Crazy Diamond is a box set of the three studio albums augmented by nineteen bonus tracks.) When it came to CDs, however, they were split up again. (The two original records were issued separately but subsequently repackaged as a double album. Tormented but unquestionably brilliant, Barrett left a musical legacy which is wholly contained on Floyd’s first LP (plus some singles), his two solo albums, the Peel platter and an album’s worth of outtakes entitled Opel. The Television Personalities have sung about him, Robyn Hitchcock, Anthony More, Edward Ka-Spel of the Legendary Pink Dots and others have been compared to him numerous art, psychedelic and neo-mod bands have invoked his name, recorded his songs or acknowledged his impact. Still, Barrett has influenced many bands and remains an enduring rock icon for the chronically dislocated, his unselfconscious looniness offering a framework for artists to explore updated acid-rock with little more than an acoustic guitar. Syd fell out of Pink Floyd after a debut album ( The Piper at the Gates of Dawn) that put the band on the verge of major international success having grown erratic, withdrawn and unpredictable, he pretty much retired in 1968, and - except for the two solo records he made in 1970 - lived a private, reclusive existence. One of rock’s legendary living dead casualties until his actual death in 2006, guitarist-songwriter Syd Barrett formed Pink Floyd in 1965 and made it one of the first art-school bands to abandon blues for druggified psychedelia.

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