I had the money for this extravangance from a few week's work for Debbie Wilson Research. I was wrong for the job and didn't last long at it but it gave me my first working paypackets ever (not counting the money for the video editing job the year before but that was different: 'nother story).
I'd borrowed a silk tie from my brother Stephen for the interview and wore a shirt from my own wardrobe that I took to be mainstream and respectable. The collar was too tight and I made it through the interview with a face like a tomato. I went in the next day and started work in a government office, collating figures from accomodation and hotel industry records. I didn't know what the work was for and didn't ask for the same reason that I didn't know what my father did for a living until I was about seventeen: I didn't care.
This was intensely boring work but helped me with my attempt to quit smoking. At one point (it might have been in a private sector office (my team went to several different locations we were white collar nomads) a fortyish man came through with greeting and handshakes for us all. He later popped into the office I was working in and grabbed a file.
"Hi," he said and gave me a deathcrush handshake. "How're you doing?"
"Great," I said without irony. "How are you?"
He grinned and on his way out said, "I'm winning," also without irony.
I never saw him again. I was glad. Way back then it made him sound like a prick. The only one of the team I had much to do with was a nice enough guy called Gordon who showed me the ropes and kept an eye on how I was doing. We were clopping down the stretchy stone steps of Trades Hall one Friday morning and I remember him asking: "got a good weekend lined up?" I was still new to office work and instead of lying and saying, "yeah, how about you?" I said, "no." He never asked me again.
At one point we were invited into a staff room for the birthday of some lifer who shrank into a corner with a constant time-serving grin. Gordon was a veteran of these things and had warned me that the last time it happened he was allowed to use a staff member's tea mug because its owner was on leave that week. At the end of the first fortnight the portly but pleasant boss (a woman in her forties: everyone who was a second or more older than I was going through their unreachable forties) handed me my pay sachet and said: " Here, Peter, this is what makes it all worthwhile." On the way home that evening I bought a bottle of Jack Daniels.
The next fortnight was my last. Most of it was at the research firm's headquarter offices a few floors over Anne Street with a view of Mt Coot-tha (non-Brisbanites be directed, it's pronounced Mount Cootha). It was a lot better work, mostly writing abstracts for government publications and I excelled at it. But the core of the job was the numbers and I was probably just too slow and sloppy at that. The boss sat on my desk on my last day, handed me my pay and let me go in front of everyone else. Naive, I asked for a reference and was told I could use her as a referee for the language-based work but not the numbers. Then she said, and this saddens me today, "you're free to go."
Embarrassed, I pretended to work for another twenty minutes and packed up and left while the others were at afternoon tea. The mix of rejection and elation is a strange one. I told Dad (who was down from Townsville on one of his renovation assault campaigns on the Auchenflower house) that the project I was working on had finished and he left me alone over it. If I'd told him the truth I would've had two solid weeks of management-class humiliation at every meal.
My shopping spree at Indooroopilly was an early encounter with what would later be given the nauseating name of retail therapy. Nevertheless, it was guided by the fact of being financed by my final payment from Debbie Wilson Research; I was buying things that would last.
A little later some friends came over and we sipped the American whiskey (which had in fact lasted weeks) o'er the Vivaldi records. Apart from the achingly beautiful audio quality of it, the set was one of Christopher Hogwood's directions of baroque mastery which insisted pedantically on period-correct instruments and arrangements (so that the strings were strung slack and the continuo could be organ or lute instead of the usual harpsichord). It made for a lovely late autumn afternoon. Then someone venturing near the LP stack flipped through it until they found Barrett, picked it up and said: "you got this on vinyl."
"I did," I said. "Put it on after this."
For two of the company it was the first Syd they'd heard outside of what was on Relics and it was more warming than the whiskey watching them fold into it as the meandering chime of the clean Fender Esquire noodled before the tide of bass and organ brought us into Baby Lemonade.
I later learned that that beginning, that highly articulate guitar playing was not only Syd himself (I'd assumed it was producer and former bandmate David Gilmour) but recorded only to get a level before the take. Gilmour kept it in. The guitar playing in the rest of the song is nowhere near as articulate (ie when Syd knew he was being recorded).
After the grey day joys of the opener comes the lazy and comfy Love Song with its feed seive acoustic guitar, organ (fellow Floyder and co-producer Richard Wright), tack piano and a double tracked Syd on something soothing. It picks up tempo for the outro and everyone keeps up. Syd probably thought he was going the same pace.
Dominoes slinks in almost unnoticed with Syd quietly musing about losing when his mind's astray over a deep dark thudding bass and kick drum while Rick Wright plays a Riders on the Storm rhodes and Syd Provides a flying backwards guitar line (maybe the longest I've heard). A sad song possibly about inevitability. He sounds muted and resigned.
It is Obvious sounds more upbeat but Syd still sounds tired. A major chord, a fourth up, down again, up again, like a mandraxed Street Fighting Man but there's something going on in all the creeping into cupboards, stranded on spikes, his blood reading oh listen. Something he seems to have seen that no one else has or can. Except for whoever is invited by these words: minds shot together, our minds shot together. Reason it is written on the brambles. Could just be an acid trip. Could be something he couldn't say outside of singing it.
There is none of the light of the first solo album. The Madcap Laughs is filled with golden hair and underwater luminosity, clowns and jugglers. There is much cause for concern in it but it almost sounds stumbled upon there. Here the condition, the field of vision, the no mans land of consciousness was spreading out before Syd and he (helped by the firm hands on the wheel of Gilmour and Wright) was describing it with far more control than he was able the first time.
I have no business feigning psychiatric diagnoses but the next track Rats which sounds like a mix of Syd's normal associative ecstasies and one of Charles Manson's maximum security rants. "Rats rats lay down flat if you think you're unloved than we know about that." The ceaselessly bashing rhythm like the constant nag of They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha Ha lashes for the whole song. Syd begins in his baritone range (which always surprises me even though he used it often) and wavers between it and an octave over it. But during the line "I look into your eyes" he goes from somewhere low to a searing wail. This lies somewhere between mischief and dropping the docking rope. "Rats rats lay down flat yes yes yes yes lay down flat..."
If Rats was unsettling try Masie which closed side one. A glacial 6/8 blues shuffle on the drums with a clean but dark guitar keeping to the lower strings and a bass thud. No change. That all the way through. Syd keeps to his lowest range, sometimes finding notes at the bottom of whatever well he found this one in. Maisie. Bad luck. The pride of the bull. His luminous grin put her in a spin. This track has the sound Angelo Badalamenti found for every David Lynch scene that involved threatening sleaze, carpets crusted with cigarette butts and gum, factory surfaces thick with grease and someone with a ghastly distorted voice walking in under the incandescent bulb to do damage. Syd occasionally puts a toppling laugh in the lines. Something bad is happening here.
Flip the disc and Gigolo Aunt starts after a brief reverby crunch of guitar chords. A constant Beatley thump in the organ, bass and drums and sweet guitar interjections. But this is fun. The wordarama doesn't have the slippery grip of the first side. The words "su-perlative day" are delivered for direct injection; everyone who hears them has an instant picture of a beautiful afternoon. If there are hidden shadows here they are too hard to see for all the light. It's old Scarecrow Syd back again.
Waving My Arms in the Air. Hey, he's still here, bouncing around the scenery in one of Ray Davies' afternoons of rain, shine, tea and toast and all things lovely and English. Like Ray, Syd couldn't sound like his transAtlantic inspirators if he tried; his solid power as a singer was as a middle class English boy. It gave his whimsy and his invention their driving power and is why cover versions never quite sound genuine unless they, too, are delivered English (not British, mind you, English, actually home counties English). Listen to This Mortal Coil's cover of Late Night from Madcap for proof. Imagine Pub With No Beer sung by Marc Almond. Cannot work even in jest.
But the song crunches its gears and strips them as it shifts into another song. There's a party and it sounds good but he's not happy and every thought he gives the girl drags him further into withdrawal until he isn't at the party as much as observing it, thinking and watching as even his thoughts disintegrate and fall around him like his painting of the insects on the cover, pretty but pretty obviously dead.
But the thing is that this was no longer the crazy diamond Syd. There were no more whorls of verimillion waves in a sky explorable with an interstellar overdrive. But there was the shapeless terror behind the coats in the hallway and the difficulty of getting fingernails to stop growing, the zombies and reptilian people just beyond the front door and the chops in the fridge that were always going off.
The treks through the endlessly starting and stopping sessions and takes that even the best production and editing could not mask, the songs that sounded like the instruments were bumping against each other in the dark, all that journey had come to wordless rhythm tracks and muddy belching to suicidally reckless guitar chord progressions. There was nothing left of the black and green scarecrow or the crazy diamond that could meet even an eager and forgiving public. There was just this hobo with the dead eyed stare burning his money on London hotel bills, forgetting why he crossed a room, constantly brushing his teeth.
The padding around the '80s release of the Opel album (pointless early takes and meaningless unfinished tracks) left me feeling dirty when I listened to it. The title track alone held substance but even that with its form (as coherant as he'd ever been) ended with a long and pained plea for something obscure and frightening for its formlessness. The rest was there because of that song. Only that song seemed to merit release but I still wonder about that. It felt like someone had raided his garden shed and excitedly told you that this was his shovel, this was his rake and here's something that seems to be a kind of chair.
Later in his life, towards its end when the online world swooped from the ether and found him the youtube videos appeared. Fat, old and ugly Syd going to the shops. Fat, old and ugly Syd in his front garden. All of it was set to songs like Dark Globe ("wouldn't you miss me?"), the comments section filled with laments about his devastation. Well, I watched them too.
When I heard of his death in 2006 I wept along with all the other rubbernecks on youtube. Such a refulgent star had fallen and kept rolling downhill until one day he just gave up and stopped breathing. He didn't even know he wasn't famous anymore.
But then I heard an interview with Roger Waters who talked about lunching with the band's accountant. "Poor Syd?" the numbercruncher had exclaimed. "He got a big cut out of every Pink Floyd compliation there ever was as well as royalties from the steadily growing cult following lapping up Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the solo albums. He was rolling in it!" The necker cube changed. Suddenly instead of it appearing to be moving from me it started moving my way. Poor Syd? Why should he have kept wanting to be a star? It was we put that bullshit on him. And his escape from it, however incompletely intentional, proved final and satisfying.
Ask yourself: would you rather emerge from a psychotic episode with the old fashioned verve and endlessly tour bowling alleys and RSLs with the old hits, a spanking new autographed Fender and a face made out of orange polymer or would you rather wake up every day finding the joy in designing a new door knob or repaint the kitchen cupboards because the splatter job you did on them last weekend was already boring or go to the shop and see if the old lady has worked out that you mean bovril when you ask her for that black mad cow stuff or hammer dining room table seats together from the palings of an old fence? I know what I'd choose.
But it gets clearer still. There's a track called Wined and Dined, third from last on side two, before the joyously wild Wolfpack and the cute Effervescing Elephant. Wined and Dined is a gentle song about a lovely date with Syd's slide guitar prominent as well as some pleasant fuzzy amp tremolo and a cushion-comfy acoustic strumming through. Of all the tracks on the album there is not a single moment where the bar structure is held up at knifepoint. It is in perfect time from the first to the last. A look at the credits says much. David Gilmour arranged and directed the backing which included Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright. It's tight and perfectly delivered. Even Syd's lead guitar stays on track. It is also the album's only boring track. That's the Syd that would have gone on in music not the one in the next track (Wolfpack) and not even the one in the storybook funny final song about the elephant. Just a tired perfection squinting out at the light through the grey glue of medication until the breathing stopped.
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