly. I didn't play much in Cambridge because I was from the art school. But I was soon playing on the professional scene and began to write from there"

Both Syd and Roger wrote in those early days, not just Syd as some critics have suggested. Syd's material fitted easier into the pop music framework as it was then since he wrote short 'songs' with chart potential. Syd explained it:

"Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people I would've thought, primarily. I mean, anybody walking into an art school like that wouldn't have been tricked, maybe they were working their entry into an art school.

"But the choice of material was restricted, I suppose, by the fact that both Roger and I wrote different things. We wrote our own songs, played our own music. They were older, by about two years I think. I was 18 or 19. I don't know that there was really much conflict except that perhaps the way we started to play wasn't as impressive as it was to us, even, wasn't as full of impact as it might have been. I mean, it was done very well rather than considerably exciting. One thinks of it all as a dream."


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