PINK FLOYD

The early Sixties. Everything is up in the air, not least love, drugs and sex. A group of talented teenagers from academic backgrounds in Cambridge — Roger 'Syd' Barrett, Roger Waters and David Gilmour — are all keen guitarists and among many who move to London, keen to discover more of this new world and express themselves in it. Mainly in further education — studying the arts, architecture, music — they mix with like-minded incomers in the big city.

In 1965, Barrett and Waters meet an experimental percussionist and an extraordinarily gifted keyboards-player — Nick Mason and Rick Wright respectively. The result is Pink Floyd, which more than 40 years later has moved from massive to almost mythic standing.

Through several changes of personnel, through several musical phases, the band has earned a place on the ultimate roll call of rock, along with the Beatles, the Stones and Led Zeppelin. Their album sales have topped 250 million. In 2005, at Live 8 — the biggest global music event in history — the reunion of the four-man line-up that recorded most of the Floyd canon stole the show. And yet, true to their beginnings, there has always been an enigma at their heart.

Roger 'Syd' Barrett, for example. This cool and charismatic son of a university don was the original creative force behind the band (which he named after the Delta bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). His vision was perfect for the times, and vice versa. He would lead the band to its first precarious fame, and damage himself irreparably along the way. And though the Floyd's Barrett era only lasted three years, it always informed what they became.

These were the summers of love, when LSD was less an hallucinogenic interval than a lifestyle choice for some young people, who found their culture in science fiction, the pastoral tradition, and a certain strain of the Victorian imagination. Drawing on such themes, the elfin Barrett wrote and sang on most of the early Floyd's material, which made use of new techniques, such as tape-loops, feedback and echo delay.

Live, the Floyd played sonic freak-outs — half-hidden by new-fangled light-shows and projections — with Barrett's spacey lead guitar swooping over Waters' trance-like bass, while Wright and Mason created soundscapes above and beneath. On record they were tighter, if still 'psychedelic'. Either way, they sounded 'trippy'. And perhaps that was Barrett's intention. He certainly ingested plenty of LSD and other drugs, which didn't help his delicate mental balance.

Over the spring of 1966, the young band were regulars at the Spontaneous Underground 'happenings' on Sundays at the legendary Marquee Club, where they were spotted by their future managers Peter Jenner and Andrew King. And by the autumn, the Floyd had become the house band of the so-called London Free School in west London.

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