(Credits: Alamy)
Mon 6 April 2026 20:15, UK
With the world at your feet, it is remarkably easy to have too much of most things. When you’re in a successful band, the excess is built into the architecture of the lifestyle, with your rider jam-packed with sex, drugs, alcohol…the list is endless.
For Syd Barrett, the list eventually became a ledger of his undoing. Through late 1967 and early 1968, the Pink Floyd frontman became increasingly erratic, fuelled by a heavy intake of LSD, amphetamines, and Mandrax. He developed a blank, dead-eyed stare that seemed to look through friends rather than at them, as producer Joe Boyd recalled after a performance at the UFO Club, describing his eyes as “vacant, as if someone had reached inside his head and turned off a switch”.
But before the chemical haze settled in, Barrett had already experienced too much of something else: his housemate and bandmate, Roger Waters. In the mid-1960s, the early iterations of Pink Floyd lived in a state of creative and domestic proximity in London and Cambridge, an informal, bohemian existence where Barrett would often crash at Waters’ flat.
While this closeness birthed the union of psychedelic masterpieces, it also created a mounting emotional tax. In a 1965 letter to his girlfriend, Jenny Spires, Barrett offered a rare, lucid glimpse into this domestic friction; amidst whimsically decorated pop-art graphics, Barrett scribbled a line that remains both playful and profoundly revealing: “You can have too much of Roger, even though he’s a good mate”.
At the time, the remark was a lighthearted jab, the kind of casual exasperation felt by any young man sharing tight quarters with an ambitious friend who also happens to be your bandmate. However, with the benefit of hindsight, the quote also foreshadowed the fragile dynamics that would emerge as Barrett’s mental health declined and Waters stepped into the role of the band’s de facto disciplinarian.
The “too much” eventually reached a breaking point. David Gilmour famously recalled the day the band simply decided to stop being mates with their leader: “We were driving up Ladbroke Grove, and someone said, ‘Shall we go and pick up Syd?’ And somebody else, probably Roger, said, ‘Nah, let’s not’. And we didn’t. We just drove off to Southampton.”
This cold abandonment marked the end of the Barrett era, but the “too much of Roger” sentiment would eventually consume the rest of the band, too. After Barrett’s departure, Waters’ conceptual grip tightened, leading to the gargantuan success of The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, but also to the same fractious atmosphere that had once exhausted Syd. By 1985, the internal rot was complete, and Waters followed Barrett out the door.
In the 1994 track ‘Poles Apart’, Gilmour finally seemed to address both ghosts of the band’s past. The line, “Did you know… It was all going to go so wrong for you”, was directed at the tragic decline of Barrett, while the follow-up, “And did you see it was all going to be so right for me?”, was aimed squarely at Waters.
“It’s just a shame he didn’t talk more later, or that there aren’t more letters about what was going on from 1967 onwards, when things weren’t going so well for him,” said Mark Blake (the author and documenter of Barrett’s diaries) in an interview with Mojo. While Barrett would eventually slip into the shadows of public life, this particular diary entry captured him still in the light, as a young man simply trying to navigate the mundane frictions of friendship.
