Syd Barrett, 1975.

For whatever reason, I lately find myself thinking about a 2006 Economist obituary for Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, who self-medicated his worsening mental illness with massive doses of LSD, extinguishing his great talent by 1968, three years after the group had formed. An excerpt from the obit:

“His weird words and odd, simplistic melodies, sent through an echo-machine, seemed sometimes to be coming from outer space.

Yet there was also something quintessentially English and middle class about Mr Barrett. His songs contained the essence of Cambridge, his home town: bicycles, golden robes, meadows and the river. Startlingly, he sang his hallucinations in the perfect, almost prissy enunciation of the Home Counties. He made it possible to do rock in English rather than American, inspiring David Bowie among others. The band’s first album, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ (1967), made Mr Barrett central, plaintively calling up the new age from some distant and precarious place.

Yet the songs were already tipping over into chaos, and by January 1968 Mr Barrett was unable to compose or, almost, to function. Dope, LSD and pills, consumed by the fistful, overwhelmed a psyche that was already fragile and could not bear the pressures of success. At concerts he would simply play the same note over and over, or stand still in a trance. If he played, no one knew where he was going, least of all himself. The band did not want to part with him, but could not cope with him; so he was left behind, or left them, enduring drug terrors in a cupboard under the stairs in his London flat. Casualties of ‘bad trips’ usually recovered, with stark warnings for the unwary. Mr Barrett, famously, went on too many and never came back.”

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“Come on you raver, you seer of visions / Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner”: