Syd Barrett, who died last Friday in Cambridge, founded Pink Floyd in 1965 and led them to their initial success - with very English songs like Arnold Layne and See Emily Play - before dropping out of the band as a result of taking too much acid and coming to gigs in a "catatonic" state, unable to play more than a note, if at all.
He wrote a fifth of the songs on the Pink Floyd retrospective greatest hits Echoes album, even though he was only with the band for a fraction of their career. Two solo albums, released after he left, were not hugely successful in terms of sales, but were massively influential in terms of their spaced-out, sometimes mellow, sometimes manic music.
The song Dominoes is one of the finest ever produced, and echoes of Syd's sound live on in hundreds of hugely popular indie bands today.
Telegraph | News | Syd Barrett
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