“One thinks of it all as just a dream…”

STORIES about Syd Barrett are legion. That he became overbearingly egotistical, impossible to work with. That he was thrown out of Pink Floyd. That he suffered a psychological crack-up. That he once went for an afternoon drive and ended up in Ibiza. That he went back to live with his mother in Cambridge as a part of a mental healing process. That occasionally he goes to the house of Richard Wright, the Floyd’s organist, and sits there silently for hours without speaking.

Some of the stories are true.

Roger Waters: “When he was still in the band in the later stages, we got to the point where any one of us was likely to tear his throat out at any minute because he was so impossible… When ‘Emily’ was a hit and we were third for three weeks we did Top Of The Pops, and the third week we did it he didn’t want to know. He got down there in an incredible state and said the reason was that John Lennon didn’t have to do TOTP, so he didn’t.”

In the past two years he has made a couple of albums.. The other was . The cover of has a picture of him crouching watchfully on the bare floorboards of a naked room. A nude girl stretches her body in the background. The picture encapsulates the mood of his songs, which are pared down and unembellished, unfashionably stripped of refined production values, so that one is left to concentrate on the words and stream-of-consciousness effect. His work engenders a sense of gentle, brooding intimacy; a hesitant, but intense, awareness.