Syd Barrett

Early 1970: "The Madcap Laughs" has just come out, rehabilitating Barrett after his forced departure from Pink Floyd. Convinced he had a brilliant, long-lasting solo career ahead of him, his managers pressured Syd into another venture at Abbey Road, hoping to produce another successful record. "I'm only 24, I'm still young, there's time," Barrett would say, showing a certain reluctance to go back into the studio and get to work.

Indeed, the recording sessions for his first solo album had been anything but a walk in the park: "He kept taking Mandrax. He was so out of it that during those sessions his hand would slip off the strings while he fell off his chair," recalls Storm Thorgerson, Syd's childhood friend and renowned rock album cover designer for the Hipgnosis studio.

To convince Barrett to get back to work, another old friend is called in: Dave Gilmour, his replacement in the Floyd, who had already served as producer, alongside Roger Waters, on "The Madcap Laughs": the guitarist was rightly considered one of the few people, if not the only one, capable of establishing fruitful communication with the Cambridge genius. Gilmour: "At that point we only had three options, if we wanted to do anything with Syd. We could work with him in the studio, playing while he handled the recording; that was almost impossible. The second option was to lay down some kind of track and then have him play over it. The third possibility was for him to record his basic ideas alone, with guitar and voice, and then we'd try to make something out of it." The third option won out, so Barrett was given complete freedom to record demos, which Gilmour would later work on, with the help of Rick Wright, another old bandmate of Syd's in Pink Floyd. Young Jerry Shirley was brought in on drums.

Work began in late February and dragged on for a long time; the album wouldn't actually see the light of day until November 1970, after countless difficulties. Despite the cover art, designed by Syd himself, "Barrett" can hardly be called a damp squib. The opening trio is disorienting: "Baby Lemonade", "Love Song" and "Dominoes", three gems that stand at the very peak of Barrett's output. Three love songs, with constantly shifting moods, acoustic one moment and pervaded the next by a barely whispered electricity, a skipping gait forever poised between the measured and the hushed, all united by that psychedelic-tinged mood that was his true trademark.

"It Is Obvious", declares the next track, though nothing here is truly obvious: Barrett's singing is dazed, the lyrics begin to definitively lose their grip on reason, the melody grows unsteady. It's the bridge leading us into the album's maddest stretch: the two oddball blues numbers "Rats" and "Maisie", though built on a rhythmic fabric as well-worn as it was dear to Barrett, shine with a light of their own thanks to their strangeness, their otherness compared to the rest of the album. Where "Rats" has an obsessive drive, "Maisie" settles everything down, with Syd seemingly even trying, unusually, to play the tough guy.

Then comes "Gigolo Aunt", perhaps the best-"polished" song on the whole album, which unfortunately also remains the only one Barrett actually took part in during the final recording stage. Marked by an insistent bassline, over which effective embroideries of electric guitar and organ are laid, it draws more than a smile thanks to its bizarre, ironic lyrics ("'Cause I know who you are, you're a gigolo aunt").

"Waving My Arms In The Air", a kind of throwback to Swinging London and to the days when Syd led Pink Floyd through their first, celebrated light shows, perhaps waving his arms in the air just like that, brings the melodies back onto more familiar tracks, blending into the following "I Never Lied To You", a classic love song that echoes the album's successful opening stretch. "Wined And Dined", extraordinary in its simplicity, stands out for its delicacy and the flawless flow of its chords. A classic calm before the storm, it's paradoxically the ideal send-off for the album's final abrupt swerve.

"Wolfpack", probably Barrett's own favourite track, is as fierce as the pack it sings of with such anguish, its lyrics strangely raw ("The life that for a moment was ours / has fallen away in the end / brief circling / fresh prey / dripping with flesh and bone"). In the song it's almost as if Syd wanted to schizophrenically pour out all the latent violence of his precarious state of mind. The album closes with the whimsical nursery rhyme "Effervescing Elephant", one of Barrett's very earliest compositions, dating all the way back to when he was 16 and dug up for the occasion.

Despite all the limitations of an album born from material barely superior in quality to a demo tape, and a sound that Gilmour had to invent from scratch, receiving no sign of disapproval from his friend (nor, in truth, of approval, aside from a "thanks for everything" at the end of the sessions), "Barrett" has merits that go beyond the purely musical. An extraordinary collage of moods, it is the perfect musical transposition of the inner conflicts, faded memories, loves and fears of a fading rock star, a genuine analysis from within of a state of alienation that, sadly, had no way out.

Superior in emotional charge to its predecessor, "Barrett" is Syd's true artistic "testament", the last high note before he left behind a stage he had trodden as intensely as briefly, retreating into his own world of small passions, naive obsessions and plain everyday routine.

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26/10/2006