Syd Barrett

Syd Barrett is one of those figures where the mythology almost swallows the man, but the music — if you actually sit with it — is genuinely extraordinary. He co-founded Pink Floyd and wrote nearly everything on their debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which came out in 1967 and still sounds like nothing else from that era: playful, unsettling, childlike, and deeply strange all at once. His two solo records, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, are fragile and fascinating in a way that polished studio albums rarely are. The mental breakdown and his withdrawal from public life in the early seventies turned him into a kind of tragic romantic symbol, which I think actually obscures how genuinely talented and original he was as a songwriter. He passed away quietly in Cambridge in 2006, reportedly having lived as a reclusive painter for decades. A sad story, but the records he left behind are worth far more than the legend.

Name (English)

Syd Barrett

Name (Japanese)

シド・バレット

Reading

しど・ばれっと

Born

January 6, 1946 – July 7, 2006

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Capricorn / Dog

Origin

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Occupation

guitarist / singer / poet / singer-songwriter

High school

Cambridgeshire High School for Boys

University

Anglia Ruskin University

• Official sitehttps://www.sydbarrett.com/
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd%20Barrett
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B7%E3%83%89%E3%83%BB%E3%83%90%E3%83%AC%E3%83%83%E3%83%88
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q173061

Tags

• guitarist
• singer
• poet

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.