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Pink Floyd · S1 E2
The Painter
Roger Keith Barrett is born in Cambridge in 1946. Everyone calls him Syd. He plays ukulele, paints with obsessive precision, and has a charisma that makes every room revolve around him
Cambridge, 1962. Syd Barrett picks up a guitar at a house party and the room stops talking, because he plays like someone who sees colours the rest of them can only hear.
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The Barrett Family
Roger Keith Barrett is born on January 6, 1946, in Cambridge, the youngest in a family that treats creativity as a birthright. His father Arthur fills the house with music and instruments. Syd grows up surrounded by art books and the assumption that making things is what people do.
“You couldn't take your eyes off him. He was beautiful and funny and incredibly bright.”
— Storm Thorgerson (childhood friend, later Pink Floyd's cover designer), from Chapman, Rob. "Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head." Faber and Faber, 2010
Arnold Layne, Pink Floyd (1967)
Pink Floyd's first single, produced by Joe Boyd at Sound Techniques studio in Chelsea, January 1967. The song bounces between playful melody and eerie undertone, with Syd's guitar cutting in and out like a flickering light. Listen for Rick Wright's organ, which gives the whole thing a seaside funfair quality.
TAP TO REVEAL: Where did the nickname "Syd" come from?
Where did the name "Syd" actually come from?
Terrapin, Syd Barrett
From The Madcap Laughs (1970), Syd Barrett's first solo album. A gently hypnotic acoustic piece that sounds like someone painting with sound: layers of guitar building on top of each other, each one slightly different from the last. This is the purest recording of what Syd Barrett's mind sounded like when it was working at its most beautiful.
Syd Barrett arrives in London to study painting, but Regent Street Polytechnic is already full of students playing guitars in stairwells. Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Rick Wright are there, and they are looking for exactly the kind of person Syd happens to be.
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