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English rock group. It was formed in London in 1965 by architecture students Syd Barrett (Roger Keith Barrett; b Cambridge, 6 Jan 1946, d 7 July 2006; guitar and vocals), Nick Mason (Nicholas Berkeley Mason; b Birmingham, 27 Jan 1945; drums), Roger Waters (George Roger Waters; b Great Bookham, Surrey, 9 Sept 1944; bass guitar and vocals) and Rick Wright (Richard William Wright; b London, 28 July 1945, d 15 Sept 2008; keyboards). They began by playing covers of rhythm and blues standards, but combined these with a highly innovatory light show, promising a ‘total environment of light and sound’. They thus became the most visible initial exponents of ‘psychedelia’ and by 1966 were headlining the new UFO club in central London. They deftly exploited media horror at the psychedelic movement, dispassionately denying any use of drugs. In late 1966 they played at the launch of the radical publication International Times, an important counter-cultural event. The early style was typified both by the song Interstellar Overdrive, which consisted of an opening and closing chromatic riff, enclosing an improvisation structured through a gradual loss and recovery of consistent metre, texture and registral spacing, and also by Bike, a childlike song full of metrical shifts and unsuspected timbres. By 1968 Barrett had become impossible to work with (a situation normally credited to psychiatric problems brought on by drug abuse) and his childhood friend Dave Gilmour (David Jon Gilmour; b Cambridge, 6 March 1947) was drafted in first to supplement his work on stage, then by mid-1968 to replace him. In this guise they began to move away from the spaced-out, freely improvised material on Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Col., 1967) and A Saucerful of Secrets (Col., 1968), although in live performance they still employed vivid light shows and back projections.
Reference Entry. 703 words.
Subjects: music
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