Pink Floyd's Five-Piece Experiment: When Gilmour and Barrett Shared the Stage

For a few surreal months in late 1967, Pink Floyd carried two lead guitarists. David Gilmour was hired not as a replacement but as a second guitarist to prop up Syd Barrett, whose LSD use had made his onstage playing and singing increasingly unreliable. The band thought Barrett might snap out of it if he had a safety net.

The result was a bizarre double act. Gilmour would play Barrett’s parts exactly, sometimes singing along, while Barrett stood on stage half-present, staring at the audience or detuning his guitar mid-song. The band never officially announced the change. They just brought Gilmour on tour to the US, where Barrett would sometimes wander off, refuse to play, or simply not show up. Audiences noticed something was off but didn’t understand the internal tension. That tension ended when the band finally stopped picking Barrett up for gigs in early 1968.