Syd Barret
The rock band Pink Floyd has proven over the years to be a great influence on music and art in Britain and around the world. The band is most acclaimed for their sonically experimental approach and their cerebral masterpieces of the seventies. But having made seven albums before they became a world-renowned psychedelic band, they had time to develop their signature style and songwriting technique. The early days of the band are some of the most interesting in the history of rock music. The founder and once the undisputed leader of Pink Floyd, Syd Barret, showed erratic glimpses of brilliance in his songwriting and musical ideas, but only after writing all the songs on their widely successful debut album in the mid sixties and gaining worldwide popularity for Pink Floyd, Syd left the band because of a nervous breakdown, induced by his constant consumption of LSD and latent schizophrenia. Its undeniable, however, that Syd's erratic brilliance influenced and inspired the remaining members of the band, giving them the means to become one of the most popular and celebrated bands in history. His influence on the band can be most clearly seen, not surprisingly, in their most successful and fully realized albums, The Dark Side of the Mo
Syd's condition worsened as the group went on tour in America. His onstage presence was getting more and more unusual and catatonic. At times he would just stand onstage and not move a muscle for hours or he would play something completely irrelevant to what the rest of the band was playing. Nick Mason, the drummer of the band, recalls a situation exemplifying this: "Syd went mad on that first American tour in the autumn of 1967. He didn't know where he was most of the time. I remember he detuned his guitar onstage in Venice, LA, and he just stood there rattling the strings which is a bit weird, even for us," (qtd. in The Syd Barret Story). Shortly after the chaotic tour, it was clear that the band could not go on with Syd. It is disputed whether he left voluntarily or was thrown out, but his influence on the band would last must longer. on, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall, which were all released years after Syd's departure. The next album was one of the most pivotal steps is the history of rock music. The Wall, one of the most successful concept albums of all time, was a double album written mostly by Roger Waters, about isolation, fame, and madness. The story of The Wall, while most often thought of as an autobiography of Waters, has an indisputable element of the Syd Barret saga in the hero Pink, "whose rise to stardom is accompanied by a descent into madness," (Watkinson 125). The elements that lead up to Pink's building of the wall, the death of his father, trouble with school, coping with fame and success, and dealing with the expectations of your peers, are all things that Syd Barret and Roger Waters struggled with in their lives. And Roger had seen these things destroy his close friend and former bandmate.
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Approximate Word count = 1451
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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