Syd Barrett Was Not Your Crazy Diamond

Before he was a cautionary tale, he was Roger Keith Barrett — the fourth of five children, born in Cambridge in 1946, nicknamed Syd at fifteen. He could paint, he could play guitar, and in 1965 he helped start a band that became Pink Floyd.

For two years he was the one who wrote the songs. “Arnold Layne.” “See Emily Play.” The strange, brittle, gorgeous early singles that made the band’s name. He was the frontman, the face, the one the cameras came looking for.

Then it came apart. Through late 1967 and into 1968 Barrett became increasingly erratic, and he was taking a great deal of LSD and amphetamines. Behaviour that had read as eccentric started to read as frightening. The band brought in his old Cambridge friend David Gilmour, at first as a second guitarist, and by April 1968 Barrett was out of the group he had founded.

Here is the part worth slowing down for. The people closest to him disagreed, publicly, for the rest of their lives, about what was actually wrong. Roger Waters said he suffered from schizophrenia, “without a doubt.” Rick Wright blamed a catastrophic acid experience for burning something out. David Gilmour said the breakdown would have happened anyway — that it was deep-rooted, and that the drugs were a catalyst rather than a cause.

What Barrett was ever formally diagnosed with was never made public. He never told that story. And yet half a century on, a specific condition gets attached to his name with total confidence by people who never met him. He may be the most armchair-diagnosed man in rock music, which is its own quiet theft: a whole life reduced to a differential.

In June 1975 he turned up unannounced at Abbey Road, where the band were finishing “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” — a song they had written about him. He was heavyset, his head and eyebrows shaved. Nobody recognised him for a while. When they did, Roger Waters was in tears. Barrett slipped away during the party for Gilmour’s wedding, which happened to fall on the same day, and that was largely the end of it.

He had made two solo records in 1970 — “The Madcap Laughs” and “Barrett” — and then he stopped. He went home to Cambridge, took up painting, worked on large abstract canvases, and lived quietly for another three decades. He died there in July 2006, aged sixty, of pancreatic cancer.

The phrase “crazy diamond” is beautiful. That is exactly the problem with it. It is a beautiful phrase about a person, and it flatters everyone who reaches for it, because it turns a man’s collapse into a poetic inevitability — the price of the gift, the flaw that makes the stone valuable. Listen to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and you can hear grief. Listen to the way people talk about Barrett and you can hear something else: the pleasure of a good story.

The honest version is smaller and sadder. A man got ill in his early twenties. The people who loved him argued about it for decades. He was badly served by a moment that had no idea what to do with a musician who could not work. He withdrew, and the withdrawal got reframed as mystery, because mystery is more interesting to the rest of us than illness is.

The one account we never got was his. That is the loss at the centre of this. Everything else — the theories, the diagnoses, the album titles — is us, talking about a man who left the conversation in 1968.

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