IT’S GOT TO HAVE BEEN one of history’s most anticlimactic rock deaths, even though it’s just the way Roger “Syd” Barrett would probably have liked to go. Quietly, in Cambridge, at his dead mother’s semi-de-tached, and of diabetes. Just over 40 years ago, and he certainly didn’t know it then, Barrett co-founded a band that twisted through London’s haze-starved under-ground to emerge as one of rock’s most pro-gressive, controversial, bludgeoning and, fi-nally, self-destructive, forces.

For three sparsely busy years, Barrett, with a touch of assistance from co-founder Roger Waters, suffused Pink Floyd with a sound that it would rapidly lose when he was dropped from the band in 1968. And through the four decades that followed his expulsion as a result of a professionally crip-pling addiction to lysergic acid, Barrett’s reclusive overcast life ran eerily parallel to the systematic obliteration of his style from the band he created.

Barrett belonged to a time in rock few can now reconcile with. It was a time when singing in a dry English accent—where “like” was “loik”—and the use of Zippo lighters to make a guitar crunch and wail together, were completely, profoundly new. A world where bicycle bells and witch’s laughter painted with psychedelic washes of keyboard pre-cluded the percussive obsession of post-Barrett Pink Floyd, say, Another Brick In The Wall (The Wall, 1979), or Money (Dark Side of the Moon, 1973), songs that the band is tragically most associated with today in that amor-phous corpus we call the mainstream. Early Pink Floyd, some will tell you, was another band entirely. It indubitably was.

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