Why? Because I read about Syd Barrett and what I read bore no resemblance to his old band Pink Floyd. Liking Pink Floyd took decades. For a while back in the late '70s my favourite '60s music was psychedelia. Starting with the Beatles offerings I foraged where I could to find more. Not easy then and where I was (Townsville) where if you found anything it was second hand and so virtually by chance. But a friend of my sister had a copy of the first Pink Floyd album and that, coupled with what I knew of his strange, wild ways was enough. It was three years before I heard this disc but I was already a fan of it.
A slinky slide into an open E chord opens Terrapin in just enough time before Syd comes in with a voice that could not have come from anywhere but upper middle class England. "I really love you and I mean you." A familiar A-G-E from Arnold Layne and the years of blues that had inspired him and we repeat. "The star above you crystal blue." A light electric guitar provides a dozy accompaniment as though stirring from a snooze on a long warm afternoon. Declarations of love blend with a description of animal freedom, under the water with the sun streaming through. An instrumental verse so laid back it just sound as though Syd forgot to sing. Bridge again. Repeat last verse end on a strum which speeds up just before the cut off. A breezy song of simple pleasures.
No Good Trying stumbles through the door and only just manages to keep its feet. The deep Syd voice comes in urbane and assured despite his staggering. She shouldn't bother with any of her elaborate disguises or personae or anything else she wants to pretend; he will know. Syd's acoustic is all but buried, mostly audible by the pick sound. Around him a psychedelic band thunders, the drummer struggling to provide a backbeat. It's the drum fills that make it sound so unstable. The band was brought in later (most of Soft Machine) and they struggle. Syd isn't keeping time so beats are added to some bars and lost from others. A stinging organ note after the first verse brings everything together for a moment but once it's gone we're back to the shambles.
Love You is a rollicking ball of cute as Syd tells of an extended flirtation. It sounds like his Fender playing unplugged but mic-ed up rather than an acoustic. Tack piano like the one on Bike. The tempo is kept well enough and it's upbeat so the band doesn't have as much to fight against. Syd is almost disciplined here so his word jams work rhythmically. This would convey the experience felt by a fashionable young thing being approached by a beauteous alpha boy who talked like a Lewis Carroll poem and whose eyes made her the most important woman in the room. But that was before and while this sounds like Syd at the time, I mean afterwards, there's a sadness to it which makes each winking moment grind with a kind of void horror.
No Man's Land starts with a electric cranking before bursting into full psychrock with what reads like a scary trip as the band grinds around him. Guitar tone breaks, drums machine-gun and a big bass drives everything from underneath. A brief pair of verses about a kind of compressing horror before an instrumental verse plunges on. Syd speaks something under the music, calmly, saying a lot but to whom and what about? There's a strange creepiness to it. The song comes to a halt with a jamming looseness but the point has been made and made decisively.
Dark Globe is a solo performance, just Syd and his acoustic guitar. Syd pleads with the memory of a departed lover to remember him after a traumatic parting which he likens to a physical collapse. Some lines that sound like words salad ("I'm only a person whose armbands beat on his hands hang tall") start sounding more like private meanings than nonsense on every listen after, perhaps only she would understand. Two verses of identical form (well, as identical as Syd wanted them) reach to a wailing beg: "Won't you miss me? Wouldn't you miss me at all." His voice almost breaks near the top of its range. She isn't just a memory to him, she's there in his mind's eye, in the room, gazing back. She doesn't even need to shake her head. It's not just Syd playing for the emotion rather than the time signature here. He's pounding the strings as he soars to his prayer person to person or person to apparition. The recording is clean and airy around the glittering storm. It's no wonder that it was left like this. No backing band would do anything but steal from it. It's left, a spiking glow in the dark studio, wondrous, beautfiul, but too frightening to approach.
Here I Go is the kind of pretty boy cute number that Donovan had made his own. Like Donovan, Syd could put a little sting in the tail or just be playful but here he lets a little of the nightmare out in the opening lines: "she said a big band is far better than you." The last three words descend the steps to the lowest of his range as though he's asking her down to a cellar with the lights off. But then it strips to life with a kind of jaunty shuffle as he meets another girl who, though she's not so groovy, at least likes him and it's all hunky dory by the end. A side-ending song. Anyone who whinges about how a decent recording with top notch musicians would have made this one a classic should know or remind themselves that this airy anodyne fluff was one of the few done WITH a band. It wasn't all No Man's Land.
A big acoustic chopping chord is answered on the off beat by a big clean electric chord and we're off. The drums, bass and guitars build a kind of moving cubby house moving with wobbly steps forward as Captain Syd calls out orders and reports on strange sightings from the crow's nest. "Please leave us here, close our eyes to the octopus ride." Aaah. All the swirly shifting images makes sense. The octopus here is a kind of real octopus but also one of those big whirling fairground rides, spinning and lifting. If Syd's timing and its relationship with a post hoc backing band hadn't existed it would have been necessary to invent it. This song wants you disorientated and out of sorts. It could be a bad trip with dragons and scattered needles or everything that went through your head as a kid on a ride trying not to explode with nausea. A strange barely controlled quiet moment happens but it's about being lost in the wood. Isn't it good? Isn't it bad? We gear up again for full speed and the ride begins anew, giving us the title for the whole album: "well, the madcap laughs at the man on the water ..." Eventually Syd is left to respond to one pendulous line with another. They don't need clear meaning, they just need to stave off the great collapse. "Please leave us here, close our eyes to the Octopus ride." And the song trails off to a soft, if abrupt, finish.
Golden Hair emerges slowly out of the dark with a modal melody fashioned some time around 1346. An organ drone smoulders quietly as a cymbal is played expertly for atmosphere. At magic hour the sound of her singing draws him into the pool of her light and he begs her to appear, not to join him down there, just to give sight. Syd's beautiful setting of James Joyce's poem brings it to warm life and remembers to include the eye-widening eeriness of love. Utterly enchanting.
Long Gone begins with single strings playing the vocal melody in a corvine minor key. Syd comes in a the bottom of his range but soon soars to the top of his voice, harmonising with himself as the organ moves to the front to hold him up. That three times but not really as what he is telling a story. I think of it as what happened when the narrator of Golden Hair did break through and break into her room. She was long gone, either physically absent, comatose, or deep in madness, aloof and beyond anyone's love. The louder verses wail with fear but always fall back to the weary statement of her absence. Scary song.
She Took a Long Cold Look opens straightaway with those words. It's another solo Syd and guitar (and his lyric sheet when he turns it over halfway through the song) as his strumming plays a non-swinging pair of chords as he describes someone who does not love him or is difficult to love. She likes to be "extreme just to be extreme" like "a broken pier on a wavy sea". He descends into a kind of trippy introspection and finds that he can breathe even as the water streams over him as he sees only the sky.
Feel seems to be a series of images with something trying to push through them. Another solo effort it sounds like a run through rather than anything finished as he tries cadences here or finding his place there, either attempting to placate the microphone before him or unaware of it. "Alright," he says after the last chord. Alright, let's finish it later or alright, that'll do?
If It's In You begins with a false start as he loses his pitch on a high winding wail. He talks to the producer and starts again. It's no better but he's committed now and goes on. There are clear verses in this but they are made of fragments and images that feel like the barest of sketches. He tries for an Indian influenced mellisma on the word thinking, stops and starts frequently and ends somewhere.
Late Night brings all this back to form. We start with a band in place as a slide swoops up and the down like a golden pendulum. A atmosphere is peaceful and contemplative. The verse only slightly disturbs this with a tighter pace. In a downward tumbling melody Syd describes a lost love and pains of separation but does so with the recall of moments of togetherness with some bringing the kind of passion that must be kept to a whisper or a longing for a kind of childlike innocence. The choruses rise in a gentle pain: "inside me I feel alone and unreal and the way you kiss will always be a very special thing to be." The faster pace trails off and rests in the opening figure of the slide rising and falling, the night around it offering sleep and dreams.
So, what's the deal, here? If you got into Syd Barrett through his Pink Floyd output with its tighlty constructed singles and jammy but directed psychedelic album tracks you might have expected more of that, perhaps more folky, given the absence of the band. But if there was an Arnold Layne there was also an Apples and Oranges. If there was a Lucifer Sam there was a Jugband Blues. Things just don't work out the way we prefer them.
Syd was certainly troubled but the range here from the high form of the last track to the mess of the one before it speak less of a chaotic mind than a highly active one. The difference between the two numbers might not be a good day versus a bad one or Syd with or without his medication but that they were both released regarless of readiness. Some early commentators on this record considered its release to be an act of cruelty.
Would this sound better if he'd worked with a band and taken a group of people familiar with the material into the studio to soar to greater heights than with the old band? Maybe, but I doubt it. Partly, Syd was just like that. If John Lennon dropped or added a beat here or there in songs like Across the Universe or All You Need is Love he had a supportive group and astute producer to either correct or accomodate it. The jamming aesthetic that Floyd would keep to for many an album after he left were not just tolerant of his wandering musicality but encouraged it. It's more a case that this record at its clearest presents that artist without embellishment, mind going fast, fishing around for chords or ways to get the thoughts out while the studio clock was ticking, partially indulged and partially dismissed by the producers exhausted by it. This is why I said at the start that he was producing himself as each case of the roll call that eventually included his old band mates: everyone eventually had to fold themselves around what was happening in front of the mic.
Me, I don't think the worst of this is charming or original but painful. Then again, the best of it wears its chaos on its sleeve and thrives in the results, cranking and crashing around an uncertain terrain without a care. Whether he was insane or more creative than even he had control over he was able to front up with some songs that only those who came after would sound like. (When I finally got a copy while at University I was so obssessed with this record and its creator that I would slur "see ya later" into "SydBarrett" to see if anyone would notice.)
David Bowie's albums from this time, The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory plunder the aesthetic. They are more disciplined by a massive order but were made in admiration of this moment of melee. Bowie's false start and chat to the producer at the beginning of Andy Warhol on Hunky Dory is a direct tribute to Syd (to the point of it being a lift from the start of If It's In You). When paying tribute to the bands of his youth in the Pinups album, his recreation of the madness that was See Emily Play is one of the rare rock covers that reaches the spirit of its original. And ask yourself who comes to mind when you hear Long Gone or Octopus? It's just that it works the other way around. And it might not have been just Syd but after this album Bowie dropped that Anthony Newley "'ow's ya farver" London from his vocals and started sounding more like himself.
As to the rest it's fair to say that like the Velvet Underground or The Stooges or indeed Bowie, anyone at the beginning of a creative life who hears this album will be influenced by it, will want to sing about toadstools and lightning like they've just come from Devonshire tea, will want to wrest free of the cover band rigidity of repeating instead of renovating, will want, through this most other of artists, to become themselves.
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