{"id":18148,"date":"2020-02-19T05:30:53","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T10:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=18148"},"modified":"2020-02-19T07:50:20","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T12:50:20","slug":"no-good-trying-syd-barretts-the-madcap-laughs-at-50-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2020\/02\/19\/no-good-trying-syd-barretts-the-madcap-laughs-at-50-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"No Good Trying: Syd Barrett’s ‘The Madcap Laughs’ at 50 (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a> \u2026 <\/i><\/p>\n

excerpted from my book, Reinventing Pink Floyd<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

Barrett had approached his old friend David Gilmour \u2013 then on holiday in Ibiza, Spain, the setting for the Barbet Schroeder film More<\/i> \u2013 and asked him and Roger Waters to produce. They agreed, and scheduled overdub and recording sessions on spare days between live performances and post-production work on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma<\/i>.<\/p>\n

On its January 1970 release, The Madcap Laughs<\/i> would feature 13 original Syd Barrett songs; the finished product was a an attempt to organize the hodgepodge of recordings Barrett made over the previous year and a half. Five of the finished tracks bear a Gilmour-Waters production credit; two others are listed as Barrett-Gilmour productions. Most of the remainder is sourced from the Malcolm Jones sessions of April 1969, with one track (\u201cLate Night\u201d) featuring a Jones-overdubbed take of a recording from the earliest sessions produced by Peter Jenner.<\/p>\n

Though neither Gilmour nor Waters had any official production credits prior to 1969, the band’s work on the More<\/i> soundtrack at Pye Studios had given the pair a good deal of hands-on experience behind the recording console. Jerry Shirley says that by this time Gilmour \u201chad already grasped what it took to be an excellent engineer and then producer. He was learning as he went. I\u2019m sure that whole experience was a huge learning curve for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Unlike the Jones-produced sessions, most of the songs overseen by Gilmour and Waters would be solo performances featuring only Syd Barrett’s voice and acoustic guitar. Production duties, then, would have less to do with technical matters and more to do with marshaling a suitable performance from Barrett. Syd’s unwillingness to conform to conventional rules of song structure and meter meant that no two takes of a song were the same, so the idea of post-production editing-together of acceptable sections from multiple takes could not even be considered; Gilmour and Waters would instead have to coax several takes out of their charge, and select from among those.<\/p>\n

The haunting \u201cDark Globe\u201d employs Barrett’s signature unconventional compositional approach, and the solo performance would appear unadorned on the record. \u201cLong Gone\u201d features Barrett’s overdubbed vocal harmonies and a sympathetic organ part supporting his acoustic guitar melody; it features one of Barrett’s strongest lyrics and an unusually disciplined musical approach.<\/p>\n

The very brief \u201cShe Took a Long Cold Look\u201d finds Barrett wedding a simple folk-style acoustic guitar part to his typically stream-of-consciousness lyrics; the take threatens to break down at the halfway point, but Barrett catches himself and continues. The song ends suddenly, to the sound of Barrett flipping the pages of a notebook. After a message from the control room (\u201c’Feel,’ take one\u201d), Barrett delivers a disjointed tune featuring oblique lyrics and seemingly random chord sequences. \u201cIf It’s in You\u201d is even less disciplined; it’s barely a song, and sports an odd vocal melody; the recording includes a snippet of Barrett speaking, expressing frustration at the manner in which the session is progressing.<\/p>\n

The pair of tracks noted as Barrett-Gilmour productions (\u201cOctopus\u201d and \u201cGolden Hair\u201d) are the product of a more conventionally fruitful session several weeks earlier, in mid June 1969. Though additional \u201cGolden Hair\u201d musicians aren’t listed on the album sleeve, it’s possible that an uncredited Rick Wright provides a vibraphone accompaniment that doubles the song’s melodic line. Otherwise the recording features only Barrett. On \u201cOctopus,\u201d Barrett plays both acoustic and electric guitars, and the song is closer in style and structure to the songs he had written for Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn<\/i> two years earlier. David Gilmour adds basic drum and bass guitar parts, likely overdubbed after the guitar and vocal were cut, in reversal of the customary studio overdub procedure. Barrett’s meter is erratic as ever; Gilmour would have faced a challenge following it, but the experience may have helped prepare him for his next album project with Barrett.<\/p>\n

Syd Barrett spoke to Melody Maker<\/i>‘s Chris Welch about the album in January 1970, days after its release. Welch prefaced his printed interview with a disclaimer of sorts: \u201cIt was not always so easy to understand his erratic train of thought,\u201d he wrote, adding, that in his estimation, Syd was \u201conly as confused as he wanted to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Referring to \u201cOctopus,\u201d a song chosen off The Madcap Laughs<\/i> for release as a single, Barrett said, \u201cI like to have really exciting, colorful songs. I can’t really sing. But I enjoy it and I enjoy writing from experiences. Some are so powerful they are ridiculous.\u201d Perhaps responding to the solo acoustic nature of the Gilmour-Waters-produced tracks on the LP, he noted, \u201cWhen I was with the Floyd \u2026 the volume [they] used inclined to push me a little.\u201d<\/p>\n

Likely owing at least in part to the romanticizing of Syd Barrett’s legend in the years to come, The Madcap Laughs<\/i> \u2013 which had received mixed reviews on its original issue \u2013 would be lauded in some quarters as a cracked classic, even a work of genius. A more measured perspective could be found in Allan Orski’s brief Syd Barrett entry in the weighty tome Music Hound Rock: The Essential Album Guide<\/i>. Characterizing a 1994 compilation that collected all officially-available Syd Barrett solo recordings, the reviewer described The Madcap Laughs<\/i> as \u201ca harrowing set of rough sonic quality, full of false starts and half-finished compositions that harshly illuminate the muse of a bright talent.\u201d Other modern-day reviewers were wholly unmoved. In a 1994 review in MOJO<\/i> Tom Hibbert described the song \u201cNo Good Trying\u201d as \u201ca song less than pleasant to listen to,\u201d and suggested that its title \u201cseemed to sum the whole matter up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"In a 2003 interview with Record Collector<\/i>‘s Daryl Easlea, Gilmour recalled the sessions for The Madcap Laughs<\/i> as \u201cpretty tortuous and very rushed.\u201d Describing Barrett as \u201cvery difficult,\u201d Gilmour found himself quite frustrated. Barrett, on the other hand, seemed unfazed and blissfully unaware of any problems with the sessions. \u201cI want to record my next LP before I go on to anything else,\u201d he told a Beat Instrumental<\/i> reporter in March 1970. \u201cAnd I\u2019m writing for that at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

And despite the challenges of The Madcap Laughs<\/i> sessions, Gilmour would return to help Barrett a few months later \u2013 this time in a more hands-on manner \u2013 as both producer and sideman for Syd’s second solo album, Barrett<\/i>.<\/p>\n

My book Reinventing Pink Floyd<\/i> explores the British group’s development to the point at which they created the groundbreaking album The Dark Side of the Moon<\/i>. Hardcover and e-book editions were published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2018; a paperback edition followed in 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One \u2026 excerpted from my book, Reinventing Pink Floyd Barrett had approached his old friend David Gilmour \u2013 then on holiday in Ibiza, Spain, the setting for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18149,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,57],"tags":[1705,3176,2108],"class_list":["post-18148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book","category-psych","tag-pink-floyd","tag-reinventing-pink-floyd","tag-syd-barrett","cat-10-id","cat-57-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18148"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18386,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18148\/revisions\/18386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}