During recording sessions for Wish You Were Here at Abbey Road Studios, London, England, Syd Barrett turned up out of the blue as Pink Floyd were listening to playbacks of Shine On You Crazy Diamond — a song that happened to be about Barrett. By that time, the 29-year-old Barrett had shaved off all of his hair (including his eyebrows), become overweight, and his ex-bandmates did not at first recognise him. Barrett eventually left without saying goodbye, and none of the band members ever saw him again.
A sophisticated concept album about the things in life that break people’s spirits. They returned to Abbey Road studios to begin work on their follow-up, Wish You Were Here. It was a concept album that touched on such themes as absence, the corruption within the music business, and the drug-induced mental collapse of their founder and original leader, Roger Keith Barrett, better known to the world at large as “Syd.” The nine-part epic song that begins and ends the album, “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond,” was no doubt written specifically as a tribute to Syd. Coincidentally, the day the sessions commenced was also Syd
Barrett’s 29th birthday.
Near the end of the album’s sessions, as the vocals for “Shine On” were being completed, the band noticed a heavyset man with a shaved head and eyebrows who had wandered into the studio, his mental state later described by drummer Nick Mason as “desultory and not entirely sensible.”
“Roger [Waters, the bass player] was there, and he was sitting at the desk, and I came in and I saw this guy sitting behind him—huge, bald, fat guy,” recalled keyboardist Richard Wright in a 1984 interview. “I thought, ‘He looks a bit . . . strange . . . ’ Anyway, so I sat down with Roger at the desk and we worked for about ten minutes, and this guy kept on getting up and brushing his teeth and then sitting—doing really weird things, but keeping quiet. And I said to Roger, ‘Who is he?’ and Roger said ‘I don’t know,’ and I said ‘Well, I assumed he was a friend of yours,’ and he said ‘No, I don’t know who he is.’ Anyway, it took me a long time, 
When the others realized that the strange man was indeed their erstwhile leader, now a shadow of his former self, they were horrified. Waters was even reduced to tears. Syd willingly told the band he was happy to lend his services to them, but it was clear to all present that he was in no shape to perform in a band with anyone. He had, in fact, already withdrawn from performing and recording music the year before following an abortive attempt at a solo recording. After that session, none of the members of Pink Floyd would see Syd again, as he would eventually permanently retreat to his hometown of Cambridge, England, where he died in 2006 from complications of diabetes at age 60.
