Barrett - Syd Barrett > Reviews > A lost genius

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Groundbreaking
Lyrics	Sublime
Quality and consistency of tracks	A couple of weak links
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Good
Value for Money	Good

Advantages:	A wistful and highly original album .  Very poignant .
Disadvantages:	Not most people's cup of tea .  Depressing .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

The cover of this album, drawn by Syd Barrett himself, is of insects. It is a subtle tribute to the beatles, as they are all beetles.
Like the Beatles, Syd often writes very childish lyrics and simple, straightforward love songs. However, there the similarity ends. As experimental as the Beatles were at the time, they cannot match Syd for sheer experimentation and audacity. He was the mainstay of early Pink Floyd and wrote their completely wonderful debut album Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

Barrett is a much more mournful record. It was made shortly after he left the Floyd, due to mental illness. The album is one of the few glimpses we have in music of someone going over the edge.
However, Syd still retains his poetry and mastery of lyrics, even if the confidence which propelled him to stardom had gone.

The first track is "Baby Lemonade":

In the evening sun going down
When the earth streams in, in the morning
Send a cage through the post,
Make your name like a ghost.
Please, please, Baby Lemonade

I'm screaming, I met you this way
You're nice to me like ice.
In the clock they sent through a washing machine
Come around, make it soon, so alone...
Please, please, Baby Lemonade.

Here you get the sense of the way he employs bizarre word associations. The song comes over as trying to be an ordinary, sixties pop song, but it is fractured and has its own fragile beauty.

This is accompanied by an instrumental overdubbed over Syd's lyrics and produced by David Gilmour, ironically Syd's replacement with the Floyd. The backing band do some justice to Syd's ideas, but ultimately the album is not as powerful as Opel, an album of outtakes from the recording sessions which produced The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. However, the official albums are more accessible and less raw than Opel and some people may prefer them.

The next track "Love Song" is ostensibly a simple love song, but it contains the same dark undercurrents which pervade all of Syd's work.

Dominoes is an outstanding song, "You and I in place. Wasting time on dominoes. A day so dark, so warm. Life that comes of no harm." - a beautifully haunting melody celebrating the ordinary. Part of what makes Syd so unique is his ability to create strange scenes in the listener's mind, very ordinary, yet far removed from the everyday world.

It Is Obvious is one of the weaker songs, I think, yet there are still moments of intense poetry "mark the blanket where the sparrows play / and the trees by the waving corn stranded /
my legs move the last empty inches to you / the softness, the warmth from the weather in suspense".

The next track "Rats" is excellent. The chorus is angry and spiky and full of sarcastic vitriol. "Rats, rats lay down flat! We don't need you, we act like that. And if you think you're un-loved, then we know about that . . . rats, rats, lay down flat! Yes, yes, yes, yes, lay down flat!".

By contrast, the verses employ a stream of consciousness technique, piling words and images on top of each other to create a densely textured soundscape: "Bam, spastic, tactile, engine, heaving, crackle, slinky, dormy, roofy, wham I'll have them, fried bloke, broken jardy, cardy, smoocho, moocho, paki, pufftle, sploshette, moxette, very smelly . . ."

Maisie is a very mournful ditty, sung in a very low range. It is not my favourite track on the album, yet it still creates a typically strange and haunting atmosphere.

Gigolo Aunt relieves this somewhat - a cheerful and completely mad song, as near as Syd gets to a conventional pop song on the album.

Waving My Arms in the Air returns to a more introspective feel - with some spoken passages, I think reflecting Syd's insecurities:
"There will be shoulders pressing in the hall
and I won't know if you're here at all
there will be wine and drinking in the yard
there won't be anybody very hard."

Wined and Dined is a wonderfully whimsical love song, which is very catchy. At the same time, however, it reads like a lament for a happy time that the singer has lost:

Wined and dined, oh it seemed just like a dream!
Girl was so kind, kind of love I'd never seen.
Only last summer, it's not so long ago...
Just last summer, now massed winds blow...

Wolfpack and Effervescing Elephant, by contrast are pure products of Syd's childish and highly eccentric imagination. Wolfpack is sung in a screaming voice, and is truly atmospheric and chilling. Effervescing Elephant, by contrast, is charming, silly and hilariously funny:

An effervescing elephant
With tiny eyes and great big trunk
Once whispered to the tiny hairy ear of one inferior
That by next June he'd die, oh yeah!
Because the tiger would roam.
The little one said: "Oh my goodness I must stay at home!
And every time I hear a growl
I'll know the tiger's on the prowl
And I'll be really safe, you know
The elephant he told me so."

It has a fantastic, jaunty rhythm and makes for a great way to round off the album, otherwise it would be overly dark.

Barrett is not for everybody, but it contains some truly outstanding and brutally honest lyrics.