pretty good article about syd in latest RS(#1006) with LED ZEPPELIN on cover...story by DAVID FRICKE is well written,here are a couple excerps...

In Los Angeles,during an engagement at the Cheetah,the Floyd were befriended by the club's house band:the future Alice Cooper,then called the Nazz. "Pink Floyd basically ran out of money-they didn't have any place to stay,"says singer Alice Cooper. "So they stayed with us,in our house in Venice. I remember coming down to breakfast one morning,and there's Syd at the table. He's got purple crushed-velvet pants on,and he is staring at this box of corn flakes-the same way you and I would watch television. He was watching something that we couldn't see."

In 1982,Gilmour described the unique tribulations of workin with Barrett on his two solo albums:"You had to prerecord without him,working from one version of the song he had done, and then sit Syd down afterwords and try to get him to play and sing along,with a lot a droppin in.Or you could do it the other way around,where you'd get him to do a performance of it's own and then try to dub everything else on top of it."
Gilmour laughed at the memory with a kind of droll exhaustion."The concept of him performing with another bunch of musicians was clearly impossible,because he'd change the song every time.He'd never do a song the same way twice- I think quite deliberately."