Barrett
Oh boy. Syd Barrett’s second solo album is a tough one to assess. It is more tonally coherent than The Madcap Laughs and has moments of lyrical beauty and musical intrigue, but it isn’t entirely clear that his heart is in it any longer.
When I last listened to this, in January at the same time as I wrote about The Madcap Laughs, I thought this the weaker of the two albums; now, I’m more taken by its charms, though not especially convinced by it. As Rob Chapman notes in his excellent biography of Syd, Syd Barrett; A Very Irregular Head, seven of the songs are more or less the same shuffle in A. This is a very different man to the one who wrote See Emily Play.
And yet.
There’s something about this album, something about Syd’s by turns engaged and disengaged performances, that gets under the skin. It isn’t just in the fine production job that Dave Gilmour brings off, though that’s part of it; it’s somewhere in the sense that , even at its most ephemeral and diaphanous, there’s something of substance trying hard to get out, and if the music is somewhat generic, the lyrics often aren’t.
In the sad town
cold iron hands
clap the party of clowns outside
rain falls in gray far away
(Baby Lemonade)
Only last summer, it’s not so long ago
Just last summer, now musk winds blow
(Wined and Dined)
Perhaps it’s my empathy for Roger Keith Barrett, sloughing off the character of Syd and all it brought with it, that’s influencing me. In any event, although his guitar exercise that’s tacked onto the beginning of the record shows he still had ability if he felt like it, the heavy musical lifting is done by Gilmour and Rick Wright; Dominoes sounds a lot like a Pink Floyd song–it’s certainly taken at a stately Floyd tempo. Rats, though, reminds me of a very polite Captain Beefheart and points to what might have been, as does the well-know Gigolo Aunt.
In the end, even though it gets under my skin, and there are moments when I got really engaged, I think the album flatters to deceive. Gilmour and Wright did a lovely job for their old friend, but he didn’t reciprocate.
I don’t own this one, so listened on Spotify. There’s also at least one YouTube playlist:
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