SYD BARRETT

Back in the summer of love in 1967 it apparently never occurred to anyone that taking strong hallucinogenics every day might not be too good for the ol' brain. Those adorable young hippies were too busy freaking out under the spell of psychedelic explorations to notice. And one of the best such perpetrators of acid-fuelled rock was none other than staid old prog rockers Pink Floyd who, before the multi-million selling glum rock operas, were briefly led by the explosive unhinged genius of Syd Barrett. Barrett was one of the stars of the scene, with his raffish good looks and rainbow clothing interesting the ladies, his phenomenally inventive and innovative approach to guitar playing interesting the hippies, and his in-built sense for a great pop melody interesting the kids (and record company executives). The Pink Floyd's debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was mostly Barrett's baby (albeit a very disturbed one) and was a hit at the time and even now is still regarded as one of the best debuts in rock. Syd was a little too fond of the mind-bending chemical enhancements, though, and his mental powers soon lost any modicum of stability. He became impossible to play with and rarely turned up to gigs, leading the rest of the band to draft in Dave Gilmour to cover for him. Even if, by some miracle, Syd did wander in to the right place at the right time they often neglected to plug him in. It seems almost inconceivable now that a band as solidly professional as Pink Floyd should have been led by a man at the very opposite extreme and it is little surprise that he was booted from the band completely in 1968, with his musical career seemingly at an end with nothing left to come from a mind frazzled by LSD.

But, surprisingly, Pink Floyd's original manager not-so-wisely decided the real money lay still with Syd and instead of letting him retreat back into his Cambridge cottage pushed him into trying to begin a solo career. A debut eventually appeared, with an obviously desperate second hot on its heels, before Syd's mind finally walked out of his body and he retired from the music business and, it would seem, society as a whole. No doubt angry old hippies would like me to point out that there seems little doubt that Syd had real and serious mental illnesses and therefore his breakdown was not solely caused by his copious (and even often involuntary) consumption of acid. It didn't fucking help, of course, and although Piper strikes just the right balance of acid-fuelled insanity and visceral jazz-flavoured rock Barrett's still-born solo career was obviously renderd DOA by his inability to muster any kind of coherent, consistent thought. That said, despite acting like a rabbit in the headlights in the wake of the Floyd's initial success Barrett still had an excellent second album left in him, and it is not that controversial to suggest that the quality of The Madcap Laughs was not matched by his old friends in Pink Floyd until the mid-seventies. Barrett's solo career attracted little attention at the time, though, (not helped by his incapability of playing live) and the two records only started to sell after the legions of fans picked up by DSOTM and WYWH were notified of his legacy through the Floyd classic "Shine On You Crazy Diamond". One struggles to imagine many fans of Pink Floyd's commercial rock behemoths were particularly enamoured with Syd's insane ramblings but it at least put his name on the rock map and he developed into the paradox of being one of the most popular cult figures, with a rarities compilation of studio leftovers appearing in the eighties and a relatively prominent Greatest Hits package in the late nineties (tying in with a much-hyped BBC documentary). Indeed, one might question whether a solo artist with barely one coherent album deserves a full page but his status has risen to such a level that his relevance in rock history cannot simply be ignored.

From: Jenny Riley

Hello Jack. Cool site,I have just read the Syd reviews and am some way into the Floyd ones. It's nice to read reviews that I agree with, mostly anyway! "Late Night" is also my favourite song from Madcap, Syd sounds so together, the gentle lyrics and slide guitar show what might have been if he had not been slowly destroyed by schizophrenia. Poor Syd, his life from 1968 onwards must have been a living hell. Compassion and support from his so called friends seem to have been in short supply. I can hardly bear to listen to "If it's in You" as it reduces me to tears. I just want someone to stop the recording and say ‘ok Syd you’re going to hospital to get treatment’ and taken him whether he wanted to or not! Maybe his breakdown would not have been so severe ----if only.I just love The Piper at the Gates of Dawn Syd's voice is wonderful in that very English middleclass way, especially on "Flaming" , my fave song on the album. "Astronomy Domine" from the brilliant intro, its spacy trippy lyrics, to Syd’s swooping voice, sometimes it sounds like his guitar, weird! As you say "Interstellar Overdrive" is timeless. I also like the wild vocals on "Pow R Toc H" and I like the way friends who don't 'get' Syd react when they hear them, 'what the ------ is that?'!!!!!! Go Syd!!!!!I can see why both men and women are attracted to Syd Barrett. Ok, when he was young he shone like the sun! As a woman I relate to the lyrics, his voice, all mixed up with his beautiful sexuality. Men seem to be attracted by that anarchic way he had about him, his mad genius guitar playing, and the way he looked. He was always the coolest of the Floyd, the clothes, the hair style, the others never looked comfortable. Dave came a close second though! The lyrics on "Vegetable Man" suggest that Syd wasn’t happy with his haircut!, that song is so psychologically honest.God, I'm rambling ! Back to reading your reviews. Jenny

What is surprising about this album is not its often sloppy musicianship, absent-minded and sometimes disturbing vocal performance from Syd, fractured, often incoherent arrangements, and moments of harrowing fear and insecurity but the fact that it is so bloody good. Surely at the moment Syd ran off stage thinking his head was melting whilst playing for the Floyd most people must have assumed it signalled the end to his artistic contributions. Like I said earlier and on the Pink Floyd page, everyone now thinks Pete Jenner was almost as mad as Syd himself to throw all his eggs into Syd's basket-case and abandon the remaining members of Pink Floyd. However, the majority of material on here is FAR superior to the dull, droning art-rock experiments Pink Floyd were fannying around with at the turn of the decade. Despite the fact Syd sounds half-there at the best of times and obviously well under the influence of downers his ability to write great pop songs is still just about working under the strain. You can almost sense his damaged creative capacity fizzling and crackling, particularly when Syd's dark side causes him to wander away from the melody or lose track of the arrangement, but it had yet to blow up completely. Much-lauded art-rockers the Soft Machine were drafted in to act as his backing band but such was Syd's sporadic and inexplicable approach to playing the guitar (he would just sit there and strum away, paying no heed to anything else) only a few tracks feature complete band performances and even those were overdubbed well after Syd had stumbled out of the studio. "No Man's Land" is the only track that really comes close to imitating the acid rock Syd propagated in the Floyd. It is surprisingly (and relatively) tight and one of the most immediately accessible songs on the album. Its normal-ish company includes two of the highlights in the form of the playfully high tempo rollicking "Love You" and the almost normal-sounding blues of "Here I Go", which is a wonderfully self-deprecating tale about a girl who rejects him because he left Pink Floyd ('she said "a big band is far better than you"'). Although that trio might have formed the basis of at least a recognised solo career, if not a popular one, everything else on the album is alternatively blighted or elevated by Syd's unique mental constitution. Although he is obviously losing his grip on his ability to write and perform songs there is enough creativity still making its way to the surface for most of the material to be utterly fascinating. It is a cliche but you really won't hear many albums that sound like this one. "Octopus" is a childish madcap stomp, whilst "Dark Globe" is the darkest moment on the album with Syd's performance so harrowing and erratic that the backing band were unable to add any overdubs, leaving a stark cry for help with his disturbing wail 'I tattooed my brain all the way'. One suspects the spritely and relatively sober "Here I Go" was sequenced immediately after it merely to prevent the listener from fearing too much for Syd's sanity. After another incongruously coherent artistic gesture with "Golden Hair" (with Syd reading an excerpt of James Joyce's poetry) the album degenerates into a run of solely acoustic tracks with Syd's performances at their most erratic, with the sound of him turning a page on "She Took a Long Cold Look" and culminating with his frustrated mumblings after a false start of the painfully atonal "If it's in You". The predominantly acoustic second half was produced by David Gilmour and one suspects at least part of the reason he left such unprofessional takes in was to emphasise the impossible task he faced. The bare acoustic material is below the quality of the over-dubbed songs and are obvious evidence of the degree to which Syd was struggling to write an entire set of complete material. You can almost hear Syd's gift leaving him as the album progresses but it does end poignantly with the beautiful, downbeat "Late Night", which features some lovely slide guitar by Syd, again utilising his trusty cigarette lighter. The fact that he was able to surprisingly produce so much excellent, if erratic, material is what makes this album a flawed masterpiece. Indeed, such is the delicate and unfathomable nature of its author it is almost impossible to discern where the genius ends and the flaws begin.

The rambling incoherency of the second side of Madcap signalled that Syd had already begun the descent into insanity and complete seclusion. Fearing - quite rightly - that his brightly burned star was just about to flicker out completely Jenner rushed Barrett back into the studio and once again entrusted Dave Gilmour to salvage a complete album from his fractured ramblings. Unfortunately, Barrett was almost gone and the resulting album is akin to something like a puppeteer trying to control his broken string doll. Few of the songs were completed by Barrett, with most relying only on garbled nursery rhymes or simple one-liners, endlessly repeated. In essence, Barrett had used up nearly all his complete compositions on his debut and was no longer in any fit state to produce any new ones. Gilmour's solution is often criticised by purists as instead of leaving the bare essence of Syd's bizarre and incomplete meanderings he sought to tighten them up into proper songs through heavy overdubs by local musicians. These overdubs were done without Barrett's consultation and certainly without his presence in the studio but I find it hard to get too worked up by it given he surely didn't give a shit about it himself. As a result, though, instead of sounding like a unique window into the mind of a fading lunatic the album ends up presenting only a set of lacklustre pop tunes, with mere glimpses of Syd's genius. That said, I certainly don't think it is a bad album, and probably interesting enough to warrant reasonable respect, but it is a shadow of his work on Piper and Madcap. A few of the songs seem to be coherent enough to count as proper songs, with the opening "Baby Lemonade" being both the most holistic and impressive track on the album. Similarly, some of the more fragile songs are quite pleasant, if still quite sad-making, with Syd retreating into pseudo-childhood with the lacksadaisical, wistful "Dominoes" ('you and I and dominoes, watching the day go by') and "Wined and Dined". Both songs capture Syd's naked fear and insecurity and are all the more compelling in their sadness. Speaking of childhood, Syd makes such allusions explicit at the close of the album with the charming simplistic nursery rhyme "Effervescing Elephant" being apparently the first song he ever wrote and therefore completing his immature regression, reflected in reality with him leaving London to move back in with his mother in Cambridge where he has stayed ever since. The majority of the material is listenable enough and perhaps due to Gilmour's production, and not despite of it, ends up sounding merely like a less inspired retread of his debut, with the up-tempo runaround "Gigolo Aunt" coming closest to capturing his quaint pop. There is still a sense of the dregs of his fractured mental capacity being squeezed out, though, and one can hardly be too surprised that this proved to be his last word to the world. Regardless of whether Gilmour rescued the recordings or ruined them with his overdubs it is clear that this is about as substantial as it was ever likely to get.

Syd Barrett's first renaissance occurred in 1975 with the success of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. Both the title track and the thematic "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" were tributes to him and piqued the interest of the millions of fans Pink Floyd had picked up post-DSOTM. A box set named after "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" appeared containing Barrett's two solo albums and, although few nouveau-Floyd fans were sold, his status as a cult figure started to grow exponentially from that point on. Syd, of course, refused to leave his rural retreat and to this day has refused any public contact, apparently managing to subsist on the royalties he still receives. Of course, in this situation both the record company and hardcore fans can be rewarded by a compilation of new material and eventually, in the late-eighties, an album was released made up of the most coherent of left-overs from the studio sessions at the turn of the sixties. Clearly, given Barrett's erratic behaviour, there are no shortages of incomplete studio takes and the nineties remasters of his catalogue included plenty of out-takes as bonus tracks on each CD. Unfortunately, two of the most coherent outtakes from his solo career did not appear until the Greatest Hits did in the late nineties in the form of "Two of Kind" (from a Peel session) and "Bob Dylan's Blues" (not a cover but a rather wry piss-take). Most of the material on here is made up of alternate takes from the first two albums and is therefore of little use. They might have tried to fool you by giving them different names ("Clowns and Jugglers" is "Octopus", "Wouldn't You Miss Me" is "Dark Globe") but most of them are just inferior versions of the final takes, albeit unobscured by Gilmour's overdubs. That said, the lack of extra instrumentation merely reveals just how fragile the compositions were, not to mention Syd's mind, and are far from essential listening. Thankfully, about half of the set is made up of new material but with the quality varying only from slight to practically non-existent. "Word Song", for instance, sees Syd read out randomly linked words against a single chord being strummed. If that is the kind of thing he brought into the studio each day one can only sympathise profusely with Gilmour's position. Like Barrett, though, the frailty of some songs does make them quite endearing, in a nonetheless disturbing way, with "Dolly Rocker" and "Let's Split" being only half-written but quite sweet in their naivity. Two of the most coherent and complete new numbers appear in the form of the opening title track and the delicate "Milky Way". Both seem to benefit from simply having some conscious thought put into them. A complete band does appear on "Swan Lee (Silas Lang)" but it is rather too disparate and the frail falsetto "Birdie Hop" is sadly pathetic. Put bluntly, there simply wasn't enough material left over from the recording sessions to justify a completely new album. There are some decent new songs but with two of his best not even publicly appearing until a decade later it is an incomplete gesture. If you like Barrett then it is obviously worth getting but, even so, it only serves to stand as the lower end of the barometer charting Syd's steady descent from mental stability and artistic success.

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