MUSIC: Syd Barrett's Solo Work

"I tattoed my brain all the way"...  

Syd Barrett is probably the most famous acid-casualty of the 1960s.  He is remembered for his early Pink Floyd work, but his (in my opinion lyrically stronger) solo albums are generally neglected.

Syd Barrett’s solo work is now available on Spotify, and this seems like a good subject with which to accidentally create and end a loose trilogy of posts; last week we looked at Forgotify and the unintended sadness of lost music, and after that we’ve looked at Lewis Carroll’s rejection of the adult world in favour of child-like fantasy.

Syd Barrett & Friend

Barrett’s solo lyrics, along with a lot of 1960s psychedelic lyrics, are steeped in images rooted in childhood, and quite often images rooted in the idea of Victorian childhood.  Not the chimney-sweep version of Victorian childhood, but the rocking-horse in the nursery version – most, though not all, of the 60s psychedelia movement of the time was middle-class  His solo music is not forgotten exactly (although some of it spent a significant amount of time out of print), but it is dwarfed by his previous band’s work – Pink Floyd.  

I don’t really want to talk much about pre or post-Barrett Pink Floyd, but the gist of the story so far is that Barrett was the leading creative force of Pink Floyd in the early days, always cutting an odd figure, showing some signs of what we would now associate with bipolar disorder.  He started to lose his mind (very possibly because of the vast amount of LSD floating around, although it’s thought be some that the hallucinogen was just a catalyst for a breakdown he was already heading towards).   He became extremely eccentric and erratic.  He was eventually dumped by the rest of the band; they courageously confronted the illness and difficulties of their friend head-on by just not picking him up for gigs anymore.

So he retreated even more into his own world, staring out as if marooned, eventually being persuaded to make some solo records at the tail-end of the 60s.  And they’re really good listening.  I haven’t listened to them in years but they really are quite startling.  This doesn’t always mean startlingly good.  But there’s something in the atmosphere of both albums that always sucks me in.  I think it’s not so much the songs themselves (although some haunt me for days), but the audible effort involved in just getting them out in the first place.  And they both share a mood of someone lost in time, yearning for a more innocent world.

The first album, ‘The Madcap Laughs’, is the most fragmented in style.  This is probably more to do with the fact it took 2 years to complete with several different musicians and producers than Barrett’s mental health.  

Barrett & Another Friend - The back of 'The Madcap Laughs' album.

There are songs with laid-back moods and some which are much more aggressively obscure.  The opening ‘Terrapin’ is a child-like lullaby.  ‘Octopus’ is a musically cheerful evocation of an octopus ride at a fairground, with a chorus where Barrett pleads to be left there.  The lyrics have flashes of darkness (“Isn’t it good to be lost in the wood/Isn’t it so bad, quiet there…”).  ‘No Man’s Land’ is where Barrett drawls “When I live I die/They even see me under call/We under all, we awful, awful, crawl” before breaking down into unintelligible murmurs.  

All the songs sound like they’re just about able to continue but are capable of derailing at any moment, as ‘No Man’s Land’ essentially does.  Even something relatively joyous (like ‘Love You’, a song which is grinning way too much to sound healthy) can end in a disconcerting and abrupt manner.  Sometimes a song seems to end and then starts again as if it’s just remembered something.  At the start of a song called ‘If It’s In You’ you hear him snap at someone (perhaps himself) for not being able to sing an ambitiously high note, and the song goes on to contain many false starts and missed notes.  And eventually you realise that this must have been the most useable take.   It feels voyeuristic, and changes the way you listen to the rest of the album.  All those moments where the songs break down away to nothing are just metaphors for their author’s state of mind, more so than the content of the songs themselves.

A drawing by Syd Barrett, the cover of his second and final album.

The second album ‘Barrett’, is more cohesive because it is played by more or less the same band all the way through and was made in a much shorter length of time.  It begins with the song that for me sums up the best of Barrett’s solo work completely; a deceptively sunny piece of post-psychedelia psychedelia with lyrics that are inexplicably disturbing (the opening lines are “In the sad town/Cold iron hands clap/The party of clowns outside/Rain falls in grey far away”).  It sounds like one of Barrett’s Pink Floyd singles, ‘See Emily Play’; but this time the imagery isn’t quaint Victorian whimsy but is instead either unintelligible or worrying.  And is vastly more interesting as a result.

‘Dominoes’ has a sense of bleak ennui, with its repeating visions of numbness and endless falling.  ‘Rats’ is essentially a stream of consciousness, as if Barrett’s trying to express too many things at once.  These are the darkest moments.  ‘Gigolo Aunt’ shows the more uplifting side of his music at this point, ‘Baby Lemonade’ without the subversively gloomy lyrics.  And it ends with ‘Effervescing Elephant’, which has all the violent whimsy of a Victorian nursery rhyme and reminds me most of ‘How Doth The Little Crocodile’ by Lewis Carroll.

These albums are incredibly sophisticated in their efforts to reach back to childhood.  Rather than anything from Pink Floyd’s discography, Barrett’s solo work sounds most like a John Lennon song from ‘The White Album’, ‘Cry Baby Cry’.  It has the eerie feeling of nostalgia, and the stranger feeling of someone mistaking nostalgia and fantasy for reality.  This does not in any way make the music depressing or far too disturbing to listen to.  There’s true joy and, yes, madcap laughter on both albums.  The textures are much more complex.  

I think it’s important to remember that Syd Barrett wasn’t someone who, like Ian Curtis, was lost in misery.  He was just lost.  After ‘Barrett’ (and some claim during it) he lost interest and became a physical recluse, but psychologically he had cut himself out of society years before, long gone.  These songs are a snapshot of a rapidly dissolving, if not completely dissolved, sense of reality; but that does not mean that they are not filled with artistic and emotional truths.