The departed: band members who got away

Max Rafferty,  The Kooks
Rafferty was an original member of The Kooks, having been asked to play bass with the band as they started to record demos.

Following a couple of years with The Kooks - taking in the recording of their debut album, Inside In/Inside Out - Rafferty was removed from a winter 2005 UK tour by the band's tour manager. Rafferty subsequently underwent therapy and returned as a full-time member in January 2007. Matters didn't really improve, however, and earlier this year he again left the band, this time for good. His departure was announced via a concise statement on The Kooks' MySpace page.

Glen Matlock The Sex Pistols

Glen Matlock was in the thick of it from the very start of The Sex Pistols - in the Sex shop, co-writing most of the songs on Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols (including the best-ever quartet of consequentially released singles, Anarchy in the UK, God Save the Queen, Pretty Vacant and Holidays in the Sun). Booted out of the band by manager Malcolm McLaren for having the audacity to admit to liking The Beatles, Matlock is now back in the fold as the Pistols reap the dividends denied to them in the late 1970s.

Syd Barrett Pink Floyd

Barrett  was recognised as the fragmented genius behind the first phase of Pink Floyd - the psychedelia-driven mid to late 1960s. Yet his well-documented ingestion of psychotropic drugs and other chemicals pushed him over the brink and impinged on the band's ambitions. It's not that he was given the boot - he was just left behind, as his replacement, David Gilmour, recalls in the book Crazy Diamond: "Normally, we would pick him up . . . but one day someone asked, 'Shall we pick Syd up?' and someone else replied, 'No, let's not bother.' We never went to pick him up again. It's as simple as that."